Down in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, a plaque records the 110 Covenanters who were executed by hanging there, and elsewhere in the city, between 1661 and 1688. The third entry simply says, ’22 July 1663, Archibald Johnston, Lord Warriston, Architect of the National Covenant’. Lord Warriston was one of the chief leaders of the covenanting movement, and as a lawyer he was the man responsible for constructing the legal part of the 1638 National Covenant document. As such, he became a special target during Charles II’s purging of Scotland.
Although Warriston’s diary had been known about, it went missing until 1896 and 1906 when sections were discovered. Unfortunately, 1639-1650 has still been lost, but what we have is invaluable for this period of our turbulent history. In his diary we do not find the ramblings of some extremist, but rather the heart of a deeply compassionate man who loved God. ‘I began to tremble,’ he wrote when experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit as he confessed his sins, ‘my soul ever crying with utterance, ‘God’s mercy, God’s mercy, God’s mercy… ‘Father, glorify thyself in my life and death’… I thought at this time that my Jesus took my heart in his hand and knit it and wrapped it within the heart of God, so that I found God as it were within my heart, possessing and filling all the wounds and holes thereof… God was mine, yes, fully mine; and I was his, yes, totally his…’
As he prayed between 3.00 and 6.00 am on 23 April 1637, God was preparing him for what would come. ‘The Lord makes me to apprehend that this clear day will have a dark night’, he wrote,‘and this fair calm will have a foul storm.’ As he and his wife Helen prepared themselves for the storm which would come, he was requested by the leaders of Edinburgh to use his lawyer’s skill to draw up the legal section of the National Covenant. This section was taken from the Acts of Scottish Parliament which promised to uphold the Scottish Protestant Church. On 27 February 1638 he read out the National Covenant to the leaders and ministers for their combined critique, with only two words being changed. The next day the lords, barons and nobles signed the first copy in Greyfriars’ Kirk.
As he travelled around parts of Scotland explaining the document to packed congregations, over and over again, there were scenes of weeping and confessing the sins of compromise in the church. On 1 April 1638, in St Giles in the Royal Mile, after the lords Loudon, Montrose, Boyd and Balmerino put up their right hand in agreement, the congregation did the same, and ‘there rose such a yelloch [tumult], such abundance of tears, such heavenly harmony of sighs and sobs, universally through all the corners of the church, as the like was never seen nor heard of. The Spirit of the Lord so filled the sanctuary…’ For Warriston it was more than he could have imagined, causing him to pen the following words: ‘The Lord make us never forget his presence in it, but rather make us tell it to our posterity, and make us walk worthy of it, within the compass of this Covenant… O Edinburgh, Edinburgh, never forget this day of April, the gloriest day that ever you enjoyed.’
Alexander Henderson had been asked by John Pym, the Puritan and Parliamentarian leader of England, to draw up the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant, which combined a covenant for religious freedom, along with the liberty of Parliament and civil rights. A team of eight was chosen to travel down to London, including Warriston. Everywhere they went they were treated as heroes, but after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, they were branded as fanatics and rebels. A warrant for his arrest went out on 1 February 1661, but he had already fled to Europe. He was captured in France, then sent to the Tower of London, before being taken to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh. He was hanged on 22 July 1663, just yards from his own house near Mercat Cross on the Royal Mile, and just a stone’s throw from St Giles where he had witnessed the ‘gloriest day’ that Edinburgh ever enjoyed. His head was cut off and impaled by the soldiers on the Netherbow Port, and was years later buried with his body in Greyfriars’ Kirkyard.
‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints’ (Psalm 116:15, NKJV).
Image: Archibald Johnston, Lord Warriston: George Jamesone, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons