For Christ's Crown & Covenant!

By Dr. Mark Jardine - Posted at Jardine's Book of Martyrs : Renwick's Tree in 2006 - Image from Jardine's Book of Martyrs It is a curious fact, that James Renwick , the minister of the Covenanters, has remarkably few places named after him considering his central role in their struggle in the 1680s. That stands in marked contrast to Alexander Peden, whom Renwick opposed, who has a plethora of trees, caves and stones associated with him. One reason for that may be that Peden’s wanderings through the landscape had a superb and evocative publicist in the form of Patrick Walker, whose Life of Peden was a very popular work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One place where Renwick is remembered in the landscape is at his place of birth, Moniaive, in his native parish of Glencairn in Dumfriesshire. There a monument was erected ‘about 100 yards from the place where he is supposed to have been born’ just over the hill to the north of the monument. Thanks to Evelyn Boyes

Covenant Ladies Index Page  (Apples of Gold) Lady Mary (Johnston) Lindsay Countess Crawford Lady Mary Johnson was the eldest daughter of James, Earl of Annandale and Hartfell, by his wife Lady Henrietta Douglas, daughter of William, first Marquis of Douglas, by his second wife, Lady Mary Gordon. She was married at Leith, on the 8th of March, 1670, to William, sixteenth Earl of Crawford, and second Earl of Lindsay, the son of John, Earl of Crawford and Lindsay, and brother to the Duchess of Rothes. Her husband, like his parents was a nonconformist, and great deference was paid to him by the Presbyterians. On this account he was, throughout the period of the persecution, a marked man; and, from the danger to which he was exposed, he once intended to go abroad, though he never went, but lived in retirement till the Revolution, which brought him deliverance and honour. The early education and family connections of this lady tended to prejudice her mind against the suffering Covenanters. Bu

William Guthrie - Image from Banner of Truth Posted at Banner of Truth : William Guthrie, one of the holiest and ablest of the experimental divines of Scotland, was born at Pitforthy, Angus, the seat of his ancestors, in the year 1620. He was the eldest son of the family, and his superior genius was displayed in his early and successful attention to learning; but till his entrance into college life, he did not obtain that intimate and saving acquaintance with Divine truth which enabled him at once to stay his own soul upon God as the God of his salvation, and to prescribe most skilfully for the cases of spiritual disease that came under his notice. He felt himself greatly indebted for acquaintance with the way of holiness to the instructions of a near kinsman. This was his cousin, James Guthrie, then holding one of the chairs in the New College of St Andrews, and afterwards highly esteemed as the faithful minister of Stirling during the period of the Covenant, for his faithful adherenc

The Two Margarets Covenant Ladies   Index Page  (Apples of Gold) Margaret McLauchlan and Margaret Wilson The years 1684 and 1685 were years of terrible suffering to the Covenanters. The history of these years is written in letters of blood, and they were emphatically called, by the sufferers, 'The Killing Time.' the savage ruffians, who were scouring the country like incarnate demons, hunted the poor helpless victims of their cruelty like wild beasts, over moors and mountains. If they met with a person who refused to answer their questions, or who did not satisfy them in his answers; or if they found another reading the Bible; or observed a third apparently alarmed or attempting to escape, they reckoned all such persons fanatics, and in many instances shot them dead on the spot. The devil had gone forth, having great wrath, as if knowing that his time was short. Patrick Walker remarks, that during these two years, eighty persons were shot in the fields, in cold blood; and he f

By Dr. Mark Jardine -  Posted at Jardine's Book of Martyrs : Amid the flotsam of the Killing Times of 1685 are a few brief lines on a threatened drowning of a woman at Kirkcudbright. She never was drowned, but her remarkable story deserves to be told… The case of Grizel Fullarton has striking parallels with the drowning of the two Wigtown martyrs, Margaret McLachlan and Margaret Wilson . Grizel Fullarton was captured by Colonel James Douglas, who commissioned the court that initially sentenced the two Wigtown women to be drowned for refusing the abjuration oath in April, 1685, under powers awarded to him on 27 March . The events of Fullarton’s case took place earlier in the same year in the same jurisdiction, Galloway, but under a slightly different set of judicial commissions. She was scheduled to face some of the same judges that went on to condemn the Wigtown women, but under their commission to press the abjuration oath in January, 1685. Read more...