How Scottish Presbyterians became so powerful in England

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This is the second of our talks about the Scots and the English Civil War. And in this talk we’ll be looking at how instrumental the Scottish Army was in securing the defeat of Charles I in 1644-1646? And we’ll ask: how was it that Scottish armies came to invade England in 1648?

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England’s civil wars were a multinational conflict in which multiple rival armies criss-crossed the internal borders of the British realms. In this talk, we will be assessing the significance of Scottish involvement in the English civil war. Older generations of historians, working on both sides of the border, were unanimous in their negative evaluations of both Scotland’s military capability and the political effects of what was implicitly seen as Scottish interference in an English conflict. The pioneering historian of the Scottish Revolution, David Stevenson, drew a direct line from the sending of a Scottish army into England on the side of parliament in January 1644, to the conquest of Scotland by the English New Model Army in 1651. He gloomily characterised the period as ‘down-hill all the way’.

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This talk takes a different perspective. It contends that Scotland’s leaders made a pragmatic, calculated, and clear-sighted decision to intervene in England’s civil war on terms favourable to them. Scottish clerics and politicians took up residence in London, where they embedded themselves in the networks of the parliamentary presbyterians who broadly shared their views on the conduct of the war and the terms for peace. These years were important for generating new political ideas and practices that transcended purely national considerations. Undoubtedly, the Scots faced successive unprecedented challenges that pushed the resources of a relatively poor kingdom to breaking point. However, their government proved capable of recovering from repeated crises and, in the Lowlands at least, Scotland’s social structures proved resilient. The failure of a fracturing parliamentary alliance to secure a peace settlement with the king after 1646 is not the subject of this talk, but it provides the all-important context for explaining a seeming contradiction in the actions of Scotland’s leaders: why did the Scots, who had fought against Charles I in the mid-1640s, send another army into England in 1648 with the express purpose of restoring him to his English throne?

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We start by looking at how and why the Scots joined the English civil war on the side of parliament?

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On the eve of the English civil war, Scotland was governed by people who had signed a religious bond called the National Covenant. They had successfully defended themselves against two attempts by Charles I to crush them by force and gone on to effect a constitutional and religious revolution. The king personally ratified the Covenanters’ legislation in a parliament that concluded its business in November 1641, by which time Ireland was in rebellion and the king’s government in England was unravelling. As relations between Charles and his English parliament deteriorated sharply in the early months of 1642, both sides manoeuvred to secure Scottish support, or at least prevent their enemies from securing it. At the same time, the Scottish government was permitted by the king to raise an army to assist in the suppression of the Catholic rising in Ireland. Major-General Robert Monro arrived in Ulster with the first contingent of Scottish troops in April 1642.

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Scotland’s political elites were divided over what action they should take in response to the breakdown in England. Royalists, naturally, thought it was their duty to uphold the king’s authority and publicly petitioned the Scottish government to offer him its support. When this proposal came to nought, the king sent James, 3rd Marquis of Hamilton, the premier Scottish peer and former royal commissioner, to try and gain a party for him in Scotland. The Scottish Secretary of State and Hamilton’s brother, William, Earl of Lanark, also returned to Scotland to assist the king’s cause. They were up against the pro-parliament grouping around Scotland’s most powerful nobleman, Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquis of Argyll. By the summer of 1643, Argyll was in a position to open negotiations with the English parliament. Despite misgivings in England about the wisdom of calling upon the Scots for assistance, commissioners were sent to Edinburgh in early August to begin working on the treaty called the Solemn League and Covenant.

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The rationale for the Solemn League amongst the English politicians who advocated it, notably John Pym, was straightforward: the king seemed to be winning the war and the injection of the 20,000 troops promised by the Scots would change their fortunes. The English parliament was prepared to pay the Scottish army’s expenses in order to secure this outcome. In addition, the English parliament obligated itself to remove the bishops from the churches of England and Ireland, and seek the ‘reformation of religion’. It is clear from the wording of the Solemn League that ‘reformation’ meant bringing the churches of England and Ireland more into line with the Scottish presbyterian model. However, insertion by the English commissioners of a qualifying phrase, ‘according to the Word of God’, has been read by some historians as deliberately designed to resist the argument that any single form of government had been prescribed by Scripture. No doubt this was intended on the English side to facilitate compromise both with moderate royalists and religious independents who advocated some measure of toleration.

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That things worked out contrary to almost anyone’s expectations does not mean the Solemn League should never have been agreed. The treaty was a pragmatic response, on the Scottish side, to the threat posed to the Covenanter revolution by a triumphant and emboldened king keen to avenge himself for the humiliations of 1641. The Solemn League was a good deal for the Scots. It moved responsibility for resourcing the Scottish army onto their neighbours, while advancing the reformed faith. English parliamentary presbyterians and Covenanters were alike committed to parliamentary government, limitations on the royal prerogative, extirpating false religion in all its forms, and advancing the Protestant reformation in Ireland. It is therefore misleading to see the Solemn League as an imposition of alien ideas onto the English by Scottish Presbyterians. Historians have been too ready to endorse the view of Robert Baillie, one of the Scottish commissioners, whose assertion that the ‘The English were for a civill League, we for a religious Covenant’ has been taken as proof of the essential incompatibility of their respective aims. Yet some English men and women, especially in the City of London, greeted the Solemn League with genuine enthusiasm, not simply because the government mandated it, idealistically hoping it would be the vehicle to establish ‘true publick liberty, safety and peace’ throughout the kingdoms.

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What was the Scottish contribution to the parliamentary war effort?

The army of the Covenant, commanded by Alexander Leslie, 1st Earl of Leven, a soldier with some thirty years’ experience in the Swedish service, crossed the Tweed in January 1644. It was the largest single force on foot in the British Isles, the royalist and especially the parliamentarian armies being made up of regional forces with their own command structures. With the exception of the port of Hull, all of Yorkshire and the northeast was in royalist hands and under the overall control of William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle. During the early months of 1644, Newcastle was able to check the Scottish army’s advance south. Under pressure from parliamentarian forces under Ferdinando, 2nd Lord Fairfax, and Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester, with Oliver Cromwell as Manchester’s Lieutenant General of Horse, Newcastle was forced to turn his attention to the defence of England’s northern capital, York. The opposing armies converged on Marston Moor on 2 July and, after initial setbacks, the parliamentarian alliance successfully routed the royalist forces.

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Marston Moor was one of the bloodiest battles of the war and a catastrophe for the royalists. It wrecked their capacity to hold the north of the kingdom, thereby relieving pressure on the parliamentarians operating further south, who were now freed up to take the fight to the king’s forces in the west. That most effective of self-publicists, Oliver Cromwell, seized the credit for Marston Moor, but Scottish forces had been crucial to the victory. Cromwell had been ably supported by the experienced Scottish Commander of Horse, David Leslie, while it was Scottish foot regiments who had stoutly stood their ground at a point when the battle was very much in doubt. A number of reasons explain why the Covenanter army did not get the recognition it deserved. Expectations that the Scots would deliver a ‘knock-out blow’ were probably always unrealistic but, as the war dragged on, it was the ‘foreign’ Scottish army that became the focus of increasing anger at the cost of war. With the English parliament under huge financial pressure, pay to the Scottish army quickly fell into arrears and its soldiers resorted to free quarter and plunder. Mounting complaints against the Covenanter army, as historian David Scott has shown, may well have been genuine, but they were also deliberately orchestrated as part of wider disputes between the parliamentary commanders.

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Bitter divisions over the management of the war effort were also exacerbated by religious differences. Oliver Cromwell’s quarrel with a Scottish officer, Lawrence Crawford, who accused the Englishman of dismissing presbyterians in favour of independents, fed into an explosive dispute between Cromwell and Manchester over the conduct of the war. The second battle of Newbury, in Berkshire, at the end of the 1644 campaigning season, was the trigger. Despite numerical superiority, and perhaps because of the prospect of defeating forces led personally by the king, Manchester repeatedly failed to press the advantage, thereby allowing the royalists ultimately to march away to winter quarters. A month later, a frustrated Cromwell took the extraordinary step of presenting a formal complaint against Manchester to the House of Commons. Cromwell’s own account reveals that the quarrel had become so fundamental that he was prepared to breach social convention by publicly criticising a peer of the realm and his military superior:

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His Lordship having now noe further evasion left to shift it off under another name, playnely declared himself against fighting … With all earnestnesse and sollicitousnesse [the earl] urged all discouragements against it, opposed all that was said for it, and, amongst things, it being urged that if now we let the King goe off with such honour it would give him reputacion both at home and abroade to drawe assistance to him, especially from France, where (wee heard) endeavours were to get ayde for him. But, if wee beate him now, it would loose him every where, and therefore it concern’d us now to attempt it before such ayde came. His Lordship replyeing told the councell he would assure them there was noe such thing, adding (with vehemence) this principle against fighting: that if we beate the King 99 times he would be King still, and his posterity, and we subjects still; but if be beate us but once we should be hang’d, and our postering be undonne. Thus ‘twas concluded not to fight …

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Around this time, a plan began to emerge amongst leading independents to remove Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, from overall command of the parliamentarian forces and ‘remodel’ them into a new army headed by Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Oliver Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of Horse. By these means, parliament would be able to defeat the king without having to rely on the Scots.

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The ability of the Covenanter leaders to prosecute their aims more effectively was severely impeded by events north of the border. The signing of the Solemn League and Covenant had triggered a reaction amongst political figures in Scotland who were both ideologically opposed to a war of aggression against the king and resentful of the power wielded by the Marquis of Argyll. James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, was a charismatic individual whose initial commitment to the Covenanter cause had waned as early as 1640. In February 1644, Montrose was commissioned as the king’s lieutenant-general in Scotland and tasked with rallying the king’s sympathisers to overthrow the Covenanters and join up with royalists in the north of England to destroy the parliamentarians. Initially, Montrose struggled to recruit, but the arrival in July of an Irish brigade under Alasdair MacColla transformed royalist fortunes in Scotland. Montrose and MacColla came together in Perthshire in August and embarked on a year of stunning but highly destructive victories. This stymied the progress of the Covenanter army in England, which refused to drive south while it might yet be required to save Scotland.

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By August 1645, Montrose looked to be in command of the Lowlands and panicked Covenanters had fled over the border. ‘For these things we weep’, lamented Robert Baillie, ‘our eyes runne doune with water.’ Yet Montrose was struggling to keep control over Irishmen and Highlanders who were less interested in the king’s cause than in plundering the lands of the Campbells, their ancestral rivals. The destruction wreaked by Catholic Irishmen and Gaelic-speaking Highlanders alienated potential sympathisers amongst Protestant Lowlanders. Almost too late, the Covenanter leadership concluded in early September that it had no choice but to pull troops out of England. David Leslie’s experienced soldiers surprised and defeated Montrose at Philiphaugh in the Boarders on 13 September. The king’s lieutenant fled into the Highlands, leaving many of his men and their female camp followers to be butchered by vengeful Covenanters. Although Montrose remained in Scotland for another year, his power was broken.

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With the neutralisation of the royalist threat in Scotland, the army of the Covenant could now afford to take a more active role in the push towards Oxford. Leven’s forces made an important contribution over the winter of 1645-6 to the siege of Newark, a strategically important crossing-point of the River Trent. By this time, however, the New Model Army was in the ascendant. In June 1645, forces under Fairfax and Cromwell had inflicted defeat on the king at the battle of Naseby. Robert Baillie gives the Scottish perspective on this decisive encounter:

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It will be hard for the king to stand any more in the fields. … What use the Independent partie may take of this very great and entire victorie, wherewith God hes been pleased to bless –

Sorry [repeats]:

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What use the Independent partie may make of this very great and entire victorie, wherewith God hes been pleased to bless – these counsells which they took against the mind of most here, and by appearance against all reason, we cannot yet say. However, our danger was very great, and God now hes made us secure from the malignant partie; for their strength seems to be broken, except God, contrare to appearance, as oft he hes done, raise them yet againe to scoure us more, who truly are not in our hearts humbled in either nation. 

