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Scotland and the twin monarchies
While the bonds of England’s Irish empire were thus being refashioned, the spotlight returned to Scotland. In 1485 a part-Welsh dynasty, the Tudors, had been prevailed upon to rescue England from a disputed succession. Now it was Scotland’s turn. In truth, candidates for the English crown had always been of mixed blood, but the Tudors and the Stuarts were considered sufficiently ‘native’ by their respective nations of origin as satisfactorily to dilute the English monarchy.
With the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, the succession to the English throne passed to Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, as great-great-grandson of Henry Tudor. The new king had been tutored in the bloodstained Scottish court under the tutelage of various regents. Perhaps surprisingly, he had matured into a competent, even erudite ruler. On assuming the English throne as James I (r.1603–25), his progress south to London was a much-ridiculed cavalcade of ‘coarse and beggarly Scotsmen’. He exercised his prerogative as he went, hanging some victims without trial and conferring knighthoods on all who asked, even reputedly (and improbably) on a side of beef as ‘sir loin’.
In London, Elizabeth’s tired Puritan regime was galvanised by the newcomer from Scotland’s Renaissance court. London society came to life. Entertainment was raucous and bisexual. Shakespeare’s previously modest South Bank troupe became The King’s Men. James built an exquisite Italian palace at Greenwich, the Queen’s House, designed by Inigo Jones, for his Danish wife, Anne. London’s view of Scotland as a place of dour Calvinists was transformed.
James was the nearest an English monarch had come – or perhaps ever would come – to an intellectual and a diplomat. His determination to end Elizabeth’s long and costly war with Spain bore early fruit in the Treaty of London of 1604. He tried to steer a middle way between continuing Catholic tendencies in the Church of England and the more extreme Puritans. His chief handicap was to enjoy arguing with everyone, not least with parliamentarians in Edinburgh and London. This was complicated by his belief in the royal prerogative as a divine right, on which he wrote a book. He was also fascinated by witchcraft, an interest to be honoured by his house dramatist William Shakespeare in Macbeth.
James was the king separately of Scotland but ex officio of Ireland and Wales. He personified the ‘union of crowns’, and in 1606 invented the union flag composed of the crosses of St George and St Andrew. There was much argument over which should be on top of the other, with St George winning. James wished also to see constitutional union with Scotland, in what might be called the Welsh solution. Citing the Almighty, he told the London Parliament, ‘Hath He not made us all in one island, compassed with one sea and of itself by nature indivisible?’
The Scottish assembly was ready to agree with James, but the English one was not. A union of crowns was one thing, of parliaments and governments another. London MPs still regarded Scotland much as had the Romans, a land of northern barbarians and unfit to send members to Westminster. One MP said of the Scots, they had ‘not suffered above two kings to die in their beds in two hundred years’, though a similar accusation had not excluded the Welsh. James was rebuffed and had to remain king of two separate nations. His fixation on the union was at least commemorated in calling the national flag the Union Jack after his nickname.
A similar and more delicate distance was established in matters ecclesiastical. The Scottish Presbyterians shared none of James’s enthusiasm for bishops, regarded as England’s quasi-Catholic episcopal hierarchy. Conflict was to continue throughout James’s reign. Presbyterianism had taken deep root in Scotland and any confrontation would merely lead to conflict. As long as both countries at least were Protestant, James diplomatically let the matter rest.
In the event, the king did not return to Scotland for fourteen years, ruling by letter from London. As king of Scotland he governed, he said, ‘with my pen … which others could not do by the sword’. When he did return it was to grapple with the severest blot on the country’s politics, and one that had defeated his predecessors. This was the continuing clan anarchy in the Highlands and Islands. Massacres and vendettas continued. At the Eigg massacre in 1577 the Macleods suffocated 350 MacDonalds by trapping them in a cave and lighting a fire at its mouth. In 1603 the MacGregors killed over 140 Colquhouns in cold blood at the Battle of Glen Fruin.
James employed familiar methods, including imprisonment, summary execution and land expropriation. He even banned the notorious MacGregors from using their own name. Determined to lift the Highlands into the modern age, he demanded that the clan chiefs’ male heirs be educated in Edinburgh. Under the Statutes of Iona, bards, beggars and fugitives were banned – as was the sale of wine and whisky ‘other than to chiefs and gentlemen’. This was true Highland emasculation.
