The Scottish Revolution 1637-44 E-Book

David Stevenson

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In 1637 Scotland exploded in rebellion against King Charles I. The rebellion sought not only to undo hated anglicising policies in the Church, but to reverse the wholesale transfer of power to London which had followed the 1603 Union of the Crowns. The Covenanters fought for a Scottish parliament free from royal control as well as for a Presbyterian Church. Their success was staggering. When the king refused to make concessions they widened their demands, and when he planned to conquer Scotland with armies from England and Ireland, they occupied the north of England with their own army and even forced the humiliated king to pay for it. The Covenanters had triumphed, but the triumph proved fragile, as their success destabilised Charles I's other two kingdoms. The Scots had proved how brittle the seemingly absolute monarchy really was. First the Irish followed the Scottish army and revolted, then in 1642 England collapsed into civil war. How were the Covenanters to react? In the three-kingdom monarchy, Scotland's fate would depend on the outcomes of the Irish and English wars. It was decided that Scotland's national interests - and doing God's will - made it necessary to send armies to intervene in both Ireland and England to enforce a settlement on all three kingdoms that would protect Scotland's separate identity and impose Scottish Presbyterianism on all of them. As the Covenanters launched an invasion of England in 1644 their hopes were high. Political realism and religious fanaticism were leading them to launch a bold bid to replace English dominance of Britain with Scottish.

Leseprobe

THE SCOTTISH REVOLUTION 1637–1644

The Triumph of the Covenanters

DAVID STEVENSON

To my parents, in gratitude

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2022 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published in 1973 by David & Charles, Newton Abbot

Copyright © David Stevenson, 1973 and 2003

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 420 7

The right of David Stevenson to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Strathmartine Trust towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Contents

Foreword

Preface

  1 The Rule of Charles I in Scotland and the Causes of Discontent, 1625–1637

Scottish society

The government of Scotland

The revocation

Religious policies and the growth of opposition

  2 The Prayer Book and the National Covenant, 1636–February 1638

The organisation of resistance and the prayer book riots

Petitions and supplications

The making of the national covenant

  3 The Glasgow Assembly, March–December 1638

Hamilton’s mission

Preparations for the assembly

The assembly

  4 The First Bishops’ War and the Treaty of Berwick, January–July 1639

Military preparations and first skirmishes

Confrontation on the Border and war in the North

The treaty

  5 The Failure of the Treaty of Berwick, July 1639–March 1640

The general assembly

The lords of the articles and parliament

Towards a new year

  6 The Second Bishops’ War and the Treaty of Ripon, March–November 1640

Renewed preparations for war

Parliament, the subduing of the North, and the assembly

The expedition into England

  7 The Treaty of London and the 1641 Parliament, November 1640–November 1641

Negotiations in London

Growing disunity: the Plotters and the treaty

The king in parliament

  8 The Rule of the Covenanters in Scotland, November 1641–June 1643

The Scottish army in Ireland

Attempts to mediate in England and the Cross Petition

Towards intervention in England

  9 The Solemn League and Covenant, June 1643–January 1644

The convention of estates

Civil league and religious covenant

The army of covenant

  10 Conclusion: The Triumph of the Covenanters

The kirk

The three estates

The king and the union

The Scottish revolution

Conventions and Abbreviations

Notes and References

Select Bibliography

Bibliographical Update, 2003

Maps

Notes to Maps

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

When my books The Scottish Revolution (1973) and Revolution and Counter Revolution in Scotland, 1644—1651 (1977) were first published, research into seventeenth-century Scottish history was a much neglected area. It had, long before, been annexed by Church historians, who tended to use it to stage replays of the sectarian Protestant controversies of their own day (Church of Scotland versus Free Church versus Episcopalian Church, etc.) in a two-centuries’ old setting. Demonstrating that in the seventeenth century controversies either Presbyterian or Episcopalian had been ‘right’ scored a powerful point, for surely it proved that the descendents of the winner were in the right as well.

In an increasingly secular age, seventeenth-century Scotland treated in this way came to be perceived as a monotonous wasteland of squabbles over matter that seemed not just petty but boring. Moreover, as Churches themselves became embarrassed by sectarian pasts and turned to creating images of themselves as all being essentially of one faith, seventeenth-century fanaticisms became an embarrassment. Perhaps it was best to give them—and the century—a low profile.

I came to the period as an atheist, though Scots-born and conscious that I was influenced by the Presbyterian tradition in which I had been raised. Living first in a firmly Presbyterian part of Belfast and then in Episcopalian England, I subsequently studied history in Catholic Dublin—but in a university that was Protestant-dominated because the archbishop of Dublin forbade Catholics under his jurisdiction from enrolling as students. Thus though I reacted against an approach to Scotland’s past that presumed only religion mattered, I was primed against the equally distorting secularist assumption that religious controversy was unimportant.

As a student I was drawn to the seventeenth century partly through the boom in the study of the English Civil Wars created by Marxist influences that sought to detect, in the overthrow of the monarchy of Charles I and the establishment of a republic dominated by Cromwell, signs of deep social changes creating a moment of revolutionary potential that aspired to a more equal and democratic society. This revolutionary potential had come to nothing, had failed, but the fact that it had blazed even briefly could be interpreted as a reassuring sign, far back in history, of better things that would some day come to be. Of course it is easy to see (especially in retrospect) that what the Marxist-inclined historians were trying to do was what the nineteenth-century ecclesiastical controversialists in Scotland had done: they were seeking to use the past to increase the credibility of their personal beliefs.

Like most historical debates, in the end the ‘English Revolution’ debate was to fizzle out in exhaustion, but the controversy had proved hugely enlightening. It provoked much research and publication of an enviable quality, and encouraged historians to go beyond established genres of constitutional, political and religious history to examine the structures of society and how they were changing, and to take account of the thoughts and experiences of ‘ordinary’ people.

I found this ferment of ideas about the English revolution exciting and stimulating. But in some ways it seemed (to a Scot studying in Ireland) puzzling. It might seek to see if the English Civil Wars could claim a place in the world history of Revolution, yet it was often remarkably parochial. Englishmen only need apply. Yet the monarchy which was overthrown was a three-kingdom monarchy, the republic that replaced it had amalgamated all three kingdoms. And it had been civil wars first in Scotland and then in Ireland that led to civil war in England. Yet in accounts of the English Revolution, events in Scotland and Ireland were dealt with, as a stage direction might put it, as ‘distracting noises off’. Events in the two other kingdoms might impinge from time to time on English affairs, but essentially they had nothing to contribute to debate about why the Stuart monarchy fell. They were nothing to do with the real action. Provoked by this determined ‘one kingdom’ outlook, I turned to this period in Scotland to see if what had gone on there really had been irrelevant to events in England. I quickly found one excuse at least for England’s historians’ silence about Scotland. If they had looked for enlightenment about what was happening there, they would have found the histories available gave the impression that little went on in Scotland except religious controversies. They would have been confirmed in their opinions that Scotland’s experience was irrelevant to their concerns.

One conclusion that could be drawn from this was that if Scotland’s contribution to the seventeenth-century upheavals in the period was to be accessible and comprehensible to historians south of the border, a less blinkered account of Scotland was needed, which acknowledged the importance of religion (just as it had to be acknowledged in England) but indicated that there were many other fruitful ways of approaching it.

The result of this was the two books that are now being reprinted. In having a chronological narrative as their base they may be thought of as being themselves ‘old-fashioned’ in approach, but that seemed to me what was needed. An acceptable, non-sectarian modern narrative combined with analysis was necessary as a starting point for more specialist research, and to engage the attention of historians outside Scotland.

Another context in which the history of the period was being debated in the 1960s and 1970s, and which also contributed to these books, was that of the concept of a ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ in Europe (and perhaps even beyond) that had led to civil wars in many countries in the mid-seventeenth century decades. Whether the ‘crisis’ was basically one of economies, social structures or state formation was eagerly argued, but many were determined to find some common factor in the almost simultaneous upheavals in a number of different states. The historian is by profession a pattern-seeker, but at times we can try too hard.

Notable in the crisis debate, as in the revolution debate, was the absence of Scotland and Ireland, while England held centre stage. If my books were partly aimed at giving Scotland a leg-up onto the revolution bandwagon, they were also trying to get the country onto the general crisis one. Putting the books into these contexts might seem to suggest that they were contributions to controversies which are now dead, but in retrospect I hope they may also have contributed to a powerful new approach to the history of the three kingdoms which began in the 1970s to emerge from the ‘revolution’ and ‘crisis’ debates, and which has since contributed greatly to understanding of the mid-seventeenth century—and indeed to that of much wider periods than that. Up to then, English, and Scottish history had tended to come in separate packages. When histories of Britain appeared, they were generally histories of England with occasional Scottish and Irish knobs on—and some still are. But in the 1970s the search for a ‘new’ British or ‘three kingdoms’ history began, and has boomed ever since, inspiring new research, perceptions and insights. How to write a history which gives due place to the experiences of each of three kingdoms, when one of them, England, is much richer and more populous than the other two put together, is never going to be a question which has a universally agreed answer. Once English power expanded to create a three-kingdom state which she dominated the problem becomes even more difficult.

However, the New British History, may now be in danger of running into difficulties—not over basic aims but over its name. ‘Britannia’ strictly speaking referred to the island later divided into England, Scotland and Wales, and excluded Ireland. While both islands were ruled by a regime based in London, British Isles seemed a useful term to refer to its home (non-colonial) territories, but once most of the island of Ireland became the independent Republic of Ireland it seemed to some no longer appropriate. It seemed a term cunningly conceived to enmesh Ireland in Britain, a colonialist term. ‘British Isles’ might seem to suggest some lingering claim to British hegemony even after Irish independence. With sensitivities increasingly acute through continuing conflict over the status of Northern Ireland, there came growing acceptance that ‘the British Isles’ was a politically incorrect term. In the context of historical writing there was an easy answer to the need for a new name to cover the whole of the group of islands lying off the north-west European mainland which have been intimately linked through many centuries of history and have closely overlapping experiences. ‘British’ or ‘British Isles’ history could become ‘Three Kingdoms’ history. (An alternative suggestion, to re-name the island group the ‘North Atlantic Archipelago’ was striking, but hardly catchy).

Three Kingdoms might suit the needs of historians, but is of no use to modern politicians dealing with the problems of the ‘One Republic and One Monarchy’ Island group. Instead a new term has slipped into debate that is not contentious, promoted especially by the Irish. The British Isles have become ‘These Islands.’ It may seem at first bizarre and evasive, but it may be that within a generation or two ‘These Islands’ will be boldly emblazoned on maps where ‘British Isles’ once stood. Or perhaps just ‘The Isles,’ for there is already in shadowy existence a ‘Council of the Isles’ made up of representatives of the British and Irish governments, of the devolved assemblies of Wales and Northern Ireland and of the parliament of Scotland.

The New British History, having transformed our perspectives of the past and contributed to recent debates on devolution, may abandon its name as the British Isles is doing, and re-emerge as Isles History. If this be thought unlikely, remember how quickly British historians abandoned the term ‘German Ocean’ when that was found unacceptable with the outbreak of the First World War. In its place came ‘North Sea,’ and historians hastened to impose it on the past.

As the preceding paragraphs have demonstrated, much work has appeared on the early covenanters since The Scottish Revolution was published, but along with its companion Revolution and Counter Revolution, it remains the only detailed narrative and analysis covering the whole of the turbulent years, which were to prove crucial to Scotland’s subsequent history, from protest in 1637 to conquest in 1651.

