Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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they knelt. They made rather more progress in less formal sessions with Buck-
ingham, seated round a table.
1
The detailed execution of the revocation and these other early measures
need not concern us. Charles proved not entirely inflexible, and he scored a
limited success in the regulation of teinds—though very little in improving his
regular Scottish revenue. Achievement fell far short of expectation. His clumsy
authoritarianism simultaneously alienated the older nobility and his Scottish
administrators, and made bad blood between the latter and the Scottish
people. These tensions were eased somewhat during a period of five years,
beginning early in 1628, when William Graham, Earl of Menteith, estab-
lished himself as Charles’s chief agent in the government of Scotland. As presi-
dent of the council he managed it adroitly when he was present, and by
travelling on average twice a year between Edinburgh and the English court
he kept the king in closer touch with Scottish affairs and Scottish feelings than
at most other times during the reign. He knew better than to oppose Charles’s
policies directly, but his advice as to what was practicable often took the hard
edges off them. In particular, his success in tempering the implementation of
the act of revocation took much of the heat out of the nobility’s animosity
towards it. His disgrace in 1633 left the faction-ridden Scottish administra-
tion weakened, and deprived the king of a vital link with the Scottish aristoc-
racy. The tortuous story, too long to tell in full here, is typical of Scottish
politics and reflects no credit on any of the participants. Menteith had royal
blood in his veins, being descended from David, Earl of Strathearn, who was
reputedly King Robert II’s son by his highly dubious first marriage. King
James I of Scotland made David’s grandson surrender the earldom of Strat-
hearn for the greatly inferior one of Menteith. In a fit of antiquarian vanity
Charles’s minister, the seventh earl, persuaded him to reverse the exchange
and restore him to the earldom of Strathearn. Thereby he made enemies, and
some jealous magnates and privy councillors, chief among them his confidant
the Earl of Traquair, Treasurer Depute, made out that Menteith had never
renounced his rights as a blood descendant of Scottish kings. They specious-
ly charged him with having actually said he should rightfully be King
of Scotland. Charles made some effort, but not enough, to ward off his
disgrace, and Menteith, financially ruined, languished under house arrest
until December 1637.
2
Traquair was now the rising power, and after a long and devious quest he
secured the dominant post of Lord Treasurer in 1636. He was an adroit polit-
ical fixer and a tolerably competent financial administrator, but in a serious
88 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
1
Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 16–17.
2
Maurice Lee, Jr., The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana and
Chicago, 1985), chs. 2 and 3.
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:26 AM Page 88
crisis he could be counted upon only to put his own advancement or survival
before his obedience to the King’s commands. Charles, it must be said, was
not making his Scottish council’s task any easier. Having excluded most of its
best talent by debarring the judges of the Court of Session, he further altered
its balance by appointing bishops to it on a lavish scale. By the end of 1634
eight of the Scottish bishops were privy councillors, and John Spottiswoode,
Archbishop of St Andrews, had just been appointed Lord Chancellor, the first
churchman to hold that office since the Reformation. This injudicious
involvement of the bishops in secular administrative and political functions
went down even worse in Scotland than in England, for they were regarded as
very much the king’s creatures; they have been well described as ‘the civil
servants of absolutism’.
3
For advice on Scottish affairs, however, Charles
looked not to his council in Edinburgh, whose job (as he saw it) was to carry
out his commands, but on those Scottish nobles who had been his courtiers,
and hence to a greater or lesser degree anglicized. Sixteen of them held offices
in his household in 1638. Highest in rank was his kinsman James Stewart,
Duke of Lennox, the hereditary Lord Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral
of Scotland and the kingdom’s premier peer. But Lennox had little Scottish
blood in his veins; he was born and bred in England, and he did not even visit
Scotland until he accompanied the king there for his coronation. His person-
al influence as Charles’s close companion was not inconsiderable, but he was
a political lightweight. More effective and ambitious politically was James
Hamilton, Scotland’s only marquis. He had come to England with his father,
James I’s trusted friend, when he was ten, and before he was fourteen he was
married to a neice of Buckingham. He was still only nineteen when both
James and his father died, but such was Charles’s favour and affection
towards him that in addition to lavish royal gifts, he received Buckingham’s
lucrative office of Master of the Horse on the favourite’s death. By 1635 he
was a member of both the English and Scottish privy councils, but at that
time he had paid only one visit to Scotland since his early boyhood. In con-
trast with Lennox, however, he had his roots and the bulk of his landed
wealth there; nevertheless after Menteith’s fall Charles was woefully short of
counsel from men who knew the Scottish political scene at first hand.
