The English Civil War: A People’s History

She liked admiration and she also liked politics and intrigue. Her main interest in Henrietta was almost certainly centred on the access the queen gave her to her own powerful court faction, and Henrietta, like anyone, may sometimes have resented the fact that she was never liked for herself. And both women were locked in the competition that court society imposed on them, an unspoken, deadly scramble for notice, importance, power, access, which neither could ever truly win. Henrietta was always ahead because of her position, but like most people, wanted to be loved for her own qualities, and there Lucy could outdo her in wit, charm and beauty. It was easier for Henrietta to blame Lucy for her occasional eclipse than to question why her husband’s nobles so resented her influence; it was easier for Lucy to triumph over and rival Henrietta than to ask herself why her role in affairs always had to be a minor one.

Lucy and Henrietta were also frustrated because no one really took them seriously. They were both encased in a role which compelled them to be sweet and wise and self-controlled in public. Though women were often seen as emotionally and sexually uncontrolled, behaving that way led to social ostracism. They were not allowed to display or even to have feelings of competitiveness, anger, and frustration, which meant that those feelings raged unexpressed and unchecked. Composing bons mots of detraction, laughing at adorers, and slighting each other gave those feelings temporary release. What they both truly wanted was to have an impact on policy.

So, late in the 1620s, Lucy was a trifle bored. It all seemed so easy. At first the new monarchy of Charles I appeared a little dull and straitlaced: ‘If you saw how little gallantry there is at court,’ Lucy complained, ‘you would believe that it were no great adventure to come thither after having the small pox, for it is most desolate and I have no great desire to return.’ But this is the carelessness of success. A 1628 painting shows her translated to the centre of feminine power at court, transformed by masque costume into a goddess. The Duke of Buckingham, as Mercury, leads a procession of the arts to the king and queen, Apollo and Diana; the countess can be seen directly behind the queen’s shoulder, handily placed for whispering in her ear. Such allegorical names could be codewords, too; the countess’s brother-in-law referred to himself as Apollo, Walter Montagu as Leicester (a name that hinted at his role as the queen’s favourite, and perhaps implied something about their relationship). Lucy sponsored a performance called The Masque of Amazons, and danced in other masques. She was on top of her own small world.

But then it all fell apart. For reasons about which we can only speculate, Lucy declined a personal invitation to dance in William Davenant’s The Temple of Love, in 1634. And she never danced again in a court masque. Her absence from court was also noted by Viscount Conway in 1634: ‘now and a long time she hath not been at Whitehall, as she was wont to be, which is as when you left her: But she is not now in the Masque. I think they were afraid to ask and be refused … What the Words [quarrel] were, I know not, but I conceive they were spoken on the queen’s side, where there will never be perfect friendship. For my Lady of Carlisle … will not suffer herself to be beloved but of those that are her servants.’ Conway’s diagnosis was that Lucy was spoiled, could not bear to play second fiddle to the queen any longer, but it’s notable that he attributes the final unforgivable words to Henrietta.

While James Hay was accomplishing his gorgeous dash through Europe, Lucy was pursuing her own interests with equal vim and excess. With her customary adaptability and nose for fashion, she picked up from France the one role that would allow a woman in her position exactly the kind of power that her father had declared to be impossible. She was a salonnière, which meant something more than an influential hostess. A salonnière was a woman who was married or widowed, beautiful, sought-after, enormously literate and well-informed, fun to talk to, and interested in politics. Her salon consisted of her followers, chosen (like guests at a dinner party) with both business and pleasure in mind – a mix of poets and politicians. These followers played a half-joking, half-serious amorous game, presenting themselves as devoted to their lady, writing sonnets and letters to her, composing love games for her. Yet the focus was on wit and skill rather than merely on sex; the game of courtship provided a thrilling occasion for exercising power and talent. In particular, the goal was to find new ways of praising the salonnière herself – and new extremes of praise, too. So when Edmund Waller assured Lucy that in her presence all men ‘ambition lose, and have no other scope,/ Save Carlisle’s favour, to employ their hope’, William Cartwright could trump him by telling Lucy that any jewels she wore could only darken her lustre. And it was not only professional poets, perhaps hungry for advancement, who wrote. Courtiers and nobles addressed verse to her too. The Earl of Holland wrote love poems. Lucy’s sister Dorothy thought they were awful, ‘he is more her slave than ever creature was’, she wrote disgustedly, ‘many verses he hath lately writ to her, which are the worst that ever were seen’.

