2

Popery and Arbitrary Government

The Restoration in Ireland and Scotland and the Makings of the British Problem

It cannot be denyed, but that the Roman Catholicks of Ireland have infinitely suffered, during the late Usurped Governments; But they have done it cheerfully… having had all that time, as Companions in Suffering, not only some of the Nobility and Gentry of England and Scotland, but the King himself, and all the Royal Family… But now since His Majesties happy Restauration, and during the universal Jubilee of Joy over all the British Monarchy, that the Irish alone shou'd be… condemned to a perpetual Sufferance, far surpassing those they formerly endured under the Government of Cromwel, is a Calamity rather to be deplored than exprest.¹

The Bishops of England were like the Kings of Judah, some good, some bad; but the Prelates in Scotland were like the Kings of Israel, not one of them good, but… who made Israel to Sin.²

The Restoration in Ireland and Scotland – as in England – was welcome to broad cross-sections of the population. Yet in both kingdoms the eventual settlement in Church and state was highly partisan, and left substantial numbers of those who had supported the return of monarchy dissatisfied. In Scotland the re-establishment of episcopacy, coupled with the way the government chose to deal with the problem of Presbyterian nonconformity, created severe political and religious tensions. In Ireland there were a cluster of political, economic and religious grievances, though the most contentious issue by far proved to be the land settlement, especially the extent to which those (mainly Catholic) who had been dispossessed during the 1640s and '50s should be restored to their estates. The purpose of this chapter is to explore not only how these issues and tensions created instability in Ireland and Scotland respectively, but also how they interacted with developments in England to generate problems of a British nature. This will in turn set the context for the crisis that was to befall the Stuart monarchy in the late 1670s. It is impossible to appreciate the depth of the fears that English Whigs came to hold during the Exclusion Crisis about the threat of popery and arbitrary government unless we recognize that the Whigs were reacting, in part, to the threat of popery (in Ireland) and arbitrary government (in Scotland) that they already thought existed within the Stuart kingdoms. This chapter will also establish the necessary background for understanding the revolutions that occurred in Scotland and Ireland in 1688–91 (to be explored in the sequel to this book), both of which were reactions not just to developments in the 1680s, or under James II, but to what had been going on since 1660.

IRELAND

Most of the inhabitants of Ireland welcomed the return of monarchy in 1660. The regime established in the wake of the execution of Charles I in 1649 and parliamentary victory in the wars of 1641–52 had rested on a very narrow support base. Most Protestants in Ireland had sided with the English parliament during the Civil War, in reaction against the Irish Rebellion of October 1641 – a rebellion of Gaelic Irish and Catholic Old English in which over 3,000 Protestant settlers were violently killed and thousands more left to die after they had been stripped of their clothes and possessions and driven from their homes in winter. However, from 1648 those in the south rallied behind the crown, and by early 1649 an alliance of Catholic and Protestant royalists under the leadership of the Earl of Ormonde was in control of most of the country outside Dublin. Cromwell had to reduce Ireland to subservience to the newly born English republic by a brutal military campaign, and then use a policy of expropriation and plantation to try to create a new, Protestant, ascendancy that would be loyal to his regime. By the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1652, all those who had taken an active role in the rebellion of 1641, had been responsible for killing Protestants, or were still in arms and failed to submit to the new regime were to have their lands confiscated; unless they had ‘manifested their constant good affection to the commonwealth of England’, all other landowners were to suffer partial forfeiture, proportionate to their supposed ‘delinquency’. The execution of the act involved the transplantation of delinquents across the river Shannon to Connacht, regularized by the Act of Satisfaction of 1653. The confiscations hit Catholics and Protestants, native Irish and Old English, alike, although it was Catholics of Old English stock who had the most to lose. The result was that Catholics, who had held 60 per cent of the profitable land of Ireland in 1641, held only 8 or 9 per cent by 1660. The beneficiaries were the parliamentary adventurers (those who in the 1640s had invested in parliament's war effort in return for the promise of land once the reconquest of Ireland had been achieved) and those soldiers who had served in Ireland under Cromwell, although many of the latter being either unwilling to settle in Ireland or unable to wait until the land they had been promised became available sold their debentures to speculators.³

The Cromwellian conquest also resulted in the loss of Ireland's political independence, such as it was. Ireland (along with Scotland) was merged into one commonwealth with England and, instead of having its own parliament, was given the right to send thirty members to sit in the parliament in Westminster. On the religious front, the 1650s saw an attempt to export the English ecclesiastical settlement into Ireland: prelacy was suppressed and the Book of Common Prayer was prohibited, but a national Established Church was maintained (with allowance for worship outside this framework), and an attempt was made to provide a preaching ministry to encourage the spread of Protestantism. Cromwell evinced little of his noted belief in religious toleration when it came to dealing with the Irish Catholics, however. Although the Catholics were not forced to attend Protestant services, the Catholic clergy – generally excluded from any of the negotiated peace settlements – were hunted down and, if caught, were liable to imprisonment, exile or even execution. In 1656 parliament passed an act whereby people over the age of sixteen could be required to take an oath abjuring the papal supremacy on pain of losing two-thirds of their real or personal property. The hope was that, once the influence of the Catholic clergy over their flocks was destroyed, the mass of the population would have no choice but to listen to Puritan ministers and, with the threat of coercive measures hanging over their heads, might be induced to convert. It proved totally misguided. The Catholic clergy managed to cling on, and even began to increase in number as the 1650s progressed; few conversions materialized; and the result was merely to strengthen the belief of Catholics in Ireland that they could not be safe so long as Protestants remained in charge. With the collapse of the Protectorate in 1659, the republican regime in Ireland quickly fell apart. Following the resignation of Henry Cromwell as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in June, a power struggle emerged between different factions of the army, and, in the face of a rapid drift towards political instability and a radicalization of the army under Edmund Ludlow, Protestant landowners grew increasingly anxious about the security of their newly acquired estates. The dissolution of the Rump Parliament and the seizure of power by the army in England in October 1659 was the last straw. On 13 December a group of officers under Sir Theophilus Jones, backed by gentry of old Protestant stock, seized Dublin Castle and declared for parliament.⁴ Shortly thereafter, Sir Charles Coote and Lord Broghill, two ex-royalists turned Cromwellian collaborators, secured the garrisons in Connacht and Munster. The instigators of the coup purged the army of radicals and called an Irish Convention, representing the pre-war constituencies (though with boroughs and cities, except for Dublin, limited to one member instead of two), to meet at Dublin on 27 February 1660. Although dominated by Cromwellian settlers and the army, the Convention's members were persuaded (largely through the skilful management of Broghill and Coote) that only a restoration of monarchy could secure their interests.⁵ As the second Earl of Clarendon was later to recall, ‘of all his Majesties Subjects’ it was the English in Ireland who ‘made the Earliest advances towards his Majesties Restoration when the 3 Kingdoms were Governed by Usurpers’.⁶ Indeed, the future Earl of Shaftesbury claimed in his autobiography that General Monck, commander of the army in Scotland, would never have acted against the English army and forced the dissolution of the Rump without knowing that he had the support of Coote and the army in Ireland.⁷ In that sense, the Restoration was made in Ireland.

Charles II was proclaimed king in Dublin on 14 May, amid widespread celebrating. One contemporary confessed he had never seen ‘the like for rejoyceing’: the nobility, gentry, citizens and army were out in all their splendour; ‘the streets ran with Wine’, paid for by the corporation, for the consumption of ‘the multitude’; and the evening saw salutes from the great guns, fireworks, and ‘almost a Bonfire at every house’. The city also staged a mock funeral of the Rump, represented ‘by an ugly mishapen body without an Head’ but with a huge belly and enormous backside, which was carried through the city on a hearse, preceded by a group of mourners dressed in white carrying banners bearing the motto ‘Vive le Roy.’ The procession ended at the mayor's house, where the mayor first gave the funeral guests cakes and ale before they proceeded to burn the Rump at a bonfire outside his door.⁸

Settlement and Sale – Leaving them ‘cloakless and shirtless in poverty’

Constitutionally, the Restoration in Ireland – as in England – saw a return to the status quo ante. This meant that Ireland reacquired its status as a separate kingdom (albeit one belonging to the crown of England), with the right to hold its own parliament, though subject, of course, to the restrictions of Poynings’ Law. What made the Restoration in Ireland crucially different, however, was that it was brought about by those who had benefited from the Cromwellian regime – a factor that was to shape decisively the nature of the settlement. Their main concern was to retain control of their land, and – initially, at least – they were in the driving seat. Those Irish Protestants who had suffered for their support of the Stuart cause, of course, likewise welcomed the return of monarchy, but naturally hoped for a return to political dominance and for the restoration of their estates. On the religious front, episcopalians, Presbyterians and Protestant nonconformists all hoped to secure their respective religious interests. The Irish Catholics, on the other hand, ‘sat still’ during the spring of 1660, ‘and contributed nothing to this great Revolution’, as one Protestant put it, though most undoubtedly welcomed the return of monarchy, expecting to be allowed the same degree of practical religious toleration they had enjoyed before 1641 and to be restored to their estates.⁹ The promises Charles made in his Declaration of Breda of April 1660 encouraged all groups to believe that he would satisfy their desires. Thus, on the day that Charles was proclaimed, the corporation of Trim in County Meath rejoiced at God's providential restoration of the ancient government and proclaimed their joyful acceptance of everything contained in ‘his Majesties favourable and merciful declaration of Breda]’.¹⁰ Only a handful of radical sectarians remained consistently opposed to monarchical government.

Those who sat in the Irish Convention agreed on the need for a state Church, though they differed over whether a Presbyterian or an episcopalian settlement was preferable. Their priority, however, remained land. Thus they instructed the commissioners sent to London in June to treat with the King – a combination of episcopalians and Presbyterians – to secure the estates of the parliamentary adventurers and Cromwellian settlers, but gave them no specific orders concerning the settlement in the Church. Once the King's own preference for episcopacy became apparent, the commissioners conceded that the Church in Ireland should be ‘resettled in Doctrine, Discipline and Worship’ according to the laws in force in Ireland in Charles I's time, though ‘with such Liberty to tender Consciences’ as Charles II had promised in his Declaration of Breda. The corporation of Dublin likewise petitioned the King in late May for the settlement of that ‘forme of church government and divine worshipp’ used under Charles I and James I ‘and which is already established here by lawe’.¹¹

