Allan Massie: Brave Covenanters were dangerous fanatics too

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 19:51

IN JOHN Buchan's Huntingtower the Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn, on the first night of his walking-tour, lodges in a house where "he supped handsomely off ham and eggs, and dipped into a work called Covenanting Worthies, which garnished a table decorated with sea-shells".

He might have found that book, or one like it, in a good many Scottish homes, for the persecuted Covenanters were the folk-heroes of Presbyterian Scotland, and others besides Robert Louis Stevenson would remember fondly "Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying…"

So, for example, a few hundred yards from where I live, there is a monument to the Battle of Philiphaugh fought on 13 September, 1645, between the Covenanters and the Royalist army of the Marquis of Montrose. It was erected by the local laird, Sir John Murray, in the middle of the 19th century, "in memory of the Covenanters who fought and died" in the battle. In truth few of them were killed in that one-sided encounter after which the God-fearing victors massacred the Irish prisoners they had taken and their women and other camp-followers. Nevertheless, despite the horrors that followed the battle, the monument remembers only the Covenanters, heroes of Presbyterian Scotland, and not their victims.

Things are very different today. If the Covenanters have not been written out of the popular history of Scotland, they have certainly been set aside, and a historian, Dane Love, who has compiled an encyclopaedia of the Covenanting movement, complains of this neglect, contrasts it with the attention lavished on the romantic Jacobites, and declares the Covenanters' struggle to preserve religious freedom – often resulting in them being hunted down and killed by the King's soldiers – should be more widely known. "

So why has this happened? It is not just because the Jacobites have the songs and the Covenanters the sermons, though there is something in that. The historian, Professor Tom Devine, suggests the Jacobites have been assimilated to "an almost nationalist tradition", while the Covenanters "don't have that appeal" – despite, one must add, being more intensely nationalist than the Jacobites – and instead "are seen as a sort of Scottish Taleban who would have turned Scotland into a theocracy not unlike modern Iran". Clearly, therefore, a bad thing.

In truth, there is confusion here, as Prof Devine very well knows. It arises because there were two Covenants. The first was the National Covenant signed in Edinburgh's Greyfriars kirkyard in February 1638, and subsequently all over Lowland Scotland. It was provoked by the attempt of Charles I to bring the Presbyterian Kirk into conformity with the Church of England and to impose English church practices on it. Signing the Covenant was indeed an act of national resistance, one which should appeal to our present governing party. Montrose himself signed the Covenant, and would later be one of the Covenanting generals in the Bishops' Wars which followed. For one who, in the words of John Buchan's biography, "had his full share of national pride, the cause of the Covenant was the cause of the patriot".

But then this justified rebellion went further and became a sort of revolution which brought royal authority into question and threatened to subject the state to the government of the Kirk and its ministers. This was when Montrose and others turned against it.

Civil War broke out in England too, and, when the parliament there sought Scottish help against the King, there followed, in 1643, the second Covenant, known as the Solemn League and Covenant. This brought the Scots Covenanters into the war on the parliamentary side, but they made a condition: that Presbyterianism should be imposed on England too, so that there should be conformity between the churches in both kingdoms. In short, having begun as defenders of the right of the Scottish people to have their own form of church government, the Covenanters were now demanding that the English should surrender their own right and accept Presbyterianism, which only a minority even on the parliamentary side wanted.

It was this second Covenant that the small minority of extreme Presbyterians continued to insist on after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and, because Charles II was not in their opinion a "Covenanted King", they rejected his authority and were persecuted as rebels. That they were cruelly persecuted is certain and many went bravely to what they considered martyrdom. But when Mr Love speaks of "their struggle to preserve religious freedom", he slides over the inconvenient truth that the freedom they demanded for themselves was not one they were prepared to grant others. The heroes of the movement were the men who murdered Archbishop Sharpe in the sight of his daughter on Magus Moor in 1667.

In The Tale of Old Mortality, one of the greatest of political novels, inspired by the story of an old man who devoted his life to caring for the graves of the martyrs, Scott does full justice to the courage of the persecuted Covenanters, but also shows how their religious zeal had bred intolerant fanaticism. He has one of the Archbishop's assassins explain as proof of God's approval of the murder that they had actually been lying in wait for one of Sharpe's "minions" when the Almighty delivered him into their hands. This is the language of politico-religious terrorism, sadly familiar today. Osama bin Laden might nod agreement.

We should certainly honour and commemorate the Covenanters; they are a more central and important part of our history than the Jacobites. Yet, in doing so, we should make a distinction between the men who signed the National Covenant as an act of patriotism in 1638 and the extremists who continued the struggle in the reign of Charles II. That they were brave and sincere men and women, willing to accept a death which they considered martyrdom for their faith is certain, and for this reason they too deserve to be honoured. But they were also harsh and narrow-minded fanatics who wouldhave imposed on Scotland a fiercely intolerant regime. Toleration of other opinions was to their mind an "abomination", an offence against the Will of the Almighty which they alone could interpret. Prof Devine is not far astray in comparing them to the Taleban or the Iranian theocracy.