Covenanter

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The Covenanters formed an important movement in the religion and politics of Scotland in the seventeeth century. In religion the movement is most associated with the promotion and development of Presbyterianism as a form of church government favoured by the people, as opposed to Episcopacy, favoured by the crown. In politics the movement saw important developments in the character and operation of the Scottish Parliament, which began a steady shift away from its medieval origins. The movement as a whole was essentially conservative in tone; but it began a revolution that engulfed both Britain and Ireland.

The name derives from biblical bonds, or covenants. The National Covenant of 1638 takes as its point of departure earlier documents of the same kind, and is chiefly concerned with preserving the Reformation settlement, free from crown innovations.. It's sister document, the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant, is also concerned with religion, but its chief importance is as a treaty of alliance between the Covenanters in Scotland and the Parliament of England, anxious for help in the increasingly bitter civil war with Charles I.

Congregations and Kings

The Covenanters are so named because in a series of bands or covenants they bound themselves to maintain the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. In December 1557, with the Reformers locked in a struggle with the Scottish government, headed at the time by Mary of Guise, the Catholic Queen-Regent, a number of lords entered into a formal pact-or Covenant-pledging that the 'Congregation of Christ' would unite to defend itself against the 'Congregation of Satan'. As a form of combination this was a seminal development, but one which nevertheless took as its point of departure the kind of pacts for mutual defence contained in older bonds of manrent.

Still later, in 1581, James VI, in an attempt to disarm criticism's of the growth of Catholic influence at his court, signed what was to become known as the 'King's Covenant'-or the 'Negative Confession.' Based on the Confession of Faith of 1560, it denounced the Pope and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church in no measured terms. The importance of this document-which had a limited impact at the time-lay in the future; for it was to be incorporated wholesale in the first truly national Covenant of 1638.

Bishops and Kings

The Scottish Reformation in 1560 had raised as many problems as it had settled. The authority of the Pope may have gone, but the exact status-and structure-of the new church remained uncertain for a considerable time. By the 1580s two distinct parties had emerged, one favouring Presbyterianism and the other Episcopacy. Broadly speaking this can be divided into what, for want of a better term, might be described as the 'church party'-headed by Andrew Melville-and the 'court party', headed by the king himself. For Melville bishops had no authority in scripture, whereas for James they were essential agents of royal power. Before the Union of the Crowns in 1603 there were occasions when one side prevailed, only to give way to the other, in what gives all the appearance of a political tug-of-war; but in the end James gained ground as Melville and his allies lost. In the early years of the seventeenth century he had introduced bishops at both the parliamentary and then the diocesan level. His triumph was complete when Melville was banished from Scotland for life.

It should be stressed that this contest had little-if anything-to do with particular forms of worship in the Scottish Church, which remained Calvinist, whether in a Presbyterian or a Calvinist guise, different in every way from the High Church Anglicanism increasingly favoured in the post-Elizabethan Church in England. It was when the King tried to move the Scots in this more dangerous direction that the problems started.

James may have succeeded in creating a unified British Crown; his ambition to create a unified British state was defeated at an early stage by the intransigence of both national parliaments. If there was to be no British state there might at least be a British church; for it was here, in the area of religion, that the royal prerogative was less circumscribed. How was such a model to be defined? For James the answer was immediate and obvious. In England the Reformation had been a partial, state directed process, which had allowed the continuation of many older Catholic practices. Above all, the English church was a mirror to the majesty of the crown. English bishops could, at times, be awkward customers; but nowhere near as awkward as Melville and his associates, whose preaching was on occasions not just impolitic but subversive. Their vestments and ceremonies were much more seemly in every way than the plain Scottish habit. As if on some kind of missionary work, when James returned to Scotland for a brief visit in 1617, the only one he ever made after the Union of the Crowns, he brought with him William Laud, then Dean of Gloucester, to demonstrate to the Scots just how splendid the spectacle of religion could be. He also came north with a related but supplementary task: to introduce a number of innovations which went beyond the bare issues of church government with which the crown had hitherto concerned itself.

Articles

Even against the wishes of John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews, who argued that the time for innovation was not ripe, James urged on a reluctant northern church five new ceremonies: private baptism, private communion for the sick, kneeling at communion, observance at the principal holy days and confirmation of children. A General Assembly of the Church held at St. Andrews greeted these innovations with so little enthusiasm that the king pointedly urged the ministers to think again, summoning a new Assembly to Perth in 1618. This time he got what he wanted, but with no good grace. The so-called Five Articles of Perth were ratified by Parliament in 1621, but only after much arm-twisting. It would not yet be true to say that the monarchy was in a minority of one; but for the first time in may years it was dangerously close to this position..

