Revd Richard Cameron was either the most loved, or most hated man in Scotland in 1680. He was hailed as a martyr and the Lion of the Covenant by the stalwart covenanting militia in their struggle for freedom; but by the Royalists, Episcopalians and moderate Presbyterians, he was called a ‘fanatic’, and the ‘notorious leader’ of the rebel Covenanters. The price on his head was 5,000 merks, dead or alive. When he was finally killed at Airds Moss in Ayrshire, after a short battle with the king’s men, his head and hands were cut off by the soldiers and taken to Edinburgh. Cameron’s body parts were shown to his father Alan, who was languishing in the Tolbooth prison, and then placed on spikes at the Netherbow Port on the Royal Mile, as a warning to others.
As a friend of Revd Donald Cargill, Cameron was determined to stand fast to the Covenants of 1638 and 1643, which he viewed as a vow to God. Charles II had tried to manipulate the Presbyterians into a compromise with his so-called Indulgences between 1669 and 1679. On the surface, he was extending amnesty to the beleaguered Presbyterians, but in reality, they had to give up their treasured Christian democratic polity and become Episcopalians under the absolute control of the king. Many pastors, weary of the struggles, and desperate to resume their work in the parishes, caved in under this pressure. However, a minority, like Cameron, held fast. The king’s ploy was effective in driving a wedge between the moderate Presbyterians and the covenanting Presbyterians.
One day, on 22 June 1680, Richard Cameron and 20 other Covenanters, rode into the village of Sanquhar, read out a document, sang some Psalms, and nailed the document to the market cross, then rode off again. It was this act of defiance that led to Cameron’s death. The government called the Declaration of Sanquhar an ‘execrable’ document, enacted by Cameron’s ‘Wicked Crew’. So, what was it that made the king’s blood boil? The document lists three necessary reformations in the church to free it from the papacy, prelacy (control by the political bishops), and ‘Erastianism’ (control by the State, or king). It contains the reminder that Scotland is a covenanted nation before God, and that the people ought to ‘disown Charles Stuart, that has been reigning (or tyrannizing as we may say) on the throne of Britain these years byegone’. It recalls that the king is a perjurer and law-breaker, and that he has also usurped both church and parliament in Scotland. The declaration concludes that they ‘do declare a war with such a tyrant and usurper’ in self-defence. Furthermore, it rejects the Duke of York, afterwards King James VII, as an avowed papist, whose intention was to take Scotland back to Rome.
Today, in our comfortable culture, it is easy for critics to castigate Cameron and his followers as fanatics, but few pause to think. In our Scotland of the 21st century, the church enjoys freedom by law from the absolute control of papacy, prelacy, and the State; it also has a constitutional monarch, and a democratic system. We even had a regiment in the British army until 1968, celebrated for its bravery, named the Cameronian Regiment, after Revd Richard Cameron. Are we all ‘fanatics’, then?
‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints’ (Psalm 116:15, NKJV).
Richard Cameron, Heroes and Heroines of the Scottish Covenanters; Dryerre, J. Meldrum; Partridge & Co London; 1901, Penarc, Wikipedia Commons.