It started with a post on politics.ie:
The Scottish Covenanters: Radicals or Proto-fascists?
That irritated Malcolm in oh-so-many-ways.
First up was the looseness of thought that could apply a term like “proto-fascists” to the early seventeenth century. It’s like blaming Christopher Columbus for not just checking out Google Earth (which would have saved him, the native Americans, and the world an awful lot of bother).
Let’s get that out of the way for a start.
Fascism, as a term, became current, imported from Italian, only around 1921, and proto-fascism was coined (in the New York Times, believe it or not) a decade later to refer to Georges Sorel (1847-1922). So extrapolating back three further centuries is a leap of imagination too far.
Anyone devious enough to plunder the Eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (and that’s not going to occur to any of the habitués of politics.ie) may discover an earlier reference:
… in Sicily a discontent of which Socialist agitators took advantage to organize the workmen of the towns and the peasants of the country into groups known as fasci.
That was plumped out by Eric Hobsbawn in his Primitive Rebels of 1959:
The great peasant rising of 1894—the Fasci Siciliani—saw [the Mafia] on the side of reaction, or at best neutral .‥ Even then it was observed that the rise of the Fasci had diminished the hold of Mafia on the peasants.
That quibble apart, Malcolm’s main objection was to the thinness of the argument. It depended from a casual reading and a review on the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement website. Oh dear! The depth of thought here can be quickly exemplified:
Take the Covenanters. After many years of “struggle” they were able to impose their vision on Scotland (albeit a watered down one.) It was a long road. In Greyfriars Churchyard in 1638 they signed a ‘Church in Danger’ document which they called the National Covenant. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 had taken the Stuarts to London faster than the proverbial Scottish Labour MP (and with the same intention of not returning!)
The interests of our larger neighbour seemed to predominate in all affairs – be it politics, culture or religion. The Greyfriars signatories had a legitimate grievance in feeling that their Kirk was being anglicised. But let us put this “Scottish Revolution” in perspective. True, the Covenanters act of rebellion was favoured in much of lowland Scotland. Parts of the north east and the Gaeltacht were the exceptions. Charles I’s domestic English problems had a say in both these outcomes : it gave the Covenanters a free hand to secure their position within Scotland free from any organised royalist resistance until late 1643 – early 1644 by which time England and Ireland were in civil war.
Let’s not choke on that nonsense about 1640s Ireland being in “civil war”. But whizz to the end of the same effort:
The Covenanters legacy can be seen in many small town lowland prejudices, namely anti-highland and anti-Irish prejudices. For my part, the Covenanting tradition belongs to the Orangemen lock, stock and barrel – in bigotry, in language, in defence of the same rights and victories. They signed covenants in 1638; they play flutes and lambeg drums today. For those who believe in a secular Scottish Republic, who adhere to the old United Irishmen maxim of ” uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter” then we can have no truck with the intolerance and proto-fascism of the Covenanters. How can we ever re-claim that maxim if we honour those who tried to destroy it.
That tells us more about the author than about the topic. It seems to assume that, because the Ulstermen of 1912 adapted the Covenant as a device, it must be the same device. So the author is entitled to berate the National Covenant of 1638 with the rhetoric of the late 20th-century by some process of assimilation.
Malcolm objected. He drew attention to Neil Oliver’s opinionated, shallow but amusing A History of Scotland (now in paperback). The episode on the Covenant, God’s Chosen People, is re-titled King Jesus. Oliver starts his chapter with a throat-clearing anecdote:
A Scottish Presbyterian man is headed for a new life in Australia when his ship hits an uncharted reef and sinks. Alone of all the passengers and crew he survives the wreck and swims to a little uninhabited island. Twenty years later another liner is blown off course by another storm and onto the same reef. This time a handful of survivors make it into a lifeboat and they row themselves to the Scotsman’s island.
He greets them warmly and takes them on a tour of their new home. They soon realise he has worked hard to create a comfortable, civilised life for himself.
‘This is my house — complete with running water,’ he says, walking them past a well-built timber building with a roof of palm leaves.
‘Here’s my garden and my vegetable plot,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘I can grow fruit as well, anything I want — the climate is so wonderful.’
‘And over there — slung between two palm trees — is my hammock, where I like to watch the sun set each evening.’
One of the survivors takes a minute to gaze around and then poijnts to a stone building on a nearby hill.
‘And what’s that?’ he asks.