English historians have not on the whole been kind to Hamilton, and it is true
that he was not equal to the impossible tasks that Charles imposed on him
from the outbreak of its Scottish rebellion onward; but a case can be made
that he always strove to serve his master after his fashion, sometimes in
despite of himself, and at the end he sealed his loyalty with his life.
Charles’s sole visit to Scotland before the troubles began was for his coron-
ation in 1633. It had been announced five years earlier and several times
Storm over Scotland 89
3
Julian Goodare, ‘The nobility and the absolutist state in Scotland, 1584–1638’, History
LXXVIII (1993), 177, 180.
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:26 AM Page 89
postponed, and if the long delay was not enough of a wound to Scottish pride
the ceremony was made an aggressive display of alien rites. Whether it even
occurred to Charles to be crowned at Scone, as most Scottish kings had been
since early times, or Stirling, which had been more recently favoured, we do
not know. His first choice of venue was St Giles’s, Edinburgh’s principal
church and soon to be designated a cathedral, but he settled for the abbey kirk
at Holyrood, where James II had been crowned. A splendid procession down
the royal mile set forth his regal power with suitable pomp, but the four-hour
coronation service aroused deep disquiet. Its framework was that of Holy
Communion according to the English Book of Common Prayer, which struck
the Scots, who were quite unfamiliar with it, as half way to the Mass. A stage
24-feet square had been constructed at the east end, from which further steps
led up to a communion table placed altarwise. Two lighted candles stood on
it, and behind it hung a tapestry depicting the crucifixion, before which the
bishops genuflected as they passed. Five of them officiated with Archbishop
Spottiswoode, all wearing white rochets and stoles of blue and gold, the likes
of which had not been seen in Scottish worship since the Reformation. Laud,
whom Charles had just made a privy councillor of Scotland, was prominent
with them on the dais. Other bishops, who may have jibbed at such vest-
ments, sat below it in their black gowns. To the coronation oath prescribed
by Act of Parliament in 1567 Charles pointedly added a promise to preserve
to the clergy all their canonical privileges, and specifically to defend the
bishops.
4
He was not to foresee that before he next visited Scotland episcop-
acy there would be swept away lock, stock, and barrel.
The first Scottish parliament since 1621, and the last before the rebellion,
began its business two days after the coronation and held its final plenary
session eight days after that. Virtually all initiative was delegated as usual to
the Lords of the Articles, whose selection was manipulated in the same way
as in 1621, but to encourage them to dispatch swiftly the programme of le-
gislation which he personally had helped to prepare, Charles himself attended
most of their meetings. The Articles were docile enough, and he decreed that
there should be no debate in the final full meeting of parliament. Nevertheless
some of his most cherished measures had a quite unusually rough passage
there, despite the fact that he ostentatiously took down the names of those
who spoke against them. He got his revocation ratified, but there was real
resistance to the confirmation of the Five Articles of Perth and of his power
to regulate clerical dress, while some of his new taxes came close to being
thrown out. The powerful Earl of Rothes was particularly bold in opposition,
and two lords whom he was about to elevate to earldoms, Loudoun and
90 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
4
John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in the British Context (Edinburgh,
1990), ch. 1 (by Morrill), pp. 2–3.
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:26 AM Page 90
Lindsay, had their promotions stopped because of their outspokenness. All
three were to be leading Covenanters five years later.
Charles had no desire to linger in Scotland. He made a brief progress,
which took him no further north than Stirling, and then set off home. His
whole stay in the country had lasted just over a month, the same time, almost
exactly, as he had spent on his leisurely journey northward to the border. He
left a fair number of individuals gratified by the favours he had dealt out, and
a royal visit was such a rare event that it was naturally greeted with a good
deal of popular acclamation. Charles himself reckoned it a great success, but
he was never very clever at distinguishing between the spontaneous popular
enthusiasm that royal appearances nearly always generated in those times
and the considered responses of the political nation. He left the nobility chaf-
ing at their loss of power and influence under their chilly and alien monarch,
who knew them little and seemed to value them less. He left the tax-paying
classes, those of Edinburgh in particular, resentful of the heavy increase in
their burdens that he had steamrollered through parliament. Above all, he left
a deeply religious nation justifiably apprehensive that he intended to bring
its faith and worship and church government into conformity with those of
England.
