A History of Britain, Volume 2 (12 page)

The Laudian emphasis on inclusiveness fitted neatly with Charles's own innocent concept of his monarchy as an office for the entirety of his subjects. The trouble, though, was that by entirety he meant Scotland as well as England. For if the object of the Laudian reforms was to create an orderly harmony within the Church of England, any kind of exceptions to its uniformity would, by definition, sabotage the whole project. Thus, thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his convictions, Charles planned to introduce the Laudian prayer book to Scotland. In 1634, a year after his coronation in Edinburgh, it must have seemed a good, a necessary project. How was he supposed to know that it was the beginning of his end?

THE BRITISH WARS
began on the morning of 23 July 1637, and the first missiles launched were foot stools. They flew down the nave of St Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh (the kirk of St Giles until the east and west walls had been removed to enlarge the church to proportions compatible with its new dignity), and their targets were the dean and the Bishop of Edinburgh. The reverend gentlemen had just begun to read from a new royally authorized Prayer Book. Even before the hurling of the stools, the attempt to read the liturgy had triggered a deafening outburst of shouting and wailing, especially from the many women gathered in the church. The minister John Row, who called the detestable object ‘this Popish-English-Scottish-Mass-Service-Book', described keening cries of ‘Woe, woe' and ‘Sorrow, sorrow, for this doleful day, that they are bringing in Popery among us' ringing round the church. Terrified, the dean and bishop beat a swift retreat, but not before hands reached out in an attempt to strip the white surplices from their backs. In other churches in the city, such as the Old Kirk close by St Giles, the minister was barracked into silence; at Greyfriars the Bishop-designate of Argyll surrendered to a storm of abuse. In the afternoon the appearance of bishops and clergy was a sign for crowds to appear from nowhere, surrounding the nervous ministers, jostling and yelling their undying hatred of the ‘Popish' liturgy.

The Prayer Book riots were not, of course, a spontaneous protest by the outraged common people of Scotland. The royal council had conveniently let it be known, months in advance, that the Prayer Book would be introduced by Easter 1637, which gave its opponents – Calvinist
preachers and lords – time to organize their demonstration. Printing delays had postponed the date further, so that by July the trap was well set, and Archbishop Laud, his bishops, the council and the king innocently fell right in. They were caught completely off guard. As far as Charles I could see, Scotland was likely to be perfectly obedient to his ambition to create a single Arminian Church throughout Britain. Had not the Scottish parliament obliged him, if reluctantly, in 1633 when he had come to Edinburgh for his coronation (eight years after being crowned in Westminster)? To be sure, there had been some fuss in 1626 when he had revoked the land titles and grants of the Scottish nobility, but it was customary to do this every twenty-five years, before regranting them on terms spelled out by the new sovereign. What Charles had failed to notice was the intense resentment caused when it was made clear that some of those land grants transferred by the Reformation from Church to lay hands were now to be given back to establish endowments for the bishops. And the king had been much too complacent about the apparent lack of resistance to his ‘book of canons', introduced in 1636, restricting preaching and giving dominant authority to the bishoprics.

But then Charles talked to all the wrong people in all the wrong places, to deracinated silk-coated London-Scottish noblemen like the Duke of Hamilton, or to his tough-minded treasurer in Edinburgh, the Earl of Traquair, who for the most part told him what he wanted to hear. The king had been born in the ancient royal abbey town of Dunfermline, but he was an absentee monarch who knew virtually nothing about the reality of Scotland and fatally misjudged the depth and breadth of its impassioned Calvinism. What he ought to have done was go to one of the little granite-grey towns of the southwest, such as Irvine, on a Monday marketday, and hear the full trumpet blast of preachers like Robert Blair or David Dickson thundering against the iniquitous destruction of the godly Church by such as Archbishop Laud and his corrupt and tyrannical lackeys, the bishops. The mere notion that the Church of Rome (as the Arminians argued) was a ‘true', if misguided, Church and not actually the abominable institution of Antichrist, sent them into a paroxysm of wrath. Hard-pressed by the official Church, often stripped of their livings, such men had become itinerant preachers, taking refuge with their equally fierce Presbyterian Scots brethren in Ulster, across the North Channel. There, they were embraced into like-minded communities of psalm-singers and scripture-readers. Despairing of the realm of the Stuarts, some of the godly ministers had even decided to build their Jerusalem in Massachusetts and had got as far as Newfoundland before being blown back by a tempest, which, needless to say, they interpreted as
God's design that they should, after all, do his work at home. Back in Scotland they turned into so many Jeremiahs and Ezekiels, calling on God's children to resist such abominations as surplices and kneeling and stone altars as if they were the desecrations of Sodom.

