THE period between the Restoration of Charles II and the creation of the United Kingdom was a crucial phase in the formation of modern Scotland’s political and religious cultures.1 A time of sharp divisions and controversial political experimentation, the five decades after 1660 engaged the nation’s rulers and thinkers in a search for answers to two sets of intertwined questions. The first concerned political authority: how, and from where, would Scotland be governed? What sort of monarchy should the nation have, and what other institutions were necessary? The second questions related to religious institutions and ideas. What would be the character of the national Church, and how could the rival claims of religious and political authority be reconciled? How could religious diversity—and ultimately a plurality of Churches—be accommodated within a stable society? These religious problems fundamentally influenced the context in which Scotland’s monarchs attempted to rule. The two sets of questions had shaped Scottish politics since the sixteenth century, and had become especially problematic after the royal court moved to London in 1603. But the decades after 1660 are noteworthy for the divisive and often extreme solutions proposed. Moreover, tentative answers to the problems were in place by the end of the period, eventually allowing Scotland some respite from its early modern experience of religious and political turmoil.
Historians rarely study the five decades after 1660 as a unit. Justifiably, they often portray the Revolution of 1688–90 as a turning point. This chapter assesses the politics and religious debates of the Restoration period (1660–88), before considering the changes brought by the Revolution, and the character of post-Revolution Scotland. The chapter concludes that there are good reasons for seeing the ‘Union settlement’—the constitutional package combining regnal and parliamentary union in 1707, the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council in 1708, and the Toleration Act of 1712—as a more decisive set of changes than those of 1688–90. In terms of Scotland’s major political and religious questions, the Revolution had made options available, but the Union settled on particular answers.
When distinguishing between the pre- and post-Revolution periods, historians have been influenced by several familiar narratives through which the history of these years has been told. For the period 1660–88, there are two especially well-worn interpretations. First, there is an account of Restoration politics in terms of the rise and fall of two dukes, Lauderdale and York. A second narrative concerns the Crown’s religious policies in the Restoration period: its attempt to impose a uniform episcopalian settlement on the Church. For the years after the Revolution, two popular images can be identified, one broadly Whiggish in character, the other essentially Jacobite. The Whig tradition sees the period 1690–1707 as the last stage in the formation of Great Britain. Political trends and economic setbacks in the 1690s pointed towards a new relationship with England, and Scotland’s elites argued about, but in most cases came to terms with, parliamentary union. The alternative account of the period characterizes the Revolution as a political betrayal, the first of a series of disasters that befell Scotland during, and as a result of, King William’s ‘ill years’.
The high political narrative of Restoration Scotland describes how John Maitland, Earl and later Duke of Lauderdale, and James, Duke of York and Albany and later King of Scots, made and broke alliances in pursuit of a monopoly of power. Lauderdale, who had been a prisoner of the Cromwellian Protectorate and became secretary to the restored Charles II, initially worked with John, Earl of Middleton, royal commissioner to Parliament in 1661 and 1662. Parliament passed an Act of Indemnity, pardoning most participants in the wars and governments of the 1640s and 1650s, but not until 1662. Thus potential opponents of the Restoration legislation enacted before the indemnity were reluctant to criticize Middleton’s agenda for fear of being exempted from pardon. The ‘billeting affair’, Middleton’s attempt to have Parliament exclude Lauderdale from the indemnity, forcing him from office, backfired, and Middleton himself fell from power. Lauderdale then allied with John Leslie, Duke of Rothes, letting him take the blame for administrative inefficiency, corruption, and religious coercion so severe that it provoked a Presbyterian rising in 1666. With Rothes discredited, Lauderdale himself assumed the office of royal commissioner to the parliaments and conventions of estates from 1669 to 1678. He remained in post as secretary, and also acted as one of the commissioners supervising the Scottish Treasury. But Lauderdale’s allies became fewer and of lower status, and powerful opposition to him emerged within the political elite. Charles protected his secretary until the Presbyterian rising of 1679 made Lauderdale’s position untenable. In late 1679, then, the king sent to Edinburgh his brother James, who took control of the Privy Council and served as commissioner in the Parliament of 1681. James briefly succeeded in recovering wide-ranging support for the Crown’s government of Scotland, from which he benefited on his accession to the throne in 1685. But his political style and pro-Catholic religious agenda were divisive: by 1688, his government was narrowly based, and many of Scotland’s nobles, lairds, and burgesses were ready to contemplate a revolution.2
