How the Scots invented the Modern World.
The true story of how western Europe"s poorest nation created our world and everything in it.
by Arthur Herman.
Preface.
People of Scottish descent are usually proud about their history and achievements. Yet even they know only the half of it.
They can recite many names and details in the familiar story of their people. "Braveheart" William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; the Arbroath Declaration and Mary Queen of Scots; Robert Burns and Bonnie Prince Charlie. They point out how James Watt invented the steam engine, John Boyd Dunlop the bicycle tire, and Alexander Fleming penicillin. Yet no one else seems to pay much attention. Scots often complain that Scotland"s place among nations deserves more exposure than it gets. But their complaints have an ironic, rather than a beseeching, tone. They seem to take a perverse pride in being so consistently underestimated.
The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it. This Scottish mentality was a deliberate creation, athough it was conceived by many minds and carried out by many hands. It is a self-consciously modern view, so deeply rooted in the a.s.sumptions and inst.i.tutions that govern our lives today that we often miss its significance, not to mention its origin. From this point of view, a large part of the world turns out to be "Scottish" without realizing it. It is time to let them in on the secret.
This is the story of how the Scots created the basic ideals of modernity. It will show how those ideals transformed their own culture and society in the eighteenth century, and how Scots carried them with them wherever they went. Obviously, the Scots did not do everything by themselves; other nations-Germans, French, English, Italians, Russians, many others-supplied bricks and mortar for building the modern world. But it is the Scots who drew up the blueprints and taught us how to judge the final product. When we gaze out on a contemporary world shaped by technology, capitalism, and modern democracy, and struggle to find our own place in it, we are in effect viewing the world through the same lens as the Scots did.
Such an understanding did not come easily. Sir Walter Scott said, "I am a Scotsman; therefore I had to fight my way into the world." The history of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of hard-earned triumph and heartrending tragedy, spilled blood and ruined lives as well as great achievements. In 1700 Scotland was Europe"s poorest independent country (Ireland, after all, was governed by Englishmen, and Portugal still owned Brazil). Yet the story of how this small, underpopulated (fewer than two million people as late as 1800), and culturally backward nation rose to become the driving wheel of modern progress is not only largely unknown, it may even be inspiring.
For if you want a monument to the Scots, look around you.
Prologue.
The Tron Church stands on Edinburgh"s High Street, almost at the midpoint of the Royal Mile, which rises to Edinburgh Castle at one end and slopes down to Holyrood Palace at the other. In 1696 the Tron Church was in many ways a monument to the strength and success of Scottish Presbyterianism, or as the Scots themselves call it, the Kirk. In 1633 the Edinburgh Town Council had decided they needed a new place of worship near the "tron," or public scales, where merchants and officials established the true weight and measure of commodities sold in the city markets. It would be designed as a specifically Presbyterian church. Unlike the larger St. Giles Cathedral, or the former monastery site of Greyfriars Church off Candlemakers Row, it carried no taint of a.s.sociation with Scotland"s Roman Catholic past. Nor would it be under the sway of the new Bishop of Edinburgh, appointed by King Charles I to thrust a foreign Anglican creed down the people"s throats.
Construction got under way in 1637. Then, the next winter, High Street was filled with the sound of drums and psalm-singing crowds, as citizens flocked to sign a National Covenant to take up arms against King Charles. The Covenanters took over the city in defiance of their English oppressors. The Tron Church sat unfinished while the Scots routed Charles"s army in the Bishops" War. It withstood the siege of Edinburgh by Oliver Cromwell"s troops in 1652. It was still unfinished when Charles I"s son, Charles II, sailed across the English Channel to be restored to his throne in 1660. Not until 1678 did builders finally complete its unpretentious steeple, "an old Dutch thing composed of wood and iron and lead edged all the way up with bits of ornament," and set Edinburgh"s coat of arms above the doorway, with this inscription in Latin: THE CITIZENS OF EDINBURGH DEDICATE.
THIS BUILDING TO CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH.
Edinburgh"s tron served the community in another way, as the town pillory, where the courts sentenced transgressors to be bound and punished. "Much falset and cheiting was daillie deteckit at this time by the Lords of Session," wrote one diarist in 1679. He continued with relish, "there was daillie nailing of lugs and binding of people to the Tron, and boring of tongues; so that it was a fatal year for false notaries and witnesses, as daillie experience did witness."
Sixteen hundred ninety-six would be a fatal year for another kind of transgressor. August had been a cold month, in fact it had been raining and freezing all summer. As the Tron Church struck eight o"clock, four young men were hurrying past, huddled against the cold. One was John Neilson, law clerk in the Court of Session, aged nineteen; the next Patrick Midletoyne or Middleton, aged twenty, a student at the College of Edinburgh. With them were Thomas Aikenhead, almost nineteen, a theology student, and John Potter, also a university student at the tender age of thirteen. We do not know for certain, but they may have been coming from Cleriheugh"s Tavern, a favorite neighborhood haunt for students, law clerks, and members of the legal profession.
