The Covenanters and the Killing Time

I. The Covenants

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 established a Reformed church in Scotland whose doctrine was set out in the Scots Confession and whose government developed, under the influence of Andrew Melville in the 1570s and 1580s, towards a Presbyterian system of kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods and a General Assembly. James VI, who became king of England in 1603, favoured bishops as a means of royal control over the church, and by 1610 he had restored a form of episcopacy alongside the Presbyterian courts. In 1618 the Five Articles of Perth required kneeling at communion and the observance of holy days, measures that many Scots regarded as a return to Catholic practice.

Charles I went further. In 1637 he imposed a new Prayer Book on the Church of Scotland without the consent of the General Assembly or Parliament. Its first use, in St Giles' in Edinburgh on 23 July 1637, provoked a riot, and opposition spread across the country. In February 1638 the opponents of the Prayer Book drew up the National Covenant, which bound its signatories to defend the Reformed religion and to resist innovations not approved by free assemblies and parliaments. It was signed in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh and then throughout the Lowlands. The General Assembly at Glasgow in November 1638 abolished episcopacy, and the resulting conflict with the king, the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640, ended in the king's defeat.

In 1643 the Covenanters concluded the Solemn League and Covenant with the English Parliament, by which the Scots agreed to send an army to support Parliament in the English Civil War in return for a commitment to reform religion in England and Ireland "according to the Word of God, and the example of the best reformed churches". The Westminster Assembly, in which Scottish commissioners took part, produced the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and the Directory for Public Worship, which the Church of Scotland adopted and which remain the subordinate standards of Scottish Presbyterianism.

The Covenants gave Scottish Presbyterianism a distinctive theology of the nation. Their supporters believed that Scotland, like ancient Israel, had entered into a covenant with God, and that the nation and its rulers were bound by it. They drew on the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures in which kings and people renewed the covenant, such as the covenant made under Jehoiada in 2 Kings 11:17 and the covenant of Josiah in 2 Kings 23:3, in which the king "made a covenant before Jehovah to follow Jehovah and to keep his commandments". Breaking the Covenant was regarded as national perjury that would bring divine judgement.

II. The Restoration and Episcopacy

In 1650 the Covenanters had crowned Charles II at Scone after he swore to the Covenants, but they were defeated by Cromwell at Dunbar in September 1650, and Scotland was occupied by the English army until 1660. The Covenanters themselves had divided in 1650–51 into the Resolutioners, who were willing to admit former royalists to the army, and the Protesters, who insisted on strict adherence to the Covenants.

At the Restoration in 1660, Charles II, who had come to regard the Covenants as an infringement of royal authority, restored episcopacy to the Church of Scotland. The Act Rescissory of 1661 annulled the legislation passed since 1633, removing the legal basis for Presbyterian church government. The Covenants were declared unlawful, and copies were burned by the hangman. Bishops were appointed, among them James Sharp, a Resolutioner minister who had been sent to London to represent Presbyterian interests and who was appointed archbishop of St Andrews in 1661. Many Presbyterians regarded Sharp as a traitor to the cause he had been sent to defend.

In 1662 Parliament required all ministers appointed since 1649 to seek presentation by the patron of the parish and collation by the bishop. Around a quarter of the ministers of Scotland, some two hundred and seventy, refused and were deprived of their parishes. The deprivations were heaviest in the south-west, in Galloway, Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire, where nearly all the ministers left their charges. Their places were filled by new ministers, often young and inexperienced, whom many parishioners refused to hear and who were derided as "curates".

III. Field Conventicles

The deprived ministers continued to preach to their former congregations in private houses and, increasingly, in the open air. These meetings, called conventicles, were held in fields, on hillsides and on the moors, often with thousands in attendance. They were illegal, and the government passed successive laws against them. The Mile Act of 1663 forbade deprived ministers to live within twenty miles of their former parishes, and fines were imposed on those who failed to attend their parish churches. Soldiers were quartered on the households of absentees and collected the fines.

