The tour guide was in full throttle. His group stood outside St Giles’ by the brass markers outlining where the old Tolbooth Prison used to stand. ‘Edinburgh was once a hotbed for a group of religious fanatics called Covenanters’, he yelled; ‘today we would regard them as the Islamic State of the 17th century. I’m so glad that we live in a Scotland that celebrates democracy and human rights, and prevents such religious extremism and bigotry.’Many in the group nodded; some even clapped and cheered. Again, our history was being rewritten. It is not just the uninformed tour guides who unwittingly repeat this mistake; even some of our historians and scholars do the same. For example, Professor Tom Devine could say, ‘[The Covenanters] are seen as a sort of Scottish Taleban who would have turned Scotland into a theocracy not unlike modern Iran.’
Are such statements true? Were the Covenanters really religious fanatics and dangerous extremists who would have turned Scotland into a theocracy like Iran? Usually, people who say these things have not dug deep enough in our history, and without realising it, are victims of some of the propaganda of men like Sir George Mackenzie, the chief persecutor of the Covenanters. In his short book written in 1691, called A Vindication of the Government in Scotland during the Reign of King Charles II, he outlines his version of the truth. He wrote that ‘This Paper comes to set Things in their True Light.’He continued: ‘In the year 1637, we liv’d under the most Pious and Orthodox Prince of the Age, and yet a Rebellion was form’d against him, as a Papist, and a Tyrant, by which all the Fundamental Laws were shaken, and all honest Men ruin’d. Neither needs there any other Proof for this Assertion, than the Records of Parliament, General Assemblies, and Justice Court.’
If Charles I was so pious and non-tyrannical, why did he trample over Scottish rights and force the church and nation to be under his authority as Head of the Church, when he knew that what he was doing was illegal? Why did he break English law and violate the rights of the English Parliament? Why would there be fears that even the Magna Carta, our foundational British charter for freedom, would be lost? Why would there be the necessity of going to all the trouble of producing two Covenants for multitudes to sign? To which records before 1637 does Mackenzie allude? The Presbyterian form of church had already been enshrined in the Great Charter by 1592.
‘No man in Scotland ever suffer’d for his Religion’, wrote Sir George Mackenzie, ‘not one died for any Principle in Religion.’ So, what did all those Covenanters die for? ‘They are guilty of atrocious crimes against the whole of Society’, says Mackenzie, and especially because of their defiance of the divine right of the king. In answer to this pamphlet and others, copies of which were being distributed all over Britain, Mackenzie’s contemporary, Revd Robert Wodrow, painstakingly copied up a mass of evidence from legal documents, letters, diaries, church proceedings, and inscriptions, compiling them into four volumes in his book The History of the Suffering of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution. He wrote:
‘There is a Party among us who deny there was any persecution of the Presbyterians for conscience sake in that period… It is boldly asserted and published to the world, that no man in Scotland ever suffered for his religion… Sir George Mackenzie’s Vindication of the Reigns of King Charles and King James, was represented, and carefully spread, with many other pamphlets… perfectly contrary to the knowledge and experience of multitudes yet alive… As an historian, I was chiefly concerned to represent facts… I have charged our Prelates [bishops] with being the first movers of most parts of the persecutions of these times: this is a matter of fact, fully known in Scotland.’ It is no wonder that the Covenanters and their descendants raised epitaphs all over southern and central Scotland in memory of their loved ones, lest we forget. We only have to think about the holocaust deniers to realise how this can happen, and why the Jewish people are so keen to keep their own memory alive.
It is important that we neither demonise the Covenanters, nor follow a 19th century hagiography that elevates them above frail humanity: often we hear of their tears for their own sins and shortcomings. At times, in the bloody war that dragged on and on, liberty seemed like an empty dream: the reality that stalked them on a daily basis was survival, cruelty, false accusations, and death. Mackenzie was correct in bringing to our attention three of the atrocities committed by some of the Covenanters. After the battle of Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, on 13th September 1645, the commanding officer, Sir David Leslie, on the advice of a pastor, had 80 women and children put to death, along with the remaining Royalist soldiers as an example. Two years later he put to death some prisoners of war at Dunaverty Castle. Leslie was haunted by these acts of cruelty for the rest of his life. The third atrocity was in 1679, when nine extremist Covenanters knifed and shot Archbishop James Sharpe in retaliation for his key part in the brutal persecution of their friends. Such an act of murder was condemned by most of the Covenanters.
Desperate times bring out desperation in people. Would you or I have assassinated Hitler during the Second World War, knowing that he was exterminating the Jews and others? Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a gentle teacher and pacifist, but after he saw the dreadful photos of holocaust victims which had been smuggled out of a death camp, he changed his mind and joined with others to plot Hitler’s death, which failed and led to his own execution.
‘In wrath, remember mercy’ (Habakkuk 3:2, NKJV).
Image: Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons