(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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