Such cues were all that Charles needed. By the end of June 1660 he had made appointments to the vacant bishoprics, and, although several months elapsed before the consecrations could take place, by the beginning of the next year episcopalianism had been fully restored.¹² 1661 the King issued a proclamation declaring all meetings by papists, Presbyterians, Independents and separatists illegal and prohibiting such people from appointing days of humiliation or thanksgiving and from making ordinations. Then in May the newly convened Irish parliament issued a proclamation requiring ‘all persons whatsoever’ to obey the laws establishing the government of the Church by bishops and to conform to the Prayer Book, and passed a declaration ordering all towns to burn the Solemn League and Covenant and requiring those clergy who had taken it to renounce it in public.¹³ Although several English Presbyterian ministers in the area around Dublin conformed, most nonconformist ministers found themselves driven out. In the province of Ulster, with its nearly seventy Presbyterian ministers who had taken the Covenant ‘with great solemnity’, only a handful conformed – these changing from ‘solid and gifted’ men of God to ‘loose, oppressive, proud’ and even ‘profane’ creatures under the influence of episcopal government, according to the contemporary Ulster Presbyterian historian Patrick Adair.¹⁴ The Irish Convocation, which sat between and 1663, established that preachers should pray for ‘Christ's holy Catholick Church’ in other words, ‘for the whole Congregation of Christian People dispersed throughout the whole world and especially for the Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland’ – revealing their belief that there was one true Church and that therefore the religious settlements in the three kingdoms needed to be in conformity with each other. They further stipulated that preachers should pray for the king as ‘Defender of the Faith and Supream Governour… over all Persons in all Causes as well Ecclesiasticall as Temporall’.¹⁵ For the time being, however, the legal basis of the restored Church remained the old Elizabethan Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity of 1560, together with the articles and canons of 1634. It was not until 1666 that the Irish parliament passed an Act of Uniformity (based on the English act of 1662) prescribing a revised Book of Common Prayer, requiring episcopal ordination of all clergy, and stipulating that all clerics and teachers subscribe a declaration against the Solemn League and Covenant and renounce resistance to the king or anyone ‘commissionated by him’. This non-resistance oath subsequently came to be imposed by many corporations as a test for membership.¹⁶ The Restoration ecclesiastical establishment, like its English counterpart, was to be narrowly episcopalian and firmly committed to the principle of non-resistance.

Although the Restoration brought no formal toleration for Catholics, the dissolution of the Cromwellian union did mean an end to the harsh persecution of the 1650s, which had been based on the application of English anti-Catholic legislation to Ireland. Irish legislation which applied to Catholics was mild in comparison. The main disabilities were spelled out by the Irish Act of Supremacy (1560), which required all office-holders, ecclesiastical persons and those taking holy orders or university degrees to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and by the Act of Uniformity (1560), which laid down fines of – shilling per Sunday for those who failed to come to church.¹⁷ Yet for much of Charles II's reign the penal laws against Catholics were laxly enforced, resulting in a de facto toleration – though there were to be bouts of repression, typically when political exigencies in England led to pressure for stricter measures against papists in Ireland. The law did, at least in theory, guarantee the Protestant political and economic ascendancy in the towns. The requirement to take the oath of supremacy excluded Catholics from corporate office, while most corporations at the Restoration revived old by-laws excluding Catholics even from becoming freemen and thus engaging in trade, although even these stipulations (as we shall see) were not consistently or uniformly enforced.¹⁸

The most controversial issue in Ireland proved to be the land settlement. Catholics expected the restoration of their estates, which they regarded as having been illegally taken from them during the 1640s and '50s; indeed, some immediately tried to repossess their former lands, and Charles II had to issue a proclamation against this on 1 June 1660.¹⁹ The current occupiers, by contrast, wanted to protect what they believed they had legally acquired. Broghill and Coote insisted that ‘the English interest in Ireland’ had to be preserved, and convinced Ormonde – now Lord Steward of the Household – that the Catholics in Ireland should be excluded from the English Act of Indemnity of August 1660, though the Catholics felt this was contrary to the Declaration of Breda. Their fate was to be determined by future legislation.²⁰ Charles realized that he would need to help those who had lost their estates in his father's cause, both Protestant and Catholic, while at the same time providing some form of compensation for the purchasers. In an impossible attempt to appease these competing interests, on 30 November 1660 he issued a declaration promising that Catholics innocent of involvement in the Irish Rebellion should recover their estates and that soldiers and adventurers should keep their acquisitions or be compensated (‘reprised’) for the land they had to restore to innocents, and offering land to Protestants who had served in the royal forces in Ireland before June 1649.²¹ He appointed a body of commissioners – all Protestants, and many of them Cromwellian purchasers – to administer the redistribution of land, but the Irish courts refused to enforce their decisions, as lacking statutory authority. Charles was thus forced to defer the land question to parliament, which assembled in Dublin in May 1661.²²

Catholics were not formally excluded from this parliament: there was no legal bar to their election, and a proposal that no one should be allowed to sit unless he took the oaths of supremacy and allegiance was rejected in England. Only one Catholic was returned, however, and his election was subsequently overturned on petition. A few Catholic peers sat in the Lords, but many Catholics were debarred as a result of outlawry proceedings following the rebellion of 1641. The parliament which made the land settlement was therefore scarcely representative ‘of the people of Ireland’, as one Irish Catholic later complained. On top of this, the operation of Poynings' Law meant that any legislation the Irish parliament agreed to would have to be approved by the privy council in England, thus guaranteeing that English interests would be put first.²³