Central to James’s policy was the grant of ever more power to the Stuarts’ ancestral allies, the Campbells of Argyll. Like the Stuarts, the Campbells were not long-standing Highlanders. According to Alistair Moffat, they took their name from the Gaelic for ‘crooked mouth’, meaning foreign sounding. Their origins were probably in Brythonic-speaking Strathclyde. Either way, in 1607 the Campbells were granted the peninsula of Kintyre from the MacDonalds and the island of Islay from the Macleans, assuring them the lasting enmity of both. Unlike the great castles built by the English against the Welsh, the castles of Scotland were built by Scotsmen against each other. Interclan violence did not cease but its scale drastically diminished.
Where James had debated and negotiated with Presbyterians, his son Charles I (r.1625–49) would have none of them. As king of Scotland and notionally of its church, he was determined to bring the Kirk into line with the English church, notably on bishops, governance and liturgy. When he visited Scotland to be crowned its king in 1633, he came accompanied by his conservative Archbishop Laud, complete with candles, crucifixes and genuflection. He ignored the Presbyterian assembly and enforced Laud’s new prayer book on churches throughout Scotland.
This was religious provocation of a high order. When the new prayer book was read in Edinburgh’s St Giles’s cathedral on the first Sunday of the new regime, there was a riot, sparked in part by a female activist, Jenny Geddes, throwing a stool at the minister. The Bishop of Brechin conducted Sunday services with a pair of loaded pistols ready on his pulpit. The prayer book proved unusable and the bulk of the Scottish aristocracy and establishment said so, forming a committee of opposition known as the Tables. By 1638 Scotland was in a ferment not seen since the days of Mary Queen of Scots.
Charles in London was wholly unmoved, demanding all dissent be punished. The Scottish response was a new National Covenant drawn up by the Tables and approved by the Scottish parliament. It honoured Scotland’s loyalty to the king in matters secular but not religious. Here loyalty should be to Christ and the Bible. Protestantism was the faith of Scotland and the Covenant was described as ‘the great marriage day of this nation with God’. It was carried to towns across the Lowlands and signed by thousands, the first great petition in British history. Only Royalist pockets round Aberdeen declined to sign.
This Covenant was to be of deep and lasting significance to Scottish identity. As the Irish were steeling themselves to a divorce from London on Catholicism, so were the Scots on Protestantism. Both saw widespread popular uprisings against an English central authority utterly resistant to compromise. To the Scots, the Henrician Reformation had toppled the pope but merely replaced him with the king. The Scots wanted no pope, Roman or English. The Covenant was a cry ‘against our poor country being made an English province’. Scottish clergymen who failed to read the Covenant from their pulpits were howled down and driven from them by their congregations.
Scotland had its own parliament and government, led by provosts, church leaders, academics and clan chiefs. The last included the Calvinist Campbells, Earls of Argyll, and James Graham, Marquess of Montrose. Its church was governed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Glasgow, which declared all bishops dismissed and Laud’s prayer book ‘heathenish, Popish, Jewish and Arminian’. Scotland might offer formal homage to England but in matters of religion it could hardly have expressed its independence more vigorously, not least to its own king. The Scottish Covenant was a first daring taste at least of an institutional British democracy.
The Bishops’ Wars
History books describe the British Isles in the 1630s as lurching towards civil war. Most of Europe was in the death throes of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), a dispute rooted in Catholic opposition to the Lutheran Reformation. Though it had religious overtones, England’s conflict between Charles and Parliament was essentially political. It was an argument over the nature of popular consent to monarchical rule, a tension that had run intermittently through English politics since Magna Carta (1215). Now an implacable king and an implacable Parliament rendered it insoluble short of war.
That was one civil war. In reality there was a second, known at least in Scotland and Ireland as the War of the Three Kingdoms. It tested to destruction the one-sided treaties and concordats that had bonded England, Scotland and Ireland over the centuries since Edward I. At issue were to be Ireland’s repressive Poynings’ Law and the plantation and Scotland’s rebellious Covenant. As England divided and took to arms, Scotland and Ireland found their loyalties conflicted and their freedoms jeopardised.
Charles’s immediate reaction to Scotland’s Covenant was reckless. There would be no compromise. With no money voted by his mildly pro-Scottish Parliament, the king in 1639 assembled a ramshackle army and marched north to Berwick. There he confronted a Scottish force led by Alexander Leslie, commander of hardened troops recently serving with the Swedish army in the Thirty Years War. After negotiations in which the Scots refused to concede, the two sides reached stalemate.