As they pa.s.sed the church, Aikenhead shivered from the cold wind bl.u.s.tering around them. He turned and remarked to the others, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called h.e.l.l, to warm myself there." Again, it is not known whether any of the other lads laughed at his little joke. But the next day one of them, or another of their circle, informed the kirk authorities of what Aikenhead had said.
Aikenhead"s joke turned out to be no laughing matter. Other students revealed that, in between theology cla.s.ses, Thomas Aikenhead had been systematically ridiculing the Christian faith. He had told astonished listeners that the Bible was not in fact the literal Word of G.o.d but the invention of the prophet Ezra-"Ezra"s romances," as he called it. He a.s.serted that Jesus had performed no actual miracles, that the raising of Lazarus and curing the blind had all been cheap magic tricks to hoodwink the Apostles, whom he called "a company of silly witless fishermen." He said the story of Christ"s Resurrection was a myth, as was the doctrine of Redemption. As for the Old Testament, Aikenhead had said that if Moses had actually existed at all, he had been a better politician and better magician than Jesus (all those plagues of frogs and burning staffs and bushes and so forth), while the founder of Islam, Mohammed, had been better than either.
All this would have been horrifying and insulting for a believing Presbyterian to listen to, but Aikenhead had expounded larger issues as well. He claimed that G.o.d, nature, and the world were one, and had existed since eternity. Aikenhead had opened the door to a kind of pantheism; in other words, the Genesis notion of a divine Creator, who stood outside nature and time, was a myth.
Maybe Aikenhead had been bored. Maybe the theology student was merely showing off his ability to play fast and loose with issues that others treated with reverential care. The stunned silence and dumbfounded looks of his listeners must have been very gratifying to a young man who, at the ripe old age of eighteen, believed he knew it all. But the authorities were not amused. The truly d.a.m.ning evidence against Aikenhead came from his friend Mungo Craig, aged twenty-one, who said that he had heard Aikenhead say that Jesus Christ Himself was an impostor. When the Lord Advocate, the Scottish equivalent of attorney general, heard this, he decided that Aikenhead"s remarks const.i.tuted blasphemy as defined by an act of Parliament in 1695, which decreed that a person "not distracted in his wits" who railed or cursed against G.o.d or persons of the Trinity was to be punished with death.
Scotland"s legal system operated very differently from the system in England. All power of criminal prosecution rested in the hands of one man, the Lord Advocate. He had full powers to prosecute any case he chose. He could imprison anyone without issuing cause, or decide to drop a case even in the teeth of the evidence, or pursue it even when the local magistrate deemed it not worth the effort. Lord Advocate James Stewart was learned in the law, heir to a landed fortune, and a keen member of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He also knew that the Kirk was deeply concerned about the wave of new religious thinking coming up from the south, from England, which its enemies called "lat.i.tudinarianism."
Lat.i.tudinarians were "big-tent" Anglicans. The name came from the supposedly wide lat.i.tude they were willing to give to unorthodox religious opinions that a more tradition-bound Protestant might see as lax or even blasphemous. They believed Christianity should be a religion of tolerance and "reasonableness" rather than rigid dogma. Although they were deeply despised in Scotland, the Lat.i.tudinarians had become quite powerful in the Church of England. Several were now bishops; one, John Tillotson, was even Archbishop of Canterbury. Tillotson and the other "Lat.i.tude men" were also closely wired into the new scientific ideas sweeping across seventeenth-century Europe. They were keen admirers of England"s two most famous scientists, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician Isaac Newton, and saw no conflict between religious belief and rational scientific inquiry into the nature of man and the world. To a Scottish Presbyterian of the old school, Lat.i.tudinarianism was little different from atheism. And in Aikenhead"s jocose remarks, Lord Advocate Stewart sensed more than a whiff of both.
Stewart had a formidable battery of laws with which to prosecute the case. In 1695 the General a.s.sembly of the Reformed Church had recommended that ministers apply directly to civil magistrates for punishing cases of blasphemy and profanity. Scotland"s Parliament had then obliged by stiffening the old blasphemy statute with a "three strikes and you"re out" provision, in which after the third offense the unrepentant sinner could be put to death "as an obstinate blasphemer."