But then, Dorothy was biased. Like Lucy, Dorothy was ambitious and intelligent, but unlike Lucy she was married to a quiet, mild-mannered nobleman with strong principles, a member of the Sidney family with little interest in making a place for himself at the centre of the Caroline court. That did not stop Dorothy intriguing for him night and day, though. Her letters to and about Lucy burn with a frustrated ambition that allows us to see how galling it must have been for other women to witness Lucy’s success. But she was admired by men. Perhaps her effect was most eloquently summarized by the ageing Earl of Exeter:

The night is the mother of dreams and phantoms, the winter is the mother of the night, all this mingled with my infirmities have protracted this homage so due and so vowed to your ladyship, lest the fume and vapours so arising should contaminate my so sacred and pure intention. But much more pleasure it were to me to perform this duty in your lodgings at Court when you see your perfections in the glass adding perfection to perfection approving the bon mots spoken in your presence, moderating the excess of compliments, passing over a dull guest, without a sweet smile, giving a wise answer to an extravagant question … Were I young again, I should be a most humble suitor.

It sounds idyllic. But for her critics, and for the critics of salons and their female patrons in general, the salon was a nightmarish space full of horribly spoiled women whose caprices could unfairly influence national policy.

For a while, Lucy did not care, and could afford not to. But the game of love toyed with the deadly serious game that Lucy and James were also playing: advancement. For James Hay, whose power had been based on James I’s favour, the transition to Charles’s reign was a struggle, and though he kept his hand in, he was never quite so central again. Charles made him Governor of the Caribbees in 1627, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1633. But he died relatively young, on 20 April 1636, when he was only fifty-six, and he did it, like everything else, with character and in style. ‘When the most able physicians and his own weakness had passed a judgement that he could not live many days, he did not forbear his entertainment, but made divers brave clothes, as he said, to out-face naked and despicable death withal.’ It was a gallant remark, but one that showed James Hay’s limitations. Even facing death, his mind ran along its usual graceful, frivolous paths.

Next time, Lucy would look for someone more serious. Just as she had altered her world spectacularly by marrying James, so she would seek out extreme change again and again. James’s death left her a rich, young and beautiful widow, perhaps the ideal position for a woman in the seventeenth century who wanted both power and a good time. No patriarchs and no mental limits would stop her now. And perhaps having had a husband of glorious frivolity is precisely why she then sought seriousness, and sought it before the now-ailing James had died. Political power for Lucy was to come next through Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, one of her most self-abasing followers, but also one of the shrewdest and least disinterested. Holland was an eager member of a faction which included Lucy’s brother the Earl of Northumberland, which argued passionately for a French alliance and for movement against the rising power of the Hapsburgs. Henrietta Maria often supported this faction. It was anti-Spanish, bursting with military ambition and rather reminiscent of the Earl of Essex and his followers during the reign of Elizabeth in its dash and impracticality.

Seriousness led to seriousness. She had had troops of frivolous followers, but when Lucy fell in love again, it was not with a gallant cavalier. The man who caught her eye was like her father and her husband in that he was powerful, mobile, and ambitious. But Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, was utterly unlike the easygoing and high-living James Hay. He wasn’t content with a life of pleasure, as Hay had been. He wanted to rule, and Lucy was a vital part of his political plans.

Wentworth’s ambitions had changed radically in the course of his lifetime. He had begun as an ardent defender of Parliament’s ‘ancient and undoubted right’, and in 1627 had eagerly gone to gaol for refusing to pay the Forced Loan. But he always opposed the godly, and attempts to control the king, and these considerations led him to change sides abruptly, a volte face which led directly to a barony and elevation to the Privy Council. Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay commented that he was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was ‘a baptism into the community of corruption’. Part of the loathing he aroused in contemporaries was caused by dislike of the opportunist turncoat. But he may have sincerely believed that in the all-too-evident split between the king and Parliament, it was the king who was ruling the country. Lucy was part of his plan to ingratiate himself thoroughly with the court.