James had one saving feature: frequently drunk on theory he was always sobered by practice. When the depth opposition to the Five Articles, especially kneeling at communion, became known, while refusing to backtrack, he made no attempt to ensure that they were uniformly enforced. Established practice, in other words, became a matter of personal choice. From whatever point of view, the situation was far from satisfactory; and when James died in March 1625 the pen no longer governed Scotland with its accustomed ease.

James had neither created a unified church nor a unified state; he had simply united disparate political processes in England and Scotland, with the added complication of colonial Ireland. More seriously, there was now an undercurrant of opposition to royal policy in both England and Scotland: the English Puritans, silenced within an increasingly Arminian church, but still significant; and the Scottish Presbyterian dissidents given, it might be argued, a new lease by the king himself in the foolish introduction of the Five Articles into a church that gave all the signs of accepting Episcopalian government as a permanent state of affairs. James bequethed to his successor political and religious problems that would have challenged Solomon. Instead of Solomon Britain got Charles I.

Books

Apart from a few Scots courtiers in London, most of the leading men of the realm had ever seen Charles prior to his coronation in Edinburgh in 1633, eight years after he came to the throne. The suspicions and fears he had aroused by his earler Act of Revocation, which threatened to rob the nobles of all the church land they had gained since the Reformation, were deepened by the time he had left. He came to Scotland, like his father in 1617, accompanied by William Laud, now Bishop of London, and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Services were carried out at both Holyrood and St. Giles according to the Anglican rite, in the process of being refined, beautified and improved by Laud and his fellow Arminians. The king clearly intended to set an example; for many it was a simple act of provocation. For Charles the Scottish church offered a poor contrast to its English cousin. He completely failed to understand it was at least a national church, the one means of self-expression left to a country in danger of being submerged by the Anglo-centric policies that had emerged out of the Union of the Crowns. Having threatened the propert rights of the landed classes, and cast doubts on the teaching of the Scottish church, Charles proceeded to undermine what was left of the political power of the aristocracy: bit by bit they were replaced as the chief power in the land by the bishops.

From the mid-1630s Charles was filling vacancies in the Scottish Privy Council, the executive authority in the north, from the panel of bishops. In 1635 John Spottiswoode was appointed Chancellor, the highest political office in the land, and the first time a cleric had held the position since well before the Reformation. Many who would have expected a position on the Council were left outside in impotent frustration, including James Graham, 5th Earl of Montrose, whose father had been a member for over twenty years. Charles, in effect, had created a Privy Council that no longer refelected the balance of power in the land, and one, moreover, that was deeply divided between secular and clerical interests. John Stewart, Earl of Traquair, the Lord Treasurer, was far from pleased with the growing power of the bishops, seeing them as a threat to his own authority. Others, most notably Arcibald Campbell, Lord Lorne, acting head of one of the most powerful of the Scottish clans, neither liked nor trusted their clerical colleagues. Matters were fine for as long as the Council only had to deal with matters of routine administration: the real problem would come when it was forced to deal with some extraordinary crisis.

James had taken Scotland only part of the way towards a unified British church; Charles decided it was time to push the matter further. With a self-assurance born of a unique kind of arrogance and political blindness, he made no preparation for this fatal step, other than to insist that it should be so. In the worst possible circumstances, having alienated virtually all shades of opinion, beyond the Episcopal party, and not even troubling to consult his own Privy Council, in 1635 he issued a royal warrant authorising a new set of clerical rules-the Book of Canons-to be published the following year. These new rules began by emphasising royal supremacy over the Church of Scotland and, in one of the most remarkable assertions of this supremacy, required the Church to accept a new Liturgy or Service Book-sight unseen-to replace the Book of Common Order, in use since the Reformation.

