Alexander Henderson(c. 1583–1646)

Alexander Henderson was born around 1583 at Criech in north-east Fife, son of a small Fife laird's family. He was schooled at St Andrews from 1599, took his MA at St Salvator's College in 1603, was retained as a regent (university lecturer) in philosophy at St Andrews from 1603 to 1610, and on the patronage of George Gladstanes, Archbishop of St Andrews, was presented to the parish of Leuchars in north Fife in 1612. He served the Leuchars parish for the next twenty-six years and was, through the long Erastian period of the Five Articles of Perth (1618) and the imposition of the English liturgy on the Scots Kirk, an increasingly leading parish minister of the Presbyterian opposition to the Stuart religious settlement.

On the twenty-third of July 1637, on the imposition of the new Anglican-pattern Service Book at St Giles in Edinburgh, the famous riot of Jenny Geddes and the Edinburgh tradeswomen put the Scottish religious crisis at the centre of British politics. Henderson was called from Leuchars to Edinburgh by the Tables (the standing committee of Scots opposition representatives) and, with Archibald Johnston of Wariston, drafted through January and February 1638 the National Covenant, the constitutional document by which the Presbyterian establishment of the Kirk of Scotland was reaffirmed and the new Anglican-pattern reforms refused. The Covenant was signed at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh on the twenty-eighth of February 1638 and circulated to every parish in Scotland through the following month; copies were signed by an estimated three hundred thousand people across the country, the largest single subscription document in Scottish history.

He was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland at the Glasgow Assembly of November 1638, the first national Assembly in twenty years, at which the Scottish bishops were deposed and the Presbyterian polity of the Kirk was constitutionally re-established. He served as Moderator again at the Edinburgh Assembly of 1641 and the St Andrews Assembly of 1643. From August 1643 he led the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly of Divines in London, the synod of English Puritan and Scottish Presbyterian theologians convened by the Long Parliament to reform the Church of England. The Solemn League and Covenant of September 1643, the constitutional alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Kirk, was substantially his text and brought the Scottish army into the English Civil War on the parliamentary side.

He was the leading Scottish member of the Westminster Assembly for the next two and a half years, drafted the Directory for the Public Worship of God (1645), the Form of Presbyterian Church Government (1645), and contributed to the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the foundational doctrinal document of English-language Presbyterianism, in continuous use in the Presbyterian churches of Scotland, Ireland, England, the United States, Canada, Australia and Korea. He returned to Scotland from London in poor health, attended on King Charles I at Newcastle in May 1646 in an attempt to negotiate the King's acceptance of the Presbyterian settlement, and died at Edinburgh on the nineteenth of August 1646 in his sixty-third year. He is buried at Greyfriars Kirkyard, two yards from the spot on which the National Covenant had been signed eight and a half years before. The Henderson name in modern Scottish religious history carries the weight of the drafter of the National Covenant of 1638.