Wentworth knew the language he should use to approach someone like Lucy, the fashionable vocabulary of literary Platonism, on which he was drafting a short dissertation designed to please the ladies. In a letter to Viscount Conway, as early as March 1635, Wentworth wrote: ‘I admire and honour her, whatever her position be at court. You might tell her sometimes when she looks at herself at night in the glass, that I have the ambition to be one of those servants she will suffer to honour her … a nobler or a more intelligent friendship did I never meet with in my life.’ As a result of drawing the most powerful courtier in Britain into her net, Lucy was confirmed as a source of power – frightening but indispensable. Like a rich relation, she had to be conciliated and placated. And it went straight to her head – to Wentworth’s, too. For him, Lucy was a kind of trophy, a sign that he had made it, to the very top of the world. They exchanged portraits, full-sized ones by Van Dyck; Wentworth could literally hang Lucy on his wall.

But for Lucy it was all part of a pathway to a sterner, fiercer kind of love, the love of God. For she became, and ardently remained, a Presbyterian, an adherent of the Scottish Kirk, one of those who longed to see the achievements of the Scots repeated in the English Church. Perhaps Wentworth had told her stories about Ireland, or possibly she was intimidated by the tight knot of Catholics around Henrietta. Perhaps attaching herself to Wentworth, who was rather Godlike in his own estimation, helped form her views. She was as partisan, as militant, as Anna Trapnel on behalf of God. She never became fanatical – at the end of her life she could still tell ribald jokes about godly Scots – but she was serious. And she was also very practical. Her new admirer could help her protect her property in Ireland from the papists. Women like Lucy used their power to keep their estates intact.

So the streets of London in the late 1630s threaded through radically different worlds. They were stitched together by trade. A piece of silk might have known a wider London than any of those who wore it, for the silk would have come into the country through Poplar docks, new home of the East India Company. Unloaded on a wharf, surrounded by spices and scents from the East, it was also thrown about by hardworking navvies who lived in the sprawling, brawling East End, which was terra incognita to the West End that it served. Luxury passed by the life of a poor girl like Anna Trapnel, but did not settle in her hard world. Yet her London was linked to the brighter London of Lucy Hay through a finely spun skein of silk, and both women would be affected by the war.

IV The Bishops’ Wars, the Three Kingdoms, and Montrose (#ulink_1be51b13-5328-5a8f-a5a0-def9899032d9)

The immediate cause of the terrible wars wasn’t class difference, or resentment of the luxury at court. The gulf between dismal shipyard conditions and the exceptional extravagance of court masques was for the most part endured silently. What triggered the war was a prayer book. It was known as the Scottish Prayer Book, and it was an attempt by Archbishop William Laud to extend to Scotland the reforms that had made many so unhappy in England. The book in question was large, a folio. It was badly printed, with many typographical errors, and it was delayed for months in the press. But these were not the worst of its problems. It came to symbolize many things: the menace of popery, English rule in Scotland, the king’s unwillingness to listen to his truest friends.

This little cause of a great war still has its posterity today. Unless you are Roman Catholic, the Lord’s Prayer ends with the words ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever’. These final lines are William Laud’s lasting memorial. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he added them to the Lord’s Prayer in the new Scottish book. When Charles II created the 1662 Prayer Book, its authors borrowed heavily from Laud’s Scottish Prayer Book, and retained the lines, which to this day have something of the ring of ecclesiastical monarchic absolutism.

But the addition to the Lord’s Prayer was not why the Scottish Prayer Book was so disliked, though a general antipathy to set prayers rather than extempore devotions was an issue. The controversy brought to a head tensions that were already at work. The crisis reflected the unstable situation between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. It exposed deep fissures and incongruities which were already present. It would be an exaggeration to call them festering grievances. The badly printed book acted as a wake-up call. People suddenly stubbed their toes on differences which they had once been unwilling to see. Charles wanted to extend his father’s policy and attempt uniformity of religion between the kingdoms. He wanted order and obedience. He was announcing that he and not the Scots was in charge of the Kirk. And that could not be borne.

