Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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owed something to freemasonry, which had been attracting members of the

nobility and others of the Edinburgh elite during the 1630s.

Meanwhile Charles had not even deigned to reply to the national Supplica-

tion, and his response to the October riots was typically provocative. His ﬁrst

hint of conciliation came in an instruction to the council, received on

7 December, to issue a proclamation declaring his abhorrence of all popish

superstition and disclaiming any innovations against the laws of his native

kingdom. That was not going to satisfy anyone. Placed in an impossible pos-

ition, Traquair and Roxburgh for the council met on the 9th with ﬁve leading

Supplicants at Holyroodhouse and tried to induce them to moderate their

stance. But the Supplicants rejected their proposals, and proceeded to submit

a ‘declinator’, which formally denied the right of the bishops on the council

(i.e. most of them) to sit in judgement on their grievances because they were

interested parties. They also presented an enlarged supplication which

extended its condemnation to the Scottish Court of High Commission. The

council, which was now sitting by the king’s orders at Dalkeith, wriggled

until 21 December before it gave way to heavy pressure and agreed to receive

these unwelcome documents; but in the interim Wariston drew up a protest-

ation for the Supplicants, afﬁrming that their grievances must be redressed

through accepted constitutional channels. This was an early intimation of the

pressure for a General Assembly and a parliament that was soon to become

irresistible. Upon the council’s receiving the declinator and the new supplica-

tion the Tables dispersed from Edinburgh, but they left behind a strong hold-

ing committee, whose chief members were Rothes, Loudoun, and Balmerino.

At this stage Charles sent for Traquair, though not so much in order to con-

sult him on how to save the situation in Scotland as to berate him for traf-

ﬁcking with the Supplicant leaders and failing to support the bishops.

Traquair reportedly told him that to enforce the use of the Prayer Book he

would need an army of 40,000 men; his advice was to withdraw it and con-

centrate on asserting his civil authority. Charles was not to be convinced, and

he sent the Treasurer back with a proclamation that utterly dismayed him,

though he warned his master of its consequences in vain. The council, now

moved again on Charles’s orders to Stirling, heard it read there on 19 Febru-

ary. It offered no concessions on the prayer book, for whose contents the king

took full personal responsibility. Those who had gathered without his permis-

sion to frame petitions and declarations against it were liable to ‘high censure,

both in their persons and their fortunes’, but he would overlook their offences

if they returned home at once and engaged in no more meetings. Any who dis-

obeyed, however, would be subject to the penalties of treason. As Gardiner

98 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

(Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 166–9; and see the same author in Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National

Covenant in the British Context, pp. 107–8.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 98

wrote, the proclamation ‘was virtually a declaration of war’.

In the shorter

term, it triggered the National Covenant.

News that the king’s response was utterly negative sped back to Scotland

much faster than Traquair travelled. By 6 February the holding committee

knew enough to summon the Tables back to Edinburgh, and by the 16th

Wariston was apprised (one would like to know by whom) of the main points

of the king’s proclamation. When it was ﬁrst published at Stirling, the leading

Supplicants were there to make a protestation, and they organized further

formal protests when it was read out at Linlithgow on the 21st and Edinburgh

on the 22nd. There were now about 2,000 of them and their sympathizers in

the capital, and they sent further circular letters to their potential supporters

far aﬁeld, summoning them to Edinburgh for ‘the most important business

that ever concerned this nation’.

This was the context in which, on the 23rd,

they publicly constituted the ﬁfth or general Table as potentially a provision-

al government. Its ﬁrst act, unanimously approved by the other Tables that same

day, was to commission ‘a band of mutual association for offence and defence’,

which was published ﬁve days later as the National Covenant. Wariston was

again the chief draftsman, assisted by Alexander Henderson, and the text was

revised by a sub-committee of the ﬁrst Table consisting of Rothes, Balmerino,

and Loudoun, who carried the ultimate responsibility for it. Henderson was

perhaps the most eloquent and inﬂuential of all Scottish ministers, and prom-

inent in opposition to the prayer book from the beginning. He combined a

convert’s enthusiasm for Presbyterianism with considerable diplomatic skill.

