by John Buchan
Lord Napier,
from and engraving by W. Banks, after the portrait by Jameson.
1635-36
In the year 1635 the royal blunders multiplied. A temperate protest by Lord Balmerino against certain recent acts came into Spottiswoode’s hand, and thence to the king’s. It was construed as high treason, and in March 1635 the writer was put on trial, convicted by a majority of one, and condemned to death. He was presently pardoned, but the affair deeply impressed his countrymen; it was the bishops’ doing, and it seemed as if the old liberty was now dead in the land. A crisis had been reached when a man like Drummond of Hawthornden, no lover of the Kirk, was forced into vigorous remonstrance, and could advise his sovereign to study Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos. In May a royal warrant authorized a new book of canons to regulate the government of the Church of Scotland, and the book was published in January 1636, prepared by a committee of the Scottish bishops and revised by Laud and Juxon. It re-enacted in substance the Articles of Perth, which had become a dead letter, prohibited extempore prayer, allowed confession, and claimed for the king supreme authority in ecclesiastical causes. More ominous still, it promised a service book, or liturgy, and threatened in advance excommunication against all those who should not accept it. It would be hard to conceive of a more foolish provocation. The book had no authority except the royal ipse dixit, and yet many of the canons dealt with civil as well as with ecclesiastical law. It challenged not only religious but political liberty.
1636-37
The promised liturgy appeared in an atmosphere already superheated. In November 1636 Charles wrote to the Privy Council, ordering that the new “Book of Public Service” be used, and that each parish provide itself with two copies before the following Easter. But it was not till 1637 that the book was published. It is probable that the Scottish bishops had little to do with it, for even the most sacerdotal among them hesitated before this monstrous innovation. Laud and his English colleagues took the English Prayer-book, made a few changes which the Scottish hierarchy had suggested, and made many others in the direction of a more exacting ritual. “The book, with the canons which preceded it, had no ecclesiastical sanction, either of all the bishops, or of a General Assembly. The imposition was an act of sheer royal autocratic papacy; the book, being English, insulted Scottish national sentiment; the changes from the English version were deemed to imply a nearer approach to Rome. Protestantism was in danger. The landowners suspected that Charles meant to recover some of their old ecclesiastical estates for the rebuilding of cathedrals and cleaning of churches; and thus, from the ‘rascal multitude’ upwards, through every rank and condition of his subjects, he gave intolerable offence, and caused extreme apprehension. He lost three kingdoms and his head, not for a mass, but for a surplice.”
The tumult was instant and universal. The devout women of Edinburgh rose in their wrath, and the first attempt to read the new service-book in St. Giles’s church was the signal for a riot. The flame ran fast over Scotland, for the offence was grievous; to endure such interference with private worship was to stultify the whole Reformation principle, and to sit quiet under flagrant illegality was to sacrifice the ancient liberties of the realm. Every post to England carried a supplication or remonstrance to His Majesty. The Privy Council, divided between the lay lords and the bishops, was helpless; it suggested deputations which Charles would not receive, and meantime it was being flooded with petitions from every part of the Lowlands. The king’s proclamations only made matters worse, and by October public meetings were being held everywhere, bishops were being rabbled, and the pacific Mr. Robert Baillie was writing: “No man may speak anything in public for the king’s part, except he could have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill.”
1637
On 15th November an important step was taken. With the sanction of the Lord Advocate, Sir Thomas Hope, the malcontents organized themselves into a body of commissioners — four committees of nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers, henceforth to be known as the Tables. It was in substance a provisional government, and behind it was all Scotland, except the remoter Highlands and Aberdeen. In opposition to the king stood the solid phalanx of the Kirk, led by Alexander Henderson of Leuchars, the ablest statesman among the ministers; the burgesses were unanimous on the same side, as were also the lawyers; the lairds were represented by such names as Stirling of Keir, Hume of Wedderburn, Douglas of Cavers, Fraser of Philorth, Mure of Rowallan, and Agnew of Lochnaw; among the nobles were Sutherland, Cromartie, Ruthven, Eglinton, Wemyss, Lothian, Home, Loudoun, Lindsay, and Yester. The peerage and the lesser baronage of Scotland were united as they had never been before and were never to be again. Even the Lords of the Council were inclining to the malcontents, and the bishops had withdrawn from that uneasy assembly.