Charles’s intentions and personality mattered terribly because all that tied Scotland to England was the bare person of the king. James I had tried to unite England and Scotland in more than himself, but had met with ferocious opposition from both sides. The English didn’t want smart Scots on the make like James Hay influencing affairs in London. The Scots didn’t want to disappear into the identity of their richer, more populous, more powerful neighbour. Their unease was exacerbated when James died and was replaced by his son Charles. Charles sounded much more English than James had, despite having been born in Scotland. The Scots suddenly felt they were being ruled by a king from another country; James, after all, had been their king first.

James had, in fact, been especially the nobles’ king. The Scottish nobility knew all about managing the power of a monarch with worrying ideas in matters of religion. They had managed to carry out a Protestant reformation in 1560, against the wishes of their ruler, the Queen Mother, who had been acting as regent for her daughter Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned as Queen of France. Then, in 1567, they had replaced Mary Queen of Scots, the recalcitrantly Catholic monarch, with her newborn son. Of course they had never meant to do away with monarchy itself, only with popery. But they were practised in putting God first and the monarch resolutely second.

But though the nobles had felt James was theirs, they saw that he was lost to them when he went south in 1603 to govern England. The court vanished from Edinburgh, and the Scottish nobility no longer had access to the person of the king. James only revisited Scotland once in his entire reign, so he came to see English ways as natural. This trend intensified under Charles, so that by 1638, the English thought of the king as theirs, with Scotland as a kind of allotment that he might visit and farm in his off-hours, or a small estate, best left to second sons. England’s arrogance in this was founded in its undoubted economic superiority; it was richer by far, had almost twice the population of Scotland, Wales and Ireland put together, and had the largest city in Western Europe as its capital.

Ironically, the identity of the Scottish nobility was not only compromised by their absentee landlord, but by their own Anglicization. The Scottish nobility began to demand deference from inferiors in a way that had never before been customary. They also expected a king to require less deference from them than the English norm. The trouble was that Charles failed utterly to convince them that he valued them. A slew of administrative reforms flew past their heads, and Charles did not even make a pretence of consultation. In a world of honour, that stung. The result was that Charles had few friends or allies among the Scottish Lowland nobles.

Through its earlier civil war over Mary Queen of Scots, Scotland came to define itself in terms of religion. It needed a unifying factor, for Scotland was as ethnically split as Ireland. The Lowlands spoke Anglo-Scots, and the Highlands spoke Gaelic. The Lowlands thought the Highlands barbarous, almost like the Irish; after all, they both spoke Gaelic, and the Highlanders were violent thieves in Lowlanders’ eyes. The Highlanders thought the Lowland Scots were usurping foreigners who had pushed the Gaels out of the fertile lands. Finally, Highland chiefs liked to ignore the Crown as much as possible, while Lowland chiefs tried to be involved in decision-making and government. But religious differences, though fierce, were less stark. The Lowlands, or the ‘radical south-west’, was passionately godly, vehemently Presbyterian, but Aberdeen was Episcopalian. Many Highlanders were nominally Catholic, but the Campbells were eagerly Protestant; in fact, despite being Highlanders, the Campbell Lords of Argyll tended to think like Lowlanders, keen to ‘civilize’ the Highlands.

The Scottish Church was itself a jumble. It had been a Presbyterian, Calvinist Kirk, with strict Church courts imposing tough moral discipline, presided over by ministers and lay elders. James had managed to bolt an episcopate onto it, and while some of its members remained unenthusiastic, the uneasy Jacobean status quo was grudgingly accepted. This disgruntled compromise was symbolized by the Five Articles of Perth, of 1618, which attached to the Kirk such Anglican matters as holy days, confirmation by bishops, kneeling at communion, private baptism, and private communion. But they were often not obeyed by those for whom they stuck in the throat as popish, and at first Charles seemed happy to tolerate this.

It was when it became evident that Charles and Laud hoped to make the Church of England and the Kirk as close to identical as possible that the Kirk grew restive. A small radical party was created within the Kirk just as a godly party formed within the Church of England. Most of the very godliest Scots went to Ulster, to preach there. But some stayed behind because they felt that the Kirk was still God’s chosen church. One godly minister, Samuel Rutherford of Kircudbrightshire, wrote of the Kirk as his ‘whorish mother’, or ‘harlot mother’. She might be corrupt, but she still belonged to him.