‘Oh, that’s my church,’ says the Scotsman.
Another survivor points to an almost identical building right beside the first one.
‘And that?’ he asks.
“That?’ says the Scotsman. ‘Oh … that’s the church I don’t go to.’
At which point, Malcolm was challenged to give his own interpretation of what the Covenant was all about. And this he did in three extended postings.
Part ye firste
Above all, it is necessary to appreciate the inter-weaving of the religious and the political. Along with that we need to recognise that Scotland was then a rapidly-evolving social system, but any sense of Scottish separateness had to play off French and English interference.
So, perhaps one starting point would not be in Scotland nor in the seventeenth century. It would be with that July 1525 act of the Scots parliament forbidding the import of Lutheran materials (so they must have been current, and significant). Or with Patrick Hamilton, who studied under Luther and Erasmus, and absorbed their humanism and the “discovery” of individual conscience. Archbishop Beaton had him burned (in the Fifeshire rain it took six hours for him to die) and the Reformation in Scotland had its first martyr.
In 1545 Beaton arrested George Wishart (a protestant reformer and political agent of Henry VIII — this is, after all, during the “rough wooing”) and burned him, too. Revenge came soon: Wishart was assassinated (29 May 1546) and the sixteen conspirators barricaded themselves in St Andrews Castle, where they were joined by sympathisers, including one John Knox. When they surrendered, a month later, Mary of Guise and her ruling faction had them sent to the French galleys.
Then there was, of course, the earlier Covenant (“the first Bond”) of 1557-8. Five noblemen, “The Lords of the Congregation”, swore to leave the Catholic Church, to establish ministers and defend them and their congregations against interference. Across Scotland, local worthies, town officers and the gentlefolk signed up. It’s worth noting that this, rather than simple reforming zeal, was a “moderate” reaction as much against Knox and his ilk as against Mary of Guise.
24 April 1558: Mary of Scotland was married to François, Dauphin of France, who could, and did, now boast himself King of Scotland. Loudly.
Meanwhile, back home, Mary of Guise set about suppressing the first Bond, demanding that protestant preachers submit to Romanism before her. None appeared; and they were outlawed. That provoked what must have been a concerted plot by the Prod nobles. “The Beggar’s Summons” of New Year, 1559, was nailed to friaries and hospices in all the burghs, claiming the property for the poor of the town. Many burghs declared for protestantism, and the nobles recalled John Knox.
A week after arriving at Leith, Knox preached at Perth (11 May 1559): the congregation rioted for two days, gutting the ecclesiastical property there and at Scone. Mary of Guise raised an army to march on Perth. The Lords raised their own forces, sacked St Andrews, occupied Edinburgh. Mary of Guise retreated to Dunbar and called for French aid.
July 1559: Henri II of France died. François II succeded, and published his royal arms, quartered with the emblems of Scotland and England (his claim was that Elizabeth was illegitimate and he was rightful King of England through his wife)
That drew Elizabeth of England into the issue. First money was sent; then the English fleet blockaded the French at Leith. Stalemate. Only when Mary of Guise herself pegged out (11 June) did the French at Leith surrender. The result was the Treaty of Edinburgh (6 July 1560) between the English and the French.
Now this bit is significant. The Scots were not at any time signatories to the Treaty: this was a matter for the English and French to decide on their behalf, and in their own national interests. No foreigners were to be appointed to Scottish offices. The government of Scotland was to be in the hands of a council of twelve: seven nominees of Queen Mary, five by the Scottish parliament.
Parliament assembled on 1 August 1560: the usual notables (earls and Catholic bishops), twenty-two burghs represented, and — wha’ hey! —110 lesser nobles. “Power” (whatever that term implies in this context) was no longer the plaything of the Great Lords, but was being diluted among the lesser landlords and the rising burgesses.
Mary had not signed the Treaty, and would not do so because it meant denying her claim to the throne of England, so the first item on the agenda: were they legally constituted? Parliament duly voted its own legitimacy. The protestants from the burghs and those lesser lords took over the Lords of the Articles (effectively the main “executive”). The Lords of the Articles abolished papal authority and the Mass, not forgetting to seize church lands and property. Knox was called in to write the twenty-five Articles of Confession of Faith (a.k.a. the “Scots Confession”).