The Scottish Revolution deals with the way Scotland sought to defend her position within ‘The Isles’ against threats from an English-based and anglicising monarchy. Early success was remarkable, but helped to provoke the emergence of new threats, from rebels in Ireland and from civil war in England. The Scots responded with military intervention in both the other kingdoms, and sought to impose a settlement throughout the Isles that would protect Scotland’s interests in the future. In secular terms victory would be sought by war, and much of the motivation was also secular—the desire to protect Scotland’s political interests. But in ideological terms the driving force was to be religion. Success would come because what was being done was God’s work. His continuing favour to the Scots, successors to the Jews as his Chosen People, would ensure victory.

Thus, though the covenanters’ fight was a national one inspired by calls for ‘liberty,’ that word was so defined as to include imposing their intolerant religious ideas on the rest of the population of The Isles, by force if necessary. At the beginning of 1644, buoyed up by fanaticism and bold military moved to solve intractable political problems, the covenanters were confident that they were on the road to success. They were wrong. God moves in a mysterious way, and in their arrogance they had misinterpreted his intentions.

Preface

The purpose of this book is to provide a political history of the period; I believe that lack of such a work is probably one of the main reasons why this period of Scotland’s history has been so neglected—in accordance with G. R. Elton’s dictum that ‘political history must come before any other and has always done so. The study of history began as political history. … It need not stop there, but unless it starts there, it will not start at all’.1 The absence of an adequate political history of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland has made research on other aspects of it very difficult.

That the period has been neglected hardly needs stressing. Indeed it even lacks a generally accepted name or label, often being vaguely referred to as ‘the civil war period’, borrowing the name (and even the war) from England, or in terms of the rivalry of Argyll and Montrose. Both are misleading and inadequate. To talk of the covenanting period recalls to most people the years after 1660 when the covenanters were a tiny minority, not the years when they ruled Scotland; this in itself is a clear indication of the neglect of the earlier period. I have therefore coined the term ‘The Scottish Revolution’. This obviously risks the charge of trying to jump on the fast-accelerating bandwagon of revolutionary studies without a valid ticket, but I believe the term is justified, and hope this book will help to demonstrate its appropriateness.

Though it is primarily a work on Scottish history, I hope it will also make some contribution to the study of aspects of English history, especially the part played by Scotland in English affairs. As Gilbert Burnet put it, ‘the first beginning and rise of the Civil Wars having been in Scotland, from whence they moved South-wards, there can be no clear understanding of what followed until these first disorders be truly stated’.2 The subject also has some interest for the general study of mid-seventeenth-century revolutions, yet Scotland’s revolution has been largely ignored. Thus Roland Mousnier lists obscure as well as famous revolts and revolutions from all corners of Europe and beyond, but makes no mention of Scotland. He even quotes Robert Mentet on the origins of the seventeenth-century revolutions without realising3 (or at least without thinking it worth mentioning) that this was a former Scots minister, Robert Menteith, who had settled in France in the 1630s. But of course much of the blame for this refusal to consider the significance of events in Scotland must lie on Scots historians who have failed to make these events intelligible to outsiders.

Any study of the covenanters must include a good deal of religious history, but I have tried to avoid the error of Buckle, and many others before and since (clerical and anti-clerical), the belief that ‘the real history of Scotland in the seventeenth century is to be found in the pulpit and in the ecclesiastical assemblies’.4 Far too much so-called political history of seventeenth-century Scotland has been little more than church history. I have sought to redress the balance by emphasising the importance of laymen, secular motives and civil institutions in the complex events of the time.

There is almost no aspect of the rule of the covenanters which does not cry out for further research. If this book manages to provoke some interest in it by showing that there was more to it than the dreary and irrational antics of backward and fanatical Scots obsessed by dark religion, then it will have served its purpose.

D.S.

University of Aberdeen

CHAPTER ONE

The Rule of Charles I in Scotland and the Causes of Discontent, 1625–1637

SCOTTISH SOCIETY

When James VI died in 1625 he was the first Scottish king since 1390 to leave an adult heir to succeed him, and Scotland was enjoying a period of peace and stability which contrasted sharply with the periodic anarchy of the sixteenth century.1 The nobility and the kirk, the two great interests in the land that had rivalled his power in his early days, had come to support his regime. The problems of chronic disorder in the Highlands and on the Borders seemed to have been cured, the violence of personal and family feuds and rivalries throughout the country to have been greatly reduced. The Scottish parliament—which in any case had never achieved anything like the power and influence of its English counterpart—had been brought firmly under royal control. Ruling Scotland from London through the privy council in Edinburgh, James had smugly boasted in 1607 ‘This I must say for Scotland and truly vaunt it: here I sit and govern it with my pen: I write and it is done: and by a Clerk of the Council I govern Scotland, which others could not do by the Sword’.2 Though by this time an absentee monarch, James had had many years of personal experience of Scottish political life in his youth; this had taught him the skills of a politician and the limitations of his power. His son Charles had had no such training in the realities of royal power in Scotland, yet assumed that he too could govern by the pen.

The contrast between the old king, James, wise (or at least cunning), flexible and experienced in Scots affairs, and Charles, young, rash, ignorant of Scotland, heedless of growing opposition, is a commonplace which has behind it a basis of truth. The story of James’ reign (in Scotland) is one of triumph over difficult circumstances, his son’s reign a story of difficult circumstances exacerbated by political ineptitude in the king. Charles I inherited a fairly orderly and loyal kingdom of Scotland in 1625; less than thirteen years later the great majority of his Scots subjects of all classeshad united in opposition to him.

The keystone of the arch of Scottish society was the king, and one might say that this keystone had been seriously loosened by the absentee monarchy brought about by the union of the crowns of 1603. Yet at first the union seemed to have enhanced the king’s position. By that time James had gone far towards restoring royal power in Scotland after the confusion of his long minority. The union helped him to continue this process by freeing him from fear of his over-mighty Scots subjects, by placing the great resources of England at his back, by the vast increase in prestige and stature which the English crown brought him. Yet already at the time of his death it was becoming, perhaps not obvious but at least discernible, that the changes in the way Scotland was governed, and indeed in Scottish society itself, brought about by the union were potentially dangerous to the monarchy. Some of these changes were perhaps inevitable consequences of union, others followed from changes in royal attitudes and policies which were strongly influenced by the move from Edinburgh to London.