That fear rested in more than the coronation service. Wherever Charles
worshipped during his Scottish visit he insisted on the use of the Anglican rite
and vestments. Soon after he got home he sent orders to Bishop Wedderburn,
the Dean of the Chapel Royal at Holyrood, that all services there should be
conducted according to the English prayer book, pending the preparation of
a Scottish one, and that communion should be received kneeling. Next May
he instructed all members of the Court of Session to take the sacrament there
twice a year. In the same month he formally directed the Scottish bishops to
prepare a Book of Common Prayer and a set of canons, the first to secure uni-
formity in worship, the second the same in discipline. Some months earlier he
had decided to create a new bishopric of Edinburgh, with St Giles’s as its
cathedral. The building currently housed three kirks, divided by partition
walls. He ordered that these should be demolished and that two new church-
es should be built in compensation; one, the beautiful Tron Kirk, was actual-
ly erected. There were good administrative grounds for a see of Edinburgh,
and the opening up of St Giles’s was a great architectural gain, but he had
interfered autocratically with the way the people of the Scottish capital had
chosen to worship, and since the heavy building costs fell on them they did
not thank him. He could not foresee that in restoring St Giles’s to its full glory
he was creating a theatre for the most fateful riot of his reign.
In all the vast changes that he intended to make in the religious life of Scot-
land, he never had a thought of involving what nearly all protestant Scots still
regarded as the highest ecclesiastical authority in the realm, the General
Storm over Scotland 91
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Assembly of the Kirk, even though it had not been allowed to meet since
1618. He approved the new book of canons in 1635 and had it published in
January 1636, upon no other authority than that of his royal prerogative.
Regarding church government, it took the power of bishops over their dio-
ceses for granted, but made no mention of presbyteries or of the General
Assembly. It forbade ministers to offer extempore prayers, as was their common
practice, or to use any other than the forms prescribed. Most provocatively of
all, it commanded the use of the Scottish Book of Common Prayer, which was
not yet completed, on pain of excommunication. It reaffirmed the Five Art-
icles of Perth, which inter alia required communicants to receive kneeling,
and it ordered that communion tables should be placed at the east end of the
church. In December 1636 a proclamation of the Scottish council ordered
that the new prayer book should be used everywhere, and that every parish
should purchase two copies by Easter; yet the first printed copies only reached
Scotland in May 1637. The Scottish bishops had done their work on it with
reasonable dispatch, but the king insisted on closely scrutinizing every draft,
in consultation with Laud and Bishops Juxon and Wren; Laud himself
records that Charles ‘carefully looked over, and approved every word in this
liturgy’.
5
Laud was his willing lieutenant, but it was essentially the king’s deci-
sion to impose the book on Scotland, and the Scottish bishops found their
freedom in drafting it heavily restricted by his requirement that it should be
based as closely as possible on the English Book of Common Prayer of 1549
(not 1559). They did secure significant concessions, notably in the office of
Holy Communion, and in the use throughout of the word ‘presbyter’ instead
of ‘priest’, but they could not shake Charles’s insistence on the retention of
numerous saints’ days in the church’s calendar, and on the inclusion of a
dozen chapters from the Apocrypha, which the Scots rated much further
below the canonical scriptures than English churchmen did.
The differences between the Scottish and English books were greater than
used to be supposed, but the new services were so much closer to the English
rite than any form of worship that the Scots had known for generations that
they can be forgiven for seeing them as much the same. The preface to the
Scottish book was quite open about the king’s desire for uniformity of
worship throughout his three kingdoms on the basis of the English Common
Prayer, and expressly condemned the practice of praying extempore. The ban
on this, and the insistence that sermons should only be preached in the con-
text of long sequences of set forms, seemed to the Scottish clergy a denial of
their mission and an insult to their gifts. The book’s emphasis on the sacra-
ments ran counter to their conception of the Kirk’s main function. As to the
92 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
5
Quoted from Laud’s Works, VI, 504–6 in Donald, An Uncounselled King, p. 48. The clas-
sic account, with all relevant texts, is by Gordon Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer
Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954).
