After much deliberation, and the reconcilement of many scruples of conscience and difficulties among the various classes of Presbyterians, this elaborate and solemn compact and vow was publicly promulgated, and, for the first time, sworn in Edinburgh, on the 28th of February 1633.[20] An immense concourse of spectators assembled in the Greyfriars’ church and churchyard, at an early hour, on the morning of that day; and at two o’clock, Rothes and Loudon of the nobility, Henderson and Dickson of the clergy, and Johnston, their legal adviser, arrived with the Covenant ready for signature. Henderson began the solemnities of the day with prayer, and Loudon followed in an oration of great courage and power; after which, about four o’clock, the Earl of Sutherland was the first to step forward and inscribe his name on the Covenant; and he was immediately followed by Sir Andrew Murray, a minister at Abdy in Fife, and all who were within the church; after which it was laid out on a flat gravestone in the churchyard, and signed, till the parchment was full, by persons of all ranks, sexes, and ages, with uplifted hands, and consecrated by solemn invocations to heaven, and with such demonstrations of enthusiasm as it is difficult, in these latter times, to imagine. It was a day, as piously and eloquently described by Henderson, in which the people in multitudes offered themselves to the service of Heaven “like the dew drops in the morning”—“wherein the arm of the Lord was revealed”—and “the Princes of the people assembled to swear allegiance to the King of kings.”
These impressive proceedings did not terminate till nine o’clock in the evening; but the next day copies of the Covenant were laid open through the city and signed, with very few exceptions, by all the people. They were transmitted through all the provincial towns and parishes; and, unless, by a few at St Andrew’s, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, the Covenant was hailed with mingled emotions of devotion and patriotism, such as, perhaps, never either before or since pervaded any nation with such simultaneous unanimity. Its spirit spread far and wide over the land like fire over its heath-clad hills, penetrating the shadows which brooded in the firmament; and, as the fiery cross was wont to be the signal for array in feudal strife, it summoned the sons of the hill and the dale to prepare their swords, should these be needed, for combat in a holier cause—subduing, with unexampled power, the hereditary feuds of hostile clans, and combining the whole nation into one mighty phalanx of incalculable energy.
It is unnecessary, in this place, to trace all the turnings and windings of the tortuous policy by which, after this decisive demonstration of physical, as well as of moral strength, King Charles and his abettors endeavoured, for some months, to break down this great combination. Every variety of intrigue, and every artifice for procrastination, was employed to divide the Covenanters, and quell the spirit which had thus been evoked by his arbitrary proceedings; and the duplicity of Charles, in holding forth terms of accommodation, while he was preparing to crush Scotland by force of arms, is a fact fully demonstrated by many documents of unquestionable authenticity, which leaves one of the deepest stains that still rest on the memory of that misguided and unfortunate monarch. On one occasion when the Marquis of Hamilton came from Court, on a pretended amicable mission as the King’s Commissioner, he was received at his entrance by 60,000 of his Majesty’s Scottish subjects, including nearly all the nobility, gentry, and 600 clergymen, in a body, whose line extended from Musselburgh to the outskirts of the Metropolis; presenting a spectacle which moved the Commissioner even to tears, and drew from him a wish, that his monarch had but witnessed such a host of his subjects, seeking only the enjoyment of their civil and religious liberties.
After many ineffectual attempts, by intimidation and artifice, to dissolve this league, and to break asunder the ties by which the Covenanters were bound together—after issuing new proclamations for the enforcement of the Liturgy, and the rotten Episcopacy of Scotland, and again in trepidation recalling these—after attempting, by a revival of the Covenant and Confession of the former reign, with hollow and equivocal terms intermixed with it, to counteract the National Covenant—and, after essaying to beguile the Covenanters by conceding to them a General Assembly of the Church and a Parliament, fettered, however, with such conditions as would have rendered these but a repetition of the corrupt and packed assemblages which, from 1606 to 1618, inclusive, had, under the management of his father, subverted the law of the land and the liberties of the Church—Charles was at length constrained to bow before a spirit which he could neither quell nor conquer. Hamilton, after various journeys betwixt the Court and Scotland, at last arrived at Dalkeith on the 16th of August; and, after anxious consultations with the Privy Council during several days, that body, with the royal sanction, at length abandoned the policy which he had endeavoured to enforce, and two acts were proclaimed—the one indicting a General Assembly at Glasgow on the 21st of November following, and another summoning a Parliament to be held at Edinburgh on the 15th of May 1639; and, at the same time, a declaration by the King was proclaimed, discharging the use of the Service Book, Books of Canons, High Commission, and Articles of the Perth Assembly—ordaining free entry to ministers, and subjecting the bishops to the jurisdiction of the General Assembly. A sort of amnesty also was passed, and a fast appointed to be held, on the fourteenth day before the Assembly, for a peaceable end to the distractions of the country.[21]
And thus the people of Scotland achieved a vindication of their laws and liberties, without one human life being sacrificed, or one drop of blood being shed; after years of deep dissimulation, was Charles constrained, by a great national confederacy, to yield in the end, all that his subjects had required at his hands as their sovereign. The conflict, however, was not yet terminated, and it continued, with many varieties of fortune, through future years. But the purpose for which the preceding narrative has been given being attained, it would be premature to prosecute these historical details further at present. Such a preliminary statement, however, appeared to be necessary, in order to clear the way for the Proceedings of the first General Assembly of the Church which had taken place during the long space of thirty-six years; for, although there had been six nominal assemblies during that interval,[22] these were so overborne by royal interference, and illegal and unwarrantable intrusions, that they were all essentially illegal, and were afterwards held to be null and void for ever.