Wariston was still in his twenties, and one of the most complex characters to

be caught up in these events. He kept a voluminous diary which presents him

as a soul in torment, endlessly wrestling with his conscience, engaging in long

dialogues with his God, and alternating between utter dejection in face of

supposed divine judgements and exaltation over apparent blessings. Yet the

Covenanting leaders appreciated his astuteness as a man of business, his pre-

cociously acute political sense, and his knowledge of Scottish history. He was

also well versed in the story of the Dutch revolt, with its useful parallels, and

in the political thought that it had generated, particularly in the work of

Althusius ( Johann Althaus). In the public declarations and manifestoes that

he prepared he showed a ﬂair for ﬁnding forms of words that would gloss

over potential divisions, and in pursuit of unity he was adept at presenting a

revolutionary cause as a conservative one. The contrast between his public

and his private persona parallels that between the lucid English of the docu-

ments that he drafted for the Supplicants and Covenanters and the broad

Scots in which he communed with his maker in his diary.

Storm over Scotland 99

S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the

Civil War (10 vols., 1883–4), VIII, 326–8.

Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 82.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 99

‘Banding’ had a long history in Scotland, and it had ﬁrst been turned to reli-

gious use when the protestant nobility formed the Band of the Lords of the

Congregation in 1557. This married the magnates’ age-old practice of joining

together under mutual bonds for some political or social purpose to the

Reformers’ concept of a covenant, whereby the faithful entered into a solemn

pledge to each other and to God to walk together in the ways of the Lord. The

last such national band had been in 1596. The present National Covenant

began by repeating in its entirety a confession of faith dating from 1581, var-

iously known as the Negative Confession or the King’s Confession. It had

been sanctioned and signed by James VI and ordered to be subscribed

throughout the kingdom, but James had been only fourteen at the time, and

it must be seen historically as a move in the intense power-struggle that fol-

lowed the overthrow of the regent Morton rather than an expression of the

king’s personal convictions. But in a phase of Presbyterian ascendancy it had

been conﬁrmed by a General Assembly in 1590 and reimposed by the king’s

council, and it was obviously helpful to invoke the stamp of royal authority

for its condemnation of saints’ days and auricular confession, its branding

of the papacy as Antichrist, its rejection of the Roman religion as utterly cor-

rupt and erroneous, and much else that implicitly repudiated the spirit if not

the letter of the new Prayer Book. It afﬁrmed convictions that were very

far from those of Charles and Laud, but very close to what most Scots had

grown up in.

Having rehearsed the confession of 1581, the Covenant recited a long list

of Scottish statutes which condemned popery and idolatry and upheld the

true protestant religion as professed by the Kirk. The Covenanters’ fear that

the Prayer Book and Canons were the thin end of a popish wedge was genu-

ine, and not only because they shared the suspicion of English puritans that

Laud and the Arminians were deliberately heading the Church of England

back towards Rome. There was a strong catholic element among Charles’s

Scottish courtiers, including the Earls of Douglas, Nithsdale, Semple, and

Abercorn. George Con, the papal agent at the court of Henrietta Maria from

1636 to 1639, was a Scot and an astute charmer; Charles notoriously loved his

company, and enjoyed plenty of it. The catalogue of statutes that the

Covenant reafﬁrmed was studiously selective, omitting the conﬁrmation of

the Articles of Perth and all those that had granted authority to the bishops,

or conﬁrmed them in it. There is indeed no mention of bishops in the

Covenant, other than a passing disapproval of the ‘civil places and power of

kirkmen’, though it expressly upheld the authority of national assemblies,

presbyteries, and kirk sessions. This silence was obviously tactical, aimed at

accommodating the many who hated the Caroline innovations and the threat

to Scotland’s political integrity in the manner of their imposition but had

no quarrel with the Jacobean synthesis of episcopacy and Presbyterianism.

100 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 100

Constitutionally, the Covenant’s careful listing of the statutes which its sub-

scribers swore to uphold implied that there were other acts whose authority

they disputed. Herein lay a challenge to the positive law of the land such as

would not be heard in England until after the ﬁrst Civil War.

In the ﬁnal and positive part of the Covenant, it solemnly committed its

subscribers to the same objectives as had inspired the earlier general bands,

namely to defend true religion and uphold the king’s authority. As regarded

religion, they would neither implement the innovations in worship or church

government, nor recognize the civil ofﬁces and authority conferred on

churchmen, until these had been ‘tried and allowed in free assemblies, and in

parliaments’. In civil matters they would maintain to the uttermost ‘the king’s

majesty, his person, and authority, in the defence and preservation of the

foresaid true religion, liberties, and laws of the kingdom’. Thus their commit-

ment to true religion (as they deﬁned it) was absolute, while to the king’s

authority it was conditional, depending upon his employing it to uphold their

religion, laws, and liberties. In defence of these ends they pledged their mu-

tual support and assistance, ‘so that whatsoever shall be done to the least of

us for that cause, shall be taken as done to us all in general, and to every one

of us in particular’.