Now, Aikenhead was no third-time offender. This was the first time he had been up before the magistrate, and by law that was punishable only by imprisonment and public penance. But if it could be proved that he had "railed and cursed" against G.o.d and the Trinity, then he came under the special death-penalty provision. This is what Lord Advocate James Stewart decided Craig"s testimony established, and so when he ordered Aikenhead"s arrest on November 10, 1696, he fully intended to see him on the gallows.
Aikenhead was taken to a cell in Edinburgh"s munic.i.p.al prison, the Tollbooth. He realized at once that he was in a very serious position. At first he strenuously denied he had ever said such things. But when presented with the depositions, he claimed that if he did say them, he was just repeating doctrines he had read in some books (he did not specify which) that he had been given by another student-ironically, the chief witness against him, Mungo Craig. He instantly regretted everything. He did not only "from my very heart abhorre and detest" the words he had uttered, he wrote to the court, "but I do tremble" at the very sound of hearing them read aloud again. He stressed his sincere belief in the Trinity, in Jesus Christ as Savior, and in the truth of Scripture. As a native of Edinburgh, it was "my greatest happiness that I was born and educated in a place where the gospel was professed, and so powerfully and plentifully preached." Thomas asked that his case be set aside, pleading his repentance and his extreme youth. But he was now in the grip of larger forces.
The trial got under way, with Lord Advocate Stewart himself conducting the prosecution. There was no defense counsel.
A Scottish jury had three options, not two, in offering a verdict, just as it does today. They are "guilty," "not guilty," and "not proven," which jurors invoke when they decide the prosecution has failed to make a compelling case even when the prisoner is obviously guilty. Such a verdict might have enabled Aikenhead to escape the extreme penalty Stewart was demanding. But, confronted with the evidence absent a formal reb.u.t.tal, and with a prosecutor determined to make a public example of the boy, the jury found Aikenhead guilty of blasphemy.
On December 23, Stewart asked for the death penalty. "It is of verity, that you Thomas Aikenhead, shaking off all fear of G.o.d and regard to his majesties laws, have now for more than a twelvemonth . . . made it as it were your endeavor and work to vent your wicked blasphemies against G.o.d and our Savior Jesus Christ." Having been found guilty, Stewart added, "you ought to be punished with death, and the confiscation of your movables, to the example and terror of others." The sentence was duly p.r.o.nounced, and Aikenhead was condemned to hang on January 8 of the new year.
By now the case was acquiring some notoriety. Two of Scotland"s leading jurists, Lord Anstruther and Lord Fountainhall, visited the boy in prison. They were disturbed by what they heard and saw. They found Aikenhead in tears and near despair. He told them he repented that he had ever held such beliefs, and asked for a stay of execution, "for his eternal state depended on it." Anstruther in particular had his doubts about using a secular court to prosecute a case of blasphemy. "I am not for consulting the church in state affairs," he wrote to a friend. The purpose of the courts, and of capital punishment, Anstruther said, was to punish crimes that disturb society and government, rather than sins against G.o.d. The law normally paid no attention to questions of cursing, lying, and drunkenness, and correctly so. "But," he confessed, "our ministers generally are of a narrow set of thoughts and confined principles and not able to bear things of this nature."
One of those who certainly could not was Thomas Hallyburton, later Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. His argument against Aikenhead was straightforward and brooked no opposition. G.o.d makes the laws, not man, and they must be obeyed. "We by our very beings," he argued, "are bound to obey, submit, and subject ourselves to his will and pleasure who made us . . . and therefore his will, if he make it known," as in scripture and the Gospels, "is a law, and the highest law to us." Aikenhead, "this inconsiderable trifler," had broken that law and so he had to be punished. Hallyburton"s att.i.tude was, let him serve as an example to anyone who tries the same thing.
A battle was shaping up between two different views of the proper relations between the civil and the religious law, with hard-liners like Hallyburton on one side and more secular-minded lawyers like Anstruther on the other. Someone who took an obvious interest in this, and in the Aikenhead case generally, was the Englishman John Locke. Locke was nearing the end of his career as a political writer and theorist, but his most recent work touched directly on these issues. This was A Letter Concerning Toleration, A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in October 1689, which took the exact opposite approach to Hallyburton"s. "The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate," Locke had written, "because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to G.o.d." published in October 1689, which took the exact opposite approach to Hallyburton"s. "The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate," Locke had written, "because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to G.o.d."
Locke"s point was that it did not matter whether Aikenhead had broken G.o.d"s laws by saying that the Apostles were "witless fisherman" or Jesus was an impostor, or not. Religious belief was a matter of private conscience, and no public authority has the right to interfere in how it is exercised. It was a view closely allied with that of the Lat.i.tudinarians: "I esteem Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," Locke said. It also overlapped with Anstruther"s. Civil power was limited to "Civil Concernments," as Locke put it, which by their nature excluded religious matters. Locke"s arguments, which form the basis of our modern idea of the separation of church and state, were beginning to have an impact in England, as the Act of Toleration of 1689 showed. But in Scotland, where witches were still being prosecuted in the courts and hanged (two would be executed that next year), as in Ma.s.sachusetts (the infamous Salem witch trial had taken place in 1692), a different att.i.tude prevailed.
