God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [187]
When parliamentary commissioners had arrived in Scotland on 7 August, their priority was to secure troops. The Covenanters, however, were more concerned with securing closer union of the churches, or were at least more concerned with extracting that as the price of military support. A precondition of the military alliance became, for the Covenanters, a joint band or covenant to pursue shared religious objectives. In other words, where the parliamentarians were seeking a civil alliance, the Covenanters wanted a covenant; and for reasons internal to England that meant that the English commissioners had to try to restrain the influence of strict adherence to Presbyterian discipline on the shape of the covenant.13 The weakness of Parliament’s military position in England did not allow for robust negotiation.
This was the context in which the Solemn League and Covenant was produced. It was the document that the Covenanters wanted, not a straightforward statement of the parliamentary cause as seen by its English adherents. It was intended that the covenant would be sworn by all the inhabitants of the three kingdoms and would commit them to the promotion of a common religious practice. Significantly that entailed the preservation of the kirk, but the reform of the English and Irish churches. This reform was to be undertaken according to the example of the best reformed churches, and since no reform was proposed of the kirk, it is pretty clear which churches the drafters had in mind. Henry Vane, the chief parliamentary negotiator, is credited with securing a little wriggle room for those uncomfortable with Scottish presbytery: a clause was changed in Westminster so that reform should be pursued ‘according to the word of God’ rather than by the ‘same holy word’ that governed the kirk. It was not simply a religious covenant, since subscribers were also bound to preserve both Houses of Parliament and the King’s person and authority, and to seek the punishment of malignants as well as opponents of religion. In fact only two of the six clauses were purely religious.14 Nonetheless, the religious bond was close to the heart of the military alliance, and like all religious commitments it posed potentially very serious problems of conscience.15
There can be little doubt that this religious programme was closer to the mainstream of Scottish opinion than of English, or even the centre ground of the parliamentary coalition. For the Covenanters the best security for the gains they had made in 1640 and 1641 lay in the export of their church settlement, and that was in hand here, but many of those who fought for Parliament in England had not taken up arms for that. Moreover, the covenant pledged to extirpate heresy and schism. Sectarians could hope for little sympathy here, and respectable Congregationalists might look askance too. The pay-off for the English parliament was priceless, however: alongside this mutual covenant to pursue reformation the Covenanters demanded £30,000 per month from the English parliament in return for sending 21,000 men to bolster Parliament’s ailing cause.16
The Scottish Convention adjourned on 26 August, the day that the draft of the Solemn League reached Westminster, where it was forwarded to the Assembly of Divines. Amendments were added in early September but negotiations were taking place with Gloucester under siege and Parliament’s military fortunes far from thriving: nice distinctions over the precise form of the most desirable form of Protestant worship were allowed to slip notice, in the interests of political and military expediency. Scots commissioners arrived on 7 September and the covenant was finally