The resultant Act of Settlement of May 1662 gave statutory force to the royal declaration of November 1660.²⁴ The problem was, as contemporaries were well aware, that Ireland would need to be two or three times its size to satisfy all the competing interests.²⁵ A court of claims set up to administer the act's provisions heard some 800 cases, issuing 566 decrees of innocence to Catholics and 141 to Protestants, and declaring 113 Catholics ‘nocent’; but when the time allowed for hearing cases expired, in August 1663, several thousand claims remained unheard. Protestants complained about the liberality to Catholics, especially since it was apparent that they themselves would not receive adequate land in compensation, and alleged that decrees of innocence had been obtained on false evidence. Many Catholics, on the other hand, felt they had been denied the chance to prove their innocence, while some of those restored found that they could not recover their estates because the present occupiers could not be settled elsewhere. In 1665 parliament passed an Act of Explanation in an attempt to clear up the mess: soldiers and adventurers were to hand over one-third of their land to meet the requirements of restoration and reprisal; existing decrees of innocence were confirmed; but no more claims were to be heard, the act instead naming certain individuals who were to have full or partial restoration of their estates. The end result was that Catholics were restored to the ownership of about 20 per cent of the profitable land of Ireland – a mere third of their holdings in 1641. Charles himself did not help matters by giving the land taken from the regicides, estimated at 169,431 acres, to his brother, the Duke of York, thus diminishing the stock available for reprisals. Other courtiers also benefited from royal largesse: Ormonde, who served two stints as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1662 – 8 and 1677–85), vastly increased the size of his estates, as did the Earl of Anglesey, while the English Secretary of State, Henry Arlington, was given a grant of estates in Queen's County and King's County (Laois and Offaly) as a ‘sweetener’ in order to ensure his support for the Act of Explanation.²⁶ To Irish Catholics the land settlement was ‘the greatest injustice’ ever seen, with ‘an innocent nation’ being ‘excluded from their birth-rights’ and ‘condemned before they were heard’.²⁷ Nicholas French, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, in a pamphlet of 1668 condemning the ‘Settlement and Sale of Ireland’, blamed the King's ministers, and particularly Clarendon, who, he alleged, aimed at ‘the general extirpation of the whole Irish race’. Yet he also criticized the King himself for conferring lands taken from the regicides on his courtiers and favourites, and in particular on his brother, since these lands had been acquired illegally by the regicides in the first place and were not the King to give away.²⁸ As the Gaelic Irish poet David Ó Bruadair bemoaned, the Irish nobility had remained loyal to Charles II and followed him into exile, ‘Yet when home they returned they got nought of their old demesnes / But to gaze at their lands like a dog at a lump of beef.’ The Act of Settlement, he concluded, ‘hath broken their banks, / And left them all cloakless and shirtless in poverty’.²⁹

As in England, there were attempts to encourage attachment to the restored monarch through the promotion of public celebrations and annual commemorations. On 23 April 1661 several towns celebrated Charles's coronation in England with civic displays, street parties and bonfires.³⁰ In 1662 parliament added 29 May to the calendar of annual celebrations.³¹ Many corporations throughout Ireland enthusistically commemorated the anniversaries of both the coronation and the Restoration each year, providing alcohol for the local inhabitants and encouraging the construction of bonfires.³² More provocatively, in 1662 parliament passed an act establishing 23 October as a day of commemoration for deliverance from the Irish Rebellion. As a result, each year pulpits were to thunder with sermons recounting the alleged atrocities committed on the Protestant population by Irish Catholics, and any incumbent who chose not to give a sermon was nevertheless obliged to read the 1662 act aloud to his congregation, thus helping to forge and reinforce a Protestant memory of what supposedly had transpired in 1641. Protestant parishioners themselves often marked the occasion with anti-Catholic rituals, such as pope-burnings, which inevitably proved contentious in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. In 1666 parliament went further and added 5 November to the calendar of commemorations.³³

The Sources of Discontent

Although most in Ireland had welcomed the return of monarchy, many felt some degree of dissatisfaction with the Restoration settlement. This was true, to varying degrees, of all the different interest groups within the kingdom. The Restoration benefited Protestants of the Established Church most. Nevertheless, some of these had to turn over land to Catholics, and, given that they made up less than 10 per cent of the population, they feared that any further concessions to Catholics or to Protestant nonconformists would make their position highly vulnerable. Moreover, although the English government guaranteed their ascendancy within Ireland, their interests were always subordinated to those of England whenever the two clashed. Thus the Restoration regime in England continued the long-established policy of making sure that the Irish economy could not threaten its own. The export of Irish wool to foreign countries had long been prohibited, and in 1662 the English parliament passed an act making it a felony.³⁴ Two acts of 1663 and 1667 put a stop to the rapidly expanding and highly prosperous Irish cattle trade, in order to protect the interests of English cattle-breeders.³⁵ Breeders in Ireland, who had suffered considerably as a result of the restrictions placed on the import of Irish cattle into England imposed in 1663, were outraged when it became apparent in late 1666 and early 1667 that the English government was planning a total prohibition. One Dublin Protestant predicted the new bill would ‘certainly beggar us’;³⁶ similarly, Sir Heneage Finch, speaking in the English parliament, reminded his fellow MPs that the Protestant adventurers had just been forced to give up two-thirds of their estates and claimed that the proposed bill would ruin them.³⁷ Yet it was not only Protestants in Ireland who would suffer; Catholic breeders also had much to lose. Revealingly, we find opponents of the Irish Cattle Bill prepared to embrace the argument that, by enacting a measure that would strike at the economic prosperity of the Catholic community, the English government would jeopardize the well-being of the English interest in Ireland. In February 1667, shortly after the passage of the second Irish Cattle Act, the earls of Anglesey and Burlington and Viscount Conway (all peers with substantial Irish landholdings) drew up a detailed memorandum to the King representing ‘the growing evils that Act must inevitably bring’, claiming that many Irish ‘who cannot find a livelyhood by the breeding of Cattle’ had ‘already gone into actuall rebellion, burning and spoyling the English’, and warning that ‘the necessities and poverty of the Generality’ not only would decrease the King's revenues but might even ‘invite and facilitate invasion’. The solution, they sugested, was to lift the prohibition and allow free trade.³⁸ Protestant traders in Ireland received a further blow from the Navigation Act of 1671, which undermined Irish overseas trade by insisting that all imports from the colonies had to be landed first in England.³⁹ As a Letter from a Gentleman in Ireland put it in 1677, the jealous English ‘interpret our industry as Theft’: ‘you prohibit our Cattel, you restrain our Wool; our Manufacture is intolerable; you forbid our Trading with any Forreign Commodities in your own Plantations… We are in all things, indeed, treated by you like, or worse than Aliens.’⁴⁰