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 92
Communion itself they saw a world of difference between a congregation
seated at the table while their minister, facing them, broke the bread as Christ
had done among his disciples, and a surpliced celebrant performing an act of
consecration at what looked all too like an altar, with his back to the com-
municants, while they awaited their turn to kneel at the rails and receive. The
rubric was not specific about his stance, but this is what it suggested, and
though kneeling had been prescribed by the Articles of Perth it had not been
widely enforced. There was of course not a word in either the canons or the
Prayer Book about lay elders and kirk sessions, which played such a vital part
in Scotland’s religious life.
The manner of imposing such great alterations upon the nation’s worship
and church order was almost as objectionable as their content. For the Art-
icles of Perth James had obtained the reluctant assent of a General Assembly
and a parliament, but Charles decreed the use of the Prayer Book, as he had
the canons, simply as an act of prerogative. The only Scottish clergy whom he
consulted were the bishops, who instantly became far more unpopular than
they already were. The despotic and threatening tone of the royal proclam-
ation which commanded the universal and exclusive use of the book, months
before the public could have a sight of it, was typical of Charles’s style. The
Scots, besides loathing it for its own sake, saw it as one more move in the sub-
ordination of their country to England, even though that does not seem to
have been his intention. But they had before them the recent cause célèbre of
John Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino, who typified the link between religious
opposition and national pride, and whose fate warned others who might be
tempted to resist—or so Charles thought, not reckoning that it might prove
more of a beacon to the Scots than a deterrent. Balmerino had been boldly
critical of the king’s ecclesiastical measures in the 1633 parliament, especial-
ly of his claim to determine what apparel ministers wore when conducting
public worship. Subsequently he was found in possession of a remonstrance
against such policies, which he had not himself drafted but had annotated in
his own hand. It was never presented, and it is not clear that he showed it to
anyone but Rothes and his own man of business, but the offending copy was
leaked to Archbishop Spottiswoode, who took it to the king. Charles imme-
diately had Balmerino arrested, and on his refusal to submit insisted that he
be tried for treason. Traquair presided over the trial in March 1635, and
when the packed jury was equally divided he gave his casting vote for a ver-
dict of guilty, merely because Balmerino had not revealed the document and
betrayed its author. But such was the public outcry that Traquair himself
joined in persuading the king to grant a reprieve, which was followed a year
later by a full pardon. The whole shabby business helped to ensure that when
ministers of the Kirk held meetings during 1635–6 to concert their opposition
to the king’s ecclesiastical policies, they were not short of sympathizers
Storm over Scotland 93
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 93
among the nobles and lairds, though it was agreed that their lay champions
should keep their heads low until public reaction to the Prayer Book could be
gauged.
6
The Scottish council fixed Sunday, 23 July, for the introduction of the new
services, and its members walked in procession to St Giles’s for morning wor-
ship—except for Traquair, who preferred to attend a kinsman’s wedding far
away, and Lord Lorne, the old Earl of Argyll’s heir, who found himself sud-
denly indisposed. The rest soon found themselves at the heart of the riot of
the century. They and the dean, who conducted the service, were pelted with
folding-stools, clasped bibles, and other missiles, while a great crowd outside
battered at the doors and hurled stones at the windows. The bishop was stoned
as he fled from his cathedral; the dean shut himself up in the steeple. There were
simultaneous demonstrations in other Edinburgh churches, and women took
the same conspicuous parts in them as they did in St Giles’s. They were of course
by no means spontaneous; we have a glimpse of a planning meeting where some
enterprising Edinburgh matrons agreed that women should lead the protests so
that their men could take over when the disturbances really got going.