The following year Charles tried again, and again failed to raise funds from a Westminster Parliament now strongly sympathetic to the Scots. He demanded that his deputy in Ireland, the Earl of Strafford, send him troops, despite fierce Irish opposition from Ulster Protestants supporting the Presbyterian Covenant. No battle of any consequence ensued, largely because the king’s soldiers were not considered fit to fight. By the end of 1640 the so-called Bishops’ Wars has dissipated and the Scots were left in control of the north of England, including Newcastle and Durham. Strafford was summoned to London by Parliament, impeached and executed in 1641. Scotland had won and was relatively at peace.
Ireland and plantation
In 1640 Charles in England had ended eleven years of ‘the tyranny’ by summoning what became the Long Parliament. It was composed largely of a new middle class of gentry, strongly Protestant and opposed to the king’s assertion of divine supremacy. This appalled Catholic Ireland. For almost a decade it had been ruled by Strafford and Dublin’s oligarchs. Strafford was now gone and the arrival of a Protestant London Parliament was the starting signal for another Irish rebellion, one that was to last from 1641 to 1653.
The O’Neills of Tyrone under Owen Roe O’Neill returned from the flight of the earls with bands of seasoned veterans of the Thirty Years War. O’Neill’s opponents were now legion. They embraced the London Parliament, the Protestant ‘ascendancy’ in Dublin, the plantation communities of the north and a new threat, of Scottish ‘Covenanter’ soldiers being sent to Ulster by Edinburgh to enforce London’s anti-Catholicism. Ireland’s sole ambition was to be left alone with its lands intact and its faith Catholic.
The rebels seized much of Ulster, massacring Protestant settlers and driving thousands back to Scotland or to the security of Dublin’s Protestant Pale. An atrocity in Portadown saw Catholics drive a hundred settlers off a bridge into the River Bann, to be shot as they struggled in the water. An alleged quarter of Ireland’s Protestant population was killed and parts of Ulster were described as ‘looking like hell if hell could exist on earth’. Within weeks in 1641 O’Neill, was in control of much of Ireland, though not Dublin. He professed loyalty to King Charles – assuming the king’s sympathy for Catholicism – but opposition to the Westminster Parliament.
In 1642 the Scots agreed with London to send an army to Ulster, which set sail and held the north-east in alliance with Ulster Protestant militias. It proceeded no further. In May that year an Irish Catholic Confederacy was formed in Kilkenny that was soon well enough established for Spain, France and the papacy to support it with ambassadors and military aid. The confederacy claimed to rule most of Ireland, if not all. It was the nearest the island was to come to ‘home rule’ until the twentieth century.
The 1640s thus saw the Bishops’ Wars enable the Scots to repossess the religious and political sovereignty for which they had long fought and which they felt they had achieved in the 1328 and 1560 Treaties of Edinburgh. To that extent, they had no further quarrel with England. Meanwhile across the Irish Sea the Irish confederacy, at least in 1642, had achieved Catholic supremacy over much of the island and even seen itself widely recognised internationally. Both nations had won a sort of independence from England. Yet at the very moment when they might have achieved a settlement with an England that was itself about to fight over its constitutional status, the Scots and Irish plunged into internecine religious conflict.
Scotland plays its hand
In 1642 Charles raised the standard of revolt against Parliament and fought the first battle of his Civil War at Edgehill in Warwickshire. The outcome was indecisive and left Parliament in a quandary. It pleaded for aid from the Scots, whose Bishops’ Wars army under Leslie was still intact and experienced. The Scots knew they were in a powerful position. They would aid their Puritan brothers in England, but only so long as it was to fight against bishops and the ‘popish’ worship of the English king. Scottish negotiators in 1643 duly drew up a Solemn League and Covenant with the English Parliament, agreeing that Leslie’s army would march south against Charles in return for a reform of the Anglican church on Presbyterian lines. In addition, £31,000 would be paid to Scotland for each month its army was in service. A desperate London Parliament agreed.
In the summer of 1644, 2,000 Scottish soldiers joined Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead force and other regiments outside York. At the Battle of Marston Moor they overwhelmed Charles’s Royalists, killing over 4,000. ‘God made them as stubble to our swords,’ said Cromwell. This early intervention by Scotland was decisive. Defeat would have left the Royalists with the initiative, whereas Cromwell’s troops now emerged as the strongest weapon in the Parliamentary armoury.