These political events gripped contemporaries who were unfamiliar with, or had forgotten, royal government. In his Memoirs, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh described the change of government following the billeting affair as ‘so great a surprisal, and being the first, [it] made such deep impressions upon us, who were unacquainted with such alterations’.3 Gilbert Burnet, another contemporary observer who shared Mackenzie’s fascination, laid down the outlines of the high political narrative in Burnet’s History of His Own Time (1724–34), which he began writing in the mid-1680s.4 Before departing for London in 1674, Burnet had been successively episcopalian minister of Saltoun in East Lothian and Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University. For a while, he was patronized by Lauderdale and Charles II; Burnet was acquainted with the Duke of York, and had been a close friend of James Drummond, later Earl of Perth, chancellor from 1684 and subsequently a Catholic convert. Thus Burnet’s History was well informed about Scotland under Charles II. Moreover, Burnet’s emphasis on political factions and manoeuvres was later complemented by other printed sources. One was Mackenzie’s Memoirs; the most influential was the Lauderdale Papers, a selection of Lauderdale’s correspondence edited by Osmund Airy in 1884–5.5 Subsequent historians focused on the personality and chicanery of Lauderdale, often absorbing from Airy an ambivalent appraisal of the man, and a one-dimensional hostility towards his rivals, in particular James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews.6 Meanwhile, the rise and fall of James VII was comparatively under-researched, not least because the king’s archive was destroyed by French Revolutionaries in 1793. Nevertheless, historians found a suitably critical perspective on James’s government of Scotland in the journals of Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall, a lawyer and parliamentarian in the 1680s, but a loyal adherent of William II from 1689.7
This traditional narrative dwells on factional politics, partly because there was broad agreement among the ruling elite on the need to uphold the Stuart monarchy, to preserve and even extend the royal prerogative. In recent years, historians have done much to examine the noble ethos and revived royalism of Restoration politics.8 Scotland’s magnates asserted their position of political leadership, which had been threatened in the 1640s and 1650s by radical clergy and lairds, by the greater significance given to moneyed merchants in a period of war and high government expenditure, and by English occupation. The struggles between Lauderdale and his rivals were largely about access to the king in London, the control of material resources, and minor matters of policy. Though major ideological differences concerning monarchical authority and Church government existed in Scottish society, most men who objected to the royalist consensus were excluded from power by oaths of allegiance to the king. James’s success in Edinburgh in 1679–82 was based on a renewal of royal authority and patronage, brought geographically and emotionally closer to Scotland’s political and professional elites.9 The Test oath, enacted by Parliament in 1681, alienated some politicians and clergy from James, but their principal objection to the oath was its internal inconsistency, rather than its wide definition of royal authority.
Working with the story of the rise and fall of Lauderdale and York, historians have probed the nature of Scotland’s government and its political institutions. Lauderdale’s success, it is argued, depended on his proximity to Charles II at court, and his control of the flows of information between the king and Scotland. Lauderdale’s weakness, which James was to replicate, was a growing isolation from the political nation, vividly illustrated by his hectoring confrontations with the Scottish Parliament. Making innovative use of the traditional Restoration sources, revisionist scholars of the pre-Union Parliament have demonstrated that while Parliament magnified the royal prerogative in numerous statutes, it was also a source of opposition to royal policies. This was apparent in 1669–70, when the Crown proposed Anglo-Scottish union, and more strikingly in 1686, when parliamentary opposition prevented the passage of an act repealing religious penal laws, despite its approval by government loyalists among the Lords of the Articles.10
The familiar narrative of politics fits well with another recent historiographical trend: the development of British perspectives on Restoration politics and culture. Lauderdale and York were political giants in England as well as Scotland. In the late 1670s, opposition to the Crown’s ministers in the English Parliament drew on evidence of Lauderdale’s supposedly tyrannical government of Scotland.11 In 1679 James went to Edinburgh in part to remove himself physically from English politics at a time when the Westminster Parliament was agitating for his exclusion from the succession. While English Whigs condemned the Crown’s record in Scotland, Tories applauded the Scots’ loyalty to their kings. For historians of English political culture in this period, Scottish events have assumed a new significance.12