As any good thriller-writer would plot it, François II then popped his clogs (septic ear over Christmas 1560) and Mary was a widow. She rattled around for a few months while every Catholic monarch in Europe weighed up his chances, until her uncles suggested a trip home. When she arrived back, a convinced Catholic monarch, she found the Scottish Kirk had become formalised, that laymen, Elders, had responsibility for their congregations, and that the Kirk had a General Assembly. The Kirk had laid down a Book of Discipline which not only detailed religious matters, but social ones: poor relief, and free education. Only the nobles, recognising they would be paying for all this, held up profound social progress.
Thus was established the pattern of Scottish life that persisted until Charles I determined to change things.
Part ye seconde
The various doings that saw off (the photogenic, but otherwise useless) Mary, Queen of Scots, made little impact, except to cement the protestant lords into their dominance. The caveat here, of course, is that the Kirk was established only in the Lowlands: the writs of both monarch and General Assembly barely touched the Highlands and Islands; the north-east was episcopalian. Then there was the small matter of money.
Sequestered church property had, as so commonly happens, fallen into the hands of the nobles. There was an agreement, “the Thirds”, by which the nobles provided for the church and the monarchy: neither of these two recipients found their share sufficed. Stewarts were high-maintenance. The ministers of the Kirk were constantly increasing in number (not surprisingly: the Lowlands were over-populated, to which we shall return shortly).
Once Mary despatched herself to serial captivities in England, Scotland settled into business as usual: two decades of bloodshed and assassination.
The minority of James VI was managed by a succession of four regents (Moray, Lennox, Mar and Morton): two murdered and one beheaded. Meanwhile, Andrew Melville was creating a powerhouse at Glasgow University. Melville was one of the divines who authored The Second Book of Discipline (1578).
Here we have the handbook of a Calvinist Scotland. Melville spelled it out to James:
There is twa kings and twa kingdoms in Scotland, there is Christ Jesus and His kingdom the Kirk whose subject King James the sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a heid, nor a laird, but a member.
Not what any self-destructive Stewart meekly accepts, particularly one who is seen to be flirting (indeed: this is James Stuart) with Rome in the form of Frenchified cousin Esmé Stuart, soon elevated to Duke of Lennox. The protestant lords arranged the kidnap of the king (the Raid of Ruthven) to force Lennox’ removal; but growing suspicion of James obliged him into his Negative Confession, denouncing popery, which later became the first element of the National Covenant.
James came back with:
- First with his Trew Law of the Free Monarchies, which boils down to that “divine right” James learned from reading Bodinus (Jean Bodin, 1530-96) and which was drummed into us at middle school.
- Then in May 1584 James formulated his “Black Acts” to affirm royal supremacy and send Melville and his fellow Calvinist divines into exile.
- Much later (1598) came Basilikon Doron, his treatise on kingship addressed to his son-and-heir:
... learn to know and love that God, whom to ye have a double obligation; first, for that he made you a man; and next, for that He made you a little God to sit on his throne, and rule over other men.
Spot the coming crisis.
James’s other problem was money. After 1586 he had an agreement with Elizabeth to keep the peace on the border, in return for a stipend of £4,000 a year (this James saw also as a down-payment on his eventual accession to the English throne). Then the marriage (October 1589) to Anne of Denmark brought in a substantial dowry. If these connections, and the appointment from the “new men” of officials such as Sir John Maitland, eased his problems with his protestant gentry, they also provoked a rising by the Catholic lords. [Though there are also indications that James was in on the plot, as a roundabout way of pressing his claims on Elizabeth of England.]
To side-track from the religious issue, it’s worth noting another ramification. The rebellious Western Isles had to be brought under proper control. In 1597 it was enacted that a plantation and townships should be established for the “civility and policy” of the Western Isles. What was attempted, with small success in Lewis and Kintyre, became the pattern for Ulster, and then for Nova Scotia. Apart from subduing the parts royal power and protestantism had not previously reached, the plantations drained off the surplus population of the Lowlands, many of whom were unwelcome immigrants into England or entering mercenary service in Europe.
James’s opportunity to subdue the presbytery came once he was established in England. He invited to London Melville (who on arrival was promptly locked up in the Tower and denied any return to Scotland) and other divines (who were roundly abused). James set about increasing the number of Scottish bishops. Then, in 1617, the English parliament financed a royal trip to Scotland. Oh, dear!
At Holyrood James installed a choir and organ. He imposed the Five Articles of Perth, effectively anglicizing the Scottish practice: communion would be received kneeling; confirmation performed only by bishops; private communion and baptism be permitted; confession be restored (this last significant because it qualified the private conscience so important to Calvinists). When the Kirk did not abide by the letter of these Articles, the General Assembly was prohibited. And that, along with the publication of the Authorized Version, was how James left the Scottish church.