The field conventicle became the defining institution of Covenanting Scotland. Worshippers gathered at remote places that could be watched from the surrounding hills, with sentries posted to give warning of approaching troops. Men often came armed. A service might last many hours, with prayers, psalms sung from the metrical psalter of 1650, preaching and sometimes the celebration of communion, which in the large outdoor gatherings could draw many thousands. The preachers took texts that spoke to the condition of a persecuted people, among them Psalm 74:20, "Look to the covenant, for the dark places of the earth have become the haunts of violence", and Isaiah 32:2, with its image of a shelter from the wind and a hiding place from the rainstorm.

The government's efforts to suppress conventicles grew more severe over time. In 1670 an act made preaching at a field conventicle punishable by death and attendance punishable by heavy fines. The government also offered Indulgences in 1669 and 1672, which allowed some deprived ministers to return to parishes on conditions, but these divided the Presbyterians, since the more uncompromising refused to accept a toleration granted by royal authority over the church. The indulged ministers were condemned by the stricter party as having compromised the Covenant.

IV. The Pentland Rising

In November 1666 a group of Covenanters in Galloway, provoked by the treatment of an elderly man by soldiers collecting fines at Dalry, disarmed the soldiers and captured Sir James Turner, the commander of the troops in the south-west. The rising grew to about three thousand men, who marched towards Edinburgh in the hope that the capital would rise to support them. The support did not come, and by the time the insurgents reached the Pentland Hills their numbers had dwindled to under a thousand, weary and poorly armed.

On 28 November 1666 they were defeated at Rullion Green by government troops under Sir Thomas Dalziel of the Binns, a royalist officer who had served in the Russian army. About fifty insurgents were killed in the battle and many more captured. Around thirty-six prisoners were executed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ayr and other towns, and others were tortured with the boot, an instrument that crushed the leg, to extract information. Among those executed was Hugh McKail, a young minister whose speech on the scaffold, ending with a farewell to the world and its delights, became a classic of Covenanting literature. Others were transported to Barbados.

V. The Highland Host

The government's policy in Scotland after 1667 was directed by John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, the secretary of state, who alternated between conciliation through the Indulgences and repression. In the mid-1670s, as field conventicles continued to grow, Lauderdale turned to harsher measures. Landowners were required to sign bonds making them responsible for the conduct of their tenants and servants, and many in the south-west refused, arguing that they could not answer for the religious practices of others.

In January 1678 Lauderdale quartered an army of around six thousand Highland soldiers and three thousand Lowland militia on the south-west, chiefly in Ayrshire, in order to compel the landowners to sign the bonds and to suppress conventicles. The Highland Host, as it was called, remained for about two months. The soldiers lived at free quarter, plundering houses, taking livestock and goods, and inflicting considerable losses on the population, although there were few killings. The episode increased resentment of the government, and many observers in England and Scotland regarded it as an unjustifiable use of military force against the king's own subjects. It contributed to the climate of anger that preceded the events of 1679.

VI. John Graham of Claverhouse

John Graham of Claverhouse, born around 1648, served as a volunteer in the French and Dutch armies before returning to Scotland in 1677 to take up a commission in a troop of horse charged with suppressing conventicles in the south-west. He became the most notorious of the government commanders in Covenanting memory, known as "Bloody Clavers", and many of the summary killings of the 1680s were attributed to him or to the troops under his command. In 1684 he was appointed to the Privy Council.

Historians have presented differing assessments of Claverhouse. His own letters show a soldier who regarded the Covenanters as rebels and who carried out the orders of the government with efficiency, but they also show that he sometimes recommended clemency and that he regarded the prosecution of ordinary people as less effective than the punishment of leaders. In Jacobite and later romantic tradition, especially after his death at Killiecrankie in 1689, he was celebrated as "Bonnie Dundee", the loyal and gallant servant of the Stuart kings. The two images of the man, as persecutor and as hero, reflect the divided memory of the period.

