The first of the Scottish covenant bands appeared in 1557, and for
a century these religious dissenters preached a clear gospel, while
simultaneously mounting a military campaign for independence from
England. A “killing time” followed the 1679 assassination of the king’s
archbishop, James Sharp. Charles II had restored the monarchy in
England in 1662, and was not about to allow another rebellion like the
one that severed the head of Charles I. The Covenanters must be
stopped — annihilated. So in late 1680 the crown’s agents conducted
raids against commoners who had any association with the likes of
Donald Cargill or Richard Cameron.

Alison was taken from her home in Perth and Harvie from Borrowstounness. Each was interrogated concerning the Sanguhar Declaration, a Covenanter creed, and other differences of doctrine and practice. Of these matters the women knew little beyond the preaching they had heard. But they did strongly affirm that their sins had been forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ. Credited by the court with good sense and uncommon intellects, they were nonetheless condemned as traitors and rebels, and then further condemned to hell by the king’s churchmen.

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On January 26, 1681, Alison and Harvie were led with five other female criminals to the Grassmarket, Edinburgh’s outdoor gallows. Alison testified: “So I lay down my life for owning and adhering to Jesus Christ, He being a free king in His own house, for which I bless the Lord that ever He called me.” Harvie wrote before her hanging: “I die not as a fool or evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters; no, it is for adhering to Jesus Christ, and owning Him to be head of His church.”

Together on the platform they sang Psalm 84. As the winter wind carried their voices to Heaven, the hangman pushed them over the edge. The king had won a short moment of silence at Grassmarket Square, but many more voices were singing in the angelic choirs above them.

“Blessed are those who spread joy that arises out of their own suffering. He who denies himself for others clothes himself with Christ.” —Prince Vladimir of the royal House of Ghica, who was imprisoned in a harsh dungeon

This story is an excerpt from Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs. You can get your own copy free with any donation to The Voice of the Martyrs.

He turned out to be a very good one. He was clear, sincere, and passionate. In the meetings he held along hillside heather and valley stream, hundreds would hear him preach about a gospel centered on Christ, a church free of state control, and a destiny of joy that God had prepared for each person who trusted the Savior. Cargill would have been proud to hear him and see him evade capture time and time again.

One time, Renwick traveled to Newton Stewart for a series of outdoor meetings, called conventicles. During his stay at the town’s inn, an
officer of the king’s army, also passing the night at the inn, engaged him
in conversation. The two talked into the night, each equally delighted by
the lively interchange. At length they retired. When the officer inquired
the next morning about his new friend, he was told the man named James
Renwick had left early to escape capture. The stunned officer simply
returned to his barracks, convinced that such a winsome, harmless young
man as Renwick was not worth arresting.

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On another occasion, Renwick sought a hiding place in a shepherd’s
cottage from which he had heard loud singing. He surmised it to be a
Covenanter’s cottage because of the exuberance of the music. But no,
this shepherd was merely drunk and free-spirited. Still, Renwick spent
the night. In the morning while his own clothes were drying, Renwick used one of the man’s old plaids for a morning walk, roaming the valley
to pray and enjoy the early hour. Suddenly, a troop of soldiers appeared.
They stopped the plaid-draped Scotsman to ask the whereabouts of the
preacher they were hunting. Satisfied with the old man’s empty-headed
innocence, the soldiers rode on. Another narrow escape for Renwick.
Finally, in 1684, a frustrated Privy Council issued an edict naming
James Renwick and all who gave him aid as enemies of the state. To
withhold information or to hide him was tantamount to collusion in his
crimes. Even then, three years would pass before the king’s men would
catch him.

In December 1687, Renwick was seized in Edinburgh when an officer heard praying inside a house and recognized the voice. The charges against him were three: refusing to accept the king’s authority, refusing to pay the tax, and counseling his listeners to attend outdoor meetings with arms. Renwick pleaded guilty to all three and declined offers of pardon. On February 17, 1688, he was hanged in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, and his head and hands hung on Netherbow Gate.

Who might have been watching that day in the Grassmarket? What young Christian might have been inspired when they heard him say, “I go to your God and my God. Death to me is a bed to the weary. Now, be not anxious. The Lord will maintain His cause and own His people. He will show His glory yet in Scotland. Farewell.”

This story is an excerpt from Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs. You can get your own copy free with any donation to The Voice of the Martyrs.

Virtually nothing is known of McKail’s birth and growing years.
After studying at the University of Edinburgh, he was ordained at the
age of twenty, only a year after Charles II had rejuvenated the monarchy
following Oliver Cromwell’s failed experiment in popular sovereignty.

McKail was a Scotsman. He could neither travel forever nor ignore
his calling to the Scottish church. Four years in hiding was enough. He
returned to Galloway to watch and wait. When his fellow Covenanters
took up swords and clubs against the British, he couldn’t be content sitting quietly at his hearth.

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Whether McKail became a fighter is uncertain, but certainly he
knew the Covenanter captains and likely traveled with them. In November 1666 he was captured and tortured for information, which apparently he withheld despite a metal wedge being hammered into his leg,
shattering the bone.

A month later, on December 18, he was tried with other prisoners
and sentenced to be hanged. During the next four days he prepared for
death, composing an eloquent gallows farewell and asking his father,
who was with him for a last dinner on the night before the hanging, “I
desire it of you, as the best and last service you can do me, to go to your
chamber and pray earnestly to the Lord to be with me on that scaffold;
for how to carry there is my care, even that I may be strengthened to endure to the end.” Then he asked his father to leave him, or else he
would stir emotions that would deflect his purpose the next day.

