Part 4

Unfortunately, it is not known who drafted this covenant, nor whether it originated in the spontaneous desire of any of these devout children. Such a child as Emilia Geddie would have been quite competent to frame such a paper. Beatrix Umpherston, whose name heads the list, was then ten years old. She married the Rev. John M’Neil, and died in her ninetieth year.

[Sidenote: The Strategy of Claverhouse]

In a report which Claverhouse gave in this year to the Committee of Privy Council, explaining how he had quietened Galloway, the following passages occur:—

“The churches were quyte desert; no honest man, no minister in saifty. The first work he did was to provyd magasins of corn and strawe in evry pairt of the contry, that he might with conveniency goe with the wholl pairty wherever the King’s service requyred; and runing from on place to ane other, nobody could knou wher to surpryse him: and in the mean tyme quartered on the rebelles, and indevoured to distroy them by eating up their provisions; but that they quikly perceived the dessein, and soued their corns on untilled ground. After which, he fell in search of the rebelles, played them hotly with pairtys, so that there wer severall taken, many fleid the contry, and all wer dung from their hants; and then rifled so their houses, ruined their goods, and imprisoned their servants, that their wyfes and schildring were broght to sterving; which forced them to have recours to the saif conduct, and made them glaid to renounce their principles.... He ordered the colecttors of evry parish to bring in exact rolls, upon oath, and atested by the minister; and caused read them evry Sonday after the first sermon, and marque the absents; who wer severly punished if obstinat. And wherever he heard of a parish that was considerably behynd, he went thither on Saturday, having aquainted them to meet, and asseured them he would be present at sermon; and whoever was absent on Sonday was punished on Monday; and who would not apear either at church or court, he caused arest there goods, and then offer them saif conduct: which broght in many, and will bring in all, and actually broght in tuo outed disorderly ministers.”

[Sidenote: The Success of Claverhouse]

So this booted apostle of Episcopacy confessedly caused men to renounce their principles by driving them from their haunts, rifling their houses, ruining their goods, imprisoning their servants, and bringing their wives and children to starvation! And so he filled the deserted churches by causing an attested roll to be read every Sabbath after the first sermon, and severely punishing the absentees, if obstinate. In extreme cases he even attended church himself, and those who were absent on Sabbath were dealt with on Monday. But, ere long, measures much more severe were to be adopted.

[Sidenote: Apologetic Declaration]

[Sidenote: The Killing-time]

The devout and gentle but resolute Renwick, having been sent to Holland for ordination, returned in the autumn of 1683 to the arduous and dangerous post which had been so honourably held by Cameron and Cargill, and they could not have had a worthier successor. In November 1684, the Cameronians published their “Apologetick Declaration and Admonitory Vindication,” in which they adhered to their former declarations against Charles Stuart, and warned those who sought their lives or gave information against them, that in future they would regard them as the enemies of God and of the covenanted work of reformation, and would punish them as such. The Privy Council met this declaration by ordaining that those who owned it, or would not disown it upon oath, should be immediately put to death whether they had arms or not. This was to be always done “in presence of two witnesses, and the person or persons having commission from the Council for that effect.” The darkest time of the persecution, the period specially known as “the killing-time,” had now arrived; prisoners had already been hurried to death three hours after receiving sentence.

The infamous Lauderdale had been constrained to demit his office in 1680, and his life in 1682; Rothes had predeceased him by a year; and now they were to be followed into another world by the crowned scoundrel (otherwise “His most Sacred Majesty”) for whose favour they had persecuted the followers of that cause which all three had sworn to maintain. By the death of Charles the Second, on the 6th of February 1685, no relief came to those who were hunted like partridges on the hills of Scotland.

[Sidenote: Priesthill and Wigtown]

The heartless sensualist was now to be succeeded by him who combined unrelenting bigotry with lechery. Charles had long been suspected of more than secret leanings to the Church of Rome; James was an avowed and ardent Papist. It was on the 1st of the following May that, under Claverhouse, the dread scene was enacted at Priesthill, when John Brown was taken to his own door, and shot in presence of his wife and child; and on the 11th of the same month that this cold-blooded cruelty was rivalled by Lag at Wigtown, when Margaret Wilson and Margaret Lauchlison (or M’Lauchlan) were tied to stakes and drowned by the rising tide.

[Sidenote: Conventicles]

Between these two tragedies, the Scottish Parliament of the new King distinguished itself by passing three harsh Acts. One of these declared it treason to give or take the Covenants, to write in defence of them, or to own them as lawful or binding; the second declared the procedure of the Privy Council to have been legal in fining husbands “for their wives withdrawing from the ordinances”; and by the other the penalty of death and confiscation of goods was adopted as the punishment to be inflicted on hearers as well as on preachers at either house or field conventicles. Yet even with this stringent Act it was impossible to put down conventicles. It was not for the mere satisfaction of opposing a tyrannical and bloodthirsty Government that the frequenters of conventicles were willing to risk so much. Renwick’s sermons show that he was a faithful preacher of the Gospel; and those who had realised in their own experience that it was the power of God unto salvation were anxious at all hazards to listen to the Word when proclaimed by such a devoted and fearless messenger.

