The Broken Covenant: Scotland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1650
By 1650, Britain was a shattered continent in miniature. The kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland had ceased to be governed by monarchs or even by parliaments; they were ruled instead by ideology and fire, and the sword had become the only arbiter of law. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms—a tangle of civil, religious, and dynastic conflicts that had begun in 1639—had entered their terminal phase. Scotland, once the covenantal conscience of the British Isles, now found itself standing between the ruins of a monarchy it could not save and a republic it could not endure.
The war’s roots lay deep in religious conviction. The Scottish Covenanters, having defied King Charles I in the 1630s over his imposition of Anglicanism, had risen as the militant guardians of Presbyterianism. They had fought Charles, allied with the English Parliament, and in 1649 had watched in horror as their former ally executed the king they believed they were reforming, not replacing. “The execution of Charles I,” writes David Stevenson, “was not only a political trauma in Scotland—it was a theological catastrophe” (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1977, p. 211).
Determined to resist the new English Commonwealth, the Scots crowned Charles II king at Scone in January 1651, demanding in return that he subscribe to the National Covenant and rule as a Presbyterian monarch. Charles, ever adaptable, swore the oath, though his faith in it was as shallow as the ink with which it was signed. Meanwhile, in England, Oliver Cromwell, Lord General of the New Model Army and the hammer of the monarchy, saw in this act not only rebellion but apostasy. Scotland had become a royalist staging ground, and that, to Cromwell, was intolerable.
In July 1650, Cromwell invaded Scotland with approximately 16,000 men, veterans of the English Civil War, hardened by Irish campaigns and imbued with religious zeal. Opposing him was the Scottish Army of the Kirk, led by David Leslie, a cautious, capable commander who had once served under Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden. Leslie had the advantage of terrain and numbers—nearly 20,000 troops entrenched around Edinburgh—but his force was hamstrung by political interference. The Kirk’s ministers insisted on purging “malignants”—those insufficiently zealous—from the army, thereby weakening morale and decimating leadership.
Cromwell found himself pinned down and increasingly desperate as autumn rains turned supply lines into mud. Then, on 3 September 1650, the Scots made a fatal error. They descended from their defensive position above Dunbar, intending to strike a decisive blow. Instead, they exposed their flank to Cromwell’s veterans. At dawn, he launched a devastating assault. The Scottish army broke. Over 3,000 were killed, and 10,000 captured, many of whom would be shipped to New England in chains or forced into labor. Cromwell called it “a remarkable mercy”; others called it the beginning of the end.
The English then occupied Edinburgh and pressed deeper into Scotland. By 1651, Charles II led a last-ditch invasion of England, hoping to rally royalist support. But that gamble ended at Worcester, where Cromwell crushed his army on 3 September—the anniversary of Dunbar—marking the final collapse of royalist resistance across the British Isles. “Worcester,” Cromwell declared, “was a crowning mercy.” For Scotland, it was a final humiliation.
The consequences were far-reaching. Scotland was placed under English military occupation. Its parliament was dissolved. The Kirk was fractured. Thousands of its sons were dead, imprisoned, or exiled. “The kingdom,” writes historian John Morrill, “was not conquered merely by soldiers but by exhaustion, disillusionment, and its own inability to decide what kind of state it wanted to be” (Revolt in the Provinces, 1999, p. 264).
The 1650 campaign, and especially the Battle of Dunbar, revealed both the fragility of ideological war and the ferocity of those who fight under divine banners. Cromwell, for all his tactical brilliance, was also an apocalyptic visionary, convinced he was doing the work of God. Leslie, for all his discipline, was bound by a church more interested in doctrine than survival. And Charles II, in the middle, would bide his time, return in 1660, and avenge nothing.
It might have written that “in the year 1650, Scotland tried to restore a king, and lost a country instead.” It was not only a battlefield lost at Dunbar—it was the last breath of the Scottish dream that God’s law might govern kings as well as men.
References:
- Stevenson, David. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651. Royal Historical Society, 1977.
- Fissel, Mark Charles. The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns Against Scotland, 1638–1640. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Morrill, John. Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1660. Longman, 1999.
- Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army: In England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653. Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
- Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford University Press, 2002.