Another Scottish lawyer who was sympathetic to Aikenhead"s cause, James Johnstone, kept Locke informed of the trial, including copies of the indictment, the student depositions, and Aikenhead"s appeal. Johnstone pointed out that all the witnesses against Aikenhead were barely out of their teens, and that "none of them pretend, nor is it laid in the Indictment, that Aikenhead made it his business to seduce any man." He noted, "Laws long in desuetude should be gently put in Execution, and the first example made of one in circ.u.mstances that deserve no compa.s.sion, whereas here there is youth, levity, docility, and no design upon others."
Meanwhile, Aikenhead had pet.i.tioned Scotland"s leading judicial officer, the Lord Chancellor, and its governing body of royal officials, the Scottish Privy Council, for mercy. He restated his regrets and his desire to repent. "May it therefore please your Lordships," he wrote, "for G.o.d"s sake, to consider and compa.s.sionate my deplorable circ.u.mstances." Anstruther also stepped forward as the boy"s advocate, pleading mercy and saying that in his opinion Aikenhead would grow up to be an eminent Christian if his life was spared. But the Privy Council told him there was no chance of mercy unless the Kirk interceded for him. This it would not do. Instead, as Anstruther wrote, "the ministers out of a pious and ignorant zeal spoke and preached for cutting him off."
When the final vote came in the Privy Council on Aikenhead"s appeal, it was a tie. Then Lord Chancellor Polwarth cast the deciding vote for death.
Only one possible source of rescue remained, and that was in London. The English Parliament and the Privy Council were of course powerless to do anything; this was Scotland and out of their jurisdiction. If, however, King William and Queen Mary, who resided at Whitehall Palace but who were also rulers of Scotland, got wind of the case, they could use their power to issue a pardon or at least a reprieve. This is what the Kirk now had to forestall. They sent a pet.i.tion to William and Mary: "We cannot but lament the abounding impiety and profanity in this land, so we must acknowledge your Majesty"s Christian care in enacting good laws for suppressing the same, the rigorous execution of which we humbly beg."
Execution was right. On January 8, the Year of Our Lord 1697, at two o"clock in the afternoon, Thomas Aikenhead was taken to the gallows on the road between Edinburgh and Leith. Shivering in the cold wind, he delivered a final speech, the condemned man"s right by custom. "I can charge the world, if they can stain me, or lay any such thing on my charge, so that it was out of a pure love of truth, and my own happiness, that I acted," he declared in a wavering voice. "It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to truth," he added, and to follow reason where it leads. This he had done, and now it would cost him his life.
He then blasted the chief witness against him, Mungo Craig, "whom I have to reckon with G.o.d and his own conscience, if he was not as deeply concerned in those h.e.l.lish notions (for which I am sentenced) as ever I was." But then he forgave Craig, as he forgave all concerned in the trial, and wished that the Lord might forgive Craig likewise.
He then uttered his last wish: "It is my earnest desire that my blood may give a stop to that raging spirit of Atheism which hath taken such footing in Britain.... And now, O Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in thy hands I recommend my spirit." The hangman pulled away the ladder, the body swung, and Thomas Aikenhead, not quite nineteen, was dead.
Such was Scotland as it stood at the end of the seventeenth century. A nation governed by a harshly repressive Kirk; a nation of an unforgiving and sometimes cruel Calvinist religious faith; of trials for blasphemy and witchcraft; of a cranky, even perverse contrariness in the face of an appeal to mercy or reason or even the facts.
This was Scotland on the threshold of the modern world. Yet it would be misleading to call it "traditional Scotland." It was in fact of relatively recent vintage. The men who persecuted Thomas Aikenhead belonged to a cultural world that had come into being a little more than one hundred years before, with the Scottish Reformation.
To men such as the Reverend Thomas Hallyburton or Lord Advocate Stewart, the religious revolution John Knox had brought to Scotland in the sixteenth century had left a legacy of glory, but also of great bitterness. The True Faith had triumphed over Popery and corruption. But it had cost a century of almost uninterrupted violence and bloodshed, with Scotland torn apart by anarchy, civil war, foreign invasions, religious persecution, and repression. Throughout it all, the Scottish Kirk had had to fight a relentless battle against established political power. Securing the Presbyterian faith had led to the overthrow of one monarch (Mary Queen of Scots), rebellion against and then execution of another (Charles I), and the forcible removal of a third (James II).
