(published in the July 2008 edition of “The Ulster-Scot” newspaper by the Ulster-Scots Agency)
Article by Dr Lawrence Holden (Queens University) and Mark Thompson (Chairman, Ulster-Scots Agency).
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“...the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of Pentland, was nothing more than the intolerable oppressions of those times justified, nature having dictated to people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country...” Daniel Defoe, 1717
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In an early history of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, historian Robert Wodrow described the 1680s in Scotland as the ‘Killing Times’ due to the extreme measures used against the Covenanters. Since Wodrow first coined the phrase it has been used to describe both the 1680s, and a longer period of persecution which began when King Charles II came to the throne in 1660. It has been used almost exclusively for what Wodrow described as the suffering of the Church of Scotland.
In Ulster, where a particularly Scottish form of Presbyterianism had flourished, these persecutions began with royalist troops harrassing Presbyterian assemblies in Ballymena - and ended with two young Presbyterian ministers from County Down and County Donegal lying dead and unburied on the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh.
A Return to Persecution
The joyous scenes across Ulster when the Solemn League and Covenant was administered in 1644 had been followed by a period when Presbyterianism had flourished across the country. As the ministry expanded Presbyterian church government was established in congregations with Kirk Sessions, regionally in Presbyteries, and finally in 1659 the entire Presbyterian Church in Ulster gathered in Synod for the first time in Ballymena. It was a point of consolidation for the fledgling Kirk which had endured many trials in the early decades of the century. However, the restoration of Charles II in 1661 ushered in a new regime - a return to the old order of episcopacy within the church and persecution of those without.
‘All the brethren in the North’
Immediately after the appointment of arch-bishops and bishops in January 1661, the Lord Justices in Dublin, acting on their orders, banned all ‘unlawful assemblies’ - in which they included meetings of the Ulster Presbyterians.
In defiance of the proclamation, the final meeting in a series of Presbyterian Synods was held in Ballymena ‘where all the brethren in the North were present’. From the small meeting house in the town the Presbyterians of Ulster had sent commissioners to address Charles II. In the same meeting house the brethren had received the returning commissioners in sadness when they learned that at the Royal Court any mention of the Covenant was ‘smothered’. The ministers rightly predicted that there was ‘a change and overturning drawing near’.
That change came swiftly and dramatically. Shortly after the ministers left their last Synod in Ballymena by Meeting House Lane, a party of royalist troopers sent by George Rawdon arrived in the town to ‘scatter the brethren’. They were too late, the ministers had already left the town. It would be thirty years before Presbyterians would again sit in Synod in Ireland, and sadly, never again as a united body adhering to the Covenants.
June 1660 - ‘A matter of terror’
‘A matter of terror’ was how the Presbyterian ministers in Scotland who had stuck rigidly to the Covenants viewed the restoration of King Charles II. Named ‘Protestors’ for their refusal to accept any limitation of the Covenants in Scotland’s national life, they were justified in their concerns about the return of the king.
The arrests and public executions began soon after. In August, James Guthrie, the minister of Stirling, was arrested. In September, his book “Causes of God’s Wrath” (published 1651), and Samuel Rutherford’s “Lex Rex” were both declared to be “poisonous and treasonable”, with all copies to be seized. Despite the terror of the times in the first execution of this new period of persecution, James Hamilton, former minister of Ballywalter, willingly faced the crowds at Edinburgh's Mercat Cross where he publicly prayed at the execution of the Marquis of Argyll on 27 May 1661. In this act of public loyalty Hamilton embodied the gratitude of the Ulster Scots for Argyll's support in an earlier day of persecution. [NB: James Hamilton and James Guthrie were close friends and colleagues in the ministry. In 1648, the General Assembly had tasked Hamilton and Guthrie to draw up an account of the duties of church elders, after which Guthrie published his "Treatise of Ruling Elders and Deacons" in 1652 - click here for the full text]
Four days later, Guthrie was executed on the same spot. Before his execution he told his young son not to be ashamed at his hanging for ‘it is in a good cause’. Allowed to speak to onlookers from the gallows, Guthrie exclaimed that the Covenants ‘can be loosed or dispensed with by no person, or party, or power on earth, but are still binding on these kingdoms, and will be so for ever hereafter’. Guthrie’s head was severed and fixed to the Netherbow Port in the city, a grim announcement that the anticipated ‘terror’ of the Covenants had arrived.
Spring 1661 - The Ministers Ejected
By Spring of 1661, 61 of Ulster’s 68 Presbyterian ministers had been ejected from their pulpits – the bishops ‘simply held them not to be ministers’. In Scotland, Presbyterianism was deemed unsuitable to ‘his Majesty’s monarchical estate’. In 1662 around 400 ministers were ejected across Scotland, and the ‘king’s curates’ were imposed upon parishes. The people across Ulster and western Scotland withdrew to the fields and ‘solitary places’ to hear their rightful ministers preach.
‘Solemn and great meetings’
The Ulster Scots inhabitants of Ballymena witnessed the changing regime at first hand, as royalist troopers charged through the streets and their Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee. Parliament ordered the burning of the Covenant in towns throughout the land. Isolated resistance began in towns such as Carrickfergus, where the magistrate John Dalway initially refused to comply with the order. It soon spread throughout the countryside as a group of young Presbyterian ministers determined to uphold a Covenanting witness ‘called the people to solemn and great meetings, sometimes in the night and sometimes in the day, in solitary places’.
Across Ulster the small group of ministers preached to large numbers in the fields and hills, often in the long summer nights in the months that followed the ejection of the Presbyterian ministers, at times wearing disguises to avoid being captured by the authorities. Young ministers such as John Crookshanks of Convoy, Andrew McCormick of Magherally and Michael Bruce of Killinchy ‘were cried up as the only courageous ministers by the common sort of people, and by those who had great zeal’. At the field meetings it was reported that the Ulster Scots ‘flocked to them’ in great numbers, and ‘in daring the magistrate openly and calling great assemblies together in despite of authority, was, by that sort of people, thought great stoutness and gallantry’.
Crookshanks, Bruce and McCormick
The three ministers most notably involved in the Ulster field-meetings had come into the Ulster church in a period of expansion during the late 1650s.
• John Crookshanks from Redgorton in Perthshire had been educated at Edinburgh University and was ordained in the parish of Raphoe about the year 1657, though he ministered to a congregation in Convoy.
• Michael Bruce was also educated at Edinburgh University and after graduating in 1654 he was recommended by the former minister John Livingstone to the congregation at Killinchy. After his trials Bruce was ordained in Killinchy in October 1657.
• Andrew McCormick’s origins are less well known, having worked as a country tailor before being recognised as ‘a great professor of religion’ and called to the ministry. After his time at university McCormick crossed into Ulster in 1654 or 1655 and was eventually ordained in Magherally near Banbridge in 1655.
The three young ministers had served their congregations for a short period before the ejections of 1661. On being ejected from their pulpits they had determined to oppose the persecutions of the bishops and each would suffer for that opposition in different ways in the coming years.
Blood’s Plot
In 1663 Crookshanks and McCormick were implicated in “Blood’s Plot”, named after the leader of the scheme, Captain Thomas Blood. McCormick allegedly gave assurance that 20,000 Scots in Ulster would join the planned revolt and he was reported to be in Dublin in 1663 ‘to see in what readiness they were for that design’. When the unsuccessful plot was eventually uncovered Crookshanks and McCormick were forced to flee from Ulster and reprisals were enacted on Presbyterian ministers across the country whether they had knowledge of the plot or not.
In June 1663 ‘the whole ministers of Down and Antrim, who could be found, were in one day apprehended’. The ministers of Antrim were imprisoned in Carrickfergus and those from County Down were imprisoned at Carlingford Castle. Four ministers of the Lagan Presbytery in Donegal were ordered to be jailed in Lifford in 1664, a sentence reduced to a form of house arrest which lasted for the following six years.
Ulster & the West of Scotland - smouldering resentment
The ministers of Antrim and Down were eventually issued with an order that they must ‘depart the kingdom or go to prisons in other parts of Ireland’. Many chose to go to Scotland and found themselves in the company of Presbyterian brethren in the western lowlands who had been deposed by the bishops in 1662. Added to the humiliating deposition and persecution of the ministers was a smouldering resentment felt by the Presbyterian people who were suffering from the brutal military presence of Royal dragoons in their midst.
The mingling of Ulster and Scottish Presbyterian ministers in western Scotland in the years after 1663 caused a rise in the number of field meetings in south-west Scotland despite the introduction of harsh laws designed to stop them.
The episcopal authorities in Scotland feared the connection of Ulster and Scottish Covenanters and the bishop of Aberdeen, Alexander Burnet believed that an insurrection was being planned in a conspiracy hatched by Scottish Covenanters and Ulster Presbyterians. Burnet had good cause to fear that union as reports from Raphoe in 1664 claimed that though John Crookshanks ‘had escaped and gone into Scotland’, before he left ‘he gave great hope to his party that there will speedily be a rising in Scotland, so that they are now bolder than they have been’. Whatever plans the Covenanters across Ulster and western Scotland may have had for ‘a rising’, its beginnings were to prove sudden and spontaneous.
13 November 1666: The Dalry Rising
As royalist troops filtered into south-west Scotland extracting fines for non-attendance at the parish churches, a farmer at Dalry in Galloway was apprehended by soldiers for non-payment of a fine. They threatened that they would ‘strip him naked and set him on a hot grid iron because he could not pay’. Local Covenanters intervened - shots were fired at the party of soldiers, and rather than wait for reprisals a Covenanter band of approximately 200 men and 50 horse answered a call to arms.
