‘In the year 1650… we did sinfully both entangle and engage the nation and ourselves, and that poor young prince to whom we were sent,’ wrote Alexander Jaffray in his diary, ‘making him sign and swear a Covenant, which we knew, from clear and demonstratable reasons, that he hated in his heart.’ Jaffray had been sent as one of the commissioners by the Scottish Parliament, along with the Earl of Cassilis, Lord Brodie and Lord Liberton, to try and persuade the exiled Charles II to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 in Breda in the Netherlands, in order to gain Scottish support.
The unthinkable had happened in 1649. His father, King Charles I, had been executed by his own English Parliament, and the world was still reeling from the shock. Charles I had certainly overstepped his boundary, breaking the law and forcing entry in Parliament to try and arrest some leading politicians, but was executing their autocratic king also overstepping the boundary for the English Parliament? Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians were all for a clean sweep. They believed that a drastic removal of the king would hasten the democratic process, but the Scots mostly had a different view. They loved the idea of a king in whom Scottish blood flowed, and their response to the English Parliament was one of anger and indignation. True, the Covenanters believed that the king should remain within his own sphere, and not encroach on the church. They pressed for a more democratic church and government, but they also believed in a constitutional monarchy, not the removal of the king altogether.
Jaffray, who became the Provost of Aberdeen, and who at one time lived in Newbattle outside Edinburgh, continued in his diary: ‘He [Prince Charles II] sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed on him: – where, I must confess, to my apprehension, our sin was more than his… I spoke of it to the king himself, desiring him not to subscribe the Covenant, if in his conscience he was not satisfied, – and yet went on to close the treaty with him, who, I knew so well, had for his own ends done it against his heart.’ It was this signing of the Covenant against Charles II’s will, for ulterior purposes to regain the throne, which became the ‘great sin of Scotland’. It would lead to the Civil War between the Covenanters and Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians, with the Covenanters being defeated at Dunbar in September, 1650. After the heady days of Presbyterian successes between 1638 and 1650, Scotland would now face defeat at the hands of Cromwell, and his imposed Commonwealth government. Worse than that, Charles II, after being crowned by the Scots at Scone in 1651, would go on to regain the English throne in 1660 at the Restoration when the Commonwealth fell apart. The Covenanters, who had helped Charles II regain his throne, would then be subjected to the horrors of the Killing Time between 1661 and 1688, when this king would show his true tyrannical colours.
‘If a man makes a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by some agreement, he shall not break his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth’ (Numbers 30:2, NKJV).
Image: Plaque commemorating Charles II’s signing of the Solemn League and Covenant at Breda in the Netherlands, in 1650, Wikipedia Free Commons.