VII. The Murder of Archbishop Sharp

On 3 May 1679 a group of Covenanters from Fife, led by David Hackston of Rathillet and John Balfour of Kinloch, who had been waiting to waylay the sheriff-depute of Fife, unexpectedly encountered the coach of Archbishop Sharp on Magus Muir near St Andrews. Interpreting the encounter as providential, they stopped the coach, dragged Sharp out in the presence of his daughter, and killed him with swords and pistols. Hackston, who had a private grievance against Sharp, took no part in the killing but did not prevent it.

The murder of Sharp was condemned by many Presbyterians but justified by the more extreme Covenanters as the execution of a persecutor and apostate. It provoked severe measures by the government, and several of those involved fled to the west, where they joined the armed conventicles that were preparing to resist the government.

VIII. Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge

On 29 May 1679, the anniversary of the Restoration, a group of armed Covenanters led by Robert Hamilton entered Rutherglen, extinguished the bonfires lit in celebration of the king's birthday, and fixed to the market cross a declaration against the acts of the government since 1660. On 1 June, John Graham of Claverhouse, a cavalry officer charged with suppressing conventicles, attacked a large armed conventicle at Drumclog in Lanarkshire. The Covenanters, using the boggy ground to their advantage, routed his dragoons, killing around thirty-six.

The victory at Drumclog encouraged the Covenanters to raise an army, which grew to several thousand men. But they were divided over their aims and principles. The stricter party, led by Hamilton and the minister Donald Cargill, refused to cooperate with those who had accepted the Indulgences, and much of the time before the battle was spent in disputes over a declaration of principles. The government sent an army under James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, to suppress the rising.

On 22 June 1679 the armies met at Bothwell Bridge on the river Clyde. The Covenanters held the bridge for a time but were driven off by Monmouth's artillery and infantry, and their army broke and fled. Several hundred were killed in the pursuit, and around twelve hundred prisoners were taken to Edinburgh, where they were held in the open air in a part of the Greyfriars kirkyard for several months. Many were released after giving a bond not to take up arms again, but around two hundred and fifty who refused were sentenced to transportation to the American colonies. Their ship was wrecked off Orkney in December 1679, and most of the prisoners, locked below decks, drowned.

IX. The Cameronians and the Sanquhar Declaration

After Bothwell Bridge the most uncompromising Covenanters, a small minority, rejected not only the bishops and the indulged ministers but the authority of the king himself. Their leaders were the ministers Richard Cameron, Donald Cargill and later James Renwick, and they became known as the Cameronians or Society People. On 22 June 1680, the first anniversary of Bothwell Bridge, Cameron and about twenty armed followers rode into the burgh of Sanquhar in Dumfriesshire and fixed to the market cross a declaration disowning Charles II as king on the grounds that he had broken the Covenant and become a tyrant, and declaring war on him and his supporters.

On 22 July 1680 Cameron and his small band were surprised by government dragoons at Airds Moss in Ayrshire. Cameron was killed, and his head and hands were cut off and displayed in Edinburgh. Hackston of Rathillet was captured and executed in Edinburgh with great cruelty. In September 1680, at Torwood, Cargill pronounced a formal excommunication of the king, the Duke of York, the Duke of Monmouth and other officers of state. Cargill was captured in 1681 and executed in Edinburgh in July of that year.

The Cameronians organised themselves into societies that met for prayer and discussion and sent representatives to general meetings. They held that all who supported the government, including other Presbyterians, were complicit in its sins, and they separated themselves from them. Their position was expressed in the Informatory Vindication of 1687 and in the Apologetical Declaration of November 1684, which warned that those who participated in the persecution of the Society People would be regarded as enemies of God.

X. The Test Act and the Killing Time

The Scottish Parliament of 1681, presided over by James, Duke of York, the king's Catholic brother, passed the Test Act, which required all holders of public office to swear an oath that included adherence to the Scots Confession of 1560, the king's supremacy over the church, and a renunciation of the Covenants. The Earl of Argyll, who took the oath with a qualification, was tried for treason and sentenced to death, but escaped to the Netherlands. Around eighty ministers of the established church resigned rather than take the Test.