For all its value, the traditional interpretation of Restoration politics has had several negative consequences for Scottish historiography. It focuses excessively on short-term political changes, and though it assumes that politicians acted on materialist motives, little is known about the economic basis of their authority. Partly because of their expenditure in the civil wars, many nobles were highly indebted in the Restoration period. At root of much of the criticism of Middleton, Rothes, and Lauderdale were concerns that they maximized the profits of office (and of religious coercion) to pay back their debts and live in luxury. Yet there have been relatively few studies on the extent of noble indebtedness and the strategies landowners pursued to recover their finances. To date, most research on debts of the elite has concentrated on highland chiefs.13 More generally, Restoration historians have defined politics too narrowly, focusing on the factional struggles of the political elite, and on relations between men in Edinburgh and London. There are few assessments of women’s political activities, or of popular participation in politics, for long a dominant agenda in the history of Restoration England.14
To examine the resources and institutions of the state in late seventeenth-century Scotland, historians have had to break free from the confines of the traditional political narrative. As one scholar of the Treasury under Lauderdale complains, Airy’s selection of the Lauderdale Papers was thematically narrow, directing research energies away from administrative themes. Various other studies of government and bureaucracy have yet to be synthesized into the general literature.15 Political historians could do more to interrogate the consensus among legal scholars that the codification of Scots law in the Restoration period was the basis for the preservation of distinct legal arrangements after the Union.16 And the revival of interest in Parliament could be balanced with more systematic research on the Privy Council.
Yet the most striking gaps in Restoration historiography lie in religious themes. The details of Restoration religious policy in Scotland form an even more entrenched narrative than that of high politics.17 Following the restoration of bishops to the Church in 1661–2, the Crown attempted to enforce universal conformity with the Church of Scotland, imposing fines, imprisonment, exile, and execution on thousands of Presbyterian dissenters. The government’s policy used to be written about chiefly from the dissenters’ point of view, not least because theirs became the winning side of the argument with the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in 1690. The development of a Presbyterian bias in the historiography was ensured by the publication of the History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721–2) by the minister Robert Wodrow. In opposition to the Restoration government’s claim that the Presbyterians were politically seditious, and therefore justly punished, Wodrow argued that they had suffered persecution merely for their religious beliefs. Likewise, he interpreted acts of Presbyterian resistance, notably the risings of 1666 and 1679, as freedom fighting. Dedicating the History to George I, Wodrow characterized the Presbyterians’ nonconformity as a struggle for ‘revolution Principles’—the tenets of 1688–9—‘even before the revolution was brought about’.18
As Colin Kidd has argued, the balance between early modern radicalism and polite eighteenth-century Whiggery in Wodrow’s History was ‘precarious’; it would be unacceptable to later, more conservative Presbyterian historians such as William Robertson.19 Yet Wodrow’s contribution has structured most subsequent histories of Restoration religion, including those hostile to Presbyterianism. Such was Wodrow’s command of the sources that even the most recent scholarly accounts of religious policy repeat his narrative, if not his bias.20 Furthermore, the resistance of the Restoration Presbyterians was a fruitful theme for nineteenth-century novelists, and remained appealing to a wide readership into the twentieth century. After Wodrow, historians of Restoration Presbyterianism such as John Howie paid disproportionate attention to the Cameronians, a small group of extremists who seemed to represent Covenanting Presbyterianism in its most heroic and principled phase.21 Wodrow’s careful but partisan account was simplified and distorted. The Presbyterians had become the stuff of popular history, commemorative monuments and parochial folklore.
By the late twentieth century, it was common for historians to decry the dominance of the religious-policy narrative and its tendency to inhibit fresh thinking about Restoration Scotland.22 Yet it is important not to misconstrue the place of religion in late seventeenth-century historiography. While the enforcement of uniformity has been analysed at length, religious life itself has generally been overlooked. Following Wodrow, historians have predominantly used government sources: proclamations, Privy Council registers, and politicians’ correspondence. Less often studied are Restoration Presbyterians’ writings on Church government, their sermons, diaries, and correspondence. Despite some fine discussions of resistance theory, much remains to be said about the ideas at stake in the controversy between Presbyterians and episcopalians.23 Furthermore, the episcopalian Church—the supposed beneficiary of the government’s policy—has hardly been studied. The only book-length appraisal draws solely on printed sources and is over fifty years old.24 Recent improvements in the accessibility of manuscript ecclesiastical records should encourage new research on the Restoration Kirk as an institution, and on its social and cultural roles.