In 1696, memories of the struggle were still fresh. Scots gave the years of the Restoration, the 1660s and 1670s, a sardonic nickname: "the Killing Time." In England, King Charles II is remembered as an easygoing, amiable rogue. In Scotland, however, his government used brutal armed force to stamp out the remnants of the National Covenant movement, which had rebelled against his father. Many of the Presbyterian ministers who asked William and Mary not to save Thomas Aikenhead could tell of having to go into hiding for their faith, pursued like animals across mountains and glens, and watching friends and neighbors murdered or transported into servitude across the Atlantic.
Aikenhead"s prosecutor, James Stewart, had been forced to flee for his life abroad. Patrick Hume, Baron of Polwarth, who had cast the decisive vote for death, was no decadent bewigged Restoration aristocrat. He knew what it was to be a hunted man. When several prominent opponents of Charles II were arrested for plotting against his life (the so-called Rye House Plot of 1683), Hume, although not directly implicated, had been forced to hide in the family burial vault in the parish church in Polwarth. For one month he had remained there, surviving on food smuggled in by loyal servants, with no light except through a narrow slit in the stone. By that tiny beam he had read and reread a Latin translation of the Psalms to keep his spirits up, so that, at age eighty, he could still recite them by heart.
Having received no mercy themselves, how likely was it that they would extend it to the likes of young Aikenhead the blasphemer?
Yet in 1696 this old order was already on its last legs. The execution of Aikenhead was the last hurrah of Scotland"s Calvinist ayatollahs. There was already a new generation on the rise of ministers and university professors and lawyers like Anstruther and Johnstone, who were not immune to the more progressive att.i.tudes percolating up from the south. Then in 1701 James Stewart himself pushed through Parliament an important legal reform, an act of habeas corpus that limited the Lord Advocate"s power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
There were other, more ominous changes in the offing. On the same day Aikenhead was executed, January 8, the Edinburgh city fathers asked the Scottish Privy Council to make provision for the mult.i.tudes of poor and indigent people begging in the streets "in this great dearth and time of scarcity." The traditional economy of Scotland was dying, under the hammer blows of harvest failures and famine. Beginning in 1695, Scots suffered three failed harvests in a row. Two hundred years later a historian described what happened: The crops were blighted by easterly "haars" or mists, by sunless, drenching summers, by storms, and by early bitter frosts and late snow in autumn. For seven years this calamitous weather continued-the corn rarely ripening, and the green, withered grain being shorn in December amidst pouring rain or pelting snow-storms . . . The sheep and oxen died in the thousands, the prices of everything among a peasantry that had nothing went up to famine pitch, and a large proportion of the population in rural districts was destroyed by disease and want.
No one knows how many died during the famine of the Lean Years of 16971703, but they probably numbered in the tens of thousands. Wrote Sir Robert Sibbald at the time, "Everyone may see Death in the Face of the poor." For an already impoverished and spa.r.s.ely populated country of fewer than two million souls, the 1690s set a benchmark of collective misery and misfortune Scots never approached again, not even in the worst years of the Highland Clearances.
The new century, then, marked the end of one way of life for Scotland and the beginning of another, simply because there was nowhere else to go. For the next generation of Lowlands Scots, the world of their fathers-of Covenanters, of the Killing Time, of famine and starvation, of pillories at the Tron, of the execution of witches and of Thomas Aikenhead-would become more and more a remote memory.
For this was the culturally and materially backward nation that forward-thinking Scotsmen worked to change. In doing so, they would also change the world. Before the eighteenth century was over, Scotland would generate the basic inst.i.tutions, ideas, att.i.tudes, and habits of mind that characterize the modern age. Scotland and the Scots would go on to blaze a trail across the global landscape in both a literal and a figurative sense, and open a new era in human history. In fact, the very notion of "human history" is itself, as we shall see, a largely Scottish invention.
Fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. The Scots argued that societies, like individuals, grow and improve over time. They acquire new skills, new att.i.tudes, and a new understanding of what individuals can do and what they should be free to do. The Scots would teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around. And for the modern Scot, for Adam Smith or David Hume or Henry Brougham or Sir Walter Scott or any of the other heroes of this book, that past was the Scotland that had tried and executed Thomas Aikenhead.
Yet that same fundamentalist Calvinist Kirk had actually laid the foundations for modern Scotland, in surprising and striking ways. In fact, without an appreciation of Scotland"s Presbyterian legacy, the story of the Scots" place in modern civilization would be incomplete.
PART ONE.
Epiphany
Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent government, even the Presence of our chief n.o.bility, are unhappy in our accent and p.r.o.nunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circ.u.mstances, we shou"d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?