Laud's Liturgy

This Service Book was to be known by contemporaries-and for centuries afterwards-as 'Laud's Liturgy'. In a sense this would seem to be psychologically appropriate, for the simple reason that it expressed a deep sense of national frustration at royal and Anglican arrogance. In reality it was the work of a panel of Scottish bishops, anxious not to offend the sensibilities of the nation that the straightforward use of the English Prayer Book-Laud's own favoured solution-would have caused. Spottiswoode and at least some of his colleagues were far more sensitive to Scottish opinion than is often supposed. Even so, the circumstances under which the Service Book was conceived and born could not have been worse, leading to all sorts of exaggerated rumours about its contents. In a mood of fearful expectation the Privy Council managed to delay the first reading of the Book to the summer of 1637; but, on the insistence of the king, finally decreed that it would read on Sunday 23 July, arguably one of the most fateful days in British history.

On the Sunday in question St. Giles Cathedral was packed. Among the congregation were many serving women, seated on three-legged stools, keeping places for their mistresses. To show support for the Prayer Book the members of the Privy Council were also present, with some ominous exceptions: Traquair said he had a prior engagement, and Lord Lorne pleaded sickness. When Dean John Hanna appeared carrying a brown leather book the murmering began. As soon as he started to read many people, led by the serving women, rasied their voices in protest. A stool was allegedly hurled at the unfortunate Hanna by one Jenny Geddes. When David Lindsay, recently appointed Bishop of Edinburgh, tried to quiten the unseemly tumult, he was greeted with a variety of epithets, including one accusation that he was the son of the Devil and a witch.

Like a great wave caused by a rock thrown into a silent pool, the commotion radiated out from Edinburgh across the rest of Scotland. Montrose made the feelings of many of his fellow peers plain when he described the Service Book emerging from the bowels of the whore of Babylon. Robert Baillie, the minister of Kilwinning in Ayrshire, expressed the mood of the nation in more measured terms; "...there was in our land never such ane appearance of a sturr; the whole people thinks Poperie at the doores...no man may speak for the king's part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. Ithink our people possessed with b bloody devill, farr above any thing Icould ever have imagined."

It was perfectly clear that the Privy Council was well aware of the resentment that the reading of the Prayer Book would unleash. In the weeks that followed they were placed in an almost impossible position, caught between the anger of the king and the determination of the opposition; for they were now faced with an opposition just as organised as the Lords of the Congregation had been prior to the Reformation.

Nobleman's Covenant

Petitions hostile to the king's church policy began to arrive in Edinburgh from all parts of Scotland. Many shared a common theme: the innovations in religion had not been approved by either Parliament or the General Assembly. Faced with this depth of opposition the Council, on its own initiative, suspended the reading of the Liturgy, and made sustained efforts to open the king's mind to the scale of the crisis. True to character, he reused to listen. By degrees the political temperature increased. It's almost certain that the crisis could have been headed off anytime before the late summer of 1637 by the summoning of an emergency General Assembly, the withdrawal of the Prayer Book, and the cobbling together some convenient formulae intended to preserve the royal dignity. Charles, however, was not prepared to give way on any of the issues, choosing to make a stand on his own authority and majesty. This was no longer good enough. Before long it was the role of the bishops and the government of the king that were in dispute, not simply the Prayer Book. Charles turned a protest into a rebellion, and then a rebellion into a revolution.

Like the Soviets in the wings an alternative authority was already taking shape. That December the various classes of protestors-nobles, ministers, lairds and burgesses-came together to form an executive council to be known as 'The Tables.' Before long the Tables had authority in the land greater than the Privy Council itself.

The hapless and beleagured Traquair finally received permission to report directly to the king in the new year. He told Charles with commendable frankness that he must either abandon the liturgy or come to Scotland with an army of 40000 men: instead of an army the king gave him anoother proclamation. Still believing, after all the turmoil of the previous year, that a simple assertion of the royal will was enough to dispel the opposition, Charles took the most fateful step of all. He decided to set matters straight: it was he and not Laud or any other bishop who was responsible for the Service Book. There could be no more pretence about 'evil councillors'. Charles was offering a direct challenge to the Tables, fully expecting them to stand down. Sadly for him they did not.

When the new proclamation was read in Edinburgh on 22 February it was greeted with derision, not reverance. In responding to yet another example of royal blindness, the Tables took one of the most important steps in Scottish history. Answer was to be given to the king in the form of an extended address, to be known as the National Covenant. Based on the Negative Confession of 1581, it was also widely known at the time as the 'Nobleman's Covenant', providing some insight into the driving force behind the whole movement.

