The Covenanters & Civil Wars

1. The National Covenant and the Glasgow Assembly

The National Covenant grew directly out of the 1637 Prayer Book crisis (Card #14). Fearing further royal religious innovation, the lawyer Archibald Johnston of Warriston and the minister Alexander Henderson drafted a document that was first subscribed at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 28 February 1638. It was carefully constructed in three parts: first, a word-for-word reproduction of the 1581 "King's Confession" (the Negative Confession); second, Warriston's "legal warrant" — a recital of the many Acts of the Scottish Parliament defending the Reformed Kirk and condemning "papistry"; and third, Henderson's practical application, a band binding subscribers to defend "true religion" against the unauthorised innovations of the Prayer Book and episcopal changes — while professing loyalty to the King's person and lawful authority.

The genius of the Covenant was that it framed radical resistance as legal conservatism: subscribers claimed to be defending the established, statutorily-protected religion against illegal novelties, not rebelling. Contemporaries claimed enormous crowds gathered in Edinburgh — figures of around 60,000 are traditionally repeated, though these are best treated as traditional estimates rather than precise counts (and larger than the city's contemporary population). Copies were carried across the country and signed by nobles, lairds, burgesses, ministers and commons, though subscription was notably thinner in the north-east and Highlands. It rapidly became the organising instrument of a movement — the Covenanters — that seized the political initiative.

Charles's attempt to defuse the crisis by summoning a General Assembly backfired. Meeting in Glasgow Cathedral from 21 November 1638, the Assembly was packed with Covenanter sympathisers and lay elders, some armed. When the King's Commissioner, the Marquess of Hamilton, ordered it to dissolve, it refused and sat on in open defiance of royal authority. Over the following weeks it swept away a generation of royal religious policy: it condemned the Prayer Book and Canons, annulled the contested assemblies of 1606–18, and on 8 December 1638 voted to abolish episcopacy and declare it unlawful, deposing and excommunicating the bishops. The Assembly dissolved itself on 20 December 1638. The Kirk was now Presbyterian in government, and the Covenanters effectively controlled Scotland.

2. The Bishops' Wars and their English consequences

Charles regarded the abolition of bishops as rebellion and resolved to impose his will by force — but he badly underestimated Scotland. In the First Bishops' War (1639) the Covenanters, stiffened by professional soldiers who had served in the Thirty Years' War under the veteran Alexander Leslie (later Earl of Leven), proved far better prepared than the King's improvised army. Charles declined to risk a battle at the border and agreed to the Pacification (Treaty) of Berwick on 18 June 1639, a truce that settled nothing.

The historians Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, in Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War (2014), reconstruct the 1639 campaign from Scottish, English and Swedish records. Leslie, a Swedish field marshal, left Stralsund on 1 January 1638, signed the Covenant, and in August 1638 obtained his release from Swedish service; the Swedish council of war then let muskets and field pieces go to Scotland through the Scottish merchants James and John Maclean in Stockholm. Charles planned a four-pronged attack: Hamilton by sea into the Forth, the Earl of Antrim from Ireland into the west, the King with the main army in the south, and a Royalist rising in the north-east. It came apart quickly. On 21 March 1639 Leslie's party blew in the gate of Edinburgh Castle with a petard and took it. Leslie led about 6,000 men into Aberdeen at the end of March (older accounts wrongly give Montrose the command), while the artillery officer Alexander ('Dear Sandy') Hamilton fortified Leith so well that the Marquis of Hamilton never landed. Patrick Ruthven, the most experienced Royalist soldier in Scotland, refused command because he was asked to share it with the nobility. At Duns Law in early June Leslie, now Lord General, invited Royalist officers to dine and inspect his army, about 1,000 Highlanders among it; the Royalists withdrew without a fight.

