Crown Covenant and Cromwell Read online

  Covenant and Country

  The widespread signing of the Covenant in 1638 – outwardly no more than an affirmation of Scottish adherence to the reformed church – unquestionably signalled the beginning of what one chronicler of the time aptly termed the ‘Trubles’. While it is easy to view the struggle simply as a religious war, it has rightly been remarked that in seventeenth-century Scotland ‘ecclesiastical issues alone, and ministers alone, could never bring about a revolution’.4 Instead the Covenant was also a response to a wide-ranging set of secular as well as religious grievances, which came about and grew over a long number of years. It is a measure of Charles’ political ineptitude that he encompassed his own downfall by initiating what was intended to be a revolution in both church and state – while simultaneously alienating all four of the country’s ‘Estates’.

  Unlike Charles’ moribund English Parliament, the Scots legislature comprised not two discrete houses but four collegiate ‘Estates’. Traditionally there had been three, although the tenants in chief – that is those holding lands directly from the Crown – were themselves divided between the nobility, sitting in their own right as lords of Parliament, and the lesser tenants, who elected only a proportion of their number to serve as representatives for each shire, thus creating in effect another Estate. The others were the representatives of the royal burghs; and the representatives of the church or Kirk. It was the latter who proved controversial. Before the Protestant Reformation it was the bishops as lords spiritual who sat in Parliament, just as they did in England, but ousting the bishops in favour of Calvinist presbyteries gave this Estate into the hands not only of ministers of religion who owed no allegiance but to their God and their presbytery, but also opened it to the lesser lairds, burgesses and tradesmen serving as lay elders of the Kirk.

  Almost by default John Calvin’s religious teaching had also brought about a far greater degree of democratic accountability in secular government, little dented by King James’ reintroduction of bishops as presidents of their presbyteries in 1610. Outwardly this particular measure might appear to have restored the political status quo, but in reality it was a compromise under which the new bishops found themselves to a degree accountable to their presbyteries on both temporal and spiritual matters.

  Charles on the other hand had an altogether different notion of the power and the authority of the bishops, whom he regarded from the outset of his reign principally as an executive arm of his own personal authority. Simply put, his view was that since he was the head of the church, its officials were therefore his to command.

  However another important cause of what was to follow can also be traced back to Charles’ accession to the Scottish throne in 1625 and to the Act of Revocation which accompanied it. The frequency with which Scotland was ruled by regents, acting in the name of infant monarchs, led to the convention that between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five the king could revoke all gifts of land and property made during his minority, because he may have been unduly influenced by whoever was acting as regent at the time. There was no justification for such a Revocation in Charles’ case because he was already of age and indeed almost out of time when he succeeded his father. However not only did he go ahead and proclaim one in 1626, but against all precedent he also extended it backwards to encompass all disposals of both royal and ecclesiastical lands that had been made since 1540!

  The significance of this distant and seeming arbitrary point in time was that it predated the death of King James V in 1542 and the Rough Wooing which followed as first England and then France sought to gain control of Scotland. It was a period of near anarchy, complicated by the Protestant Reformation and by power struggles between the various factions intent on securing the regency, which would later be dramatised by William Shakespeare as the central theme of Macbeth.5 In the end Scotland’s independence was maintained but it was a ruinously expensive business which saw the old Catholic Kirk shorn of its vast landholdings; taxed, mortgaged and otherwise secularised first to help pay for the war against England and latterly to the benefit of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, who then fought to secure the Reformation and expel their soi-disant French allies. Now although most of those lost lands were to remain in the actual possession of their present occupiers, all the feus and other taxes attaching to them were to revert directly to the Crown. While the analogy is not an exact one, Charles was in effect proposing to convert the tenure of the lost lands from freehold to leasehold. By way of softening the blow, compensation for their revenues valued at ten years’ purchase was promised to the present owners, but the Exchequer was all but bankrupt and this was sagely regarded as unlikely to materialise. More importantly in a culture where the number of a man’s tenants and followers was still generally accounted of rather greater importance than more material indicators of wealth, the potential loss of those tenants and followers was a very serious matter indeed.

  Outwardly Charles’ belated return to Scotland in 1633 might have begun promisingly enough with all the pomp and splendour a coronation demanded, and the Edinburgh militia even tricked themselves out in new white satin doublets, black velvet breeches, silk stockings and feathered hats especially for the occasion.6 No sooner had the necessary ceremonies been observed and the king departed southwards again than the real trouble began, for by then, in addition to the still festering matter of the Revocation, a number of other serious grievances had arisen.

  Insofar as he ever deigned to explain himself at all, Charles’ ostensible justification for the dubious recovery of those former ecclesiastical lands was to enable him to employ their revenues to provide proper stipends for ministers of the church and also to finance radical changes in religious practice in parallel with Archbishop Laud’s concurrent remodelling of the Church of England. Such changes would see the return of full Episcopal government of the church untrammelled by presbyteries, together with a prescribed book of common prayer and Anglican forms of worship which appeared little altered from those of the Catholic Church.

