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(this biography by Lawrence Holden)
John Crookshanks
Born: Redgorton, Perthshire (1630s?)
Portrait: none
Ulster connection: Sat in the only united Presbyterian Synod in Ireland (Ballymena 1659 - 1661). Minister of Raphoe, Co. Donegal (1657 - 1661)
Died: Battle of Rullion Green, Pentland Hills, 28 November 1666
Memorial: Named on the monument at Rullion Green
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(photo above: Raphoe Cathedral, Co. Donegal. This is probably Crookshanks' original church)
John Crookshanks was born in Redgorton, Perthshire, where his father also named John ministered from 1626 to 1661. Crookshanks was educated at the University of Edinburgh during the 1650’s and was eventually ordained in Raphoe, County Donegal about the year 1657. He received a £100 per annum payment from the treasury under the commonwealth, and received it in lieu of tithes already collected from the congregation and appropriated to the treasury.
Crookshanks sat in the first, and only united, Presbyterian Synod to meet in Ireland, which convened at various time in Ballymena from 1659 to 1661. It was here the ministers first became aware of Charles II’s very public repudiation of the Solemn League and Covenant and the coming persecution of the post-restoration era. The early Church historian and minister of Cairncastle Patrick Adair described the aim of the re-established bishops was ‘to crush faithful ministers… and to extinguish the remainder of Presbyterian government’. The majority of ministers attempted to remain quietly within the bounds of their congregations hoping to calm the people and achieve a measure of toleration for their peaceful conduct. However, a small group including John Crookshanks, Andrew McCormick and Michael Bruce chose to oppose the breach of the Covenant and preached at large field meetings across Ulster.
These ministers were reported to have ‘called the people to solemn and great meetings, sometimes in the night and sometimes in the day, in solitary places, whither people in great abundance and with great alacrity and applause flocked to see them’. The preaching was directed ‘much against the bishops and the times’. Shortly after Crookshanks led these large field meetings he had to flee from Ulster to escape arrest. Crookshanks first went to Rochelle in France seeking an entry into the ministry, where allegedly he was told ‘to return to his country and congregation, and to adhere to his own people; and if suffering came, it was his duty to suffer with the people for that truth which he had preached unto them’.
John Crookshanks was to suffer greatly for the truth in the following years. He had only returned to Ulster when he was implicated in ‘Blood’s Plot’ wherein former members of the Cromwellian regime sought to attack Dublin castle and overthrow the government. The plotters claimed they would advance the cause of the Covenant thereby enlisting for a short time the interest and support of some Presbyterian ministers from Ulster including Crookshanks. In the repercussions and reprisals carried out in response to the failed plot Crookshanks again found it necessary to leave Ireland. He first went to Scotland in summer 1664 along with other Ulster Presbyterian ministers who had fled due to the repressive episcopal regime.
The persecution of the post-restoration era had also strongly effected Scotland. The fugitive ministers from Ireland found themselves amongst Presbyterian brethren who had also suffered ejection by the bishops. The resentment caused by a large number of depositions, which had occurred in the Presbyteries along the west coast, was compounded by a military presence often characterised by its brutality. From such circumstances an unplanned and spontaneous Covenanter rising broke out in Galloway and made it’s way east to Edinburgh. John Crookshanks took an active part in the rising, and was said to have returned to Donegal for a short time to recruit men. He was later reported to have been ‘in and upon the said rebellion, and joining with the said rebels, and going alongst with them and marching with them with their horse and arms’. On the day of the battle on the 28th November the Covenanter army drew up on the Pentland hills to face the government troops. John Crookshanks, and his brother in the ministry Andrew McCormick of Magherally, were amongst the first to engage the enemy in a small detachment which fought a fierce skirmish at the foot of Turnhouse Hill. Both men died, their bodies lay unburied when darkness fell, and the Psalm singing of the main Covenanter army ceased as they were broken on the Pentlands.
A stone memorial marks the place where the ministers fell. Simply inscribed ‘Here and near this place lyes the Reverend Mr John Crookshanks and Mr Andrew McCormack ministers of the Gospel… Killed in this place in their own innocent self defence and defence of the Covenanted work of Reformation…’ In Ireland John Crookshanks had argued ‘that Christian faith was free and could not be compelled by a magistrate’.
It was a fitting argument from the reputed translator of George Buchanan’s 1579 book De jure regni apud Scotus (The Powers of the Crown in Scotland) [ in it, Buchanan lays down the doctrine that the source of all political power is the people, and that it is lawful to resist, and even punish, tyrants. The book was condemned by Acts of Parliament in 1584 and 1664. In 1683 it was burned by the University of Oxford.]
Crookshanks suffered dearly for the freedom of his faith. As his body lay at Turnhouse Hill he was among other Covenanters who were tried at Edinburgh in their absence and condemned as ‘guilty and culpable of treasonable crimes…in joyning and being in armes in the said rebellione… to be executed to death, and demeaned as traitors, when they shall be apprehended’.
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Notes:
• Crookshanks is referred to in the last of Samuel Rutherford's published Letters (in a letter to John Murray, Minister at Methven in 1661): "...these are to entreat you that you would combine with Mr Robert Campbell, Mr John Cruickshanks, and other of the brethren in your bounds, to stir up one another that we may wrestle with the Lord for the remnant..."
• In The Kirk and Lands of Convoy since the Scottish settlement, the author Rev T H Mullin states that Crookshanks ministered in what is now the Church of Ireland Cathedral in Raphoe (see photo at the top of the page), and that this was the venue for the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1644. Some of Crookshanks' sermons have survived and are held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, including one on Psalm 137.
• In James Seaton Reid's History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1837) Vol II p 387, the footnotes say that "...Mr Crookshanks was originally from Derry, where several respectable families of that name still reside. He left a son, as appears from the following entry in the minutes of the presbytery of Laggan: 'March 1674-5. The people of Raphoe by their letter desire the presbytery would take care of the education of Mr John Crookshanks' son, a hopeful youth. The meeting appoint Mr Hart and Mr Campbell to speak about this matter to the relations of the young man in Derry..."
• One of the 13 Apprentice Boys of Derry who closed the gates of the city in April 1689 was William Crookshanks, who "...appears to have been of the family of the Rev John Crookshanks, the Presbyterian minister of Raphoe, who was a native of Derry, and who was killed at the battle of Pentland..." Mackenzie's Memorials of the Siege of Derry, 1859 p 10
• Crookshanks was suspended by the Bishop of Dunkeld in 1663. (Life of Robert Blair, 1848, p 455)/ It is likely that after leaving Ulster, Crookshanks returned to his late father's church (and his own home town) of Redgorton in Perthshire, which is just 10 miles from Dunkeld. His father had died in 1661, and the congregation may have called the young John to fill his late father's pulpit.
Below: the monument and interpretive plaque at Rullion Green. Click here for the location on MultiMap.
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