At the meeting of petitioners on 15th November the young Montrose was present. In September leading ministers had been appointed to secure adherents for the opposition, and Mr. Robert Murray of Methven was nominated for Perth and Stirling. Montrose at a later date named Mr. Murray as “an instrument of bringing me to their cause.” Along with Rothes, Loudoun, and Lindsay of the Byres he was appointed to the Table of the nobility.
1638
The unrest could have only one consequence. Traquair, the Treasurer, got no comfort at the royal court; indeed, in a proclamation which he brought back in February 1638, Charles took complete responsibility for the new liturgy, and required all petitioners to disperse on pain of treason and not to reassemble without the Council’s consent. On February 22, 1638, when that proclamation was made in Edinburgh, a public protestation was read by Wariston, and one act of war was met by another. On that day Montrose was among the protesting leaders, mounted in boyish enthusiasm on a barrel, so that the prophetic soul of Rothes was moved to observe: “James, you will never be at rest till you are lifted up above the rest in three fathoms of a rope.” The Tables decided to revive the Covenant of 1581 against popery, and to add their own grievances, and Alexander Henderson and Wariston drafted the new version. It was an old device, for when the Scottish nobles chose to walk in the path of rebellion it had been their fashion to enter into “ane band.” This was, however, to be a legal act, and to make the Almighty a party; in Wariston’s word it was “the glorious marriage day of the Kingdom with God.” The first part repeated the Covenant of 1581 against Rome; the second part recited the acts of Parliament passed since the Reformation in favour of the Kirk; the third part pledged its signatories to defend their religion against all innovations not sanctioned by Parliament and Assembly, and to “stand to the defence of our dread sovereign the King’s Majesty, his person and authority, in the defence and preservation of the foresaid true religion, liberties, and laws of this Kingdom.” It was a candid and straightforward document, temperately expressed and accurately directed to the grievances which it was designed to remedy. The claim was to both spiritual and civil freedom, and the formidable sanction behind it was at once ecclesiastical, feudal, and democratic. On the last day of February it was read in Greyfriars’ church in Edinburgh, with its solemn appeal that “religion and righteousness may flourish in the land, to the glory of God, the honour of the King, and the peace and comfort of us all.” On that and succeeding days it was signed amid scenes of deep popular emotion, and in subsequent months copies were carried far and wide through the land, and even overseas to Scots serving in foreign wars.
On the first day Montrose subscribed his name. According to Baillie he was brought in “by the canniness of Rothes.” John Leslie, sixth Earl of Rothes, was an adroit diplomat, and had an old grievance against the Act of Revocation. He was disliked by Charles, and probably returned the dislike. He was little of a precisian in character, for he is described by Clarendon as “very free and amorous, and unrestrained in his discourse by any scruples of religion, which he only put on when the parts he had to act required it, and then no man could appear more conscientio
usly transported”; nor was he extreme in politics, and Clarendon believed that but for his early death he would have gone over to the king’s side. Doubtless Rothes desired to strengthen the movement by the adhesion of the representative of an historic house, who was still an attractive mystery to his countrymen; doubtless Montrose was not insensitive to the persuasive charm of one who was much his elder and was the most generally popular man in Scotland. Talks with Rothes and Mr. Robert Murray, and the fact that the Fife nobles with whom he had spent much of his time during his St. Andrews years were among the promoters of the new Covenant, may have predisposed him to the popular side.
Alexander Leslie, First Earl of Leven,
from the painting by Georges Jameson.