Protestant nonconformists, who in Ireland outnumbered members of the Established Church, and the Cromwellian settlers (most of whom were themselves nonconformists) were alike upset with both the settlement in the Church and the land settlement. A minority of extremists resorted to active conspiracy against the restored regime. In the spring of 1663 a group of discontented army officers, led by Lieutenant Thomas Blood and Colonel Alexander Jephson, together with a few nonconformist ministers, launched an unsuccessful plot to seize Dublin Castle and the strongholds of Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Clonmel, with the aim of overthrowing both the land and the ecclesiastical settlements. In their printed declaration, they proclaimed their intent to secure ‘the English interest in the 3 Kingdoms’, which they alleged was being ruined ‘by countenance given to popery’, and demanded that ‘all the English’ should be restored to the estates they possessed as of 7 May 1659 and ‘That Religion should be setled according to the Solemne League and Covenant’. They did not call for the reinstitution of a republic, however, but intended to declare ‘For the King, and English intrest’.⁴¹ Rumours of republican conspiracy in England in the 1660 often contained an Irish dimension. Thus in 1664 there were reports of a plot linking England, Holland and ‘the old army in Ireland’, headed by the exiled republicans Algernon Sidney and Edmund Ludlow, while in August 1665 there surfaced rumours of a plot in the English West Country, which again involved a simultaneous conspiracy in Ireland.⁴² Fears of a French or Dutch invasion of Ireland in 1666, at the time of the second Anglo-Dutch War, prompted the government to take heightened security measures as it feared for the loyalty of the more disaffected nonconformists of Ireland (especially in Ulster); the covenanter rebellion in the south-west of Scotland in November of that year had the same effect. The government was probably overreacting, as Ireland was to remain quiet, but it clearly felt that it was better to be safe than sorry.⁴³

The extent of discontent among Cromwellian settlers and non-conformist elements in Ireland is difficult to gauge. In 1663 Jephson had alleged that the discontent among the English was ‘so generall’ following the proceedings of the court of claims that they would not ‘long beare it’, though his remarks undoubtedly betray the self-delusion of a desperate plotter.⁴⁴ Some of the revelations of supposed republican plots involving malcontents in England and Ireland were little more than the product of the fertile imaginations of unscrupulous informers seeking to feed off government paranoia. Nevertheless, the assize records for Clonmel, County Tipperary, which happen to survive, hint at pockets of disaffection in the Irish south. For example, one Charles Minchin was indicted at the April 1663 assizes for having said on several occasions over the past couple of years ‘that if there were but three men [in Ireland] to oppose the King his comeing into his Kingdomes, he would be one’, adding that he would readily engage against the government rather than hand over his estate. At the same assizes, one Henry Feltham was indicted for saying that he hoped the King ‘were served as his father… was’ and ‘That it was like to goe hard with the English Enterest’ that Ormonde ‘did rather favour the Irish Entrest then the English Enterest’, while one Daniell Quinlyn was indicted for saying he cared not ‘for the King Queene or Duke of York’ since he got more by Cromwell than by them. All three were found not guilty, it should be said, perhaps suggesting that the prosecutions were malicious. On the other hand, the Clonmel records abound with allegations of seditious talk in the early years of the Restoration, intimating at least that political tensions ran high in this area and that many were suspected of harbouring deep grievances against the new regime. They also point to tensions between the Gaelic Irish and the Cromwellian interlopers: one of Feltham's accusers was a man called Teige Magrath; at the April 1663 assizes Thomas O'Dwyer was indicted for refusing to help a constable pacify an affray and accusing the constable of being a rebel; while in October 1665 one David Davies was accused by one Mortagh O'Bryen of saying that he wished ‘Oliver Cromwell were alive againe’ and ‘the King hanged’.⁴⁵

When all is said and done, it appears that the great majority of Protestant dissenters in Ireland did become reconciled to the Restoration regime, which afforded them a good measure of de facto toleration. Ireland never saw the establishment of the same type of penal code as was to emerge in England; it thus had no Conventicle Act nor Test Act. One Dublin correspondent observed in late 1666 that local officials were prepared to ‘winck at’ nonconformist worship, ‘It stomaching our Constables’, he said, ‘to secure such when they say they may not disturbe the Papists at their meeting’; even the bishops, aware that the Irish dissenters were not as ‘troublesome nor quarrelsome as those of Scotland’, seemed willing to connive at them.⁴⁶ In the late 1660s and early 1670s the royal administration in London moved towards a policy of informal indulgence, instructing successive Lord Lieutenants not to proceed against nonconformists without specific authorization from the King. By leaving alone those who accepted the Restoration settlement, the government thereby hoped to isolate the more militant types and thus concentrate its energies on those who posed a true threat. The biggest worry were the Scottish Presbyterians in the north, who were well organized with their own, independent, ecclesiastical structure. However, the tacit support of the vast majority of Presbyterians in Ireland was secured by the regium donum of 1672, a grant by the crown of £600 per year to ministers of the Presbyterian Church, which was graciously accepted, even in Ulster, as a gesture of the government's goodwill. Although tensions existed within the Presbyterian movement in Ireland, and itinerant preachers from Scotland did their best to keep the covenanting tradition alive among the rank and file in Ulster, most of the better-off Presbyterians and their ministers were reluctant to rock the boat by engaging in any intrigues with their covenanting brethren across the North Channel not least, perhaps, because of their recognition that any threat to the existing Protestant ascendancy could only work to the advantage of Catholics. Nonconformists were also made freemen of some towns, meaning that economically they were not as marginalized as their counterparts in England. However, neither the government nor the Established Church wanted to see the spread of dissenting congregations, and both remained hostile to any efforts – particularly by the Ulster Presbyterians – to expand into new areas of Ireland. At best, an uneasy equilibrium prevailed.⁴⁷

