The Covenanters in Ulster

Part Seven: Ulster and the Killing Times, Part III : 1679 - 1690 The Revolution and the Remnant

(published in the September 2008 edition of “The Ulster-Scot” newspaper by the Ulster-Scots Agency)

Article by Mark Thompson, Jack Greenald and Dr William Roulston. With thanks to Rev Robert McCollum, Rev Harry Coulter and Dr Lawrence Holden for their ongoing guidance and support.

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The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 is celebrated every year on 12 July by thousands of people. William’s arrival brought an end to the 50 year persecution of the Covenanters, which had seen 18,000 Scots and Ulster-Scots either killed, imprisoned or banished for their faith. The Revolution brought civil and religious liberty to the British Isles. But William’s “Revolution Settlement” did not place the Covenants at the heart of the nation. This divided and disappointed the Covenanters, leading ultimately to the formation of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

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June 1679: Refuge in Ulster
Following the Covenanters’ defeat on 22 June 1679 at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, Ulster again became their refuge. On 28 June the Duke of Ormond wrote to Hugh Montgomery (Earl of Mount Alexander, near Comber). News had reached Ormond of the “flight” of Covenanters from Scotland to Ulster, and he ordered Montgomery to send troops to the ports of Donaghadee and Larne. Montgomery confirmed that any escaping Covenanters would be seized and imprisoned at Downpatrick and Carrickfergus. On the Scottish coast, Graham of Claverhouse did the same, stationing troops at Portpatrick and Ballantrae, because “those rogues run over to Yrland”.

One of these Covenanters was William Kelso. Kelso had fought at Bothwell and then fled to Ulster. He had been one of the passengers onboard a flotilla of around 14 open boats, carrying Covenanters who had fled the brutal aftermath of Bothwell, firstly to the Ayrshire coast at Irvine, and then across the water to Carrickfergus. Kelso avoided the government troops on the Ulster coastline and headed inland, but was seized at Lisburn on 27 June 1679.

The Bothwell Bridge defeat had a devastating impact on the Presbyterians. Only four ministers now continued as field preachers – Richard Cameron, who had preached at Strabane in the early 1670s, Donald Cargill, John Blackadder and James Renwick. James Renwick did not become a preacher until 1683, having resolved to become a Covenanter minister after witnessing Cargill being martyred at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in July 1681. The rest had been silenced by fear, bribery and the ever-present reality of execution – or had fled to the safety of Ulster.

June 1680: The Sanquhar Declaration
The remnant of Covenanters, now led by Richard Cameron “The Lion of the Covenant”, were still determined to oppose King Charles II and his officials in both Ulster and Scotland. So on 22 June 1680, the anniversary of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, Cameron and a group of 20 Covenanters rode into the Galloway village of Sanquhar. Their “Sanquhar Declaration” was a devastating attack on the King, disowning him, describing him as a tyrant, and declaring war on him “and all the men of his practices”. The targets of their fury included the King’s brother James, the Duke of York – the man who five years later would become King James II. Copies of the Sanquhar Declaration were soon circulating among the Covenanters in Ulster.

July 1680: The Battle of Airds Moss
Knowing that the King would now unleash a merciless retaliation upon them for their defiance, Cameron gathered a group of around 60 men. While at worship on the open plain of Airds Moss, outside Muirkirk, they were ambushed by royal troops, led by the notorious Captain John Creichton of Castlefin in Donegal.

As they came under attack, Cameron famously prayed for the safety of the younger men in his company - “Lord, spare the green and take the ripe”. Nine of the Covenanters, including Cameron, were killed. David Hackston (whose gravestone features on the front of the Covenanters in Ulster Heritage Trail and in the banner at the top of this website) was seriously wounded and captured, and later suffered the most brutal death of any of the Covenanters. Richard Cameron had his head and hands cut off, which were then delivered in a bag to his father who was in prison in Edinburgh. The severed heads of Hackston and Cameron were later displayed on spikes in the city.

Richard Cameron had prophesied that theirs was a standard that would overthrow the throne of Britain. He was right. Eight years after the Sanquhar Declaration, the entire nation rejected the Stuart monarchy and replaced them with William and Mary at the “Glorious Revolution”.

1680s Scotland - “a hunting field”
During the 1680s, the savagery of the anti-Covenanter persecutions was personified in the king’s brother, James Stuart, Duke of York. He declared that “there would never be peace in the country until the whole south of Scotland had been turned into a hunting field”. He empowered his senior officers including Tam Dalzell, Graham of Claverhouse and Grierson of Lagg to search, examine, imprison, torture and kill as they pleased. They did so with an army of close to 10,000 Highland dragoons, who delighted in ravaging the Lowland homeland of the Covenanters.

