The English Civil War: A People’s History

James had, in fact, been especially the nobles’ king. The Scottish nobility knew all about managing the power of a monarch with worrying ideas in matters of religion. They had managed to carry out a Protestant reformation in 1560, against the wishes of their ruler, the Queen Mother, who had been acting as regent for her daughter Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned as Queen of France. Then, in 1567, they had replaced Mary Queen of Scots, the recalcitrantly Catholic monarch, with her newborn son. Of course they had never meant to do away with monarchy itself, only with popery. But they were practised in putting God first and the monarch resolutely second.

But though the nobles had felt James was theirs, they saw that he was lost to them when he went south in 1603 to govern England. The court vanished from Edinburgh, and the Scottish nobility no longer had access to the person of the king. James only revisited Scotland once in his entire reign, so he came to see English ways as natural. This trend intensified under Charles, so that by 1638, the English thought of the king as theirs, with Scotland as a kind of allotment that he might visit and farm in his off-hours, or a small estate, best left to second sons. England’s arrogance in this was founded in its undoubted economic superiority; it was richer by far, had almost twice the population of Scotland, Wales and Ireland put together, and had the largest city in Western Europe as its capital.

Ironically, the identity of the Scottish nobility was not only compromised by their absentee landlord, but by their own Anglicization. The Scottish nobility began to demand deference from inferiors in a way that had never before been customary. They also expected a king to require less deference from them than the English norm. The trouble was that Charles failed utterly to convince them that he valued them. A slew of administrative reforms flew past their heads, and Charles did not even make a pretence of consultation. In a world of honour, that stung. The result was that Charles had few friends or allies among the Scottish Lowland nobles.

Through its earlier civil war over Mary Queen of Scots, Scotland came to define itself in terms of religion. It needed a unifying factor, for Scotland was as ethnically split as Ireland. The Lowlands spoke Anglo-Scots, and the Highlands spoke Gaelic. The Lowlands thought the Highlands barbarous, almost like the Irish; after all, they both spoke Gaelic, and the Highlanders were violent thieves in Lowlanders’ eyes. The Highlanders thought the Lowland Scots were usurping foreigners who had pushed the Gaels out of the fertile lands. Finally, Highland chiefs liked to ignore the Crown as much as possible, while Lowland chiefs tried to be involved in decision-making and government. But religious differences, though fierce, were less stark. The Lowlands, or the ‘radical south-west’, was passionately godly, vehemently Presbyterian, but Aberdeen was Episcopalian. Many Highlanders were nominally Catholic, but the Campbells were eagerly Protestant; in fact, despite being Highlanders, the Campbell Lords of Argyll tended to think like Lowlanders, keen to ‘civilize’ the Highlands.

The Scottish Church was itself a jumble. It had been a Presbyterian, Calvinist Kirk, with strict Church courts imposing tough moral discipline, presided over by ministers and lay elders. James had managed to bolt an episcopate onto it, and while some of its members remained unenthusiastic, the uneasy Jacobean status quo was grudgingly accepted. This disgruntled compromise was symbolized by the Five Articles of Perth, of 1618, which attached to the Kirk such Anglican matters as holy days, confirmation by bishops, kneeling at communion, private baptism, and private communion. But they were often not obeyed by those for whom they stuck in the throat as popish, and at first Charles seemed happy to tolerate this.

It was when it became evident that Charles and Laud hoped to make the Church of England and the Kirk as close to identical as possible that the Kirk grew restive. A small radical party was created within the Kirk just as a godly party formed within the Church of England. Most of the very godliest Scots went to Ulster, to preach there. But some stayed behind because they felt that the Kirk was still God’s chosen church. One godly minister, Samuel Rutherford of Kircudbrightshire, wrote of the Kirk as his ‘whorish mother’, or ‘harlot mother’. She might be corrupt, but she still belonged to him.