Charles, however, was incapable of appreciating the power of Scottish Calvinism's clarion call for a great purification. As far as the king was concerned, Scotland was not all that different from England, and if the one had been bent to the royal will by well-intentioned firmness, so might the other. But the Scottish Reformation, of course, had been nothing at all like the slow, staccato progress of England's conversion to Protestantism. Its Calvinism had struck in great electrifying bursts of charismatic conversion, backed up by teachers, lecturers and ministers, and only forced into reluctant and periodic retreat by James I, who, unlike his son, had known when to stop. It was an irony in the great holy shouting match of 1637–8, that
both
sides imagined they represented continuity not change. Charles and Laud thought they were building on the Five Articles of Perth of 1618 and that the protesters were Presbyterian rebels who sought to overthrow the whole royal supremacy of the Church. But ministers like Samuel Rutherford, whose preaching at Anwoth had been so offensive that Bishop Sydserf of Galloway had him banished to the safely conservative confines of Aberdeen, believed that they were merely upholding a much more ancient covenant between Scotland and God. That covenant was in every respect like the one made between God and Israel but had specific roots in the (fictitious but immensely influential) history of Scotland's conversion in the third century AD. According to those histories, the Church had been received by the
community
before ever the first king, Fergus, had begun his reign in the year 310. His sovereignty, then, had been conditional on acceptance of the covenant made between God and Scotland, the
original
godly nation – before England and even before Rome.

This is what the likes of Blair and Dickson and Rutherford and countless other ministers preached, and this is what their flock fervently believed. Laud and the bishops were the filthy priests of Baal, who presumed to come between them and their covenant with the Almighty. For the moment, the king himself was given the benefit of the doubt, being led astray by ‘evil counsel'. The Prayer Book riots in July 1637 and the still more startling events that followed were not meant to herald the overthrow of the house of Stuart. On the contrary, they were intended to reaffirm its sovereignty in Scotland but only on the understanding that that kingdom could not, and would not, be treated as a mere appendage of England. The hope, especially among the more moderate nobility, was
that the unenforceability of the Prayer Book would persuade the king to listen to wise advice and retreat from his policy of ‘innovations'. In fact, the Duke of Hamilton, who replaced Traquair as the king's principal commissioner in Scotland, warned the king in June 1638 to back away from further confrontation. Hamilton even had the prescience to predict to Charles that if he persisted trouble would not be confined to Scotland but would inevitably spread to all three of his kingdoms.

What Hamilton had witnessed since arriving in Scotland was the first revolutionary upheaval of seventeenth-century Britain. Even the organizers of the Prayer Book riots had been taken aback at the force and overwhelming popularity of the protests. Town officers did nothing about apprehending the rioters, other than briefly detaining a few of the serving women and apprentices who had made the loudest noise. But through the winter of 1637–8, the moment was seized to mobilize a great petitioning movement against the bishops, which caught up ministers, nobles, lairds and townsmen in its crusading fervour. A dissident group on the royal council in Scotland produced a ‘Supplication' to the king, urging him to abandon the Laudian Church and replace it with a godly Presbyterian order. Charles's response was to assume that only some sort of foreign, probably French, influence could explain this temerity, to order the council out of the continuously riotous Edinburgh and to threaten to treat as traitors those who persisted in their opposition.