It was the Catholic majority who had most reason to feel aggrieved, suffering as they did from religious, economic and political disabilities. It is important, however, not to generalize about the Catholic interest in Ireland. Some Catholic landowners, mainly those of Old English stock, did recover their estates at the Restoration, and they were naturally less resentful towards the restored regime than those who did not. The Old English, of course, saw themselves as the heirs of the original English conquerors of Ireland, and thus have to be distinguished from the Gaelic Irish, very few of whom made any gains from the Restoration land settlement and who were most resentful of English rule (though, significantly, it was the Gaelic Irish who typically embraced the myth that the Stuart kings were originally descended from the ancient kings of Ireland and believed therefore that in Charles II they had a king who was theoretically one of their own). We also have to recognize that the concerns of the Catholic landowning classes were different from those of the Catholic tenantry or the Catholic merchants or working classes of the towns, as well as the existence of differences of interest between the laity in general and the clergy. Certainly, the vast majority of Catholics, whatever their background, hoped for some alleviation of their plight, though most, it is probably fair to say, wanted to show that they deserved better treatment because they were loyal subjects. Thus in December 1661 the Earl of Fingall and ninety-seven other Catholic peers, gentry and proprietors subscribed a remonstrance addressed to Charles II pledging their unqualified allegiance to the crown and renouncing all foreign power, ‘be it either Papal, or Princely, Spiritual, or temporal’, in return for religious toleration. More signatures were collected over the next few months, bringing the total number of subscribers to 164 of the ‘chiefest’ of the Catholic laity together with some 70 of their clergy; most of the clergy remained hostile, however, and after a prolonged controversy the subscription was eventually dropped.⁴⁸ Yet spokesmen for the dispossessed Catholics tended to insinuate that the natural desire of the Catholics to be loyal would evaporate if something were not done to ease their burden. Thus the Bishop of Ferns warned that if, out of despair, ‘the destroyed Irish’ chose ‘to joyn with the Scots against the English that possess their Estates’, ‘the English Interest’ would without a doubt ‘be lost in Ireland’; it was thus in ‘the true Interest of England’ to raise ‘the Irish as a Bulwark, or bal-lance, against our English and Scotch Presbyterians’. Favouring the Irish would also ‘quash all the Designs against England, That France or any Foreigner may endeavour to ground upon the discontents of a destroyed, and desperate people’.⁴⁹

The trouble for the crown, however, was that any concessions granted to Catholics in Ireland ran the risk not only of alienating the Protestant interest in Ireland, but also of stirring up political trouble in England, where suspicions were already emerging that the royal administration was soft on popery. During the administration of the Cabal, when Charles was experimenting with a policy of greater indulgence for Catholics and for Protestant nonconformists in England, moves were made to ease the plight of the Catholics in Ireland. Lord Berkeley, appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1670, not only showed considerable favour to the Catholic clergy, but also admitted some Catholics as JPs and to other minor offices, and in March 1672 he issued a general licence allowing Catholics to buy or lease property in corporate towns and to be admitted as freemen, as well as restoring them to ‘all the privileges and freedoms’ they or their ancestors had enjoyed during the reign of Charles I. In May 1672 Berkeley was replaced by the Earl of Essex, whose ‘New Rules’ for the corporations of Ireland in September 1672 allowed the head of the government in Ireland to dispense office-holders and freemen from the requirement to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. The primary aim was to enhance royal control over the corporations in Ireland – the new rules also provided that all new office-holders had to be approved by the Lord Lieutenant and the Irish privy council – but the effect was to raise a challenge to the Established Church's monopoly of office-holding. Thus over the next few months Essex issued a number of dispensations to both Catholics and Protestant nonconformists; in Dublin alone, some nine or ten Catholics took their seats on the common council, while Kinsale saw the intrusion of several new freemen with Irish names.⁵⁰ During this time the royal administration in England also showed itself willing to re-examine the land settlement. In January 1672, responding to a petition from Colonel Richard Talbot (the future Earl of Tyrconnell) on behalf of the ‘distressed subjects of Ireland… outed of their estates’ by the late usurped powers, Charles II set up a commission of inquiry to inspect the Act of Settlement and the Act of Explanation, their implementation and the disposing of forfeited lands.⁵¹

The new spirit of self-confidence that such concessions engendered among Catholics proved alarming to many Protestants. From Munster, the Earl of Orrery (the former Lord Broghill) reported how, following the council's decision of March 1672 to allow Catholics to become freemen, ‘the old Rebellinge Irish Magistrates’ of Cashel, in County Tipperary, ‘Came in a body’ and demanded that the present magistrates hand over power to them. The English, ‘haveinge noe Garrison to Defend them’, were terrified, but after stalling for time eventually secured a letter from the King explaining that the intent (at this time) was only to allow Catholic merchants to dwell in the towns, not admit them to the magistracy. Orrery also complained about the greater insolence of the Catholic clergy. In Limerick, one priest conducted a Catholic funeral in broad daylight in a Protestant churchyard ‘almost under the Nose of the Bishop of Lymerick’, without so much as asking leave. Although the Catholic clergy did seek Orrery's permission to hold masses publicly in the city, they had already signalled their intention to worship openly, having erected convents and mass houses ‘in hundreds of Places’, some in open view right by the highway, while one of their archbishops was reported to have boasted that shortly all Protestants ‘should be Compeld to goe to Mass’. Indeed, in parts of the west Catholics were refusing to pay tithes to the parish minister, declaring that ‘they would Pay them to the Romish Priest of the Parish’.⁵²