Peace collapsed within a year. In the Second Bishops' War (1640) the Covenanters seized the initiative, invading northern England, winning the Battle of Newburn (28 August 1640) and occupying Newcastle — seizing the coal supply on which London depended. Militarily humiliated and financially exhausted, Charles was forced into the Treaty of Ripon (October 1640): the Scots were to remain in occupation of Northumberland and County Durham as security, hold Newcastle, and be paid £850 a day to maintain their army pending a final settlement (concluded by the Treaty of London, August 1641). Murdoch and Grosjean put the 1640 army at about 23,000: Leslie crossed the Tweed in August with about 12,000 foot and 1,500 horse, while James Livingston, a veteran of the Scots-Dutch Brigade, brought about 6,000 foot and 1,000 horse down the west. At Newburn Leslie hid nine guns on the north bank of the Tyne overnight; the roughly 4,500 Royalists at the ford broke under Hamilton's artillery, and Leslie ordered that fleeing men be taken prisoner rather than killed. Newcastle's garrison left for Durham, and back in Scotland Patrick Ruthven, who had held Edinburgh Castle for the King and bombarded the town, surrendered it by treaty on 15 September 1640. The Venetian ambassador reported that Leslie kept such discipline that no looting took place. (Contemporary and modern sources variously date the treaty's signing to 14, 16 or 26 October 1640, reflecting the drafting-and-signing sequence; the substance is not in doubt.)

The Scottish crisis was a major catalyst of the English parliamentary crisis. Charles recalled Parliament in April 1640, after eleven years of personal rule, to fund a renewed war against the Scots; this Short Parliament preceded Newburn and was quickly dissolved. Defeat and the financial burden of the Treaty of Ripon then helped force the summoning of the Long Parliament in November 1640. In May 1641 a statute required that Parliament’s consent for its dissolution. That Parliament proceeded to dismantle his personal rule, and within two years England itself slid into civil war. In a real sense, the Scottish Covenanters lit the fuse of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

3. Scotland's entanglement in the English Civil War and the Solemn League and Covenant

When civil war broke out in England in August 1642, the Covenanters at first stood aside. But by 1643, with Parliament faring badly, both sides courted Scotland. The result was the Solemn League and Covenant, accepted by the Kirk on 17 August 1643 and by the English Parliament and the Westminster Assembly on 25 September 1643. Its terms were a bargain of mutual advantage that concealed a fundamental misunderstanding: in return for a Scottish army to fight Charles, the English promised to reform the churches of England and Ireland "according to the Word of God" and to "extirpate popery, prelacy… superstition, heresy and schism." The Scots read this as a binding commitment to impose Presbyterianism across all three kingdoms; the English parliamentarians largely regarded it as a pragmatic military alliance. That gap would poison Anglo-Scottish relations for the rest of the decade.

A Scottish army under Leven crossed the Tweed in January 1644. Its most important contribution came at the Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644), one of the largest battles of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. As historian Andy Hopper summarises, "The allied armies considerably outnumbered the royalists, mustering up to 28,000 men, just over half of whom were Scots," against roughly 19,000 Royalists — and Leven served as overall commander of the "Army of Both Kingdoms." The allied force destroyed Prince Rupert's Royalist northern army and lost the King the north of England. Although later English accounts emphasised Cromwell's cavalry, the Scottish contribution to the allied victory was substantial. Royalist strength is itself disputed: the Scottish quartermaster general Ludovick Leslie put Rupert's army at about 22,000, well above the usual modern figure.

4. The veteran generals and the Marston Moor myth

Murdoch and Grosjean argue that the British civil wars cannot be understood as "Scots" against "English". Scottish veterans of the Thirty Years' War fought on every side. Patrick Ruthven, a former Swedish lieutenant general, was the King's Lord General from October 1642 until November 1644; on the authors' reading, supported by Sir Richard Bulstrode's account, he drew up and commanded the Royal Army at Edgehill in the Swedish brigade formation. James King, Lord Eythin, was senior military adviser to the Earl of Newcastle and commanded most of the Royalist foot at Marston Moor. On Parliament's side William Balfour, a veteran of the Scots-Dutch Brigade, led horse at Edgehill, and Lawrence Crawford commanded the Eastern Association's foot. In 1643 the two main Royalist field armies in England were in effect directed by Scots from Swedish service. This is the authors' interpretation of command at Edgehill; older accounts give Prince Rupert or the King a larger role.

