Scottish Heroines of the Faith, by Donald Beaton, published by the Scottish Highlands Reformed Book Trust, paperback, 91 pages, £6.95, obtainable from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom.
Rev Donald Beaton (1872-1953) was a prominent Free Presbyterian minister and was editor of this Magazine from 1921 to 1949. Long before he became editor, he contributed a series of articles on some of the godly women in the Scottish Church which had previously appeared in a periodical of the time, the Protestant Woman. The articles were published as a book in 1909, and it is good to see that book now reprinted (with light editing). In his Introduction, the author states, “While women are not called upon to lead, yet there may be times when the sense of duty is so overwhelming as to call them forth from the place of comparative obscurity to act and suffer for their Lord and Master. In Scotland we have had a noble band of such witnesses – women who, with all the tenderness of their nature and the full consciousness of the place ordained to them of heaven, yet when the call of duty came shrank not from the suffering their action involved.”
Most of the women lived in Covenanting times. One exception was Helen Ronaldson of Perth, who was drowned in 1544, when Romanism in Scotland was seeking to suppress the beginnings of the Reformation. One of the charges against her was that she refused to pray to the Virgin Mary when her children were born.
The other exception was Elizabeth Welsh, whose husband was John Welsh, the godly, prayerful minister of Ayr before he was exiled to France. She was a daughter of John Knox and secured an interview with King James VI and I in London. The author writes, “Mrs Welsh pressed her request that her husband might get back to Scotland, so that he might enjoy his native air. . . . At last King James offered to grant her request provided she would persuade her husband to submit to the new order of things [the King was increasingly pushing the Scottish Church in the direction of the Church of England]. Mrs Welsh, lifting her apron and holding it towards the King, replied, ‘Please, your Majesty, I’d rather kep [keep] his head there’. She maintained the highest traditions of her departed father for quick repartee and high-souled courage.”
We may never have heard of John Brown of Priesthill if he had not been murdered by order of Claverhouse, who led a group of soldiers hunting down Covenanters. He was a godly man, and his wife Isabel was a godly woman. After the deed was done, Claverhouse asked her: “What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman?” She answered meekly: “I thought ever much good of him, and as much now as ever”. And she faithfully went on to ask Claverhouse how he would answer for that morning’s work, and he understood full well that she meant answering before God.
There are brief accounts of 19 women in all, some of whom suffered imprisonment during the times of persecution in the second half of the seventeenth century. Among them was Lady Colvill, who was kept in a dark, fireless cell in the Edinburgh Tollbooth. Mr Beaton comments that she never gave “the slightest hint that she wished liberty or comfort at the expense of renouncing her allegiance to the Covenanted cause in Scotland”.
After William Veitch had been sent to prison as a Covenanter, his wife Marion prayed to God, “who I can say is a present help in time of trouble, that [her husband] might be kept from the evil of sin”. That was her particular request for him. We should not be surprised to find her acknowledging that God “was graciously pleased to answer” her request.
These were women who were kept faithful during their time in this world, and their godliness should be an example to us all. Clearly there was limited information available about some of the godly women who are described here, but it is good to have our attention drawn to them all. (Two references to Charles I, on pages 51-52, should be to Charles II; the father was executed in 1649.) The book is to be welcomed.
Do you find it a burden to pray, a burden to hear or read the Word of God? Is it a burden to you to meditate upon God and Christ, and things above? It is all for want of love to Christ, for love makes hard things easy, and heavy labour to be light.
Is liberty so suitable to a captive man, or bread to a hungry man, or health to a sick man, or ease to a pained man, as Christ is to a sinful man? Thomas Doolittle