At home, Scotland was divided. It had begun the war on Parliament’s side but a number of Highland clans remained loyal to the Stuart monarch, in particular the MacDonalds. In his cause the latter threw a group of Campbell women over a cliff to their deaths. Then in 1644 James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, switched sides to support the king and seized and sacked Aberdeen. He crossed Scotland to Campbell country and burned the Argyll castle of Inveraray to the ground, with enthusiastic assistance from MacDonalds and Macleans. Montrose’s campaign ended in the taking of Glasgow in the spring of 1645, when for a brief period he and the Royalists had most of Scotland at their feet.
To Charles in England this was scant consolation. His last personal stand was at the Battle of Naseby in 1645, after which he fled for refuge to what he thought was a sympathetic Scottish camp at Newark. The Scottish commanders debated his fate, his case being undermined by letters discovered from his wife Henrietta Maria in Paris, begging for military aid from Catholic France. The queen pledged that Charles would ensure in return that England would go ‘back to Rome’. The king’s plea for Scottish refuge was now denied and the Scots handed him over to Parliament for the enormous sum of £400,000.
The Scottish army returned home to overwhelm Montrose, who fled not to France but to Norway. Three years later, when Charles was scheming his restoration in prison on the Isle of Wight, some Scots did gather in his support. This time it was, bizarrely, in return for Charles agreeing to ‘give Presbyterianism a trial’ in England. But a Royalist Scottish force under the Duke of Hamilton was swiftly put down by Cromwell, who visited Edinburgh and received a hero’s welcome staged for him by Argyll and other Covenanters. The Scots were not always of one mind. In 1649 Parliament despaired of Charles’s encouragement of Scottish insurrection. He was duly brought to London and execution, a republic being declared with Parliament as ‘the supreme power in this nation’. The word ‘nation’ was undefined.
Wales’s sad Royalists
While the Irish were mostly for Charles, and the Scots were sometimes for him, the Welsh were overwhelmingly so. They had been happy with Laud’s prayer book – Laud was formerly Bishop of St David’s – and only one of the twenty-seven Welsh MPs in the Long Parliament was strictly a Puritan. Welsh pockets of support for Parliament were confined to the ‘English’ settlement of Pembroke and the borders round Wrexham. In 1642 the Royalist Earl of Worcester in Raglan even offered refuge to Charles after Naseby and to the young Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. The Venetian ambassador reported that the Welsh were ‘beseeching the king to go and live in that corner of the kingdom’.
The principality at one point contributed 10,000 men to Charles’s army, and the castle at Harlech was the last Royalist stronghold to hold out in Wales, not surrendering until 1647. A year later a disgruntled Parliamentary force in south Wales rebelled and staged a Royalist uprising of 8,000 troops in Pembroke. It was quickly defeated at the Battle of St Fagans outside Cardiff, reputedly the largest battle ever fought on Welsh soil. Wales was pacified by Cromwell himself in a march to Pembroke.
Royalist Wales now had its officers stripped of their estates. They were transferred to four Parliamentary colonels, all with the name of Jones. Its castles were slighted, with Caerphilly and Raglan showing the scars to this day. Though Wales was firmly Protestant, a commissioner for the propagation of the gospel was sent to introduce strict Puritan worship and 270 conservative Anglican clergy were dismissed from their posts. At the same time seventy English-speaking grammar schools were set up, including some for girls. Cromwell said of Wales that ‘God hath kindled a seed there hardly to parallel since ancient times’.
The devastation of Ireland
Ireland’s independent Catholic Confederacy remained firmly Royalist and was treated by Parliament with none of the leniency Cromwell had shown towards Wales. It had since 1641 been in formal rebellion against England, though English Parliamentarian forces had re-established control of the Dublin Pale. Ulster Protestants were also in control of most of Ulster. With the death of Charles I, the confederacy was in formal alliance with Charles II, based in France and ready to stage an invasion of England. It was a threat London could not ignore.
In the summer of 1649 Cromwell arrived in Dublin with his general Henry Ireton, a hundred ships and a battle-hardened army. He systematically crushed the increasingly divided confederacy. The town of Drogheda, on refusing to surrender, suffered atrocities and executions. Rebel leaders were exiled as an alternative to execution and their land was confiscated and given to English soldiers. It was the Thirty Years War on Irish soil. The proportion of land now held by Protestants rose from 41 per cent to 78 per cent. Gaelic schools were closed and some 12,000 rebel Irish soldiers were shipped to the West Indies as indentured labourers, in effect slaves. Of some 1.5 million Irish it is estimated a third died during the confederacy, killed, starved or diseased. Cromwell declared Ireland a republic. Its eight years of home rule had come to a bloody end.
