History Nerd Bucket List: The Jenny Geddes Stool

Before I depart this world, I would like to visit St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, and see the Jenny Geddes memorial. 

I’m told it’s open to the public.



Why? What’s interesting about a stool?

Well, it’s probably impossible to point to a single moment, or a single object, and say “The Enlightenment began here.”.  But if you were absolutely forced to choose one moment and one object?  One pebble that started the avalanche? 

Then Jenny Geddes’ legendary stool, flying through the air on a hot summer Sunday in 1637, wouldn’t be a bad choice.


So the story: back in 1637, King Charles I decided to impose a new prayer book upon the Church of Scotland. 


[Charles I: cool outfits, bad King]

Charles was the King of three Kingdoms — England, Scotland, and Ireland — and all three had state-controlled Protestant churches.  The Protestant Church of Ireland was a minority Church, of course.  But almost everyone in England belonged to the Church of England, and almost everyone in Scotland belonged to the Church of Scotland. 

And these were two different Churches.  They were both Protestant, and mostly Calvinist in theology.  But they had completely different origins.  And they used different systems of Church government, different styles of architecture and art, and — this is key — different prayers.  And the Church of Scotland, in particular, was deeply bound up with Scots nationalism.

But King Charles wanted to harmonize the two Churches and bring their practices closer together.  (“Why?” is a perfectly reasonable question here, and “because Charles I was stubborn and not very bright” is a perfectly reasonable answer.)  So he had some Scots courtiers down in London write a new prayer book that was closer to the English one, and ordered that it be used in Scotland.



[cue ominous music]

This was not well received by the Scots. 

There were a lot of different reasons for them to dislike the new prayer book, starting with the obvious one that by forcing Scots to use English-style prayers rather than vice versa, it was a gross offense to Scots nationalism and Scots pride.  But also, many Scots were fanatically, almost hysterically, anti-Catholic.  And many of these Scots had come to suspect that King Charles, or at least some of the courtiers around him, were far too sympathetic to Catholicism, if not actually closet Catholics themselves.  The fact that Charles had a Catholic French princess as his Queen didn’t help here. 

Also, while Charles really was a devout Protestant, he thought the Catholic Church had some good ideas about music, art, and the dignity of the clergy.  So he was fine with nudging the Church of England towards a more Catholic look-and-feel: more ceremony, more ritual, more stained glass and incense and chanting.  Today we’d call it High Church (or, if you’re Low Church, “bells and smells”).

Even in England, many people viewed these changes with suspicion.  In Scotland, they were viewed with utter horror.  And changing the prayer book was seen as the tip of the crypto-Catholic wedge.

And so: on the first appointed Sunday, when ministers stood up and began delivering prayers, all hell broke loose.  In particular, at St. Giles Cathedral — the biggest, most important church in Edinburgh — legend has it that a woman named Jenny Geddes stood up, grabbed a stool, and hurled it straight at the minister’s head, shouting these memorable words:  “De’il gie you colic, the wame o’ ye, fause thief!  Daur ye say Mass in my lug?“

The fause thief did not, in fact, daur.  He fled in terror, wame and all.  Services were cancelled, and no lugs were offended by Mass.


[don’t mess with Jenny’s lug]

The historiographically sophisticated CT readership probably won’t be surprised to hear that (1) while a riot definitely took place, it’s not clear that Jenny Geddes started it; and, (2) actually, we’re not completely sure that Jenny Geddes even existed; and, (3) if she did exist and she did throw a stool, the stool is long gone: the memorial is a 20th century reconstruction.

But okay.  Putting these quibbles aside, why were Jenny and her stool so important?  

Because the Edinburgh riots outraged, outraged King Charles: how dare trash like Jenny Geddes defy him!  So instead of backing off, he doubled down.  (You may recall what I said about Charles being stubborn, and not too bright.) 

This turned what might have been an isolated incident into a sustained storm of national and religious feeling, culminating in the Scottish Covenant.  Which was basically the Scots uniting, arming themselves, organizing for war, and rebelling against King Charles (while loudly proclaiming that they weren’t doing any such thing). 

