Scotland by Michael Lynch

Author:Michael Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446475638
Publisher: Pimlico

16

REVOLUTION AND WAR

ON 23 JULY 1637, MEMBERS OF CHARLES I’s PRIVY COUNCIL, THE TWO archbishops of Scotland, eight of the bishops and the bulk of the Lords of Session solemnly filed into the High Kirk of St Giles to hear the first service conducted according to the liturgy laid down in the new Prayer Book. As soon as the Dean of St Giles began to read, a riot broke out. A large number of the congregation staged a walk-out and some continued to demonstrate outside; others shouted abuse and at least one hurled a stool as well. The stool missed, but the impact was felt throughout Scotland. It was the first of a series of carefully planned demonstrations against both the new liturgy and bishops. Services in the three other Edinburgh churches were also packed with demonstrators. The hapless ministers retreated in confusion; the Dean himself spent much of the day in the safety of the steeple of St Giles; and the Bishop of Edinburgh fled to the Palace of Holyroodhouse in a borrowed coach which was stoned for most of the way. Within a week the new Prayer Book had been abandoned, but the campaign gathered pace over the next two months as more than sixty petitions and supplications poured into the privy council from kirk sessions and presbyteries in a broad arc from Fife to Dumfriesshire. The internal dissensions within the privy council were increasingly exposed; the bulk of the lay councillors, headed by Traquair, blamed the ‘imprudent precipitation’ of the bishops, and they, in their turn, tried to pin responsibility for the disturbances on Traquair, who had been notable by his absence on 23 July, for failing to anticipate the troubles. By October, when the King’s council moved to Linlithgow for its own safety and virtually abandoned the capital to the dissidents, the battle lines were being drawn up. By November, the ‘Supplicants’ were beginning to organise themselves into a revolutionary cadre: four ‘Tables’, representing the nobles, lairds, burgesses and ministers, were set up.1 Their status was as yet unclear, but in the following February they approved a manifesto – the National Covenant.

Despite appearances, neither the issues nor the actors in this sensational drama were clear-cut. In the Supplication drawn up in October 1637 by the leading dissidents and presented in a new form by Lord Loudoun to the privy council in December, the claim was made that the essence of the issue was ‘alteratione of religione’; Rothes in February 1638 asked only that ways be found that the ‘incontrollable’ bishops, who were blamed for both the Prayer Book and the disaffection between the King and his subjects, ‘might be restrained’; but no mention was made of their being dismissed, still less the abolition of their office.2 Although it had been the interference by the bishops in both central and local government which had galvanised opposition for many, ranging from nobles to the more radical ministers or the urban mob, others – including many ministers – were not so sure that bishops had no place in a reformed Church.

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