Search Results

This chapter examines the efforts at liturgical reform during the 1660s and 1670s and demonstrates that influential Episcopalians had come to see liturgical worship as an essential feature of church life and made significant efforts to settle a liturgy in the Kirk. These efforts failed because they were caught in the crossfire between competing factions in the Kirk. It was this dispute that set Episcopalians on the path to developing the robust devotional and liturgical culture that has been a hallmark since the eighteenth century. This chapter considers what happened to both public worship and personal devotion during the Covenanting period which it then compares to the period immediately after the restoration of episcopacy. It examines the proposal for a liturgy debated in 1665 and 1666 and concludes with an examination of the arguments for set prayer and liturgy that emerged from the circle around Bishop Leighton in the early 1670s and the influence they had on future generations of Episcopalians.

This chapter examines the Irish insurrection of 1641. It identifies the differences between the historical experience of Ireland with that of England and Scotland. It argues that the ‘three kingdoms’ or ‘composite monarchies’ context for the rising of 1641 is essential to explaining why previously hesitant leaders cast caution to the winds and sought to resolve their difficulties through insurrection. On the positive side, Catholic leaders in all provinces of Ireland were greatly impressed by the way in which the Scottish Covenanters had been able to dictate terms to the monarchy through the simple expedient of having resort to arms, but on the negative side they would also have calculated that the difficulties being experienced by the king in dealing with both his English and his Scottish subjects provided them with a unique opportunity to redress their own problems through a show of force.

The flashpoint for the Wars of the Three Kingdoms was Scotland, where debates on ecclesiology and law generated attacks on the ecclesiastical supremacy of Crown and bishops. Debates on ecclesiology in Scotland produced a very powerful defence of the notion that legally-established religion was the foundation of political liberty. The result was that English and Scottish opponents of Caroline ecclesiology developed arguments which linked concepts of doctrine and political liberty. This chapter examines debates touched off by the National Covenant, and provides an important perspective on the British dimension of the constitutionalism of religion. Scottish writers responded to attempts by the English to ‘Anglicise’ the Kirk by asserting the legal and doctrinal perfection of their own reformation, which was also the guarantee of political liberty. These contributions help us to understand what lay behind the move toward armed resistance in defence of religion and liberty.

This chapter provides a summary on the Anglo-Scottish relations before the Covenant. It specifically addresses the medieval inheritance of Anglo-Scottish relations. Undoubtedly, the fourteenth-century Wars of Independence hugely influenced the development of late medieval Scotland, leaving the Scots with a legacy of popular distrust of England. The new British state system with its composite monarchies was not unique, and multiple monarchies existed elsewhere in Europe. The structures put in place for the government of the new Britain had minimal or little impact on Anglo-Scottish relations, and what is surprising is how little governmental change took place. In terms of culture, the greatly improved Anglo-Scottish relations of the early seventeenth century had a modest impact. Religion was the single most damaging evidence of Scotland's distinctive traditions being compromised, and significantly it was on this issue that the Covenanters placed greatest emphasis in their subsequent negotiations with English parliamentarians in the 1640s.

Walter Scott did not invent the historical novel, yet his Scottish novels showed the possibilities inherent in this type of fiction. Well-versed in earlier French fiction, German historical drama, and English fiction of the eighteenth century, Scott brought romance back into the novel and did not shrink from adapting Gothic elements to his plots. Like his German forebears, he focused on rebels, outlaw bands, and lost causes. Historical characters almost never played the principal role in the action. John Galt’s portrayal of religious fanaticism in ‘Ringan Gilhaize’ outpaced even Scott’s ‘Old Mortality’. The latter’s exploration of the theme of national identity—Scotland after the Union with England and under the Protestant Succession—appealed to continental-European writers and readers concerned with national unification, as in Germany or Italy. The medieval novels ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Quentin Durward’ appealed greatly to French readers less concerned with the national problem. Scott had many continental translators and imitators, but reaction set in from the 1830s and his work rapidly lost popularity and esteem—perhaps regrettably.