The task of compiling the document was delegated to Alexander Henderson, the minister of Leuchars in Fife, and a young lawyer by the name of Archibald Johnston of Warriston. Both men went about the task with considerable care. It could not be seen as too radical, as there were still many ministers, for example, who were not convinced that Episcopacy was contrary to divine law. At its heart lay one simple yet profoundly revolutionary principle, perhaps not sufficiently recognised at the time: there should be no innovations in church and state that had not first been tested by free Parliaments and General Assemblies. On 28 February the process of signing the new Covenant began at Greyfriars Church: it was the death warrant of the Divine Right of Kings. Charles' enemies now acquired a new name-the Covenanters.

In the course of the year that followed a situation already bad for the king got steadily worse. Following the advive of James, Marquess of Hamilton, he allowed the General Assembly to meet at Glasgow in November, the first since that held at Perth twenty years before. It's not absolutely certain what Hamilton, a man of limited political ability hoped to achieve by this move; but the outcome was contrary to all expectations. Not only were the bishops-hunted figures rarely appearing in public now-prevented from attending but the whole affair was so stage-managed that it was packed out with as many elders, many of them armed, as ministers. Hamilton, having lost all control, departed. The Assembly, now tecnically illegal, continued to meet until 20 December. Its proceedings showed how much more radical feeling had become since the Covenant was first signed in February. All that James and Charles had worked for over the past forty years: the Liturgy, the Canons, the Five Articles of Perth and the Court of High Commission. Even more significant, Episcopacy itself was abolished and the bishops condemned and excommunicated one by one. Presbyterianism was declared to be the one true government of the Church of Scotland. This, it must be stressed, was a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution; for the bishops stood condemned not just as church officials but also as officers of the crown. The historian Leopold von Ranke was later to compare the defiance of the Glasgoe Assembly to that moment, a century and a half later, when the French National Assembly resisted the commands of Louis XVI.

Bellum Episcopale

After the failure of the Hamilton mission, emphasised by the fiasco of the Glasgow Assembly, it was clear that the issues between the king and the Scots could not be solved by any diplomatic process. For Charles war entailed a major risk: he simply did not have the resources to mount a serious miltary operation. Fresh funds would mean summoning Parliament; but the king had now ruled England for eleven years in its absence, and the last occasion on which it was summoned was far from satisfactory. The Scots, moreover, were especially adept in keeping one step ahead of the king in the propaganda stakes, determined that any military contest with England should not be seen in the context of ancient national rivalries. Even the very title of the coming conflict was a measure of their success. By the summer of 1639 it was being referred to as the Bellum Episcopalae-the Bishops War. While there may very well have been Englishmen prepared to heed distant trumpets, there were precious few prepared to die for Scottish bishops.

In the First Bishops' War of 1639 the two sides give all the appearance of posturing like barnyard cocks, full of sound and fury that signified nothing. It concluded with the Pacification of Berwick, a settlement with no settlement, that was little better than a breathing space. The Covenanters agreed to withdraw the decisions of the 'illegal' Glasgow Assembly; but Charles agreed that another should meet in Edinburgh, along with a new Parliament. It was obvious to both sides that Edinburgh would simply confirm all the decisions taken at Glasgow.

Charles' did, however, did have one small success while at Berwick: he won over Montrose, hitherto a leading Covenanter. This was not entirely due to the royal charm. At the time of the Glasgow Assembly Lord Lorn, now the eigthth earl of Argyll, abondoned his place on the royal council and joined the Covenanter rebels. As the leading Scot of his generation he quickly acquired a commanding role, thus displacing men like Montrose. Personal rivalry, as well as political hostility, were to lead to the first serious fracture in the whole movement.

As expected, the Edinburgh Assembly confirmed all the decisions taken at Glasgow the previous winter. But it did even more, uncovering the real causses of the contest with the king. It was no longer a struggle over simple confessional differences, or even a question of church government: it was over the nature of political power itself. Not only was Episcopacy abolished, but churchmen were declared incapable of holding civil office. What was worse, from the king's point of view, the appointment of bishops was declared not just to be wrong in practice but contrary to the law of God. Charles had accepted Traquair's argument that Episcopacy might be set aside in Scotland as a temporary expedient. However, to declare it contrary to scripture meant that its rejection could not be limited by space or time. If Episcopacy was universally unlawful how was it to be maintained in England and Ireland?

