In the summer of 1637, King Charles I—a monarch whose aesthetic sensibilities far outpaced his political acumen—attempted a feat of administrative harmonization that would ultimately cost him his head. He sought to impose a new, Anglican-inflected prayer book upon the Church of Scotland. While both the English and Scottish churches were Protestant and largely Calvinist, they were distinct entities with divergent liturgies and deep-seated national identities. To Charles, uniformity was a matter of statecraft; to the Scots, it was an existential threat to their spiritual and national autonomy.
The flashpoint occurred at St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. As the Dean began to read from the new liturgy, a market trader named Jenny Geddes reportedly stood up and hurled her folding stool at his head. It was a singular, violent rejection of imposed order. This humble piece of furniture, flying through the air on a hot Sunday morning, became the "pebble that started the avalanche." The ensuing riots led to the National Covenant, the Bishops' Wars, and eventually the English Civil War.
Historians often struggle to pin the birth of the Enlightenment to a specific coordinate in time, but the Geddes incident offers a compelling candidate for its messy, physical origin. It represented a fundamental break in the divine authority of the crown and the beginning of a long, intellectual pivot toward institutional skepticism and individual conscience. Today, a memorial to Geddes stands in St. Giles’, a reminder that the systems shaping our future are often redirected by the most unrefined of objects.
With reporting from Crooked Timber.
Source · Crooked Timber