To understand the Scots, one must understand the way the Kirk fostered a certain idea of collective identity, generating a powerful sense of sin, and then alleviating it with penitence. The Stool of Repentance was a wooden seat, often a kind of step-stool with different levels for different crimes. It stood immediately in front of the pulpit, elevated to where everyone could see it. Those deemed immoral by the Church courts had to sit on it while a sermon was preached. The connection between the trembling example of sin before the eyes of the congregation and the words of the preacher was what made this punishment different from most English methods, in which the sinner was generally displayed by the church door rather than inside the building. In Scotland, words and spectacle were welded together into a single great theatrical event. To emphasize this, the sinner then made a speech of repentance. It was important to cry, and sound truly sorry. If the congregation was convinced, the sinner would be welcomed back into the community with kisses and handclasps; if not, there would be more of the same. Some ‘sinners’ embraced the drama, and revelled in the opportunity to tell everyone exactly how wicked they had been. The congregation, too, was knitted together by their shared emotions of revulsion and joy at repentance. The ritual created a community which reacted to divisions and differences sternly, with horror and violence.

The Kirk’s idea of community became central to Scotland’s sense of its national destiny. To reinforce this ideal, the Eucharist was extended into a great festival of togetherness, with everyone sitting at long tables, passing bread and wine, and then listening to very, very long sermons. Advisers tried their best to warn Charles that he couldn’t impose the English Prayer Book on Scotland from the first moment they knew a new liturgy was coming. So Charles and Laud listened, and tried to incorporate changes that they hoped would appease the Scots. But their efforts failed to quell rising alarm, which was further spread by the new canons imposed in 1636. These ruled out extempore prayer and insisted that ministers be allowed to preach only in their own locale. Wild rumours circulated in Edinburgh that the new liturgy was going to reappoint abbots to the old monasteries and offer them seats in the Scottish Parliament. Even some Scottish Catholics began to believe the king was gradually restoring the Roman Church. These rumours fomented existing opposition within the Kirk. Implicit in Kirk identity was the idea that Scotland was the chosen Nation of God, the true Israel. Just as the Israelites had suffered enslavement and imprisonment at the hands of tyrants, but had triumphed through the might of God, so they too would succeed through God’s power. Their views were given a darkly frightening context by the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in Europe, which pitted Catholic against Protestant. For Protestants, it was the beginning of the struggle against Antichrist, encouraging them to see the fight against Rome as a fight between Good and Evil.

The crunch came in October 1636, when the Scottish Privy Council was ordered to issue a proclamation commanding the use of the new prayer book. By that time, the opposition was ready. The alarm generated by the whole affair was now at a level where some of the Kirk members would not have accepted a prayer book handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. Accordingly, in April 1637, one of the Kirk’s most godly spokesmen, Alexander Henderson of Leuchars, met in secret with a group of Edinburgh matrons, who agreed to lead the protest when the prayer book was first used. Women may have been chosen because it was hoped that they would not be punished savagely.

The prayer book’s supporters tried to be ready, too. Those willing to use it decided to begin at the same time, hoping to divide the opposition and to show solidarity. So on the morning of Sunday 23 July 1637, ‘that black doleful Sunday to the Kirk and the Kingdom of Scotland’, said Presbyterian Archibald Johnston, the two Scottish archbishops, and eight or nine bishops, assembled in St Giles Church Edinburgh, and the dean began to read. Johnston of Warriston was a zealous lawyer who became a Scots commissioner. He deposited his diary in Edinburgh Castle for safekeeping, believing he was living in momentous times, like an Old Testament prophet. Johnston recorded what happened: ‘at the beginning thereof there rose such a tumult, such an outcrying … as the like was never seen in Scotland’. Women began to shout insults, ‘calling them traitors, belly-gods, and deceivers’. Others ‘cried Woe! Woe!’ and some cried ‘Sorrow, sorrow for this doleful day, that they are bringing in popery among us!’ and many got to their feet and threw their wooden stools at the bishops. The atmosphere was intimidating, as one observer, minister James Gordon, reported; ‘There was a gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the Dean was reading, a she-Zealot hearing him starts up in choler, traitor, says she, does thou say Mass at my ear, and with that struck him on the face with her Bible in great agitation and fury.’

