In June 1638, Charles finally sent Hamilton to mediate with his fellow-Scots. By then the Covenanters had grown more confident, encouraged by the widespread support they had received. They asked for a free general assembly and a Parliament to make sure the prayer book could never be reintroduced. Hamilton was only there to stall the Scots until Charles could get his army moving. The Covenanters had created a new system of representation; commissioners from each shire and burgh were to form an elected body and to remain in the capital, being replaced frequently by elected substitutes. This new body was to have a different president every day, so that power was not concentrated in the hands of one man. This idealistic if slightly impractical rule suggests that tyranny was very much a preoccupation. And yet despite all this, the new assembly was window-dressing. Power remained with the strongest nobles, Rothes, Montrose and Loudoun.
On 21 November 1638, a new representative body met, this time representing the Kirk itself. This was the Glasgow Assembly. Huge numbers of people filled Glasgow Cathedral. The new body soon proved unmanageably radical. Hamilton tried to control it, with about as much success as Canute holding back the waves. Having rid itself of Hamilton, the new body began enacting a godly dream of restoring the Kirk to its glory days of full and unmixed Presbyterianism. On 4 December, the new assembly passed an act declaring the six previous Kirk assemblies unlawful, which meant that the Kirk was no longer bound by their decisions. Then on 6 December the assembly condemned Charles’s prayer book and canons as replete with popish errors. On 8 December, the assembly abolished episcopacy, and on 10 December it removed the disputed Five Articles of James’s reign. This brisk and decisive rate of progress resulted in a Kirk purified of compromise and popery, in less than a month. The Scots were creating God’s kingdom, allowing the light of the gospels to shine.
Their decisiveness would prove an example for the English godly party from this time on. The Kirk ensured this by distributing polemics explaining the connection between the restored Kirk and the legitimacy of resisting a tyrant. One of the creators of the Covenant, Alexander Henderson, wrote that ‘except we stand fast to our liberty we can look for nothing but miserable and perpetual slavery’. What he meant was liberty in religion, but the heady experience of having that liberty at Glasgow had made him determined to protect it against the prerogative of anyone who sought to take it away. The result of the prayer book crisis was therefore to join religion and political ideology stoutly together by an unbreakable chain.
It was easy to see why men like Alexander Henderson would be Covenanters. Less easy to understand is the position of Highland nobles like Argyll and Montrose. Of these two leading Highland nobles of the Civil War years, it was the ambitious, eager, warmhearted Montrose who was the first to subscribe to the Covenant. He first joined those Covenanters who sought to petition or supplicate the king in November 1637. It seems an odd decision for a Highlander. The Lowlands were suspicious of popery in part because they perceived the Gaelic lands – Ireland and the Highlands – as a hotbed of papists, and this was not altogether paranoia; there had been a significant Catholic revival among the Gaelic lands. Lowlanders also saw the Highlands as barbaric because of the growth and development of its clan structure in the sixteenth century. Later writers infatuated with the romance of old Scotland portray the clans as ancient, even paleolithic, but in fact they were largely a product of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is difficult to define what a clan was; it came to be seen as a family structure, but in Montrose’s time it was a band, or bond, which could be created between equals or between those of different rank. Usually, it was faintly feudal; the clan chieftains offered protection (from other clans) in return for loyalty (fighting when summoned). The result was to set up violent rivalries across the Highlands. Each clan could increase its wealth, honour and fame only by expanding into the territory of another clan, by raiding another clan, or by plunder. The result might be just a few casualties, but it sometimes involved the massacre of whole communities, including women and children. Such bloodshed frightened and horrified Lowlanders, who were inclined to see the Highlanders as barbarians.
The Covenant flourished in an urban world of merchants, professionals and other middling men. These people were all but absent from clan Highland life. So too was the king, and central government in general. Highland chiefs were traditionally not very interested in central government, or even in the making of laws. At home, they made their own. As for the monarch, in theory Highlanders were effusive in their tributes to the Stuart kings, but in practice they recognized few real obligations to them. Highlanders also shared with their royal master King Charles a love of disguise and tricks which is especially manifest in Montrose’s generalship and tactics. Montrose would be dependent, too, on men even more monoculturally clannish than he, notably the fighter Alasdair MacColla. Masking, mumming and women dressed in men’s clothing doing strange midnight dances were ineradicable parts of the Highland scene, and alien to the Presbyterian Kirk.
But Montrose signed the fierce and rigid Covenant. It is entirely probable that he was swayed by two things: the excitement of the moment which fed his personal ambition, and a very reasonable wish to influence events. He came from one of the oldest and noblest families in Scotland, and held estates in Perth, Stirling and Angus; he was educated richly and fully, in France and Italy as well as Scotland. He was graceful and handsome, with cold, lucid grey eyes. He was also a fine horseman and an excellent archer. He was, said Clarendon, too apt to condemn those he did not love.
He had been at the University of St Andrews, majoring, as it were, in hunting and hawking, in archery and golfing, though he did do some studying. At the age of seventeen, Montrose was married to Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of Lord Carnegie, afterwards Earl of Southesk. In 1633, as soon as he was twenty-one, he left Scotland to travel on the Continent. He had come back to Scotland in 1636, and had been presented to the king in London, by Hamilton, who apparently told Charles that someone as beautiful and charismatic and arrogant as Montrose could only be a menace. So Charles merely extended his hand to be kissed, then turned away. Montrose was bright and proud; he got the message. It has been suggested that the slight to his honour was what impelled him to see the merits of the Covenant. But he himself later wrote:
This our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of these sometime pretended prelates, who having abused lawful authority did not only usurp to be lords over God’s inheritance, but also intruded themselves in prime places of civil government; and by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book, the brood of the bowels of the whore of Babylon, as also to the prejudice of the country, fining and confining at their pleasure: in such sort, that trampling upon the necks of all whose conscience could not condescend to be of their own coin, none were sure of life nor estate, till it pleased God to stir up his own instruments, both in Church and policy, for preventing further, and opposing, such impiety.
For Montrose, then, Covenanting was not always an angry response to rule from Westminster; it could also be an angry response to rule from Canterbury. Montrose had been reading not only the Bible, but Foxe and Spenser, and from them he had learned about the global war against the evil Whore of Babylon, popery whether lodged in the so-called Church of England or in Rome. It was that war which he set out to fight. But he set out to fight it as a Highlander, and this meant to increase his own power at the expense of other Highland nobles.
He was not the only one. Archibald Campbell, Earl and later Marquess of Argyll, a Highland noble with a huge estate, much of which had been acquired from the MacDonalds by very dubious methods, similarly had an eye to the main chance. He became an ardent Covenanter because the king was willing to employ the MacDonalds under the Catholic Earl of Antrim to suppress the ‘rebellion’. The new war of religion meant business as usual among nobles and clans who had been enemies for centuries. Meanwhile, veterans from Protestant armies on the Continent were flooding back to Scotland, forming a professional army under Alexander Leslie, who had held a senior command under Swedish Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus.
It was an age that loved plotting and feared the plotting of others, but there may have been a real conspiracy. The Scots’ success at doing