The period from about 1681 to 1688, and especially the years 1684 and 1685, became known in Covenanting tradition as the Killing Time. After the Apologetical Declaration of 1684, the Privy Council ordered that anyone who refused to disown it on oath could be shot on the spot. Soldiers under Claverhouse, Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, and other commanders patrolled the south-west, questioning people they encountered and putting to death those who refused to take the abjuration oath or who were found with arms. Military commissions were empowered to try and execute suspects summarily.

Several incidents became famous in Covenanting memory. On 1 May 1685 John Brown, a carrier of Priesthill in Ayrshire, was shot by Claverhouse's troops in the presence of his wife and children after refusing to take the oath. Claverhouse's own report states that Brown was found with bullets and treasonable papers. Elsewhere small groups of Covenanters were shot on the moors, and many were buried where they fell. Hundreds of others were imprisoned. In May 1685 about one hundred and sixty prisoners were confined in the vault of Dunnottar Castle on the coast of Kincardineshire in very poor conditions, and several died there.

XI. The Wigtown Martyrs

The most famous case of the Killing Time was that of the Wigtown martyrs. On 11 May 1685 two women, Margaret McLachlan, aged about sixty-three, and Margaret Wilson, aged eighteen, were drowned in the waters of the Solway at Wigtown, tied to stakes in the estuary as the tide came in, after refusing to take the abjuration oath. They had been condemned by a court that included Grierson of Lag. A reprieve had been granted by the Privy Council in Edinburgh, but it was not acted upon.

The truth of the story was disputed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by writers who argued that the reprieve had been carried out and the drowning had not taken place. The historian Mark Napier argued in the 1860s that the account was a myth. The weight of the evidence, including the records of the local kirk session and the testimony collected by Robert Wodrow in the early eighteenth century, has led most historians to accept that the drownings occurred. The story became one of the most widely known episodes of Scottish history, and a memorial stands at Wigtown. The graves of the two women are in the churchyard of Wigtown, and a stake marks the traditional site of the drowning on the shore of the estuary. Their story was retold in sermons, ballads, paintings and children's books, and it became a focus of the Covenanting commemorations that grew in the nineteenth century, when large open-air gatherings were held at sites associated with the martyrs.

XII. Women among the Covenanters

Women played a prominent part in the Covenanting movement. They attended field conventicles in large numbers, sheltered fugitive ministers and wanderers, carried messages and supplies, and in some cases suffered imprisonment, fines, transportation and death. Women of landed families such as Lady Anne Mackenzie and Lady Colville supported deprived ministers and held private meetings in their houses, and the government found it difficult to prosecute them.

Among the women of humbler origin, Isabel Alison and Marion Harvie were hanged in Edinburgh in January 1681 for their adherence to Cargill and the Sanquhar and Torwood declarations, which they refused to disown. Marion Harvie, a servant girl from Borrowstounness of about twenty, declared at her trial that she would not deny what she had heard Cargill preach. Their testimonies were included in A Cloud of Witnesses. The prominence of women in the movement has been studied by historians such as Louise Yeoman, who have used letters, testimonies and spiritual diaries to examine the religious experience of Covenanting women.

XIII. Exiles in the Netherlands

Many Scottish Presbyterians took refuge in the Netherlands during the persecution. Rotterdam, which had a Scottish church from 1643, became the centre of the exiled community, and deprived ministers such as John Brown of Wamphray and Robert MacWard wrote there in defence of the Covenanting cause and corresponded with the societies in Scotland. Students such as Renwick were trained and ordained in Dutch universities, and books and pamphlets were printed in the Netherlands and smuggled into Scotland.

The exiles also included political opponents of the government, among them the Earl of Argyll and other leaders who fled after the Test Act of 1681. In 1688 several of the exiled ministers, including William Carstares, accompanied William of Orange on his expedition to England. Carstares became William's chief adviser on Scottish affairs and played an important part in the Revolution settlement of the Church of Scotland in 1690.

XIV. James Renwick

James Renwick, born in 1662 in Dumfriesshire, witnessed the execution of Cargill in 1681 and joined the Society People. He studied at Groningen in the Netherlands, where he was ordained in 1683, and returned to Scotland to minister to the societies as their field preacher. He drew up the Apologetical Declaration of 1684 and the Sanquhar Declaration of 1685, which rejected James VII as a Catholic and a usurper, and he preached to the scattered societies across the south-west for five years while a price was set on his head.

