From July 6 to 22, 2012, Connie Wardle participated in a pilgrimage through countries touched by the Protestant Reformation. This is the ninth of a series of reflections on the journey.
As I walked through the echoing sanctuary of St. Giles Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland, I tried to imagine the riot.
It was on July 23, 1637. The service had scarcely begun. The dean stepped into the pulpit and began to read from a brand new prayer book.
King Charles I had requested the new liturgy. It was part of an effort to impose an episcopal system—with its bishops and hierarchies—on the Scottish church. It was very unpopular.
The poor dean had barely begun reading the collects when, according to tradition, a woman named Jenny Geddes hurled her stool at his head. A riot ensued.
Did the dean hide behind the pulpit? Did he pop up now and then to try to keep reading? Did he give up and make a run for the doors?
As I rounded one side of the sanctuary and peered through a pair of wrought iron gates, my joviality drained away. There stood a reminder of the violence that gripped the country in the years that followed.
There are two elaborate tombs in St. Giles. Both men were Covenanters—those who signed the National Covenant in 1638 and advocated for Presbyterian governance—but in life they fought on opposite sides in a civil war.
James Graham, the Marquess of Montrose, came to fight with the Royalists who supported the king. Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, fought against him on the side of the Covenanters.
Two enemies, both of them Presbyterian, are now encompassed by the walls of the same church. They lie across the sanctuary from each other, their graven images sleeping with swords on their chests.
The decades that followed the riot in St. Giles are punctuated with bloodshed: the Bishops Wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the persecution of Covenanters and armed rebellions against government forces.
When King Charles II was restored to the throne and an episcopal system was again imposed on the church, some ministers began to preach in the countryside. These illegal meetings were called “conventicles” and preaching at one was punishable by death.
In Edinburgh, we passed a number of places where Covenanters were executed during what is often called the “Killing Time.” A portion of the churchyard of Greyfriars Tolbooth and Highland Kirk was used as an open-air prison. In the Grassmarket area, a monument marks where the hangman’s scaffold stood.
Attending an illegal prayer meeting seems like such a small thing. Did people think it would it make that much of a difference? Was it really worth the risk?
Yet rulers feared the conventicles. In their way, the gatherings were powerful.
Walking in the shadows of those memorials made me realize how rarely I think about meeting with fellow believers. As I haul myself out of bed on a Sunday morning, I don’t think of going to church as a powerful thing. I don’t think about those Christians, past and present, who risk their lives each time they meet together. Although I stand in the shadow of a cross every Sunday, how often have I thought about the cost of faith?
