Introduction

Of all the documents on this site, the Solemn League and Covenant is probably the one that most puzzles the reader of today. It is neither a confession of faith nor a catechism, but an oath: a solemn covenant with God, subscribed by the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland. And yet, without it the rest cannot be understood. It was the covenant that gave the Westminster Assembly its definitive shape and fixed its task, and that is why the Scottish editions of the Confession of Faith printed it for centuries together with the other documents. So we include it here as well. The Assembly had first met in July 1643 with a modest charge, to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England; the Covenant turned it into the assembly of three kingdoms that drew up the Standards.

To understand it, one must go back a few years. Scotland had embraced the Reformation in 1560, and in time her Church had been ordered in a presbyterian way. Kings James VI and Charles I strove to impose bishops upon her and, in 1637, a prayer book in the Anglican manner. The resistance was immediate: in 1638 the Scottish nation bound itself in the National Covenant to defend the reformed religion. Meanwhile, in England, the conflict between Charles I and Parliament broke out in 1642 into civil war, and in Ireland the rebellion of 1641 had cost the lives of thousands of Protestants.

In 1643 the English Parliament, hard pressed in the war, asked Scotland for help. The English sought a civil and military alliance; the Scots demanded, in addition, a religious engagement. Hence its double name: a league between the kingdoms and a covenant with God. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved it on 17 August 1643; on 25 September it was sworn at Westminster by the House of Commons and the Assembly of Divines, and afterwards people of every rank subscribed it in both kingdoms. The Scottish Parliament ratified it in 1644.

Its first article explains why it is here. The subscribers bound themselves to bring "the Churches of GOD in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, Confession of Faith, Form of Church Government, Directory for Worship and Catechising", and to reform religion "according to the Word of GOD, and the example of the best reformed Churches". That list is, point by point, the work of the Westminster Assembly: the Confession, the Form of Government, the Directory and the Catechisms that are read on this site. By virtue of the Covenant the Scottish commissioners took their seats in the Assembly, among them Alexander Henderson, Samuel Rutherford, George Gillespie and Robert Baillie, whose influence is felt throughout it.

The rest of the Covenant binds its subscribers to defend that reformation, to reject popery and the government of the Church by bishops, to maintain the loyalty due to the king in the defence of religion and of the liberties of the kingdoms, to preserve the peace between them and, in its last article, to humble themselves for their own sins and those of the nation and to seek a true reformation of life. It is not a political programme with a religious varnish, but the engagement of whole peoples to submit their public life to the Word of God, as Israel did of old: "Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual Covenant that shall not be forgotten" (Jer. 50:5).

Its later history is that of a broken covenant. Charles II swore it in 1650 and again at his coronation, in 1651; but, once restored to the throne in 1660, he repudiated it. In 1661 it was publicly burned in London by order of Parliament, and in Scotland it was declared unlawful. Decades of persecution followed against the presbyterians faithful to the Covenant, the Covenanters, many of whom paid with their lives for their refusal to renounce it.

To read it today is to remember that the Westminster Reformation was not an academic exercise, but the endeavour of whole nations to acknowledge Christ publicly as King of his Church and of their common life, and that this endeavour cost blood.

The Covenant is preceded by the approbation of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland of 1643 and the act of ratification of the Scottish Parliament of 1644.