in Scotland?
the liberating effects of full union with England before acquiring the wherewithal to stand up to their over-mighty magnates and tyrannising clerics.
The question also touches one of the assertions of the
‘new British history’ that flourished at the end of the 20th century. If the Civil Wars were a single integrated crisis, as John Morrill has averred, it would be reasonable to assume that the unprecedented ‘intermingling of peoples’ that occurred in this decade also included some cross-fertilisa-tion of ideas. London’s printing presses were churning out material that could have been accessed almost as readily by the inhabitants of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, as those of York, Norwich and Bristol. Could the radical ideas expressed in English publications have taken hold north of the border? After all, Scotland’s history, culture, politics, religion, social structures and institutions, although distinctive, shared broad similarities with England’s.
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people together with one another and with God, aimed to mobilise popular support and make good the claim that defence of ‘true religion’ was not a cloak worn by a seditious faction, but the profession of a nation united. Charles pre-ferred the first interpretation. Emboldened by the fact that he could call upon the resources of his other kingdoms, he began preparing a military solution to the Scottish problem.
Waging war on his own people turned out to be a fatal mis-calculation: it not only galvanised the Scots behind the fight for national self-preservation, but also divided the English.
Many were persuaded that, at a time when Catholic armies were on the march in Europe, the king of Britain had better things to be doing than attacking godly Protestants who also happened to be his subjects.
One of the most (in)famous images of the Prayer Book riots is that of the legendary ‘Jenny Geddes’ hurling her three-legged ‘cutty’ stool at the clerics who led the ill-fated service in Edinburgh’s main church of St Giles. Although
‘Jenny’ was almost certainly the mythical creation of a later period, the prominence of women in these events is well-attested to in contemporary sources. It has been sug-gested that the inspiration for the legend was a real woman called Barbara Hamilton, wife of John Mean, an Edinburgh merchant and opponent of royal religious policy. (Scottish women usually kept their own names after marriage; taking the husband’s name follows English custom.) The distur-bances of July 23rd were not the only example of crowds taking to the streets and low-born women continued to be eager to express their opinions. In the summer of 1639, James Gordon, Lord Aboyne, second son of the royalist Marquis of Huntly, failed to make himself sufficiently inconspicuous on a trip to Edinburgh and was attacked by a group of female assailants. Women were taking advantage of what Natalie Zemon Davies describes as the ‘licence’
that patriarchal societies grant to ‘the unruly woman’: by More importantly, Scots could read English publications
and vice-versa. Yet important recent work by, among others, Philip Baker and Eliot Vernon, Michael Braddick and Rachel Foxley, suggests that the distinctively English historical narratives that underpinned the radical ideas of this decade – the Norman Yoke, Magna Carta, the Common Law tradition represented by Edward Coke’s Institutes, the Petition of Right – would have made them difficult for Scots to appropriate. The unilateral decision made by Englishmen in January 1649 to execute the man who also happened to be Scotland’s king and the subsequent conquest of the country by Cromwell’s New Model Army further tarnished English radicalism north of the border. This is evidenced by responses to the introduction of religious toleration. Many Scots probably went to gawp at English preachers who, like Conservative Cabinet ministers today, were an intriguing novelty in their midst, but most ultimately opted to remain with their own congregations.
W
E MIGHT nonetheless ponder why 17th- century Scots do not appear to have de-veloped their own radical agendas for law reform, expansion of the franchise and religious change. Nearly 40 years ago David Stevenson wrestled with this matter in what remains the definitive political study of Civil War Scotland. His conclusion was that the deferential, hierarchical nature of Scottish society obstructed the emergence of popular radical movements.The power that Scotland’s feudal landowners wielded over their tenants, in combination with the control exerted by presbyterian clerics over their parishioners, not only pre-vented the Scottish people expressing new ideas, but also inhibited them from thinking them. Although Stevenson demonstrated that a ‘revolution’ had taken place in Scotland by 1641, he suggested that it was limited by two facts: it was fundamentally religious in origin and constitutional rather than socio-political in nature. There was simply no space in Scotland for the emergence of the kind of secularising, democratising movements that were regarded in the 1970s as essential aspects of the revolution in England.
