It is six years since Jonet died. His one surviving boy, Thomas.is eight years old. Their first-born, John, died shortly after they were married despite their perching for weeks on the Stools of Repentance before the Reverend Gartshore’s pulpit. Standing at the back of the Kirk, Johne still grieves behind a rampart of numbness
Jonet was a Smythe, her mother was an Adam. And she was bonny – five years younger than John.
The land has been generous to both the Forresters and the Smythes since the King returned, The weather was good and the grain yields better, prices dropped and slowly, year after year, they prospered. It puzzles Johne that the Lord has blessed the Stuart Restoration with abundance but The Lord is mysterious in his judgement, his father would have said.
Johne’s own parents were stripped bare by plundering armies. The Parish was harried, the Laird’s Castle burned. Everything was taken from them – grain, beasts, goods. Johne’s boyhood had been hard. They starved but they survived, thin bairns herding sheep up near Slaughter Howe where the bones of dead Covenanters protrude like grasping fingers from the peat. At first there was only porridge and kail: later there was furniture, cattle to trade, a puckle silver. Tobacco. Then tea. He still pays his rent in meal, cheese and chickens.
But, like all the gudemen of Kilsyth, he remains wary, haunted. The hirschips and exactations of childhood left gaunt and anxious, a short-tempered man and a worrier to this day.
Perhaps their good hairsts are a sign of God’s personal contentment? Recognition that they, at least, kept the faith while their Godly Commonwealth rotted back towards Romish superstition and ritual.
The previous Minister, the Reverend Graham, resisted the canons until 1663. The old man refused to worship God by the licence of the bishops for he said they had “abjured Prelacy in the Covenant and declared the bishops to be anti-scriptural and anti-Christian.”
He refused to take the Oath of Supremacy because he “could not in conscience allow any king or head of the Church but Jesus Christ. He would not pray for the king, or swear to him, because he was a persecutor of the Church, and thereby an enemy to God, because he had renounced the oath of God in the Covenant.”
His parents thought it wise to read out the Oath of Abjuration through clenched teeth when the prelates replaced the people’s chosen pastor with Rev. Garthshore, a man more amenable to the Episcopacy, The ordered Johne to spit the words out too.
Johne was twenty-one when the Covenanters rose again and marched on Edinburgh. He wanted to go that time but his father bade him stay. No need, his father said, in going to extremes. When the brave defenders of the faith were beaten at Rullion Green Johne wondered what if he and others like him had joined?
He was courting Jonet then and she was not impressed by his Covenanting enthusiasms. And, of course, impressing Jonet was his whole project and desire. Back then, every waking hour he was not working on his father’s rigs was spent courting her. They handfasted, took the fruit before the flower and earned their sojourn on the stool in the kirk. His father didn’t mind the fornication, just the shame and the fine. He said their penance would have been more severe under the Reverend Graham. Garthshore, was no disciplinarian.
The laird returned to rebuild Colzium Castle, eventually, and continued bigging up his Burgh. Kindly tenants were turned out. Rents were set in silver. Loyalty meant nothing. He ordered his tenants’ to lay the earthern pipe from a spring well to a cistern in the village that saved the toonsers the walk to the Garrel. Livingstone returned to the old Popish ways. Most of his tenants and cottars remain staunch Presbyterians for Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart.
Despite popish ritual, however, good harvests filled the barns and byres. Put silver in their pouches.
Good fortune tempts bad luck.
These days the thieving Highland men who wasted the parish when Johne was an infant, have turned vicious. Broken men descend from their glens to rob and to extort protection. The caterans demand ‘hospitality’ and exact ‘rents’ of their own sort: on a gudemans life or on his cattle. The rascals are the antithesis of everything- heathens rejecting law and order, property and piety, community and natural justice?
Johne’s family keep weapons loaded in the house but none would be foolish enough to step out on the rigs and face the savages.
Meanwhile, Claverhouse and his brigands murder godly men on the spot for refusing his Oath of Abjuration these days. Fines are levied on those who fail to attend the parish churches of the King’s Curates. In the South. Cameronians have signed a new Covenant in Sanquhar, refusing to pledge allegiance to a King who will not recognise their religion so the King’s agent. The death penalty is imposed for preaching at their field conventicles. Six thousand rascal Highlanders are billeted in Ayrshire and Galloway, plundering their hosts. It seems the South-West shires breed folk more faithful to God’s Covenant – or less wise – than his father proved to be.
Though Kilsyth’s episcopalian mimickry is as paper thin as their communion wafers. The parishioners may have forsaken the good and godly earnest of the Lords Supper – coarse bread and wine around a few trestles, laid out in the kirk, family groups partaking as the apostles did on the night before Gethsemane – but no Forrester will kneel to take communion.
That, and muttering beneath their breath, is the sum of their resistance however.
Besides, Johne has other reasons to conform to the popish rituals these days. He has his eye on wee Christian Naipper across the kirk. The lass is barely half his age, a bittie plain compared to Jonet but sturdy enough. And at his age…
Jonet gave him two more sons, Thomas and Walter, after their first born died. Walter killed her. Despite John’s constant dreads and over-thinking, they had eight happy years together. Jonet understood him, could navigate his moods. Could Christian do the same? And would she have him?
©John Bolland 2026
[i] in penance for their fornication
[ii] Not a ‘Little Ice Age’ but possibly the consequence of reforestation of North America after the population had been decimated by the diseases introduced by Europeans.
[iii] To take licence from them was to homologate their authority as legal, which they detested and abhorred.
Daniel Defoe
[iv] Being debarred all manner of liberty to worship God in public, and on the severest penalties forbidden to assemble themselves together, either in the churches or in private families; and believing it at the same time their duty according to the Scriptures, not to forsake assembling, they could not satisfy their consciences to obey man rather than God. Daniel Defoe
[v] The Abjuration Act of 1662 was a formal rejection of the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. These were declared to be against the fundamental laws of the kingdom. The Act required all persons taking public office to take an oath of abjuration not to take arms against the king, and rejecting the Covenants. This excluded most Presbyterians from holding official positions of trust.
[v] When the incestuous fornicator, Calum Og McGrigor of Callendar, was hanged in Stirling, John and Jonet, pregnant, barely showing, travelled out to watch him die. McGrigor had terrorised the parishes to the West with his band. It brought some comfort to know that he was dead.
[vi] McGrigor’s case can also shed some light on the way contemporaries understood brigandage, not least through the wording of his 1669 indictment. McGrigor, this document claimed, had been ‘long a Lous and broken man and a vagabound and […] altogider idle and uithout any land [or] imployment’. Such language suggests that, for the authorities, criminality of McGrigor’s type was problematic not just because it was violent and destabilising, but because it represented a ‘normative’ challenge. In becoming a bandit, McGrigor was rejecting all the standard social roles he might have been expected to play. Much like vagrants, witches, or Gypsies, bandits were so frightening because their very existence struck at the core structures of order and hierarchy that governed early modern society. Little wonder, then, that contemporaries recognised only one proper response to bandits like McGrigor: they had to die, either in the field, or on the scaffold.
[vii] James VII
[viii] And 3000 Lowland Militia.