Project Description

2016/01

The Covenanters

A Visit to Kilmarnock

The nineteenth century New Laigh Kirk sits in a prominent, elevated position near to the centre of the East Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock. My visit, however, was not so much to examine this impressive, refurbished church building – it was more to do with what lay around the structure, in the kirkyard. New Laigh kirkyard has three memorials to Covenanters who died during the dark days of the seventeenth century.

The first stone stands just to the right of the church porch, as you enter from the steps rising from John Dickie Street. It bears the following inscription:

Here lie the heads of John Ross and John Shields, Who suffered at Edinburgh, December 27th 1666, And had their heads set up in Kilmarnock.

“Our persecutors mad with wrath and ire, In Edinburgh members some do be, some here; Yet instantly united they shall be, And witness ’gainst this nation’s perjury.”

Ross was a native of Mauchline, Ayrshire, and Shields a tenant of Titwood farm in the parish of Mearns, Renfrewshire. They were accused of being spies, found to be in possession of arms, and to be in Kilmarnock for the purpose of passing information about the King’s troops – all capital offences at the time.

The second memorial, elaborately carved with images of pistols, swords and flags, and containing the words ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ and ‘God and our Country’, is found at the centre of the graveyard. It commemorates the martyrdom of John Nisbet, tried on the charge of being at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, and executed on the gallows at Kilmarnock Cross on 14th April 1683. The place of his execution is still marked by a stone inside the nearby Burns Mall. His memorial contains the following verse:

“Come, reader, see, here pleasant Nisbet lies, His blood doth pierce the high and lofty skies; Kilmarnock did his latter hour perceive, And Christ his soul to heaven did receive. Yet bloody Torrance did his body raise And buried into another place; Saying ‘Shall rebels lye in graves with me! We’ll bury him where evil doers be.”

The third and last stone is more recent, replacing an earlier one set into the kirkyard’s northern wall. The original depicted an open Bible, and the words of Psalm 44:17 and Revelation 2:19. The present inscription identifies Thomas Findlay, John Cuthbertson, William Brown, Robert Anderson, and James Anderson, who were all brutally treated by their persecutors, and who were among 200 drowned near the Orkney Islands after being sentenced to transportation upon capture at Bothwell in June 1679.

Reference is also made on the same memorial to John Findlay, an honest and pious man martyred at the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, in December 1682. Who were the Covenanters?

Memorials to men and women ‘of the Covenant’ are to be found throughout Scotland – but who were these ‘Covenanters’? In essence, they were those who signed the National Covenant in 1638, an affirmation of their opposition to the ‘meddling’ of Stuart kings in the affairs of the Church of Scotland.

Seventeenth century monarchs held to ‘the Divine right of the monarch’. Not only did they claim God’s mandate to be infallible rulers in civic matters, but to be sovereign in the business of the church. This was unacceptable to Scottish Presbyterians: No man, king or otherwise, could be Head of the Church – that role belonged to Christ alone. And so this issue was central to the entire Covenanting struggle. Those naturally loyal to the Stuart dynasty were thus alienated, and for fifty years (1638-88) until the arrival of Prince William of Orange, untold suffering would be the lot of these faithful souls.

King Charles I introduced Archbishop Laud’s Book of Common Prayer to Scotland in 1637. Opposition was immediate, and when the King declared that refusal to comply was treason, the battle lines were drawn. Severe repression followed. Ministers were ‘outed’ from their pulpits and banished from their parishes. Many continued to preach at open air conventicles, or in barns and private houses. This became a capital offence. Citizens failing to attend their local church – now in the charge of Episcopalian ‘curates’ – could be fined and interrogated by torturous methods. Failure to take the oath of loyalty to King Charles, recognising him as head of the church, might well result in summary execution by blood-thirsty dragoons scouring the country for ‘rebels’.

Persecutions became more frequent during the ‘Killing Times’ that followed the restoration of Charles II in 1660. An army of 6000 Highlanders, altogether unsympathetic to the Presbyterian Lowlanders, was raised by the government in 1678. These ‘soldiers’ swept through the West and South of Scotland, looting and plundering, and quartering themselves on the already impoverished Covenanters.

These, then, were the Covenanters – brave souls who would not bow the knee to those who sought to usurp the Crown Rights of their one true Sovereign, even Jesus Christ, no matter the cost! The bard of Scotland, Robert Burns, pays this tribute:

The Solemn League and Covenant Brings now a smile, now brings a tear; But sacred freedom, too, was theirs: If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.

Rev Timothy Nelson