The Rise of the Covenanters and Religious Conflict: Faith, Defiance, and the Road to War
When Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, inheriting the dual crowns of England and Scotland, he stepped into shoes that had been polished by the subtle political maneuverings of his father, James VI and I. But Charles was no Solomon. Where his father was cautious, deferential, and willing to compromise to preserve royal authority, Charles was imperious, reserved, and tragically convinced of his divine infallibility. He lacked the political radar to sense when a storm was gathering—and in Scotland, the clouds had been swirling since the day he first opened his prayer book.
Charles believed in order, hierarchy, and the unifying power of a single religious liturgy across his dominions. To him, uniformity in worship was not merely desirable—it was sacred. “The beauty of holiness,” he once said, “must be the same in every corner of my kingdom.” But that vision ignored the deeply rooted religious identity of the Scottish people. Presbyterianism, austere and uncompromising, had been hard-won through decades of theological struggle. It rejected bishops as unscriptural, rejected liturgical pomp as popish, and cherished the authority of the local kirk. In trying to impose Anglicanism—replete with vestments, rituals, and royal oversight—Charles was not only dictating religious practice; he was challenging national identity.
The breaking point came in 1637. Without consulting the Scottish Kirk or Parliament, Charles introduced a new Book of Common Prayer, crafted by Scottish bishops but modeled almost entirely on the Anglican liturgy. The reaction was instant, visceral, and unrelenting. In St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, legend tells us that Jenny Geddes, a market woman, hurled a stool at the minister’s head and shouted, “Daur ye say Mass in my lug?” The stool became a symbol of popular defiance, and the riot that followed ignited a national movement. As historian David Stevenson notes, “No single act of Charles’s reign provoked such instant and overwhelming resistance. It was not merely unpopular; it was intolerable” (Stevenson, 1973, p. 65).
In 1638, resistance to royal policy took organizational form with the signing of the National Covenant. Drafted in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, the Covenant reaffirmed the Reformation principles of 1560, rejected episcopacy, and denounced any innovations not authorized by the Kirk and the Bible. Scottish nobles, ministers, and common folk—many of them illiterate—lined up to sign the document, often in blood. It was a mass declaration of loyalty not to the king, but to God and to a Presbyterian vision of the church. “The Covenant,” wrote historian Rosalind Mitchison, “was both a religious and national manifesto. It signaled that resistance to the king could now be cast as obedience to divine law” (Mitchison, 1982, p. 211).
The signatories came to be known as the Covenanters. They were not rebels in the conventional sense; they were loyal Scots who believed the king had betrayed the true faith. But their emergence as a coordinated, armed movement directly challenged the very foundation of Charles’s monarchy. He could not tolerate a rival source of authority—especially one wrapped in the moral language of salvation.
What followed were the Bishops’ Wars, a name that belies the scope of the crisis. These were not minor border skirmishes but the first tremors of an earthquake that would engulf the British Isles. In 1639, Charles mobilized his army to crush the Covenanters. But the king, ever aloof, lacked military experience and money. His English troops, many of whom sympathized with Puritan causes, were unmotivated and poorly supplied. The Scots, by contrast, were prepared and politically united. Under the able leadership of Alexander Leslie—a veteran of the Swedish army under Gustavus Adolphus—they assembled a disciplined force infused with religious purpose. “They marched,” writes Allan Macinnes, “not simply as soldiers but as the Army of the Covenant—a crusading force imbued with moral certainty” (Macinnes, 2007, p. 109).
The First Bishops’ War of 1639 ended without a major battle. Charles, realizing his position was untenable, agreed to the Pacification of Berwick. But the truce was short-lived. By 1640, both sides were preparing again for war. Charles attempted to bypass Parliament and raise funds through alternative means—known as “ship money” and forced loans—but this only deepened resentment in England. When he called the Short Parliament in April 1640, it refused to grant funds without addressing grievances. Frustrated, Charles dissolved it after just three weeks.
The Second Bishops’ War later that year would be decisive. The Scottish army invaded Northumberland and Durham, defeating English forces at the Battle of Newburn and occupying Newcastle—the source of London’s coal supply. Facing a military and political crisis, Charles was forced to summon what would become the Long Parliament in November 1640. “The price of the king’s Scottish failure,” historian Conrad Russell wrote, “was the English Revolution. Without the Bishops’ Wars, there would have been no civil war in England” (Russell, 1990, p. 146).
Indeed, the road to the English Civil War began in a Scottish pulpit. The attempt to suppress the Covenanters had exposed the fatal weaknesses in Charles’s governance: his refusal to negotiate, his financial mismanagement, and his alienation of both English and Scottish subjects. The Covenanters, though driven by theological conviction, had unintentionally reshaped the political future of Britain. They proved that organized religious resistance could outmaneuver a king. They revealed the power of a cause when fused with national identity. And they demonstrated that divine authority, once claimed by monarchs, could be reclaimed by the people.
In the years that followed, the Covenanters would play an even more complex role—first allying with the English Parliament in the Civil War, then turning on it, and eventually suffering brutal repression under Cromwell. But in the late 1630s and early 1640s, they stood as a beacon of principled defiance. Michael Lynch summarized it best: “The Covenanting revolution was the first successful revolution in Britain. It was Scottish, religious, and radical. And it opened the gates to a century of constitutional redefinition” (Lynch, 1992, p. 229).
References
- Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History. London: Pimlico, 1992.
- Mitchison, Rosalind. A History of Scotland. London: Methuen, 1982.
- Macinnes, Allan I. Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007.
- Russell, Conrad. The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Stevenson, David. The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973.