Their cruelties extended to women and children. Marion Cameron, said to be a sister of Richard Cameron, was discovered with two friends, each with a Bible, and were shot on sight. Two young women, Isabel Alison (27) and Marion Harvey (15) were arrested and executed for having attended an open air conventicle. Covenanter children are recorded as having been interrogated, tortured and killed. The field preacher Donald Cargill, aged 60, was arrested in 1681 and was publicly beheaded in Edinburgh on 27 July.

1681: The Covenanters form the United Societies; the Ulster ministers
Despite the loss of Cameron and Cargill, the remaining Covenanters were resolute and reorganised themselves as the United Societies in December 1681. They formed eighty local societies with a membership of around 7,000 people.

Now without ministers, in February 1683 the United Societies issued ‘a call, by a remnant of the true Presbyterians of the Church of Scotland’ to ministers of the Gospel, which included Alexander Peden, Michael Bruce and Samuel Arnot , all three of whom were in Ulster at the time. None of these ministers felt able to accept the call, but in 1686 David Houston, a Covenanting minister who had also spent time in Ulster, was accepted as a minister by the Societies. The Societies sent another young preacher, James Renwick, to Holland to train for the ministry. In Summer 1683 Renwick returned to Scotland via Ireland - in August he arrived in Dublin, where he recruited a number of followers. On 24 August he wrote: ‘I think the Lord has a special hand in my coming to this place... He has kindled a fire which I hope Satan will not soon quench’.

While in Dublin Renwick was thought to be responsible for a document which stated that Irish Presbyterians would ‘stand for all those that have or would fly for Religion from Scotland, and for their Brethrerne that were under affliction there, and that they were to assist them to the utmost of their indeavours’.

The Societies also had supporters in Ulster. Three men from Belfast - a bookbinder named James Caldwell, and two coopers named James Coburn and John Robinson – had been circulating Renwick’s paper and encouraged sympathisers to sign it.

As the arrests continued, prisoners taken at Carrickfergus in November 1684 admitted that ‘they had subscribed to a kind of engagement carried about by one Callwell amongst the Scotch in the north, the substance of which is to assist the brethren now persecuted for the cause of religion in Scotland... when they were asked whether they would pray for the King or no, the only answer that could be got from them to that question was that they would pray for the elect’.

1685: The Two Margarets
The Duke of York became King James II in February 1685. Just three months later two women - Margaret Wilson (18) and Margaret MacLachlan (64) - were arrested near Wigtown on suspicion of having attended an unauthorised prayer meeting. They were tied to stakes in the rising tide at Wigtown, but if they disowned their faith they would be freed. They both refused. The older Margaret was first to drown, with the younger Margaret refusing to bow to the tortures of the soldiers who were gathered around her.

Forcing her head under the water, they mockingly shouted “Tak anither drink, hinny!”, but she defied them by singing Psalm 25 as the waters engulfed her. The bodies of the “Two Margarets” were buried together in Wigtown graveyard along with three local men who were executed a few days later.

News of the drownings swept the country and soon reached Holland. On 10 October 1688, in his Declaration for Scotland, William of Orange wrote of “drowning them without any form of law or respect to age or sex” as one of the barbarities being experienced by the people of Scotland at the hands of their government. In response, government propagandists denied that the drownings had ever taken place.

1688: Execution of James Renwick; the end of the Killing Times
From Renwick’s published letters it is clear that he was planning a return to Ulster, but before he was able to he was captured and martyred at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh on 17 February 1688, aged 26. A large memorial just outside his home village of Moniaive commemorates him to this day. In July 1688 the last of the martyrs, a 16 year old Ayrshire boy named George Wood, was shot dead in the fields near the village of Sorn, his only crime being caught in possession of a Bible.

By the end of the year, Richard Cameron’s prophecy was fulfilled - King James II was overthrown and the ‘Killing Times’ were at an end. To this day, the Killing Times are the most murderous systematic persecution of a people ever known in the British Isles, driven by the vicious cruelty of four successive Kings against their own subjects: Scots and Ulster-Scots alike.

1688: Revolution, “The Comber Letter” and the Siege of Derry
William of Orange was invited by seven leading aristocrats to sail to England and take the throne from James II. He arrived at Torbay in Devon on 5 November 1688 with 12,000 troops and 500 ships. A service of thanksgiving was led by Rev William Carstairs (William’s Scottish Presbyterian chaplain, whose father had fought with the Covenanters at Rullion Green) with the singing of Psalm 118. King James II then fled to Ireland, realising that his only hope of regaining the British throne was by rallying his co-religionists in Ireland and linking up with the Scottish Highlanders.

