When Charles II lay dying in 1685, his anger against the faithful Covenanters was still boiling. Despite his two-pronged attack of persecution and temptation through Indulgences, a remnant stood firm, unmoved. This group had openly exposed his perjury and called him a tyrant in both Church and State. More than this, they had had the gall to reject him as king. One of them, Revd Donald Cargill, had read out his excommunication from ‘the true church’ publicly in front of thousands at Torwood on 12 September, 1680.
In October 1684, Revd James Renwick had published his Declarations Against Intelligencers, stating that ‘we have disowned the authority of Charles Stuart… and all authority depending on him’. The document, attached to mercat crosses throughout parts of Scotland, renounced his ‘wicked and hellish designs’. The faithful Covenanters also stated that ‘we utterly detest and abhor that hellish principle of killing all who differ in judgment and persuasion from us, it having no bottom upon the word of God’, but they also said, ‘we have declared war against him, and his accomplices’. This war was not by aggressive military means, but through prayer and preaching; they only acted in self-defence. Now, as he lay dying, Charles II’s hatred for Protestants was revealed when he called for the last rites by a Roman Catholic priest. Ridden with lust, pride and hatred, he slipped into eternity.
His younger brother, the Duke of York, became the next monarch, as King James VII of Scotland and Ireland, and King James II of England. With frenzied passion he pursued the remnant, following his brother’s Abjuration Act, which meant that unless people could accept the king on oath as the Head of the Church, they could be shot on sight. It soon became clear that this fervent Papist was not only out to exterminate the Presbyterian Church, but also the Protestant Church in Britain. The Covenanters had predicted this, and now it was even dawning on the moderates that those whom they called ‘fanatics’ had been right all along. If the ‘divine right of kings’ had led Henry VIII to break with Rome, the ‘divine right of kings’ now led James VII to bring the nation back to Rome.
When James VII openly started favouring the Roman Catholics and pressing for this in Parliament, an alarm call rose up throughout Britain. In Scotland the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Bishops of Galloway and Dunkeld opposed the king, but were removed from their positions. Taking the law into his own hands, James VII feigned toleration for the moderate Presbyterians and Non-Conformists, in order to emancipate the Roman Catholics and bring them back to places of power and influence in government, the military and in the universities. With the imprisonment in 1688 of the Archbishop of Canterbury and six English bishops in the Tower of London for speaking out against the king’s despotic control over Church and State, both the English and Scots had had enough. The Jesuits were invited back to rebuild the Roman Catholic faith in London, and at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The last straw was when his Roman Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart. The prospect of a Roman Catholic dynasty enslaving the nation again to the Papacy was Britain’s worst nightmare. It would lead to the Glorious Revolution and the freedom of the Presbyterian Church.
‘Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel than all the kings of Israel who were before him’ (1 Kings 16:33, NKJV).
Image: James VII (James II of England), school of Peter Lely, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.