To understand the Scots, one must understand the way the Kirk fostered a certain idea of collective identity, generating a powerful sense of sin, and then alleviating it with penitence. The Stool of Repentance was a wooden seat, often a kind of step-stool with different levels for different crimes. It stood immediately in front of the pulpit, elevated to where everyone could see it. Those deemed immoral by the Church courts had to sit on it while a sermon was preached. The connection between the trembling example of sin before the eyes of the congregation and the words of the preacher was what made this punishment different from most English methods, in which the sinner was generally displayed by the church door rather than inside the building. In Scotland, words and spectacle were welded together into a single great theatrical event. To emphasize this, the sinner then made a speech of repentance. It was important to cry, and sound truly sorry. If the congregation was convinced, the sinner would be welcomed back into the community with kisses and handclasps; if not, there would be more of the same. Some ‘sinners’ embraced the drama, and revelled in the opportunity to tell everyone exactly how wicked they had been. The congregation, too, was knitted together by their shared emotions of revulsion and joy at repentance. The ritual created a community which reacted to divisions and differences sternly, with horror and violence.

The Kirk’s idea of community became central to Scotland’s sense of its national destiny. To reinforce this ideal, the Eucharist was extended into a great festival of togetherness, with everyone sitting at long tables, passing bread and wine, and then listening to very, very long sermons. Advisers tried their best to warn Charles that he couldn’t impose the English Prayer Book on Scotland from the first moment they knew a new liturgy was coming. So Charles and Laud listened, and tried to incorporate changes that they hoped would appease the Scots. But their efforts failed to quell rising alarm, which was further spread by the new canons imposed in 1636. These ruled out extempore prayer and insisted that ministers be allowed to preach only in their own locale. Wild rumours circulated in Edinburgh that the new liturgy was going to reappoint abbots to the old monasteries and offer them seats in the Scottish Parliament. Even some Scottish Catholics began to believe the king was gradually restoring the Roman Church. These rumours fomented existing opposition within the Kirk. Implicit in Kirk identity was the idea that Scotland was the chosen Nation of God, the true Israel. Just as the Israelites had suffered enslavement and imprisonment at the hands of tyrants, but had triumphed through the might of God, so they too would succeed through God’s power. Their views were given a darkly frightening context by the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in Europe, which pitted Catholic against Protestant. For Protestants, it was the beginning of the struggle against Antichrist, encouraging them to see the fight against Rome as a fight between Good and Evil.

The crunch came in October 1636, when the Scottish Privy Council was ordered to issue a proclamation commanding the use of the new prayer book. By that time, the opposition was ready. The alarm generated by the whole affair was now at a level where some of the Kirk members would not have accepted a prayer book handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. Accordingly, in April 1637, one of the Kirk’s most godly spokesmen, Alexander Henderson of Leuchars, met in secret with a group of Edinburgh matrons, who agreed to lead the protest when the prayer book was first used. Women may have been chosen because it was hoped that they would not be punished savagely.

The prayer book’s supporters tried to be ready, too. Those willing to use it decided to begin at the same time, hoping to divide the opposition and to show solidarity. So on the morning of Sunday 23 July 1637, ‘that black doleful Sunday to the Kirk and the Kingdom of Scotland’, said Presbyterian Archibald Johnston, the two Scottish archbishops, and eight or nine bishops, assembled in St Giles Church Edinburgh, and the dean began to read. Johnston of Warriston was a zealous lawyer who became a Scots commissioner. He deposited his diary in Edinburgh Castle for safekeeping, believing he was living in momentous times, like an Old Testament prophet. Johnston recorded what happened: ‘at the beginning thereof there rose such a tumult, such an outcrying … as the like was never seen in Scotland’. Women began to shout insults, ‘calling them traitors, belly-gods, and deceivers’. Others ‘cried Woe! Woe!’ and some cried ‘Sorrow, sorrow for this doleful day, that they are bringing in popery among us!’ and many got to their feet and threw their wooden stools at the bishops. The atmosphere was intimidating, as one observer, minister James Gordon, reported; ‘There was a gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the Dean was reading, a she-Zealot hearing him starts up in choler, traitor, says she, does thou say Mass at my ear, and with that struck him on the face with her Bible in great agitation and fury.’