The best-known story about Marston Moor is that the three allied generals, Leven, Lord Fairfax and Manchester, fled the field. Murdoch and Grosjean trace it to Leonard Wattson and Major Harrison, who were promoting the Independents' and Cromwell's part in the victory, and to later anti-Covenanter writers such as John Spalding and Sir James Turner, neither an eyewitness. They count nineteen eyewitness testimonies written within two weeks of the battle and find no mention of the generals' flight in any; several place Leven leading the infantry after part of the allied right wing broke, and Simeon Ashe has him trying to stop the runaways by words and blows. No enquiry into the generals' conduct followed, and Leven himself demanded punishment for deserters. Six Scottish foot regiments and Dalhousie's horse did break, and Leven's own horse under Lord Balgonie fell back before rallying, but the authors calculate that thirteen of nineteen Covenanter foot regiments held, and that David Leslie's horse fought beside Cromwell's on the left. Robert Baillie, who first repeated the flight story in London, soon complained that the Independents had given Cromwell credit for the whole victory. This is a revisionist reading; older narratives, following C. H. Firth, accepted the flight.

After Marston Moor York surrendered on 16 July 1644 on terms that kept the allied army outside the walls and promised a garrison at least two-thirds Yorkshiremen. Newcastle, which refused terms, was mined with the help of some 3,000 colliers and stormed from four quarters on 19 October 1644; among those taken in the castle was Leven's old comrade from Swedish service, Donald Mackay, Lord Reay. Leven's insistence on discipline, and his refusal to let his army take free quarter, became harder to sustain as English pay fell months in arrears in 1645. By November 1645 his army before Newark was down to about 7,000 fighting men from the 22,000 who had crossed in 1644.

5. The Covenanting state: war makes a government

In the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), Laura Stewart argues that the Covenanters built the most effective state Scotland had yet seen. Before 1637 the Crown had no standing army, no militia and no permanent tax office; when it needed force, it summoned lords and their followers. When the elite withdrew support from Charles I in 1637–38, a "coercive vacuum" opened, and the Covenanters filled it "with astonishing speed".

Within a year an army was suppressing resistance in the north, and from the mid-1640s it helped collect taxes. In 1639 the new government began revaluing property so that taxation could reach more of the nation's wealth, and in 1644 it introduced Scotland's first excise tax on staple goods. Parliament ran the country through committees in every shire and burgh, which organised the war effort and even settled local disputes. At first the presbyteries collected voluntary donations and mobilised opinion, giving the new committees the authority of a familiar church court. Stewart calls this a distinctively Scottish "presbyterian shire".

The alliance between church and state had limits, though. When the Duke of Hamilton's party took power in 1647 to raise an army for Charles I (the Engagement), its opponents under the Marquis of Argyll walked out, knowing that presbyteries hostile to the Engagement would obstruct the levy. Stewart rejects the idea that the Covenanting state was in inevitable decline from 1643: it survived the crises of the mid-1640s and did not collapse from within. It took a richer neighbour and Oliver Cromwell to destroy it, "and even then, it was a close-run thing".

Its legacy outlived it. The excise and the "cess" (monthly maintenance) invented in the 1640s were kept after the Restoration. Charles II's ordinary revenue was eventually about three times his father's, roughly two-thirds of it spent on the army. In Stewart's judgement, the later Stuart state was more powerful than Charles I's, "but it was not necessarily more authoritative".

6. Montrose's campaign examined

Even as the main Covenanter army fought in England, Scotland was convulsed by a Royalist insurgency of astonishing brilliance. James Graham, Marquess of Montrose — who had himself been an early Covenanter but had come to fear the domination of Argyll and the Presbyterian clergy — was commissioned as Charles I's lieutenant in Scotland. With a small, shifting force never much above a few thousand men, built around an Irish Confederate brigade under Alasdair Mac Colla and Highland clansmen (many drawn by hostility to Clan Campbell), Montrose won a remarkable run of victories: Tippermuir (1 September 1644), the storming of Aberdeen (13 September 1644), Inverlochy (2 February 1645) — a devastating blow to the Campbells — Auldearn (9 May 1645), Alford (2 July 1645) and his greatest triumph at Kilsyth (15 August 1645), after which he was briefly master of Scotland and summoned a parliament in Glasgow.

