The Reformation of the Churches in 1560 away from Popery and domination by Rome, pleased the Scottish people. In 1592 Presbyterianism was established. But by 1610, in an effort to bring the Scottish Church into line with the Anglican one, James VI and his London Parliament appointed Bishops and increasingly enforced a more Episcopal form of governing the Church in Scotland. Seven years later he even set about imposing reforms in the congregational worship. The Presbyteries and many ministers and heritors, hating this domination from the south, felt that they were being betrayed.
On Charles I’s accession in 1625, the new King saw no reason to change the Episcopal rule and in 1637 he decided to introduce a Prayer Book suitable for Scottish congregations. Churchmen and parishioners protested, determined on strengthening their own Assembly for church affairs and returning to Presbyterianism and a truly Scottish Kirk.
Angry arguments on the subject led to the drawing up and signing of a National Covenant in Edinburgh in 1638 (see the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities) to oppose the power of the prelates. The Covenant and other Covenants that followed it in many areas, became strongly supported by ‘Covenanters’.
Then in 1660 when the monarchy was restored after Cromwell’s rule, Charles II came to the throne renewing Episcopacy and the power of the Bishops in Scotland. This was regarded as a great betrayal of all the churchmen had tried to do since the Covenant was signed. Many refused to conform and there were feuds and bloody battles throughout the southern half and in some other parts of Scotland.
We read in well-known books such as Men of the Covenant by Alexander Smellie, The Scottish Covenanters by James Barr and Scottish Worthies by John Howie that in the district round and not far south of here, acclaimed Covenanters fought bravely for the Presbyterian cause.
Although throughout most of the troublesome times Carmunnock church had to remain peaceably with the Established one, some of its ministers fought a long hard struggle in support of the National Covenant. The Rev James Mowbrae, being a “good Presbyterian man”, was forced by the Bishops to give up his post in 1639. His successor the Rev Matthew McKail took a prominent part in support of the Covenant, but was transferred to Bothwell in 1649.
His son Hugh McKail who we presume spent his young years in Carmunnock, aged 9 when they moved to Bothwell, was later licensed to preach and became one of the best known martyrs when he was hanged in Edinburgh in 1666 at only 25 years of age. We read that “his scaffold speech excited such lamentations as were never heard in Scotland; there was not an eye that did not run with tears”. Well-known historians writing of him, quote reports of the time: “scarce was there a dry cheek in all the streets and windows about the Cross in Edinburgh” and his Farewell to life and Welcome to death speech just before his execution, is famous.
The Rev Andrew Morton, minister at Carmunnock from 1650, gained much popularity and support, both active and passive, from the villagers here when he took a prominent stand against the Government’s men who had set up a Court of Law in the Kilbride area under a Major Whyte, to deal with offenders.
Dismissed from Carmunnock church in 1662 for non-conformity, Mr. Morton held clandestine services for baptism, preaching in Kilbride, Glasgow and even in the open fields for some of his old parishioners, and sentries had to be posted to give fair warning of any sight or sound of approaching soldiers. But his successor at Carmunnock Church, the Rev Robert Boyd, reported on him; Mr. Morton, formerly a soldier, was arrested and thrown into the dungeon at Stirling Castle for a time and on a later occasion when he was again caught preaching, he was heavily fined.
Nearly 70 years earlier, in 1597, Carmunnock Church had been taken into the Presbytery of Glasgow. Ninety long years after that, following the changes in ecclesiastical and political argument - first of all from the Old Faith to Presbyterianism, then to Episcopal rule over the Presbyterian Church later leading to Episcopalianism - Scotland eventually had its own true Kirk. And it was as the result of the Presbytery’s strength and influence, the freedom of decision afforded by the Covenants, and the determination of many in the district, that Carmunnock, like most other small churches, became part of the ultimate resolve.
With the end of the Royal Stuart Kings in 1688 the Presbyterian Church was no longer opposed, and in 1690 the rule of the Bishops was abolished. Once more, suitably trained ministers had to be found. By 1710 the Hamiltons had disposed the last part of their barony lands at Carmunnock to the Stuart Lairds of Castleton who had already added most of the surrounding area to their Estate. When the law of Patronage was revived in 1712, it was now the Stuart Lairds who became - more officially than before that date - the ‘Patrons’ and chief heritors of our parish church.
When peace returned after the long struggle, the Rev Andrew Morton came back to be minister at our church in 1687 and it is said the villagers, joyfully taking the opportunity at that time, forcibly threw the unpopular Rev Mr. Boyd out of the Manse! Then in 1691 Mr. Morton died and he was buried in the ministers’ corner of the churchyard: his flat tombstone, the inscription almost obliterated, is sculptured with a skull and crossed bones.
Mr. Morton’s successor as minister at Carmunnock was his son-in-law the Rev Andrew Tait(e). It was in his time that, because of the Church of Scotland’s concern regarding the serious lapse in the taking of Communion throughout the long unsettled period, much was done to re-establish this on a regular basis. While Mr. Tait took the well-attended Communion services in the church, four or five other ministers “thundered away from morning to night” to worshippers who came from all around, crowding into a huge tent specially erected on the Low Green every Communion time for very many years afterwards, even into the 19th century.
The stone plaque high on the church’s wall above the ministers’ graves, is in memory of Mr. Tait and his family and, similarly, it bears the skull and crossed bones above which is the sculptured head of a guardian angel. His death in 1743 was half a century before the time of the Rev Adam Forman of the parish’s First Statistical Account. Yet some 80 years after that, in the 1870s two crosses about two or three feet high still stood on the Low Green, thought to have been erected at some point in this interval of time to mark the ground consecrated for these services. By that stage the stone cross - the original one of the two - was broken and leaning over and it is said that the wooden one beside it which had been put there to replace it, was already rotten even although it was of a more recent date.
Monuments to the men of the Covenants stand in many districts in this part of Scotland. Churchyards at Dalserf in the Clyde valley, and Fenwick north of Kilmarnock have graves of some famous martyrs and there are others in Strathaven cemetery, Eaglesham churchyard and in the green opposite Cathcart Old Parish Church.
Close to their hideouts and secret pathways across Eaglesham’s bleak moors, a lonely monument stands on the sky-line at Lochgoin in their memory. It chiefly commemorates John Howie, 1735-93, one of successive generations of Howie tenants of Lochgoin farm, author of Scottish Worthies first published in 1775. Revised from the original by a Rev W Carslaw a century later, the book is a historic account of the hard struggle and of Covenanters many of whom sheltered at Lochgoin in John Howie’s great-grandparents’ time, about whose exploits and experiences he was told throughout his early years by his grandfather and friends.
Carmunnock - although it had abided for the main part with the Established Church of the period - remembers even today not only the support, bravery and fortitude of many in this district, but salutes the Presbytery’s dedication in the title of our church’s monthly parish magazine The Covenanter.