Seeing that the crowd was inattentive, the bishop abandoned his attempt to read from the prayer book, and preached a sermon instead. Some of the most violent protesters had already left, but they hung around outside, making a racket, and finally throwing stones at the bishop when he tried to leave. Other bishops and clerics were also attacked by groups of Edinburgh women. Johnston was pleased. ‘I pray the Lord to make his own children with tears and cries to pray against the spiritual plague of Egyptian darkness covering the light of the Gospel shining in this nation’, he wrote, fitting words for the man who was to be one of the leaders of resistance himself.

The women involved were described as ‘rascal serving-women’, and certainly those arrested were indeed servants. Other ‘women’ were said to be men in disguise, for, said one witness, ‘they threw stools to a great length’. The opposition now gathered itself together to organize a campaign to petition the king in London. Petitions came mainly from Fife and the West, and when it began to be obvious that the king wasn’t speeding to remove the hated book, many became anxious that war might ensue. The godly Presbyterians had no intention of backing down. There were more riots, and more petitions, and finally Charles responded autocratically, claiming that he had written the prayer book himself (the suppliants had claimed to believe it was the work of bishops). His touchy pride had surfaced again, but so had his wish to be loved; he offered to forgive everyone if they would only go home and do as they were told.

This offered nothing to moderates, and made the intransigent even more certain that they were doing God’s work. On 23 February 1638, the nobles chose a committee of lairds, burgesses and ministers to sit with them. This committee created the Covenant. It was based on the old confession of faith signed by Charles’s father James in 1581, a textual ancestry that tried to proclaim the committee’s loyalty to the Stuart monarch. It vowed to uphold the true religion of the Church of Scotland, and to oppose popery and superstition. It was first signed at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 28 February. Read aloud by Johnston, it was signed by the assembled nobles first, then lairds. Next day three hundred ministers signed it. Then hundreds of people in Edinburgh, then thousands more as it was distributed across the nation by its original signatories.

Later, support for the Covenant came to mean resistance to tyranny, but that was an evolution. The original Covenant bound its signatories to uphold true religion and to support the king. It neglected to specify which injunction was more important if there should be a conflict between them.

The Scots invented the Covenant as a form of resistance to rule from Westminster. Those who took the oath were required to oppose the recent innovations in religion. Loyalty was reserved for a king willing to defend true Protestant religion. The Covenant was with God; if the king failed to defend the reformed tradition in the Kirk, the people were morally required to resist him because to do so was to keep faith with God. But the oath also included a declaration of allegiance and mutual association which became a definition of nationhood. Scotland, under a covenanted king, had a divine role to play in overthrowing popery and thus bringing about Christ’s rule on earth. Perhaps one day every nation was to be part of the Covenant, under Scotland’s leadership.

Charles still failed to act. It was becoming clear that he was not in control of the situation. Like many men with problems, his were made worse by a visit from his mother-in-law, who came for a prolonged stay in 1638. A contemporary engraving of her progress shows a sumptuous procession down a Cheapside lined with slender, pointed Jacobean gables. A brilliant patron of the arts, a flamboyant presence, a Medici to the core, Marie de Medici cut a swathe through London’s crowds. Her vast entourage, which she expected Charles to support, included six coaches, hundreds of horses, monks and confessors in handfuls, peers and princesses, dwarfs and dogs. Dash was a strong point. Tact was not. She told everyone that she was hoping for Charles’s conversion to the one true Church. He, so quiet, so shy, so unwilling to express public opinions, must have felt uneasy with her bounce and verve. Laud, too, had grave doubts about the boisterous Marie’s impact on her daughter and so on the king. When Henrietta called for English Catholics to fast on Saturdays and to contribute the money to the army sent against the wholesomely Protestant Scots, she linked the expedition in the mind of the public with her own faction. She was also known to be contemplating a Spanish match for her daughter, who was seen attending Mass as the army marched.

