Scottish Covenanters and the English Civil War Origins

Revolutions and Their Deep Roots

We are inclined to think of revolutions as historical events that disrupt the order of the world — eras that rewrite the history of their times and transform the cultures of the places in which they occur. And of course the great revolutions of the world do indeed do all of these things. But simply because the historical effect of revolutions is such a radical transformation of society, we should not be lured into seeing revolutions as arising from sudden disjunctures in the social fabric. Revolutions are not like a meteor crashing into the body politic and changing the way in which things are done in an abrupt and external fashion. The English Civil War, like other revolutionary battles, was fought along long-standing cultural, economic, and religious fault lines.

Rather, revolutions are like earthquakes: while they may seem to come out of nowhere, and while they certainly shake the world, they arise from long-discerned and — at least at some level — measurable and understandable forces. Revolutions are always the natural results of particular sets of cultural and economic conditions. Just as it is true within the natural world — just as earthquakes arise from the shifting of tectonic plates — it is also true that all major events in human history are connected in understandable and even predictable ways to the events that came before.

This is not, of course, the same thing as arguing that it is always easy to see — either in advance or even in hindsight — the connections between the present and the past. This tends especially to be the case in the aftermath of revolutions, because it is the nature of revolutions to bury the past that led up to them in literal, metaphorical, and polemical rubble. And the farther we are in time from those original revolutions, the more difficult it will be for us to determine the connection between the conditions leading up to a revolution and the revolution itself.

But, as difficult as it may be for us to understand the nature of revolutionary eras, if we want both to understand where revolutions come from and how and why they change in specific ways the societies in which they occur, we must look not so much to the revolutionary moments themselves as to the moments that occurred before — and often many years before. We must, in other words, take a long historical view, looking not to the months before the firing of the first shot but to the years and even the decades before the revolution occurred.

This paper examines one of the more historically consequential revolutions in Western history, looking at a specific set of precedents that led up to the English Civil War. This revolutionary conflict was not as important in terms of its effects — either in England or elsewhere — as the American and French revolutions would be in their countries of origin or in other nations, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as a failed revolution. Certainly the end result of this revolution was in many ways a return to the status quo (although this is arguably true of the French Revolution as well), and so it was not as radical or as strategically successful as the American Revolution or later revolutions such as the Russian. But it changed in many ways the manner in which the English thought about their government, and it rewrote the nature of power relations among the different national and quasi-national factions in the British Isles.

This paper examines one particular element of the English Revolution: the Scottish Covenanter Party and its reaction to the Anglican Prayer Book. This is not to say that the English Civil War was essentially or primarily a religious war, although differences over religion certainly played into it. The roots of the series of political upheavals that collectively constitute the English Civil War were based as much in economics as in religion, and as much in political philosophy as in economics.

Before looking specifically at the effects of the Scottish Covenanter Party and its reaction to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, it will be useful to summarize in broad terms the overall causes — religious and otherwise — of this war that began in the period following the Renaissance, during which modern ideas of governance and of the rights of individuals were being developed.

Economic and Political Tensions Under the Early Stuarts

As Kishlansky (1997), along with a number of other scholars, argues, in order to understand why war broke out in England in 1642 under the reign of Charles I, it is imperative that we step back a reign in history and look at conditions at the beginning of James I's reign. James was, of course, the first king to rule over both England and Scotland. England was a far wealthier country than Scotland, and James was perhaps somewhat overwhelmed by the wealth of his southern kingdom — and perhaps too inclined to believe that the English treasury could not be depleted.

When Charles succeeded to the throne after the death of his father in 1625, he brought little of a personal fortune from his Scottish holdings and so, like his father, depended upon English wealth. This was problematic because Charles — like James — was a firm believer in the divine right of kings and saw no reason why he should have to ask the English Parliament for money.

If he had simply appropriated money from Parliament for personal expenses, he might have escaped without any serious ruffling of Parliament's feathers. But Charles — already looked upon with suspicion by a number of members of Parliament and the nobility because one of his first acts as king was to marry a staunchly Catholic princess — quickly became involved in the religious wars of the time and began to ask Parliament to commit the monies of Protestant England to Catholic military causes.

Such requests were not well received by Parliament, which moved to use all of the resources at its disposal to limit the power of this king. Parliament's main power lay in its oversight of most taxes and other levies on the people; it limited these taxes to the greatest extent possible, thereby forcing Charles to call Parliament into session again and again to ask for money. Members of Parliament took advantage of being in session to attempt to influence the king, who in turn worked to limit that influence by finding ways to raise money without calling Parliament into session.

The Court of Star Chamber and Royal Finance

One of the primary ways in which Charles raised funds was through a private royal court that he used to levy fines to fund both his personal needs and his political and religious ventures. This Court of the Star Chamber remains legendary for the oppressiveness of its policy-making:

Closely linked to religion was the King's power, against which a movement had been steadily building, and which reached one of its bloodier confrontations during Charles I's "personal rule." The Court was used to enforce royal proclamations, so much so that in 1620 Chamberlain complained "the world is now much terrified of the Star Chamber, there being not so little an offence against any proclamation but is liable and subject to the censure of that court." This was exacerbated by the increase in the number of government prosecutions, many upon the oral procedure of ore tenus, based upon the defendant's admission of guilt. A good example of the way Star Chamber was used for Charles' personal rule is the case of Richard Chambers, fined £2,000 for "comparing of his Majesty's government with the government of the Turks, intending thereby to make the people believe that his Majesty's happy government may be termed Turkish tyranny."

There was clearly a growing opposition to Charles' "personal rule," which the Star Chamber was used to suppress. One aspect that most irked the influential classes, next to religion, was finance. Charles, like his father, spent enormous sums, and when his lavish personal life and the needs of state were combined, he was perpetually short of funds. In the absence of a cooperative Parliament, he turned to what contemporaries described as "unconstitutional modes of extorting revenue" — namely the Star Chamber, since fines naturally went to the Crown. As Kenyon states, "the most important single cause of Star Chamber's unpopularity was the role it was called to play in the 1630s in the enforcement of the King's financial and social policies." So much so that Pym, one of the leaders of the Parliamentary faction, complained in 1640: "The Star Chamber now is become a court of revenue."

Between 1631 and 1641, 175 actions were brought by the Attorney-General in Star Chamber, most for breach of proclamations — effectively a demand for money. A clear example of this is the actions for payment of ship money. Social policies were enforced as well, and the fines for such offences as building tenements, enclosures, and monopoly infringements all went to the Crown. The Star Chamber's role as an arm grabbing money for the King's purse was widely recognized and despised, and its reputation declined accordingly.

Parliament was eventually able to limit the power of the Star Chamber, but remained on the defensive in its attempts to force Charles to recognize its authority as a power equal to — or even superior to — his own. This led to years of quarreling between king and Parliament over money, and would lead Charles to dissolve Parliament altogether. He would reign without their advice, consent, or legal authority to raise taxes for eleven years.

It was just before this period that the Anglican Prayer Book was introduced into Scotland, prompting a group who called themselves the Covenanters to attempt an invasion of England. Charles, who appears to have been genuinely alarmed at this threat from his ancestral homeland, called Parliament back into session to ask them to levy a tax so that he might fight the Covenanters. It should be noted that one of the ironies of this particular chapter in the English Civil Wars was that the Covenanters in general agreed with Charles that the king should have access to at least some of the treasury without needing to ask Parliament for permission.

Parliament refused to levy a tax to fight the Covenanters, so Charles once again dissolved Parliament and began paying the Covenanters to keep them away from London. But in 1641 he ran out of funds to keep the Covenanters at bay.