Over the past few months, Lauren and I have visited Edinburgh twice, and Oxford once–and now, at long last, I finally understand the US Constitution.

Edinburgh’s dominant feature is its castle, which looms literally over the city’s skyline, and metaphorically over its history. For centuries, it has been the primary destination of anybody who would invade Scotland’s capital city–including the modern-day, camera-clutching kind of invader.
The castle’s excellent audio tour gives you a sense of the sweep of the building’s history. You soon realize that, for £9, you have gained entry to a site whose admission price was paid in blood for roughly a millennia.
The tour gives particular emphasis to Scotsmen who fought against England. Since the castle is maintained by the Scottish government–which is, after all, now part of the Great British government–some small effort is made to emphasize that perhaps Scotsmen should try to avoid killing Englishmen whenever possible. The tone of these descriptions will sound familiar to any grown up who has ever pretended to disapprove when a child insults a neighbor who richly deserves it.
Among the Scots who have earned mild reprobation for taking up arms against the crown, one name in particular caught my eye: John Paul Jones, who left his home of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, to move to the Colonies. Many years later, he would return to his native land in order to harass British ships.
Jone’s connection to the castle is a bit tenuous, but at least two of his crewmen were among the American prisoners of war locked up in the castle’s vaults, and, really, how much reason do you need to celebrate–I mean, to castigate–a Scot who took up arms against the King of England?
Jones’ shipmates were only a few of the many Colonial sailors locked up in the Castle, and the graffiti those POWs left behind includes one of the earliest known representations of the Stars and Stripes. Even on the May day of our visit, the city was cold, the castle hill was windy, and the vaults in which the prisoners had been stored were cramped and sunless. Touching the heat-sucking stone wall on which some nameless American prisoner had scratched “1780,” the year of his captivity, I thought about the sacrifices he and his shipmates made for me.
Unpleasant though their circumstances might be, of course, those American soldiers had it relatively easy. A century before they arrived at the Castle, it had been the site of a massacre of Scottish Covenanters. Covenanters were men and women who refused to acknowledge that Charles II had supreme religious authority. They signed covenants stating that only Jesus Christ had that authority; as more than one historian has noted, they were effectively signing their own death warrants. In 1685, 187 Covenanters were squeezed into one of the castle’s vaults, and left to die. They were neither the first nor the last men and women to die at the castle for the crime of believing the wrong things about God.
Religious controversies also inspired acts of barbarism at Oxford–but, as befits the genteel location, they were of a decidedly less deadly variety.
They took place in Oxford Cathedral, which sits in the middle of Christ Church College. The Cathedral has a rare stained glass window showing the murder of Thomas a Beckett. And why are Beckett windows so rare? Because Henry VIII ordered that every stained glass window bearing an image of Beckett be smashed, lest Beckett’s resistance to Henry II inspire similar resistance among the clergy to Henry VIII. Somehow, Christ Church college’s Beckett window was spared.
But other windows in the Cathedral would not be so lucky. A set of windows by master artist Abraham Van Linge were smashed by the Puritans for being so beautiful and ornate as to be considered idolatrous; the Oxford official who destroyed them is reputed to have jumped up and down on the fragments just to guarantee they could never be pieced back together.
To a modern-day American, these disputes seem obscure, perhaps even amusingly quaint. Time has a way of turning bloodshed into tourist attractions. But to the British citizens who invented the US, mass slaughters over questions of theology would have been bright and painful national traumas. John Paul Jones’ crew, remember, spent time imprisoned in a fortress where men had sometimes been jailed for being too Catholic, and sometimes for not being Catholic enough. These men would have have been uncomfortably aware that, once you invite the King into your church, it’s only a matter of time before he starts smashing the windows.
And so I now understand, in a much more visceral way than I did before living in England, the motivation behind the first three words of the American constitution. As soon as they opened their mouths, the Founding Fathers wanted to make clear that it is not God who is vesting His power in the United States government. It’s “We, the people.” Many–or even most–of the men who signed the Constitution believed in a Supreme Being. But they also believed that, while we may report to God, our government reports to us, and they wanted to make sure that nobody was going to eliminate the middleman. Thanks to their foresight, Americans have lived for more than two centuries without the sort of religious upheavals that once traumatized the United Kingdom. Let’s hope that we never become complacent enough to invite the King back into the church.