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Naseby greatly enhanced the standing of the independent soldiers and politicians who were least inclined to support Scottish interests, but they were certainly not alone by now in wanting to see the Scots return home. Royalists, knowing defeat was only a matter of time, saw an opportunity to divide the parliamentary alliance by dangling the possibility that the king would negotiate with the Scots alone. By the spring of 1646, the French ambassador, Jean de Montereul, was acting as a broker between the king and the Scots at Newark. At the end of April, with the New Model Army approaching Oxford, King Charles I suddenly disappeared. ‘Many did think he was in London’, noted Baillie, ‘many that he was for Ireland. At last he was found in our armie at Newark.’

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The Scots now had custody of a king who was no more prepared to accept the Covenants than he had ever been. Baillie optimistically reported that ‘good people’ were joyful that the king was with the Scots, but many English parliamentarians were outraged. Quickly despairing of a viable treaty with the king, the Scottish commissioners began to consider an alternative possibility: the payment of their army’s arrears in return for surrendering the king to the English parliament, subject to guarantees regarding his safety and their continued interest in a settlement. In January 1647, English commissioners arrived in Newcastle to take custody of the king and hand over the first instalment of the money owed to the Scots. Contemporary newsbooks shrieked that the Scots had sold their king, and Charles himself was reputed to have added, ‘at too cheap a rate’, but it is hard to see what else the Covenanter leadership could have done. The £200,000 sterling paid to the Scottish army enabled the Argyll grouping to extricate the Scots army from England intact, ensure an orderly disbandment, and satisfy the government’s most pressing creditors. Scotland still possessed a military capability and the architects of the Solemn League remained in power.

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We want to ask now:

How should we evaluate the political and religious effects of the Scottish presence in London?

The mid-1640s were an important moment of experimentation in what some historians call a confederal approach to the problems of the regal union. It was Scottish Covenanters who had the clearest vision of a reconfigured union of equals, strengthened through formal bonds and better communications between the two parliamentary governments. This would avoid the situation whereby ‘evil counsellors’, as contemporaries termed them, could use a union vested almost exclusively in the person of the monarch as the vehicle for imposing their designs against the public good. Article V of the Solemn League demanded ‘a firm peace and union to all posterity’, while subsequent proposals for settlement, notably the Newcastle Propositions, envisaged the appointment of permanent ‘conservators of the peace’ to sustain good relations between the two kingdoms in future.

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Closer union was given a degree of institutional expression through the formation, in February 1644, of the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Careful analysis by John Adamson bears out Michael Braddick’s view that the Committee was ‘a highly political body’. Some of its key members, notably Cromwell, Saye, and Oliver St John, saw the Committee as the means to challenge the Earl of Essex and assert their own control over the parliamentary war effort. With only four seats occupied by Scots, their voices were unlikely, by design, to be the decisive ones. Their ability to influence policy was necessarily affected by relations with the grouping around Saye and St John. As the latter developed plans for an army that would advance their own interests, this relationship foundered and the Scots, in response, moved to align themselves with Essex’s supporters. With the establishment of the New Model Army, the independent grandees were able to create a new executive body, the Army Committee, onto to which no Scots were appointed. When the army of the Covenant left England, the Committee of Both Kingdoms was dissolved.