In bringing the Proceedings of the Assembly 1638, under the reader’s notice, it is deemed expedient to do so by embodying in these pages a very interesting account of the meeting of the Assembly, from the Journals of Principal Baillie, who was a member of it, and whose volumes, referable to those times, are considered of the highest authority by all succeeding historians. His account of the Assembly, up to the time that the Court was constituted by the election of a Moderator and Clerk, is all that is meant to be given in this place.
“Notwithstanding the indiction,” says Baillie, “our hopes were but slender ever to see the downsitting of our passionately-desired Assembly with the Commissioner’s consent, for daily he found himself more and more disappointed in his expectation to obtain these things which it seems he put the King in hopes might be gotten. Episcopacy to be put in place of safety, above the reach of the Assembly’s hand, was now seen to be impossible, if his engines for this purpose, by the skill of his party, was turned back upon him. The Council had subscribed the King’s Covenant, as it was exponed at the first in the 1581 year. His declaration, that Episcopacy was then in our Church, and will, that the Assembly should be discharged to meddle in the trial of this matter, could not be gotten concluded in a Council act. Sundry of the Lords of the Session being required to subscribe the Covenant in that his sense, refused; with a protestation, that the exposition of these parts which might make for or against Episcopacy, should be referred to the determination of the ensuing Assembly. Noblemen and ministers did not dissemble their mind in their discourse of the unlawfulness, at least the inexpediency, of this office in our Church, and so their design by any means to have it presently put down. This put his Grace in great perplexity; for he conceived, as some said, by the words and writs of sundry of our nobles of chief respect, that the Assembly might have been gotten persuaded to establish, at least to permit, or pass by untouched, that office: when the contrary appeared, he was at a nonplus; for his instructions had made the place of bishops a noli me tangere; but their persons were permitted to the doom of the severest mouth among us, where their miscarrying had required censure. His next disappointment was in the matter of the Covenant. He thought to have gotten the King’s Covenant universally subscribed, and ratified hereafter in the Assembly; so that the other, which had been subscribed by us before, might be quietly, without any infamous condemning of it, suppressed and buried. But far above and against all his thoughts, that Covenant was universally refused; and, among these few that put their hands to it, divers avowed their mind, in all things, to be the same with those who had sworn the first. The missing of this intention increased his Grace’s malcontentment. In two other designs also he found himself much deceived. He thought, an act for the freedom of the practice of Perth Articles, might have contented us; and without condemning the matters themselves, before the Parliament by supplication had been brought to the casing of the standing law; but an universal inclination appeared in all to have the things themselves tried without delay, and acts presently found anent them, as their nature required. Sicklike his instructions carried him to the removal of the high commission, books of canons, ordination, service, but to reason or condemn anything contained in any of them, which might have reflected against any public order, or anything practised or allowed by my Lord of Canterbury and his followers, in England or elsewhere. We in no case could be content, except we were permitted to examine all that were in these books, their matter now being the avowed doctrine of many in our Church; and since we found the articles of Arminius, with many points of the grossest Popery, in the books, sermons, and discourses of our bishops and ministers, we were resolved to have these doctrines censured as they deserved, without any sparing with respect to any person who maintained them.
“The Commissioner, finding himself mistaken in all these, and many more of his designs, was afraid to labour to discharge the Assembly before it began, or at least to mar it so, if it sat down, that it should do no good. We referred to this intention his diligence to find subscribers to protestations against the assembly. We heard by our opposites of huge numbers of thir; yet when it came to the proof, there were but few who could be moved to put their hands to such an act; yea, not one who durst avow it, and reason the lawfulness of their deed. Some twenty hands at most were at the bishops’ declinature opposite to our covenant. A few others, especially eight of the Presbytery of Glasgow, (who, to the Commissioner’s great discontent, refused to adhere,) made forms of protestations by themselves; but to no purpose. From this same intention, we alleged, flowed the putting to the horn, some days before our sitting, all these commissioners of the nobles, gentry, ministers, who, for any civil cause or pretence, could be gotten denounced, that so the synod should be deprived of many members. This practice was so new, and so strong reasons given in, why this kind of horning should hinder none from voicing in a synod, that no use was or durst be made of any such exception; only the Treasurer’s good-will, by the invention, was collected to be but small toward our cause. A proclamation also was made, that none should come to the place of the Assembly but such as were members; and that in a peaceable manner. We protested, all might come who had interest, of party, witnesses, voters, assessors, complainers, or whatever way; and that every man might come with such retinue and equipage as the Lords of Council should give example.
“These, and many more occurrences, put us in a continual fear of the Assembly’s discharge; yet the King’s word was engaged so deeply, proclamations, publick fastings at his command, had already past; and mainly the King’s thought, that the inserting what he had granted, anent the service-book, canons, and Perth articles, in the Assembly’s books, would give some contentment to the people, and disengage his promise of an assembly, though nothing more should be granted: these, and such considerations, made the Assembly sit down, contrary to all our fears, and a fair face to be made for a while by the Commissioner, as if he intended nothing else, and confidently expected his sitting till all questions should be peaceably decided for the content of all.
“On Friday, the 16th of November, we in the west, as were desired, came to Glasgow; our noblemen, especially Eglinton, backed with great numbers of friends and vassals. We were informed, that the Commissioner and counsellors were to take up the town with a great number of their followers. So the nearest noblemen and gentlemen were desired to come in that night well attended. The town expected and provided for huge multitudes of people, and put on their houses and beds excessive prices; but the diligence of the magistrates, and the vacancy of many rooms, quickly moderated that excess. We were glad to see such order, and large provision, above all men’s expectation; for which the town got much thanks and credit. It can lodge easily, at once, Council, Session, Parliament, and General Assembly, if need should require.