Government policy, cruelty, and violence have diverted historians’ attentions from religious beliefs and worship. Yet a body of new research signals a change in emphasis. David Mullan’s work on Presbyterian diaries and memoirs should encourage more studies of the religious lives of the clergy and laity. The present author argues that the years after 1660 saw the emergence of an episcopalian confessional culture, distinct in terms of theology, liturgy, and piety from the Presbyterian culture that would dominate post-Revolution Scotland. In an article on Sir Robert Moray, Frances Harris has suggested how the religious, intellectual, and political interests of a Restoration statesman can be reconciled.25 Drawing on these insights, historians should seek to recast the place of religion in the historiography, recovering its social and intellectual significance, and at the same time defining politics more broadly to encompass ideological disagreement. There is a need for international perspectives on Scottish religion after 1660, particularly research on the influence of the Church of England and of continental Protestants and Catholics. Intellectual continuities and traditions should be brought back into focus. By studying religious and political life across long time periods, historians will be able to break down the restrictive chronological barriers of 1660 and 1688, and with them the distortions of the standard narratives.
In the traditional interpretations examined in this chapter, the Revolution of 1688–90 stands either as a terminal moment or as a point of departure. There are important reasons for seeing the interval between William of Orange’s invasion of England in November 1688 and the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in the summer of 1690 as a turning point. In politics, the Revolution brought a rapid reconfiguration of the governing elite, reviving the careers of opponents of James VII, including figures such as Sir James Dalrymple of Stair and Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth who had spent parts of the 1680s in exile in the Netherlands.26 Of greatest consequence—particularly for highland society—was the rehabilitation of Archibald Campbell, son of the executed ninth Earl of Argyll, who regained his father’s title. For the Campbells, Dalrymples, and their peers, dynasties that shaped eighteenth-century politics and society, the Revolution was a rebirth.
In the shorter term, the Revolution was a milestone of institutional change. By comparison with the parliaments of 1661–2, the convention of estates that met in March 1689 asserted its own importance, adopting a Claim of Right designed to reconfigure the relationships between the monarchy, its subjects, and their parliaments. The Claim and the accompanying articles of grievances have always attracted much historical scrutiny. But it is important to remember how many of the innovations requested in these documents were the subject of continuing political struggles after William and Mary accepted the throne. The supposed right to address the Crown was highly ambiguous, as the Country Party’s petitioning campaign of 1699–1700 proved. Presbyterianism was re-established as a result of parliamentary pressure, not because the king was obliged by the Claim of Right. The abolition of the parliamentary Lords of the Articles was also something of a chance event; and it was not the permanent setback for the Crown that historians used to describe.27 Nevertheless, the Revolution’s institutional changes altered the place of Parliament in Scottish politics. Subsequent meetings required careful management by the government, and provided a more suitable platform for political opposition than had existed in the Restoration period. Moreover, the removal of the bishops from politics, and the revival of the General Assembly as the governing authority in the Kirk, introduced further complexity to political life. Institutional reforms brought by the Revolution ensured that in the period 1690–1707 Scotland would not be amenable to government by a single, pre-eminent minister of the nature of Lauderdale or York.
In a related way, the Revolution was a watershed for popular participation in politics. Historians used to suggest that the nobility were nearly as dominant in 1688–90 as they had been at the Restoration. Yet recent scholars have paid more attention to crowd violence in the Revolution, notably anti-Catholic demonstrations and the eviction of episcopalian ministers from parishes across southern Scotland. The so-called ‘rabbling’ of the clergy catalysed the resurgence of Presbyterianism, and helped to shape a Revolution settlement more radical than that achieved in England.28 The survival of the Williamite regime in the 1690s depended on international war, and on support among Scotland’s elites. But historians should remember that the Revolution had popular foundations, and that the violence of 1688–9 made politicians more aware of the destabilizing (and potentially counter-revolutionary) role of crowds.
