The Civil Wars Experienced

Britain and Ireland, 1638-1661

Martyn Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134724536
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The Civil Wars Experienced is an exciting new history of the civil wars, which recounts their effects on the 'common people'. This engaging survey throws new light onto a century of violence and political and social upheaval
By looking at personal sources such as diaries, petitions, letters and social sources including the press, The Civil War Experienced clearly sets out the true social and cultural effects of the wars on the peoples of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and how common experiences transcended national and regional boundaries. It ranges widely from the Orkneys to Galway and from Radnorshire to Norfolk.
The Civil Wars Experienced explores exactly how far-reaching the changes caused by civil wars actually were for both women and men and carefully assesses individual reactions towards them. For most people fear, familial concerns and material priorities dictated their lives, but for others the civil revolutions provided a positive force for their own spiritual and religious development.
By placing the military and political developments of the civil wars in a social context, this book portrays a very different interpretation of a century of regicide and republic.

1
THE ABERDEEN DOCTORS AND HISTORY

This first chapter is an attempt to examine the relationship between people and history; more particularly when a group of people come up against one of the apparent main strands of history. In this case this chapter looks at a group of academics who strove to discuss the nature of Protestantism with some degree of professionalism even though they realised that the issue was crucial and central to the survival of Protestant worship. It is necessary to set out something of the background to this debate.

The 1637–40 rebellion of the Scottish people was based on the genuine concern that their Kirk was to be overthrown by a king with little interest in them or their culture and distinct Church. Unlike that of England, Wales and Ireland, the Scottish Church had been formed without the leadership of a monarch. Moreover, it had aimed at a modern existence, separate from the civil administration. This had been imperfectly achieved. When he reached maturity James VI had sought to influence Church structure and had successfully reimplanted bishops into the system, but even so, he had failed to make the Kirk an Episcopal Church. At times the bishops functioned as superintendents of the Kirk, rather than acting in the manner of an English or Welsh bishop. To the Scots in 1637 it would have appeared that this compromise was under threat. Charles had no interest in unique qualities: he sought imperial control over his churches. The Church of Ireland, which had different articles of faith and no guiding canons, and the Scottish Kirk with its elected hierarchy, had to be brought into line with the English and Welsh Church. The Anglican Church and the Church in Wales were also were being brought to a new obedience by an authoritative Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Laud was a product of the Church of England. He was of obscure origin, his father was a clothier in Reading and as the Church had been the sole source of his rise in status, he and the Church were bound as one and the restitution of the fortunes of the Church and the desire to impose a secure foundation of faith and order became his life. Laud disliked the doctrine of double predestination favoured by the Calvinists and found in the Churches of the four nations. Instead he favoured the choice promised by the bible, which relates the role of the individual in his or her own salvation by good works and adherence to the rituals of the sacraments. To Calvinists, who believed that before the creation of the earth an omniscient God, to whom the past, present and future were one, had ordained which souls would be saved (the elect) and which were damned (the reprobate), the notion of sacraments and free will were popish superstitions. To introduce them into the thus far reformed Church was clearly the work of those preparing the ground for the reintroduction of Roman Catholicism. Given the background of the victories being won by the Catholic powers on the continent, this became a tangible sweat-generating fear. The women and men in St Giles identified the Book of Common Prayer as a standard bearer for the counter-reformation, in other words, the popish anti-Christ.

In Scotland Charles I’s succession heralded religious and political changes which steadily alienated first, sections of the nobility, the legal profession and finally a growing section of the population. Charles had removed significant sections of the judicial system from the government and placed new members of the nobility in their place. It was perhaps the attack on the Kirk which excited most of the ire. Charles was really only continuing his father’s attempts to elevate the importance of the episcopacy at the expense of the elective structure of the Kirk, but he did it in a far less subtle manner. His Scottish coronation in 1633, which he used as a showcase for the re-modelled episcopacy, had the related and no less objectionable theme of demonstrating the English Church as the rolemodel for the Scots to follow. Whether or not Charles deliberately sought to portray the Kirk as inferior, or just to use the English Church as a model for an ordered Church in all of his three kingdoms, the effect was to suggest the forth-coming Anglicisation of Scotland. The final straw came four years later when Charles sought to impose a prayer book, similar to the Book of Common Prayer in use in England and Wales, but adapted to suit the Scottish Church.

In Edinburgh at St Giles cathedral, people later believed that a woman called Jenny or Jenet Geddes was first to rise. She hurled her small portable cutty stool at the dean of the cathedral in his pulpit. Jenet Geddes may not have thrown this stool, although such a person did live in Edinburgh and some twenty-two years later held a luckenbooth in the market outside the west face of the cathedral, but there is no contemporary evidence that it was her. References to her were only made some time after the event. Even so she had become a potent revolutionary figure. In the cathedral today a sculpture of the ‘Cutty Stool’ by Merilyn Smith stands on the north side of the nave ‘dedicated to Jenny Geddes 1637 by Scotswomen’. Nearby, a few yards from the pulpit, a plaque reads:

Constant oral tradition affirms that near this spot a brave Scotchwoman Janet Geddes on 23 July 1637 struck the first blow in the great struggle for freedom of conscience which after a conflict of half a century ended in the establishment of civic and religious liberty.

There seems to be little doubt that women were involved in the stool-throwing that day, although Archibald Johnston of Wariston says only this of the rioters:

At the beginning thairof their rayse sik a tumult, sik ane outcrying quhat be the peoples murmering, mourning, rayling, stoolcasting, as the lyke was never seien.¹

On the other hand, an all male presence was suggested by non-written evidence, as the best known woodcut of the event shows only men on their feet throwing stools. Yet there is compulsive evidence that women were central in the early opposition to the religious policies of Charles I in Scotland. David, 2nd Earl of Wemys, says clearly:

which buck was so filthy polutted with the treue Rittes and radgs of Rome that sum Religius men and women of all sortes did so heat itt that they would not permitt itt to be read in Edinburgh and first att the ridding of the sead bouk the good religius wimen did rise up to the ridder and flange ther bouks ther stoulles att him and did rive all the service Bouk a peisses and the Bishop if Edinburgh called Mr. David Lindesy quho was sitting in the Kirk that caused reide itt was so stoned with the wifes and knocked that he was forsed to flie to ane steare benorth the crosse and did wine up otherways they head killed him.²

Henry Guthrie, Bishop of Stirling, asserted that women were involved in the planning of the rebellion as well as in its execution. His explanation of events was as follows:

that the work might be done in St Giles’ Kirk with the greater solemnity, the bishop of Edinburgh came there himself from Holyroodhouse to assist at it. No sooner was the service begun, but a multitude of wives and serving women in the several churches rose in a tumultuous way, and having prefaced awhile with despightful exclamations, threw the stools they sate on at the preachers, and thereafter invaded them more nearly, and strove to pull them from their pulpits, whereby they had much ado to escape their hands, and retire to their houses… This tumult was taken to be but a rash emergent, without any predeliberation; wheras the truth is, it was the result of a consultation at Edinburgh in April, at which time Mr. Alexander Henderson came thither from his bretheren at fife, and Mr. David Dickinson from those in the west country; and those two having communicated to my lord Balermino and Sir Thomas Hope the minds of those they came from, and gotten their approbation thereto, did afterwards meet at the house of Nicholas Balfour in the Cowgate, with Nicholas, Eupham Henderson, Bethia and Elspa Craig and several other matrons, and recommended to them, that they and their adherents might give the first affront to the book, assuring them that the men should afterwards take the business out of their hands.³

Whilst his 1928 editor suggests that Guthrie was being impartial in his account, he had drifted towards royalism after 1644 and his account of the conspiracy may be an attempt to explain that his earlier pro-Covenant response may have been as the victim of conspiracy. Nevertheless, the implication that Edinburgh women were involved at the upper levels is important and supported elsewhere.

The riotous day at St Giles was followed by a series of noisy protests in the streets of the capital and other burghs. The Scottish Privy Council, largely in sympathy with these disturbances, received petitions from the Scottish people and in turn petitioned the king for redress. Both sets of petitioners wanted the prayer book removed. The king was obdurate and would not withdraw, insisting that the prayer book was not a step on the road to popery and professing to believe that if only his council could or would convince his Scottish subjects of that fact then the trouble would pass. Because the strictures of a monarchical government allowed only limited means of influencing a king, the council could not simply tell the king to remove the book. Saved from this form of directness the king could simply resort to telling the council to get on with imposing his wishes on Scotland. By October the frustration of the people of Scotland had inspired the drafting of a Supplication and Complaint. This was presented to the council and blamed the Scottish bishops for imposing the prayer book. Even outside the immediate framework of monarchical government a direct demand or accusation could not be directed at the main agent at fault. Only the lieutenants could be blamed.⁴ The presentation of the Supplication prompted more demonstrations and the king ordered the arrest of the so-called Supplicants. The king’s chief minister in Scotland, the Earl of Traquair, returned to London to impress upon the king the need for careful management of the situation, only to find himself marginalised by a king determined to impose his will by force. He had taken some of the advice offered by the Earl of Nithesdale and began to prepare the royal castles in Scotland for war. He ignored Nithesdale’s other suggestion that the drive to impose the prayer book across the country be slackened, and went for direct confrontation, pressing for the arrest of the Supplicants throughout the winter of 1637–8. In February 1637 the king tried to outflank his opponents. Traquair was sent back to Scotland with a proclamation which first offered to forgive the Supplicants if they stopped their opposition to the prayer book. The second strand of the proclamation was to finally declare that the king alone was responsible for ordering the prayer book. This it would have been hoped would prevent any more attacks on the supposed originators as to do so would entail an attack on the king himself. Instead the Supplicants responded with a public reaffirmation of the relationship between the Scottish people and their God. Archibald Johnston and Alexander Henderson, a minister from Leuchars in Fife, drafted the National Covenant. This was in part based on a confession of faith drawn up by James VI and his Kirk in 1581, known as the Negative Oath, and sworn by people of all ranks. The new Covenant also went further, suggesting that some of the acts passed in the General Assemblies since 1581 had been taken under duress. By referring to the need for a free General Assembly the Covenant suggested that some of the more recent legislation, the Episcopalian policies of James VI and Charles I, were unconstitutional. Henry Guthrie recorded the Archbishop of St Andrews as saying ‘Now all that we have been doing these 30 Years past is thrown down at once.’ Most of the bishops fled, but three, including Guthrie, stayed on and gave up their titles, whilst one, John Guthrie Bishop of Murray, stayed in place suffering excommunication and imprisonment.⁵

Over the next months and years as attitudes and postures hardened Johnston became embroiled in the oppositionist cause, influenced or comforted greatly by a prophetess, Margaret Mitchel or Mitchelson, ‘ane poore damaseil’, who gave Johnston the ‘best prognostication we could learne for our business’. Johnston recorded two visits to hear Mitchelson during the autumn of 1638, before she went to his house on 23 October where ‘hir presence [was] useful to me and myne’. It is possible that Mitchelson was not unique in Edinburgh during that period: Johnston refers to ‘sum uthers’ who were proving the confidence in God’s will which the Covenanters required.⁶ On 28 February 1638 at St Giles the first signatures were appended to the Covenant. On the following day it was signed by civil and religious representatives of the burgh at Tailor’s Hall on Cowgate; a day later it was made available to all the people of Edinburgh. After that copies were dispersed around the country to be signed by as many people as possible.

The journeying of the Covenant around Scotland in 1638 came to an abrupt halt at the two universities of Aberdeen. Some of the academics took the Covenant into consideration and the result of their debate was of widespread consequence within Scotland and England. Moreover, it set the tone for a good number of the attempts at reaching a median way during the next five years. At King’s College in Old Aberdeen, the old Kirktown of the Bishops of Aberdeen, the decade following the accession of Charles I had been absorbed by the continued rounds of a battle over the constitution of the university and the nature of the duties to be performed by the academics there.⁷ In essence these debates centred on the validity of the Old Foundation, the precepts under which the university had been founded by Bishop of Aberdeen, William Elphinstone, with papal authority in the 1490s as a college of the Catholic Church. Following the Estates session of 1578 the college had been reconstituted as a Protestant institution, but James VI seems to have been relatively ambivalent to this New Foundation. Further doubt on the validity of the New Foundation was cast in 1617 when James ratified the privileges of the university conferred at its foundation without making it clear which foundation was being referred to. For the next twenty years the battles between the rival factions dominated the university’s relationship with central government; for the foundations meant jobs, chairs, scholarship and personal prestige, in other words inter and internecine departmental warfare—the stuff of academic life. When the National Covenant was drafted in Edinburgh, attention in Aberdeen shifted from internal warfare to what seemed to be a national theological and academic debate, in which scholars had a very public role. King’s College was not the only university there. During the frustrating wait for the New Foundation to be confirmed, Presbyterians had encouraged George Keith, Earl Marischal, to found a college down the road in New Aberdeen. The Aberdeen doctors, who were principal theologians from King’s College, Marischal College and from the town, found that they could not support the aims of the men who drafted the Covenant. Aberdeen was not isolated in its hostile reaction to the Covenant, north-east Scotland as a whole was less enthused by the Presbyterian reaction to the king’s religious policy than the southern lowlands and King’s College’s current patron, the Marquis of Huntly, was opposed implacably to the Covenant.

The men known as the Aberdeen doctors were, from Old Aberdeen, the King’s College principal, William Leslie; the professor of Divinity, John Forbes; and the minister of St Machar’s Cathedral, Alexander Scoggie. From New Aberdeen they were from Marischal College Robert Baron, Professor of Divinity; James Sibbald, minister of St Nicholas’ Kirk; and minister Alexander Ross.⁸ These men were all essentially moderate Kirkmen who sought to maintain the widest interpretation of the Protestant faith to avoid any dissent and division which might weaken the Kirk in the face of Roman Catholic aggression. Apart from a kernel of Protestant tenets, they believed that there had to be room for some differentiation in forms of worship within the Kirk. They did not accept the rigidity of the Covenant, but neither did they accept the Episcopalian stance of Charles I. Episcopacy itself they accepted because they could find biblical justification, but they recognised that Melvillian Presbyterianism also had merits and biblical sanction. The king was recognised by the doctors as the fountain of power and authority who had the right to direct the form of the Kirk. They saw only unimportant differences between the stances of the two opponents when compared with the threat posed by Roman Catholicism. Although the doctors recognised that the authority of the king, ironically their own theological stance was not acceptable to Charles himself. When confronted by the controversy the doctors tended to direct their arguments towards the relationship between the National Covenant and the king’s power. In the doctors’ opinion the National Covenant of 1638 had no royal authority. Whilst their sympathies lay with neither side, their obedience to earthly power meant that they appeared to agree with the king. Nevertheless their stance offered grounds for debate and potentially compromise; they themselves sought to be convinced rather than to overturn the Covenant.

This latitudinarian stance adopted by the doctors, earlier in the decade, had already alarmed Samuel Rutherford who, before the Covenant was drafted, saw their genuine desires for unity within the Protestant world as betrayal of the cause, but he was also angered by Forbes’ defence of the Five Articles of Perth. By April 1638 the doctors’ first discussions of the issues were made in a spirit of compromise if not sadness over the polarity which had rapidly developed since the previous July. The king, wilfully or not, misread their cautious approach as support for his position and commended the university. The public appearance of the doctors’ position came with the circulation of Professor Forbes’ manuscript paper A Peaceable Warning, which alerted its readers to the dangers of following the Covenanter lead. Forbes had kept aloof from the college’s internal wrangles, and only slowly entered the debate over the Covenant. Within the academic milieu, and then from the pulpit, and then in manuscript, Forbes began to warn of the Covenant’s inappropriateness as a means of uniting the Kirk because of its lack of royal authority. The manuscript was ill-received. Regardless of any merit in Forbes’ warning, the paper was, possibly deliberately, read as an attack on the nobles leading the Covenanting movement and the serious issues Forbes had raised were thus side-stepped and the discussion refocused on the apparent personal attacks. In the face of these accusations, Forbes made grovelling apologies to those whom he was alleged to have impugned. Even so he re-wrote the tract and this time published it in print, to try and demonstrate that he was not attacking the Covenanters personally but simply pointing out the dangers of polarisation.

When the delegation of Covenanters—Andrew Cant, minister of Pitsligo, David Dickson, minister of Irvine, and Alexander Henderson—arrived on 20 July, the two groups were already almost irreconcilable. Forbes led the doctors. There were now six men who had remained steadfast in the face of Covenanter attacks. One of the original seven, a minister from New Aberdeen, William Guild, had by July signed the Covenant. The two groups never actually met. By the time the group arrived one of the doctors, probably Robert Baro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Time Line
• Maps
• 1: The Aberdeen Doctors and History
• 2: Under Occupation: The North of England, 1640–8
• 3: Experiencing Rebellion In Ireland, 1641–9
• 4: The Scottish Experience of the Wars In the Four Nations, 1638–48
• 5: Experiencing War In Wales and England
• 6: The Revolutionary Period, 1648–53
• 7: Conquered Nations: Republican and Restoration Scotland and Ireland, 1653–61
• 8: Republic and Restoration In England and Wales, 1653–61
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography