In 1638 Scotland rose against Charles I’s attempt to impose bishops and an English-style prayer book on its church. The National Covenant — sworn across the country that year — bound its signatories to defend the reformed kirk, and the revolution’s decisive act happened in Glasgow: in November and December 1638 the General Assembly met in Glasgow Cathedral and, defying the king’s commissioner who ordered its dissolution and walked out, sat on to depose the bishops and abolish episcopacy root and branch. It was the most consequential assembly in Scottish church history, and it happened in the choir of the cathedral.
There followed half a century in which religion and war were the same subject. Glasgow was occupied, taxed and garrisoned by every side in turn — Covenanting armies, Montrose after his nearby victory at Kilsyth in 1645, Cromwell (who lodged in the Saltmarket and traded sermons with the city’s ministers) — while its people buried the dead of battle and plague together.
The bitterest phase came after 1660, when the restored Charles II brought the bishops back and outlawed the Covenants. Ministers who refused the new order were driven from their pulpits and their congregations followed them to illegal open-air services — conventicles — on the moors; attendance became treason, and the government’s dragoons made the south-west of Scotland, Glasgow’s hinterland, the theatre of the ‘Killing Time’. The rising that ended at Bothwell Brig, a few miles up the Clyde, in 1679 saw hundreds of Covenanter prisoners marched through to imprisonment in Edinburgh; executions followed at Glasgow Cross as elsewhere.
Glasgow’s own martyrs are remembered where they fell and lie: memorial stones in the Cathedral precinct and elsewhere name the men hanged at the Cross ‘for their adherence to the word of God and Scotland’s covenanted work of reformation’, and the city’s memory of them shaped its self-image for two centuries — radical, scriptural and stubborn under authority.
The Revolution of 1688–90 settled the quarrel the Covenanters’ way: bishops out, presbyterianism established — the constitution the Church of Scotland keeps to this day. The men of the moors had lost almost every battle and won the war entire; and it had begun, formally and forever, in Glasgow’s cathedral.