Clan Henderson · 1638
The National Covenant in Greyfriars
On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1638, in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, the Scottish nobility and gentry gathered to subscribe a four-thousand-word document called the National Covenant, drafted by the Edinburgh advocate Archibald Johnston of Wariston and the Leuchars minister Alexander Henderson, in the third month of the country's open resistance to the Caroline-Laudian Prayer Book that Charles I had attempted to impose on the Kirk by royal warrant. The Covenant was signed by some four hundred men in the kirk that afternoon, and laid out on a flat tomb-slab in the kirkyard for the remainder of the burgh to subscribe over the next several days. Many signed in their own blood. The document was then carried in copy through every shire of Lowland Scotland, and was, by the spring, signed by the great majority of the country's adult male Protestant population. The Covenant became the constitutional pivot of the next half-century of Scottish history: of the Bishops' Wars of 1639–40, of the alliance with the English Parliament in 1643, of the Westminster Assembly, of the long defeat at Dunbar in 1650, and of the political identity of Presbyterian Scotland for two hundred years afterwards.
It is twenty past two on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1638, in the nave of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, in cold light through the high south windows. He is fifty-five years old. He is Alexander Henderson, minister of the parish of Leuchars in Fife, by training a moderate, by temperament a careful Latinist, by the events of the last six months one of the two principal authors of the document that has just been laid out on the upper end of the communion table. Archibald Johnston of Wariston is at his right elbow with a quill and an inkpot. The Earl of Rothes is at his left.
The kirk is filling. The doors at the west end have been open since one o'clock and the procession of nobles and lairds and burgh commissioners has been coming up the Cowgate from the Lawnmarket in groups of ten and twelve. The kirkyard outside is already three deep at the gate. The body of the kirk is, by the count Wariston has been taking from the porch, two hundred and twenty men with another hundred and forty in the kirkyard. They will not all subscribe today; subscription will go on for a week.
The document on the table is in Wariston's hand, four sheets of vellum stitched into a single roll, four thousand and some words. It begins with the recital of the Negative Confession of 1581 (the brief Calvinist confession Knox's generation had written in the king's name) and goes on through eighteen acts of the Scottish Parliament that have set the religion of the country, and concludes with the famous Band in the Henderson hand: that the subscribers will, by all lawful means and to the utmost of their power, defend the same religion. The document does not name the king. The document does not name the bishops. The document is, by every careful Latinist's reading of it, a constitutional argument and not a rebellion.
He thinks: the king has had three months to send a reply to the supplications. The king has not sent a reply.
He thinks: the bishops have, in private, been told by Spottiswoode that the king will hold to the Prayer Book. The bishops have, in public, said nothing.
He thinks: if the burgh subscribes today, the country subscribes by Easter. If the country subscribes by Easter, the General Assembly meets in the autumn and the Prayer Book is set aside.
He thinks: the king will read the Covenant in London in three weeks. The king will read it as treason. The king will be wrong about it being treason. The king will be right that it is the end of his Scottish bishops.
He thinks: I have spent four months drafting language that does not name the bishops and does not name the king and that holds the country to the Reformation Parliament's Acts. The language has held in the drafting committee. It will hold today.
Wariston, on the table, finishes the reading of the document at half past two. The Earl of Rothes is the first to step forward. He signs in ink, in a careful hand, on the upper margin of the first sheet. The Earl of Argyll, who has come up from London this week and has not declared himself, follows him. Lord Loudon. Lord Lindsay. The Earl of Cassillis. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh. The minister of St Giles. The list runs through the afternoon, and into the evening by candle, and out into the kirkyard the next morning where the document is laid on a flat ledger tomb-slab and the burgh and the country gentry sign in turn for the next five days. By the tradition of the next two centuries, several signed in their own blood. By the contemporary diaries it was several score of younger lairds, who did so to make a point, not the majority.
The Covenant was carried in copies through every Lowland shire by the end of March 1638. By the General Assembly at Glasgow in November the country had effectively re-formed the Kirk on Presbyterian lines and abolished episcopacy. The First Bishops' War of June 1639 was, on the Scottish side, the army of the Covenant in the field. The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 took the same theological ground into a military alliance with the English Parliament against Charles I. Henderson became Moderator of the General Assembly four times, attended the Westminster Assembly in London as one of the Scottish commissioners, and died in Edinburgh in 1646, twenty months before Charles I went to the scaffold. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, fifteen yards from the slab on which the Covenant had been laid out for subscription. The slab is still there. The Covenant in its various extant copies is in the National Records of Scotland; the most-quoted copy is the one held at Edinburgh University, four sheets of vellum, four hundred signatures on the margins. The line in the kirkyard tradition that several Edinburgh advocates pricked their thumbs and signed in blood is, by the contemporary record, true of perhaps four men. The phrase that gathered around them was the Covenanters, and it would be a name to die under for the next sixty-eight years, until the toleration that came with the Glorious Revolution.