Then on 3 December a letter was found in Comber, addressed to the Earl of Mount Alexander, alleging that on 9 December all of the Protestants of Ireland were to be slaughtered. The letter caused pandemonium – 3000 Protestants fled in ships from Dublin, with thousands more pouring inside the city walls of Londonderry. As the civic leaders of the city dithered, 13 young “Apprentice Boys” shut the gates. One of them was William Crookshanks - a relative of John Crookshanks, the Ulster Covenanter minister who had been killed at Rullion Green. Mount Alexander, who had followed orders to arrest Covenanters in 1679, cynically turned to the Covenanters of county Down, led by minister David Houston, for protection.

1689: The Cameronian Regiment Formed
The Scottish Parliament met in March 1689, guarded against any Jacobite (pro-James) attack by armed Covenanters. The following day William and Mary were proclaimed Monarchs at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.

However the struggle was not yet over. Claverhouse, the persecutor of the Covenanters, raised a force of Highlanders to carry on the fight for James. In response, on 14 May 1689 the United Societies raised a regiment of 800 men at Douglas in Lanarkshire, which they named the Cameronian Regiment (in honour of Richard Cameron), ‘in defence of the nation, recovery and preservation of the Protestant religion, and, in particular, the work of reformation in Scotland, in opposition to Popery, Prelacy, and arbitrary power’.

Claverhouse was killed at the battle of Killiecrankie on 27 July 1689, and despite the Jacobites winning the battle, his death was a fatal blow to James II’s ambitions of retaking the crown. The Cameronian Regiment fought their first battle against the Jacobite Highland army at Dunkeld on 18 August 1689. Outnumbered and in hostile territory they won a famous victory for the Williamite cause and secured the success of the Revolution in Scotland. Back in Ireland, William’s famous victory over James at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 secured the Revolution for the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.

DAVID HOUSTON (1633 - 1696)
The only remaining Covenanter minister was David Houston. He was born near Paisley in 1633 and came to Ulster around 1660 where he preached to congregations in the Route Presbytery in North Antrim.

His commitment the Covenants led to an unsatisfactory relationship with the Presbytery and on 27 February 1672 he was suspended. He was believed to be in Scotland from 1675-9 and was actively involved in the Battle of Bothwell Bridge.

Following the battle he continued to preach in both Ulster and Scotland, but in January 1688 he was arrested and jailed in Dublin. The authorities decided that he should stand trial in Edinburgh, where, like so many others, he would most likely be executed. The Covenanters of Ayrshire rescued Houston at Lugar, near Muirkirk, on his journey to Edinburgh and by 1689 he was back in Ulster, living in Newtownards. He was also present at the Siege of Derry. From 1692 to his death, Houston lived at Armoy in County Antrim.

A Bishop wrote to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1694 that Houston was a ‘clergyman that preached up the Solemn League and Covenant, accusing the people of Scotland for not sticking to their League, and having a congregation of 500 resolute fellows that adhere to him’. David Houston died in 1696 and was buried at Connor in Co Antrim.

1689 - 1701: The Revolution Settlement
The political changes that the Revolution settlement brought fell far short of what many Covenanters in the United Societies had hoped for. The Church of Scotland and its General Assembly were now established as Presbyterian, with the Westminster Confession of Faith as their ‘subordinate standard’. But the Covenants, which had been a spiritual foundation for the people throughout their “50 Years Struggle” from 1638-1688, were cast aside by the new post-Revolution Church.

Regardless, all three ministers of the United Societies - Alexander Shields, William Boyd and Thomas Lining, and also a minority of their members - joined the Church of Scotland, and the General Assembly was allowed to meet for the first time in almost 40 years.

However, the majority of the members of the Societies remained faithful to Scotland’s National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, and were opposed to the Revolution Settlement. William was an uncovenanted King, the Covenants were not renewed and the majority of the reinstated Church of Scotland ministers had accepted the royal “indulgences” during the earlier persecutions - during the time when the Societies had remained steadfast.

These glaring weaknesses in the Revolution Settlement cemented the separate existence of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

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WILLIAM KELSO
William Kelso, a chemist from Ayr, was just 27 when he fought for the Covenanters at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679. After their defeat, he was one of many Covenanters who escaped over land to the Ayrshire coast and then sailed to Ulster for refuge, avoiding the government troops which had been stationed at the ports on both sides of the water on high alert. Kelso was eventually arrested in Lisburn on 27 June, and was questioned by the authorities about Covenanter strategy.

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DAVID HOUSTON AT THE SIEGE OF DERRY
4000 people died during the Siege, the longest in British history. A comment made at the time was “No matter how many of them die, they are but a pack of Scotch Presbyterians”. David Houston was at the Siege, where he “would suffer none to fight for the Protestant religion but such as would take the Covenant”. Houston’s influence was beyond doubt - in Ulster “his movements were narrowly watched by the various political leaders in this province”. The lecture hall at Kellswater Reformed Presbyterian Church (shown left) is named the Houston Memorial Hall, with a large commemorative plaque.

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WIGTOWN - THE TWO MARGARETS AND THEIR MEMORIALS
• The drowning of the two Margarets is the most famous of all Covenanter martyrdoms, and their graves and memorials are popular locations for visitors, with tourist roadsigns pointing out their locations. The graves are in the small graveyard at Wigtown church and are very distinctive - they are painted white and are surrounded by black cast iron railings. Nearby, a stone stake marks the location where they were drowned, and a huge obelisk monument to their memory overlooks the town.

•There is also a grand Victorian monument to them in central Scotland, in the graveyard of the Church of Holy Rude next to Stirling Castle. Sadly it has been vandalised over the years and is presently in poor condition, but is still worth a visit if you are in the area.

• Some traditions say that Margaret Wilson had four older brothers, all of whom had fled to Ulster.

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WATCH, READ AND VISIT

CD: “Psalm Singing - Christ and His Suffering Church”
This is a recording of the event of Saturday 31st May 2008, held in Carrickfergus Civic Centre, featuring the choirs of the Eastern Presbytery, Northern Presbytery and
Western Presbytery of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. Copies are available from
Rev Harry Coulter (tel 028 9336 6201 / email: harry.coulter@yahoo.co.uk)

FREE Covenanters in Ulster Heritage Trail now available
The Covenanters in Ulster wallchart-style heritage trail ia available from the Ulster-Scots Agency (telephone 028 9023 1113 / email: info@ulsterscotsagency.org.uk). Bundles of up to 200 free copies are also available for distribution within church congregations.

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Part Six: Ulster and the Killing Times Part II: 1666 - 1679 A Kirk Divided

(published in the August 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). With thanks to Rev Robert McCollum, Rev Harry Coulter, Dr William Roulston and Jack Greenald for their ongoing guidance and support.

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“I have made inquiry how the pulse of this part of the country beateth. I find that very many ministers are lately come out of Scotland and do preach privately in several places and in those discourses do tell the people that they should have good hearts, for times will change shortly...” Col. Sydneham, Carrickfergus, November 1667.

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Ulster as a refuge
In the months after the Covenanters were broken at the Pentland Rising/Battle of Rullion Green in November 1666, the searching persecutions, particularly in the west of Scotland, meant that many of the Ulster Scots who had been involved in the rising attempted to return home across the North Channel.

In their flight they were joined by the western Scots whom they had mingled with in the troubled days before the Rising. Just as Scotland had proved a safe haven for the Ulster Scots in times of persecution, such as the forcing of the ‘Black Oath’ in the 1630s, now Ulster proved a refuge for the Scots. The experience of persecution and flight across the North Channel, in both directions, was a regular occurrence in the period. It became a common and shared experience of the lowland Scots on each side of the Channel, their frequent crossings rendering the short stretch of sea little more than an inconvenience.

Within days of the battle the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland ordered ‘any of His Majesty’s frigates now at Dublin to lie between the north of Ireland and Scotland, and to take account of all who pass those seas’. His worries were based on the unity of purpose between the Scots, complaining that in Ulster ‘there certainly are many as ill inclined as those in rebellion in Scotland’. The artificial blockade created by the king’s ships sailing out of Dublin to patrol the North Channel was easily breached. Covenanters were already passing into Ulster, including ‘ministers, come out of Scotland, who have a great concourse of people that follow them and hear them preach all manner of sedition’. By the New Year in 1667 it was reported that ‘Scots who were in the late insurrection there have got over to Ireland in spite of vigilance at the ports. A boat was found without owner or pretender lately in Glenarm creek, which we suspect landed some of them’.

‘Great disorder among the Scotch’
In the late 1660s and early 1670s the Ulster Scots still resolutely refused to conform to the established episcopal church. The ministers ejected in 1661 still attracted large crowds of people to the fields, hills and ‘solitary places’, motivated by their belief that Presbyterian Church government was divinely ordained and conformity to episcopacy sinful. Rullion Green, and the persecutions which followed it, tended to sustain the Covenanters’ resolution rather than quench it. The bishops still nurtured the belief that the rising was ‘either born in Ireland or put to nurse there’ and that its aftermath brought ‘factious preachers which run out of Scotland, like wild boars hunted out of a forest and throw their foam of seditious doctrine among the people’.

The influence of Scottish ministers in Ulster was only one part of the problem the established church and state authorities faced. Across all of Ulster the deposed Presbyterian ministers, as well as those recently arrived from Scotland, were preaching in outdoor conventicles which were too large and frequent to be dealt with in any effective way. The Lord Lieutenant Ormond recognised the problem stating that ‘It is not strange that the non-conformists in the north of Ireland when they are more numerous and united should assume more boldness in their meetings than in other places’.

Cairncastle and Carrickfergus
The authorities also began to grow concerned at reports that the Ulster Scots were again publicly renewing the Covenant. In the late summer of 1668 a large conventicle was held during the night in Cairncastle, county Antrim. Four local Presbyterian ministers were involved, preaching to a large gathering that had travelled from Coleraine, Carrickfergus, Antrim and Belfast. The people were called on to subscribe the Covenant and reported to have been urged ‘to stand to the Covenant, and not yield to the government’, the ministers telling them, ‘that God would fight their quarrel’. By late December of 1668 Ormond was warned that there was ‘great disorder among the Scotch... all those Scottish ministers that were silenced here and afterwards sent to Scotland by your Grace’s command are now returned and in all places preach up the Covenant very openly and with a boldness in my mind very dangerous’.

The threat of another rising developing out of the unrest amongst the Covenanters in Ulster preyed on the mind of government officials. Charles II had been informed of the discontent of the Ulster Scots and the Lord Lieutenant Ormond openly speculated that the field meetings could act as a prelude to something much more serious. In Ulster, he reported, ‘the preaching up of the Covenant so boldly and so frequently and in so many places is a degree beyond conventicling and is the next immediate step to active rebellion’.

Those concerns were exacerbated by the fact that the Covenanters in Ulster were greatly strengthened by
the continued arrival of people and ministers from Scotland. By the spring and early summer of 1670 William Keyes, the Presbyterian minister of Belfast who had been present at the night-time conventicle at Cairncastle, was reported to have been ‘in the liberties of Carrickfergus by the highway [and] had six Scotch preachers with him and had six sermons and above 3,000 persons... some say 4,000 and many of them out of Scotland’.

‘The temper of the tymes’
Despite the ongoing persecutions in the country the Presbyterian ministers attempted to maintain the Church structure it had erected in more peaceable times in the 1640s and 50s. Congregations had access to preaching, the Lord’s Supper and even Baptism at conventicles, although in one case in Donegal the minister had to flee at ‘the furious approach’ of the bishop whilst baptising a young child.

The authorities had some knowledge that the Ulster Presbyterians still maintained a strong Church structure, but they had no idea of the regularity of Kirk Sessions, Presbytery meetings, or indeed that an oversight committee of ministers had regular secret meetings in Ahoghill in the absence of a Synod. Due to the turbulence of the times the Presbyterian organisation had to be secretive, it also had to be cautious with the arrival of many Scots ministers of whom they had little knowledge. Before a minister was accepted into a congregation, the settled ministers insisted on the candidate pledging a unity of purpose, due to what they called ‘the temper of these tymes’, the candidate was urged ‘expressly and particularly to peaceableness and subjection to his bretherne in the Lord’.

David Houston and Alexander Peden
The Presbyteries’ insistence on ministerial unity was not easily achieved in a Kirk which had already experienced divisions on the degree of application and role of the Covenant in the state.

In the 1650s the Scottish Church had already become bitterly divided between Protestors who would admit none to public or military positions unless they had subscribed the Covenant, and the Resolutioners who took a more moderate stance. The Ulster Kirk had favoured the more moderate Resolutioner stance but had not prevented young militant Protestors such as Crookshanks, McCormick and Bruce entering into Ulster. With the influx of Scottish ministers in this era the same problems arose, as a new group of young ministers arrived who adhered to the Protestor principles and began to openly oppose the state rejection of the Covenant.