Seeing that the crowd was inattentive, the bishop abandoned his attempt to read from the prayer book, and preached a sermon instead. Some of the most violent protesters had already left, but they hung around outside, making a racket, and finally throwing stones at the bishop when he tried to leave. Other bishops and clerics were also attacked by groups of Edinburgh women. Johnston was pleased. ‘I pray the Lord to make his own children with tears and cries to pray against the spiritual plague of Egyptian darkness covering the light of the Gospel shining in this nation’, he wrote, fitting words for the man who was to be one of the leaders of resistance himself.

The women involved were described as ‘rascal serving-women’, and certainly those arrested were indeed servants. Other ‘women’ were said to be men in disguise, for, said one witness, ‘they threw stools to a great length’. The opposition now gathered itself together to organize a campaign to petition the king in London. Petitions came mainly from Fife and the West, and when it began to be obvious that the king wasn’t speeding to remove the hated book, many became anxious that war might ensue. The godly Presbyterians had no intention of backing down. There were more riots, and more petitions, and finally Charles responded autocratically, claiming that he had written the prayer book himself (the suppliants had claimed to believe it was the work of bishops). His touchy pride had surfaced again, but so had his wish to be loved; he offered to forgive everyone if they would only go home and do as they were told.

This offered nothing to moderates, and made the intransigent even more certain that they were doing God’s work. On 23 February 1638, the nobles chose a committee of lairds, burgesses and ministers to sit with them. This committee created the Covenant. It was based on the old confession of faith signed by Charles’s father James in 1581, a textual ancestry that tried to proclaim the committee’s loyalty to the Stuart monarch. It vowed to uphold the true religion of the Church of Scotland, and to oppose popery and superstition. It was first signed at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 28 February. Read aloud by Johnston, it was signed by the assembled nobles first, then lairds. Next day three hundred ministers signed it. Then hundreds of people in Edinburgh, then thousands more as it was distributed across the nation by its original signatories.

Later, support for the Covenant came to mean resistance to tyranny, but that was an evolution. The original Covenant bound its signatories to uphold true religion and to support the king. It neglected to specify which injunction was more important if there should be a conflict between them.

The Scots invented the Covenant as a form of resistance to rule from Westminster. Those who took the oath were required to oppose the recent innovations in religion. Loyalty was reserved for a king willing to defend true Protestant religion. The Covenant was with God; if the king failed to defend the reformed tradition in the Kirk, the people were morally required to resist him because to do so was to keep faith with God. But the oath also included a declaration of allegiance and mutual association which became a definition of nationhood. Scotland, under a covenanted king, had a divine role to play in overthrowing popery and thus bringing about Christ’s rule on earth. Perhaps one day every nation was to be part of the Covenant, under Scotland’s leadership.

Charles still failed to act. It was becoming clear that he was not in control of the situation. Like many men with problems, his were made worse by a visit from his mother-in-law, who came for a prolonged stay in 1638. A contemporary engraving of her progress shows a sumptuous procession down a Cheapside lined with slender, pointed Jacobean gables. A brilliant patron of the arts, a flamboyant presence, a Medici to the core, Marie de Medici cut a swathe through London’s crowds. Her vast entourage, which she expected Charles to support, included six coaches, hundreds of horses, monks and confessors in handfuls, peers and princesses, dwarfs and dogs. Dash was a strong point. Tact was not. She told everyone that she was hoping for Charles’s conversion to the one true Church. He, so quiet, so shy, so unwilling to express public opinions, must have felt uneasy with her bounce and verve. Laud, too, had grave doubts about the boisterous Marie’s impact on her daughter and so on the king. When Henrietta called for English Catholics to fast on Saturdays and to contribute the money to the army sent against the wholesomely Protestant Scots, she linked the expedition in the mind of the public with her own faction. She was also known to be contemplating a Spanish match for her daughter, who was seen attending Mass as the army marched.

In London, Charles and his advisers had begun to evolve ambitious plans for Scotland. Wentworth was determined to carry out the policies he had introduced in Ireland; he wanted an English deputy, and probably English law, too. The Scots, who had ears in the king’s circle, probably got wind of this line of thinking. It made them more determined to hang on. By now, Charles was convinced that the only way to solve his problems in Scotland was by force of arms, and he spun out the negotiations only to give himself time to arm, a pattern of behaviour he was to repeat in England later.

