Scottish Episcopalianism

Many assume the Scottish Episcopal Church is simply "the Church of England in Scotland," or a modern offshoot of English Anglicanism. Neither is accurate. The Scottish Episcopal Church descends from the pre-1690 Church of Scotland's own episcopal (bishop-governed) structure — the national church itself was governed by bishops for long stretches before 1690, not imported wholesale from England — and it remains today a fully autonomous member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, constitutionally and institutionally separate from both the Church of England and the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland.

This article separates documented history — statutes, dated acts of Parliament and General Assembly, and the institutional record of persecution and later toleration, all independently verifiable — from traditional characterisations, such as how fully "Jacobite" the Episcopalian community as a whole actually was, which varied by region, congregation, and decade and is better understood as a tendency than a universal fact. There is no significant legend/myth category of claim about this topic beyond the common public confusion of the Scottish Episcopal Church with the Church of England, which this article corrects directly. Both historical instances of religious persecution referenced in this series — the penal laws against Episcopalians covered here, and the penal laws and social marginalisation faced by Catholics covered in companion cards — are stated plainly and without minimisation, consistent with this series' commitment to historical accuracy over confessional loyalty in either direction.

A National Church, Not a Foreign Import

It is easy, looking at Scotland today, to assume that Presbyterian government has always been the Church of Scotland's natural and permanent form, and that any bishop-led alternative must be a later English import. The historical record is more complicated. For roughly a century after the 1560 Reformation, the government of the reformed Church of Scotland oscillated between Presbyterian and episcopal models, as competing visions of church governance became entangled with the wider struggle between the Stuart monarchy's preference for royal control via bishops and a powerful current within Scottish Protestantism — associated above all with the Covenanting movement — that saw Presbyterian "parity of ministers," with no bishops, as the only scripturally legitimate and politically safe polity. Episcopacy was restored as the Church of Scotland's governing structure in 1662 under Charles II's Restoration settlement, and it functioned, for the better part of three decades thereafter, as the structure of the national, established church — not as a dissenting minority tradition. It is this pre-1690 history that the Scottish Episcopal Church understands itself to continue, which is why describing it as an English transplant misrepresents its actual lineage.

1690 and the Birth of a Minority Church

That changed decisively with the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688–89, which deposed the Catholic James VII of Scotland (James II of England) in favour of the Protestant William and Mary. The Scottish Parliament's 1690 Act abolishing Prelacy permanently replaced episcopal government with Presbyterian polity as the structure of the established, national Church of Scotland — the settlement that endures, with modifications, to this day. Bishops and clergy who could not in conscience transfer their allegiance from the exiled Stuart line to William and Mary — the so-called non-jurors, from their refusal to swear the required oath — were deprived of their official positions within the national church but did not disappear. They continued to minister to congregations loyal to the older episcopal tradition, operating entirely outside the newly Presbyterian establishment. This is the direct institutional ancestor of today's Scottish Episcopal Church: a body born not from an English missionary effort but from Scottish clergy and laypeople who declined to accept the 1690 settlement.

Jacobitism and Real Persecution

Because the non-juring Episcopalian community's objection to 1690 was, at root, an objection to the deposition of the Stuart monarchy, it became closely — though never entirely — associated with Jacobitism, the political movement seeking to restore the exiled Stuart line, first under James VII/II and his son, then under his grandson, Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"). This association was not merely rhetorical. After the defeat of the 1745–46 Jacobite rising at Culloden, the Hanoverian government moved decisively against non-juring Episcopalian worship as part of its broader suppression of Highland and Jacobite society. The Toleration Act 1746 and, more severely, the Penal Act 1748 imposed real and serious legal penalties: clergy who ministered without registering and swearing allegiance to George II, and without praying for him by name in services, faced six months' imprisonment for a first offence and transportation for life to the colonial plantations for a second. Lay Episcopalians who worshipped at unregistered meetings were barred from public office, from voting, and from attending Scottish universities. This was genuine state persecution of a religious minority, grounded explicitly in its presumed political disloyalty, and it should be named plainly as such — just as the parallel persecution of Scottish Catholics, covered elsewhere in this series, should be named plainly.

Importantly, the Episcopalian community of this period was not monolithic. Alongside the penalised non-jurors, a parallel and legally tolerated Episcopalian tradition existed in the form of "qualified chapels" — congregations, often serving English merchants, soldiers, and officials resident in Scotland, that used clergy ordained in the Church of England or the Church of Ireland and the English Book of Common Prayer, and which willingly swore allegiance to the Hanoverian crown. These chapels operated openly throughout the period of persecution precisely because they posed no political threat, illustrating that "Scottish Episcopalian" and "Jacobite" were overlapping but not identical categories even at the height of the penal era.

Toleration, Reunion, and Modern Identity

The underlying political conflict dissolved gradually. Charles Edward Stuart's death in 1788, without a Protestant heir the non-jurors could in conscience support (his brother and designated heir was a Roman Catholic cardinal), removed the practical rationale for continued non-juring allegiance to the Stuart cause; most non-juring Episcopalians thereafter transferred their loyalty to the reigning House of Hanover. The Penal Laws themselves were repealed by the Westminster Parliament in 1792, formally ending a period of roughly forty-five years of legal persecution. Reunion between the formerly non-juring and the "qualified" congregations followed gradually through the nineteenth century, with the last separate qualified chapel joining the unified Scottish Episcopal Church only in 1920 — a reminder of how slowly these divisions healed even after the political stakes had evaporated.