The Edinburgh Parliament proved no less radical. The Lords of the Articles, a body which controlled the agenda was remodelled, giving a much greater say to the lesser gentry and the burgesses, and removing direct royal input. As an institution Parliament began to remodel itself; and in the course of the next few years was to cover ground that had taken centuries for its English cousin. All of the acts of the General Assembly were given the status of law. The Edinburgh Parliament had, in effect, confirmed a revolution: in Scotland royal power, as it was traditionally understood, was dead. It was an impossible situation for Charles to accept, even if he were of a mind to do so. He could not rule as an absolute monarch in one corner of his kingdom and a constitutional monarch in another. For England the situation was particularly invidious because of its more advanced tradition of constitutional law. For Charles to summon a new Westminster Parliament at any time before the outbreak of the First Bishops' War would have been a risky enterprise; after the Edinburgh Assembly and Parliament it was a step wrought with suicidal implications.

As Charles made ready for a renewal of the war in the summer of 1640 the Scots made a rapid, and decisive, movement. Under the command of Alexander Leslie, a professional soldier, an army crossed the border in August, sweeping aside local royal forces at the Battle of Newburn, going on to occupy the port of Newcastle, and thus obtained a stranglehold on London's coal supply. The Second Bishop's War had ended almost as soon as it had begun. Charles was forced to agree a truce, one of the terms of which provided for the payment of daily expenses for the Scottish army, which was to remain in northern England pending the conclusion of a final peace. Charles had no choice but to summon a fresh English Parliament, which gathered in Westminster that November. This was to become the Long Parliament of the Civil War, which was not to disperse finmally until 1653, having gathered the king's head along the way.

Leagues and Covenants

In the weeks and months that followed to conclusion of the Second Bishop's War and the summoning of the Long Parliament the Scots watched as England slipped ever deeper into political quicksand. What Charles gained with one hand he inevitably lost with the other. It is sometimes argued that the Covenanters wished to recast the whole of Britain in their own Presbyterian image. It is certainly true that they had been prseeing for a full-scale reform in the English church since 1641, though this is not for the reasons usually given. The Scots were as aware as the king that a political and religious settlement in one part of the realm could not be maintained in perfect isolation from another. It was a question, above all, of security.

With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 the Scots initially maintained a position of neutrality, but they were much more fearful of the prospects of a victory for the king than a victory for Parliament; and when Charles looked close to winning in 1643 the point for intervention had come. By the late summer of that year the Covenanters in Edinburgh were just as anxious as the Puritans in Westminster for a purely military alliance. But Parliament believed that its request for aid would have to be sweetend by the promised reform of the Church of England. In furtherance of this the Scots were to be invited to send representatives to an Assembly of Divines to meet at Westminster. This was destined to become the basis of a great misunderstanding. By bringing the question of religious reform together with that of a military alliance Parliament conjured up a spectre that was to lead to disaster.

The Parliamentray delegation headed by Sir Harry Vane came to Edinburgh on 7 August, making contact with the government and the General Assembly, meeting in St. Giles. Vane informed the gathering that Parliament had abolished Episcopacy, and invited them to send delegates to the Westminster Assembly, which had been called to help in the reconstruction of the Church of England.

In their mutual urgency to do business both sides entered into an alliance to be known as the Solemn League and Covenant. Vane, having awakened the possibility of religious uniformity between Scotland and England, made sure that the document, drawn up like that of 1638 by Alexander Henderson, made no definite commitment to a Presbyterian system. The final form of church government in England was left deliberately vague by the insertion, on Vane's insistance, that it would be "according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches." England wanted a military alliance: the Scots had been led to believe that they could also have a religious Covenant. Here were the seeds of tragedy.

The Scots now believed they were to enter England to impose a religious settlement in their own image, essentially what King Charles had attempted to do so diastrously in 1639 and 1640. But there was no party in England willing to support a Presbyterian settlement, at least in the sense that the Scots understood it. There is little doubt that the Solemn League and Covenant was one of the grravest political errors in Scottish history. Its basic aim could not be fulfilled. Even so, throughout the remainder of the Civil war, up to the invasion of England in 1651, the Scots tried to win one side and then the other over to its aims, becoming ever more divided in the process.

Rebels and Causes

Scots intervention in the war tipped the balance in favour of Parliament; but no sooner had one danger receded than another appeared. The Scots had fought side by side with Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Marston Moor in July 1644, and made a vital contribution to the victory. Yet Cromwell and his allies were quick to claim a great part of the credit for themselves. This may have been wounding: infinitely worse was the English general's close association with groups of religious radicals, known collectively as the Independents, who held Bishops and Presbyters in equal contempt. In time fears about the Independents and the other radical political and religious sects in England were to be of far greater concern than the bishops ever had been.