On, in part ye thirde, to the nub of the issue, starring Charles I.
Parte ye thirde
Let’s imagine being — say — among Edinburgh advocates at the end of March, 1625. News has arrived from London (the roads are bad, it may have been from a ship-captain landed at the Port of Leith). King Jamie Stewart the Sixt is deid. His son Charles Stewart, the spare not Henry the heir, is proclaimed.
What would these intelligent and thoughtful professional men make of the situation? As many opinions as there are lawyers, no doubt.
Traditionalists would bewail the loss of prestige by the union of the crowns, a constant reminder that Scotland was a smaller, poorer place than the southern neighbour. Yet, wealth and power of England had financed conquest in the Highlands, leading to the outlawing of the Clan MacGregor, the forced reduction of the chieftains’ private armies, and the imposition of reformed religion, along with the guid Scots tongue, on the Gaelic fringes.
Others would as likely award deid King Jamie a fair rating. Under his reign, the longest of the Scottish kingdom, Scotland had changed greatly, and for the better. The country was a more orderly place, particularly now the Border troubles were ended (look at a map: see how close Edinburgh and the Lothians lie to the Border). The over-population of the Lowlands had been alleviated when the excess of borderers went to break heids in Ulster and further awa’. Burghs prospered with improved trade: there was a small but growing middle class. Enough of the feudal great Lords had gone south (having waxed fat on the pickings from sequestered church lands) and taken with them their squabbles and Francophilia. The lesser lords, the baronage, the gentry, were increasingly the makirs of the Scottish reformation, and now were more to the fore.
King Jamie in distant London, ruling through a Privy Council, suited the Scots very well. Scottish opinion was not anti-monarch; but the Calvinist temperament wanted a king who would accept the authority of scripture. Jamie at Holyrood had confronted this, and seen himself as the ultimate arbiter of divine authority. He also wisely knew his limits; managed the General Assemblies to accommodate the conservative elements from further north; achieved some shift of authority from presbytries to his appointed bishops; and arranged an agreed Prayer Book (instructively, through an Assembly held up in Aberdeen); but hadn’t attempted to impose it forcibly.
Charles Stewart was an unknown quantity. He had left Scotland as an infant; and spent half his conscious life as the spare to the heir. Among his first actions was the 1625 Act of Revocation, which annulled all grants of crown lands back to 1540, and restored the Teinds (the tithes) due to the Scottish church. This instantly bolstered his own and the church’s income; and financed the episcopacy through which he intended to rule the Kirk, and thereby the whole of Scotland. This was further implemented in 1634 with nine bishops nominated to the Scottish Privy Council where power was to be centralised.
When Charles, in 1633, long overdue, came to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation, he transgressed every limit of tolerance his father had tacitly recognised. He brought with him Archbishop William Laud and the full panoply of Anglican worship. He created a bishop of Edinburgh; and Charles’s episcopacy was authoritarian. His Lords of the Articles had drafted a whole tranche of Acts which determined what the Church of Scotland would now be. When John Elphinstone, Lord Belmarino, objected to the imposition of royal authority on the Kirk (and the parliament voted with Belnarino — though the clerk prudently recorded a different result), Belmarino was arraigned for treason, found guilty by the odd vote of fifteen justices, condemned to death, and only reprieved by some special pleading.
Using his self-awarded powers, Charles then imposed a Book of Canons which styled him Head of the Church, a new Service Book (“Laud’s Liturgy”) and all without reference to the General Assembly or the Scottish parliament. All this seems to have been acceptable to the generality of the clergy, who had already accepted the episcopacy, whose status, and even stipends, had been improved. However, the lay congregations had absorbed their Calvinism well; and saw their presbyterianism stemming from the General Assembly, where the monarch had no say.
For the first time, on 23 July 1637, James Hanna, dean of the High Kirk in Edinburgh, read the order of service from the new Book of Common Prayer. When he reached the Collect, there was a pre-arranged riot. Jenny Geddes, who ran a vegetable stall in the market, gets the credit for first heaving her foot-stool at Hanna, wishing on him a hellish dose of the farts for saying Mass in her hearing. That gains effect in the demotic original:
“Deil colic the wame o’ ye, fause thief. Daur ye say Mass in my lug?”