Renwick was captured in Edinburgh in February 1688 and tried for denying the king's authority, refusing to pay the cess (a tax that funded the troops) and encouraging armed resistance. He refused to recognise the authority of James VII and was executed in the Grassmarket on 17 February 1688, at the age of twenty-six. He was the last of the Covenanters to be executed for his principles. Ten months later James VII fled to France in the Revolution of 1688.

XV. James VII and Toleration

James VII, who succeeded his brother in February 1685, was a Catholic. In 1685 the Earl of Argyll landed in Scotland in an attempt to overthrow him, in coordination with the rising of the Duke of Monmouth in England, but the rising failed and Argyll was executed in Edinburgh in June. The Scottish Parliament of 1685 passed further legislation against conventicles, including the death penalty for attending them.

In 1687, however, James issued Letters of Indulgence granting toleration to Catholics, Quakers and moderate Presbyterians, permitting them to worship in private houses and later in meeting houses. His purpose was to secure liberty for Catholics, but the Indulgences enabled many Presbyterian ministers to return from exile in the Netherlands and to preach openly. The Cameronians refused to accept a toleration that came from a Catholic king and that included Catholics, and they continued to hold field meetings.

XVI. The Revolution Settlement

In November 1688 William of Orange landed in England, and James fled to France. In Scotland a Convention of Estates met in March 1689 and declared that James had forfeited the crown. It offered the crown to William and Mary on terms set out in the Claim of Right, which declared that prelacy was a great and insupportable grievance and should be abolished. Claverhouse, now Viscount Dundee, raised the Highland clans for James and defeated the government army at Killiecrankie in July 1689, but was killed in the battle. In August 1689 a regiment raised from among the Cameronians, the Cameronian Regiment, defended Dunkeld against the Jacobite Highlanders.

In 1690 the Scottish Parliament abolished episcopacy, restored the ministers deprived in 1662, and established Presbyterian government in the Church of Scotland, ratifying the Westminster Confession as its confession of faith. The surviving deprived ministers, about sixty, returned to their parishes. The Revolution settlement did not renew the Covenants, and the strictest Covenanters, maintaining that the nation remained under covenant obligation, did not join the established church. They formed societies that in 1743 constituted the Reformed Presbytery, the origin of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

XVII. Scripture and the Covenanters

The Covenanters drew their principles from Scripture, read through the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession. They regarded Christ as the sole head of the church and held that the civil magistrate had no authority to determine its government or worship. They cited the apostles' declaration in Acts 5:29, "We must obey God as ruler rather than men", as the foundation of their refusal to obey laws that they held contrary to God's law. The question of Christ's headship of the church was summarised in the phrase "the Crown Rights of the Redeemer".

The Covenanters' view of resistance was influenced by the political theology of Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, published in 1644, which argued that the king was bound by law and by the covenant with the people, and that a king who broke the covenant could be lawfully resisted. Rutherford's book was burned by the hangman in 1661. The Cameronians went further, holding that a ruler who had broken the Covenant had forfeited his authority entirely. The narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures provided precedents, such as the account in 2 Chronicles 26:16-18 of the priests who withstood King Uzziah when he entered the temple to burn incense, a passage cited against royal supremacy over the church.

The Psalms had a central place in Covenanting worship and devotion. The Scottish metrical psalter of 1650 was sung at conventicles and on the scaffold, and many of those executed sang a psalm before their deaths. Psalm 23 in its metrical form, beginning "The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want", became associated with the Covenanters in later tradition. The texts of lament and appeal to God for justice spoke directly to their circumstances, among them Psalm 79:2-3, which describes the bodies of God's servants given as food to the birds and their blood poured out like water with no one to bury them. The dying testimonies of the martyrs frequently referred to the cry of the souls beneath the altar in Revelation 6:9-10, who called out for judgement on those who had shed their blood.