It could not last. Charles I's main cause collapsed at Naseby (June 1645); Montrose's Highlanders and MacDonalds drifted home; and the Covenanters recalled the seasoned David Leslie from England. On 13 September 1645 Leslie surprised and destroyed Montrose's remnant at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk — the decisive defeat of Montrose’s 1644–45 campaign. The captured Irish troops and camp followers were massacred, and organised Royalist resistance in Scotland was over. Montrose escaped abroad, returning in 1650 on Charles II's behalf only to be defeated at Carbisdale and executed in Edinburgh.

7. Charles I's surrender and the "selling the king" question examined

With his cause lost, Charles I surrendered not to the English but to the Scottish army at Newark on 5 May 1646, gambling that he could split the Scots from their English allies. The gamble failed. The Scots pressed him relentlessly to take the Covenant and accept Presbyterianism in England; he refused, and the alliance the Solemn League had created was now unravelling over exactly the religious question that had made it.

Here lies one of the most persistent myths of the period: that the Scots "sold their king." The reality is more complex. Under the Solemn League the Scottish army was contractually owed substantial arrears and expenses for its service in England. After protracted negotiation, Parliament agreed to pay the Scots £400,000 "in lieu of all demands" — half (£200,000) to be paid "instantly" in two instalments of £100,000, the balance in later payments. Murdoch and Grosjean stress that the sum was back pay, and that Leven made clear that without a settlement his army would stay and begin taxing the northern counties of England. The first £100,000 instalment and the beginning of the army's withdrawal were settled together with the handover: on 30 January 1647 the Scottish army marched out of Newcastle and left the King in the hands of Parliament's commissioners (Charles physically departed Newcastle on 3 February, reaching Holdenby House on 16 February).

So was the King "sold"? The Scottish position — supported by the modern scholarship, notably David Stevenson's work on Covenanter finance — is that this was payment of a genuine debt for military service that coincided with the handover, not a cash-for-king transaction. The Scots also had a defensible constitutional argument: Charles was their king too, they could not keep him against Parliament's will indefinitely, and he had refused every settlement they offered. Nevertheless, the optics were terrible, and Royalist propaganda immediately branded the Scots as Judas-figures who had betrayed their sovereign for silver — captured in the contemporary jibe "Traitor Scot / Sold his King for a groat." The accurate characterisation is neither wholly innocent nor a simple sale: it was a debt settlement, negotiated under pressure, whose timing made it look like a sale and handed the King's supporters a permanent propaganda weapon.

8. The Engagement and the Battle of Preston

Within a year, Scottish opinion swung back towards the captive King. A faction of more conservative, royalist-leaning Covenanters — led by the Duke of Hamilton — concluded a secret treaty with Charles, the "Engagement," signed on 26 December 1647. Charles promised to confirm the Solemn League and to establish Presbyterianism in England for a trial period of three years; in return the "Engagers" would raise an army to restore him. The deal split Scotland: the hardline "Kirk Party" and the General Assembly denounced the Engagement as a sinful compromise (the Kirk declared it a breach of God's law in May 1648), because Charles had not himself taken the Covenant.

The Engager army invaded England in July 1648, badly led, poorly trained and riven by division. Both Leven and David Leslie declined commissions in it, as did other experienced officers, and Hamilton raised fewer than half the 20,000 men he had hoped for. Cromwell fell on it in a running, three-day battle at Preston (17–19 August 1648), scattering it completely. Hamilton was captured and later executed. Defeat abroad triggered revolution at home: the anti-Engager "Whiggamore Raid" brought the radical Kirk Party to power in Edinburgh. The Second Civil War was over, and Charles I's fate was sealed.

9. The execution of Charles I and Scotland's proclamation of Charles II

On 30 January 1649 Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. It is essential to be precise: the execution was an English act, and Scotland did not sanction it; Scottish commissioners protested against the trial and execution. The Scots had fought Charles's religious policies for a decade, but they had never sought the destruction of monarchy itself, and the killing of their own anointed king was received in Scotland as sacrilege. The Scottish Parliament responded within days: on 5 February 1649 it proclaimed his son King Charles II — not merely of Scotland but of Great Britain, France and Ireland — well before England's new Commonwealth had settled its own government. Scotland thus set itself directly against the English republic.

