Charles I believed with equal passion that the Church must be a spiritual reflection of the hierarchical world of which, he felt certain, he was at the social and political summit. He believed in the importance of bishops, regarding them as being, like himself, selected by God. He also viewed them as powerful allies across his kingdoms: ‘the pulpits … teach obedience [to the Crown]’, he wrote in late 1646.12
Charles attempted to impose his High Church beliefs on Scotland during the late 1630s, by insisting on the use of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. His high-handedness brought about the National Covenant in 1638. This was an undertaking by the Kirk, on behalf of the Scottish nation, to adhere to the doctrines previously approved by Scotland’s Parliament, and to reject any religious interference. While the Covenant acknowledged Scotland’s obedience to the Crown, it also warned that, if pushed, the people would fight for their God against their king.
The Covenanters would, essentially, form the government of Scotland from 1638 to 1651, with the 1st Marquess of Argyll – the slight, cross-eyed, redheaded chief of Clan Campbell – as its leading aristocratic light. Charles I had tried to win over Argyll early on, inviting him to London in 1638. During that visit Argyll left the king in no doubt as to his distaste for his religious plans for Scotland. Insulted rather than enlightened, Charles hatched a secret plan for vengeance, approving an invasion of Argyll’s lands by Irish sympathisers who allied with the Campbells’ bitter enemies, the MacDonalds. These low tactics turned Argyll from a man who was merely at odds with the king’s spiritual policies into a livid Covenanter, eager to champion his nation’s religious and political freedoms under one banner.
Another leading Covenanter was the lawyer Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, who was powered by intense religious convictions. The loss of Wariston’s first wife in 1633, when he was twenty-two, seems to have pitched him into a terrible place, from which he emerged with an endless appetite for godliness. Wariston would sleep for only three hours a night, passing his long days in bewilderingly drawn-out prayers and meditations. Dinner guests noted one evening that when he said grace, it took him an hour to reach ‘Amen’. While his regular devotions took three hours at a time, he must have surprised even himself when he realised that the prayers he had started at six o’clock one morning had only ended at eight o’clock that evening.
This fanatical piety gained respect amongst other Covenanters, and this readily crossed over into political influence. Wariston’s home, near Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, became the meeting place for the leading members of the Kirk, the night before the opening of each annual General Assembly. There they would agree in advance ‘the choosing of the Moderator, Committees, and chief points of the Assembly’.13
Wariston lent his sharp legal mind to the Kirk as it battled against Charles I’s proposed religious settlement for Scotland. Presbyterianism was, to Wariston, ‘more than all the world’, and ‘he looked on the Covenant as the setting of Christ on His throne’.14 Any who refused to have such beliefs as the cornerstone of their lives must, he argued, be disqualified from public office.
The religious collision between king and Kirk led to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. The Scots invaded England, taking Newcastle and threatening advances further south. The urgent need to settle the wars forced Charles to call England’s Parliament in April 1640, for the first time in eleven years. Though the ‘Short Parliament’ lasted just three weeks, a chain of events had been set in motion that eventually culminated in the English Civil War, as Members of Parliament insisted on having a long list of grievances addressed, while the king asserted his independence from the demands of his subjects. This political conflict was exacerbated by the keenly felt religious principles on both sides.
In 1643, with Royalist victories mounting and the loss of the Civil War looking possible, Parliament sought the Scots’ help. An alliance was sealed through the Solemn League and Covenant. This agreement guaranteed the preservation of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and seemed to the Scots to promise that England and Ireland would fall into line once Charles I had been defeated.
A Scottish civil war took place from 1644 to 1647, between the Covenanters and their Royalist opponents. James, 1st Marquess of Montrose, led the king’s army, a mixture of Scottish clansmen and Irish troops under Alasdair MacColla.
The charismatic Montrose won a string of remarkable victories with his small force. He repeatedly humiliated the Covenanter leader, the Marquess of Argyll, whose ruthlessness was not matched by either military ability or courage.* It was noted how reluctant Argyll was to engage with the Royalist champion. When he did, it did not go well for him.
The climax came at the battle of Inverlochy, near Ben Nevis, in February 1645. Argyll excused himself from the fight, claiming that he had a dislocated shoulder, and elected to watch proceedings from his boat in the nearby loch. From there he witnessed what was to be the bloodiest defeat his clan would ever suffer. Montrose’s significantly outnumbered men cut down 1,500 Campbells. After the battle was lost, Argyll was rowed away to safety.
Montrose’s victorious run was finally brought to an end when he was surprised in heavy mist by a large force under Lieutenant General David Leslie, at Philiphaugh in September 1645. This reverse occurred three months after the main English Royalist army had been trounced at Naseby, and added to the escalating despair in Charles I’s ranks. Montrose, refused a pardon, went into exile in Norway. The English king now seemed to have no Scottish cards left to play.
Despite this, in the spring of 1646, defeated in England and looking for a way forward, Charles I misguidedly handed himself over to the Scots. He had hoped that the allies of his English enemies would now support him, perhaps out of some underlying loyalty to his Stuart blood, but also because he had been fed inaccurate information about the Scots’ attitude to him by the French ambassador to England. The Scots, intrigued but confused by the appearance of their leading opponent in their midst, repeatedly tried to persuade Charles to take the Covenant, explaining that if he did not, they would be unable help him. But the king refused.
Charles had written to Henrietta Maria, earlier that year, saying that he would do anything to get Scottish aid as long as it did not involve him ‘giving up the Church of England, with which I will not part upon any condition whatsoever’.15 While he dug his heels in, citing his unshakeable religious principles, he was also aware of the political importance of his stance: ‘The nature of Presbyterian government is to steal or force the Crown from the king’s head,’ he told Henrietta Maria. ‘For their chief maxim is (and I know it to be true), that all kings must submit to Christ’s kingdom, of which they are the sole governors … so that yielding to the Scots in this particular, I should both go against my conscience and ruin my crown.’16
Henrietta Maria had agreed with her husband’s assessment. She told him, in a letter of October 1646, when the First English Civil War was lost: ‘We must endeavour to have the Scots for us, without nevertheless taking the Covenant, or doing anything which shall be dishonourable … since we have suffered so much, we must resolve to finish with honour.’
The king stuck to his views for several months, with no hint of compromise, leaving the Scots with no choice but to believe him when he said that he was not for turning. They had long made it clear that their God came before their monarch, and in early 1647 they effectively sold him to England’s Parliament, on condition that no harm would come to him – he was, after all, their king too.
There were, though, some moderate Covenanters who were open to a compromise with the king. They were party to ‘the Engagement’, an agreement that was secretly negotiated in December 1647 while Charles was held prisoner by Parliament on the Isle of Wight. Charles guaranteed these Scottish allies a confirmation of the Solemn League and Covenant in London’s Parliament, provided neither he nor any other Englishman was obliged to take the Covenant. There would also be steps towards