The official motto was “for religion, King, and kingdom” —


[see, it’s right here on our flag!]

— but the unofficial motto was “the Kirk (Church) up, the King down, and the English out”.

Now, King Charles wanted to be an absolute monarch.  Not because he was evil, but because (1) he was raised that way, and (2) he was surrounded by flatterers who encouraged this, and being a very bad judge of character he believed them, and (3) as a young prince, Charles had spent time at the Hapsburg court in Madrid.  And — being not too bright — he had been deeply impressed by the power and grandeur of the Spanish monarchy and its court, without realizing that they were actually a bunch of incompetent bigots who were steadily driving Spain into decline and ruin. 

But while Stuart England didn’t have a constitutional monarchy as we’d recognize it, there was one big restriction on royal power: only Parliaments could pass taxes.  And English Parliaments disliked this whole absolutism thing. 

So Parliament after Parliament refused to give Charles money unless he agreed to some relatively modest restrictions on his royal power.  Which Charles, being stubborn, absolutely did not want to do.  So eventually, Charles just stopped calling Parliaments.  Instead, he decided to “live on his own” — running a modest government while casting about for ways to raise revenue without Parliament.

By 1637 he’d been doing this for a decade and — from Charles’ POV — it was actually working pretty well.  True, the English state was running very lean.  But England was pretty decentralized anyway: a lot of the actual work of government, from Poor Laws to Justices of the Peace, was done at the local level.  By 1637, it looked like Charles’ system of absolutism-on-the-cheap was settling down to be the long-term norm.

The main constraint Charles faced was that he couldn’t fight wars, because wars were very expensive, and would require him to call a Parliament for funds.  But Charles had a simple solution for that: he pursued a mostly isolationist foreign policy and didn’t fight any wars.

But in Scotland, Charles stupidly provoked a rebellion.  Jenny and her stool — and the hundred thousand Scots who promptly fell into line behind her — meant that Charles had maneuvered himself into the worst possible corner for a would-be absolute monarch.  Because now he either had to let ordinary Scots citizens (the Covenanters) dictate terms to him, or — in order to get the funds to suppress the Covenanters with military force — he had to summon an English Parliament,  which would immediately try to dictate terms to him.

This led to the following sequence of events:

Charles:  Well, I can’t allow an armed rebellion in one kingdom.  It might spread to the others!  It must be suppressed.  I’ll call a Parliament. [calls Parliament]
Short Parliament: We have some terms.
Charles:  What?  No!  [dismisses Parliament]
Scots:  Hey, looks like you can’t find any money to suppress us.  We’re adding some additional terms.
Charles:  Damn it.  [calls another Parliament]
Long Parliament [cracking knuckles]:  Now we /really/ have some terms.




I love this stuff.  But you probably don’t want to read 10,000 words of 17th century English history.  So let’s fast-forward a bit:

All of this led, through various twists and turns, to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, aka the English Civil War.  Which led to King Charles getting his head cut off.

[how it started]

[how it’s going]

This in turn led to Cromwell, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Toleration, the Bill of Rights, and… yeah, just a whole lot of history.  

Now: if there’s one big question about the last 500 years of world history, it’s probably “Why Europe”.  Why did Europe (and not Qing China or the Ottomans or whoever) get the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment?  And why did Europe end up conquering or colonizing — at least for a while — pretty much the entire world outside of China, Japan, Iran and Anatolia?

I’m not going to go into all that today.  But consider this: if King Charles had been just a bit less stupid, or the Scots just a bit less ticked off, the rebellion might have been avoided. 

And in that case the most likely outcome is that Charles continues to bumble along for another 20 or 30 years until he dies peacefully in bed.  (Most monarchs did, after all, including many who were far more odious and incompetent than Charles.)  And in that case, we probably don’t get a United Kingdom, and we definitely don’t get a constitutional monarchy or a British fiscal-military state system.  Stuart Britain gets the worst of both worlds: a strong King with pretensions to absolutism, at the head of a very weak and perpetually cash-strapped state.  England remains, as it was in 1637, a second-rate power, pursuing a policy of isolationism because they can’t afford anything else.