10. Charles II's coronation and the question of his sincerity

Charles II's alliance with the Covenanters was a marriage of desperation on both sides. Exiled and near-friendless, Charles needed an army; the Kirk Party needed a king who would enforce their vision of a Presbyterian Britain. After long negotiation culminating in the Treaty of Breda (1 May 1650), Charles agreed to their terms, and on landing at Garmouth in Moray on 23 June 1650 he signed both the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant. On 1 January 1651 he was crowned King of Scots at Scone — the last coronation ever held there — after a sermon by Robert Douglas reminding him of his covenantal obligations, with the Honours of Scotland smuggled out of Edinburgh Castle for the ceremony.

Was this a sincere religious conversion? The evidence strongly favours political necessity, but a king’s inner beliefs cannot be established with certainty. Charles subscribed the Covenants as a hard political price for Scottish military support, rather than from demonstrated Presbyterian conviction. Contemporaries on his own side effectively admitted it: the Scots commissioner Alexander Jaffray confessed that the Covenant "committed him to abolishing the rule of bishops in the Church of England, a pledge which we knew, from clear and demonstrable reasons, that he hated in his heart … our sin was more than his." Charles came to despise the "villainy and hypocrisy" of his dour hosts, reportedly failed to conceal his relief at their defeat, and after Worcester never returned to Scotland. The Covenant-signing was a political bargain whose sincerity contemporaries themselves questioned.

11. The Battle of Dunbar

Cromwell invaded Scotland in July 1650 to crush the threat. David Leslie conducted a skilful defensive campaign, refusing battle and stripping the country before the English, until by early September Cromwell's sick, hungry army was pinned against the sea at Dunbar, its retreat to England apparently blocked, with Leslie's larger force holding the commanding heights of Doon Hill above. Cromwell seemed trapped.

What happened next is traditionally blamed on the Kirk Party's interference. The godly committee and ministers attached to the army had already purged thousands of experienced officers and soldiers as insufficiently "godly," leaving what one appalled officer called "an army of clerks and ministers' sons." Impatient to finish the campaign and reluctant to keep the army in the field, they are widely said to have pressed Leslie to abandon his impregnable position and come down from the hill to attack. On the morning of 3 September 1650, Cromwell fell on the descending, disordered Scots at the Broxburn and shattered them. By Cromwell's own dispatch his men "killed 3,000 Scots and took 10,000 prisoners, losing only 30 men in the fighting" — though the Scottish officer Sir James Balfour recorded only "8 or 900 killed" and the Royalist Sir Edward Walker put prisoners at 6,000, so the totals are contested. Modern historians add a further caveat: Leslie's descent may also have been militarily rational, since he could not force Cromwell to attack uphill and a night storm had made the exposed hilltop untenable. The purges, deployment and weather all belong in the explanation; their relative importance is debated. Dunbar was nevertheless a catastrophe for the Covenanter army.

12. The Battle of Worcester and the Cromwellian conquest

Dunbar cost the Covenanters Edinburgh and the south, but not the war. Over the winter the Kirk's grip loosened, purged royalists were readmitted, and a new army gathered around the crowned Charles II. In summer 1651 Cromwell manoeuvred to cut Leslie's communications at Stirling — deliberately leaving the road to England open. Charles took the bait and marched south, hoping English royalists would rise. They largely did not; the Scottish army was seen as a foreign invader. Cromwell's converging forces trapped Charles at Worcester, where on 3 September 1651 — exactly a year after Dunbar — a Parliamentarian army of around 28,000 overwhelmed some 16,000 mostly-Scottish Royalists. Traditional estimates put Royalist losses at roughly 3,000 killed and 10,000 captured; Parliamentarian losses were much lower, though sources disagree on the totals. Cromwell dubbed the victory his "Crowning Mercy." The estimated army sizes indicate a substantial Parliamentarian numerical advantage, but are not exact counts. It was the last battle of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Charles escaped after six weeks as a fugitive and fled to France; thousands of Scottish prisoners were transported.