-David Hume, 1757
The constant influx of information and of liberality from abroad, which was thus kept up in Scotland in consequence of the ancient habits and manners of the people, may help to account for the sudden burst of genius, which to a foreigner must seem have sprung up in this country by a sort of enchantment, soon after the Rebellion of 1745.
-Dugald Stewart
CHAPTER ONE.
The New Jerusalem
I.
Just as the German Reformation was largely the work of a single individual, Martin Luther, so the Scottish Reformation was the achievement of one man of heroic will and tireless energy: John Knox.
Like Luther, Knox left an indelible mark on his national culture. Uncompromising, dogmatic, and driven, John Knox was a prolific writer and a preacher of truly terrifying power. His early years as a Protestant firebrand had been spent in exile, imprisonment, and even penal servitude chained to a rowing bench in the king"s galleys. The harsh trials toughened him physically and spiritually for what was to come. He became John Knox, "he who feared the face of no man." Beginning in 1559, Knox single-handedly inspired, intimidated, and bullied Scotland"s n.o.bility and urban cla.s.ses into overthrowing the Catholic Church of their forebears and adopting the religious creed of Geneva"s John Calvin. Its austere and harsh dogmas-that the Bible was the literal Word of G.o.d, that the G.o.d of that Bible was a stern and jealous G.o.d, filled with wrath at all sinners and blasphemers, and that the individual soul was by G.o.d"s grace predestined to heaven or h.e.l.l regardless of any good works or charitable intentions-were themselves natural extensions of Knox"s own personality. Calvinism seemed as natural to him as breathing, and he taught a generation of Scotsmen to believe the same thing themselves.
Above all, John Knox wanted to turn the Scots into G.o.d"s chosen people, and Scotland into the New Jerusalem. To do this, Knox was willing to sweep away everything about Scotland"s past that linked it to the Catholic Church. As one admirer said, "Others snipped at the branches of Popery; but he strikes at the roots, to destroy the whole." He and his followers scoured away not only Scottish Catholicism but all its physical manifestations, from monasteries and bishops and clerical vestments to holy relics and market-square crosses. They smashed stained-gla.s.s windows and saints" statues, ripped out choir stalls and roodscreens, and overturned altars. All these symbols of a centuries-old tradition of religious culture, which we would call great works of art, were for Knox marks of "idolatry" and "the synagogue of Satan," as he called the Roman Catholic Church. In any case, the idols disappeared from southern Scotland, and the Scottish Kirk rose up to take their place.
Knox and his lieutenants also imposed the new rules of the Calvinist Sabbath on Scottish society: no working (people could be arrested for plucking a chicken on Sunday), no dancing, and no playing of the pipes. Gambling, cardplaying, and the theater were banned. No one could move out of a parish without written permission of the minister. The Kirk wiped out all traditional forms of collective fun, such as Carnival, Maytime celebrations, mumming, and Pa.s.sion plays. Fornication brought punishment and exile; adultery meant death. The church courts, or kirk-sessions, enforced the law with scourges, pillories, branks (a padlocked iron helmet that forced an iron plate into the mouth of a convicted liar or blasphemer), ducking-stools, banishment, and, in the case of witches or those possessed by the devil, burning at the stake.
The faithful received one single compensation for this harsh authoritarian regime, and it was a powerful one: direct access to G.o.d. The right of communion, receiving the body and blood of Christ in the form of wine and bread, now belonged to everyone, rich and poor, young and old, men and women. In the Catholic Church, the Bible had been literally a closed book. Now anyone who could read, or listen to someone else read, could absorb the Word of G.o.d. On Sundays the church rafters rang with the singing of psalms and recitations from the Gospel. The Lord"s Supper became a community festival, with quant.i.ties, sometimes plentiful, of red wine and shortcake (John Knox presided over one Sunday communion where the congregation consumed eight and a half gallons of claret).
The congregation was the center of everything. It elected its own board of elders or presbyters; it even chose its minister. The congregation"s board of elders, the consistory, cared for the poor and the sick; it fed and clothed the community"s orphans. Girls who were too poor to have a dowry to tempt a prospective husband got one from the consistory. It was more than just fear of the ducking-stool or the stake that bound the Kirk together. It was a community united by its commitment to G.o.d and its sense of chosenness. "G.o.d loveth us," John Knox had written, "because we are His own handiwork."