[Sidenote: Dunnottar Prisoners]

In order to cope more successfully with the expected rising of the Earl of Argyll, 184 captive Covenanters, collected from various prisons, were, in May 1685, marched from Burntisland to Dunnottar. A few escaped by the way. The others suffered a rigorous and cruel imprisonment. For several days they were, male and female, confined in a single vault, dark, damp, and unfurnished. During the course of the summer some escaped, some died, some took the obnoxious oaths. Of those who were brought back to Leith and examined before the Privy Council, on the 18th of August, a considerable number were already under sentence of banishment, and now 51 men and 21 women were similarly sentenced, and forbidden to return to Scotland, without special permission, under pain of death.

[Sidenote: The Toleration]

Argyll’s rising was a failure. He was captured, brought to Edinburgh, and there beheaded on the 30th of June 1685, not for the rising, but because in November 1681 he had ventured to take the Test with an explanation. Being dissatisfied with Argyll’s Declaration and with his associates, Renwick and his followers stood aloof from that rising; but, on the 28th of May 1685, they had, at Sanquhar, formally protested against the validity of the Scottish Parliament then in session, and also against the proclamation of James, Duke of York, as King. They also refused to take any benefit from the toleration, which he granted, by his “sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power,” on the 28th of June 1687—a toleration which was gratefully accepted by many of the less scrupulous Presbyterian ministers. Although Argyll’s attempt to overturn the throne of James the Seventh was unsuccessful, the time came, in December 1688, when he had to escape from the country, which was no longer to be his. Next April the Scottish Convention of Estates pointed out that he had assumed the regal power in Scotland, and acted as king, without taking the oath required by law, whereby the king is obliged to swear to maintain the Protestant religion, and to rule the people according to the laws.

[Sidenote: The Revolution]

Renwick, who glorified God in the Grassmarket on the 17th of February 1688, was the last Covenanter who suffered on a scaffold. He and his followers, by maintaining an unflinching protest against the reign of James, had helped to hasten his downfall. When the Convention of Estates met in Edinburgh, the Cameronians gladly volunteered to defend it; and showed their loyalty by raising in a single day, without tuck of drum, eleven hundred and forty men as a regiment for King William’s service.

Episcopacy was abolished by the Scottish Parliament (22nd July 1689) as an insupportable grievance; and (7th June 1690) Presbytery was re-established, and the Westminster Confession of Faith ratified; but the Covenants were ignored, and on that account the sterner Cameronians still stood apart, and, with that dogged tenacity which had distinguished them in the past, they held together, although for many long years they had no minister.

[Sidenote: The Martyrs’ Monument]

[Sidenote: Estimated Number of Victims]

On the Martyrs’ Monument in the Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh, it is stated that, between Argyll’s execution and Renwick’s, there “were one way or other murdered and destroyed for the same cause about eighteen thousand.” This estimate is not given upon the original monument, erected in 1706 through the instrumentality of James Currie (Beatrix Umpherston’s stepfather), and now preserved in the interesting and well-appointed Municipal Museum in the Edinburgh Corporation Buildings. That monument was repaired, and a compartment added to it, in 1728 or 1729; and the present monument supplanted it in or about 1771. The estimate has apparently been taken from Defoe’s “Memoirs of the Church of Scotland,” first published in 1717. It therefore includes those who went into exile, those who were banished, those who died from hunger, cold, and disease contracted in their wanderings, and those who were killed in battle, as well as those who were murdered in the fields or executed with more formality. The numbers which he sets down under some of these classes are only guesses, and seem to be rather wild guesses. An estimate approaching more closely to the real number might be made, and would doubtless show a much smaller, though still a surprisingly large, total. But the exact number of those who laid down their lives, in that suffering, or heroic, period of the Church of Scotland, will not be known until the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the Book of Life is opened. Of many of them no earthly record remains.

“The shaggy gorse and brown heath wave O’er many a nameless warrior’s grave.”

[Sidenote: Heroic Sufferers]

Not a few of the sufferers endured torments more terrible than death. Some were tortured with fire-matches, which permanently disabled their hands; some had their thumbs mercilessly squeezed in the thumbikins; some had their legs horribly bruised in the boots; and some were kept awake by watchful soldiers for nine consecutive nights. It is not surprising that nervous, sensitive men occasionally shrunk back in the day of trial. The wonder is that so many stood firm.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Punctuation has been normalized. Spelling and hyphenation have been retained as they were in the original book, some of which would not be considered standard.

Page headers have been represented as sidenotes.

Italicized phrases are presented by surrounding the text with _underscores_.