7 - Dunbar (1650): ‘An Achan in the Scots Army’

Summary

Introduction

To English Independents at the end of 1650, Scottish brothers in Christ became agents of Satan. Covenanters became Canaanites as bowels of compassion overflowed as bowls of wrath. Two vignettes from the armed march into Scotland illustrate this transition.

In early July 1650, Edward Whalley, Commissary-General in parliament's forces, marched north against the Scots. The soldiers, headed by Oliver Cromwell, were armed for a war they hoped to avert. Although Whalley was an Independent, he was close to many Presbyterians. On the 17th, while stopping at Morpeth, he wrote to a dear friend, brother in Christ and Covenanter chaplain, Robert Douglas. Whalley recounted a decade of close-knit fellowship in the warmest terms and spoke of the ‘Bowells of Brotherly & Christian Love’. ‘God forbid’, he pleaded, ‘that diversitie of opinion should cause alienation of affection, where God loves, wee should love, where hee hath stamp't his image, wee should place our affection.’ Religious differences were as nothing compared to the weight of Christian fellowship. In all Whalley did, he aimed at ‘their good & our owne Safety’. It was the kirk that pulled ‘the right hand of fellowshippe’ when they joined themselves to a ‘Kinge against whome, & whose familie God hath manifested his high displeasure’. Instead of viewing the godly in England as brothers, the kirk called them ‘Sectaries’. Was this not ‘to doe the Devills worke’?

Whalley's letter has been neglected by scholars, although it contains similar themes to well-known printed letters. One was a ‘Declaration of the Army of England’ to the ‘Saints, and Partakers of the Faith of God's Elect, in Scotland’. The language was firm, but gentle and inclusive – using phrases like ‘with ourselves’, ‘tenderness’, ‘bretheren’, ‘bowels of love’ and ‘bowels full of love, yea, full of pity’. Such words, even though uttered in the midst of impending war, exemplify Puritan fellow feeling and brotherly disposition. In light of intolerant Presbyterian political and spiritual aspirations, parliament's cause was ‘a just and necessary defence of ourselves’. The godly marched north with ‘the full assurance we have that our cause is just and righteous in the sight of God’. He feared that ‘we should not follow’ where God was ‘going before’.