One such young man was David Houston. We aren’t certain of the year of his arrival, but amidst the turbulence of the summer of 1671 Houston was publickly rebuked by the Antrim Meeting for ‘his disorderliness in exercising a ministry without consent of the meeting’. Houston had preached on both sides of the Bann to willing audiences at Macosquin, Ballymoney, Derrykeighan, and on the coast at Glenarm, in countryside neighbouring the large Cairncastle conventicles. The settled Presbyterian ministers formally chastised him for ‘preaching in way of opposition by fixing tent against tent’. However, despite the anger of the Presbytery, Houston remained in the country and proved popular. He received a call from the people of Glenavy in south Antrim, which the Antrim Presbytery reported included ‘some few persons in repute for piety’ who had resisted the settling of another minister in the congregation.

In the same period Alexander Peden also crossed into Ulster, he was reported to have been in county Armagh among Scots from Galloway who had fled the post-Pentland persecutions. He preached to ‘great multitudes’, and in Armagh as in the other counties, the Ulster Scots were willing to travel long distances on foot or horseback to hear ministers such as Houston and Peden. The conventicles in Armagh were also held under cover of darkness because ‘ministers durst neither preach nor give communion in the day-time, but in the night; and the people then found no hurt by wanting their sleep at such occasions’.

‘A decoy to the rest’
The popularity and militancy of field preachers such as Houston and Peden worried the settled ministry and the sad divisions which had emerged in earlier times surfaced again with a renewed vitality. In Ireland a new Lord Lieutenant, the earl of Essex, began to treat the Presbyterians with more leniency - a policy, though not endorsed by the bishops - was seen as a means whereby the offer of a ‘faire treaty’ with the more moderate ministers could result in some becoming a ‘decoy to the rest’.

Thus government policy increased the widening gulf emerging between the moderate Presbyterian party and the field preachers who contended for the application of the Covenant in its full vigour. It was a sad division in the Kirk, which was to separate further, as each party reacted in markedly different ways to resumed persecutions in the late 1670s. As the days of relative indulgence dwindled, the Covenanters on both sides of the North Channel were comforted by the sermons of their field preachers, who in the words of Alexander Peden promised them ‘crowns, crowns of glory ye shall wear ere long, and a remnant of you shall be preserved in all the sad days that is coming on Britain and Ireland’.

Galloway - a tinderbox
In Scotland, as in Ulster, conventicles increased in size and frequency. In the summer of 1678 John Welsh of Templepatrick preached at one of the biggest gatherings at Skeoch Hill near Dumfries where 14,000 Covenanters gathered. In Ulster Richard Cameron appeared at a conventicle at Strabane in county Tyrone where he preached against the indulged ministers, calling them ‘idolators and persecutors... guilty of all the blood shed since Abel’.

The state increasingly returned to using military force against the Covenanters and to subdue the west of Scotland. The circumstances mirrored those in the period the west had erupted in anger before the Pentland rising. Galloway was once again a tinderbox. Reports from Belfast alleged that in Scotland ‘there is a full purpose... to take the sword in hand, and that the covenant is there renewed’, and claimed that John Welsh was involved in its planning. The duke of Hamilton further reported that ‘ther was great allarum at Edinburgh that the West was about rising in arms’ and that ‘7,000 horses are transported from Ireland [and] that they are in the hands of disaffected persons in the western and southern shires’.

The Covenanters became increasingly militant in the face of further military persecutions, and particularly in response to the deployment of regiments of Highland troops in Ayrshire and Galloway. Throughout the south west of Scotland all the people suffered at the hands of this “Highland Host”, some ‘grievously wounded and beaten’ in what the lowland Scots described as ‘the crueltie of these strange locusts’. Their militant response included the death of James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews, who was ambushed and killed on 3 May 1679 at Magus Muir. In response, five innocent Covenanters were arrested and executed nearby.

1 June 1679: The Battle Of Drumclog
By the spring of 1679 a larger confrontation was inevitable – and it came about on the moss at Drumclog, below Loudon Hill in Ayrshire. On the 31st
of May John Graham of Claverhouse (also known as “Bloody Clavers” or “Bonnie Dundee” ) took a party of horse to scatter a reported conventicle, but on arrival on the 1st June he found a small Covenanter force of 200 men and 50 horse. Although they were not well armed, the Covenanters raised their voices to sing the 76th Psalm and received both rifle fire and a cavalry charge whilst standing their ground. Claverhouse’s dragoons faltered in the moss as the Covenanters charged, and clearing the field they pursued the royalist troops through Strathaven. It was a small battle, but a major victory. News spread like wildfire and the Covenanters across the west ‘began flocking to them from all hands’.