To a large extent Knox"s mission to create the New Jerusalem in Scotland succeeded. The Reformation laid down strong roots in the Scottish Lowlands, that belt of fertile land and river valleys running from the Firth of Clyde and Glasgow in the extreme west to just north of Carlisle and Hadrian"s Wall across to Edinburgh and Berwick-on-Tweed in the east. North of this in the beautiful but barren and spa.r.s.ely populated Highlands, its record was more spotty. But in all the areas that came under his influence, the Kirk created a new society in the image of Knox"s utopian ideal. It had turned its back not only on Scotland"s past, but on all purely secular values, no matter what the source. Knox made his view clear in one of his last letters before he died in November 1572. "All worldlie strength, yea even in things spiritual, decays, and yet shall never the work of G.o.d decay."
One of those pillars of "worldlie strength" that Knox despised was political authority, or more precisely the power of monarchs. Perhaps because Knox"s closest allies were Scottish n.o.bles who wanted to see the Scottish monarchy tamed, or because nearly every monarch he dealt with was either a child or a woman (the boy king Edward VI of England, Mary Queen of Scots, the Scottish Regent Mary of Guise, and English queens Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I), he treated them all with impatience and contempt. Yet neither Mary of Guise nor Mary Queen of Scots could do without him. Even though they were Catholics, Knox represented a spiritual authority they needed to legitimize their own. When Queen Mary announced her plans to marry her worthless cousin Lord Darnley, Knox gave her such a fierce public scolding that she burst into tears in full view of her court. She made the mistake of marrying Darnley anyway, and set in motion the series of scandals that would finally push her off the throne. By 1570, Knox recognized that Mary no longer had any part to play in making the New Jerusalem and he swept her aside, like a useless piece from the game board. Her infant son James VI was installed in her place, with George Buchanan, Scotland"s leading humanist, as his tutor, so that the boy could be raised in the Presbyterian faith.
Knox and Buchanan believed that political power was ordained by G.o.d, but that that power was vested not in kings or in n.o.bles or even in the clergy, but in the people. The Presbyterian covenant with G.o.d required them to defend that power against any interloper. Punishing idolatry and destroying tyranny was a sacred duty laid by G.o.d on "the whole body of the people," Knox wrote, "and of every man in his vocation."
Here was a vision of politics unlike any other at the time. George Buchanan turned it into a full-fledged doctrine of popular sovereignty, the first in Europe. Buchanan came from Stirlingshire in central Scotland, at a time when it was still much like the Highlands in its culture and character-in fact, Buchanan grew up speaking both Gaelic and Scots. He studied at the University of St. Andrews and then at the University of Paris alongside other future giants of the Reformation such as John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, the later founder of the Jesuits. As a Greek and Latin scholar, Buchanan had few peers. But he was also a founding father of Scottish Presbyterianism: he served as Moderator of the Kirk"s General a.s.sembly-the only layman ever to do so-and helped write the Kirk"s First Book of Discipline. His greatest achievement, however, was his book on the nature of political authority, t.i.tled The Law of Government Among the Scots, The Law of Government Among the Scots, published in 1579. published in 1579.
In it Buchanan a.s.serted that all political authority ultimately belonged to the people, who came together to elect someone, whether a king or a body of magistrates, to manage their affairs. The people were always more powerful than the rulers they created; they were free to remove them at will. "The people," he explained, "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." This is the sort of view we are used to ascribing to John Locke; in fact, it belongs to a Presbyterian Scot from Stirlingshire writing more than a hundred years earlier. And Buchanan went further. When the ruler or rulers failed to act in the people"s interest, Buchanan wrote, then each and every citizen, even "the lowest and meanest of men," had the sacred right and duty to resist that tyrant, even to the point of killing him.
Here was a powerful formula for democracy: government of the people and for the people. In the crude circ.u.mstances of the late sixteenth century, however, it was also an invitation to anarchy. That was what Scotland got for nearly two decades after Knox"s death, until Mary"s son, James VI, overturned his old tutor"s theories and rea.s.serted the power of the monarchy. The dream of the people as sovereign died. But it would leave its trace within the church itself, in the system of synods peculiar to every parish and province in Scotland. It was the single most democratic system of church government in Europe. Even the minister was chosen by the congregation"s consistory of elected elders, instead of by some powerful aristocrat or laird. The elders also sent deputations to their local synod, who in turn sent representatives to the Kirk"s General a.s.sembly. This meant that the members of the Kirk"s governing body really were representatives of the people, in addition to being enforcers of G.o.dly discipline and propagators of the Word of G.o.d.
Not surprisingly, a self-governing Kirk coexisted uneasily with monarchs such as the Stuarts, who claimed to rule by divine right. To the Presbyterian, it was still G.o.d and His people, not kings, who ruled. Preacher Andrew Melville once even told James VI that Scotland was two realms, not one, and that James as king of the first was also a subject of the second, which belonged to Jesus Christ. During his almost fifty-year reign, James VI (who after the death of Elizabeth Tudor in 1603 also became King James I of England) had the good sense not to force the issue. His son Charles I did not. When Charles finally did try to break the Presbyterian Church to his will, including forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in its church services, he set off this explosive democratic mixture.