There has been much argument as to whether the Covenanting movement

was really as centrally concerned with religion as the Covenant itself pro-

fessed, or whether it was essentially a nationalist revolution in which religious

issues acted as precipitants. But these are not mutually exclusive alternatives;

it meant different things to different participants, and for most of them it was

a matter of degree. Those who see its inspiration as primarily secular point to

the ways in which Charles’s rule as an absentee king had alienated all classes

of society, and to the nobility’s assumption of the leadership some months

before protests escalated into rebellion. They note how politically sophisti-

cated the organization of petitions, supplications, and protestations was, cul-

minating in the Covenant itself, and how all the four estates were involved at

each stage. They rightly point out that some leading nobles, Rothes in particu-

lar, were neither strong in their religious convictions nor godly in their per-

sonal lives. It can readily be granted that quite a number of magnates were

drawn to the Covenant more by a hope of recovering their old ascendancy in

central and local government than by devotion to the Kirk. The Scottish aris-

tocracy was never homogeneous. It included a substantial court interest, for

besides the sixteen peers already mentioned who held places in the king’s

household, a dozen more were linked to the court through kinship or direct

contact. That accounts for a signiﬁcant proportion of the eighty-nine adult

Storm over Scotland 101

Full text in A Source Book of Scottish History, Vol. III, 1567 to 1707, ed. W. C. Dickinson

and G. Donaldson (1954), pp. 95–104.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 101

peers living in 1638, and there were others, including the non-courtier

catholics, who were thoroughly alienated by what was going on in Edin-

burgh. A list of the nobility, probably drawn up in the middle of 1638, named

slightly more as for the king than for the Covenant.

Nevertheless a strong

core of Covenanting nobles was as devoted to the religious cause as anyone

engaged in it. We shall see how they and the politiques parted company in the

second Civil War of 1648.

It has also been argued that the economic grievances of merchants, crafts-

men, miners, and ﬁsherfolk played a greater part in aligning the burghs behind

the Covenant than has generally been allowed. Grievances there certainly

were, not only because Charles’s government failed to meet Scotland’s urgent

needs, especially in the provision of a sound currency, but because it con-

stantly tended to subordinate her interests to England’s. That was the case

with the ﬁshing, coalmining, and saltmaking industries, and the raising of the

duties levied on Scottish exports to match the English rates was also much

resented. But the burghs were never foremost in the protest movement against

the religious changes, and the corporation of Edinburgh, where so much

economic activity was concentrated, was notably hesitant about joining it.

Discontent with policies that hurt people in their callings and their pockets

doubtless made them readier to embrace the Covenant, but would never have

led to rebellion by itself. For all their grievances the Scots were a very quiet

people before 1637. The imposition of the prayer book transformed them.

For some time before then there had been a large and rapid increase in the

number of devotional and theological works published in Scotland, especial-

ly in the 1630s. It suggests that the educated laity’s interest in such matters

had been growing, well before the crisis of 1637–8. Scottish divines had been

preoccupied with the biblical concept of a covenant between a dedicated

nation and God for years before that crisis gave it such dramatic immediacy.

But when the day came round in March 1638 for mass subscriptions to the

Covenant to be taken in the churches throughout the land—a day of nation-

al fasting appointed for the purpose—there were scenes of deep popular

emotion that took even the ministers by surprise. A highly charged spirit of

evangelism attended these solemn ceremonies; the rejection of the prayer

book evoked a passionate response from great masses of the laity, who evi-

dently found in the Covenant a release from spiritual bondage. Support for it

was not universal, but it is signiﬁcant that where pressure had to be applied to

gain subscriptions it was in those areas where Presbyterianism had least taken

root, such as Aberdeen and some other parts of the north. Elsewhere, from

now on, the preachers held forth Scotland as a chosen and covenanted

102 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Bodleian Library MS Dep. 6.172, fo. 11, cited and discussed by Morrill in The Scottish

National Covenant in the British Context, pp. 15, 27.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 102

people, a second Israel, taking up the vanguard of the people of God in

Europe and leading the nation towards a more perfect reformation—even a

new heaven and a new earth. The Covenanters, especially their lay leaders,

were ﬁred by a variety of motives, but what gave the national movement its

main force was an intense religious fervour.