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Another body with which the Scottish Covenanters were involved was the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Comprising 30 lay representatives from both Houses of parliament, and 120 clerics sent from the counties of England and Wales, the Assembly was tasked with drawing up a programme to reform the Church of England. Unlike in Scotland, where the General Assembly asserted its autonomy from secular control, the Westminster Assembly derived its authority from parliament. Eleven Scottish commissioners were invited to attend the Assembly, although they were not formal members. Strong relationships with the presbyterian members of the Assembly ensured that Scottish influence was reflected in its work, although this fact undoubtedly exacerbated mounting tensions with independents seeking some degree of liberty of conscience. Its achievements, especially given the wartime conditions in which it was meeting, were considerable and long-lasting. The Directory of Worship and Confession of Faith remain the foundation texts of the Church of Scotland to this day and informed the creation of presbyterian churches in North America. Where the Assembly had far less success was in the establishment of a new national church in England. A limited presbyterian system was implemented from the early months of 1646 but, only four years’ later, the post-regicide regime annulled all legislation compelling church attendance. What Robert Baillie disdainfully called a ‘lame Erastian presbytery’ proved to be the high-watermark of the religious aspirations expressed in the Solemn League and Covenant.

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If Scottish intervention in the English Civil War failed to deliver the outcomes desired by Covenanters, their presence in London generated new and sometimes lasting relationships. Robert Baillie’s voluminous letters and journals show us something of the busy and disputatious world of presbyterian activism. He was well-connected in the circles populated by the clerics, printers, booksellers, parliamentarians, and city councillors that Baillie saw (at least at the time) as useful to the cause of the Covenants. Historian Ann Hughes describes Thomas Edwards, the presbyterian minister and author of the controversial work, Gangraena, making ‘a gift’ to Baillie of his work; Baillie was still corresponding with former associates such as the parliamentarian, Francis Rous, and the cleric and one ‘of our best friends’, Edmund Calamy, some ten years after departing London for good. Scots like Baillie and David Buchanan, who worked with the bookseller and magpie acquirer of print, George Thomason, took full advantage of being in one of Europe’s most important publishing centres to make their own contributions to international, and transatlantic, controversies over church government and the vexed issue of toleration. The Scottish contribution to public debate and political organising in civil war London requires further research.

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We now come to the question of:

Why the Scots, who had been fighting against King Charles in the First English Civil War, now decided to send an army into England in 1648 in his defence?

As the army of the Covenant marched out of England in January 1647, English parliamentary commissioners took custody of Charles I and conveyed him to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire. With the Scots out of the way, political presbyterians now focused their attentions on securing a speedy peace with Charles and containing the threat posed by an increasingly mutinous army. Fearing they were facing either disbandment or redeployment to Ireland without legal indemnity for past actions and payment of arrears, soldiers began agitating for redress of grievances. By the spring, a showdown was brewing between political presbyterians, given confidence by their dominance of parliament and their strength in London, and an army full of well-organised soldiers who were able to exert pressure on their officers. It was the army that won the initiative. In June 1647, troops headed by Cornet George Joyce marched to Holdenby and required the king to accompany them.

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The army’s Heads of Proposals, made public in August as the terms for settlement, have been described by some historians as the best of the many treaties rejected by the king. In their condemnation of the Covenants and the restoration of limited episcopacy with a measure of toleration, they represented the near-total negation of the policies pursued, at huge cost, by the Argyll grouping of Covenanters.  Around the same time, three Scottish commissioners – the Earl of Lanark; Argyll’s kinsman, the Lord Chancellor, John Campbell, 1st Earl of Loudoun; and John Maitland, 2nd Earl of Lauderdale – were sent to England to talk to the King. On 26 December 1647, fearing that Charles was on the brink of settling with the English parliament, the commissioners signed an agreement with him called the Engagement. The Scots offered the king an army in return for parliamentary confirmation of the Covenants in both kingdoms, although Charles himself would not be required to take them. These were soft terms, but the fevered political atmosphere in England meant that the commissioners felt they had to agree to them.