On Sunday, July 23, 1637, the dean of St. Giles in Edinburgh opened his morning service with the new royal prayer book, as King Charles had ordered. As soon as he started, women in the congregation began to shout insults; others threw stools and with loud protests stormed out of the church. The riots that followed over the next several months forced the Bishop of Edinburgh to flee for his life. Inspired by the resistance, ministers, n.o.bles, and ordinary citizens gathered on the last week of February of 1638 to sign a National Convenant.
The National Covenant was more than just a pet.i.tion or a declaration of faith. It was the Presbyterian version of democracy in action. In the name of true religion, it challenged the king"s prerogative to make law without consent, and affirmed that the Scottish people would oppose any change not approved by a free General a.s.sembly and Parliament. Those who signed swore to uphold the faith John Knox had founded, and that "we shall defend the same . . . to the utmost of that power that G.o.d hath put into our hands, all the days of our lives."
Bands of signatories carried copies from Edinburgh to neighboring towns and then the rest of the country. Thousands flocked to sign, both men and women, young and old, rich and poor. Ministers led their congregations to sign en ma.s.se. "I have seen more than a thousand all at once lifting up their hands," wrote one, "and the tears falling down from their eyes." In the southwest, some were said to have signed the Covenant in their own blood.
By the end of May, the only parts of Scotland that had not signed were the remote western Highlands, the islands north of Argyll, and the shires of Aberdeen and Banff, where the king"s most resolute aristocratic supporters, the Gordons, held the balance of political power. The covenanting drive even spread to the Scottish settlements in Ulster, where hundreds signed despite the desperate efforts of royal officials to stop them.
In November the General a.s.sembly in Glasgow declared war on "the kingdom of Satan and Antichrist," meaning Charles and his bishops. The Scots had forced on Charles a war he neither wanted nor could afford. Thousands of volunteers flocked into the Covenanters" army, armed in many cases with little more than hoes and scythes. Yet they managed to best Charles"s invading mercenaries and compelled him to sue for peace. The Bishops" War (there were actually two, the second following a brief truce that ended the first) revealed the flimsiness of Stuart rule, and encouraged the Parliament in London to defy Charles in turn. A civil war ensued, which culminated in the king"s execution in 1649 and the emergence of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. The English Civil War would destroy forever the facade of absolute monarchy in Britain. A new political ideal, that of government with the consent of the governed, had arrived. But it took its original impulse from the Scottish Covenanters.
Yet we should remember that the Covenanters were inspired less by their love of democracy than by their hatred of Satan. As with the rules of the Kirk, choice never entered into the matter. Those who failed to sign were often thrown into the public pillory or forced to leave town. The men and women who drove the Covenant forward were religious zealots, prepared to destroy anyone-king, bishop, or halfhearted neighbor-who stood in their way. The things we a.s.sociate with a democratic society today-the free exchange of ideas, freedom to express one"s own thoughts and opinions, a belief in tolerance and rational restraint-meant nothing to them.
Yet that same fanaticism had two faces. On one side, as the Aikenhead case would later show, it was the enemy of individual liberty and thought. For that reason, later Scots of the Enlightenment despised it, and singled it out as the single greatest threat to a free society- much as intellectuals despise and fear the so-called religious right today. But on the other side, it was also the enemy of public tyranny. It empowered individuals to defy authority when it crossed a certain line. David Hume, who himself suffered from persecution by the Kirk, saw this quality in the Covenanters of 1638. The religion of John Knox "consecrated . . . every individual," he explained to readers in 1757, "and, in his own eyes, bestowed a character on him much superior to what forms and ceremonious inst.i.tutions could alone confer."
The effect of this egalitarian democratic spirit on Scottish culture would be profound and long-lasting. When Englishman Gilbert Burnet visited western Scotland in the 1660s, he had never seen anything like it. "We were indeed amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of princes," he wrote afterwards. "Upon all these topics they had texts of scripture at hand; and were ready with their answers to anything that was said to them." Burnet also added, "This measure of knowledge was spread even amongst the meanest of them, their cottagers and servants."
Robert Burns framed it more memorably: "a man"s a man for a" that." To the Scot, appearance and outward form mean little. Instead, it is the quality of one"s inner self-one"s religious zeal, as in the case of the Covenanters, or one"s moral and intellectual integrity-that separates the extraordinary man from the ordinary one. Even in Burns, the religious skeptic and radical, we can still hear the Covenanters speaking across the centuries.
What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hodden-gray, an" a" that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man"s a man for a" that.