A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  But amidst this chaos new ideas were beginning to circulate. Literacy was spreading not just in the towns, but among the peasantry. They no longer relied on priests to translate scripture, but they were free to read, interpret and dispute it amongst themselves. The original, revolutionary message of Jesus, preaching rebellion against Rome and denouncing the refusal of the great and the good to act, could still shine through and inspire.

  In one sense nothing changed with the Reformation, in that noble power not only remained but was strengthened. But in other ways Scotland had changed. There was the faint glimmer of democracy within the new Kirk. More important, the idea that it was correct to rise up against tyrants, couched though it was in religious language, was set loose.2 When Knox called on the ordinary people of Perth to rise up, he was unleashing something that could not be so easily controlled.

  Yet there was one further obstacle to the ultimate success of the Reformation. In 1561, Mary, Queen of Scots, sent as a child to France and married to the French heir, returned after her husband’s early death. Verbally she accepted the Reformation but was opposed by Elizabeth of England and a majority of Scotland’s nobility. A tumultuous reign ended in a short civil war, Mary’s flight to England and her execution there after long imprisonment.

  Mary is one of those historical figures who feature on shortbread tins and other kitsch sold in souvenir shops. Knox and others attacked her morals and her love life, famously denouncing the ‘monstrous regiment of women’ (although this was directed at her mother, and did not endear him to Elizabeth I in England). The new queen was soon involved in the assassination of her second husband, who had previously taken part in the gruesome murder of her Italian secretary in front of her when she was pregnant. We shall not share such misogyny, but Mary was not a romantic figure swept from the throne because of ill-fated love.

  She regarded herself not only as queen of Scotland but also of England, because the English queen, Elizabeth, was held, by the Catholic Church, to be illegitimate (her father, Henry VIII, had divorced his first wife to marry Elizabeth’s mother) and a heretic. In order to win the English throne she was involved in all sorts of conspiracies and plots with France and, in particular, Spain and the Vatican. They wanted to topple Elizabeth as part of the campaign to destroy the Protestant Reformation in Europe and England’s ally, Holland, the first capitalist state that was struggling to achieve independence from Spain. It is hard to shrug off the anti-Catholic sectarianism that has blighted modern Scotland, but if one can, this can be seen as an attempt by the old feudal order to strangle a new society, struggling into life, and Mary was quite conscious of what she was involved in.

  Mary’s infant son, James VI, took the throne and was fought over by rival sections of the nobility, who abducted and tried to murder him. On reaching adulthood he used conciliation and coercion to exert a degree of control through a strong Privy Council and overcame the strict Calvinists to create bishops in the Church of Scotland, as agents of royal power.3

  In the meantime, parts of Scotland remained relatively free of royal rule. In the north-east the earls of Huntly remained Catholic, and in 1594 defied James’s order to renounce their religion or quit Scotland. The Earl of Argyll was ordered to raise an army to assert royal power, and mobilised 8,000 of his clansmen and their allies. In Glenlivet they met with Huntly and Errol’s smaller force of 2,000, but their cavalry and artillery were able to rout Argyll’s clansmen.4

  James’s continued attempts to disarm and demilitarise the Highland clans had limited success, but he still had to rely on powerful magnates such as the Campbells to maintain some kind of order. Nevertheless, a number of clans became Calvinist at the diktat of their chief: the Campbells, Frasers, Grants, Munros and Rosses would generally support the government over the next century and a half. Not only were the Highlands physically divorced from the Lowlands, but now they were also divided along religious lines.

  The dispossession of Church lands following the Reformation benefitted the nobility, not the peasantry. Nevertheless, Calvinism had its attractions for the lower orders, being based on regional presbyteries, made up of delegates, and with the election of local ministers. In response, nobles used their power to attempt to dominate much of these proceedings. The Kirk held itself as being above the power of a king and thus represented a challenge, never far from the surface, to royal rule.

  The absence of peasant rebellions is something that contrasts Scotland with other Western European countries during the period. It can be explained by the very struggle to survive, the dominance of the nobility and the lairds, and the frequency of war and feuding. The historian Victor Kiernan argues, regarding the power of Calvinism, that ‘It may not be surprising if some strata of the peasantry learned to hold fast to a dogmatic creed as a substitute for the inherited patch of soil that peasants in other countries clung to.’5

  Scotland differed from the development of feudal society in Western Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike in France, Spain and Austria it had no royal standing army nor a numerous and capable state bureaucracy. Here the chaos characterising this period meant royal control remained limited while the nobility retained and increased its power.

  By the seventeenth century the peasantry seldom owned the land they worked. Crops were sparse and rents could be as high as a third of what was grown, with payments in kind or service on top. At some point leases, it seems, grew longer, offering the peasantry more security. Smallholdings and small estates were, however, more numerous in the south-west, which was farther from royal control and in close contact with Ireland. This was the one area that would produce a rural rebellion later on.

  During the Thirty Years’ War, Protestantism was pitted against the old, Catholic order. In Scotland, identification with the Kirk and anti-Catholicism meant a popular national consciousness emerged. But it also meant that because Scotland was too weak, and faced an internal, non-Calvinist ‘enemy within’, it needed English protection. The overthrow of Mary, Queen of Scots, meant Scotland was firmly allied to England.

  Scotland was weak in other respects, as Thomas Johnston noted nearly a century ago: ‘Scotland was not a nation: it was a loose aggregation of small but practically self-supporting communities, and scanty supplies and high prices at Aberdeen may quite well have been coincident with plenty and comparatively low prices in Dundee and Glasgow.’6

  But fortunes would change for the Scottish king. In 1603, Elizabeth of England on her deathbed named James VI as her heir. When news reached Edinburgh he took off to London with alacrity, not surprising given his experience of being abducted, threatened and bullied. As he travelled south, James VI was impressed at the wealth of the English lords who joined him on his journey to be crowned. They no longer lived in fortified castles; in Scotland they still did.

  Once he had settled in London, he wanted more than the Union of the Crowns, thinking of the possibility of direct rule from London, but sensed that the Scottish nobility would resist any attempt to bring that country under one rule. Despite the best efforts of his Calvinist teachers, James believed in the divine right of kings, but he had a poor hand to play. The English Parliament, which he did not control, held the purse strings and was reluctant to finance any royal army. Nevertheless, James played this hand well, extending royal power in Scotland where he could. But this good governance would not last long.

  The War of the Three Kingdoms

  In 1639, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Alexander Henderson, wrote: ‘The people make the magistrate (king) but the magistrate maketh not the people. The people may be without the magistrate but the magistrate cannot be without the people. The body of the magistrate is mortal but the people as a society is immortal.’7 The Union of the Crowns in 1603 created a British state but there were, as yet, few cross-border institutions. The two kingdoms ran their own affairs. Yet it would be a rebellion in Scotland against James’s son Charles that triggered the English Revol
ution of the 1640s and war throughout Britain and Ireland.

  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.’8

  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.’9

  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.’10

  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.11 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!12

  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’.13

  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.14

  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.