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.15 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.
Cromwellian rule in Scotland contrasted with its violent suppression of Ireland. The country was under military occupation but benefitted from free trade with England, taxes were unified across the country, serfdom and baronial courts were abolished and justices of the peace put in place to administer the law. There was toleration for the dissident Calvinist sects that had emerged.
Colonel John James set forward the Cromwellian policy for Scotland: ‘It is the interests of the Commonwealth of England to break the interest of the great men in Scotland, and to settle the interests of the common people upon a different foot from the interests of their lords and masters … The great men will never be faithful to you so long as you propound freedom to the people and relief against their tyranny.’16
The Cromwellian republic looked to the ‘middling sort’ for support, and deliberately taxed the towns lightly to gain popularity. But Scottish commercial interests were too small to form a stable base of support. The Lowland peasantry were sullen towards the occupiers, while in the Highlands throughout the period there were Royalist rebellions.
Amidst all this a more radical force emerged in the south-west of Scotland. In 1648, a radical Covenanting force came out of Dumfries and Galloway, seizing control of Edinburgh in the ‘Whiggamore Raid’, declaring the ‘Rule of the Saints’, which has been described as:
A strange combination of social revolution and fanatical repression; they purged church and state of all ‘malignants’ and moderates, made parishes responsible for the relief of the poor and sick, established schools in every parish, made church attendance compulsory and encouraged a return to witch-hunting. But their rule was brief, ended by Cromwell’s conquest less than two years later.17
The Covenanters
The death of Cromwell in 1658 was followed by two years of confusion with no one strong enough to maintain republican rule. In 1660, the commander of the army in Scotland, General Monck, marched south in support of the restoration of Charles II to the throne. No one was prepared to withstand him. The return of Charles II to the throne led to the return of baronial courts and the Scottish Parliament – in other words, noble rule. In addition, the new king also brought with him the spectre of popery because he was widely seen as a crypto-Catholic.
Throughout Britain, Charles re-imposed bishops, though he allowed the Kirk sessions to continue. This was his grandfather’s system, but this time more than 300 ministers quit the Kirk. Across parts of the Lowlands, particularly in the south-west, they began to gather large congregations at services, Conventicles, outside the established church. The government ordered troops to break them up, but the Covenanters, as they termed themselves, resisted.
On 13 November 1666, near Dalry in Kirkcudbrightshire, government troops stopped and held an old man charged with refusing to acknowledge the new episcopacy. They threatened to strip him bare and roast him alive in his own home, but four fellow Covenanters intervened, shooting the corporal and taking the other three prisoner.
News of this took twenty-four hours to reach the garrison in Dumfries. Meanwhile, the Covenanters had overrun the sixteen-strong government garrison at Balmaclellan and, on 15 November, with their numbers put at between 150 and 500, captured Dumfries, taking the government commander in his nightgown. For the next week, they moved around the south-west, threatening to march on Glasgow, before deciding on Edinburgh, where they believed their friends were set to rise. Meanwhile, the government commander, General ‘Black Tam’ Dalyell, had been ordered to bring them to battle.
The Covenanters were ahead of Dalyell as they marched towards the capital, but discovered the city had been made secure by the Crown. Dalyell caught up with them on 24 November at Rullion Green, seven miles south, where it took three charges for the regular troops to break the Covenanters, and when they did, ‘darkness afforded escape.’18 Nevertheless, 120 were captured and 50 killed. Of those captured, 36 were executed in Edinburgh, their heads and body parts put on display around Scotland. On the scaffold, a captain in the rebel army, Andrew Arnot, prayed for his fellow accused, threw out a proclamation in support of the Covenant and then ‘… pluckt out a pocket butt of sack
and with a roaring voice uttered … that he would drink no more of the wyne till hee had it new in his father’s kingdome’.19
In 1679, a group of Covenanters dragged Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews from his carriage at Magus Muir in Fife and slashed him to death. Once more royal troops were sent to root out illegal conventicles. That June a force of dragoons under John Graham, the Laird of Claverhouse, a Royalist who had been in exile and had served in the French and Dutch armies, came across one at Drumclog near Kilmarnock. Warned by lookouts, the minister told the women and children to depart and ended his sermon thus: ‘Ye have got the theory; now for the practice.’20 In the battle that followed, Claver-house was defeated, losing thirty-six men.