Today the Scottish Episcopal Church is a small denomination by national standards — its membership numbers in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands claimed by the Church of Scotland or the Catholic Church in Scotland — organised into seven dioceses across the country. It is, crucially, a fully autonomous member province of the worldwide Anglican Communion, on equal institutional footing with the Church of England rather than subordinate to it, a distinction that matters both historically and in present-day church governance (the Archbishop of Canterbury has no jurisdiction over the Scottish Episcopal Church). In recent decades the church has taken a markedly liberal theological direction relative to many other Anglican provinces, ordaining women to the priesthood from 1994 and consecrating its first woman bishop in 2017, and in the same year becoming the first province in the global Anglican Communion to permit the solemnisation of same-sex marriages within its churches — a development that has drawn both support and criticism from within the wider Communion. Its modern character, in other words, bears little resemblance to the embattled, politically suspect minority tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, even as its institutional memory of that period of real persecution remains part of how the church understands its own history.

Toleration in 1712: a turning point

The historian Alasdair Raffe argues that 1712, not 1690, may be the real starting point of Scotland's modern religious history. After the Revolution, Episcopalians were driven out of parishes by the "rabbling" of ministers in 1688–9, but they were not subject to penal laws until after the 1715 rising, and many enjoyed de facto toleration. Even so, no legal right to worship outside the established Church existed until the British Parliament, with its Anglican majority, passed the Toleration Act of 1712. Raffe stresses that the re-established Kirk was far from triumphant after 1690: it was opposed in many areas, attacked in print, and fearful for its privileged status.

The historian Stewart J. Brown adds that the 1712 Act granted legal worship to Episcopalians who would pray for the monarch and use the English Book of Common Prayer. Limited as it was, it meant the British state would no longer enforce full conformity to the Church of Scotland. Brown also notes that the Episcopalian cause in 1689 was undermined first by the Scottish bishops' refusal to recognise William's claim to the throne, and then by many Episcopalians' open support for Viscount Dundee's rising.

Gaelic congregations

established Episcopalians in the Highlands faced the same shortage of Gaelic-speaking clergy as the other churches. The historical geographer Charles Withers, in Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981 (1984), records that in 1820 the congregation at Ballachulish numbered 823, "of whom one hundred speak the Gaelic language only", and that Episcopalians there had threatened in the late eighteenth century to leave the church altogether unless served in Gaelic. When the Gaelic-speaking minister Duncan Mackenzie moved to Fort William in 1857, his successor was an Englishman, John Derington, who resigned in 1861 having learned only a few halting phrases. In 1864 the Rev. Flemyng, secretary to the church's General Committee, wrote that its Gaelic congregations, "with one or two exceptions, are now to be numbered only by tens, where a few years ago they contained hundreds".

• Scotland's first legal toleration for worship outside the national Church came only in 1712, passed by the Westminster Parliament for Episcopalians.
• The Scottish Episcopal Church's lineage predates the 1690 Presbyterian settlement — episcopacy, not Presbyterianism, governed the national Church of Scotland for much of the preceding century.
• Under the 1748 Penal Act, a Scottish Episcopalian minister caught conducting an unregistered service twice could legally be transported for life to a colonial plantation — the same severity of penalty used against other serious criminal offences of the period.
• "Qualified chapels" — Episcopalian congregations loyal to the Hanoverian crown — operated legally throughout the period that non-juring Episcopalian worship was criminalised, showing the Episcopalian community was politically divided, not uniformly Jacobite.
• The last separate "qualified" congregation did not formally merge into the unified Scottish Episcopal Church until 1920 — more than a century after the political rationale for the split had disappeared.
• The Scottish Episcopal Church is entirely administratively independent of the Church of England; the Archbishop of Canterbury has no authority over it.
• In 2017 the Scottish Episcopal Church became the first province in the worldwide Anglican Communion to permit same-sex marriage in its churches.
• Some of Scotland's most historically significant church buildings — including several associated with Jacobite-era worship — remain active Scottish Episcopal congregations today.
• The Scottish Episcopal Church's full communion partner relationships place it in a theological position notably different from many conservative Anglican provinces in Africa and parts of the Americas, reflecting its distinctively liberal modern trajectory.

• Do not state that the Scottish Episcopal Church is "the Church of England in Scotland." It is a distinct, autonomous Anglican province with its own history, predating the modern Church of England's current form in its Scottish roots.
• Do not state that all Scottish Episcopalians in the eighteenth century were Jacobites. Qualified, Hanoverian-loyal Episcopalian congregations existed throughout the penal period.
• Do not minimise or omit the real legal persecution (imprisonment, threatened transportation, civil disabilities) faced by non-juring Episcopalian clergy and laity after 1745 — this is well documented and should be stated plainly, in parallel with (not as lesser than) the persecution Catholics faced in other periods.
• Do not state that episcopacy was a foreign or illegitimate import into Scottish church life. It was the governing structure of the national Church of Scotland for significant periods before 1690, including as late as the Restoration settlement of 1662.
• Do not imply the Scottish Episcopal Church is doctrinally or theologically identical to more conservative global Anglican provinces; its recent positions (women's ordination, same-sex marriage) place it among the more liberal provinces of the Communion.