The English court, as inherited from the Tudors, was a very different institution from that of Scotland. James’ court prior to 1603 had been small, poor (often humiliatingly so) and informal, almost homely. The Scots king was very much first among equals among his nobles, who treated him with little subserviency or awe. The richness and ceremonial of the English court provided a contrast that was balm to James’ vanity. Though he always retained something of his Scots informality, and allowed his new court to decay at times into vulgarity and sordid scandal, he none the less loved the deference and flattery with which the English treated a monarch. He encouraged this exaltation of kingship and the spread of theories of absolute monarchy by divine right, theories which he had dreamed of in Scotland but which never had won much acceptance there. His son carried this tendency further. He created round himself a court of elaborate formality and ceremonial which suited his withdrawn and fastidious nature and insulated him from his subjects. Scots coming to court increasingly found that they had to adopt formal English manners if they were to hope for royal favour and avoid being sneered at as uncouth. Yet if they did adopt such manners this created a barrier between them and their countrymen when they returned home. Charles’ dislike of the familiarity natural to his Scottish subjects was most clearly seen during his visit to Scotland in 1633. He was clearly ill at ease and found the behaviour of many Scots offensive. ‘Upon which the Lord Falkland was wont to say, “that keeping of State was like committing adultery, there must go two to it”, for let the proudest or most formal man resolve to keep what distance he will towards others, a bold and confident man instantly demolishes that whole machine, and gets within him, and even obliges him to his own laws of conversation.’3 If he found his Scots subjects boorish, they found him haughty and unapproachable.

The absentee monarchy created similar difficulties for the Scottish officers of state. Though they visited the court they had not the frequent personal contact with the king which might have built up understanding between them. The one exception to this was Sir William Alexander (Earl of Stirling, 1633), secretary of state from 1626 until his death in 1640, who normally resided at court. But his long residence at court left him out of touch with Scots affairs and feelings, and this applied also to nearly all the other Scots who spent much of their time at court and had most personal contact with the king.4 The Earl of Clarendon later recalled that when Charles I visited Scotland in 1633 ‘it evidently appeared, that they of that nation who shined most at the Court of England had the least influence in their own country’,5 though he excluded the Marquis of Hamilton from this generalisation. The king either did not notice or at least did not see it as dangerous that those with most influence in Scotland had little contact with him, for he made no attempt to widen the circle of those in whom he confided concerning Scots affairs.

Thus the union of the crowns deprived the Scots of the presence of their kings and made their kings increasingly alien to them, out of touch with Scottish feelings and opinions. These changes naturally most affected those who had been most closely associated with the king in governing Scotland, the nobility. In structure the society of Scotland was still essentially feudal, based on the holding of land from the king in return for service to him. The estates of the realm were composed of those who held land directly from the king as tenants in chief and had the right and duty to be represented in parliament to advise and assist the king in governing. There were three estates, those of the lay tenants in chief (nobles and lesser barons or lairds), the clergy, and the royal burghs.

In all but name the nobles and lairds were by the early seventeenth century separate estates, but technically they remained one as they shared a common origin. Originally all lay tenants in chief had had the duty of attending parliament personally, but in time the greater tenants had been created lords of parliament, attending personally, while the lesser men had come to elect representatives to attend for them.6 The nobility of Scotland was a surprisingly large estate, and one which was growing fast. Scotland had perhaps one fifth of the population of England (very approximately 1 million to 5 million) and was much the poorer country, but the number of nobles in each was about the same. In 1603 Scotland had between 50 and 60 nobles, and England 55. By 1641 this had risen to about 105 nobles in Scotland and 121 in England.7 The largest group of these new creations, which almost doubled the size of the Scots nobility in forty years, comprised the lords of erection, men who had come into possession of large areas of former church land which James VI had erected into temporal lordships for them—an action which had gone a long way to win him their support. Other new titles went to junior branches of existing noble families, many more were given as rewards for loyal service to the crown, some to families in which such service in various offices had become hereditary.8 The ‘inflation of honours’ represented by this unprecedentedly fast growth in the numbers of nobles naturally caused some resentment among the older nobility, especially as James and Charles tended increasingly to rely on such ‘new men’ in governing the country. Such officials of relatively humble origins were often prepared to regard service to the crown as a full-time occupation, whereas the greater nobles inevitably spent much of their time running their estates—and even had they had the time, they seldom had the inclination to concern themselves with the bureaucratic routine of administration.

The social importance of the use and promotion of ‘new men’ should not be exaggerated, however. While it brought new blood to the nobility, this hardly represented a revolutionary change. For kings to favour lesser men on whose loyalty they could rely rather than great magnates was common, though certainly James’ very success in restoring royal power and extending the machinery of government led to his employing and promoting more such men than his predecessors. Moreover most such ‘new men’ did not come from entirely outside the ruling classes but from families of lesser landowners, or lairds. With reference to the great increase in size of the Scots nobility it is worth noting that the practice of selling peerages, common in England in this period, was almost unknown in Scotland. The only known instance is that one of the six Englishmen granted Scots titles, Sir Thomas Fairfax, paid £1,500 sterling for the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron.9 The newly created lesser title of baronet of Nova Scotia, however, was sold freely.