Instead of cowing the resistance, this response turned it into a revolution. On 28 February 1638 a ‘National Covenant' was signed in a solemn, four-hour ceremony at Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, full of prayers, psalms and sermons exhorting the godly to be the new Israel. Later that day it was exhibited at the Tailors' Hall on Cowgate, where it was signed by ministers and representatives from the towns. The next day the common people, including a substantial number of women, added their signatures, and copies were made to be sent throughout Scotland. Although the covenant at first sight seems to be written in the language of conservatism, claiming to protect the king's peace, it had been drafted in part by the uncompromising Calvinist lawyer Archibald Johnston. Johnston was the kind of dyspeptic, self-mortifying zealot who lay awake at night, tortured by the possibility that he might have one grain of impurity too many to qualify for the Elect, and who, on getting into bed with his teenage wife Jean, immediately assured God (out loud) that he preferred His face to hers. For Johnston, the covenant was ‘the glorious marriage day of the kingdom with God', and he, like Samuel Rutherford, had no hesitation in assuming that kings could be lawfully called to account and if necessary removed if ever they should violate
that
marriage bed.

For countless thousands of Scots, signing the covenant was just an extension of the vows they took ‘banding' them with God in the Kirk, but the document itself rapidly assumed the status of a kind of patriotic scripture, a way of determining who was truly Christian and who not, who was a true Scot and who not. Belatedly, Hamilton attempted to organize a ‘King's Covenant' as a moderate riposte, and he managed to secure some 28,000 signatures, proof that, as in so many other crucial turning points in Scotland's history, the country was divided rather than united in its response. But it seems extremely unlikely that Charles himself ever thought of the ‘King's Covenant' as anything more than a tactical manoeuvre while he mobilized enough force to bring the Scots to heel. And by late 1638, most of Scotland was already borne aloft in the whirlwind. A righteously intoxicated general assembly in Glasgow, where Johnston served as chief clerk, went the whole distance, effectively severing all connections between the English government and the Scottish Church: it abolished bishops and the rest of the Laudian establishment. Then the Scottish parliament, which first met in August 1639 and reconvened without royal permission in June 1640, introduced three-yearly parliaments, whether or not they were called by the king.

None of the Covenanters could have been under much illusion about what Charles I's response to the Glasgow assembly would be. Their own view was that they threatened nothing, presumed no interference in the affairs of England (although, as part of the international Calvinist defence against the Counter-Reformation, they could not but hope that they might set an example for Presbyterians south of the border). If, on the other hand, the king of England came in arms to undo their godly Reformation, they would, of course, defend it with their lives. And proper precautionary measures were quickly taken through the winter and spring of 1638–9 to see to this defence. The veteran soldier of the religious wars in Europe, General Alexander Leslie, was made commander of their forces; money was borrowed from the banker William Dick to buy munitions and powder from the Dutch; castles and strongholds were transferred from royal to Covenanter authority; and the local networks that had produced signatures for the petitions and covenant – the towns and villages of Scotland – were now mined to produce money and men. Charles and Laud had really managed something quite unique: they had contrived to unite two parties, the Kirk and the lords, who were more naturally accustomed to quarrelling. And two sets of loyalties, the Church and the clan, could be used to produce a godly army. By the spring of 1639 that army numbered at least 25,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 men.

On the other side of the border it proved much harder to get an
army together, let alone a force that could be relied on to strike terror into the hearts of the Scots (or at least persuade them to abandon the Covenant). Sir Edmund Verney, who by now was much more the country gentleman than the courtier, enjoyed nothing more than to tend his estate at Claydon in Buckinghamshire, and to keep company with his wife Mary and their rapidly expanding family. But he was still officially Knight Marshal, a member of the Privy Chamber, and therefore duty bound, however reluctantly, to answer the royal summons to attend the king at York, ‘as a cuirassier in russett armes, with guilded studds or nayles, and befittingly horsed', despite his deep misgivings about the wisdom and propriety of the king's and Laud's policies. His eldest son, Ralph, was even less happy about his father (who was, in any case, in poor health) risking his life to enforce contentious doctrines of which he himself rather disapproved and which were best left to the divines to thrash out. Ralph could hardly have been reassured by his father making his will before leaving Claydon, nor by letters, which his father worried might be opened before reaching him, describing military disaster in the making: ‘Our Army is butt weake; our Purce is butt weaker; and if wee fight with thes foarces and early in the yeare wee shall have our throats cutt.' The learned Thomas Howard, Earl Marshal Arundel, seemed to be better equipped to collect art and antiquities than to lead an army, for he led the king on to fight without warning him of the dire condition of the troops. ‘I dare saye ther was never soe Raw, soe unskilfull and soe unwilling an Army brought to fight,' wrote Sir Edmund witheringly of Arundel.