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Episcopalianism retained a considerable presence beyond the confines of the central belt, and in association with the Catholic minority, became the sacramental life force behind Jacobitism which sought to restore the exiled house of Stuart and terminate the Anglo-Scottish Union. This introductory chapter argues that while much has been made of the polity, the doctrine and the discipline of the churches in Scotland, relatively little has been done on modes of worship, and even less on liturgical practices; and that historical writing has been weighted towards the preaching of the word in comparison to the administration of the sacraments. To redress this imbalance, this collection of essays examines the essence of liturgical practices for Roman Catholics and Episcopalians from Reformation to Enlightenment.

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 worship and devotion among Episcopalians and Catholics during this Revolutionary period in confessional relations and argues that multiconfessional competition encouraged churchmen to emphasise and defend the beliefs and practices that distinguished their religious group from the others. The circumstances of the Restoration settlement had entailed that Episcopalian worship was in most aspects similar to that of the Presbyterians, particularly in the absence of a formal liturgy. But in their sermons, and in the theology underlying their preaching, Episcopalians had developed a different tone, less rigid in doctrinal certainties, more sympathetic to patristic and ancient wisdom, and increasingly open to the strands of English theological writing that emphasised free will and a holy life. The chapter begins by considering the growing interest in liturgical worship in the Episcopalian Church of the 1680s and then, in the second section, turns to the books and pamphlets published to promote one confessional tradition over another, including the striking development of James VII’s reign was the setting up of a Catholic printing press at Holyroodhouse.

This chapter explores the Episcopalian community in Aberdeen with a focus on the meeting-houses and chapels which were legally established following the Toleration Act (1712) by congregations which had refused to accept Presbyterian governance of the Church of Scotland since 1689. These congregations were able to use the English liturgy and worship in a fashion which accorded with Episcopalian manners. The chapter is concerned with how Episcopalians behaved during comparatively settled political establishments between the major Jacobite uprisings, showing how Episcopalians would flit between qualified and non-juring congregations in the Jacobite period. In so doing it investigates the organisation of the Episcopalian community, the nature of their worship and what this can tell us about the relationship between juring Episcopalians and Jacobitism. On the latter point, for example, the chapter shows that jurors in Aberdeen were as remiss as non-jurors in omitting or ignoring the legislative requirement for prayers for the incumbent British royal family, especially after the Hanoverian succession in 1714. But rarely, if ever, did jurors go so far as to pray for the Jacobite Court in exile.

This chapter examines the spirituality and religious environment of the brothers James and George Garden as theologians from Aberdeen; explores whether their religious convictions tie in with their political persuasions; and whether the religious or the political components decided their actions and loyalties. Both brothers had manifold links to Jacobite circles with interests in mystical literature, and the younger one, George, was openly spreading the ideas of the Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon. Episcopacy did not automatically equate to Jacobitism and some non-jurors in their emphatic rejection of Calvinism were given more to pietism than political action. The brothers moved in the direction of Flemish mysticism. Others flirted with Coptic Christianity or Greek and Russian Orthodoxy.

This chapter considers Eucharistic doctrine and liturgical developments of the English non-jurors. For the first generation after their deprivation in 1690, liturgical innovation was not a priority for English non-jurors. Although assembling in their own chapels and oratories, and avoiding use of distinct names in prayers for the King and Royal Family, they continued to worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer. However, absence of innovation did not reflect lack of interest in liturgical matters. Together with their High Church contemporaries who contrived to accommodate conscience to the new orders in Church and State, Non-jurors persevered in a common scholarly enterprise which had already gone far towards raising awareness of the faith and practice of the primitive Church of the first four centuries. Taking into consideration of the usages controversy which split the non-jurors after 1718 and promoted an intense polemical debate which promoted a raft of innovative church practices: primarily the mixing of water with wine in the communion chalice, but also controversial were prescription of oblation and Epiclesis, reservation of the communion elements and prayers for the sick and dying.

This chapter argues that while, for Scottish non-jurors, support for the Jacobites was a political, physical, ecclesiastical and temporal disaster, as far as theology, ecclesiology and liturgy were concerned there was another side to the story; the opposite obtained. The Non-jurors, on account of earthly disappointment, concentrated on the things that were necessary for spiritual well-being and eternal salvation. The Revolution Settlement of 1689-90 gave them a freedom from Erastianism which created an opportunity that pushed the Scottish Episcopal Church towards the cutting edge of liturgy and placed her at the forefront of liturgical development in the Western Church and theological debates on the intermediate state between heaven and hell, as on prayers for the dead, came to be viewed as a spiritual aspect of Enlightenment based on rigorous patristic scholarship and forensic historical enquiry that also drew strength from sacramental continuity since the Reformation. It gave the Scottish Epsicopal Church a unique and distinguished liturgy that had influence beyond Scotland, most notably in the American Episcopal Church after the consecration of Samuel Seabury by three Aberdeenshire Bishops.

