We covered a lot of ground and a lot of history during our days in Edinburgh. From John Knox’s intellectual battles with the devout Catholic, Queen Mary, through the civil war between supporters of King Charles I and the Presbyterian Covenanters, to the “killing time” when Covenanters were executed—often brutally—by the royal government’s forces.
The time of John Knox and the time of the Covenanters came together inside the walls of St. Giles High Kirk (still often called St. Giles Cathedral).
Here Knox ministered from 1560 until his death in 1572. A statue of him, stern, bearded and pointing to a Bible, reminds visitors of his legacy.
And on either side of the large sanctuary sleep Presbyterian commanders who fought on opposite sides during the civil war.
James Graham, the Marquess of Montrose, and Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, both signed the National Covenant of 1638—a document that denounced the pope and Catholic Church doctrine. Yet Montrose sided with the king—who aimed to introduce an English-style of church with the monarch at its head—and Argyll backed the Covenanters and their belief that Christ alone rules the church.
Both men were eventually executed outside St. Giles as power swung away from the king and back again. Montrose was beheaded in 1650, the year after King Charles I was executed. Argyll was killed in 1661, the year after King Charles II was restored to the throne.
Today, commemorative statues of both men are encompassed by the walls of the same church. Their chapels face each other across the sanctuary. Between them, we sat in the choir and sang psalms to the God they both followed.
In the more modest Greyfriars kirk, we were able to see one of the few surviving copies of the National Covenant. And out in the adjacent graveyard we visited the memorial and the gated area where about 1,000 Covenanters were imprisoned in 1679.
“Halt passenger, take heed of what you do see, this tomb doth shew, for what some men did die,” reads the memorial. “They did endure the wrath of enemies, reproaches, torments, deaths and injuries. Yet they are those who from such troubles came, and now triumph and glory with the Lamb.”