But indeed Montrose required no “canniness” of noble or cleric to help him to a decision. There were those among the protagonists of the Covenant who may have been antipathetic to him — Loudoun, his colleague on the Tables, who had been a Campbell of Lawers and was trusted by no man; Wariston, that strange youth of twenty-seven, a devotee in a lawyer’s gown, who would forget time in prayer and be on his knees for fourteen hours at a stretch, and often, as his nephew Burnet tells us, slept but three hours in the twenty-four. But all Scotland was in the bond, except a few Catholic nobles and Aberdeen doctors, and in it were the companions of his youth, and Napier, his most trusted counsellor. The Covenant was legal, pronounced to be so by the Lord Advocate and by the bulk of the judges, and Montrose from his youth was a lover of legality. Further, the main issues were not yet confused. There was no attack upon the king’s authority; indeed, the royal sovereignty was vehemently asserted. The bishops were unpopular, but there was as yet little of that morbid hatred of the very name of episcopacy which followed later, when dislike of the thing done became detestation of the suspected means. In 1637 Baillie could still write: “Bishops I love;” and there must have been many in Edinburgh to relish the dialectical triumph of the Episcopalian vintner over the Presbyterian shoemaker, recorded by James Howell in his letter to Lord Clifford. The true point of conflict was far greater than any squabble about niceties of church government. It was the right of Scotland to her ancestral liberties, the confinement of prerogative within its legal limits, the keeping of churchmen out of civil offices. To a young man nourished on Plutarch and Thucydides and familiar with the current political thought of Europe, to one who at no time in his life could tolerate the ecclesiastic in politics, to a Scotsman who had his full share of the national pride, the cause of the Covenant was the cause of the patriot, the philosopher, and the well-wisher to the king.
That February noon in Greyfriars was one of the most momentous in our history, for it was the first step in a conflict which did not end till the December day, half a century later, when a king of England became an exile. To Charles it may at first have seemed but another spasm of recalcitrance which would be presently forgotten — a matter less important than the impending judgment of the Exchequer Chamber in the ship-money case. But when the news out of Scotland came, after many days, to the ears of a certain middle-aged Huntingdonshire grazier, who had lately removed to Ely, it may have caused deeper reflections. For this grazier, in the intervals of examining the work of God in his soul, had a quick eye for public portents, and he had won so much prestige as the defender of the rights of the fen commoners, that he might hope to be sent to Westminster, should the king call another Parliament.
CHAPTER III. THE FIRST COVENANT WARS (1638-39)
As for discontentments, they are in the politic body like to humours in the natural, which are apt to gather a preternatural heat and to inflame. And let no prince measure the danger of them by this, whether they be just or unjust; for that were to imagine people to be too reasonable who do often spurn at their own good: nor yet by this, whether the griefs whereupon they rise be in fact great or small; for they are the most dangerous discontentments where the fear is greater than the feeling. Dolendi modus, timendi non item.
— Bacon.
In 1639 even the most obscure woods began to be penetrated with flashes.
— Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson.
I
1638
The National Covenant was based upon sound constitutional law, but the form of the protest — the “band” borrowed from the Middle Ages — and certain passages in the document were of dubious legality. Especially ominous was the clause which bound the signatories to mutual defence “against all sorts of persons whatsoever,” which might be interpreted as including the king. There were many irregularities in the obtaining of signatures, for in certain districts it was “obtruded upon people with threatenings, tearing of clothes, drawing of blood.” Moreover, to Charles in Whitehall it might have seemed that there had been already overt acts of revolution. The new Committee of Sixteen, the Tables, had set about organizing a provisional Government. As early as February 1638 steps had been taken to raise a revenue. In March a “voluntary” tax was levied in every shire of one dollar for every thousand merks of free rent; the Covenanting lords subscribed largely, and twenty-five dollars was Montrose’s contribution; there were signs that presently the levy would cease to be optional, and that non-Covenanters would be mulcted. It all looked suspiciously like the creation of a war-chest. It was certain, too, that the movement would not remain within the four corners of the Covenant, but was capable of indefinite extension. The country was on fire, and every Sunday the ministers were fanning the flame. Wariston records a sermon in Edinburgh on 1st April, when the preacher, Mr. Rollock, after reading the Covenant, requested the nobles present — Montrose, Boyd, Loudoun, and Balmerino — to hold up their hands and swear by the name of the living God: “at the which instant of rising up, and then of holding up their hands, there rose sic a yelloch, sic abundance of tears, sic a heavenly harmony of sighs and sobs, universally through all the corners of the church, as the like was never seen nor heard of.” Scotland was in a high-strung and perilous mood.
