A People's History of Scotland (6 page)

For more than a century a battle would be fought by those who wished to retain a church hierarchy, bishops appointed by the Crown, and more radical Calvinists who held that there was no justification in scripture for this. A year later in 1638, Henderson was the principle author of the National Covenant, a dour, religiously orthodox document, but which rallied the majority of Scots against the king.

In 1581, a radical Calvinist blueprint for the Kirk, drafted by the theologian and scholar Andrew Melville, had been agreed by the General Assembly, which did not permit bishops, with church government based on the General Assembly, Kirk sessions and presbyteries, and superior to royal rule. In 1640, the issue returned. Previously, James VI had succeeded in getting the General Assembly to pass five articles requiring observance of holy days, confirmation of ministers by bishops, private baptism, communion for the infirm and kneeling at communion. Radical Presbyterians had consequently refused to accept these measures and formed private conventicles boycotting Kirk services on holy days and communion where they were required to kneel. In Edinburgh, ‘They provocatively opened their shops at the time of services, and tried to persuade others not to attend … Every communion was a dramatic event, as people watched to see who would kneel when the sacrament was given.'
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James did not push matters further, sensing that to do so would prompt resistance. In particular, he allowed local presbyteries considerable control of their parishes, which appeased the nobility who generally controlled them through patronage. Nevertheless, it raised fundamental issues for theologians such as Henderson: ‘The king's insistence on a state-dominated Church rather than a Church-dominated state as the Presbyterians would have desired, prompted the latter to band together locally in covenants.'
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When James's son took the throne, he showed none of his father's tact. Father and son believed in the divine right of kings to rule as they pleased, but James had understood that in England he was beholden to Parliament for his budget, and that in Scotland he needed to keep the nobility on his side. Charles looked to the absolute monarchies of France, Spain and Austria with longing but lacked his father's guile.

Between 1629 and 1640, Charles attempted to rule England without Parliament, finding ways to raise money through extra taxes that created widespread opposition, and he also tried to move the Church of England towards more ornate forms of worship, which many believed heralded a return to Catholicism. His attempt in Scotland to recover royal lands lost to the Scots nobility made them hostile towards him. When he did finally retreat more than a decade later, it was only to introduce another, more provocative measure.

When Charles visited Scotland in 1633, it became clear that he wanted to change the form of worship and introduce a book of prayer, regarded as ‘Papist' by most Presbyterians. Three years later the Scottish Privy Council, a body appointed by Charles, announced the introduction of the new prayer book which emphasised that ministers were subordinate to bishops, who in turn were subordinate to the king. Charles insisted on his right to decide when the Kirk's General Assembly would meet. The role of the Scottish bishops in drawing up that prayer book and the appointment of the Bishop of St Andrews as Charles's Chancellor for Scotland meant their very existence now became a matter of controversy.

A radical minority of Kirk ministers understood that this was their chance and began orchestrating opposition to Charles. They formed an alliance with discontented nobles who did not trust Charles because of his threat to their lands, and the burghers in the towns and cities who opposed changes to their religion. On 23 July 1637, the new prayer book was due to be read in the High Church of St Giles in Edinburgh, where Scotland's great and good were in attendance. Jenny Geddes pushed her way to the front of the congregation and sat upon her three-legged stool, because she could not afford to pay to sit in a pew. We know little more about Jenny; she was clearly of a humble background, but she was about to enter history.

As the Dean of Edinburgh mounted the pulpit in his new white surplice instead of the old black one and began to read, Jenny rose to her feet and shouted, ‘Villain, dost thou say mass in my lug!' and launched her stool at the man's ear. Bedlam broke out. The Bishop of Edinburgh took over at the pulpit, appealing for calm to no avail, so the congregation was cleared from the Kirk, but kept up such a noise that the service could not continue. As they left, the dean and bishop were greeted with cries of ‘Pull them down – pull them down! A Pope – a pope! Antichrist – Antichrist.'
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Some have asserted that there is no mention of Jenny Geddes in contemporary accounts, but there is a plaque in her honour in the High Kirk of St Giles.
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Jenny was celebrated in this nineteenth-century song:

'Twas the twenty-third of July, in the sixteen thirty-seven,

On the Sabbath morn from high St. Giles the solemn peal was given;

King Charles had sworn that Scottish men should pray by printed rule;

He sent a book, but never dreamt of danger from a stool.

