IV The Bishops’ Wars, the Three Kingdoms, and Montrose
The immediate cause of the terrible wars wasn’t class difference, or resentment of the luxury at court. The gulf between dismal shipyard conditions and the exceptional extravagance of court masques was for the most part endured silently. What triggered the war was a prayer book. It was known as the Scottish Prayer Book, and it was an attempt by Archbishop William Laud to extend to Scotland the reforms that had made many so unhappy in England. The book in question was large, a folio. It was badly printed, with many typographical errors, and it was delayed for months in the press. But these were not the worst of its problems. It came to symbolize many things: the menace of popery, English rule in Scotland, the king’s unwillingness to listen to his truest friends.
This little cause of a great war still has its posterity today. Unless you are Roman Catholic, the Lord’s Prayer ends with the words ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever’. These final lines are William Laud’s lasting memorial. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he added them to the Lord’s Prayer in the new Scottish book. When Charles II created the 1662 Prayer Book, its authors borrowed heavily from Laud’s Scottish Prayer Book, and retained the lines, which to this day have something of the ring of ecclesiastical monarchic absolutism.
But the addition to the Lord’s Prayer was not why the Scottish Prayer Book was so disliked, though a general antipathy to set prayers rather than extempore devotions was an issue. The controversy brought to a head tensions that were already at work. The crisis reflected the unstable situation between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. It exposed deep fissures and incongruities which were already present. It would be an exaggeration to call them festering grievances. The badly printed book acted as a wake-up call. People suddenly stubbed their toes on differences which they had once been unwilling to see. Charles wanted to extend his father’s policy and attempt uniformity of religion between the kingdoms. He wanted order and obedience. He was announcing that he and not the Scots was in charge of the Kirk. And that could not be borne.
Charles’s intentions and personality mattered terribly because all that tied Scotland to England was the bare person of the king. James I had tried to unite England and Scotland in more than himself, but had met with ferocious opposition from both sides. The English didn’t want smart Scots on the make like James Hay influencing affairs in London. The Scots didn’t want to disappear into the identity of their richer, more populous, more powerful neighbour. Their unease was exacerbated when James died and was replaced by his son Charles. Charles sounded much more English than James had, despite having been born in Scotland. The Scots suddenly felt they were being ruled by a king from another country; James, after all, had been their king first.
James had, in fact, been especially the nobles’ king. The Scottish nobility knew all about managing the power of a monarch with worrying ideas in matters of religion. They had managed to carry out a Protestant reformation in 1560, against the wishes of their ruler, the Queen Mother, who had been acting as regent for her daughter Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned as Queen of France. Then, in 1567, they had replaced Mary Queen of Scots, the recalcitrantly Catholic monarch, with her newborn son. Of course they had never meant to do away with monarchy itself, only with popery. But they were practised in putting God first and the monarch resolutely second.
But though the nobles had felt James was theirs, they saw that he was lost to them when he went south in 1603 to govern England. The court vanished from Edinburgh, and the Scottish nobility no longer had access to the person of the king. James only revisited Scotland once in his entire reign, so he came to see English ways as natural. This trend intensified under Charles, so that by 1638, the English thought of the king as theirs, with Scotland as a kind of allotment that he might visit and farm in his off-hours, or a small estate, best left to second sons. England’s arrogance in this was founded in its undoubted economic superiority; it was richer by far, had almost twice the population of Scotland, Wales and Ireland put together, and had the largest city in Western Europe as its capital.
Ironically, the identity of the Scottish nobility was not only compromised by their absentee landlord, but by their own Anglicization. The Scottish nobility began to demand deference from inferiors in a way that had never before been customary. They also expected a king to require less deference from them than the English norm. The trouble was that Charles failed utterly to convince them that he valued them. A slew of administrative reforms flew past their heads, and Charles did not even make a pretence of consultation. In a world of honour, that stung. The result was that Charles had few friends or allies among the Scottish Lowland nobles.
Through its earlier civil war over Mary Queen of Scots, Scotland came to define itself in terms of religion. It needed a unifying factor, for Scotland was as ethnically split as Ireland. The Lowlands spoke Anglo-Scots, and the Highlands spoke Gaelic. The Lowlands thought the Highlands barbarous, almost like the Irish; after all, they both spoke Gaelic, and the Highlanders were violent thieves in Lowlanders’ eyes. The Highlanders thought the Lowland Scots were usurping foreigners who had pushed the Gaels out of the fertile lands. Finally, Highland chiefs liked to ignore the Crown as much as possible, while Lowland chiefs tried to be involved in decision-making and government. But religious differences, though fierce, were less stark. The Lowlands, or the ‘radical south-west’, was passionately godly, vehemently Presbyterian, but Aberdeen was Episcopalian. Many Highlanders were nominally Catholic, but the Campbells were eagerly Protestant; in fact, despite being Highlanders, the Campbell Lords of Argyll tended to think like Lowlanders, keen to ‘civilize’ the Highlands.
The Scottish Church was itself a jumble. It had been a Presbyterian, Calvinist Kirk, with strict Church courts imposing tough moral discipline, presided over by ministers and lay elders. James had managed to bolt an episcopate onto it, and while some of its members remained unenthusiastic, the uneasy Jacobean status quo was grudgingly accepted. This disgruntled compromise was symbolized by the Five Articles of Perth, of 1618, which attached to the Kirk such Anglican matters as holy days, confirmation by bishops, kneeling at communion, private baptism, and private communion. But they were often not obeyed by those for whom they stuck in the throat as popish, and at first Charles seemed happy to tolerate this.
It was when it became evident that Charles and Laud hoped to make the Church of England and the Kirk as close to identical as possible that the Kirk grew restive. A small radical party was created within the Kirk just as a godly party formed within the Church of England. Most of the very godliest Scots went to Ulster, to preach there. But some stayed behind because they felt that the Kirk was still God’s chosen church. One godly minister, Samuel Rutherford of Kircudbrightshire, wrote of the Kirk as his ‘whorish mother’, or ‘harlot mother’. She might be corrupt, but she still belonged to him.
To understand the Scots, one must understand the way the Kirk fostered a certain idea of collective identity, generating a powerful sense of sin, and then alleviating it with penitence. The Stool of Repentance was a wooden seat, often a kind of step-stool with different levels for different crimes. It stood immediately in front of the pulpit, elevated to where everyone could see it. Those deemed immoral by the Church courts had to sit on it while a sermon was preached. The connection between the trembling example of sin before the eyes of the congregation and the words of the preacher was what made this punishment different from most English methods, in which the sinner was generally displayed by the church door rather than inside the building. In Scotland, words and spectacle were welded together into a single great theatrical event. To emphasize this, the sinner then made a speech of repentance. It was important to cry, and sound truly sorry. If the congregation was convinced,