National Covenant

Be of good cheer, I shall not do that.

However, there is an outside chance, outside, that something like my eighth great-grandfather was a man named Sir Archibald Johnston, one of the original architects and signers of the National Covenant.

For those of you who are visiting or who aren't familiar, the National Covenant was a document signed in 1638 with historic ties to St. Giles that vowed to protect the independence of the Church of Scotland from royal interference.

In fact, there's a copy of the original covenant right here in the cathedral.

Now, whether or not I'm related, I found such inspiration in their stories.

And as a result, the huge majority of Scots rise up against the king's religious reforms.

In a direct challenge to Charles' authority as their king, in 1638, thousands of Scots sign the National Covenant, pledging to defend their religion against the reforms.

What follows are the Bishops' Wars, two short conflicts in 1639 and 1640 fought over whether the king can impose his religious settlement on Scotland by force.

Charles wants to crush the Covenanters militarily, but war is expensive, and after more than a decade of ruling without parliament, he is forced into the very step he has spent years avoiding.

So to start, the Scottish Reformation had created a Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and one of the central questions of the 17th century was this: who was actually in charge of the church, the king or the church itself? It sounds like a fairly dry theological argument, but it wasn't, because behind the argument was a much bigger question.

How much authority did the king possess? Could the monarch impose bishops upon the Scottish church? Could the king dictate how worship should be conducted? And perhaps most importantly, could Scots be compelled to accept religious changes they believed were contrary to their faith? In 1638, opposition to Charles I attempts to alter the Scottish church produced the National Covenant.

The covenant was signed at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh on the 28th of February 1638, and it became one of the most defining documents of the Scottish religious and political crisis.

The Covenanters were not initially a group whose sole purpose was to overthrow the monarchy.

In fact, the National Covenant affirmed loyalty to the king whilst opposing changes to the church.

But over the following years, religious disagreement became entangled with civil war, political revolution, and eventually the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Charles I was executed.

The persecutor had become the haunted.

Back in Edinburgh, he took a lead role in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and compiled part of the Second Book of Discipline, a guidebook for the Scottish churches.

And in 1581, he authored what became known as the King's Confession, the National Covenant, built on the Scots Confession of 1560.

It was a strong and blatant denunciation of the Pope and the doctrines of Rome, and it was adopted by the General Assembly and signed by King James VI and his entire household.

That covenant, penned by John Craig, became the foundation of the great National Covenant of 1638, whose signers would be remembered forever as the Scottish Covenanters.

In a very real and direct way, John Craig is the grandfather of those courageous Presbyterians who risk their lives to worship God according to the dictates of conscience in secluded, open-air meetings called conventicles.

The boy orphaned at Flodden Field.

The Scots saw this as an attack on their religious independence.

The next winter, a group of Presbyterians wrote the National Covenant.

In the covenant, they swore loyalty to the king, but refused his authority over their faith.

Copies went to every town in the country, but it was signed at Greyfriars Kirkyard.

My name is Eoin Innes and this time we are on the final episode of our Covenanters series.

So as we begin the final episode of this series, it is worth reflecting on just how much Scotland had changed since the National Covenant was signed in Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1638.

More than 50 years had passed.

An entire generation had lived through almost continuous political and religious upheaval.

And over the following months and years, the Presbyterian system of church government was gradually re-established.

Finally, after decades of struggle, the Church of Scotland once again became a Presbyterian kirk.

This was, in many respects, the outcome that the original signatories of the National Covenant had hoped to achieve back in 1638.

Yet the victory was not quite as straightforward as it might appear.

Uh, as the Reformation spread, as biblical teaching advanced and the gospel was proclaimed, you know, both in England and in Scotland, amidst all the challenges in the 15 and 1600s, even with who is it that's sitting upon the throne, in Scotland specifically, God did amazing things where so many of the people even came together and in 1638 signed this covenant.

It was known as the National Covenant, where collectively the people, so many of them signing it, are saying, "We want Jesus Christ to be exalted.

He is the right king over the church, not a human king." Uh, so Christ and His Word is supreme, not an earthly king and what he dictates.

So that began to kind of press into pressure of, you know, how worship was gonna be done.

What we've been exploring today is how a handful of Scottish MPs, armed with a plain but powerful oath, challenged the very heart of monarchical power in early modern Britain.

The National Covenant, drafted in 1638, wasn't just a religious pamphlet.

It was a formal declaration that the Church of Scotland should be run without interference from King Charles I or Archbishop Lord.

That was a seismic move for several reasons.