SCOTLAND’S CONVENANTERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 April 1938, Page 2

SCOTLAND’S CONVENANTERS

THE STUART THRONE. On February 28. occurred the 300th anniversary of an event, memorable in Scotland and momentous for England —the signing of the Scots' National Covenant in Edinburgh, (writes G. F. Crosbie in the London “Daily Telegraph”). Scotland, it has been remarked, has never distinguished itself as originator of political and religious ideas. Yet national independence has been an historical reality, the Scottish dynamic for centuries. And when this powerful political instinct was mixed with a composite religious formula (originally imported), and given an opportune economic infusion, the result was one of the high-explosive forces of history. The French Revolution, the revolt of the American Colonies, and England’s Civil War are all traceable to one detonation: the 17th-century impact of Scottish theology on English politics. Towards four o’clock on the afternoon of February 28, 1638, the signing of the National Covenant began in the kirk of the Greyfriars in Edinburgh. If has been disputed whether the sheepskin preserved in the Huntly House Museum in the Canongate is the original document, hut it. is difficult to believe that it can be anything else. It has about 1,350 signatures in front; and on the back 1,900, together with 900 names recorded by notary public intermediaries; in ail about 4,150.

Significantly prominent and characteristic is the youthful Montrose’s signature; foremost, indeed among his peers. The greatex- and lessei’ noblesse signed until dark on the first day; the ministers and commissioners for the burghs the following morning. The third day is deemed the famous one for democracy, when the Covenant was said to have been taken outside to a tombstone in the kirkyard and subscribed by the populace in an atmosphere of tense emotion, patriotic and religious. This fervour epitomised an over-, whelming surge of national feeling, unequalled before or since. In prescribing his Book of Canons and Service Book, Charles 1. proved that, unlike his more, sagacious father, he did jHot know the stomach of his Scottish subjects. Doubts and dissent from the new orthodoxy of the Covenant were swept aside, in the country as in the capital. As in all revolutions, enthusiasm conferred authority where recalcitrants had to be intimidated. If not in the

Roman Catholic fringes, in episcopalian zones like Aberdeen scruples had to be swallowed, and the Covenant signed. Copies penetrated to the remotest parishes on the mainland. Bloodshed did not stain the Covenanting revolution, but Its legacies were to be wars, generations of bitter discord, and cultural atrophy.

LOYAL DESIRES

The Covenant, bad three sections. The first, repeated the Covenant of 1581 against Rome, which the Crown had subscribed. The second recited the Acts of the Scottish Estates passed in favour of the Kirk since the Re formation, including the oath (or its equivalent) which Charles took at his Coronation in Edinburgh in 1633. The third was the operative and obligatory part: the subscribing noblemen, barons, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, barons, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, and commons, pledged themselves to defend theix- religion against all innovations not sanctioned by the Estates and the 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 aforesaid true religion, liberties, and laws of the Kingdom. . . .” Nor was this loyalty to the Throne a legal fiction. The Republicans, who. years later, were to kill the King by way of climax to the revolution set. in motion by the Scots Presbyterians, had an outlook in religion and. politics that was foreign to Scotland. The Covenanters of 1638 wished no derogation to the ..King’s dignity, far Jess danger to his person. All they wanted was that he should rule Scotland in the general interests of Scotland, as his Stuart ancestors had striven to do. Such interests were often, even normally, in conflict; and here James (VI. and I.) maintained equilibrium and authority, even superimposing a democratic Presbyterianism. Charles, - well-meaning, tactless, with something of an enthusiast’s lack of scruple and with less experience of Scotland than any earlier Sovereign, united his Northern subjects as they had never been united before; and tlxe result; for himself was ruin.

For there was an underlying truth which Charles probably never comprehended only in so far as it concerned the jus divinum of his kinship. His father had learned it unwillingly, but unforgettably. Over 40 years before, in Falkland Palace, Andrew Melville had taken James by the sleeve: “Sir,....now again I must tell you, there are two Kings and two Kingdoms in Scotland; there is Christ Jesus and his Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and whose Kingdom not a King, or a head, nor a lord, hut a member.” This, the famous enunciation of Hilderbrandine Presbyterianism, may seem extreme; but in structure and government the Church of

Scotland is Melvillian to this day; and the King is not. its head, but a member of it.