The Covenanters now advanced on Glasgow, but internal divisions and the authorities’ capacity to hold the city meant they did not press the attack. Eventually, they faced the royal army at Bothwell Bridge. For over an hour, Galloway men held the south side of the bridge but, on running out of ammunition, were told to rejoin the main force, allowing the government forces to bring across the artillery. The Covenanters broke under cannon fire. Four hundred were killed and 1,500 captured. Seven of their leaders were executed and 250 who refused to submit to the Crown were sent as forced labour to the West Indies. En route their ship sunk off the Orkneys and 200 drowned.21
What followed became known as the ‘Killing Time’. Royal commanders went around the south-west demanding that individuals swear loyalty to the king’s Church. If they refused, they were summarily executed.
In the following years low-level guerrilla war took place across the region until the Glorious Revolution in 1688 brought an end to the repression. Some ninety Covenanters were executed. During this period the Covenanter Alexander Shields came to the conclusion that the terms king and tyrant were interchangeable. Radical Covenanters began to advocate a Republic of Jesus Christ.22 One of the radicals, James Renwick, aged just twenty-six, returned from exile and ventured to Edinburgh, despite there being a price on his head. He exchanged shots with government troops before being captured. He mounted the scaffold, ready to meet the martyr’s death he craved, and quoted Revelation 19 to the crowd: ‘Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings.’ He then called out, ‘Lord, I die in the faith that you will not leave Scotland. But that you will make the blood of your witnesses the seed of your Church, and return again and be glorious in our land. And now, Lord, I am ready.’23
Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radicals and socialists would hold up the Covenanters as fighters for equality and freedom of speech, and opponents of royalty and aristocracy. In Grey Granite, the final volume of the trilogy A Scots Quair, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of Scotland’s finest novelists, has Ewan Tavendale talk of those ‘funny chaps the Covenanters’, how ‘he had always liked them – the advance guard of the common folk in those days, their God and their Covenant just formulae they hid the social rebellion in’.24 But for all their heroism and sacrifice they were fighting for a land ruled by the Presbyterian elect.
The social upheaval of the age meant new forms of disorder involving the lower orders were also appearing. Noble control was beginning to weaken in Lowland Scotland. In 1682, a group of young men were press-ganged in Edinburgh for military service and marched to the port of Leith. A chronicler of the city wrote: ‘… some women called out to them: “pressed or not pressed?” They answered “Pressed” and so caused an excitement in the multitude. A woman who sat on the street selling pottery threw a few shards at the guard, and some other people, finding a supply of missiles at a house that was building, followed her example.’25 The soldiers fired on the rioters, killing nine and arresting three, but the local assize refused to find them guilty.
In 1685, Charles II died and was succeeded by his brother James, a Catholic, who was also seen as an opponent of parliamentary rule. In 1688, the English parliamentary leaders invited the Dutch king, William of Orange, a Protestant married to James’s daughter Mary, to take the throne. As a Dutch army marched on London, James lost his nerve and fled to France.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 heralded parliamentary rule in which the new commercial class was dominant, but across the border in Scotland noble rule and feudalism was still in place. The existence of two different systems within one island under the same Crown was not going to last for long. Among a section of the Scottish nobility and clan chiefs there was support for the return of James and his successors.
Scotland was in for a tumultuous six decades.
FOUR
Union, Jacobites and Popular Unrest
In May 1999, on the opening day of the Scottish Parliament, the veteran SNP member Winnie Ewing declared that the Scottish parliament ‘adjourned’ in 1707 was ‘hereby reconvened’.1 It was a nice rhetorical flourish, but whatever the faults of the current parliamentary body in Holyrood, it’s better than what existed prior to 1707, an elite body elected by the nobility and the burgh notables. In that year four in every thousand had a vote in parliamentary elections in England; in Scotland it was one in every thousand.2 The only form of pressure the lower orders could apply was extra-parliamentary. Before the first decade of the eighteenth century, there had been little or no tradition of that, but now things were to change.
‘A parcel of rogues’ is how the poet Robert Burns described members of the Scottish Parliament who voted for union with their London counterparts. ‘Bought and sold for English gold.’3 Many were in fact bribed, but that is not the main reason the Scottish Parliament voted for its own extinction. To understand why, it’s important to understand what the Scottish Parliament was like in 1707.