7
The Scottish council had expected some trouble, but not the explosion of
public outrage which actually confronted it. It soon showed how little stom-
ach it had for the struggle that the distant king had wished on it, and how dif-
ferently its lay and ecclesiastical members viewed the situation. Three days
passed before it sent a report of the riots to the king, and then, nervous of his
reaction, it misleadingly played them down, blaming them on the bishops’
‘imprudent precipitation’ in imposing the Prayer Book—though the bishops
had of course merely obeyed the king’s and the council’s own orders. Spottis-
woode and some fellow-bishops sent him their own account, blaming
Traquair; but the bishops themselves were split between conservative men
with Erastian leanings (the majority) and a few thorough-paced allies of Laud,
the chief of these being Maxwell of Ross, Whitford of Brechin, and Wedder-
burn of Dunblane. On the advice of Spottiswoode and some of the
former, the council ordered on 29 July that until the king’s pleasure was
known both the new and the old forms of service should be suspended, at
least in Edinburgh, where for several weeks the only public worship con-
sisted in listening to Sunday sermons. Faced with more and more petitions
against the Prayer Book, it declared that its order to the parishes to purchase
it did not extend to actually using it!
This was not only in flat contradiction to the Book of Canons and its own
earlier directives, but an act of direct disobedience to the king’s orders. The
94 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
6
Lee, Road to Revolution, pp. 157–62, 208–12; David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution
1637–44 (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 56–61.
7
Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44, p. 58, citing H. Guthry, Memoirs (2nd ed.,
Glasgow, 1747), pp. 23–4.
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council had already had his reply to its first report of the riots, which was
angry and uncompromising: he directed it to support the bishops in enforcing
the use of the new services, without any intermission. He wrote separately to
the bishops, instructing them similarly. Largely because the council had not
informed him fully and promptly of the full seriousness of the situation, he
was not yet aware that it could not both obey his commands and maintain the
public peace. A concerted campaign of petitions against the prayer book was
under way; sixty-eight of them had come in by 20 September, from presby-
taries, burghs, and parishes. Most had been drawn up by ministers and signed
by their associated elders, but leaders of lay society were mustering in Edin-
burgh to lend them support. A group of nobles met there on 19 September to
distil the gist of the local petitions into a national one, which was endorsed
next day by a larger meeting of twenty nobles (including Rothes, Balmerino,
Loudoun, and Lindsay), over eighty ministers, numerous lairds, and commis-
sioners from many burghs and parishes. This national petition was presented
that same day to the council, which had belatedly written to the king to tell
him how grave a confrontation he faced in Scotland, and proposed that some
of its members and some leading ministers should come and confer with him.
It was now digesting his reply. He would have none of it; to concede a con-
ference, he wrote, would make it appear that he had either ‘a very slack coun-
cil or very bad subjects’. The Prayer Book must be enforced at once, and the
rioters against it must receive exemplary punishment.
8
The council made some tokens of compliance, but Traquair connived with
the authors of the national petition in producing a toned-down version of it,
such as the king might be expected to read without exploding. This was com-
mitted to Lennox, who was in Scotland for his mother’s funeral, along with
samples of the more violent local petitions, in the hope that such evidence
would convince Charles that some degree of compromise was imperative. A
few days later the city of Edinburgh sided decisively with the petitioners. So
far the burgh council had tried hard to avoid offering any open defiance of the
king’s commands, without necessarily going so far as to obey them; but the
last straw was an order from him, most reluctantly complied with, to elect as
the city’s provost Sir John Hay, clerk register of the privy council and his most
sycophantic supporter on it. On 26 September it presented its own strong
petition against the prayer book to the council, and the effect on the other
Scottish burghs was dramatic. Very shortly all but Aberdeen had joined the
cause. The leaders of national resistance, still assembled in Edinburgh, de-
cided to send out an ‘advertisement’ to all the presbyteries in the country; they
entrusted the drafting of it to Archibald Johnston of Wariston, a fanatically
Presbyterian lawyer with a gift of words that he was soon to apply to the
Storm over Scotland 95
8
Ibid., p. 70.
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National Covenant itself. It brought in not only several hundred fresh peti-
tions but a much larger gathering of supporters, especially laymen, than ever
before. Nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers took to holding their separate
meetings; opposition was beginning to take on the complexion of a movement
of the estates of the realm, acting consciously as such.
Charles’s reply to the council’s letter and the petitions might have seemed
calculated to pour fuel on the flames, but neither he nor anyone else in Eng-
land yet appreciated how hot the situation in Scotland had become. If Lennox
really tried to convey it, he failed. The king’s letter, read on 17 October,
removed the affairs of the Kirk from the council’s authority altogether, so that
it could neither receive petitions nor make concessions on matters of religion.
