You may take my head from my shoulders, but not my heart from my soveraigne: Understanding Scottish Royalist Allegiance During the British Civil Wars, 1639–1651

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Abstract

On 19 April 1639, George Gordon, marquis of Huntly, the king’s lieutenant in the north, was arrested in Edinburgh by the Covenanting regime which had seized power the year before. The following day, Huntly wrote a formal response to his arrest in which he refuted the Covenanters’ authority and defiantly declared his intention to remain loyal to Charles I, even if it cost the marquis his life. Huntly wrote: ‘to be your Prisoner, is by much the lesse displeasing to mee, that my accusation is for nothing else but loyalty’. He went on to repudiate the Covenanters’ claims of justification through religion, stating that it was ‘in a pretence of Religion, which my owne judgement cannot excuse from Rebellion’. In concluding, Huntly avowed that the ‘Title of Traitor’ would not taint his honour and that ‘You may take my Head from my shoulders, but not my Heart from my Soveraigne’.
In many ways, the shaky legal grounds on which Huntly’s arrest was pursued and resisted reveals the fundamental political issue of the British Civil Wars in Scotland: which side was politically justified when both claimed allegiance to the king? The National Covenant of 1638 had emphasised the Covenanters’ loyalty to Charles I, even if by 1639 its adherents had been forced to raise
arms against the king’s forces in order to preserve ‘the Kirk of Scotland, the King’s Majesty, and three estates of this realm’. The reality of what that meant in practice was far vaguer. When Major-General Robert Monro arrived outside Aberdeen on 28 May 1640 at the head of a Covenanting
army, he called for ‘the magistrates to give in a roll or list of theise inhabitants, absent or present, that hath not subscryved the Covenant and Generall Band, that they may be dissarmed as bad and evill patriotts’. When both sides claimed to be patriots, who judged whether they were good or evil?
More importantly, how did contemporaries see their own allegiance when the political waters of the period were so murky?
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLoyalty to the Monarchy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400-1688
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages211-230
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-030-37767-0
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-37766-3, 978-3-030-37769-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2020

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