God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [24]
Finally, there is a long oath, arguing that the measures complained of by the Supplicants contravene the Word of God, and ‘are contrary to the articles of the aforesaid confessions, to the intention and meaning of the blessed reformers of religion in this land, to the above-written Acts of Parliament, and do sensibly tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true reformed religion, and of our liberties, laws and estates’.73 All subscribers became collectively responsible to the utmost of their power, and with their lives, to ‘stand to the defence of our dread Sovereign the King’s Majesty, his person and authority, in the defence and preservation of the aforesaid true religion, liberties and laws of the kingdom’. This explanation was intended to free them from ‘the foul aspersion of rebellion’ since their actions were ‘well warranted’ and arose from an ‘unfeigned desire’ to defend the true religion, the majesty of the King, the peace of the kingdom ‘for the common happiness of ourselves and our posterity’.74 This was not, in short, treason.
While it is clear that obedience was due to a covenanted king, however, the real question was left hanging in the air: the Covenant is silent on the obligations due to the king who is not defending the true religion. Given the campaigning of the previous year, this might seem like a statement of conditional loyalty. The King had been bound to this confession by his coronation oath, and if he was not with the Covenanters, they might seem to be suggesting, then he was in contravention of that oath. The double Covenant placed a not very coded limit on obedience.
In the wider context of the European Reformation this can be read as an example of fairly orthodox resistance theory. Protestants had grappled with the problem of the legitimacy of resistance to earthly powers from very early on because it had quickly become clear that the progress of the Reformation might often be blocked by ungodly kings. Resistance was difficult to justify, though, since St Paul had told Christians to ‘obey the powers that be’. One solution to this problem was to concede the right to resist to lesser magistrates: they too were powers enjoying divine sanction, and so they could lawfully use their office to resist another magistrate who was neglecting his. Another solution was federal theology – that a covenanted people constituted a divinely sanctioned power, which might resist an ungodly ruler.75
In this context the Covenant represents a manifesto for revolution, not in the sense that it called for kingless government, or for the right of any individual to resist an anointed monarch, but because it asserted a corporate intent on the authority of the body of the kirk. Mobilized through a novel institution, the Tables, it made authoritative claims on behalf of the covenanted people about the interpretation of the 1581 confession and subsequent legislation: it appeared, in fact, to make the Tables the custodian of the collective interest.76 In principle, this made the authority of the King conditional, even if the text did not spell out what to do when obligations to godly reformation and kingly authority were in tension. The implication was clear to Charles though, who wrote to Hamilton: ‘so long as this Covenant is in force… I have no more Power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice; which I will rather die than suffer’.77 But these menaces are present only in the silences – it is also possible to read this as an ambiguous or evasive document, and that was probably a source of its effectiveness. It was possible to commit to this programme without saying out loud that it was a licence to resist