He ordered the council and the Court of Session to leave Edinburgh, first for
Linlithgow and then for Dundee, and commanded that all the petitioners
assembled in the capital should depart within twenty-four hours. The council
issued proclamations accordingly, but the petitioners stayed put and the
people of Edinburgh broke into violent riots—more violent than those of July.
In one episode the Bishop of Galloway, notorious as a Laudian and a perse-
cutor of conventicles, was mobbed by several hundred angry citizens, and
when Traquair, Hay, and other lay councillors came to protect him they too
were roughly handled. Soon afterward the council, finding itself besieged in its
own chamber, had to swallow its pride and seek the protection of the leading
petitioners, who escorted it to the temporary safety of Holyroodhouse.
The nobles gathered in the city were not responsible for the riots, but they
now took an important initiative. They instructed the lairds and ministers to
stay there, regardless of the council’s orders, while they considered a ‘Suppli-
cation’ which had been drafted for them by David Dickson, one of the leading
dissident ministers. In contrast with the watered-down national petition that
Lennox had taken to London, it roundly denounced the bishops as the
authors of a pernicious book of canons and a liturgy riddled with errors, and
charged them with sowing discord between the king and his subjects. Indeed
its attack on them went further than some of the clergy had so far wanted to
go, for not all who opposed the prayer book shared the aristocracy’s animos-
ity towards the episcopate in general. But the national Supplication was signed
on 18 October by 30 nobles, 281 lairds, 48 burgesses, and 123 ministers, and
then widely circulated through the country for further signatures. Within a
month about half the Scottish nobility had put their names to it, including
young James Graham, Earl of Montrose, the king’s future champion. So had all
the burghs that mattered except Aberdeen, St Andrews, and Inverness.
The Supplicants, as they were henceforth called, organized themselves ever
more closely, and were not without sympathizers on the council itself. One
such was Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall, the king’s Lord Advocate. They
returned to their homes after the Supplication had been signed and presented,
96 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 96
but they reassembled in Edinburgh in mid-November, partly to elect a hold-
ing committee to stay and consider the king’s reply to it, but also for larger
purposes than they cared to disclose. The folly was now revealed of removing
the council to Linlithgow, when so many of its members were lukewarm or
disaffected that at first it could not even find a quorum there, while abandon-
ing the capital to the Supplicants. It deputed Traquair, Lorne, and the Earl of
Lauderdale to go to Edinburgh and persuade them to go home; if necessary
they were to charge them to do so in the king’s name (though who was to
enforce such a charge was an unanswerable question). The Supplicants
refused, claiming their right to meet for peaceful petitioning under a recent
concession by the council itself. In a tough negotiation the next day, a small
committee of nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers pressed for permission
to hold meetings in the shires to elect commissioners to come to Edinburgh in
order to hear the king’s answer. Most of the council were unhappy about
granting it, but Sir Thomas Hope gave his authoritative legal opinion that the
right to assemble was theirs by law.
In the election of commissioners that now began lay the origins of the so-
called Tables, which developed early in the next year into something like a
provisional government of Scotland, though their organization as such
evolved by stages. What the Supplicants planned at this stage was a represen-
tative body consisting of all the nobles active in the cause, together with two
lairds from each shire, one or two burgesses from each burgh, and a minister
from each presbytery; but no assembly ever sat in quite this form because far
more lairds and ministers came up to Edinburgh than the scheme provided
for. The four estates continued to hold separate meetings, and soon adopted
the practice of choosing small committees to sit on in the capital during the
lulls in the developing conflict, when the majority could safely go home. These
committees came to be called Tables because in Scottish usage the word could
be used, like board in English, to describe the men who did business round the
piece of furniture in question; being less formal, ‘table’ carried less of an impli-
cation than ‘council’ or even ‘committee’ that its members were usurping the
functions of the established agencies of the king’s government (as they
increasingly were). Each estate had its Table, but the most formidable was the
fifth or general Table, consisting of the active core of the first (that of the
nobles) with a few representatives of each of the other three. It was consti-
tuted effectively on 6 December 1637 and more formally on 23 February 1638,
just before the National Covenant was launched; it was after that that the
term Tables became publicly current. By then the general Table had become
a revolutionary executive, with Johnston of Wariston as its highly influential
clerk and chief publicist.
9
The organization of the Tables in general probably
Storm over Scotland 97
9
Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement 1625–1641
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