More fundamentally still, the Revolution changed Scotland’s menu of political options. In the Restoration period, as has been seen, royalism was a pervasive and unifying ideology, restricting the discussion of alternative visions. From 1689, support for the Revolution was the government’s shibboleth, but political culture was more pluralist. Jacobitism had a rival ideological premise rooted in the political theology of indefeasible hereditary succession and divine-right monarchy. A few committed Jacobites served at James VII’s court in exile, at St Germain-en-Laye to the west of Paris. Of those remaining in Scotland, the most principled refused oaths of allegiance to William and Mary and withdrew from politics, while less conscientious Jacobites remained in positions of influence under the new regime.29 Meanwhile, the Revolution encouraged some Williamites to consider further change, ranging from union with England to Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s radical schemes for social and political reconstitution. Much remained unsettled in the immediate post-Revolution years.
In religious terms, it might be said, 1688–90 was a decisive turning point. Conventionally, it is depicted as the ‘triumph of Presbyterianism’,30 the conclusion of the Restoration narrative of persecution and resistance. This is a simplification: mainstream Presbyterians had enjoyed considerable freedoms to worship and organize since accepting James VII’s second declaration of indulgence of June 1687. For their eighteenth-century descendants, however, it was William’s invasion that ‘delivered the Nation from Civil and Religious Oppression’, and ‘confirmed to’ the Kirk ‘all the Religious Rights and Privileges which she now enjoys’.31 Rather than James’s dubious prerogative indulgence, the statutes of 1689–90 in favour of Presbyterianism (and the Act of Security for the Church, passed with the Union in 1707) assumed symbolic importance. According to episcopalian historians, however, the Revolution began a century of prosecution, dispersal, and suppression, a narrative with parallels to the Presbyterian account of the Restoration, but with less historiographical prestige.32 Both Presbyterian and episcopalian narratives presented the Revolution as a turning point, but historians increasingly question the assumptions behind these simplistic interpretations.
The Revolution, then, brought more diversity to Scotland’s politics, expanding the range of options for the country’s future. Yet if there is one issue that dominates the historiography of the reigns of William and Mary and Anne it is union with England.33 As a result, political events of the period immediately preceding 1707 are far better understood than those of the 1690s. Historians of William’s reign have often focused on short episodes, and the wider post-Revolution political culture has attracted few scholars. Moreover, frequent changes in office-holding ensured that there is no obvious political career around which to structure a coherent narrative of the years 1690–1707. Consequently, the traditional perspectives on the period were determined more by attitudes towards the Revolution and the Union than by the nature of politics in the intervening years. Two highly politicized narratives developed; reactions to them have shaped the subsequent historiography.
The first narrative focuses on the final twists and turns of the ‘road to union’. By overturning the authoritarianism of Charles II and James VII, it suggests, the Revolution allowed for a more open and realistic assessment of Scotland’s political trajectory. Greater union with England had been a possibility since 1603, but British unity had been postponed in the Restoration period by the willingness of Charles and James to take advantage of the rivalries between their kingdoms. Scotland’s reactionary nobles had relished the opportunity to abandon the Cromwellian union, and to compete for monopoly of an autonomous political arena. With these anti-union forces weakened, the politicians of the 1690s could weigh up Scotland’s options more objectively and produce, after several false starts, the parliamentary union of 1707.34
This tendentious account of post-Revolution politics was elaborated first by eighteenth-century Whigs, buoyed up by Scotland’s intellectual and economic progress since the Union. For William Robertson, 1688–90 inaugurated a modernization of Scottish society, since it reacted against the destructive dominance of the nobility, and pointed towards integration with the country’s more advanced southern neighbour. Parliamentary union was itself a product of the Revolution, which was thus the starting point of a story of Scottish liberty. The success of empire, and the 1801 parliamentary union with Ireland, gave historians other reasons to praise the achievements of 1707. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Whigs further denigrated the pre-Union society from which modern Scotland had emerged.35
In practice, the road from revolution to union was far from smooth. Many English politicians, predominantly but not exclusively Tories, were opposed to union. In Scotland, anti-English sentiment increased, particularly when the government of William’s southern kingdom obstructed Scottish attempts to settle a colony at Darien on the isthmus of Panama in 1698–1700. At times, the Scottish Parliament pursued projects that were seen as provocative or hostile in England, notably the Darien scheme and the Act of Security (1704). Yet Parliament’s escape from the dominance of Crown and noble interests, which, it was assumed, shaped Restoration politics, was a necessary part of the Whig narrative. In its ‘last six years’, wrote William Law Mathieson in 1905, Parliament displayed ‘most unexpected vigour’, before the institution ‘made a good end’ by voting for its own abolition.36 Politics in the years 1690–1707, though fractious and unseemly, appeared more liberal than in the Restoration period. But ultimately, Parliament’s struggles were to usher in a better future.
