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1661: James Guthrie, protester

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With the words “the covenants, the covenants, shall yet be Scotland’s reviving!” Presbyterian minister James Guthrie was executed on this date in 1661 at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross, after the post-Oliver Cromwell restoration of the Stuarts.

Guthrie was a principal combatant in the interregnum-specific schism of resolutioners versus protesters.

The protesters were protesting against their opposite numbers’ hasty alliance with the exiled then-pretender King Charles II after the beheading of Charles I: correctly perceiving the Stuart heir hostile to the substantive object of presbyterian church governance, the protesters warned not “to promise any power to the King before he had evidenced the change of his principles, and the continuing of that power in his hand was sinful till that change did appear.”

Notably, and in his case fatally, Guthrie made an early exit from the royalist cause and butted heads personally with Stuart loyalist John Middleton — an officer whom Charles would advance to an earldom, and appoint to adjudicate Guthrie’s own trial. Guthrie’s prosecution has often been read as an excess of personal pique on the part of Middleton for the sharp words Guthrie had given him many years before.

He hanged together with a Scottish army deserter (who was very much the undercard attraction on this occasion) named William Govan. Guthrie claimed in his last speech that he eschewed opportunities to escape his prison so as “not [to] stain my conscience with the suspicion of guiltiness by my withdrawing.”

On this day..