Remembering the Brave

So you want to know who the Covenanters were and why you should care?

The Covenanters were a group of mostly ordinary people who lived in Scotland in the mid to late 1600's. The simple version goes like this: The English King was a tyrant and insisted on a kind of obedience that would make Saddam Hussein look cuddly. He made it illegal not to go to church (which a lot of people weren't doing because the King had changed the way church was run so that they were really uncomfortable participating in it). He not only made it illegal, but made it treason, which meant people could be arrested, tortured and exiled, transported or executed, or a special package deal, which included several of those options. So enthusiastically was this policy pursued that special tortures were invented for the Covenanters.

Opposition to the King's decrees was expressed through the signing of a Covenant or 'National Covenant' in 1638 in which those who signed promised to keep the Scottish church faithful to the Gospel, and not let the King interfere. It all becomes very complex politically as the next 50 years unfold, but that is roughly what is at the heart of it all. It is mostly influential or official people who sign the Covenant, but is adopted by many Scots, who are keen to see Scotland as a land where people can love and follow Jesus without needing go through priests and so forth.

The villain of the piece was a guy called Sergeant Claverhouse who is always depicted as having neither fellow feeling nor conscience. He comes to notice particularly in the martyrdom of John Brown of Priesthill, one of the more famous Covenanters, who was shot without a trial by Claverhouse in front of his wife and two children. His wife is similarly remembered for her great bravery in the face of this.

Many ordinary people were killed: men and women, elderly through to children. One of the more famous tales includes the execution of two women: one young (about 16) and one elderly (about 70?), who were taken by the soldiers and tied to post in the sea. They died as the tide came in. The older was tied further out in the hope that the younger might lose courage and recant. She did not. They both died.

A memorial to these two women in a graveyard just beneath Stirling castle. It is rather idealised, with an odd emphasis on the younger woman's virginity, which I frankly I find somewhat alarming. It really isn't relevant.

It was no less devastating when the clergy died. They had left the church, their livelihood and were often hunted by the soldiers. They held services on the moors for their people, and lived in hiding, going from place to place. One memorable tale involves the execution of a faithful preacher, whose head was put on a pike and displayed outside the city gates. His little boy was hidden in the attic at the time, but somehow got out of the house (as is the way of little boys), and sadly, saw his father's head. He came back to his aunt's house in tears and wouldn't say anything except "I saw my father's head" again and again. (I believe he grew up and become a clergyman himself, but died young from fever, I think).

This time was known as the "Killing Years" in Scotland.

There was much bloodshed. There was little mercy. Ordinary life for these folk was put on hold. Some never knew 'ordinary life' at all.

Why didn't they just go to church??

They didn't go to church because they knew that their only Lord was Jesus. No-one else could save them, and no-one else should have first claim on their lives.

It's a difficult movement in some ways because it is Scottish, and so necessarily tied up with Scottish nationalism (as with all things Scottish). As you read accounts (many have been 'polished up' since the 1600's), it is sometimes hard to distinguish what it is that people are dying for. But it clear that for many of them, it wasn't about Scotland the Brave so much as their commitment to the Lord Jesus.

For those folk, they didn't go to church because they believed that Jesus was their Lord. He had died to make them right with God and so they both loved and followed him, trying to imitate his love and loyalty to them. Jesus was their Lord, so Jesus had the final say in all of their life: the way they lived in everyday life, the way they spoke when they went to church, and the way they thought and the way they prayed for the King of England. They did pray for him, often as they were dying, but refused to acknowledge that he was in charge of the church. Jesus was true Lord.

Jesus had to come first for these Scottish Christians because he is true Lord and king of Kings. Not just that they thought he was, but that he is. So, you can't play around with that. If you have to suffer because of it, you have to suffer. You can't change true things just because other people tell you to. And while this is true of many people all over the world: political activists and so forth, what sets Christians apart is the assurance we have that Jesus is with us where and when we suffer, that it doesn't go unnoticed and that he warned us this would happen if we followed him.

So when we hear the tales of the brave Covenanters, standing firm in the face of fire, ocean, hunger, cold, torture and other such situations, we need to remember that they weren't bravely standing up for their beliefs all alone. They were standing with their Saviour, being loyal to him and he was with them, comforting them and infusing bravery into worn out hearts for one last stand.

Their martyrs deaths may seem remote and distant to us, here in the relative comfort of the 21st century. But their readiness to put all their hopes and dreams for this life aside and endure pain, hardship and ridicule should remind us that the Lord they died for is the same Lord whom we know, if we are Christians, and who will comfort us and make us brave in the face of persecution.

These battered, faithful Christians found him a faithful Saviour in the cold, bleak days of the seventeenth century. In our day, here and now, let us look to him and find him faithful for all our trials and in all our suffering.