The nobility of Scotland as a whole believed that they had a right to share power with the king. As the greatest of his subjects they were his natural and traditional advisers. In the past factions of nobles had often been able to defy the king or dictate his actions. By grants extorted from previous kings many had come to possess powers rivalling those of the king himself. Grants of regality gave them power to try all criminal cases except treason. In the many baron courts nobles and lairds had jurisdiction over a wide variety of lesser cases. Even the post of sheriff, the king’s chief financial, administrative, judicial and military representative in the shires, was often held hereditarily by a great local family. Commissions as king’s lieutenant had frequently given sub-regal powers in Argyll and the Isles to the Earl of Argyll, and to the Marquis of Huntly in the North East. In addition the Earls of Argyll held the office of justice general hereditarily until 1628, and even after that date remained justices general of Argyll and the Isles. The holding of justice ayres, royal circuit criminal courts, was irregular. In these circumstances royal power in the shires was often little more than nominal. Restoration of central and royal power thus inevitably entailed curbing the powers of the nobles and aroused their opposition. James had the sense to avoid any major confrontation with the nobility and consolidated his power gradually. His success in increasing his power lay more in the winning of the support of the nobility for his regime than in any direct attack on their power.

James was undoubtedly helped in curbing the nobility by the union of the crowns; the nobility suddenly found that their traditional methods of bringing pressure to bear on the crown were no longer effective. To put it cynically, one might say that they regretted that threats of violence, of kidnapping or bullying the king could no longer be used successfully, but more legitimate means of influencing the king, by personal petitioning, advice and argument, had also largely disappeared. Few could afford to spend long at the extravagant English court, or had much wish to stay there and be ridiculed for their poverty and accent. A few of course adapted, becoming anglicised courtiers more at home in London than Edinburgh, but for most Scots nobles the union of the crowns meant primarily the sudden disappearance of the institution which had been at the centre of their social and political lives, the Scottish court. It was some time before this became clear, for many of the nobles had had high hopes of the effects that having a Scots king on the English throne would have on them. They had hoped for rich pickings in offices and pensions, and at first some got them. But soon English jealousy forced the king to limit his favours to bis countrymen, and the king himself became anglicised. The Scots found that instead of their taking over the English court, it had absorbed their king and largely excluded them. They had hoped to help rule England in Scotland’s interests, but it soon became clear that this had been to expect the tail to wag the dog, and that in fact the opposite was happening.

In these circumstances it was inevitable that discontent should rumble among the nobility. They had little contact with a king who was increasingly alien, and were unable to influence him, while royal policy was directed at undermining their power. The ineffectiveness of this discontent for many years is perhaps a measure of how long it took for the nobility to realise the change in nature of their position brought about by the union of the crowns, and to adapt to this new situation.

Though convenient for the purposes of generalisation, it is of course an over-simplification to speak of the nobles as if they formed a homogeneous body. They were a diverse group, ranging from great magnates, with almost regal power on their vast estates, to Lord Somerville, so poor that he did not use his title since he could not live in a style befitting it. The division between the older nobility and the many recent creations has already been mentioned, but it does not appear to correspond to any clear division in political opinions; new nobles tended quickly to adopt the prejudices and outlook of their long-established colleagues. However, it is noticeable that a disproportionately large number of the older nobility—perhaps a fifth—were Roman Catholics, and were thus largely excluded from public life. These included great nobles like the Marquis of Huntly (living in France), the Earl of Argyll (living in London) and the Marquis of Douglas.

The other part of the estate of lay tenants in chief was equally diverse. All men holding land freehold from the king worth more than 40s of old extent (a traditional valuation) who were not nobles were entitled as ‘small barons’ to take part in electing commissioners from the shires to parliament. These lairds throughout the country numbered several thousand men, some more wealthy than many a noble, others little richer than the better-off tenant farmers.

The estate of small barons had since the mid sixteenth century become more active in public affairs than previously, and had played a leading part in bringing about the Reformation. Yet on the whole they were still far more dependent on the nobility than their English counterparts, the gentry. Family and feudal ties remained stronger than in England, and lairds often deferred to the noble head of their family or ‘name’. Many, as well as holding land direct from the crown, also held some as sub-vassals of nobles, who thus had claims over them as feudal superiors. Paradoxically the English gentleman often paid more outward respect to a noble (in accordance with English formal manners) than the Scots lairds (used to more easy-going and familiar Scots ways) did, yet it was the lairds who were the more dependent. Increased contact with England after the union of the crowns led some of the Scots nobles to feel that they should be treated with more respect and deference by their inferiors in Scotland. The eldest sons of earls had begun, in English fashion, to take the courtesy title of lord instead of being content with the plain old Scots designation of master. Such snobbish affectations on the part of nobles naturally offended lairds and others of lesser rank, just as the aloof formality of the king offended the nobles—who were none the less trying to ape it. One of the reasons for the fifth Earl of Montrose’s early popularity was his easy and courteous manner when dealing with inferiors. Patrick Gordon of Ruthven explained the changing attitudes of some of the nobles at length:

once that Inglish diuell, keeping of state, got a haunt amongest our nobilitie, then begane they to keepe a distance, as if there ware some diuinitie in them, and gentlemen therefor most put of there shoes, the ground is so holy whereon they tread; but as he is ane euill bread gentlemen that vnderstandes not what distance he should keep with a noble man, so that noble man that claims his dewe with a high looke, as if it did best fitte his noblenes to slight his inferiours, may well gett the cape and knie, but neuer gaine the heart of a freborne gentleman … It is true that in Ingland the keepeing of state is in some sorte tollerable, for that nation (being so often conquired) is become slavish, and takes not euill to be slawes to there superioures.

But our nation, I mean the gentre not the commones, haueing neuer beene conquired, but always a free borne people, ar only wine with courtesies, and the humble, myld, chearefull, and affable behavioure of there superioures.10

However, the gap between the nobility and the lairds was far from unbridgeable; as landowners, part of the ruling élite, they had more interests in common than at variance.