It is unlikely that hitherto unknown cells of Scottish radicals are waiting to be discovered. This does not mean that there is either nothing to find or to be gained by investi-gating popular political engagement. On the contrary, one of the exciting things about studying the Civil War period is that, as in England, we can see how a political crisis opened up opportunities for ordinary people to shape public events.
Both men and women took part in the Prayer Book riots of 1637 and thousands of people signed the National Covenant of 1638. What was the significance of their participation?
Were they simply instruments wielded by the nobles and clerics who would come to dominate Scottish politics?
THE SCOTS STARTED the Civil Wars. Charles I, trying too hard to complete James VI’s unfinished work of bringing the Scottish church into line with the English model, sought to impose a Prayer Book on a Protestant people who were convinced it was but one step removed from the Roman Catholic Mass. Riots ensued. When the combination of popular disturbances and a public petitioning campaign failed to have the desired effect of persuading Charles to drop his plan, the organisers of these events were forced to raise the stakes. The 1638 Covenant, by banding the Scottish
An illuminated copy of the Scottish Covenant, signed around September 1639 to mark the defection to the cause of Lord George Gordon, son of the Royalist peer, the Marquis of Huntly.
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flagging up the failure of men to maintain order and do their duty, such women reinforced expectations regarding gender roles. This kind of behaviour convinced men of otherwise different political persuasions – Covenanters and Royalists – that matters might be getting out of hand. One defender of royal authority, Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, counselled one Covenanter lady to desist from ‘unwomen-lyke attempts’ to influence politics and endeavour to learn some ‘humility’. It seems unlikely, given what we know of female activism at this time, that she heeded his advice.
The odd thing about the crowd violence of the Prayer Book crisis is that it was not, in fact, very violent. Some crowds, such as the throngs that greeted the arrival of the king’s commissioner, James, Marquis of Hamilton, at Leith in June 1638, demonstrated strength and resolve through their peaceable, albeit implicitly threatening, behaviour.
There were neither fatalities, at least until soldiers con-fronted one another on the field of battle in 1639, nor judicial executions of low-born scapegoats. This contrasts with crowd activity in London, where deaths, accidental and intentional, occurred. With the possible exception of the house belonging to the provost of Edinburgh, whose
windows were stoned by a crowd that despised him for sup-porting the Prayer Book, there was no significant damage done to property. Scots were not noted for being especially law-abiding, so this is surprising and suggests significant differences in popular behaviour on either side of the border. In the 16th century, Scotland’s towns often became battlegrounds for feuding noblemen and their retinues.
Periodic violent uprisings, as well as localised disorders, were a hallmark of the later 17th century. Why the Prayer Book crisis seems to have been peculiarly free from serious violence is a complicated matter, but several important features can be noted. The authorities in Scotland had no soldiers to command and Royalist nobles proved unwill-ing to challenge Covenanter crowds by summonunwill-ing their retinues, thereby reducing the likelihood of escalation;
the beautification of churches that English puritans found offensive and reacted against with iconoclastic fury, had not advanced far in Scotland by the time the Prayer Book was rolling off the presses; the deployment of women at the forefront of crowds may have been a tactic designed to inhibit men from resorting to force.
S
O WHAT WERE THE crowds doing? It seems that certain politicians and public figures were being tar-geted by people whose aim was to humiliate rather than harm. How did the crowds know when to take to the streets and whom to attack? Word of mouth must have been important, but it is difficult for historians to trace.Sermons galvanised people with rousing rhetoric about the imminent triumph of the forces of the Antichrist: ‘All the Pulpits of Edinburgh ... did ring with bitter invectives’, one royalist publication complained. Satirical verses and polem-ics also circulated unhindered around the country.