News of such developments provoked a strong reaction in the English parliament. On 10 March 1671, in a petition to the King against the growth of popery, parliament complained of ‘the great Insolencies of the Papists in Ireland’, ‘the open Exercise of Mass’ and the activities of the titular archbishops and bishops.⁵³ Then in March 1673, with concerns about the growth of popery already heightened by the English Declaration of Indulgence of the previous year, the Commons called for the maintenance of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, the recalling of the commission of inquiry, the removal of Catholic judges, JPs, sheriffs and magistrates, the banishment of all Roman Catholic clergy out of Ireland, and the exclusion of Catholics from the corporations.⁵⁴ A period of tightening-up followed. Several corporations, including those of Dublin, Waterford and Kinsale, passed by-laws stating that no one was to be admitted as a freeman unless he first took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, the question of the land settlement remained on the agenda. Over the course of 1678 the Irish privy council considered various proposals for a bill to be brought before a forthcoming parliament in Ireland for the confirmation of estates and the remedy of defective titles; this caused considerable alarm to those Protestants who felt that the Catholics had already received more land than was their due while they themselves had remained inadequately compensated for land given up at the Restoration.⁵⁶ The outbreak of the Popish Plot in England in 1678, however, meant that no Irish parliament was called and thus no such bill was forthcoming.

Protestants in both Ireland and England perpetually worried that Irish Catholics were conspiring with the Catholic superpowers of Europe, especially France, to destroy the Protestant interest in Britain. During the war with France and the United Provinces in 1666–7, for example, there were repeated reports that ‘the Irish were tampering with France’ and that the French were going to send an invasion force to help the Irish rise up against Anglo-Protestant domination.⁵⁷ As fears of France intensified in the 1670s, such alarms became more common. In February 1674 Shaftesbury was set to introduce a petition into the Lords proclaiming that Ireland ‘had been in danger of an invasion’ during the third Anglo-Dutch War, of 1672–4, and that the ‘French had intrigues everywhere’ and would have descended upon Ireland ‘if the last battle with the Dutch had been successful’, though the petition was lost with the prorogation on the 24th.⁵⁸ In December 1676 it was reported that Dr Oliver Plunket, the titular Roman Catholic primate of Ireland, had been conspiring back in October 1672 to get the French king and some of the other ‘Catholicke princes abroade’ to send an army to Ireland to assist the Catholics there (‘there beeing very many, whoe hee knew, thatt would take Arms withe them’) and to ‘propagat the faith to the Advantage off the Romishe Church’.⁵⁹

There is no firm evidence that the Irish Catholics ever did contemplate treasonous activity against the crown. To many English Protestants, however, they could never be trusted; hence the need for stern measures. Yet stern measures were likely to provoke the Irish Catholics into desperate action against the English interest. It was a vicious circle. If the King and his ministers tried to alleviate the situation by making certain gestures, however small, towards the Catholic community, they were likely to run the risk of being accused back in England of being soft on popery. In this sense, the Irish problem was inevitably also an English problem, even if the Catholics in Ireland themselves were not actually causing any problems.

The tensions within Ireland were so deep, and so difficult to address without creating adverse knock-on consequences, that it might seem fair to conclude that the situation there was inherently unstable. Yet it would be wrong to paint too bleak a view. Indeed, for much of Charles II's reign a relative equilibrium established itself in Ireland. The Irish economy began to recover after the devastation caused by warfare in the 1640s, and many of those who lost out as a result of the Restoration settlement in Church and state, while far from happy, found that they were able to make their peace with a regime that was not too strict in enforcing the penal codes and managed to provide for some degree of economic prosperity. One Protestant pamphleteer, writing in 1689, looked back on the reign of Charles II and observed that

though the Papists were too much countenanced and indulg'd; and many hardships placed on the Protestants, especially in relationship to the Act of Settlement, yet by the favour of Heaven… Ireland was under very auspicious circumstances: The church Flourished, Trade Increased, the Cities and Towns were every Year inlarged with new Additions, the Country Inriched and Beautified with Houses and Plantations, the Farms were loaden with Stock, and ready and quick Markets there were to vent them: The Laws had a free and uninterrupted course, and a standing Army was so far from being a Terrour, that they were the comfort and security of the people.⁶⁰

The imperial Protestant bias as well as the retrospective nostalgia is transparent: for English Protestants in Ireland, almost any year would have been better than 1689, while the very qualifications the author himself introduces hint at the existence of deep-seated discontents brewing beneath the surface. At the same time, however, such observations contain an element of truth. Things were not that bad in Ireland, or, at least, they were not as bad as they might have been, or had been in the past, or were to be again in the future. In many respects, Ireland proved less troublesome for Charles II than did England. And the situation in Ireland was nowhere near as volatile as it was in Scotland.