[Rabbie Burns later showed his sympathies by naming his mare, “Jenny Geddes”. Both Jenny Geddes and James Hanna now have their plaques in St Giles. Separately.]
Next day, the Privy Council, advised by Archbishop Spottiswood, suspended the introduction of the Prayer Book.
Demonstrations spread from Edinburgh to the other Calvinist burghs. So far, it had been the gentry and the nobles fomenting opposition. Charles, predictably, sent an edict for the ring-leaders to be arrested. Across the Calvinist kirks, ministers organised subscriptions and petitions: the opposition was becoming populist. The Privy Council appealed to London: London (Laud urging Charles to persist, lest any weakness encourage the English puritans) was emphatic the prayer book be enforced and objectors punished. Even in the episcopalian north-east, Bishop Whiteford of Brechin needed a pair of loaded pistols and an armed guard to read the liturgy (he then promptly fled Scotland for his own safety). More rioting in Edinburgh forced the Privy Council to remove to Linlithgow. The petitioners, the “suppliants”, confronted Charles’s chosen stooge, Lord Treasurer, the earl of Traquair. Official obduracy confronted rapidly-solidifying and well-organised opposition.
Out of the process of petitioning, a new administration, the Tables, began to emerge; and first assembled on 6 Dec 1637 at the Parliament House.
It’s worth noting how this worked, for it became the way Scotland would be governed under the Covenanters. Four of the “Tables”, in reality separate committee rooms, each represented one of the Estates: the divines; the lairds (who included a name to watch: James Graham, earl of Montrose); the county gentry; and the burghs, with the fifth “Table” as a secretariat and executive. The fifth Table provided not just a clearing-house, but also a testing of propositions by dialectic: five advocates, successors to that group we imagined at the start of this post. And one of them was Archibald Johnston of Wariston, a Glasgow-educated lynx-eyed lawyer … fu’ o’ fire and energy and gloom.
The Fifth Table delegated Archie Johnston to compose a “declinator”, a full, formal explanation of why the Tables excluded bishops in from discussion of their grievances.
Tranquair played for time, issuing a proclamation against popery, but also demanding the arrest of troublemakers. When the two sides did eventually meet, the Tables, led by the earl of Loudoun, presented their declinator. Loudoun was followed by James Cunningham, the minister of Cumnock, to press the doctrinal arguments. Tranquair recognised that all this was a few ulcers beyond his salary level, collected the documents, and took them and himself to London.
Charles and Laud were implacable. In mid-February 1638 Tranquair could prevaricate no longer: a royal proclamation demanded all to submit to his authority and the new prayer book.
The Fifth Table had already already been at work on its reasoned response, drafted by Alexander Henderson, the minister at Leuchars, and Archie Johnston. One provided the 1581 “Negative Confession”, agreed by James VI, and more: the other trawled law-books to complete the legal basis of the Calvinist faith and the Kirk. They had a working document of way over 4,000 words by 23 February. This went to the nobles for a final review the next day. It then passed to a convention of 300 representative ministers in the Tailors’ Hall in Cowgate: the moderates there quibbled over bishops, and this item was dropped at the last moment.
On 28 February, one of the most significant dates in Scottish history, Archie Johnston read the National Covenant to the assembled nobles at Greyfriars Kirk, in defiance of the royal proclamation which had declared such gatherings treasonable. First up to sign was the earl of Montrose. After the nobles, there were three days when the ministers and burghers signed. Then the Covenant went to the congregations.
At some point here we have moved from the populist to the popular. It was a National Covenant, carried by express horsemen, across Scotland, excepting only episcopalian Aberdeen and the irredeemably Gaelic north-west. Tens of thousands signed an personal sacred contract with a personal God, to defend our Church, the presbyterian establishment and our King. Any boundary between the ecclesiastical and the political gets lost here: all other considerations are subsumed in a Scottish national consciousness which is divinely-ordained and comprised of individual predestined souls. That’s a potent concoction.
The Covenanters may not meet the Spartist requirements for a proletarian revolution; but they were a moment of waking for the ordinary folk who were signatories. They deserve better respect for that.
The casual tourist in London may see only the core, the area between Tower Bridge and Kensington. Who knows London, who only that bit knows?
It is a commonplace that Rockwell discovered social issues and liberalism only in his last phase, particularly after he forsake the Saturday Evening Post for Look. Again, fair enough. Until one inspects further.