Was the Covenant itself a revolutionary document? The continuing dis-

agreement among historians over the question is really a tribute to the skill

with which it was composed, so as to draw in both those who did and those

who did not desire it to have revolutionary consequences. The actual out-

come did not depend so much upon the text, which was left wide enough open

to cater for a broad range of possible eventualities, as on what the Covenant-

ers were able to hammer out with the king. With another man than Charles,

whom as yet they knew little, it could have been quite different. It is fascinat-

ing to speculate on what political aims and expectations they had when they

launched their movement, beyond forcing the withdrawal of the Prayer Book.

All that the Covenant itself committed them to politically was to admit no

changes in worship or church government that were not passed by free Gen-

eral Assemblies and parliaments, and to debar kirkmen, meaning mainly

bishops, from civil ofﬁce. They denied that they had any intention of dimin-

ishing the king’s greatness and authority, but that was common form in

seventeenth-century manifestoes, and rather hollow in view of the powers

that the Tables had already usurped from the council. The constitutional safe-

guards that the Covenant invoked were time-honoured. Its promoters cer-

tainly meant to put a stop to Charles’s style of autocratic rule from afar, and

some leaders doubtless looked further into the future than others, but there is

no sign that most of them, at the outset, desired any more than a return to the

kind of government that Scotland had enjoyed before James set about subju-

gating General Assemblies and muzzling parliaments. Most may well have

hoped that the banding of the nation would sufﬁce to make the king give way.

They may not even have seriously contemplated the possibility that he

would go to war against them with an English army in order to get his way. If

they had, they would surely have made contact with potential allies in Eng-

land before embarking on the Covenant. There were some later allegations

that they did so, and Laud suspected it at the time, but the evidence for it is

slight and unconvincing. They did, however, send copies of the Covenant to

London as soon as it was signed, and a Scottish minister called Eleazar Borth-

wick who resided there, and had been employed in diplomatic work by

Hamilton, sought to win friends for it in court circles. But there was no open

propaganda to enlist English support until later, when they found themselves

faced with war in good earnest.

The Covenant was formally launched when the nobles and lairds in

Edinburgh signed it in Greyfriars kirk on 28 February, followed next day by

Storm over Scotland 103

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 103

nearly three hundred ministers and the commissioners of the burghs. While

the ministers were subscribing, the privy council met in Stirling at the sum-

mons of Chancellor Spottiswoode and other bishops, but only one of their

order attended it. Most bishops now were not so much keeping a low proﬁle

as staying out of sight altogether. Spottiswoode himself wrote to excuse his

own absence, honestly registering his advice ‘to lay aside the book and not to

press the subject with it any more, rather than to bring it in with such trouble

of the church and kingdom as we see’.

Traquair wrote to Hamilton that it

would be as easy to establish the mass in Scotland as the new prayer book.

The council virtually gave up trying to execute the king’s instructions or to

counter ‘the general combustion’. It sent Sir John Hamilton of Orbiston, the

justice clerk and a respected moderate, to explain to the king that the country

was in crisis because of religious innovations which were generally seen as

contrary to law, and to beg him to suspend the offending orders and listen to

the Covenanters’ grievances. Charles returned a cold reply, expressing sur-

prise at the disorders in Scotland and at the council’s advice. He asked that

Traquair or Roxburgh should come and explain what it really intended. Both

men came to London, and so did Lord Lorne, very likely at Charles’s request;

Traquair may have suggested that Charles should appoint him as his com-

missioner in Scotland. He and Lorne certainly travelled back in the same

coach. Lorne, who was soon to succeed his father as Earl (later Marquis) of

Argyll, was to become the leader of the Covenanters, but he had not formal-

ly joined them yet. He brought with him a paper from some of the chief of

them, however, stating their minimum demands, which now included an-

nual General Assemblies, abolition of the High Commission, a reduction in

the power of bishops, and no further enforcement of the Articles of Perth. In

a long private interview with the king, Lorne acknowledged his own general

concurrence with these objectives and spoke very frankly about his country’s

grievances. Charles showed respect for his outspokenness, but appointed

Hamilton as his commissioner to treat with the leaders of the Covenanters in

Edinburgh.