. Such an anomalous kingship was abhorrent to Charles, but his maladroitness was remarkable. James had at least convoked a General Asseembly of sorts to endorse his episcopalian Five Articles of Perth, and had never enforced them. Charles simply issued his Book of Canons and Service Book by Royal decree. TOWARDS A CRISIS. No lawyer has ever defended this arrogation; and certain of the Canons; as when treating of such a matter as divorce, definitely invaded the civil province. Dr. Juxon, writing to Maxwell, the extremist Bishop of Ross, prophesied they would make more noise than all the cannons of Edinburgh Castle. The good Doctoi’ did not dream that he would attend his King to the scaffold. That he was mobilising a “divine right” more formidable than his own, Charles might have sensed at each stage: the riot when the Service Book (Laud’s Liturgy) was tried out in St. Giles’! the setting up of “The Tables” —a committee of Public Safety drawn from the nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers, the signing of the Covenant —a “band” or bond* or covenant being the traditional Scots mode of opposition to the Government. But Charles was only confirmed in his autocratic resolve. And his proclamations were automatically answered by counter-proclamations. The revolutionaries acquired a technique and confidence; till, in November, 1638. they got their General Assembly, in Glasgow Cathedral Ranke compared it to the French National Assembly of 1789. The Scottish version of a Westminster Parliament (with which the Kinghad also dispensed for years), the Assembly signified the all-important solidarity of the nobles and the Kirk. Its clerical composition was stiffened by lay-elders with such names as Rothes. Loudoun, Argyll, Cassillis, Balmerino. The Marquess of Hamilton, who convoked the Glasgow Assembly as the King’s Commissioner, soon formally dissolved it under the penalty of treason; its intentions were beyond ’doubt. But the Assembly ignored both the Marquess’s decree and his departure. This, the ovex’ act of revolution, was to be an example fox- the Long Parliament.

The Assembly constituted itself a tribunal fox’ tlxe iixdictment of the Scottish bishops; a legislature fox’ the abolition of episcopacy; an executive textile direction of the Covenanting cause. Wax- was inevitable.

Soon the Covenanters had probably the most efficient army that eyex- invaded England from the Nortli. Texx thousand Scots were said to have served undei’ Gustavus Adolphus, so there wwas no lack of experienced officers. The General, Alexander Leslie, was illegitimate; but his authority over his baronial colonels was unquestioned. He was a Field-Marshal of Sweden.

The first and second Bishops’ Wars ensured the ascexxdancy of the Covenant, ended the real authox’ity of Charles I. in Scotland, and compelled him to submit his necessities to the Short and then to the Long Parliament. The revolutionary “Edi-nburgh-Westminstex’ axis” was confirmed by the Solemn League and Covenant, after the Civil War had begun. Historians who praise or at least acknowledge the National Covenant as the Magna Carta of Scottish self-asser-tion, unhesitatingly condemn the Solemix League as, in the light of history, a presumptuous mistake. The formidable cohesion created by .the earliei’ Covenant disintegrated undei’ stress of the Covenant made with England; and Dunbar and Cromwell and Monck’s military rule made a humiliating if salutary sequence. Yet the twq manifestos are united organically and functionally, and are attended by similarities which put. theix- common revolutionary niotif beyond doubt. One affirmed that Scotland was Presbyterian; the othex- that England ought to be.

Differing considerably in form, but much less in substance, they were both the work in the main of two men — the advocate Johnston of Warristoh, the legal mind behind the Covenanting revolution; and Alexandex- Henderson, ininistcr of Leuchars, in Fife.

Henderson pronounced the allocution in Greyfriars’ before the National Covenant was signed; and again, in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, when Mr. Speaker and both Houses (or what remained of them) attended to suscribe the Solemn League and Covenant on behalf of England in September, 1643.

As Lord Acton used to point out, democratic movements usually have religious origins, and democrats usually deny them. Of the far-reaching seculai’ repercussions of the Covenant, and the Solemn League, there is no question. But certainly more obvious is the religious vindication to-day of the former.

, Greyfriars’ churchyard (Henderson is only one of the illustrious buried there) and the Castle of Edinburgh looming above, conserve tremendous associations. Every May the Castle guns thunder out their welcome to the King's High. Commissioner to the Kirk. This is really the homage of the State to the Church, and is unique. It is the annual commemoration of the signing of those Scots lords, burgesses, ministers, and commons, of three centuries ago.