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The Engagement split Covenanted Scotland. Engagers, led by the Marquis of Hamilton, argued with some justification that the agreement with the king represented the best opportunity to safeguard Scotland’s religious and constitutional revolution. They gained control of the levers of government and began the work of raising an army. In response, the Argyll grouping walked out of parliament and, in their opposition to the Engagement, they were supported by the dominant interests in the church. A Declaration issued by the commissioners of the Kirk in May 1648 captures the depth of the divisions over the Engagement:

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We cannot but (with all dutifull respect and honour both to his Majesty and to the Estates of Parlia[ment]) plainly dissent and differ from the [Engagement], being so far from a cleer satisfaction in our consciences concerning the lawfulnesse and necessity of a War … that contrariwise we are cleerly perswaded in our consciences, it is an engagement of most dangerous consequence to the true reformed Religion, both in Doctrine, Discipline, Worship and Government, prejudiciall to the due interest and liberty of the Kirk; favourable and advantagious to the Popish, Prelaticall, and Malignant party: inconsistent with the union of the Kingdom, and the satisfaction of the Presbyterian party in England; and therefore contrary to the Word of God, to the Solemn Covenants, first Principles and publique Professions of this Kirk and Kingdom, and a remedy worse than the disease, and a course whereupon we cannot expect a blessing from God. For which reasons (expressed more fully and particularly in our Representation upon the late Declaration of Parliament) we cannot in our consciences allow either Ministers in their places and callings, or any others whatsoever, to concurre and cooperate in the Engagement.

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My own reappraisal of this period suggests widespread uncertainty amongst the politically active about what to do in the face of such intractable dilemmas. Argyll had publicly spoken out in August against supporting Charles unless he agreed to take the Covenants. To send a military expedition into England before the Scots knew what ‘power their friends had to assist them’ was not only highly dangerous, but also a breach of Covenant. Yet it is highly likely that Hamilton and Argyll remained in communication well into the spring of 1648. Argyll made serious attempts to avoid breaking with Hamilton, but his own supporters ultimately forced him to choose whose side he was on. Argyll and Hamilton went their separate ways, with ultimately fatal consequences for them both.

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The Engagement was a disaster for Covenanted Scotland. With the Kirk in open opposition to the Engagement and actively obstructing the government, Hamilton faced an uphill struggle raising an army. While the series of risings in England that some historians call the Second Civil War looked propitious for Hamilton, they had mostly been suppressed by the time he was in a position to march over the border. Hampered by lack of resources, appalling weather, and the fact that the best of Scotland’s military talent, notably David Leslie, had refused to march with him, Hamilton made ponderous progress through the north of England. Cromwell, supported by a military leader with abilities second perhaps only to himself, Major-General John Lambert, intercepted Hamilton at Preston. In manoeuvres occurring over two days, Cromwell and Lambert completely destroyed the Engager army and Hamilton himself was captured. When news reached Scotland, the anti-Engagers associated with Argyll moved swiftly to seize power from Hamilton’s supporters, led by his brother, Lanark. Scotland was on the brink of civil war. The man who averted it was none other than Oliver Cromwell. His forces arrived in Edinburgh in October and reinstalled the Argyll grouping in government. Meanwhile, petitions had started to come in to Westminster demanding that King Charles I be held to account for fomenting war against his own people.

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The failure of the Engagement seriously undermined aspirations for the confederal union of equals brought fleetingly into being by the Solemn League. At the same time, Argyll’s grouping had to deal with the humiliating fact that their return to power had been rendered possible by men who hated the Covenants. The capacity of the Scots to intervene in events that were running out of their control had been severely diminished by the New Model Army’s rise to power. Realising this, and true to form, Argyll took a pragmatic approach: he set about rebuilding the legitimacy of Covenanter government in Scotland while looking for opportunities to regain the initiative on the British stage. One king had consistently refused to accept the Covenants. Prince Charles, now aged 18, was emerging as a political figure in his own right. What the father had refused to countenance, the son might consider. Covenanted Scotland was down, but it was not out of the game.

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