22 June 1679: The Battle of Bothwell Brig
The path from victory to defeat was to prove all too swift. Despite the advantage gained at Drumclog the Covenanters lost their military advantage in a series of delays and theological debates. One party called for a free General Assembly, but recognised a duty to the ‘maintenance and defence of the king’s authority’, the other opposed ‘a king who had broken the covenant, altered the polity of the church and waged war against the godly’. Meanwhile royalists gathered an army of 10,000 men under the duke of Monmouth, and they drew up to face the Covenanters at Bothwell Brig, near Hamilton, on the banks of the River Clyde.

Although John Welsh of Templepatrick arrived with 1,000 men from Galloway on the eve of battle, swelling the Covenanter ranks to 4,000, it was not enough. Dispirited and lacking leadership the Covenanters had been all but defeated by 10 o’clock on the 22nd of June, the morning of the Sabbath. Monmouth’s army crossed the bridge at Bothwell killing 400 men and taking 1,200 prisoners.

Monmouth advanced into the south-west to check for signs of the Covenanters rallying – but their would be no response. The last great Covenanter rising was over, and once again in flight many of the remnant sought refuge in Ulster.

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John Welsh
The life of John Welsh of Templepatrick and Irongray is intimately bound up with the Scottish Reformation, Scottish migration to Ulster, the Six Mile Water revival and the struggles of the Covenanters. Welsh’s great-grandfather was the Reformer John Knox, his grandfather the celebrated John Welsh, Presbyterian minister of Ayr and his father was Josias Welsh former professor of Glasgow University who preached at Oldstone and Templepatrick at the outbreak of the 1625 revival. John was brought to Oldstone and Templepatrick when still an infant and grew up in Ulster amid revival and persecution. He later became minister of Irongray near Dumfries until being ejected for non-conformity in 1662. John Welsh became a leading figure in Covenanting struggle, playing a leading role at the battle of Rullion Green and the battle of Bothwell Brig.

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Drumclog
The Battle of Drumclog Monument, Drumclog Memorial Kirk and the famous “Bluidy Banner” which the Covenanter William Cleland carried at the battle. The Kirk (which has a Covenanter battle flag painted on the wall behind the pulpit) is on the main A71 road between Kilmarnock and Strathaven, with the monument signposted just opposite. The “Bluidy Banner” is on display at the Cameronians’ Regimental Museum in Hamilton. An exhibition of the battle can be seen at the John Hastie Museum in Strathaven. Visit the kirk’s website here.

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Visit: Cairncastle - home of Patrick Adair, haven of the Covenanters.
James Shaw arrived in east Ulster from Scotland around 1616 to join his brother-in-law Hugh Montgomery near Newtownards. He later moved to east Antrim and built Ballygally Castle in 1625. The castle was garrisoned by local Ulster Scots during the 1641 rebellion.

Cairncastle was the scene of the ministry of Patrick Adair, first historian of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, whose settlement was aided by the Shaw family. In 1669, one year following the large conventicles held during the night in Cairncastle, Patrick Adair was recorded as living in ‘Ballyhackett townland’; his glebe farm is the most probable location of the conventicle. Cairncastle also provides an excellent vantage point to view the sea crossing taken by many Covenanters in their flight to Ulster after Rullion Green and Bothwell Brig. For a biography of Adair and discussion of the location of his residence, click here.

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Visit: The Covenanters Prison and the escapes to Ulster
Approximately 400 of the Covenanters taken after the Battle of Bothwell Brig were confined in an outdoor enclosure at Greyfriars in Edinburgh. The Kirkyard which witnessed the first rise of the Covenants now became the Covenanter's prison. Some died there, others were executed, and 257 were deported overseas as slaves to the Plantations of Virginia or Barbados. However the ship they were in - Crown of London - sank in a raging storm off Orkney, and 211 drowned. Two monuments on Orkney - a 44 foot tower on the coast at Deerness, and a memorial fountain at Kirkwall church - mark the event.

Ten of the Orkney survivors are known to have fled to Ulster. They were Andrew Clark (Galloway), John Gardner (Clydesdale), John Martin (Galloway), Thomas Miller (Fife), Hugh Montgomery (Stirling), Andrew Thomson (Ayr),
John Thomson (Clydesdale), Thomas Thomson (Stirling), William Waddel (Clydesdale) and James Young (Teviotdale).

To find out more, visit the Greyfriars website and the Orkney tourism website.