By the 1970s, this narrative was under attack. William Ferguson and P. W. J. Riley refused to see the period preceding the Union as one of constructive debate and high-minded statesmanship, and instead emphasized cynical political manoeuvres, parliamentary management, and bribery.37 The ascendancy of the Namierite historical approach, which questioned the importance of principles in politics, and the rise of Scottish nationalism, seriously undermined the ‘road to union’ perspective. In recent years, however, the elitist and materialist interpretation associated with Riley and Ferguson has itself been in retreat. The dominant approach in post-Revolution political history is shifting between post-Namierite and post-Habermasian modes.38 Scottish historians are rightly wary of the specific characteristics of Jürgen Habermas’s view of the public sphere, which draws particularly on evidence of post-Revolution London. Coffee houses and periodical publications played smaller roles in Scotland; the Privy Council continued to censor printed publications until its abolition in 1708. Broadly conceived, however, a post-Habermasian approach places politics in wide social and cultural contexts, assesses both institutions and practices, and recovers the ideologies behind political debates. In Karin Bowie’s work, for example, the period’s pamphlets point to political engagement by a wider section of Scottish society than either Riley or Ferguson acknowledged. For Allan Macinnes, pamphlet debates and commercial projects show how different attitudes to political economy informed discussions of Scotland’s future.39 But while these and other scholars suggest new agendas in post-Revolution political history, the historiographical gains have so far accrued more to the early years of Anne’s reign at the beginning of the eighteenth century than to the 1690s, which still attract less interest.
One reason for this neglect of William’s reign is its reputation for disaster. The narrative of ‘King William’s ill years’ has a tenacious appeal in the popular history of Scotland. Originating in contemporary Jacobite polemic, the narrative sought to discredit the Revolution of 1688–90 by associating the Williamite regime it established with war, misgovernment, and economic calamity. The ‘ill years’ view was built on a selective and episodic survey of events, particularly the Massacre of Glencoe, the failure of the Darien scheme, and the famine of the late 1690s. The Glencoe Massacre of February 1692 was the most extreme outcome of the Crown’s highland policy, which reversed the anti-Campbell drift of the 1680s and subjected the western Highlands to greater external military interference. By exposing the government’s mismanagement and brutality, Parliament’s 1695 investigation of the Massacre made Glencoe a symbol of William’s failings. Later in the 1690s, further evidence of the king’s malign influence emerged when, to avoid provoking Spain’s rulers, who saw Darien as an imperial possession, he withdrew his support from the Company of Scotland’s attempt to colonize the territory. Making William shoulder the blame for the failure was useful to Jacobite propagandists, to unionists seeking compensation from England, and to the Company of Scotland, keen to bury the evidence of its own mismanagement. Compounding the gloom at the end of the decade, famine caused a mortality crisis and serious economic disruption. Graphic tales of the poor’s suffering coloured later negative accounts of the period. It is important to remember how readily contemporaries linked natural disasters to national sins. While the Presbyterian establishment blamed the famine on epidemic immorality, Jacobites could portray harvest failures as God’s punishment for the illegitimate Revolution and the abolition of episcopacy.40
Twentieth-century historians abandoned the Jacobitism and providentialism of the ‘ill years’ interpretation, but few sought to rehabilitate William’s government. Indeed, many scholars have found the king guilty of neglecting Scotland. Preoccupied with European wars, it is argued, William devoted insufficient time to Scotland, misconstruing its political divisions and exacerbating its difficulties. This undermined his Scottish ministers, and the resulting policies could exasperate opinion south of the border, notably when the formation of the Company of Scotland provoked a hostile reaction from the English East India Company. The Crown’s financial demands meant that William was more responsive to pressure groups in the City of London and Westminster than in Edinburgh. Before Darien, the tightening of the English Navigation Acts had already shown the union of the Crowns working against Scottish economic interests. And while William came to recognize that some reconfiguration of the Anglo-Scottish relationship was necessary, his death in 1702 prevented him from implementing further union.41
William’s agenda was undoubtedly dominated by European politics and the English fiscal–military state. But it is misleading to claim that Scotland’s problems in the 1690s resulted from royal neglect. Recent research on Secretary James Johnston and the Earl of Portland discredits Riley’s view that Scottish politics was without sure management before the rise of the Duke of Queensberry in the late 1690s.42 Likewise, scholars have shown that the government was forced to devote energy to managing Presbyterian expectations and the politics of the General Assembly.43 Aside from its adverse effects on overseas trade, however, the impact of war on Scottish society remains to be examined in detail.44 And while recent scholars have recovered the political and religious principles behind support for the Williamite regime,45 the culture of monarchy in the changed post-Revolution context calls for further study.