The representatives of the clerical estate in parliament consisted of the two archbishops and eleven bishops (twelve after the creation of the diocese of Edinburgh in 1633). One of James VI’s greatest successes in Scotland had been the assertion of royal control over the kirk. In the years after 1603 he had finally broken the power of the Melvillians, the extreme presbyterian followers of Andrew Melville who had insisted that the kirk should not be subordinate to the crown but should be supreme in its own sphere, that of spiritual matters. James had revived the powers of the bishops and through them gained control of the hierarchy of presbyterian church courts—kirk session, presbytery, synod and general assembly. Bishops had become ex officio moderators of the synods, with power to appoint moderators of presbyteries and control the admission of ministers to parishes. Church government in Scotland thus combined elements of episcopacy and presbyterianism;11 the two systems were not yet generally regarded as entirely incompatible, and this mixed system of government was acceptable to the majority of Scotsmen—including ministers, for there is relatively little sign of friction between the two elements in the church courts.12 Thus to try to make a clear distinction between ‘episcopalians’ and ‘presbyterians’ in this period is unrealistic; it was only to be Charles’ determination to exalt the former elements in the kirk at the expense of the latter that in the end convinced many that the two were incompatible. By identifying the bishops too closely with his policies in both church and state he made it inevitable that an attack on the policies would develop into an attack on the bishops. James had had the sense to avoid testing the compatibility of the two elements too far; he removed the most controversial cases from the now episcopally dominated presbyterian courts. To discipline ministers and laymen who opposed royal religious policies a new court, the court of high commission, had been established on the English model in 1610.13

James’ control of the kirk had been far from unlimited, however. When he had turned from changes in church government and discipline to changes in the worship of the kirk he had met with far more opposition than he had expected. He managed to force a general assembly in 1618 and parliament in 1621 to accept the Five Articles of Perth (concerning details of liturgical practice), but the bitter opposition aroused by their supposed papist tendencies showed the king the limitations of his power. Rather than reopen the question of relations between kirk and state, and thus perhaps undermine his achievement of having brought the kirk under royal control, James wisely conciliated his Scottish subjects by making little attempt to enforce the Perth Articles and by promising that he would not introduce any further ‘ceremonies’, thus abandoning plans to introduce a new liturgy in Scotland.14 It is overstating the case to say that James left ‘a church at peace’ in Scotland on his death,15 but it is perhaps also misleading to say that he initiated the process leading to the overthrow of royal control of the kirk in 1638.16 James started down the path that led to revolt against his son, but had the sense to turn back when he saw the strength of the forces he was arousing against himself.

At the time of Charles I’s accession most of the parish ministers of Scotland—there were between 900 and 1,000 parishes—were willing to accept the kirk as it then was. Many, perhaps even most, disliked the Perth Articles and evaded or refused to implement them, and many had little love for bishops. But very few of them were ready to take action to bring about a change; the number of dedicated presbyterians was very small though ‘their enthusiasm and sense of mission had, if anything, grown over the years’ since James had brought the kirk under royal control.17 The number of ministers punished by the court of high commission for opposing royal policy was fairly small;18 so long as ministers unhappy at the state of the kirk did not make a nuisance of themselves they could usually escape persecution. Indeed even the small minority whose opposition was open managed to survive, and by the 1630s had come to form what may be called a radical party within the kirk, analogous to the virtual church within a church formed by the English puritans. The ministers involved came mainly from the South West—men like Samuel Rutherford (minister of Anwoth, Kirkcudbrightshire, until banished to Aberdeen by the high commission in 1636) and David Dickson (minister of Irvine). Others from the same area like John Livingstone, John McLellan and Robert Blair were driven by persecution to leave Scotland and work among the Scots settlers in Ulster, but they returned frequently to preach and meet with sympathisers before retreating again to safety. All these men had close links of friendship, and some of marriage, with Edinburgh laymen like the merchants John Mean and William Rig of Atherny who had been in trouble in 1619–24 for holding conventicles or private prayer meetings. James VI had ordered the suppression of the conventicles but in 1624 the chancellor, Sir George Hay, leniently defined them as private meetings held in time of public services—a good example of how the king’s ministers could water down unpopular policies. Under this definition prayer meetings at all other times were not persecuted, and they appear to have become widespread at least in Edinburgh and the Western Lowlands. Thus the king’s radical opponents managed to establish and extend an organised party within the kirk through personal ties and conventicles, and persecution was too inefficient to prevent this, while at the same time being irksome enough to inspire it.19 But it should be stressed that such radicals continued to regard the kirk as essentially a true and godly kirk, whatever its corruptions. They had no thought of separating from it. Rutherford sums up their attitude rather startlingly by calling the kirk his ‘whorish mother’, his ‘Harlot Mother’;20 it remained his mother, and therefore he owed it his love and his best efforts to redeem it from its prostitution. Except for Roman Catholics, indeed, there was general acceptance that the kirk was the true reformed kirk; those who desired to reform it wished to do so from within, not to secede from it.

Support for royal religious policy was strongest in Aberdeen and the North East, and in the universities; Catholicism was also stronger in what has been called ‘Scotland’s Conservative North’21 than elsewhere in the country, though isolated pockets of it remained in the South as well, especially where there was the protection of a local Catholic noble (like the Earl of Nithsdale in the shire of Dumfries). Of the great clans of the Highlands only the strongest of all, the Campbells, was strongly committed to Protestantism. In parts of the North West there can have been very little organised religion at all (some parishes had been without ministers since the Reformation) but the old faith lingered on, encouraged by Catholic missionaries (Franciscans from Ireland and Scots Jesuits) and distrust of Protestantism as the religion of the hated Lowlanders.

