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Some of the ministers didn’t wait to be ejected – they voted with their feet rather than accept the authority of bishops and the monarch’s control of the Kirk. After all, to the Covenanters, Charles II had signed the Solemn League in 1650 and his renunciation of it was tantamount to blasphemy. So, denied churches to preach in, they took to the fields. These field assemblies – or
Conventicles
– became the basis of resistance to the Stewart monarchy.
The Scottish government under the earl of Lauderdale tried to suppress the Conventicles through military force. This led to an armed revolt in 1666, known as the Pentland Rising. Around 1,000 men from southwest Scotland attempted to re-enact the Whiggamore Raid (covered earlier in this chapter) and march on Edinburgh. They were poorly equipped and driven back just outside Edinburgh, then crushed at Rullion Green on the slopes of the Pentland Hills by government forces under the command of ‘Bloody’ Tam Dalyell of the Bi
Still, the rising did encourage the Lauderdale government to take a softer line with the protestors, and a limited amount of toleration was granted. Two Indulgences were passed in 1666 and 1672, which restored a total of 132 dissident Presbyterian ministers to their parishes. Feeling that this would sidefoot the more militant Covenanters, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy of 1669–70, making Charles II head of the Scottish Church and attending illegal Conventicles punishable by death.
These policies offset the positive impact of limited toleration and only served to increase the popularity of the Conventicles – some were attracting more than 10,000 worshippers. The Conventicles were guarded by armed men, so they began to look more like armies at prayer rather than worshippers.
To intimidate the dissidents, the government introduced, in 1678, the ‘Highland Host’, a force of 8,000 men from the eastern and southern Highlands. The Host soon gained a reputation for plundering the southwest of Scotland of shoes, money and horses. Although they weren’t from the Gaelic heartland, they came to be seen by the Presbyterians not only as thieves but also as agents of Catholic or Episcopalian oppression. Something had to be done! The first response was assassination; the second, armed rebellion.
One of Charles’s right-hand men in Scotland, the much-hated Archbishop James Sharp of St Andrews, was hacked to death in front of his daughter, Isabella (they were a bit more relaxed about celibacy then!), on Magus Muir, 3.2 kilometres (2 miles) from St Andrews on 3 May 1679. That action sparked an armed rebellion of 5,000 men in the west of Scotland. The rebels defeated a government force under James Graham of Claverhouse at Drumclog, on the border of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire.
The victory was short-lived – later that year, at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, the duke of Monmouth, Charles’s illegitimate son, mowed down the Covenanting army. Twelve hundred prisoners were taken and herded into Greyfriars Churchyard in Edinburgh – still known as the Covenanters’ prison. Of that number, 340 had agreed within a fortnight not to take up arms against the king. More than 200 who refused to sign were put on a ship to the West Indies, but the vessel went down off Orkney and they all drowned.
The Cameronians are coming, the Cameronians are coming!
There was one last throw of the Covenanting dice. Richard Cameron, ordained as a minister in the Scots Church in Rotterdam, was a fundamentalist and a republican who had no time for monarchy or bishops. Indeed, he was so radical that he even scared the radicals within the Covenanting movement!
Cameron and his followers (known as the Cameronians) were Scotland’s 17th-century version of the Taliban. Cameron said that Charles was ‘the enemy of God and one of the most vile adulterers that ever lived’. He publicly declared war on the king in what was known as the Sanquhar Declaration of June 1680:
We for ourselves do by thir presents disown Charles Stewart, that has been reigning (or rather tyra
The government immediately offered a reward of 5,000 merks for his capture, and Cameron was hunted down and killed in a skirmish at Airds Moss in the River Ayr valley on 22 July 1680. The Cameronians continued the struggle after their leader’s death, but it was David against Goliath without the sling! One of Cameron’s disciples, James Renwick, was the last Covenanting martyr, executed in 1688.
The Killing Times
In the 1680s in Scotland (a period that became known as the ‘Killing Times’), the Scottish government under the control of James, Duke of Albany and York, and later king, began to crack down severely on dissident Protestants.
The most important piece of legislation was the Test Oath of 1681, which forced those wishing to hold office to swear allegiance to the crown. Some high-profile refuseniks were the 8th earl of Argyll and James Dalrymple of Stair, Lord President of the Court of Session, both of whom were found guilty of treason and driven into exile.