This chapter seeks to recover the ways in which the Scottish nobility of the 1630s viewed their relationship with the king and how, when and with what ideological consequences that relationship was fractured. Analysis of the historical writings of David Hume of Godscroft, William Drummond of Hawthornden and Sir James Balfour of Denmilne demonstrates that all three of these writers adhered to an understanding of aristocratic conciliarism that took the nobility’s duty — and sometimes right — to counsel the king as axiomatic and saw political breakdown as a failure of counsel. However, while their diagnoses were cut from the same ideological cloth, their remedies differed markedly. While Hume supported aristocratic resistance to tyranny, Drummond excoriated it. Balfour, it is argued, is closer to Hume than Drummond, but also offers a unique insight into a strand of Scottish constitutional royalism — rooted in aristocratic conciliarism— that historians have hitherto ignored.

This chapter explores how the lack of a fully developed system of British councils contributed to friction in the seventeenth-century dynastic union. British councils were occasionally mooted, involving joint mutual representation of Englishmen and Scots on each kingdom’s privy council, or an additional new British council to resolve disputes. At their most ambitious, such notions involved a wholesale rethinking of the British — even European — state system. However, they were rarely implemented, and many writers on union did not discuss British councils. This conclusion explores why counsel, rather than councils, was left to do the work of lubricating the multiple monarchy, and how its failure to do so exploded in both English and Scottish resentment of foreign counsels in the years around 1700. The two decades after the Revolution of 1688 were a liminal period in which old and new ideas about counsel, parliamentary power and fiduciary monarchy blended.

Charles Louis signed the Peace of Westphalia, consenting to a partial restitution, the one result Elizabeth had tried to prevent all these years. Charles Stuart authorised James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, to subdue the Covenanters by force. Amalia von Solms and William II supported a Presbyterian alliance. Elizabeth disagreed, hoping that through Montrose the Scottish Covenant could be avoided. Amalia wanted Charles Stuart for Albertine Agnes, Elizabeth wanted him for Sophia. Rupert, blockaded into Cork, escaped with 7 ships, setting sail for Portugal. Yet Charles signed his agreement with the Scottish kirk and parliament at Breda - abandoning Montrose who was hanged. Elizabeth, disillusioned, abandoned the plan to marry Sophia to Charles and sent her to Heidelberg to join with Charles Louis instead. Charles Louis demanded the tapestries etc. from Rhenen. William II died unexpectedly. Elizabeth, who wanted nothing to do with Parliament following her brother’s execution, turned to the States General for pensions. She became Honthorst's debtor. Both the States of Holland and the States General tried to get money from Parliament for her, unsuccessfully. Elizabeth sent Edward to Germany, as news had arrived Frankenthal had been given back to Charles Louis but also out of harm’s way as he had offended Cromwell's ambassadors in The Hague. Henriette married a prince of Transylvania, amidst arguments between Elizabeth and Charles Louis who did not want his mother’s title Queen of Bohemia mentioned in the marriage contract. Both Henriette and her husband died within the year.

This chapter uses the methodology of previous chapters to illustrate and explain comparable sentiment in Scotland and Ireland. In Scotland, men and women are shown to have remained sympathetic to the Covenants and Work of Reformation. In Ireland, sympathies for the Cromwellian Conquest of the 1650s remained. These sympathies are explained once more with reference to the extent to which the Restoration was ushered in by attempts by royalists in both kingdoms to control how the civil wars and revolution were remembered.

This chapter examines how the leadership of the Kirk of Scotland organised charitable collections for soldiers imprisoned in Tynemouth Castle and Durham after the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650. In the midst of the English invasion and subsequent occupation of Scotland, ministers in Edinburgh distributed letters across the country urging parishes to donate money to support the prisoners. Parishes responded enthusiastically. This chapter shows how ministers used the galvanising effect of this charitable scheme as a way to heal ruptures within the Kirk and the Scottish political landscape. Calls to help Scottish prisoners in England did not refer to the prisoners’ previous political affiliation or the contentious position of Charles II in Scottish political discourse. The Kirk’s charitable ventures were tremendously effective at gathering financial aid but they also contributed to a wider political debate about what it meant to be a good, loyal, Covenanter.