The Covenanters' use of Scripture to justify armed resistance, and in some cases killing, was controversial even among Presbyterians. Many ministers who suffered deprivation and exile rejected armed resistance, holding that Christians should suffer persecution patiently. The murder of Sharp in particular divided Presbyterian opinion. The tension between these views remained part of the history of Scottish Presbyterianism.

XVIII. The Bible in Covenanting Households

The Covenanters were a people of the book. The Scottish Reformation had placed great emphasis on literacy so that the people could read Scripture, and the First Book of Discipline of 1560 had proposed a school in every parish. By the late seventeenth century many households in the Lowlands, including those of tenant farmers and craftsmen, owned a Bible, a psalter and a copy of the Shorter Catechism. The English translation most widely used in Scotland by this time was the Authorised Version of 1611, the product of the conference described on the site's page on Hampton Court and the Authorised Version, which had gradually displaced the Geneva Bible that had been the Bible of the Scottish Reformers.

Several Covenanters' Bibles survive in museums and churches, some with marks of damage or with inscriptions recording the deaths of their owners. Family worship, with the reading of Scripture, prayer and the singing of psalms morning and evening, was the norm in pious households. The habit of searching the Scriptures for guidance in particular circumstances, and of reading contemporary events in the light of the biblical narrative, shaped the outlook of the Covenanters and gave their declarations and testimonies their characteristic biblical language.

XIX. Memory and Historiography

The memory of the Covenanters was preserved in a rich literature. Robert Wodrow, minister of Eastwood, published The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution in 1721–22, based on documents and testimonies he collected. Alexander Shields' A Hind Let Loose of 1687 defended the Cameronian position, and the collection A Cloud of Witnesses, first published in 1714, gathered the last testimonies of those executed. Patrick Walker's lives of the Covenanting preachers, published in the 1720s, preserved oral traditions about Cameron, Cargill, Renwick and others.

In the nineteenth century the Covenanters became the subject of literary and popular interest. Sir Walter Scott's novel Old Mortality, published in 1816, portrayed both the Covenanters and their persecutors and presented the Covenanters as fanatical, a view that provoked replies from Presbyterian writers such as Thomas McCrie. Covenanters' graves and memorials across the south-west of Scotland were restored and new monuments erected, and the Covenanters were celebrated as defenders of civil and religious liberty.

The number killed during the Killing Time has been debated. Wodrow and later Covenanting writers listed several hundred deaths, including those executed after trial, those shot in the fields, and those who died in prison or in transportation. Modern estimates suggest that around one hundred were killed summarily in the fields and that the total number of deaths from all causes may have been several hundred. Historians such as Ian Cowan, Mark Jardine and Alasdair Raffe have examined the period in its political context, emphasising the government's fear of rebellion and the role of the Cameronians' own declarations of war in provoking the severe measures of 1684–85.

For summaries of the period, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Covenanters, The Killing Time, the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant.

XX. Chronology

In 1638 the National Covenant was signed, and in 1643 the Solemn League and Covenant was concluded. In 1650 Charles II swore to the Covenants. In 1660 the Restoration took place, and in 1661 the Act Rescissory was passed and Sharp was made archbishop. In 1662 around two hundred and seventy ministers were deprived. On 28 November 1666 the Pentland Rising was defeated at Rullion Green. In 1669 and 1672 Indulgences were granted. In 1670 field preaching was made a capital offence.

On 3 May 1679 Sharp was murdered on Magus Muir. On 1 June the Covenanters won at Drumclog, and on 22 June they were defeated at Bothwell Bridge. On 22 June 1680 the Sanquhar Declaration was proclaimed, and on 22 July Cameron was killed at Airds Moss. In 1681 the Test Act was passed and Cargill was executed. In November 1684 the Apologetical Declaration was issued. On 1 May 1685 John Brown was shot at Priesthill, and on 11 May the Wigtown martyrs were drowned. In 1687 James VII issued Letters of Indulgence. On 17 February 1688 Renwick was executed. In 1689 the Claim of Right was adopted, and in 1690 Presbyterian government was established.

XXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.