Though none of the crowd that thronged Edinburgh’s Grassmarket this day in 1688 could know it, that date’s execution of minister James Renwick would make an end to the Killing Time, the great 1680s persecutions that scattered martyrs’ bones across Highland and Lowland.
Renwick, at any rate, was the last of many Covenanters who submitted to the public executioner; only a few months yet remained when officers in the field were empowered to force an oath of abjuration upon suspected dissidents, on pain of summary death in the field. By year’s end, the absolutist Catholic King James II — with whose brother and predecessor the movement had such a tortured history — fled to exile as the Glorious Revolution brought the Protestant William of Orange to power: royal recognition of Scottish Presbyterianism ensued.*
The son of a village weaver, Renwick manifested a martyr’s uncommon zeal for the faith early in life and matriculated at the University of Edinburgh. There in 1681 he witnessed the hanging of Covenanter preacher Donald Cargill. Here, muses the hagiography, “the mantle of Elijah fell upon young Elisha.”
After studying — and ordination — abroad in the Netherlands Renwick returned to his native soil in 1683. He managed some five years of secret ministering in hidden homes and conventicles, and all the while the law sought him ever closer. By the time it finally hunted him to ground in 1688, so many of the faith’s august champions had already taken their martyrs’ crowns that at age 25** Renwick was among the biggest game remaining.
How often cowled on ghostly moors by torchlight had the young reverend rehearsed the steadfast refusal he might one day deliver to his persecutors? Had he prayed that the weakness of flesh would not betray his spirit with an unbecoming attachment to his own life? “I cannot own this usurper as the lawful king, seeing both by the word of God such an one is incapable to bear rule, and likewise by the ancient laws of the kingdom which admit none to the crown of Scotland until he swear to defend the Protestant religion, which a man of his profession cannot do,” he declared to his captors when pressed for the formula of abjuration.
Renwick passed this test but little could even he have imagined how speedily would be fulfilled his gallows prayer:
Lord, I die in the faith that Thou wilt not leave Scotland, but that Thou wilt make the blood of Thy witnesses the seed of Thy church, and return again and be glorious in our land. And now, Lord, I am ready.
Condemned Covenanters on Their Way to Execution in the West Bow, Edinburgh. Artist unknown. (Source)
James Renwick has enjoyed tender biographical treatment from posterity; see here and here for some longer-form examples.
* While good news for the Presbyterians, this put many an Episcopal and Catholic in a tight spot of their own, setting up decades of bloody tragedy for Jacobite loyalists … but this is a subject for other posts.
** The captain who finally caught Renwick is supposed to have exclaimed at seeing his youth, “Is this the boy Renwick that the nation has been so much troubled with?” The outlaw minister turned 26 two days before his execution.
On this day..
- 1819: Pierre Charles Rodolphe Foulard, Henry-Clement Sanson's first execution
- 1883: Vasudev Balwant Phadke dies on hunger strike
- 1955: Three for the death of King Ananda of Thailand
- 1719: Richard Worley, pirate
- 1526: Guillaume Jobert, Genevieve-blasphemer
- 1815: Eight deserters by order of Andrew Jackson
- 1938: Juan Soldado, patron saint of Mexico-US migrants
- 1524: Not Jean de Poitiers, father of the mistress
- 1944: Jean Cavailles, philosopher-mathematician
- 1872: Gomburza
- 1600: Giordano Bruno, freethought martyr
- 2004: Cameron Willingham, for an accidental fire?