The National Covenant in Greyfriars

A constitution is not always written by those who wish to overthrow a throne. More often it is written, carefully and in measured Latin, by a parish minister who has spent twenty years arguing in synod and who has come, in his fifty-fifth year, to the quiet conclusion that the law of his country has been broken by the man who is meant to keep it. The revolution, when it comes, comes in his handwriting and in his hand.

THE MAN FROM LEUCHARS

Alexander Henderson was a Fife minister, not a firebrand. He had taken the parish of Leuchars in 1614 as an Episcopalian appointee, presented over the heads of his parishioners, who had nailed the kirk door shut against him on the day of his induction. He had, in the twenty-four years since, made himself a Presbyterian by reading, by argument with Robert Bruce, and by the slow attrition of watching the Five Articles of Perth ground into the Kirk by royal warrant. He was a Latinist of the careful sort, trained at St Andrews, suspicious of rhetoric, suspicious of his own temper. The country knew him, by 1637, as one of the three or four ministers who could draft a paper that would hold in committee and hold in court.

In July of that year the Dean of Edinburgh had opened the new Prayer Book in St Giles and Jenny Geddes, by the burgh's account, had thrown her stool at his head. The supplications had begun the following week. By December the Tables, four committees of nobles, lairds, burgesses and ministers, were sitting in Edinburgh as a shadow government. By February of 1638 the king in London had sent no reply, and Henderson and the advocate Archibald Johnston of Wariston had been four months at a desk in the Tailors' Hall drafting the document that would force one.

THE NAVE AT TWENTY PAST TWO

It is the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1638. Cold light through the high south windows of Greyfriars. The doors at the west end have been open since one o'clock and the procession has been coming up the Cowgate from the Lawnmarket in groups of ten and twelve, the nobility first, then the lairds, then the burgh commissioners with their provost's chains. The kirkyard outside is three deep at the gate. By Wariston's count from the porch there are two hundred and twenty men in the body of the kirk and another hundred and forty in the yard. The communion table at the upper end of the nave carries four sheets of vellum, stitched, four thousand and some words, in Wariston's hand. Henderson stands at the table's right. Wariston is at his elbow with a quill and an inkpot. The Earl of Rothes is at his left.

The document recites the Negative Confession of 1581, which the young King James had subscribed in his own name; it walks through eighteen acts of the Scottish Parliament that have set the religion of the country since the Reformation; it concludes, in Henderson's own hand, with the Band: that the subscribers shall, by all lawful means, and to the utmost of their power, defend the same religion. It does not name the king. It does not name the bishops. It is, by every careful Latinist's reading of it, a constitutional argument.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE READING

Wariston has the roll in his hand and is about to begin. Henderson, in the seconds before the reading, runs the language one last time in his head. The king has had three months and has not answered the supplications. Spottiswoode has told the bishops in private that Charles will hold to the Book; the bishops have said nothing in public. If the burgh subscribes today the country subscribes by Easter, and if the country subscribes by Easter the General Assembly meets in the autumn and the Book is set aside. The danger is not in the signing. The danger is in the wording. A phrase too sharp and the moderates walk; a phrase too soft and the lairds of the south-west will not be held. He has set the weight of the argument on the Acts of Parliament, not on the Crown, because the Acts can be cited and the Crown cannot be argued with. He believes, in this second, that the king in London will read the Covenant in three weeks and will read it as treason, and that the king will be wrong about it being treason and right that it is the end of his Scottish bishops. He believes the language will hold. He nods to Wariston. Wariston begins.

THE SIGNING

The reading runs forty minutes. Wariston finishes at half past two. Rothes is the first to step forward and signs on the upper margin of the first sheet in a careful hand. Argyll, who has come up from London this week and has not declared himself, follows him. Loudon. Lindsay. Cassillis. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh. The minister of St Giles. The afternoon runs into evening by candle. The next morning the document is carried out into the kirkyard and laid on a flat ledger tomb-slab and the burgh and the country gentry come forward in turn for the next five days. Four men, by the contemporary diaries, prick their thumbs and sign in their own blood. By the spring the document has been copied into every Lowland shire and subscribed by the great majority of the country's adult male Protestant population.

THE BISHOP IN GLASGOW

In the manse at Glasgow that same week, John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St Andrews and Chancellor of Scotland, reads the first text of the Covenant brought up by an Edinburgh messenger and sits for a long time at the window. He is seventy-three. He has served the Crown in the Kirk for forty years, has built the moderate episcopate that Henderson is unbuilding in an afternoon, has crowned Charles at Holyrood four years before. Now all that we have been doing these thirty years past is at once thrown down, he says to his chaplain, by Burnet's record of it. He leaves for Newcastle in November. He dies in London a year later and is buried in Westminster Abbey, never having seen Scotland again.

THE ASSEMBLY AT GLASGOW

The General Assembly met in Glasgow Cathedral in November 1638. Henderson was elected Moderator on the first day. The King's Commissioner, the Marquis of Hamilton, dissolved the Assembly by royal warrant on the seventh day; the Assembly sat on, for three weeks more, in defiance of the dissolution, and abolished episcopacy in Scotland by act of Kirk. The First Bishops' War followed in the summer of 1639. The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 took the same theological ground into a military alliance with the English Parliament. Henderson sat at the Westminster Assembly in London as one of the Scottish commissioners and helped draft the Directory of Public Worship and the Westminster Confession. He was Moderator of the General Assembly four times. He died at Edinburgh in August 1646, twenty months before Charles I went to the scaffold at Whitehall.

THE SLAB IN THE KIRKYARD

The Covenanters, as they came to be called, would be a name to die under for the next sixty-eight years, through the Killing Time of the 1680s, until the toleration that came with the Glorious Revolution in 1689 and the settlement of the Kirk on Presbyterian lines in 1690. The Westminster Confession Henderson helped draft is still the subordinate standard of the Church of Scotland and of every Presbyterian Kirk in the diaspora. The country's law was, for two hundred years afterwards, argued in the language of the document he had drafted in the Tailors' Hall.

A constitution, when it is well drafted, looks afterwards as if it could not have been drafted otherwise. The careful Latinist disappears into the language. What is left is the flat tomb-slab in Greyfriars Kirkyard, fifteen yards from where Alexander Henderson himself is buried, on which the Covenant was laid out in the open air for the burgh of Edinburgh to subscribe in the first week of March 1638, and which is still there.