At the gallows, McKail spoke at some length, begging the audience
to listen to his “few words,” as his years on earth were few as well. At
the end of his testimony and admonition to courage, he said:

And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and turn
my speech to thee, O Lord! And now I begin my intercourse
with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father
and mother, friends and relations; farewell the world and all
delights; farewell meat and drink; farewell sun, moon, and
stars. Welcome God and Father; welcome sweet Lord Jesus,
the Mediator of the new covenant; welcome blessed Spirit of
grace, and God of all consolation; welcome glory; welcome
eternal life; welcome death.

Then McKail climbed the ladder to the waiting rope and prayed for
some time before the executioner released him to gravity and Heaven.
It was said that Charles II had sent a letter of reprieve, which
Archbishop Burnet of Glasgow had hidden so that McKail and other
Covenanters would die. It was a dangerous decade to be a free-church
Christian in Scotland.

This story is an excerpt from Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs. You can get your own copy free with any donation to The Voice of the Martyrs.

I marvel at your rage, ye hypocrites, who do so cruelly pursue the servants of God! As for me, I am now eighty-two years old, and cannot live long by course of nature; but a hundred shall rise out of my ashes, who shall scatter you, ye hypocrites and persecutors of God’s people; and such of you as now think yourselves the best, shall not die such an honest death as I do now. I trust in God, I shall be the last who shall suffer death in this fashion for the cause of this land!

His words were prophetic because he was, in fact, the last martyr of
the early reformation in Scotland.

Born in 1476, Mill became a priest in Angus County, Scotland.
Impressed by the teachings of the reformers, he questioned the church
hierarchy and theology and stopped saying Mass. So as a young man,
he was condemned to death for his defiance of the church. Eventually,
in 1538, Mill was arrested, but he escaped to Germany where he ministered for twenty years.

At the age of eighty-two, he returned to teach the Protestant faith
and live out his remaining days in his homeland. But he was hunted down
and imprisoned, even though as an old man he was not a threat. At his
trial, Mill entered the courtroom at the cathedral of St. Andrews and fell
to his knees in prayer. The judge, guards, and audience assumed that
Mill, feeble from his imprisonment, would be unable to speak in his
defense. Yet he spoke with force. And Walter Mill was condemned to be
executed for heresy.

While being bound to the stake, Mill continued to speak to his captors and the assembled onlookers. Many admired his bold declaration
of faith. Some complained aloud about the cruelty of his persecutors.
Mill prayed quietly for a short time. Then, as the fire was being lit, he
cried out, “Lord have mercy on me. Pray, pray, good people, while there
is time.” Then, cheerfully, he left this life to live with God.
John Knox wrote, “That blessed martyr of Christ, Walter Mill, a
man of decrepit age, was put to death most cruelly the 28th April, 1558.”

“The world for a time may
deceive itself, thinking it has
the victory, but the end will
try the contrary.”
—John Bradford, another martyr, written at the beginning
of his imprisonment in 1554

This story is an excerpt from Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs. You can get your own copy free with any donation to The Voice of the Martyrs.

When Nesbit returned from war in Europe, King Charles II had
begun to impose his will on Scotland and the Scottish church, a will
opposed by the determined free-church Covenanters. They resisted any
king as church-head and the king’s priests as intermediaries. The Covenanters believed with equal ferocity in Christ alone as head of the
church and armed resistance as the right of all who seek to worship
that way. The Covenanters would not bow to Charles without a fight.

But Nesbit had other business, too. He married Margaret Law
and they raised a family. He kept a handwritten New Testament
passed on to him from a great-grandfather who was one of the barefoot preachers sent to England in the fourteenth century by John
Wycliffe. He studied, learned, worked, prayed, and often hid from
Charles’s dragoons.

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But he couldn’t hide forever. Severely injured on the field at Rullian
Green, Nesbit was left for dead, but escaped and recovered. He fought
again at the Battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, both Covenanter
disasters, which Nesbit survived after a brave fight. By then he was
marked, and a bounty was put on his head.

To draw him out from hiding, the king’s troops forced Margaret and
the children out of their home. Unable to secure shelter that winter, she
died of exposure. A daughter and son followed her. Nesbit apparently
found them as his daughter was being prepared for burial. His surviving
son later wrote this account of it:

Friends were putting his little daughter in her rude coffin.
Stooping down, he kissed her tenderly, saying, “Religion does
not make us void of natural affection, but we should be sure it
runs in the channel of sanctified submission to the will of God,
of whom we have our being.” Turning to a corner where two
of his sons lay in a burning fever, he spoke to them but they did
not know him. He groaned, saying, “Naked came I into this
world and naked I must go out of it. The Lord is making my
passage easy.”

He buried his family and quickly went into hiding again. For two
years he evaded his captors, despite the growing price on his head.
Then one day, in the company of three others, a squad of dragoons
led by a Captain Robert, Nesbit’s cousin, surrounded them. A brief
fight followed. Nesbit’s three colleagues were injured, then executed.
Nesbit, however, was worth more alive than dead. He was taken to
Edinburgh, where he told his prosecutors that he was more afraid to
lie than to die; that he was more willing to give his life than even they
were to take it. Quickly convicted, Nesbit was sentenced to be hanged. In prison he wrote his Last and Dying Testimony:

Be not afraid at His sweet, lovely and desirable cross, for
although I have not been able because of my wounds to lift up
or lay down my head, yet I was never in better case all my life.
He has so wonderfully shined on me with the sense of His
redeeming, strengthening, assisting, supporting, through-bearing, pardoning, and reconciling love, grace, and mercy, that my
soul doth long to be freed of bodily infirmities and earthly
organs, that so I may flee to His Royal Palace.

On the gallows he recited from the eighth chapter of Romans, then
dropped and was gone. A warrior’s heart was home at last.

This story is an excerpt from Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs. You can get your own copy free with any donation to The Voice of the Martyrs.