The bishops were among the most trusted of Charles’ Scottish servants and advisers, and the king consistently advanced them and those of the ministers who supported his religious ideas in both secular and ecclesiastical power and status. For the king such a policy had many advantages. Appointed by him and dependent on him, the bishops had not the independence of royal favour which so many of his lay councillors had. Though many of Charles’ bishops (especially those that he had inherited from his father) were unhappy at his religious innovations, for religious reasons as well as through fear of the opposition that they would arouse in Scotland, they all obeyed him. Thus by increasing their secular powers Charles demonstrated the position that he felt was due to them through their place in the church while at the same time adding to his administration men on whose fidelity he could rely. That obedience was not the only quality necessary in councillors and administrators did not seem to occur to the king. Take, for example, John Spottiswood, Archbishop of St Andrews. Though known to have little enthusiasm for Charles’ religious policies, he was made president of the exchequer in 1626, and the king ruled that he should have precedence before all other subjects in Scotland; previously such precedence had belonged to the chancellor, and the holder of that office, Sir George Hay, stead-fastly refused to cede his precedence to the archbishop.22 In 1635, after Hay’s death, the king made doubly sure that his archbishop would have precedence by making him chancellor, thus appointing to the highest office of state ‘an old unfirme man’23 aged seventy who would obey, but without zeal. Far from bringing the archbishop the respect that Charles intended, the appointment earned him the hatred of those who believed that clerics should not accept lay offices, and the jealousy of the nobility.

In 1634 Charles ordered that all bishops and the most suitable ministers were to be made justices of the peace.24 Two years later four out of sixteen commissioners named in a new commission of exchequer were bishops, whereas only one was a noble,25 a striking contrast with the commission of 1626 in which only two commissioners had been bishops and eight nobles.26 The number of bishops on the privy council rose from six in 1625 to nine in 1637 and they attended more regularly in the 1630s than before, taking an increasingly large part in the council’s activities.27 Whereas many of the bishops appointed by James VI had been content (like Spottiswood) with a relatively humble position in church and state, those appointed by Charles tended to have (like their king) more exalted ideas about the respect and powers due to a bishop.

The third estate was that of the burgesses of the royal burghs (burghs holding charters from the king as tenants in chief) plus a few of the larger ecclesiastical burghs (like Glasgow and St Andrews) which joined the royal burghs in contributing to taxes and shared with them a monopoly of foreign trade. These fifty or so burghs sent representatives to parliament and enjoyed a large measure of internal self-government by magistrates and council, who tended to form a self-perpetuating oligarchy since they elected their own successors. Most of the burghs were very small. Perhaps only Edinburgh had many more than 10,000 inhabitants, and only half a dozen more than 5,000. By the standards of the greater English boroughs most of the Scots burghs were small and poor, but to say that Edinburgh was ‘destitute of mercantile spirit’ and Scotland ‘without merchants’ is absurd.28 Moreover, poor as they were, the Scottish burghs in some ways played a more important part in national life than the boroughs of England. The English boroughs had no national organisation, and most of the men who represented them in parliament were not merchants but gentry, often with little or no interest in the borough’s welfare. In Scotland on the other hand a convention of royal burghs met annually to consider matters of common interest, and the commissioners for burghs who sat in parliament were usually active merchants, though some of the smaller burghs were dominated by powerful local families. The well-organised Scots burghs were to take a leading part in opposing Charles I, while the English boroughs, each jealously guarding its own interests, provided little leadership for or against the king.29

Those who made up the three estates of Scotland, the tenants in chief, numbered only a few per cent of the population of Scotland. Those of no estate included many men of substance, such as feuars of crown lands (holding their lands in perpetuity in return for payment of a fixed annual feu only to the crown) and the greater sub-vassals, holding land from nobles and lairds. Those who actually farmed the land usually had no hereditary interest in it, holding by short leases or as tenants at will with no leases at all. Below them were the landless (or almost landless) labourers who worked on the land of others, and those in the burghs who had not the status of burgesses. Scotland was a poor country, and the conditions of life even of the tenant farmers were often miserable; the landless were even worse off, and the large numbers of poor without regular employment or maintenance were often on or over the brink of starvation. Yet except in years of unusually bad harvest there was little sign of social unrest, for the great majority stoically accepted their lot in life. Those few who did not strove to rise out of their class rather than to improve the lot of their fellows in it. Society was on the whole conservative and changing only slowly, but it was not entirely static or without tensions. As always, some were prospering, others declining. The have-nots envied the have-gots; the have-gots feared the masses of have-nots. In the burghs merchants and craftsmen squabbled endlessly. Lairds resented the pretensions of the nobles. But such divisions cannot be called ‘causes’ of the revolt against Charles I; they were rather the usual background tensions present in every society. Indeed it was Charles’ unhappy achievement to unite almost all classes and groups in Scottish society against him in spite of their conflicting interests. The causes of the revolt were ‘social’ only insofar as a variety of motives led Scottish society to unite to an unusual extent against its head.

The society so far discussed has been the society of the Lowlands, of southern and north-eastern Scotland. There were of course many important local differences in society and customs within the Lowlands, but it is true to say that the great majority of Lowlanders felt themselves to have more in common with each other than with the Gaelic speakers of the North and North West. The Lowlander usually thought of the Highlander as a savage, an alien, Irish in language and culture, given to stealing, disorder and cruelty. The division of the ruling élite into feudal estates, so important in the Lowlands, had little or no meaning in the Highlands. There were virtually no burgesses, few ministers, few nobles even, for few of the clan chiefs had yet been ennobled. Feudal landholding was not yet universal; chiefs held their lands and ruled through older claims to authority, ancestry and conquest, and had little need of charters from the king granting them lands or jurisdictions. But the extension of royal power in the Highlands by James VI had brought with it an extension of feudal landholding. This caused much confusion and unrest. Many Highlanders owing traditional clan loyalty to a chief found that another chief or noble was the feudal superior of the land on which they lived; to which was their loyalty due? How, for example, could Camerons in Lochaber reconcile loyalty to their feudal superior, the Marquis of Huntly, with loyalty to their chief, Cameron of Locheil, the ties of feudalism with the ties of kinship (actual or mythical)?

The differences between Highland and Lowland society should not be exaggerated, however. There were areas where the two overlapped, and in both society was bound together by basically the same ties, partly feudal, partly of kinship, though in general the latter tended to be the more important in the Highlands, the former in the Lowlands.30 The differences which caused friction between Highlands and Lowlands were as much linguistic and cultural as social.