Crowds often went after individuals who were already in possession of unenviable reputations. Degrading episodes at the hands of the common sort, recounted through gossip and tavern tales, then provided valuable material for the satirists. The people most likely to suffer in this way in the late 1630s were the bishops. An account of the events of July 23rd, 1637 included a vivid description of the Bishop of Edinburgh, David Lindsay, soiling himself so abundantly when confronted by an angry crowd that he warded off his attackers with his ‘stinking smell’. One of Scotland’s most important politicians was also subjected to unwelcome at-tention. The Lord Treasurer, John Stewart, Earl of Traquair, had chosen to absent himself from what became the dis-astrous first reading of the Prayer Book in Edinburgh. One wit composed a handful of gleeful little anagrams about Traquair that seem to have circulated in 1640. Variations on his name were rearranged to emphasise his untrustworthi-ness: ‘Johne Earle of Traquaire / Ho a varrie effronted lyer’.
It was the involvement of ordinary men and women that made the politics of the late 1630s so dangerous. The politics of the 1640s did not continue in this vein and there is one particular factor that explains why: the Scottish Cov-enanters, unlike the English parliamentarians, were able to create a stable and legitimate government. In other words, there was no Scottish civil war: the insurrection led by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, in the mid-1640s was destructive, but he never established an opposing regime by setting up a Scottish equivalent of the royalist capital at Oxford. Of crucial importance in making the transition from oppositional faction to governing regime was the Top: a silver medal
with an image of Charles I struck at the Edinburgh Mint, 1633.
Above: The Arch-Prelate of St Andrews is attacked while reading the new Prayer Book, 1637.
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suppression of popular political activity. This is the context into which the 1638 National Covenant needs to be placed:
it was both a product of the creative political strategies of the late 1630s and a vital component in their containment.
C
OVENANTING was not unique to Scotland. The practice of people bonding with one another and with God had parallels in England and on the other side of the Atlantic. The 1638 Covenant was printed on Dutch and, later, English presses and translated into French, Dutch and Latin. It became the underpinning for the 1643 treaty with the English Parliament that brought Scotland into the war against Charles. Known as the Solemn League and Covenant, it was disseminated throughout the kingdoms to people who professed to be‘of one reformed religion’ and committed to the pursuit of religious ‘uniformity’. Historians have, therefore, been right not only to follow Morrill’s example, by placing the Cove-nant into its ‘British’ context, but also to investigate the role of the Covenants within an English culture of subscription and oath-taking. It is surely a curiosity, then, that we know so little about the act of taking the Covenant in its country of origin. How was it received by the people in the pews and what can this tell us about popular political engagement?
I do not mean to suggest that the Covenant has been neglected. As a text, it is so well known as to justify the appellation ‘iconic’, although it is debatable whether most of the members of what is now an avowedly secularist society know what is in it. The 1638 Covenant is not, in fact, a single document, but a compilation. It is based on the 1581 Negative Confession, to which the new Covenant’s authors added two further sections: a contract between God, king and people, bolstered by a tedious but important list of acts of the Scottish parliament and general assembly of the church (its highest governing body); and an oath for the preservation of the ‘true reformed religion’ and Scotland’s ‘liberties, laws and estates’. It is fair to say that the long-running debate on whether the Covenant should be regarded as ‘radical’, or ‘conservative’, or a ‘radical’
document written in ‘conservative’ language, has long since been exhausted. That such an interpretative burden has been placed on such a short document is testament to the studied ambiguity imposed on the authors by the volatile political situation then prevailing in Scotland. Significant-ly, the words ‘presbytery’ and ‘episcopacy’ are nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Covenant. Scotland’s church in the early 17th century was governed by bishops and their status in law – something distinct, it must be noted, from Wenceslaus
Hollar's A Map and Views of the State of England, 1642-49 compares Britain's situation to that of the civil war in Bohemia.