…

And thus a mighty deed was done by Jenny's valiant hand,

Black Prelacy and Popery she drove from Scottish land;

King Charles he was a shuffling knave, priest Laud a meddling fool,

But Jenny was a woman wise, who beat them with a stool!
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In response to Charles's policies, the nobility, clergy, gentry and representatives of the burghs formed what was a counter-government, the Tables – effectively a parliament – which commissioned a National Covenant for the population to sign. This stated that if the king did not uphold the true faith, the people had the right to resist him.

In February 1638, the nobility gathered in Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirk to sign the National Covenant against popery and laws that broke acts of God. They were in favour of church matters being decided by the General Assembly and pledging resistance to any
attempts to challenge the Kirk. Later that year a General Assembly meeting in Glasgow Cathedral did away with bishops and re-asserted itself as the dominant body in the Kirk, agreeing to meet annually. The signing of the Covenant could be regarded, as Victor Kiernan argues, as ‘… a stepping stone from old feudal and clan feeling towards a new national consciousness'.
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It ensured that for the next three centuries a Scottish sense of identity was tied to Calvinism and excluded all others who did not share the faith. The reasons behind this growing conflict were economic as well as religious. The nobility wanted a Scotland that was relatively free of royal control. This was a time of inflation, which was reducing the value of rents and their income, so standing up to Charles might offer a way to improve their fortunes.

In 1639, the conflict boiled over into the short Bishops' War. The Scots commander Alexander Leslie introduced the latest military techniques, learned during the European conflict, in which large numbers of Scots mercenaries served. In contrast, Charles, desperately short of money, could rely only on raw recruits raised under the old feudal muster. Morale was poor, and after his troops reached Berwick on Tweed they made just one advance into Scotland, retreating hastily when Leslie approached.

Grasping military reality, Charles backed down and agreed to the convening of the first General Assembly in two decades. This voted to abolish bishops and, out of Presbyterian zeal and hatred of the king's placemen, to implement a radical Calvinist programme. Parliament then endorsed this, voted out the king's powers to decide when it met and created a Committee of Estates, made up of the four groups that constituted the Tables. It was a body blow to royal power.

In a desperate response, Charles declared all this void the following year, gathered another army and prepared to march north. The Covenanters, as his opponents were now called, were one jump ahead and marched south, taking Newcastle, cutting off London's coal supplies. Charles had to sue for peace and pay money he barely had to the Scots.

This time Charles had to agree to the Scottish terms and pay compensation for the expense of the war. To raise this he had to
re-convene Parliament in London, which had the power to raise taxes, but it refused to give him the money he wanted until he met its demands. The Scots had effectively reduced the king to a figurehead, giving effective control to the parliament in Edinburgh. That set an example to the parliament in London, leading to a clash that would result in civil war.
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In 1642, Charles raised an army, intending to march on London, the centre of opposition to his rule. The Covenanters, whose main leader was the Duke of Argyll, stood aside until the autumn of 1643. Once the English Parliament had agreed to ratify the National Covenant and adopt Presbyterianism, the Scots sent their army south to fight Charles's Royalist army. At this point the bulk of the Scottish nobility must have thought they held all the aces because they had the most experienced army in this war of Three Kingdoms. They were about to get a rude shock. The Scottish army fought at the parliamentary victory of Marston Moor in 1644 and there saw for the first time Oliver Cromwell's ‘Ironsides' in action. This was a new kind of army, not made up of conscripts, its officers chosen for their military skill, not their noble origins. These would become the nucleus of the New Model Army that defeated Charles, who surrendered to the Scottish army in Nottinghamshire in 1646. The Scots, however, later sold him to the English parliamentarians.

