(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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