Worcester ended serious Royalist resistance and opened the way to the Cromwellian conquest and occupation of Scotland, completed by General Monck's forces. The conquest imposed a lasting military occupation and, in the 1650s, incorporation into a Commonwealth governed from London.

13. Bridging to 1698: occupation, Restoration, persecution, revolution and famine

Cromwellian incorporation (1652–1660). The English Parliament declared that Scotland "shall… be incorporated into… one Commonwealth with this England." The Tender of Union was proclaimed at Edinburgh's Mercat Cross on 4 February 1652; the Scottish Parliament was abolished and Scotland was assigned 30 seats at Westminster. An ordinance enacted union in 1654, followed by parliamentary ratification in 1657. It was a union imposed by an army of occupation and without popular consent, but it brought free trade with England and relative order. It was dismantled at the Restoration.

The Restoration (1660). George Monck's march south helped restore Charles II, proclaimed in Edinburgh on 14 May 1660. Scotland regained its independent Parliament, law and Kirk — but Charles, notwithstanding his Covenant oaths, restored royal control and re-imposed episcopacy on the Church of Scotland. The Rescissory Act 1661 annulled two decades of legislation, and around a third of ministers were ejected, especially in the Covenanting south-west, where dissenters took to open-air "conventicles."

The "Killing Time" (1680s). Repression of the most committed Covenanters — the Cameronians or "Society People," followers of Richard Cameron and Donald Cargill — intensified after the murder of Archbishop Sharp (1679) and the defeat of the rising at Bothwell Bridge. Under Charles II and then the Catholic James VII, summary executions and judicial persecution (associated with the Lord Advocate Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, remembered by Covenanters as "Bluidy Mackenzie") killed scores of people and cemented a lasting martyrology; totals depend on the dates and categories of deaths included. (Card #14 introduced the movement's origins; the Killing Time is name-checked here only briefly.)

The Glorious Revolution and the Claim of Right (1688–89). After William of Orange’s invasion and James VII and II’s flight from England in December 1688, Scotland faced a distinct constitutional problem: James had not fled Scottish soil. A Convention of Estates met in Edinburgh and on 4 April 1689 voted that James had "forfaulted" (forfeited) the throne by his misgovernment — a contractual theory of monarchy drawing on George Buchanan. The resulting Claim of Right (adopted by the Convention on 11 April 1689), Scotland's counterpart to the English Bill of Rights, offered the crown to William and Mary, condemned James's rule as arbitrary, and paved the way for the abolition of episcopacy and the statutory re-establishment of Presbyterian church government in 1690.

Killiecrankie and Glencoe (brief gesture). Jacobite resistance under John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, won the Battle of Killiecrankie (27 July 1689) but lost Dundee himself, and the rising faded. The government's later effort to pacify the Highlands produced the notorious Massacre of Glencoe (13 February 1692), when soldiers killed members of the MacDonalds of Glencoe. Both belong to the dedicated Jacobite story of Card #17 and are noted here only to keep the timeline unbroken.

The "Ill Years" (1690s). Scotland's last national famine, caused by repeated harvest failures at the depth of the Little Ice Age, struck from roughly 1695 to 1699. Estimates suggest between 5 and 15 per cent of the total Scottish population died of starvation, with death rates in some areas such as Aberdeenshire possibly reaching 25 per cent, according to Karen J. Cullen's Famine in Scotland: The 'Ill Years' of the 1690s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). The disaster crippled an already fragile economy and formed part of the wider economic distress surrounding investment in an overseas colonial venture in an attempt to restore national fortunes — the Darien Scheme, which opens Card #16.

14. Restoration and Revolution reconsidered

Alasdair Raffe's chapter in the Handbook challenges two familiar stories about the half-century after 1660. The first is a story of high politics, the rise and fall of the Duke of Lauderdale and then James, Duke of York. Middleton's attempt in the "billeting affair" to exclude Lauderdale from the Act of Indemnity (which was not passed until 1662) backfired and brought Middleton down. Rothes took the blame for the harsh religious coercion that provoked the Pentland Rising of 1666. Lauderdale served as royal commissioner from 1669 to 1678, until the rising of 1679 made his position untenable. James then governed from Edinburgh in 1679–82 and rebuilt support for the Crown, but by 1688 his Catholic agenda had left his government narrowly based. Even the loyal Restoration Parliament could resist: in 1686 it blocked the repeal of the penal laws against Catholics.