Government troops under the command of Claverhouse forced people to take an oath acknowledging the king as supreme in matters of religion. If they refused, punishment was execution on the spot. It was king first and Jesus Christ second. In 1685, a hundred individuals – nearly all belonging to the Cameronians – were executed under the legislation and many other Covenanters were imprisoned.
At Wigton, Dumfries-shire, Margaret MacLachlan, age 65, and Margaret Wilson, age 18, were tied to stakes and drowned by the incoming tide of the Solway Firth for refusing to repudiate the Sanquhar Declaration. By October 1684, 160 men, women and children were imprisoned in Glasgow in what were said to be appalling conditions.
The Killing Times have to be put in perspective. More witches were burnt than Covenanters executed; more Quakers were imprisoned in England than Covenanters jailed in Scotland. But the important thing to grasp was not the extent of the killing but the damaging impression it made on the minds of Presbyterian Scotland.
The Reign of James II and VII
In February 1685, Charles II died of a stroke at the age of 54. Without a legitimate heir, his death brought to the throne his brother James II and VII, a self-confessed Catholic. James had none of the diplomacy and tact of his grandfather, James I and VI, but all the arrogance and stupidity of his father, Charles I. His reign lasted only a stormy three years.
Given his open Catholicism, his accession to the throne was surprisingly met with little opposition even in Presbyterian Scotland. James was master of the country, having thoroughly destroyed the Covenanting movement – the source of any likely opposition.
The proof of his mastery came early in his brief reign when he survived a plot hatched by Protestant exiles in Holland to overthrow him. The plotters were his nephew, the duke of Monmouth, and Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll. Argyll left Holland in June 1685 with three ships and 300 men, mainly from his own clan, the Campbells. He raised his standard at Kintyre, an act that coincided with Monmouth’s landing in southwest England.
The trouble was that no one was really interested in supporting this rebellion. Argyll found it difficult even to raise the bulk of his own kinsmen. Both men suffered the same fate. Monmouth was defeated at the bloody Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685; Argyll didn’t even get the chance to fight! He was captured at Inchi
James’s victory over the ragbag armies of Argyll and Monmouth convinced him that he had the support of the Scottish people and, in particular, the Highland clans. Moreover, the economy was growing and he was in a very strong financial position. So, he felt that he had a personal mandate to bring about changes in the religious life of the country.
Perhaps James was delusional, but at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1685, he sent a letter requesting new penal laws against disobedient Presbyterians. Under royal pressure, Parliament passed an Act that stated the following:
whoever should preach in a conventicle under a roof, or should attend, either as preacher or as a hearer, a conventicle in the open air, should be punished with death and confiscation of property.
In March 1686, James followed up with another letter – this time to the Scottish Privy Council, advocating toleration for Catholics. This paved the way for the Declaration of Indulgence of 1687, also known as the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, in which all subjects were free to practise their own particular faith free from persecution.
It sounded good, but there was a subtext: James saw Protestantism as a ‘false’ religion and promoted Catholicism and Catholics as much as he could. But this was in a country where only 2 per cent of the population was Catholic, and they were mainly found in the Western Isles. So, from the outset his policy of religious toleration was viewed in Scotland and in England with suspicion. Catholic converts, such as the earl of Melfort, were placed in high office at the expense of Protestants. James further outraged Presbyterians by setting up in Holyrood Palace of all places a Jesuit college, a printing press and a Roman Catholic chapel. No wonder the Edinburgh mob tore up the place! Toleration seemed to be of benefit only to Catholics.
James didn’t only a
The Glorious Revolution of 1688
Fearing that James II and VII would join with the French and attack the northern Protestant states, and without consulting the Scots, the English opposition invited the Dutch ruler, Prince William of Orange, and his wife, Mary, James’s daughter by a first marriage, to accede to the throne. William landed in Devon with an army of 14,000 men on 5 November 1688, but there was no one to fight. James and his family had run off to France. It seemed that James had abdicated, so there was no constitutional problem in offering the throne jointly to William and Mary.
The Glorious Revolution was quick and virtually bloodless, although for the Scots and the Irish there was nothing peaceful or speedy about it.