  Unfortunately for the king’s ambition, this enforced counter-reformation, suspected by many as heralding a complete return to Catholicism, alienated the Protestant population at large and deepened the resentment of those whose revenues were ostensibly to be diverted to the purpose. By November 1637 opposition to the king’s policies was nearly universal. Instructions to use the prayer book had generally been ignored and the few attempts to read it only provoked rioting. Royal authority evaporated and in the absence of a formally constituted parliament the ordinary running of the country was soon being conducted by noblemen, lairds, burgesses and ministers serving together on a variety of ad hoc boards or ‘Tables’.

  Finally, in flat defiance of the law forbidding the signing of private bands or agreements binding men to support each other either personally or in pursuit of a common object, on 28 February 1638 the first signatures were being applied to a general band7 known as the National Covenant, pledging the Scots nation to the defence of the Protestant religion. The king was not explicitly challenged by the text of this Covenant, but as the perceived threat to the reformed Kirk came from him alone there was no mistaking the significance of what was being signed.

  Throughout that year negotiations aimed at averting the impending crisis were conducted between the Tables and the king’s commissioner, James, Marquis of Hamilton. In fairness to the much criticised Hamilton, he was in an impossible position with nothing but the empty authority of the Crown to back him up against men whose ancestors had once declared at Arbroath that the king of Scots ruled only by the consent of his people and that he could be deposed if he misused the powers entrusted to him. Moreover Hamilton was not unsympathetic to their cause and consequently the role he played was an equivocal one – on the one hand publicly acting for the king in the council chamber and yet at the same time secretly encouraging the Covenanters, as the dissidents were now known, to stick by their demands.

  The result was inevitable. Charles, finding his servants unwilling or unable to uphold his authority, resolved to crush the Covenanters by force, while they for their part equally stoutly resolved to resist him. And so before embarking on the campaigns of Leslie, Montrose and Cromwell, a brief look at Scotland’s strategic geography and the art of war as it was to be practised in the mid-seventeenth century is in order.

  Going to the Wars

  Other than a few garrison soldiers and ceremonial bodyguards, there were no standing armies on either side at the outset of what eventually grew to become the War of the Three Kingdoms. It is a commonplace to preface histories of the time with comments as to the lack of military knowledge or experience to be found in countries that had been at peace for generations. In a broad sense this was true, but there were always soldiers in Ireland and an expeditionary force had been mustered for a half-hearted war with France in the 1620s. Far more importantly, in addition to countless individuals who had tried their luck in the seemingly never-ending wars in the Netherlands, or Germany, or even farther afield in Poland and Muscovy, military contractors (including the Marquis of Hamilton) had recruited whole regiments for the Swedish service in the 1630s. There was therefore a deep pool of professional expertise available to raise, mould and train armies according to the very latest doctrines, and as war became inevitable both sides scrambled to secure the services of these veterans.

  Most of them as it happens were Scots, and, while many having no doubt left their country for their country’s good never returned home again, more than enough of them responded to the Covenanters’ invitation and ‘cam in gryte numberis vpone hope of bloodie war, thinking (as thay war all Scottis soldiouris that cam) to mak wp thair fortunes vpone the rwin of our kingdome.’8 There were sufficient in fact to permit the Covenanters the luxury o
f interlarding every regiment with professional soldiers who knew their business. If a nobleman was placed at the head of a regiment then his second-in-command would be a veteran of the German wars, and if each company within that regiment was led by a bonnet laird, then he too would have an old soldier for his ensign and one or two others as sergeants. South of the border the process was never as formalised, but Charles too did his best to ensure that in 1639 his infantry regiments at the very least were led by experienced soldiers.

  The rank and file of course were a different matter. In England the king’s regiments were at first intended to be drawn from the county Trained Bands – a militia supposedly drawn from the propertied classes who had a proper stake in defending the country and maintaining the peace: ‘none of the meaner sort, nor servants; but only such as be of the Gentrie, Freeholders, and good Farmers, or their sonnes, that are like to be resident’. Each of those respectable country gentlemen was assessed according to his means as being capable of providing arms for himself, either as a cavalryman or a foot soldier, and if wealthy enough for his sons and tenants too. Inevitably, although the law required personal service, all too often those who actually appeared were Oliver Cromwell’s infamous ‘decayed serving men and tapsters’, or as a professional soldier named William Barriffe grumbled: ‘Porters, Colliars, Water-bearers, & Broom men, are thrust into the rooms of men of better quality, as though they themselves were too good to do the King and their Country service.’9 They behaved dismally during the first encounters with the Scots in 1639 and 1640, and therefore when the civil wars got under way in earnest in the 1640s King Charles settled for taking their weapons and equipment and instead left it to his officers to recruit the men they needed by whatever means they chose. His rebellious English Parliament did likewise, and initially filled the ranks of its regiments with enthusiastic volunteers. In the fullness of time, as that early enthusiasm waned, both parties eventually resorted to an ad hoc form of conscription, simply demanding that the local authorities turn over the men required without troubling themselves overmuch as to how they were to be found.

