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1638

The National Covenant was based upon sound constitutional law, but the form of the protest—the "band" borrowed from the Middle Ages—and certain passages in the document were of dubious legality. Especially ominous was the clause which bound the signatories to mutual defence "against all sorts of persons whatsoever," which might be interpreted as including the king. There were many irregularities in the obtaining of signatures, for in certain districts it was "obtruded upon people with threatenings, tearing of clothes, drawing of blood."[80] Moreover, to Charles in Whitehall it might have seemed that there had been already overt acts of revolution. The new Committee of Sixteen, the Tables, had set about organizing a provisional Government. As early as February 1638 steps had been taken to raise a revenue. In March a "voluntary" tax was levied in every shire of one dollar for every thousand merks of free rent; the Covenanting lords subscribed largely, and twenty-five dollars was Montrose's contribution; there were signs that presently the levy would cease to be optional, and that non-Covenanters would be mulcted.[81] It all looked suspiciously like the creation of a war-chest. It was certain, too, that the movement would not remain within the four corners of the Covenant, but was capable of indefinite extension. The country was on fire, and every Sunday the ministers were fanning the flame. Wariston records a sermon in Edinburgh on 1st April, when the preacher, Mr. Rollock, after reading the Covenant, requested the nobles present—Montrose, Boyd, Loudoun, and Balmerino—to hold up their hands and swear by the name of the living God: "at the which instant of rising up, and then of holding up their hands, there rose sic a yelloch, sic abundance of tears, sic a heavenly harmony of sighs and sobs, universally through all the corners of the church, as the like was never seen nor heard of."[82] Scotland was in a high-strung and perilous mood.

The wise course for Charles would have been to withdraw the service book and to give assurance that he would meddle no more with property and heritable jurisdictions; in that way he would have driven a wedge between those unnatural allies, the nobles and the Kirk. But from this course he was estopped by his passionate desire, fostered by Laud, to establish a uniform standard of worship throughout his realm, and the fear that such a concession would weaken his cause in the quarrel now drawing to a head with the English Parliament. He would fain have acted as he did in the ship-money case, and have secured a condemnation of the Covenant in the law courts, but the whole Scottish bench and bar believed in its legality.[83] He had for a moment hopes of organizing a royalist opposition in Scotland, with the help of the Highland clans and possibly of Irish troops under Antrim, but he abandoned the project when he realized that, except for Huntly and the Gordons, and the doubtful cases of Hamilton, Lanark, Traquair, and Roxburgh, he had at the moment no Scottish supporters. Yet the king, who had at times no mean capacity for judging a situation, arrived at a shrewder estimate of the Scottish situation than his advisers. If he was to win his will force must be used, and to collect that force he must have time. The Privy Council had sent the Justice Clerk to court to expound the true state of Scotland. The king was impressed, and summoned Traquair and Roxburgh to advise him; Spottiswoode, too, and certain of the Scots bishops; likewise Lord Lorn, who had not signed the Covenant, and whom Baillie thought the most powerful subject in the kingdom.[84] The outcome of this consultation was that the Marquis of Hamilton was appointed a special royal commissioner to Scotland, with authority to treat with the malcontents.

It is clear that Charles was only playing for time, and his unfortunate envoy knew well the futility of his errand. Scotland, as he once told the king, he hated "next to hell," and he had no liking for a task where success and failure would be alike without profit to himself. He arrived in the north on 7th June, to find sullen looks and little of the welcome due to a royal commissioner. He brought with him two proclamations, which promised that the canons and the service book would not be pressed "except in such a fair and legal way as should satisfy all our loving subjects"; one demanded that all copies of the Covenant should be surrendered, which the other did not; he was to use one or other according to his discretion. Traquair and Roxburgh had already warned him that a demand to give up the Covenant would wreck his mission; and, since the tenor of the first proclamation had become known, his diplomacy was prejudiced from the start. He saw Rothes, and the Tables appointed a committee of three ministers and three nobles to confer with him, one of whom was Montrose. Things had moved fast during the previous months. Henderson and Wariston had prepared "articles of peace," which went far beyond the mere matter of the liturgy. The Committee of the Tables asked for the withdrawal of the obnoxious canons and service book, but they also demanded the summoning of a free General Assembly, and, finally, of a Parliament to decide all the questions at issue. The Scottish Church was to shape its own ecclesiastical policy, and a Scottish Parliament was to give such policy the validity of the civil law. It was an honest assertion of a justifiable nationalism.