In London, Charles and his advisers had begun to evolve ambitious plans for Scotland. Wentworth was determined to carry out the policies he had introduced in Ireland; he wanted an English deputy, and probably English law, too. The Scots, who had ears in the king’s circle, probably got wind of this line of thinking. It made them more determined to hang on. By now, Charles was convinced that the only way to solve his problems in Scotland was by force of arms, and he spun out the negotiations only to give himself time to arm, a pattern of behaviour he was to repeat in England later.

In June 1638, Charles finally sent Hamilton to mediate with his fellow-Scots. By then the Covenanters had grown more confident, encouraged by the widespread support they had received. They asked for a free general assembly and a Parliament to make sure the prayer book could never be reintroduced. Hamilton was only there to stall the Scots until Charles could get his army moving. The Covenanters had created a new system of representation; commissioners from each shire and burgh were to form an elected body and to remain in the capital, being replaced frequently by elected substitutes. This new body was to have a different president every day, so that power was not concentrated in the hands of one man. This idealistic if slightly impractical rule suggests that tyranny was very much a preoccupation. And yet despite all this, the new assembly was window-dressing. Power remained with the strongest nobles, Rothes, Montrose and Loudoun.

On 21 November 1638, a new representative body met, this time representing the Kirk itself. This was the Glasgow Assembly. Huge numbers of people filled Glasgow Cathedral. The new body soon proved unmanageably radical. Hamilton tried to control it, with about as much success as Canute holding back the waves. Having rid itself of Hamilton, the new body began enacting a godly dream of restoring the Kirk to its glory days of full and unmixed Presbyterianism. On 4 December, the new assembly passed an act declaring the six previous Kirk assemblies unlawful, which meant that the Kirk was no longer bound by their decisions. Then on 6 December the assembly condemned Charles’s prayer book and canons as replete with popish errors. On 8 December, the assembly abolished episcopacy, and on 10 December it removed the disputed Five Articles of James’s reign. This brisk and decisive rate of progress resulted in a Kirk purified of compromise and popery, in less than a month. The Scots were creating God’s kingdom, allowing the light of the gospels to shine.

Their decisiveness would prove an example for the English godly party from this time on. The Kirk ensured this by distributing polemics explaining the connection between the restored Kirk and the legitimacy of resisting a tyrant. One of the creators of the Covenant, Alexander Henderson, wrote that ‘except we stand fast to our liberty we can look for nothing but miserable and perpetual slavery’. What he meant was liberty in religion, but the heady experience of having that liberty at Glasgow had made him determined to protect it against the prerogative of anyone who sought to take it away. The result of the prayer book crisis was therefore to join religion and political ideology stoutly together by an unbreakable chain.

It was easy to see why men like Alexander Henderson would be Covenanters. Less easy to understand is the position of Highland nobles like Argyll and Montrose. Of these two leading Highland nobles of the Civil War years, it was the ambitious, eager, warmhearted Montrose who was the first to subscribe to the Covenant. He first joined those Covenanters who sought to petition or supplicate the king in November 1637. It seems an odd decision for a Highlander. The Lowlands were suspicious of popery in part because they perceived the Gaelic lands – Ireland and the Highlands – as a hotbed of papists, and this was not altogether paranoia; there had been a significant Catholic revival among the Gaelic lands. Lowlanders also saw the Highlands as barbaric because of the growth and development of its clan structure in the sixteenth century. Later writers infatuated with the romance of old Scotland portray the clans as ancient, even paleolithic, but in fact they were largely a product of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is difficult to define what a clan was; it came to be seen as a family structure, but in Montrose’s time it was a band, or bond, which could be created between equals or between those of different rank. Usually, it was faintly feudal; the clan chieftains offered protection (from other clans) in return for loyalty (fighting when summoned). The result was to set up violent rivalries across the Highlands. Each clan could increase its wealth, honour and fame only by expanding into the territory of another clan, by raiding another clan, or by plunder. The result might be just a few casualties, but it sometimes involved the massacre of whole communities, including women and children. Such bloodshed frightened and horrified Lowlanders, who were inclined to see the Highlanders as barbarians.