Despite the fact that he had been deposed as king of England in 1688, for a year James VII remained king north of the border, until a Convention of the Estates (nobility, clergy, gentry and representatives of the burghs) met in Edinburgh in early 1689 to decide who was monarch on the basis of two letters – one from the exiled James VII and one from King William and Queen Mary, the new joint monarchs of England and Wales.
James’s letter was haughty and threatening, while William and Mary’s was conciliatory, stressing their determination to uphold the Protestant religion. James got only four votes. As a result, his staunchest supporter, Claverhouse (now Viscount Dundee), left with fifty horsemen to raise his banner of revolt on Dundee Law, hoping to amass a substantial army for James in the north-east and the Highlands.4
He was able to raise just 2,000 men, and on 26 July 1689 he lay in wait at the Pass of Killiecrankie in Perthshire for a stronger government army of 4,500, made up of Scots led by General Hugh Mackay. Mackay’s force passed through the narrow pass, with just one shot fired at them, to find Claverhouse’s troops lined up and their charge scattered the government army handing the Jacobites (supporters of James) victory. But Claverhouse was killed and lost 40 percent of his soldiers, dead or wounded.5
The Jacobites’ attempt to march south was blocked by Cameronian volunteers (one of the Covenanting sects) in a street fight in Dunkeld, and on 1 May 1690 the remaining Jacobite force was scattered by cavalry at Cromdale on the Spey. Meanwhile, James was losing control of Ireland, which, with the exception of the Protestants of Ulster, had rallied to him. By the end of 1690 the Stewarts seemed a spent force. But events were to intervene to give them a new lease of life.
As part of the new reign, the rebel clans in the Highlands were forced to take an oath of loyalty to the monarchs, but one small clan, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, missed the deadline. The king’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, decided to make an example of them and sent troops to massacre them all, men, women and children. Thirty-eight MacDonalds were murdered and another forty women and children died of exposure in the Highland winter.6 The massacre was carried out by men from the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot, and deepened the divide between the Campbells and other clans in the West Highlands; it also fed Jacobite propaganda.
&n
bsp; Another source of support for the Stewarts came from developments in the Church of Scotland. The Glorious Revolution had ended bishoprics – the bishops had all been avid supporters of James – and restored the General Assembly. The Episcopalian ministers who would not accept this broke away to form the Episcopalian Church (roughly equivalent to the Church of England), which became strong in parts of the Highlands and in the Lowlands north of the Tay. This would become the social base for those seeking the restoration of the Stewarts, the Jacobites.
South of the Tay, the Kirk emerged stronger than ever. The local Kirk Session spied on those breaking the Sabbath and not attending church, sexual encounters and much else. Wrongdoers might sit on the ‘stool of repentance’ in the Kirk or, in the case of gay men, be burnt alive on Edinburgh’s Castle Hill. Single women suffered even more persecution, with up to 4,500 executed because they were supposedly witches. The figure for England in the same period is around 1,000.7
In the Lowlands there existed parish schools, providing a degree of education and creating, above all, a largely literate peasantry by the seventeenth century. Yet Scotland had not witnessed any of the peasant rebellions of the late Middle Ages that shook France or England, probably because the ties to the nobility remained stronger due to constant war, feuding and poverty. This was still a country where feudal relations dominated; it was still a rural society. Nobles had their own baronial courts where they could try misdemeanours, and while serfdom had been effectively abolished in Western Europe, Scotland saw its introduction to the coal mines and salt pans in 1606 by act of the Scottish Parliament.
Despite this, all the signs seemed to promise better times once James VII was ousted, but disaster followed. In 1690, Scotland had a population of one million – with nine out of ten living off the land. The following decade was marked by a famine on such a scale it burned itself into popular memory, the worst deprivations coming in 1695, 1696 and 1698. Food prices rose steadily across the decade. In Torryburn in Fife, the minister noted that the number of deaths rose from some 21 a year in 1696 to 114 in 1697, and 81 in 1699. On the streets of Leith men died of hunger. The population fell by between 5 and 15 percent. From the parish of Monquhitter the minister would record:
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