In June 1638, Charles finally sent Hamilton to mediate with his fellow-Scots. By then the Covenanters had grown more confident, encouraged by the widespread support they had received. They asked for a free general assembly and a Parliament to make sure the prayer book could never be reintroduced. Hamilton was only there to stall the Scots until Charles could get his army moving. The Covenanters had created a new system of representation; commissioners from each shire and burgh were to form an elected body and to remain in the capital, being replaced frequently by elected substitutes. This new body was to have a different president every day, so that power was not concentrated in the hands of one man. This idealistic if slightly impractical rule suggests that tyranny was very much a preoccupation. And yet despite all this, the new assembly was window-dressing. Power remained with the strongest nobles, Rothes, Montrose and Loudoun.

On 21 November 1638, a new representative body met, this time representing the Kirk itself. This was the Glasgow Assembly. Huge numbers of people filled Glasgow Cathedral. The new body soon proved unmanageably radical. Hamilton tried to control it, with about as much success as Canute holding back the waves. Having rid itself of Hamilton, the new body began enacting a godly dream of restoring the Kirk to its glory days of full and unmixed Presbyterianism. On 4 December, the new assembly passed an act declaring the six previous Kirk assemblies unlawful, which meant that the Kirk was no longer bound by their decisions. Then on 6 December the assembly condemned Charles’s prayer book and canons as replete with popish errors. On 8 December, the assembly abolished episcopacy, and on 10 December it removed the disputed Five Articles of James’s reign. This brisk and decisive rate of progress resulted in a Kirk purified of compromise and popery, in less than a month. The Scots were creating God’s kingdom, allowing the light of the gospels to shine.

Their decisiveness would prove an example for the English godly party from this time on. The Kirk ensured this by distributing polemics explaining the connection between the restored Kirk and the legitimacy of resisting a tyrant. One of the creators of the Covenant, Alexander Henderson, wrote that ‘except we stand fast to our liberty we can look for nothing but miserable and perpetual slavery’. What he meant was liberty in religion, but the heady experience of having that liberty at Glasgow had made him determined to protect it against the prerogative of anyone who sought to take it away. The result of the prayer book crisis was therefore to join religion and political ideology stoutly together by an unbreakable chain.

It was easy to see why men like Alexander Henderson would be Covenanters. Less easy to understand is the position of Highland nobles like Argyll and Montrose. Of these two leading Highland nobles of the Civil War years, it was the ambitious, eager, warmhearted Montrose who was the first to subscribe to the Covenant. He first joined those Covenanters who sought to petition or supplicate the king in November 1637. It seems an odd decision for a Highlander. The Lowlands were suspicious of popery in part because they perceived the Gaelic lands – Ireland and the Highlands – as a hotbed of papists, and this was not altogether paranoia; there had been a significant Catholic revival among the Gaelic lands. Lowlanders also saw the Highlands as barbaric because of the growth and development of its clan structure in the sixteenth century. Later writers infatuated with the romance of old Scotland portray the clans as ancient, even paleolithic, but in fact they were largely a product of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is difficult to define what a clan was; it came to be seen as a family structure, but in Montrose’s time it was a band, or bond, which could be created between equals or between those of different rank. Usually, it was faintly feudal; the clan chieftains offered protection (from other clans) in return for loyalty (fighting when summoned). The result was to set up violent rivalries across the Highlands. Each clan could increase its wealth, honour and fame only by expanding into the territory of another clan, by raiding another clan, or by plunder. The result might be just a few casualties, but it sometimes involved the massacre of whole communities, including women and children. Such bloodshed frightened and horrified Lowlanders, who were inclined to see the Highlanders as barbarians.