By emphasizing the ideologies of politics, historians can recover the partisanship of the period.46 The main opposition groups in Parliament, the Club of 1689–90, and the Country Party that emerged in the late 1690s, contained their share of opportunists, but both groups raised important ideological questions about the Church, monarchy, and subjects’ rights. By comparison with England, where the oath of allegiance to the Crown was initially more inclusive, the Scottish regime was ideologically narrow. More attention needs to be paid to the strategies of opposition adopted by politicians and clergy in this cultural context, ranging from the formation of alliances in St Germain-en-Laye and England to passive disobedience to new institutions and requirements.
A more fundamental and challenging task for historians of post-Revolution political culture is bridging the gulf between religion and high politics seen in the works of Namierite historians and teleological accounts of secularization. Religious debates were of at least as much significance after 1690 as before. Moreover, the partisanship of William’s governments is most clear in their support for a Kirk that sought to overcome its episcopalian rivals, manipulating an account of the recent past that radically disavowed the religious policy of Charles II and James VII. Yet hardliners among the Presbyterian laity and clergy articulated a destabilizing critique of the Church’s compromises with the post-Revolution regime. The re-established Kirk was doctrinally united, but differences over its political strategy began to set the scene for the eighteenth-century fragmentation of Presbyterianism.47
The re-emergence of Presbyterianism from 1687 changed the relationship between the Kirk and Scottish society in various ways that call for fresh research. The Restoration Church had retained kirk-sessions, in which lay elders helped to enforce parochial discipline. But where episcopacy was unpopular, men of sufficient standing were reluctant to serve. In these areas, the post-1687 Presbyterian kirk-sessions may have had a moral authority their episcopalian predecessors lacked, allowing for a more severe policing of the population. The General Assembly and its commission worried about episcopalian nonconformity and Catholicism, and its clergy paid more attention than had the bishops to campaigns against immorality, blasphemy, and heterodoxy. It is unclear, however, to what extent Scotland participated in the movement for the reformation of manners, so important to post-Revolution Whig culture in England. There has been research on how the ‘immoral’ responded to ecclesiastical discipline, but too little is known about the place of religious minorities such as Catholics and Quakers in local communities.48 Scotland’s religious links with Ulster, reconfigured by the 1690 settlement, also require more study.49
A theme of long-term importance is the appointment of parish ministers. In July 1690 Parliament abolished the right of lay patrons to nominate clergy to vacant parishes, instead allowing elders and owners of heritable property to select candidates. This innovation was an affront to the nobility, and a source of conflict in numerous localities before the restoration of lay patronage in 1712. Although it may have been intended to secure the settlement by allowing Presbyterian congregations to call ministers of their liking, some episcopalian parishes used the 1690 legislation to frustrate Presbyterian control. Others resorted to violence not unlike that seen in the rabblings. While the Revolution sought a new balance in religious life between popular energies, clerical, and elite authority, its religious outcomes were untidy.
