Both parties still cherished the Covenants, and so long as these documents were held to be for ever binding on all generations, so long as the king's authority was to be resisted in defence of these treaties with Omnipotence, it was plain that in Scotland there could neither be content nor peace.

For twenty-eight years, during a generation of profligacy and turmoil, cruelty and corruption, the Kirk and country were to reap what they had sown in 1638..