1685: Robert Pollack and Robert Millar, Covenanters

On this date in 1685, Robert Pollack and Robert Millar (or Pollock and Miller) were hanged in Edinburgh as Covenanters.

An East Kilbride shoemaker and a Rutherglen mason, respectively, they were a tick and a tock in the Killing Time — lost like tears in rain amid the torrent of Presbyterian martyrs.

These adhered to James Renwick‘s subversive doctrine of Scottish presbyter control against the overweening Anglican Episcopacy, a conflict of characteristically comingling religious and political characters.

Since most of the Covenanter-killing was being done summarily by soldiers in the field, these Roberts were actually the rare gallows-birds to be condemned in civil court, for which trouble they strangled at the Gallowlee on the road from Edinburgh to Peith.

Their last testaments can be read here, along with those of many other such martyrs.

Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, and employ your strength in the holding up of the fallen-down standard of our Lord, and if ye be found real in this duty, ye shall either be a temple, which shall be a glorious sight, or else ye shall be transported, and be a member of the Church triumphant; so ye shall be no loser, but a noble gainer either of the ways.

-Robert Millar

Though not up to the fame of having their own statuary, Pollack/Pollock has a place on the Covenanter monument in East Kilbride … where the martyrs’ spiritual descendants recently held the movement’s first open-air Conventicle since the 1680s.

Part of the Themed Set: Resistance and Rebellion in the Restoration.

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