Was the Union settlement of 1707–12 a more decisive turning point than the Revolution of 1688–90? Before suggesting an answer, it will be helpful to return to the major political and religious problems outlined at the start of this chapter. What sorts of institutions would govern Scotland? What would be its constitutional relationship with its monarchs and with England? To what extent would the government try to sustain a uniform national Church in a religiously pluralist society?
Whiggish historians gave a simplistic account of the institutional changes of 1688–90 and 1707, based on teleological assumptions about the inevitability of union. Since the 1960s, historians have highlighted contingencies in the negotiation of the Union and its passage through Parliament, emphasizing that the 1707 settlement, though it was a reaction to political developments since 1688, was only one of numerous possible reactions. This underlines the value of seeing 1690–1707 as a period of uncertainties and possibilities, rather than as a prologue to the formation of the United Kingdom. Thus the Revolution was a major event, but one without clear answers to Scotland’s political dilemmas. Any sense of finality surrounding the Union is misleading, and a movement to have the Act repealed nearly succeeded in 1713. Yet the Union settlement was a radical answer to the institutional questions in Scottish politics, providing a full stop and a change of paragraph.
Presbyterian and episcopalian histories both called the Revolution a religious turning point. But like the ‘road to union’ narrative, these interpretations depend too much on hindsight, obscuring the real uncertainties of religious life after 1690. Far from triumphant, the re-established Kirk was opposed in many areas of Scotland, maligned in print, and fearful for the survival of its privileged status. The Church’s claims to autonomous religious authority conflicted with the Crown’s Erastian pretensions, sparking controversies that dissipated only gradually under the Hanoverians. Particular tension surrounded the legacy of the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), played down by cautious clergy though central to popular Presbyterianism. Not even the hegemony of Calvinist doctrine—to modern commentators, a key element of Scottish culture—seemed certain while Anglican moral theology and deist heterodoxy gained converts.50
Beyond the ‘denominational’ perspectives of Presbyterian and episcopalian history, the Revolution settlement looks still less like a set of answers to Scotland’s religious problems. Protestant nonconformity had existed since the Cromwellian occupation. The 1680s was the last decade in which violent suppression was tried as a solution to religious diversity. But no legal toleration of worship outwith the established Church was enacted before 1712. Aside from statutes against irregular marriage and baptism, episcopalian dissenters were not subject to penal laws until after the Jacobite rising of 1715. Episcopalians benefited from periods of de facto toleration from 1690, but the Presbyterian commitment to a uniform religious establishment ensured that the position of dissenters was uncertain. Union with Anglican England, in which Protestant nonconformists had gained toleration in 1689, finally brought a solution to Scotland’s problems of religious diversity (but not to the benefit of Catholics). The creation of a biconfessional state in 1707 weakened the principle of national uniformity, though it was the British Parliament’s often intolerant Anglican majority that passed an Act for episcopalian toleration in 1712. Perhaps that date, and not 1690 or 1707, should be seen as the symbolic starting point of Scotland’s modern religious history.
This chapter has suggested various agendas for reshaping late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scottish and English political and religious history. By assessing the traditional narratives, scholars can offer new conceptual frameworks and periodizations. In the history of political and religious institutions, the Revolution and the Union will remain as thresholds or turning points. If broader social and cultural approaches to religion and politics are adopted, however, continuities and long-term changes may prove more important.
Bowie, Karin, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union, 1699–1707 (Woodbridge, 2007).
Cowan, Ian B., The Scottish Covenanters, 1660–88 (London, 1976).
Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms (London, 2005).
—— Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006).
Jackson, Clare, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003).
Kidd, Colin, ‘Religious Realignment Between the Restoration and Union’, in John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995).
MacInnes, Allan I., Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007).
MacIntosh, Gillian H., The Scottish Parliament under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Edinburgh, 2007).
Mullan, David G., Narratives of the Religious Self in Early-Modern Scotland (Farnham, 2010).
Raffe, Alasdair, ‘Presbyterianism, Secularization, and Scottish Politics after the Revolution of 1688–90’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 317–37.
—— ‘Presbyterians and Episcopalians: The Formation of Confessional Cultures in Scotland, 1660–1715’, English Historical Review, 125 (2010), 570–98.
Riley, P. W. J., King William and the Scottish Politicians (Edinburgh, 1979).
Whatley, Christopher A., with Patrick, Derek J., The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006).