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own community appended underneath. At the other end of the scale, many more Covenants were printed cheaply and plainly in the smaller quarto format for domestic use and private contemplation. It seems plausible that some people were passing covenants around their friends and family to create their own covenanted community in miniature.
The circumstances under which the Covenant came into being are vital for understanding how such a legalistic document came to underpin the disruptive, schismatic and periodically violent covenanting movements that emerged in Scotland during the later 17th and 18th centuries. Two factors are of particular importance. Few scholars have commented on the fact that the Covenant was dissemin- ated around the country before it had been sanctioned by either parliament or the general assembly. From whence, therefore, did its authority emanate? This was a contested issue. Presbyterians were aware, furthermore, that their attempts to legitimate the Covenant risked enhancing its potential for generating instability. It was distributed around the country and signed by many thousands of people who, it seems, represented a broad cross-section of society.
There was a danger that individuals and congregations would come to believe that the Covenant was legitimate precisely because it had been approved by ‘the people’ and some Covenanter propaganda was ambivalent on this point.
Surviving copies seem to overwhelmingly display the names of male householders. In many places, it seems, servants, apprentices, youths, the poor and women were not invited to put their names to the Covenant. Scottish subscribers to the Covenant appear not to have been as so-cially diverse as English subscribers to the 1641 Protestation Oath. However, the absence of signatures does not mean that all these people were excluded from taking the Cove-nant. Signings were preceded by what was arguably a more important event: swearing the oath. This was a communal performance in parish churches, framed by an explanatory sermon by the minister. It is clear, at least in some places, that the entire parish community, including men, women, and children, was explicitly and intentionally involved, perhaps in direct emulation of a biblical passage about covenant-swearing: the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, referenced by the co-author of the Covenant, Archibald Johnstone of Wariston, speaks of wives, sons and daughters taking an oath to ‘walk in God’s law’ with ‘knowledge’ and
‘understanding’. The emotional intensity of these occas- ions, as parishioners stood alongside their family, friends and neighbours with their hands upheld, must have been inspiring to some but daunting to others. Many records mention the ‘tears of great joy’ shed by people in the congregation as they swore the Covenant. Tears were sig-nificant, for they were taken by the godly as a sign of what Johnstone of Wariston termed the ‘extraordinarie influence of Gods Spirit’ upon ‘frozen hearts’. It would have been difficult for individuals who were opposed to, or doubtful about, the Covenant to express negative sentiments in such an atmosphere. These performances were intended to give greater meaning, significance and context to what was otherwise a dry and unexciting document.
On the one hand, the experience of swearing the Cov-enant was empowering. For the first and perhaps the only time in their lives people who were not considered fit to serve in the most menial of public offices were being asked to give their consent to a constitution in both church and perceptions of their legitimacy – was almost
unimpeacha-ble. Debate raged in Scotland during 1638 over whether the Covenant was compatible with episcopacy. The argument was settled decisively in favour of the presbyterian inter-pretation at the end of the year, when the Glasgow General Assembly, having first kicked the bishops out of the church, appended a coda to the Covenant known as the Glasgow Declaration. Whatever the intentions and beliefs of those who took the Covenant prior to the Assembly’s ruling, the Covenant thereafter was a definitive statement that God thought the best reformed churches should be presbyterian.
A
LTHOUGH HISTORIANS have primarily been interested in the Covenant as a printed text, it is important to remember that, for most people, their first and primary interaction with the Covenant was oral – they would have heard it being read to them. There was a visual aspect, too. Some Covenants, by their size and quality, seem to have been intended for publicdisplay in parish churches. Beautifully and painstakingly copied out by hand, sometimes with illuminated lettering, these Covenants were often produced on expensive and durable vellum rather than paper. Many people would have
display in parish churches. Beautifully and painstakingly copied out by hand, sometimes with illuminated lettering, these Covenants were often produced on expensive and durable vellum rather than paper. Many people would have