Troubles, as always, come not as single spys but in battalions. The split between Argyll and Montrose had grown wider over the years. Although maintining an outward commitment to the National Covenant of 1638, Montrose placed himself at the head of an army of Catholic Irish and Highland clansmen not long after the Battle of Marston Moor, thus beginning the Scottish Civil War. The Covenanters made the strategic error of maintaining the presence of most of their professional soldiers in England, sending army after army of half-trained levies after Montrose, with predictable results. After a year of continuous victory, Montrose marched into the Lowlands in August 1645, winning the Battle of Kilsyth and temporary control of Scotland. It was only after General David Leslie returned with the cavalry from England that the illusion ended at Philiphaugh in September.

In England the Civil War moved steadily in favour of Parliament, especially after the creation of the New Model Army. The Scots army, starved of the funds and support proomised in the Solemn League and Covenant, became less and less relevant, making little direct contribution to the final victory over the king. The picture was to change dramatically in the spring of 1646 when Charles surrendered to the Scots laying siege to the royalist stronghold of Newark. The military victory may have been with the New Model Army; the political victory might still be with the Covenanters.

Charles was taken to the main Scots base at Newcastle where he was held for the best part of a year while repeated efforts were made to persuade him to take the Covenants. He remained obdurate. The Scots would have neither the military nor the political victory. With no other recourse the king was finally handed over to the commissioners of Parlaiment in January 1647, as the Scots made to leave Newcastle for the last time. They received part payment for the service of their army in England, creating the lasting confusion that Charles had been 'sold.' Nevertheless, they came to England as partners in a great crusade; they left as mercenaries.

Engagers and Whiggamores

The year 1647 is noteable for two things: the growth of political radicalism in England and political counter-radicalism in Scotland. The link between the two was the effective kidnapping of the king by Cornet George Joyce, acting on behalf of Cromwell and the leadership of the New Model Army. Charles was moved closer to London, while political leadership in Scotland moved from Argyll towards Hamilton. It was the beginning of a process that was to split the Covenanter movement right down the middle, between the clerical radicals on the one hand and the political moderates on the other.

Hamilton had set himself an impossible task: to secure a deal with Charles that would be in accordance with the principles of the Covenants. What he managed to secure in the end was a military treaty with some religious overtones, much like the Solemn League and Covenant itself. On 26 December, while incarcerated in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, Charles signed a treaty to be known as the Engagement. He would not take the Covenant himself, but he would establish Presbyterianism in England on a three-year trial basis. He also agreed to supress the Independents and the other sects. In return he was promised an army.

When the full text of the Engagement became known it led to a major division between church and state. Most of the nobility-beyond a small grouping around Argyll-sided with Hamilton; but most of the clergy refused to accept Charles' half-hearted and patently insincere nod towards Presbyterianism. This caused major problems when the Engagers began to recruit an army. Resistance was especially strong in the south-west of Scotland, fast emerging as the heartland of the most uncompromising forms of Presbyterianism.

(work in progress)

References

• Buckroyd, J. Church and State in Scotland, 1660-1681. 1980
• Cowan, E. J. The Solemn League and Covenant, in Scotland and England, 1286-1815, ed. R. A. Mason, 1987.
• Cowan, I. B. The Covenanters: a Revision Article'' in The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 28, pp43-54, 1949.
• Cowan, I. B. The Scottish Covenanters, 1660-1688, 1976
• Donaldson, G. Scotland from James V to James VII, 1965
• Fissel, M. C. The Bishops' Wars. Charles I's Campaigns against Scotland, 1638-1640, 1994
• Hewison, J. K. The Covenanters, 2 vols. 1913.
• Kiernan, V. G. A Banner with a Strange Device: the Later Covenanters, in History from Below, ed. K. Frantz, 1988.
• Mathieson, W. L. Politics and Religon: a Study in Scottish History from the Reformation to the Revolution, 2 vols, 1902.
• Stevenson, D. The Scottish Revolution, 1637-1644, 1973.
• Terry, C. S. The Pentland Rising and Rullion Green, 1905.
• Wodrow, R. The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution, reissued as 4 vols., 1828-1830