The Covenant flourished in an urban world of merchants, professionals and other middling men. These people were all but absent from clan Highland life. So too was the king, and central government in general. Highland chiefs were traditionally not very interested in central government, or even in the making of laws. At home, they made their own. As for the monarch, in theory Highlanders were effusive in their tributes to the Stuart kings, but in practice they recognized few real obligations to them. Highlanders also shared with their royal master King Charles a love of disguise and tricks which is especially manifest in Montrose’s generalship and tactics. Montrose would be dependent, too, on men even more monoculturally clannish than he, notably the fighter Alasdair MacColla. Masking, mumming and women dressed in men’s clothing doing strange midnight dances were ineradicable parts of the Highland scene, and alien to the Presbyterian Kirk.

But Montrose signed the fierce and rigid Covenant. It is entirely probable that he was swayed by two things: the excitement of the moment which fed his personal ambition, and a very reasonable wish to influence events. He came from one of the oldest and noblest families in Scotland, and held estates in Perth, Stirling and Angus; he was educated richly and fully, in France and Italy as well as Scotland. He was graceful and handsome, with cold, lucid grey eyes. He was also a fine horseman and an excellent archer. He was, said Clarendon, too apt to condemn those he did not love.

He had been at the University of St Andrews, majoring, as it were, in hunting and hawking, in archery and golfing, though he did do some studying. At the age of seventeen, Montrose was married to Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of Lord Carnegie, afterwards Earl of Southesk. In 1633, as soon as he was twenty-one, he left Scotland to travel on the Continent. He had come back to Scotland in 1636, and had been presented to the king in London, by Hamilton, who apparently told Charles that someone as beautiful and charismatic and arrogant as Montrose could only be a menace. So Charles merely extended his hand to be kissed, then turned away. Montrose was bright and proud; he got the message. It has been suggested that the slight to his honour was what impelled him to see the merits of the Covenant. But he himself later wrote:

This our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of these sometime pretended prelates, who having abused lawful authority did not only usurp to be lords over God’s inheritance, but also intruded themselves in prime places of civil government; and by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book, the brood of the bowels of the whore of Babylon, as also to the prejudice of the country, fining and confining at their pleasure: in such sort, that trampling upon the necks of all whose conscience could not condescend to be of their own coin, none were sure of life nor estate, till it pleased God to stir up his own instruments, both in Church and policy, for preventing further, and opposing, such impiety.

For Montrose, then, Covenanting was not always an angry response to rule from Westminster; it could also be an angry response to rule from Canterbury. Montrose had been reading not only the Bible, but Foxe and Spenser, and from them he had learned about the global war against the evil Whore of Babylon, popery whether lodged in the so-called Church of England or in Rome. It was that war which he set out to fight. But he set out to fight it as a Highlander, and this meant to increase his own power at the expense of other Highland nobles.

He was not the only one. Archibald Campbell, Earl and later Marquess of Argyll, a Highland noble with a huge estate, much of which had been acquired from the MacDonalds by very dubious methods, similarly had an eye to the main chance. He became an ardent Covenanter because the king was willing to employ the MacDonalds under the Catholic Earl of Antrim to suppress the ‘rebellion’. The new war of religion meant business as usual among nobles and clans who had been enemies for centuries. Meanwhile, veterans from Protestant armies on the Continent were flooding back to Scotland, forming a professional army under Alexander Leslie, who had held a senior command under Swedish Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus.

It was an age that loved plotting and feared the plotting of others, but there may have been a real conspiracy. The Scots’ success at doing what some English people longed to do – rolling back the Laudian reforms – struck the English forcibly. There is some evidence of high-level contact between the king’s godly opponents in all three kingdoms from the early 1630s. John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Saye and Sele actively plotted with their natural allies among the Covenanters to force Charles to call Parliament. Contemporaries thought that the Covenanters would never have dared to rebel without friends in England. We could even think of a kind of cross-border godly culture, with exchanges of publications, and personal contacts sensibly unmarked by treasonable correspondence. Print and pamphlets allowed the godly party in England to connect the terror of Catholicism with their own godly agenda.