  In Scotland, although in some areas the very first regiments were through necessity levied directly by local noblemen and lairds from among their tenants and dependants, most soldiers were raised under the old fencible system. By custom and law, and irrespective of status, all those men aged between the traditional ages of sixteen and sixty were liable to turn out as required for up to forty days’ service. In January 1639 as the crisis deepened instructions were circulated by the Tables for the forming of local committees of war. They were charged with managing the process by first carrying out a series of preliminary musters or Wapenschaws (weapon-showings) to establish the extent of the available manpower, whittle them down to a manageable pool of young and unmarried men who were actually fit for service, and then as directed by the government to levy out one man in four or occasionally one in eight from the rolls and form them into regiments.

  The local committees of war were also responsible for clothing, equipping, feeding and even paying them for those forty days. John Spalding recorded of a contingent raised in Aberdeen in 1644 that each soldier was provided with two shirts, coat, breeches, stockings and bonnet, bands and shoes . . . each was to have six shillings (Scots) a day, and each twelve a baggage horse and cooking utensils.10 It sounded impressive, but if their services were required beyond that forty-day period responsibility then passed to the central government, often with indifferent results.

  With some few exceptions, this system was to operate throughout the wars. As a result Scottish regiments always had a strong regional identity, albeit if insufficient men for a regiment could be levied from one sherrifdom, then the government would instruct that two contingents might be combined. Thus in 1644 for example the Master of Yester would find himself commanding a regiment composed of quite separate contingents from Linlithgowshire and Tweeddale, while a proportion of the Aberdeenshire levies were traditionally allocated to the regiments raised by the Keith family in order to cover the shortfall from their own Mearns.11 This was particularly true of cavalry units as it was difficult for the individual committees to assemble and equip large numbers, and very typically the Earl of Balcarres’ Regiment was allocated four troops from Fife, four more from the Mearns and part of Aberdeenshire, just twenty men from Forfar, and two other troops whose origins are unknown.

  The exceptions were a number of regiments raised for what could be described as general service, outwith the restrictions of the fencible system. In 1640 and 1643 a small number of units were raised as a security force ahead of the general mustering to ensure that it proceeded smoothly, and in 1642 seven regiments were recruited by voluntary enlistment for indefinite service in Ireland.

  On both sides of the border the infantry regiments into which most of these levies were gathered were theoretically supposed to comprise ten companies mustering as many as 1,500 men in total.12 In actual practice such numbers were rarely seen after the initial mustering, if at all. On all sides there was a pernicious tendency to form any fresh levies into completely new regiments, commanded by newly appointed officers, rather than forwarding the recruits to reinforce existing regiments.13 Consequently, without those reinforcements, wastage in veteran units could be quite dramatic. On campaign a strength of anything between 200 and 500 men was common, with the latter being considered a large regiment, and instead of forming two wings of battalions as recommended in the drill books of the day, most regiments could muster just a single battalion, or were even joined together in a composite one formed of detachments or remnants of more than one regiment.

  New regiments of course inevitably went through the same process of decay, often accelerated by the fact that the best officers had already found billets in the early levies, leaving the newer ones to be commanded by men whose political connections counted for more than their ability. Moreover the emphasis on raising fresh regiments meant that the numbers of officers rose in quite inverse proportion to the falling off in numbers of rank and file. Eventually the only solution was to reorganise or ‘new model’ the armies, a process that achieved near mythical status in the English Parliamentarian army, but which was primarily an accounting process that saw the wholesale disbandment of unviable units and the transfer of their personnel to bring others back up to their proper establishment. While the wage bill of the rank and file was unchanged, the reduction in the number of regiments in which they were serving inevitably led to mass redundancies among the surplus officers. Inevitably this once again introduced a political element, as each faction strove to ensure that its own candidates were appointed to the remaining posts.14

  Weapons of War

  At the time all infantrymen were equipped or at least expected to be equipped either as pikemen or as musketeers. The former, armed with 5-metre-long weapons and sometimes still wearing body armour, were held to be the more prestigious arm, and if a gentleman was to serve as an ordinary volunteer on foot he would strike a classical pose with a pike rather than fumble with a grimy musket. The length of the pike was calculated to outreach a cavalryman’s lance. In addition to that defensive role, pikemen still supposedly performed an important offensive role as shock-troops. In battle they were drawn out of their parent companies and grouped together in a single body or ‘stand’ in the centre of the battalion and were intended to roll forward irresistibly at the decisive moment and engage the enemy at ‘push of pike’. Such an encounter was graphically described in an account of the battle of Langside, near Glasgow, in 1568 where: ‘They met with equal courage, and encountered with levelled lances, striving, like contending bulls, which should bear the other down.’15 Surprisingly enough the intention was not that the opposing front ranks should mutually impale each other (something that was physically quite difficult as well as morally improbable), but that they would quite literally push the enemy backwards and so burst the opposing formation apart by main force, putting them ‘on thair backis’. Seemingly only then did the blood-letting begin as the victorious party dropped their pikes to set about their hapless losers with their swords.