Wallace & Welsh’s Ulster Connections
The path to the Pentland Hills had begun. The Covenanters were small in number, badly armed and lacked leadership. Two men from Ulster came to their aid. The first was Presbyterian minister John Welsh, who had been born in County Antrim at Templepatrick, who brought 300 men and 15 horse. Then came Colonel James Wallace, a veteran of the Covenanter army in Ulster in the 1640's, former Governor of Belfast and Elder in the Ballycarry congregation in east Antrim, who provided much needed military leadership.
Their lack of planning and resources suggests that the Covenanters may at first have wished to petition the king rather than engage in a pitched battle.
28 November 1666: The Pentland Rising (the Battle of Rullion Green)
The march eastward in late November 1666 was made in hard weather, with stragglers and deserters reducing the small army to about 900 men. As they approached Edinburgh on the 26th the Covenanters were forced to stand out in the night in ‘a great snow’ and those who remained proved resolute. Among them were John Crookshanks and Andrew McCormick who were reported to have joined ‘with the said rebels... going alongst with them and marching with them with their horse and arms’.
On the 28th November the Covenanters drew back from Edinburgh, fearing they would be caught between Royalist forces in the city and Tam Dalyell’s Royalist force which had followed them from Glasgow. (Dalyell was notable as having been the only man who had refused the Covenant at Carrickfergus in 1644).
On the morning of the 28th, Wallace drew up the Covenanters at Turnhouse Hill above Rullion Green in readiness for a Royalist attack.
The first attack came on Wallace’s left, which was met with a detachment of Covenanters in a fierce skirmish. Muskets were discarded in hand-to-hand fighting and the Royalists were eventually forced back. It was a small victory for the Covenanters, as among those who lay dead on the Pentland moss were the Ulster ministers John Crookshanks and Andrew McCormick.
As the large Royalist force attacked, the Covenanter army sang the 71st and 78th Psalms before they were broken on the Pentland Hills. The winter evening came on early and the falling darkness saved the remnant who broke towards the west... Wallace and Welsh both escaped, but among the 50 Covenanters who had been killed, the two Ulster ministers lay unburied where they had fallen.
‘Executed to death, and demeaned as traitors’
Around 80 Covenanter prisoners were taken, and the state authorities inflicted upon them malicious acts of cruelty and execution. Throughout December 1666 a spate of bloody public executions of Covenanters took place across Scotland.
The first ten men hanged had their right hands cut off and sent to Lanark to be fixed on the Tolbooth and their heads severed and sent to different parts of Scotland. To this day, a famous grave in Hamilton marks the place where the severed heads of four Covenanter prisoners from Rullion Green were later buried. At Irvine and Ayr the official hangman refused to execute the Covenanters - a problem the authorities at Ayr attempted to resolve by offering mercy to one of the prisoners if he would agree to hang the rest.
The vengeful persecution extended to the dead as well as the living. Among the Covenanters who were tried at Edinburgh in their absence was John Crookshanks. Although he was dead, he along with the others was condemned as ‘guilty and culpable of treasonable crimes... to be executed to death, and demeaned as traitors’. Crookshanks, still lying unburied on the Pentlands, had in the words of Samuel Rutherford, ‘got summons already before a Superior Judge and Judicatory... where few kings and great folk come’.
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ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL- 1ST MARQUIS OF ARGYLL
Argyll had raised an army of 20,000 Covenanters in 1638, and the authorities in Ireland feared that he might invade Ulster.He was the first Covenanter to be publicly executed following the Restoration of King Charles II. The Victorian illustration here shows his execution - his head was displayed on a spike in Edinburgh on 27 May 1661
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THE PENTLAND RISING
The importance of the Rullion Green story is clear - the first book written by world famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (right) was a 70 page tale entitled “The Pentland Rising”. He was just 16 years old when it was published on 28th November 1866 - exactly 200 years after the battle itself.
He went on to write many classic novels such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
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VISIT: First Ballymena Presbyterian Church
Due to the perpetuity lease granted to the Presbyterians of Ballymena by the Adair family in 1744, the old Meeting House Lane mentioned in the history above still winds its way through modern day Ballymena. The 1st Ballymena congregation also still gather for worship on the historic site of the small meeting house where the first and only united Presbyterian Synod was held in Ireland. In November of this year we intend to launch a 'Covenanters in Ulster' exhibition in the town in conjunction with local events planned to retell and commemorate this history.
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VISIT: Rullion Green Covenanter Memorial
Ulster ministers John Crookshanks and Andrew McCormick are the only men named on the simple memorial at Rullion Green. Today Rullion Green is part of Pentland Hills Regional Park, just south of Edinburgh near Penicuik. To visit the monument, go to Flotterstone Visitor Centre and be prepared to walk for about a mile up the grassy slopes of Rullion Green. The monument is on the edge of a small wood.
Website: www.edinburgh.gov.uk/phrp
Flotterstone Visitor Centre: Telephone 0131 445 3383
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