Do we still get a Scientific Revolution?  Sure — all the pieces were in place by 1637.  We already have Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Harvey, and Bacon.  Leibniz and Newton, Hooke and Boyle were already born.  This was a pan-European project from day one.  So while the details will be different, the general pattern should be much the same.

Do we still get an Industrial Revolution?  Probably, but I suspect it’ll be delayed by a generation or so.  And when it happens, its epicenter will be on the Continent, not Great Britain.  Unlike the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was disproportionately British in origin.  And within Britain it was disproportionately — not entirely, but very disproportionately — driven by religious nonconformists.  Absolutist Stuart England is going to have a lot fewer of those.  Also, without the massive economic disruptions and land transfers of the Commonwealth period, England’s economy is going to be more agrarian, more conservative, more dominated by a handful of noble families.  So the train still leaves the station — again, the pieces were in place — but it will move a bit slower.

Does Europe still end up conquering pretty much everything by 1900?  Probably yes.  But in this timeline the great colonizing power will be France, not the United Kingdom.  The map still gets painted, but blue instead of red.  The French get India (they almost did anyway), and they keep Canada and the North American interior, penning England’s American colonies east of the Appalachians.  Eventually France gobbles up Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and most of Africa, because they can.  We still get European colonialism everywhere, but now most of it is under the Bourbon fleur-de-lys.


[wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set]

There’s no French Revolution, or anything like it.  Why would there be?  No William of Orange, no Marlborough, no Blenheim or Ramillies.  Louis XIV sweeps the pot.  No British-led alliances of containment, no Royal Navy cheerfully devastating French trade again and again.  Stuart England won’t have the money for those things (and will probably be pro-French anyway).  So, no constant wars, ever more global in scope, loading the state with impossible debt.  And, of course, no English or American Revolutions as inspiration.

Do we still get an Enlightenment?  Okay, here’s where history really jumps the tracks.  Without Jenny Geddes and her friends, I don’t think we get an Enlightenment. 

There are no works by Hobbes or Locke in this timeline (Hobbes will still be around, but he won’t have much to say).  There’s no Commonwealth to serve as a test bed for all sorts of wild religious and political ideas, from putting a King on trial to letting the Jews come back.  There’s no Glorious Revolution, no Act of Toleration, no lifting of formal press censorship, no constitutional monarchy, no Bill of Rights.  Intellectual and political freedoms will still exist in a few places, most notably the Netherlands.  But there won’t be a large, powerful European country that is both little-l liberal and also an obvious economic and military success story. 

When we think of the Enlightenment, we probably first think of ancien regime France.  But most of the French philosophes were inspired by Britain as a proof of concept. In the universe where Jenny never throws her stool?  That won’t happen.  Montesquieu won’t spend years in England as a guest of Lord Chesterfield collecting material for _Spirit of the Laws_.  Voltaire won’t publish a book of essays admiring the advanced and progressive systems of government and political thought in Britain, because Still Stuart England won’t have those things. 

Europe’s dominant political model will be Bourbon / Hapsburg bureaucratic absolutism.  There will be odd exceptions like the Dutch and Swiss.  There will be internal critics and rebels.  But without the British examples in play, it’s hard to see what could seriously challenge that model.

The Enlightenment became a European project, and eventually a world project.  But at its beginning, it was deeply rooted in the particular historical experience of 17th century England and Scotland. And that particular historical experience was far from inevitable!  In fact, it was very weird and contingent.  Starting in 1637, the two British kingdoms quite suddenly took a right-angle turn into uncharted territory.  The consequences were momentous, and we’re still living with them.

Anyway.  If you go to St. Giles Cathedral?  Besides the modest memorial pictured above, there’s also a small plaque erected a couple of centuries later.  It reads:

“Constant oral tradition affirms that near this spot a brave Scotch woman Janet Geddes on the 23 July 1637 struck the first blow in the great struggle for freedom of conscience which after a conflict of half a century ended in the establishment of civil and religious liberty.”

And that’s all.