Hamilton did not want the job, and he has often been judged unduly harsh-

ly for failing to execute it with credit. The fact is that he was given an almost

impossible brief, and this goes much further to explain his ill-success than any

shortcomings of his own. He lacked ﬁrst-hand experience of Scottish affairs,

for he had not resided in Scotland for the last ten years (he was twenty-two

when he left it), and in some moods he frankly hated the country. He was a

courtier rather than a statesman, and he had a somewhat inﬂated view of his

own political skills, as he had of his military prowess. But those skills were

not inconsiderable, and he did his best according to his lights to employ them

104 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 87.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 104

in his master’s interests. He and Lorne were friends, but unlike Lorne he was

not burdened with strong personal beliefs about the religious merits or

demerits of the prayer book and canons. If he had been given more freedom

to manoeuvre, his relative detachment from the confessional and personal

strife that were keeping Scotland on the boil could have been an advantage.

He has been accused of lacking ﬁrmness and boldness, but he was bold

enough in telling the king the truth about Scottish feeling when he became

aware of it, and in warning him what the consequences would be if he

persisted in his policies. Charles got much better advice from Hamilton the

politique than from Wentworth the despot, who counselled that Scotland

should be reduced by force and brought ‘under the government of an English

Deputy, if not an English law’.

Unfortunately Charles was already contemplating force when he sent

Hamilton to Edinburgh. Among his courtiers were a number of other Scottish

nobles, and he sent home as many of them as he could, ahead of Hamilton, to

raise a royal interest north of the border. They merely increased the distrust

with which Hamilton was received when he ﬁnally arrived in Edinburgh on

8 June 1638. He was hobbled by the king’s instructions. Charles furnished

him with two alternative proclamations and gave him discretion as to which

to publish. Both promised that the prayer book and canons would not be

pressed except in ‘such a fair and legal way’ as would satisfy his subjects that

he intended ‘no innovation in religion or laws’.

The ﬁrst version promised

pardon for past disorders on condition that all signed copies of the Covenant

were surrendered, but warned that those who retained them or refused to

renounce the document would be declared traitors. The second did not specif-

ically demand surrender, but threatened that force would be used to restore

order if the Covenanters did not pledge their total obedience to the king; and

if the necessary force was not to be found in Scotland, he would lead an army

from England in person to reduce them. He empowered Hamilton to dismiss

disloyal councillors, to arrest anyone who engaged in public protestations,

and in the last resort to proclaim rebellious lords as traitors. It was in vain that

Hamilton warned Charles frankly that he could only get what he wanted by

force, and that his English subjects would be unwilling and his Irish ones

unable to supply it. He tried to persuade the king, now and later, that the

Covenant need not necessarily be incompatible with royal rule over Scotland,

but Charles would not hear of it. ‘So long as this Covenant is in force,’ he

wrote, ‘I have no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice; which I

Storm over Scotland 105

Quoted in C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford 1593–1641:

A Revaluation (1961), p. 251. On Hamilton see John Scally, ‘Counsel in crisis: James, third

Marquis of Hamilton and the Bishops’ Wars, 1638–1640’, in John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimen-

sions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997). Dr Scally is preparing a full-length study of

Hamilton.

Quoted in Gardiner, History of England, VIII, 339.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 105

will rather die than suffer.’

One is left wondering how many more of his sub-

jects in all three of his kingdoms might have died in their beds if he had died

in his in 1638. The Covenanters were justiﬁed in distrusting him, for he had

by now set his mind on war. The apparent concessions regarding the prayer

book in his draft proclamations were so worded that he could put what con-

struction he liked on them once Scotland was fully in his power.

In the end Hamilton published neither version, but he did agree to return to

England and convey the Covenanters’ point of view and minimum demands

to the king. There was no question of their renouncing the Covenant itself,

and they insisted on the calling of a General Assembly of the Kirk and a par-

liament. Just after he left Edinburgh he received from Charles a third proc-

lamation, with a ﬁrm order to publish it. Over the prayer book and the canons

it went no further than the previous two, but it did promise that the king

would summon a free assembly and a parliament at his convenience. In order

to promulgate it, Hamilton needed an act by the council to register it. Return-

ing to Edinburgh, he persuaded all but two of the still active councillors, who

now met at Holyroodhouse, to sign the act, but the leading Covenanters were

so dissatisﬁed with the king’s offer that they persuaded the majority to change

their minds. So the king’s commissioner was forced to tear up the act ratify-

ing a proclamation expressly ordered by the king, because the king’s Scottish

councillors were threatening to sign the Covenant themselves if he did not.