Throughout her adult life, Jane Grey Swisshelm was profoundly influenced by her religious heritage. This chapter discusses the influence of religion in general and Covenanter Presbyterianism in particular on Jane's life. It also examines her attitudes toward gender and the role of women in American society. The legacy of Covenanters, for example, gave her the courage to transgress gender boundaries in pursuit of what she believed to be God's.

The Covenanter Martyrs of the later seventeenth century were national heroes in nineteenth-century Scotland, yet their commemoration was fraught with risk. Whether through civic events, the marking of anniversaries, or the raising of historical statuary, any attempt to remember the Covenanters carried with it dangerous associations with idolatry. The sanctification of anyone – let alone their Protestant heroes – was anathema to Scottish Presbyterians. Or was it? Embodied in Scott’s Old Mortality, maintaining the grave sites of martyred Covenanters had long been a tradition within Scottish Presbyterianism. Combined with the publication of stories of the martyrs as instructive tales, the Covenanting flame was kept burning throughout the eighteenth century. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, as this chapter argues, the Martyrs occupied a central role in Scottish memory. To remember the Covenanters was to keep alive the ideals they died for: the spiritual independence of the Church, the rejection of popish ritual and episcopacy, and – more broadly – the Scottish-national virtue of civil and religious liberty. This paper concentrates on commemorative practice as a means of understanding the role played by the Covenanters in nineteenth-century Scottish society. It draws on newspaper reports of commemorative events, as well as collected essays and published sermons, to throw light on a neglected corner of the burgeoning field of collective memory and commemoration studies.

Chapter 1 discusses Daniel Defoe’s writings on Dissent and the Succession during the last years of Queen Anne and the opening years of the reign of George I. His relationship with his Dissenting co-religionists had always been a complicated one, especially over the issue of Occasional Conformity. Although thinking it indefensible that Dissenters be forced out of public office by the Corporation and Test Acts, Defoe believed equally firmly that no conscientious Dissenter should engage in Occasional Conformity to get round the law. In 1702 he was imprisoned for publishing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an ironical attack on High-Church opponents of Occasional Conformity which fooled readers on both sides. In 1713, he again risked using irony for polemical purposes, intervening dramatically in the growing public debate over who should succeed Queen Anne in the event of her death. Between February and April, he published a linked set of three ironical pamphlets putting forward (clearly spurious) arguments why it would be better if the Pretender succeeded, rather than the Elector George. The issues raised by the Protestant succession were central to Defoe’s political philosophy, as can be seen again in his Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717) where he argued that the principles that had animated Scottish Covenanters in their armed resistance to Charles II were the same as those which justified the Glorious Revolution and on which the Hanoverian Succession was founded.

This chapter focuses on the involvement of the Covenanters in higher education in the decade after the promulgation of the National Covenant. It first examines the extant evidence relating to the purges of the universities in the early years of the regime, and then assesses their use of commissions of visitation in the decade after 1638 to reform arts and philosophical teaching. By these means the Covenanters demonstrated that their prime concerns were to ensure both that the students received a sound education in Reformed orthodox theology and also that there was an appropriate provision of training for the ministry. Hence, the chapter aims to examine one of the major lacunae in our understanding of seventeenth-century higher education, and whether their individual experience at the hands of the regime differed. It also aims to further challenge the view that the Covenanters' continued focus on Aristotelian scholasticism is evidence of intellectual stasis.

The period from 1675 through the end of the century constituted one of the very coldest and most ruinous periods of that Little Ice Age. Most writing on the so-called General Crisis of the seventeenth century focus sharply on the parlous decades of the 1640s and 1650s and says little about that later crisis. Yet the religious consequences of those latter years were just as far-reaching, not least in redrawing frontiers between faiths. Unlike in the fourteenth century, Europeans now lived in a world of far-flung sea travel and colonial possessions, and persecuted populations amply exploited these opportunities to seek safe haven. Settlements in foreign lands also offered the prospect of new concepts of religious liberty removed far from the motherland, opening a dramatic new phase in attitudes to religious freedom and spiritual experimentation.