The Covenant flourished in an urban world of merchants, professionals and other middling men. These people were all but absent from clan Highland life. So too was the king, and central government in general. Highland chiefs were traditionally not very interested in central government, or even in the making of laws. At home, they made their own. As for the monarch, in theory Highlanders were effusive in their tributes to the Stuart kings, but in practice they recognized few real obligations to them. Highlanders also shared with their royal master King Charles a love of disguise and tricks which is especially manifest in Montrose’s generalship and tactics. Montrose would be dependent, too, on men even more monoculturally clannish than he, notably the fighter Alasdair MacColla. Masking, mumming and women dressed in men’s clothing doing strange midnight dances were ineradicable parts of the Highland scene, and alien to the Presbyterian Kirk.

But Montrose signed the fierce and rigid Covenant. It is entirely probable that he was swayed by two things: the excitement of the moment which fed his personal ambition, and a very reasonable wish to influence events. He came from one of the oldest and noblest families in Scotland, and held estates in Perth, Stirling and Angus; he was educated richly and fully, in France and Italy as well as Scotland. He was graceful and handsome, with cold, lucid grey eyes. He was also a fine horseman and an excellent archer. He was, said Clarendon, too apt to condemn those he did not love.

He had been at the University of St Andrews, majoring, as it were, in hunting and hawking, in archery and golfing, though he did do some studying. At the age of seventeen, Montrose was married to Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of Lord Carnegie, afterwards Earl of Southesk. In 1633, as soon as he was twenty-one, he left Scotland to travel on the Continent. He had come back to Scotland in 1636, and had been presented to the king in London, by Hamilton, who apparently told Charles that someone as beautiful and charismatic and arrogant as Montrose could only be a menace. So Charles merely extended his hand to be kissed, then turned away. Montrose was bright and proud; he got the message. It has been suggested that the slight to his honour was what impelled him to see the merits of the Covenant. But he himself later wrote:

This our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of these sometime pretended prelates, who having abused lawful authority did not only usurp to be lords over God’s inheritance, but also intruded themselves in prime places of civil government; and by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book, the brood of the bowels of the whore of Babylon, as also to the prejudice of the country, fining and confining at their pleasure: in such sort, that trampling upon the necks of all whose conscience could not condescend to be of their own coin, none were sure of life nor estate, till it pleased God to stir up his own instruments, both in Church and policy, for preventing further, and opposing, such impiety.

For Montrose, then, Covenanting was not always an angry response to rule from Westminster; it could also be an angry response to rule from Canterbury. Montrose had been reading not only the Bible, but Foxe and Spenser, and from them he had learned about the global war against the evil Whore of Babylon, popery whether lodged in the so-called Church of England or in Rome. It was that war which he set out to fight. But he set out to fight it as a Highlander, and this meant to increase his own power at the expense of other Highland nobles.

He was not the only one. Archibald Campbell, Earl and later Marquess of Argyll, a Highland noble with a huge estate, much of which had been acquired from the MacDonalds by very dubious methods, similarly had an eye to the main chance. He became an ardent Covenanter because the king was willing to employ the MacDonalds under the Catholic Earl of Antrim to suppress the ‘rebellion’. The new war of religion meant business as usual among nobles and clans who had been enemies for centuries. Meanwhile, veterans from Protestant armies on the Continent were flooding back to Scotland, forming a professional army under Alexander Leslie, who had held a senior command under Swedish Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus.

It was an age that loved plotting and feared the plotting of others, but there may have been a real conspiracy. The Scots’ success at doing what some English people longed to do – rolling back the Laudian reforms – struck the English forcibly. There is some evidence of high-level contact between the king’s godly opponents in all three kingdoms from the early 1630s. John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Saye and Sele actively plotted with their natural allies among the Covenanters to force Charles to call Parliament. Contemporaries thought that the Covenanters would never have dared to rebel without friends in England. We could even think of a kind of cross-border godly culture, with exchanges of publications, and personal contacts sensibly unmarked by treasonable correspondence. Print and pamphlets allowed the godly party in England to connect the terror of Catholicism with their own godly agenda.

This meant Montrose was not alone in his dread of the pope’s divisions. He believed firmly in monarchic power, too, but also thought that it must be restrained by law. He was elected to one of the ‘tables’, committees which also contained representatives of lairds, burghers and ministers, to monitor information which passed between the king and his council.

Opposite the Edinburgh Mercat Cross, a scaffold was erected. ‘James,’ said John Leslie to Montrose, ‘you will not be at rest till you be lifted up there above the rest in three fathoms of rope.’