Scotland changes its mind, again
Scotland for its part had been regarded as an ally of Parliament, but the Scots deplored Charles’s execution and yet again changed sides, welcoming his son, the uncrowned Charles II, back from exile in France. In 1651 Argyll, though a Presbyterian, crowned him king of Scotland in Edinburgh and supplied him with an army to march south in the cause of restoring a Stuart to the throne. Scotland was now at war in support of the same dynasty it had crushed at Marston Moor. It was an extraordinary about-turn.
Cromwell defeated the Scots that July at the Battle of Inverkeithing, where 800 Maclean clansmen died. Undaunted, Charles amassed a new force and marched south to resume the conflict at the Battle of Worcester, where he was again defeated. This time he hid in an oak tree – the ‘royal oak’ – and fled to France in disguise. Cromwell’s commander in Scotland, General George Monck, put Dundee to the sword and threatened to do likewise to all other towns on pain of massive fines. The Scottish monarchy and parliament were disbanded and the coat of arms symbolically hanged on a gallows. A decade of political duplicity had led the Scots nowhere but to renewed subordination to England.
A commonwealth of the British Isles was declared in London in 1649. Cromwell had successively defeated the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots. He had devastated Dublin and ordered all Catholics to leave. The War of the Three Kingdoms might have begun with Ireland and Scotland enjoying a considerable degree of self-rule. They had now forfeited and lost it utterly.
Cromwell introduced what Edward I, Henry VIII and James I had attempted but not achieved, the total political union of the British Isles. He abolished diocesan bishops and the House of Lords and ordained that the Westminster Commons be elected from England, Wales and Scotland, though not Ireland. Censorship was imposed, theatres and most taverns closed, church ritual banned. It was, as Alexander Pope would later say, a reduction to one dead level all mankind. The centralisation was fierce and certain to evoke resentment and opposition. Cromwell’s republican dictatorship lasted five years until his death in 1658.
The constitutional future of the British Isles could at this point have taken a number of paths. Europe’s 1648 Peace of Westphalia had dealt at length with the relationship of large states and empires to their subordinate nations. Its participants had deliberated on the status of kings and princes and on the role of religious tolerance. The concept of small-state independence was in the air. In the 1640s Ireland and Scotland had produced strong local leadership, in Ireland from the O’Neills and the Catholic Confederacy and in Scotland from the Campbells and the Church Assembly. Both nations could reasonably have seen a federal commonwealth as freedom’s opportunity.
Yet at no point did they propose it or did they liaise with each other on alternatives. Indeed, the War of the Three Kingdoms saw each kingdom at odds internally as well as with each other. Irish confederates had fought Scots Covenanters in Ireland. In Scotland, Highlanders had fought Lowlanders. The Edinburgh mob cheered Montrose, Cromwell and Charles II in succession. Only in Wales did the bulk of the population sit tight and await events. Whatever opportunity republicanism might have offered to unity between the nations passed. It was an exhausted England that eventually found a sort of cohesion.
In 1660 General Monck marched his army south. He took soundings and summoned the members of the twenty-year-old, pre-Cromwellian Long Parliament for consultation. Debate was intense but with Monck always in command. With public opinion clearly in favour of restoration, he invited Charles II (r.1660–80) back from the continent to his vacant throne. Charles arrived in London at Blackheath to a guard of honour of Cromwell’s Ironside troops. He entered the city to general rejoicing.
There must have been a sense of déjà vu in London as a Stuart monarchy was restored, a Protestant High Church re-established, complete with bishops, and a Westminster Parliament of English and Welsh MPs reassembled. In line with the Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles while exiled in the Netherlands, widespread pardons were granted and tolerance ordained for ‘differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. None the less, Catholics and extreme Puritans who refused to take Anglican communion were excluded from public offices by a series of Test Acts. These applied in Ireland and Wales, forming a base on which a formidable Nonconformity was added to an entrenched Catholicism. In Scotland adherence to a strict Calvinism was ordained. It was as if England was determined to sow disagreement and dissention, not union.