The second story, of a persecuting Crown and heroic Presbyterian resisters, owes much to one book: Robert Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721–22). Wodrow argued that Presbyterians had been punished for their faith, not for sedition, and presented the risings of 1666 and 1679 as a fight for liberty. His command of the sources was so complete that, Raffe notes, even recent historians repeat his narrative, if not his bias. Later writers gave disproportionate attention to the Cameronians, a small extremist group. Meanwhile the Episcopal Church of 1661–90, which developed its own theology, liturgy and piety, has hardly been studied.

Laura Stewart shows how the Restoration state used force. Standing forces reached about 3,000 men in the 1680s, with a militia created after 1668 that in theory added 22,000. In 1678 the "Highland Host", about 8,000 men, was quartered on the south-west, and the Estates voted an unprecedented tax of £1,800,000 Scots over five years. Soldiers helped collect taxes and fines from nonconformists, military men were given commissions of justiciary, and town councils were remodelled. Without safeguards such as habeas corpus, Scots law "increasingly appeared to serve, rather than regulate, the state". English troops under the Duke of Monmouth were needed to crush the 1679 rising.

Raffe also qualifies the idea of the Revolution of 1688–90 as the "triumph of Presbyterianism". Mainstream Presbyterians had already enjoyed considerable freedom since accepting James VII's indulgence of June 1687. Popular action mattered: crowds "rabbled" Episcopalian ministers out of parishes across southern Scotland, which helped produce a more radical settlement than in England. Raffe concludes that the decisive changes came later, with the "Union settlement": parliamentary union in 1707, abolition of the Scottish Privy Council in 1708 and the Toleration Act of 1712. "The Revolution had made options available, but the Union settled on particular answers."

15. The covenanting tradition: memory, martyrs and the Wigtown question

Edward J. Cowan draws attention to something often overlooked about the National Covenant: it was a physical document that people actually signed. Elsewhere in Protestant Europe a covenant was largely an abstraction. In Scotland, those who set out to limit royal power made themselves visible and took personal responsibility, which marked a new sense of civic responsibility. The idea had a long afterlife. Radicals of the 1790s such as Thomas Muir and William Skirving drew covenanting analogies. Chartists and Reform Act campaigners invoked the covenant, as did Keir Hardie. The Disruption of 1843 fell on the bicentenary of the Solemn League. In 1949 the Scottish Covenant for home rule gathered some two million signatures, some of them bogus.

The memory of the 1680s "Killing Times" was built largely from oral tradition, gathered after 1708 when the Kirk appealed for accounts of the sufferings. Robert Wodrow's History (1721–22) gave the Church of Scotland its first martyrology. Wodrow worked hard to separate record from tradition but admitted that much of his material could not be corroborated. The rival accounts of John Brown of Priesthill (shot on 1 May 1685) show how much depended on the telling. In one version Claverhouse's dragoons refused to shoot a man at prayer. Patrick Walker's version knew of no mutiny. Claverhouse's own report says Brown refused the oath, said "he knew no king", and had ammunition and treasonable papers in his house.

The most famous case is the drowning of Margaret McLachlan and Margaret Wilson at Wigtown on 11 May 1685. Here Cowan, who set out to defend oral tradition against the 19th-century Jacobite apologist Mark Napier, concedes that Napier's arguments against the executions ever having taken place "are convincing". The two women were tried and condemned. But a surviving petition shows McLachlan recanting, and the Privy Council's practice was to reprieve. The government never drowned a woman despite its 1684–85 decree, and only two women were executed for crimes against the state in the reigns of Charles II and James VII. The detailed story first appeared in a minister's account of 1711, and there is no evidence of Margaret Wilson's gravestone before 1730. Cowan thinks it likely both women were pardoned. He stresses that this does not mean other Killing Times deaths did not happen; many of Wodrow's martyrs did perish.