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Michael Bruce of Killinchy

(this biography by Jack Greenald)

Michael Bruce
Born: Scotland, 1635
Portrait: none
Ulster connection: Minister of Killinchy, Co Down (October 1657 - 1661; returned April 1670 - 1688, during which time he made many visits to Scotland)
Died: Anwoth, Scotland, 1693
Memorial: None (his three children are all buried at Killinchy)
Autobiography: see below
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Michael Bruce was born in Scotland in 1635, and was said to have been the great-grandson of the Rev Robert Bruce, a prominent Edinburgh minister who had been ordained in 1587. He was educated at Edinburgh University graduating with his MA in 1654.

In 1657 Bruce became the minister at Killinchy, County Down, on the recommendation of a previous minister of the church, the Rev John Livingstone, who ‘sent with him an ample recommendatory letter, dated Ancrum, July 3 1657, and directed to Captain James Moore of Ballybrega, to be communicated to the congregation’. Bruce was publicly ordained in the church of Killinchy in October.

Of Bruce’s time in Ulster, Patrick Adair in his history of the Irish Presbyterian Church wrote: ‘For at this time [1661] there were two or three young men who had come from Scotland, and had been but lately ordained by the Presbytery here, and who, intending to return to Scotland and put themselves out of the bishop’s reverence in this country, resolved to do some good before they went. They therefore 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 them. There they spoke much against the bishops and the times. This matter of preaching (as it was in itself commendable and faithful when rightly managed), did exceedingly please most people. These men were cried up as the only courageous, faithful and zealous ministers by the common sort of people, and by those who had great zeal, but little judgement and experience; though not approved of by the more serious, prudent, and experienced Christians ... I am persuaded of one of them, Mr Michael Bruce, who was most noticed, and indeed did most good at that time, that he was a person singularly gifted, truly zealous, and faithful, and also peaceable and orderly in his temper and conversation with his brethren, and in his whole way a very Nathaniel – of all which he hath given proof in the church of Christ for many years since that time’.

In the early 1660s, Bruce fled to Scotland in consequence of his outspoken preaching, Ormond had ordered the apprehension of ‘all the Scottish silenced ministers in the North who are a dangerous artillery; what I shall doe with them I know not, only I take it to bee reasonable that if they trouble mee a great deale I may trouble them a little’.

In January 1664 Bruce, and two other ministers, Henry Hunter and James Campbell, returned to Ulster from Scotland urging their followers to petition Ormond on their behalf, they wanted to be tried by a judge of assize rather than an ecclesiastical tribunal if they were accused of an offense. Bruce didn’t stay in Ulster long. On the 23 June 1664, Bruce and Crookshanks were summoned before the Scottish Council as ‘pretended ministers and fugitives from Ireland’, and in 1665 Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews was most concerned at a report that Michael Bruce was keeping a conventicle within six miles of St Andrews, in the neighbourhood of a conforming minister.

After many escapes in Scotland, Bruce was taken prisoner near Stirling in 1668, and in July following was sentenced by the Scottish council to be banished out of the three kingdoms. In September he was sent by sea to London to await his majesty’s pleasure, and was imprisoned in the Gatehouse, Westminster, where he was shortly afterwards condemned to go to Tangier in Africa. His wife followed him to London; when there, she found means to interest some of the courtiers in his favour, and Charles, unwilling formally to reverse the sentence of banishment, was prevailed on to give him the privilege of naming the place of his exile. Mr Bruce, it is said, immediately chose ‘Killinchy Woods’ a writ of nolo prosequi was obtained for him, and in April 1670 he once more settled in his favourite parish of Killinchy.

Bruce has been described as a man of ‘great genius, and a liberal education – of extra-ordinary zeal for the glory of God and the good of souls – much given to meditation and secret prayer – a thundering, broken-hearted, and most affecting preacher’. One of his opponents described him as ‘a fierce & pernicious Zealott’.

In 1688 he fled from Ireland during the turmoil of the Glorious Revolution, and went to Scotland where he became the minister at Samuel Rutherford’s old church at Anworth until his death in 1693.

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• Bruce's sermon "The Rattling of the Dry Bones", 1672, has been included in the recent "Ulster-Scots Writing, an Anthology" edited by Frank Ferguson.

• See the booklet "The Seven Bruces" by Braid Books and Moyola Books (c/o Graham Mawhinney, Labby, Draperstown, Co Londonderry BT45 7BE), a reprint of Classon Porter's series in "The Northern Whig" newspaper, 1885

• "Sermons Delivered in Times of Persecution in Scotland" by John Howie, 1779, includes a four page "biographical notice" on Michael Bruce and three of his sermons, one of which was preached after the Battle of Rullion Green in 1666