THE GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND

Charles I, like his father, ruled Scotland through the privy council in Edinburgh. It was a method of government adequate for routine administration of the country at times when there was little or no organised opposition to the regime, but inadequate to deal with any crisis. The competence of the council was extremely wide though indefinite. Its main functions were executive, to implement the king’s policies, but it had also legislative powers, though it was usual to have its legislation (unless it was only of a temporary nature) confirmed by parliament. It supervised the activities of most central and local royal officials ‘as a sort of discipline committee of the civil service’.31 The council’s judicial powers were extensive if rather vague; it was especially concerned with cases relating to the public peace and cases in which other courts were unable to provide remedies. In short, ‘The council was a convenient instrument of the royal will: it was the mainspring of executive action; the repository of the residual equitable jurisdiction of the crown; and the guardian of the peace’.32 The Scottish privy council had of course many similarities with the council of England,33 but there was one all-important difference between them; in England the king was often present at the meetings of the council and it could take an active part in discussing and making policy, and in advising the king, whereas the Scottish council after 1603 received instructions from a distant king who seldom asked its advice or gave it any discretion in important matters. It carried out the fiats of an absentee monarch, ‘very often merely putting into effect policies shaped elsewhere’.34 Often indeed the king neglected even to give the council information as to the reasons for or ultimate aims of the instructions and policies it was ordered to carry out, and many councillors became deeply suspicious as to what the king’s intentions were. This undermining of the confidence of his councillors by not deigning (or daring) to confide in them was one of the reasons why the imposing façade of the power of Charles’ Scots council collapsed so quickly once it was challenged in 1637. ‘Among the lay councillors in Scotland … it is doubtful if a single one knew the king’s mind and understood his motives’.35

Charles’ secretiveness was naturally resented by the Scots nobles who believed that their rank entitled them to a greater share in the government of the kingdom. Many of course had seats on the council and indeed Charles increased the number who had when in 1626 he reconstructed it. The privy council that he inherited from his father contained nineteen nobles and eldest sons of nobles who did not hold office, whereas the councils Charles appointed in 1626 and 1631 each had twenty-seven such members out of totals of forty-seven and forty-six respectively.36 But membership of the council did not give the nobles what they wanted, opportunities to advise the king and assist in policy-making. Consequently few of the non-office-holding nobles attended council regularly, they ‘did not respond to the king’s invitation to resume active participation and the reconstructed council of 1626 often found it difficult to form a quorum’.37 The nobles had little interest in helping to execute orders from Whitehall on which they could have little influence and which the king seldom bothered to explain to them. Charles has been criticised for omitting from his council ‘too many of the Scots lords who felt that they had a right to sit on it’,38 such as the Earl of Montrose; but, as we have seen, over half the council already consisted of nobles who were not officers of state. By contrast the English council could muster only three peers not holding office out of thirty members in 1625, and five out of forty-two in 1630.39 Therefore, as few of the Scottish nobles attended the meetings of the council regularly, the king may be forgiven for seeing little point in adding more of them to it, especially as the Scots council was already larger than the English. There is no reason to suppose that any of the nobles who joined the opposition to the king in 1637 would have been prevented or much discouraged from doing so by membership of the council; indeed many of those who were members did oppose him.

The real criticism of Charles’ policy as to the part of the nobility in his regime was that, on or off the council, few of them were encouraged to feel that they had an important part to play in government or that their interests were respected by the regime. The king could have responded to the lack of interest of the nobles in his council by making it more attractive to them. This could have been done by taking the trouble to explain his policies to it and giving it more discretion, or by encouraging them to take part in the government in other ways. Such a policy would have been difficult, and perhaps dangerous; no king remembering the powers of the Scots nobles before 1603 could be entirely happy at the idea of giving them more power and influence. But it would probably have been less dangerous in the long run than to let many of them feel that they were not given the place in the regime that was their due, and to lose all sense of identity with the king’s government.

It was not only to the nobles that the rule of Charles I from England seemed alien, imposed from afar and taking no account of Scots opinions. In 1640 Charles’ ambassador in Paris was to note ‘The Scots have never come much to me: they take me, I thinke, to be Ambassador of the King of England only’,40 and in many other ways Charles seemed to his Scots subjects to be primarily king of England—and, moreover, to be determined to change Scotland’s place in Great Britain from ‘North Britain’ to ‘North England’, so many of his innovations in Scotland were based on English practice. ‘The best policy he could devise for Scotland was to make it as like his ideal of England as was possible.’41 This led many in Scotland to believe that the king’s Scottish policies were unduly influenced by his English advisers. In fact both James VI and Charles I were very careful to see that the English council did not discuss Scots affairs, not out of any scrupulous regard for Scots independence, but to keep control of Scots affairs in their own hands and prevent any increase in the English council’s powers and competence. This was reasonable, but James and his son unwisely went further; not only was the English council not consulted about Scots affairs, but the king refused even to inform it of what his policies were in Scotland or what was happening there. Viscount Wentworth later complained ‘I never was much in Love with the way of King James his keeping of all the Affairs of that Kingdom of Scotland amongst those of that Nation, but carried indeed as a Mystery to all the council of England; a Rull but over much kept by our Master also’, and claimed that the troubles in Scotland might have been prevented if the English council had had knowledge of Scots affairs.42 Of course Charles did discuss Scotland with a few of his most trusted English advisers, especially and fatally with William Laud (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1633), but the king’s secretiveness and insistence that his English right hand should not know what his Scottish left hand was doing proved a great weakness; the disturbances in Scotland in 1637 came as a surprise to his English councillors,43 and many of them feared that the king’s reluctance to inform them of events hid designs and policies that he dared not reveal.

In 1626 Charles made a number of changes in the administrative machinery and courts of Scotland. Most of these reforms were justifiable, but introducing them all at more or less the same time, after only a minimum of consultation with those concerned, and with little attempt to justify or explain them, led to their arousing much opposition that could have been avoided with a little care and forethought.