Hamilton hummed and hawed, promised and withdrew, and finally left Edinburgh in despair. While negotiating with the Covenanters, he had been discussing secretly with his master the possibilities for the use of arms in Scotland—the chance of help from the Highland clans who hated Lorn; the best base to hold, since Edinburgh castle was in Covenanting hands. Charles was adamant on the question of giving up the Covenant; otherwise, he said, he "had no more power than the Duke of Venice," and he intended "not to yield to the demands of those traitors, the Covenanters."[85] With such terms in his instructions no emissary had a chance. The king was negotiating only to gain time, and the duplicity of the monarch was matched by that of his commissioner. For we know, on Montrose's evidence, that Hamilton privately told the Covenanters, "as a kindly Scotsman," that if they took a firm stand they were likely to win.[86] Then ensued a war of king's proclamations and Covenanting protests. Hamilton fluttered between London and Scotland, carrying royal concessions—lavish concessions which meant nothing, since Charles had already determined to appeal to the arbitrament of war. In any case they came too late. The king proposed a new covenant of his own, the chief point of which was the abjuration of popery; but the Covenanting leaders, whose detestation of Rome needed no advertisement, not unnaturally described it as a "mockery of God." Their aim was now nothing less than the complete suppression of episcopacy in Scotland. But the General Assembly was granted, and Hamilton had succeeded in some degree in sowing suspicion between the nobility and clergy by warning each of the danger to be apprehended from the other.

During the absence of the royal commissioner from Scotland in July, the Tables made a great effort to win Aberdeen and the Gordon country to the Covenant's side. Huntly himself would have none of it. His house might be perverse and uncertain, but it never lacked a high spirit and a wild chivalry, and he went his own way contemptuous of Lowland fashions. The Tables sent Colonel Robert Monro, an old soldier of Gustavus, to ask him to subscribe the Covenant, promising to give him first place in the command of their forces; but Huntly replied nobly that his family had risen by the kings of Scotland, and that if the king were to fall he was resolved to bury his life, honour, and estate under the rubbish.[87] But something might be done in the city and its environs, though Knox's disputation in 1561 with the Aberdeen professors was not an encouraging precedent. Montrose, with three ministers in his suite—Mr. Alexander Henderson, Mr. David Dickson, and Mr. Andrew Cant—arrived on 20th July, bearing a letter from Rothes to his cousin the provost, Patrick Leslie. "Do ye all the good ye can in that town and in the country about—ye will not regret it—and attend my Lord Montrose, who is a noble and true-hearted cavalier."[88] Montrose had been made a burgess of Aberdeen nine years before, and he and his retinue were hospitably welcomed. But he seems to have been in an unbending humour. He declined the proffered banquet until the authorities submitted to the Covenant, whereupon the provost and the bailies distributed the wine among the poor.[89] On the Sunday the three ministers proposed to occupy the city pulpits, but the Aberdeen clergy were not to be ousted. The missionaries were accommodated in a yard attached to the Earl Marischal's town-house, where his sister, Lady Pitsligo, was then dwelling. The three preached in turn from a wooden gallery, and on the Monday repeated the performance, amid the ribaldry of certain scoffers in an adjoining building.

Thereafter the envoys proceeded into the neighbouring villages, where they met with more success.[90] The Aberdeen ministers presented fourteen "demands," and there followed a wordy warfare of "answers," "replies," and "duplies," in which the Covenant champions did not get the best of the argument.[91] Aberdeen declared that it adhered to the discipline of the reformed Kirk of Scotland, but refused to condemn episcopacy or admit "the immutability of presbyterial government."[92] It is to be noted that, in asking for subscriptions to the Covenant, Montrose drew up and made his colleagues sign an emphatic declaration "that we neither had nor have any intention but of loyalty to his Majesty, as the Covenant bears."[93] He was interpreting what he then believed—and the bulk of Scotland with him—to be its spirit. But the incident is piquant when we remember who were his ministerial companions. Henderson, the wisest head and the purest character in the Kirk, was five years later to make the last attempt to hold him to the Covenant's side, and Dickson and Cant were to be the central pillars of the theocracy which he sought to overthrow. Perhaps on that northern journey he may have found in their hearts that which gave his enthusiasm pause, and developed those scruples which made Baillie complain that he was "hard to be guided," and "capricious for his own fancies."[94] He returned to Edinburgh at the end of July with but little to show for his labours. His future visits to Aberdeen were to be to better purpose.