The wise course for Charles would have been to withdraw the service book and to give assurance that he would meddle no more with property and heritable jurisdictions; in that way he would have driven a wedge between those unnatural allies, the nobles and the Kirk. But from this course he was estopped by his passionate desire, fostered by Laud, to establish a uniform standard of worship throughout his realm, and the fear that such a concession would weaken his cause in the quarrel now drawing to a head with the English Parliament. He would fain have acted as he did in the ship-money case, and have secured a condemnation of the Covenant in the law courts, but the whole Scottish bench and bar believed in its legality. He had for a moment hopes of organizing a royalist opposition in Scotland, with the help of the Highland clans and possibly of Irish troops under Antrim, but he abandoned the project when he realized that, except for Huntly and the Gordons, and the doubtful cases of Hamilton, Lanark, Traquair, and Roxburgh, he had at the moment no Scottish supporters. Yet the king, who had at times no mean capacity for judging a situation, arrived at a shrewder estimate of the Scottish situation than his advisers. If he was to win his will force must be used, and to collect that force he must have time. The Privy Council had sent the Justice Clerk to court to expound the true state of Scotland. The king was impressed, and summoned Traquair and Roxburgh to advise him; Spottiswoode, too, and certain of the Scots bishops; likewise Lord Lorn, who had not signed the Covenant, and whom Baillie thought the most powerful subject in the kingdom. The outcome of this consultation was that the Marquis of Hamilton was appointed a special royal commissioner to Scotland, with authority to treat with the malcontents.
It is clear that Charles was only playing for time, and his unfortunate envoy knew well the futility of his errand. Scotland, as he once told the king, he hated “next to hell,” and he had no liking for a task where success and failure would be alike without profit to himself. He arrived in the north on 7th June, to find sullen looks and little of the welcome due to a royal commissioner. He brought with him two proclamations, which promi
sed that the canons and the service book would not be pressed “except in such a fair and legal way as should satisfy all our loving subjects”; one demanded that all copies of the Covenant should be surrendered, which the other did not; he was to use one or other according to his discretion. Traquair and Roxburgh had already warned him that a demand to give up the Covenant would wreck his mission; and, since the tenor of the first proclamation had become known, his diplomacy was prejudiced from the start. He saw Rothes, and the Tables appointed a committee of three ministers and three nobles to confer with him, one of whom was Montrose. Things had moved fast during the previous months. Henderson and Wariston had prepared “articles of peace,” which went far beyond the mere matter of the liturgy. The Committee of the Tables asked for the withdrawal of the obnoxious canons and service book, but they also demanded the summoning of a free General Assembly, and, finally, of a Parliament to decide all the questions at issue. The Scottish Church was to shape its own ecclesiastical policy, and a Scottish Parliament was to give such policy the validity of the civil law. It was an honest assertion of a justifiable nationalism.
Hamilton hummed and hawed, promised and withdrew, and finally left Edinburgh in despair. While negotiating with the Covenanters, he had been discussing secretly with his master the possibilities for the use of arms in Scotland — the chance of help from the Highland clans who hated Lorn; the best base to hold, since Edinburgh castle was in Covenanting hands. Charles was adamant on the question of giving up the Covenant; otherwise, he said, he “had no more power than the Duke of Venice,” and he intended “not to yield to the demands of those traitors, the Covenanters.” With such terms in his instructions no emissary had a chance. The king was negotiating only to gain time, and the duplicity of the monarch was matched by that of his commissioner. For we know, on Montrose’s evidence, that Hamilton privately told the Covenanters, “as a kindly Scotsman,” that if they took a firm stand they were likely to win. Then ensued a war of king’s proclamations and Covenanting protests. Hamilton fluttered between London and Scotland, carrying royal concessions — lavish concessions which meant nothing, since Charles had already determined to appeal to the arbitrament of war. In any case they came too late. The king proposed a new covenant of his own, the chief point of which was the abjuration of popery; but the Covenanting leaders, whose detestation of Rome needed no advertisement, not unnaturally described it as a “mockery of God.” Their aim was now nothing less than the complete suppression of episcopacy in Scotland. But the General Assembly was granted, and Hamilton had succeeded in some degree in sowing suspicion between the nobility and clergy by warning each of the danger to be apprehended from the other.