What followed was a series of complex events that shattered the unity of the Covenanters. By the summer of 1644, the Marquis of Montrose, formerly one of the military leaders of the Covenant forces, raised an army from among the MacDonalds and other West Highland clans who, like him, resented the Duke of Argyll's growing power. They were joined by 2,000 Irish troops under a formidable warrior, Alasdair Mac Colla. In a series of stunning victories, Montrose and Mac Colla took control of northern and western Scotland, sacking the Campbell capital, Inverary, and forcing Argyll to flee in a boat.

Like the Thirty Years' War, the conflict was quickly marked, on both sides, by the killing of civilians and prisoners for religious reasons, reflecting the religious zeal of the conflict. Montrose and
Mac Colla had different aims, with the former wanting to take control of the Lowlands and then link up with Charles, while Mac Colla wanted to secure control of the West Highlands in order to link with the rebel forces who'd taken control of virtually all of Ireland (they professed loyalty to Charles but were effectively a Catholic force). The two men went their separate ways and both were thus defeated by the Covenanter army.

But after Charles's surrender in 1646, the English Parliament was progressively pushed aside by Cromwell and the New Model Army, who wanted a far more radical church than the Kirk north of the Tweed, and broke the agreement with the Scots.

As a result, a section of the Scottish nobles, the Engagers, reached an agreement in 1647 with the imprisoned Charles, in which he promised to support the imposition of Presbyterianism in England for a period of three years. Another faction of the Covenanters around Argyll, the Kirk Party, did not sign up to this. Nevertheless, when a second round of civil war, initiated by the royalists, broke out in 1647, the Engagers sent an army south, which reached Preston in Lancashire, where Cromwell routed it. Within weeks, Cromwell's forces had recaptured the king and destroyed all opposition.

On 31 January 1649, Charles Stuart stepped out from a window on the first floor of the Banqueting House onto a scaffold jutting out into London's Whitehall. A few minutes later the executioner held up his head to the crowd. The decapitation of the king stunned the Scottish nobility. They had rebelled against the bad policies of the king, usually blaming his advisers, but not against the monarchy. Cromwell's declaration of a republic in England and Wales alienated them further. This was a threat to all who claimed blue blood in their veins.

A year after Charles's execution the Scottish nobles entered into an alliance with his son, later Charles II, who promised support for the Covenant and arrived in Scotland to be crowned king of Britain. After he heard the news, Cromwell broke off his conquest of Ireland and marched into Scotland, inflicting a stunning defeat on the Scottish army at Dunbar. At the start of the battle the Scots commander
occupied high ground and had greater numbers, so victory seemed assured, but his political commissars, the ministers, demanded he descend to smite the enemy. He followed orders with disastrous results.

Afterwards, as Cromwell advanced on Perth, the pretender prince took the desperate gamble of marching south, hoping to inspire a royalist rebellion in England, whereupon he suffered another humiliating defeat, at Worcester. Thousands of Scottish prisoners were sent as forced labour to English colonies in North America and the West Indies.

Meanwhile, war was accompanied, as was usually the case, by plague or typhus, which brought mass death as armies and refugees spread disease through the country. Aberdeen lost about a fifth of its population, with 1,600 deaths, and Leith nearly half, with 2,421 deaths.
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The burden of fighting fell heaviest on the peasantry, who faced conscription as part of their feudal service, with ministers rallying them.

After his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell created the first all-British state, with Scotland under military occupation and allowed thirty seats in an all-British parliament. Cromwell abolished the General Assembly but allowed religious freedom to all apart from Catholics. After fresh rebellions in the Highlands his troops took control there.

Cromwellian rule showed that a British state could control Ireland and the Highlands, the two back doors for invasion of England, and created a formidable navy that laid the foundations of empire (Jamaica was conquered under the Commonwealth). The first Navigation Act was passed in 1651, effectively excluding the Dutch, Britain's main commercial rivals, from the domestic market and that of the British colonies.