This chapter scrutinizes the Scottish Liturgy of 1764. Built on the Service Book of 1637, the non-juring Prayer Book of 1718 and, above all, The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem of 1744, it consolidated a Eucharistic perspective that can be traced back beyond the Revolution to the Aberdeen Doctors. It also reaffirmed liturgical continuity with the Roman Catholic pre-Tridentine tradition. By permitting the reserving of sacramental elements, the new liturgy enabled non-jurors to circumvent reimposed penal laws that restricted the Eucharist to a handful of communicants in one room or meeting place. This liturgy was testament to the growing rapprochement between the jurors who adhered to Anglicanism and the non-jurors who remained committed to a universal, Catholic and Orthodox Church. This Jacobite tradition was exported to America after the surviving non-juring hierarchy consecrated Samuel Seabury at Aberdeen in 1784 as the first Episcopalian bishop of the fledgling United States. His Communion Office, published in New London, Connecticut, in 1786 was based on the Scottish liturgy of 1764.

This chapter comprises an introduction to the anonymously authored deathbed testimony titled Conversion Exemplified (1663), followed by selected reading, and several edited extracts from the work itself (including an extract from the address to the reader written by the author's husband). The anonymous gentlewoman's testimony was evidently posthumously published in order to vindicate her religious beliefs believed scandalous by her relatives who were more given to episcopacy. Recorded visits by Puritan ministers Joseph Caryl and John Rowe help to establish her piety. She expresses concern for how she would appear after death (both physically and spiritually), a concern that was quite typical of the period, when a dying person could be judged on how they behaved in their last moments.

Four parishes retained episcopal ministers until at least 1709; the circumstances that made this possible and the efforts to remove them are examined. The well documented transfer in Alva is described, together with the rabblings that occurred in Logie and Stirling. The latter was known to be a split community with a strong Jacobite element and the ongoing struggle to close down episcopalian meeting-houses is shown through church and civil court records. Networks of deposed episcopal clergy are identified, but with no input from bishops. Clandestine marriages and baptisms were a useful source of income, and the arrangements made by the schoolmaster in Dunblane noted. The 1708 Jacobite rising involved some of the episcopalian landowning families and more were to be involved in 1715. The Anglicisation of landowners was beginning to be evident by the end of the period.

This section argues that Edwards moves away from traditional congregational polity in the course of his ministry to espouse a Presbyterian form of church government in which the clergy has associational authority as an agent outside the congregation, though elected from within. This was consonant with increasing centralization and order more generally in imperial society, to which the growth of the Church of England in New England also attests. Such a shift in Edwards’s ecclesiology may give new reasons for understanding Edwards’s dismissal from Northampton, not least because it reflects distance from received Puritan notions of primordial purity and from covenantal toward contractual understandings of Gospel unity.

This chapter examines the politics of Scottish Presbyterianism in the years surrounding George I’s accession. After assessing the fortunes of the Scottish Episcopalians, the chapter analyses the tensions among Presbyterians within, and on the fringes of, the established Church of Scotland. It first reconstructs the critique of the establishment articulated by the Hebronites and United Societies, Presbyterian groups that advocated partial or complete withdrawal from the Church. The chapter then shows how the controversy over the oath of abjuration, imposed on clergy in 1712, prompted the separation from the Church of two ministers in the Dumfries area. The ministers made a coherent case for separation and propagated a Presbyterian critique of the Hanoverian succession. Moreover, they set a precedent for future secessions from the Church of Scotland. The catastrophe of the Jacobite rising in 1715 weakened the Episcopalian cause, and thereafter Presbyterian Dissent became the main motor driving the further fragmentation of Scottish Protestantism.

English Presbyterianism emerged as a subversive tradition of dissent by its sustained attempt to dismantle the Church of England’s episcopal hierarchy. This chapter explains why it exercised a wider influence on religious, political, and literary culture in proportion to its size. It presents a broader context for the evolution of Presbyterianism from early reformation impulses, to principled and pragmatic attempts to solve the Church of England’s problems, to its acerbic assault on episcopacy. Closer connections between English Presbyterianism and wider confessional conflict on the European continent are drawn, including the emergence of its literature alongside leading resistance tracts. Challenging historical narratives that tend to assign a largely theoretical status to Presbyterianism following the formal suppression of the movement by the crown in the early 1590s, this chapter argues that it continued to play an active and formative role in defining conformist and dissenting traditions in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England.