Both sides were openly preparing for war by this time. The Covenanters

were already buying arms in the Dutch Republic, and bracing themselves for

a ﬁght on more than one front. Invasion from England was not the only

threat, for they faced possible resistance in the north and west. The north-

east, especially Aberdeenshire, was the territorial base of the Gordons, whose

head, the second Marquis of Huntly, had been brought up at the English

court with Charles and his elder brother Prince Henry, and was a staunch

episcopalian. The attachment to episcopacy in the region was not solely due

to Huntly’s inﬂuence; Kings College Aberdeen played its part, and a group of

its theologians and associated ministers known as the Aberdeen Doctors

helped to put up a determined resistance to the Covenant. Westward, in the

Highlands and Islands, opposition to it came mainly from the catholic chief-

tains and their clansmen, whose loyalty the king had an obvious interest in

cultivating. The main bulwark of the protestant interest in the west lay in the

territory of the clan Campbell, whose chief, the Earl of Argyll, was the most

powerful of all Scottish magnates. The old earl, who was to die in November,

had converted to catholicism in 1617, but his heir Lorne was very ﬁrmly

protestant, though not yet a committed opponent of episcopacy and not yet a

106 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991),

p. 56.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 106

Covenanter. Given his friendly relations with Hamilton, it was not inevitable

that he should become the king’s most formidable enemy in Scotland. That he

did so was a measure of Charles’s outrage to Scottish patriotism and his

disregard for Lorne’s own legitimate interests.

A complicating factor, which linked Scotland with Ireland, was the old clan

enmity between the Campbells and Macdonalds, over a wide extent of High-

lands and Islands territory. The Macdonalds were very consciously of the

same stock as the MacDonnells of Ulster, whose current chief, Randal Mac-

Donnell, second Earl of Antrim, will crop up again in our story. Given the

right circumstances and leadership, Macdonalds and MacDonnells could still

act together as one clan. Antrim was by far the largest landowner in Ulster,

indeed one of the greatest in all Ireland. He was a grandson and a great ad-

mirer of the Earl of Tyrone who had ﬂed the country in 1607, and a patron of

the present earl’s Irish regiment in the Spanish Army of Flanders. But his

father had cultivated James’s favour by supporting the plantation of Ulster,

surrendering around 2,000 acres near Coleraine, and adopting an English

lifestyle and English landlord–tenant relationships. He leased a lot of land

very proﬁtably to Lowland Scottish settlers and built on a lavish scale, yet he

kept a foot in both cultural camps, for he clung to the catholic faith and the old

Gaelic language and values, and brought up his son in them. Young Randal,

after completing his education in France, came to Charles’s court in 1627 and

spent over ten years there, visiting Ireland only on brief occasions, though he

kept an astute eye on the improvement of his Ulster estates. In 1635 he

married Buckingham’s widow, who already had four children and was his

senior by seven years. But she was hugely wealthy, both through her late hus-

band and as the Earl of Rutland’s daughter, so he put up with his deserved

notoriety as a fortune-hunter to enjoy both the income and the privileged

access to the king and queen that his marriage secured for him. After suc-

ceeding to his father’s title in 1636, Antrim and his wife drew well over

£20,000 a year from land, pensions, Irish customs, and other sources, which

was getting on for ﬁve times the mean landed income of the English peerage.

Yet Antrim was such a reckless spender and gambler that he was nearly

always heavily in debt. His more serious contemporaries found him shallow,

vain, untrustworthy, of mediocre intelligence, and prone to nasty tantrums,

and despite a recent attempt to put him in a better light it is not easy to dis-

agree with them. But as a young man he had good looks, including striking

red hair, and he was clearly an accomplished courtier. Both the king and the

queen enjoyed his company, and his wife, besides being one of the leading

catholics at court, was an intimate of Con.

Good as the pickings were in England, however, Antrim had to return to

Ireland in September 1638 to try and reduce his debts, which were running at

over £40,000. His homecoming was most unwelcome to Wentworth, who

Storm over Scotland 107

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