SCOTLAND

It had been Scottish resistance to the imposition of the Laudian Prayer Book in 1637 which had triggered the crisis that had led ultimately to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy. In the late 1630s and early 1640s the Scottish covenanters achieved a revolution in Church and state that resulted in the overthrow of episcopacy, the establishment of a Presbyterian system of church government, and the curtailment of certain royal prerogatives (such as the right of the Scottish king to choose his own ministers, to call parliament, or to control the armed forces). The Scots had no sympathy for a republic, however; their ideal was a covenanted king. They allied themselves with Charles I during the second civil war of 1648, on condition that he support Presbyterianism, and, following the regicide in January 1649, they proclaimed his son king not just of Scotland, but also of England. Charles II was subsequently crowned at Scone in January 1651, though not until after he had been made to sign the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. Scotland had to be conquered and occupied by the English to keep it subdued. It is true that a minority of hardline covenanters, or ‘Protesters’, distanced themselves from the explicit royalism of the moderate ‘Resolutioners’; their goal was the extension of a Presbyterian theocracy over all of Great Britain. Yet the Protesters, as much as the Resolutioners, disliked the Erastianism and the religious tolerance of the republican regimes of the 1650s, and, although both ecclesiastical groups flirted with the Interregnum governments in an attempt to secure power and influence and promote their own religious agenda, the roots established by the republic north of the border were even shallower than they were in England or Ireland.⁶¹

The restoration of monarchy in the spring of 1660 – triggered, as it was, by the intervention in England by the army of Scotland under the command of General Monck – thus proved welcome to most Scots. According to the Earl of Balcarres, never did a king succeed ‘to a Crown or Throne more with the Love and Esteem of his Subjects’ than did Charles II ‘generally to all Scotland, of all Professions’.⁶² Edinburgh saw elaborate civic celebrations on 14 May, the day Charles was proclaimed king in the Scottish capital, followed in the evening by bells, fireworks and bonfires, as magistrates and citizens alike celebrated ‘this great deliverance’. There were bonfires and bells in many places throughout the country on 19 June, the official day of thanksgiving in Scotland for the King's restoration; in Edinburgh, on this occasion, an effigy of Oliver Cromwell, with the Devil pursuing him, was ‘blown up’ on Castle Hill.⁶³ Preachers encouraged such celebrations, exhorting their flocks to rejoice at the providential return of a divinely ordained monarch (though warning them not to drink to excess); at Linlithgow, to the west of Edinburgh, James Ramsey delivered a fiery sermon in which he not only preached of the sinfulness of rebellion, but insisted that the king was legibus solutus (that is, absolute), irresistible and unaccountable (except to God alone), and possessed of the power to dispense with or even abrogate the laws in certain instances.⁶⁴

The Resolutioners welcomed the Restoration in anticipation of a Presbyterian settlement; Charles II had, after all, signed the covenants. Charles in fact resented the way he had been treated by the Scots in 1650–51 and disliked Presbyterianism, but his first ministerial team, appointed in the summer of 1660, showed a willingness to compromise. Prominent positions went to the two leaders of the Scottish royalist uprising of 1653–4, the Earl of Middleton and the Earl of Glencairn – the former named commissioner to parliament, the latter chancellor. Yet the earls of Rothes, Cassillis and Crawford – three ex-covenanters – became Lord President of the Council, justice-general and Lord Treasurer respectively, while the crucial position of Secretary of State went to another ex-covenanter, the Earl (later Duke) of Lauderdale, a man of moderate Presbyterian sympathies but whose loyalty lay first and foremost with the crown. Only Protester opinion was not represented.⁶⁵

Rendering the King Absolute

Charles certainly did not want clerics determining the nature of the Restoration settlement north of the border, however. He therefore decided that the general assembly of the Church should not be allowed to meet; as a result, the working-out of the Restoration settlement was left to the laity in parliament, which sat from 1 January 1661. Middleton secured the enactment of a legislative package that undid the Presbyterian constitutional and political reforms of the 1640s and returned the Scottish polity in Church and state to the position of 1633. He was helped by the decision to revive the Lords of the Articles, the select parliamentary steering committee used to manage the passage of legislation through parliament – an act of 1640, which had received the royal assent in 1641, had determined that parliament could choose or not choose a committee of Articles, as it thought expedient – although the committee was not, for the time being, the mere tool of the court that it had once been, since the peers, shire commissioners and burgh commissioners were allowed to choose their own representatives (there were as yet, of course, no bishops).⁶⁶ Middleton's programme did meet with a fair amount of opposition, but bribes and threats enabled the government to win over potential opponents, thereby leaving diehard critics isolated and in no position to mount an effective challenge. Yet Middleton was also able to tap into a marked royalist and anti-clerical reaction among the traditional ruling classes of Scotland, who were eager to diminish the influence of the clerical estate in policy formation and anxious to do what they could to please their restored monarch, in the hope of reviving their own political and economic fortunes, which had suffered a serious decline during the troubles of the 1640s and 50s.⁶⁷

On the opening day of the session, parliament passed an act requiring all members to take an oath of allegiance recognizing Charles II as the ‘only Supream Governour of this Kingdome over all persons and in all causes’ and acknowledging that ‘no forrane Prince, Power or State, nor persone civill or ecclesiastick’ had ‘any power or superiority’ over him. The wording was vague, and some members cavilled at the oath – among them the Earl of Cassillis, who quit the parliament – because it seemed to imply that the King was also supreme in ecclesiastics, although the King's advocate hastily issued a reassurance that the supremacy applied only to civil matters.⁶⁸ Then parliament set about undoing the constitutional and religious revolution of the late 1630s and the 1640s. At first it proceeded piecemeal. On 11 January it passed two acts designed to undo the most important constitutional reforms of 1640–41. One affirmed that it was ‘ane undoubted parte of the Royall Prerogative’, by virtue of ‘that Royall power’ which kings ‘hold from God Almichtie’, to appoint officers of state, privy counsellors and Lords of Session, thus undoing a measure of 1641 requiring officers of state to be chosen with the advice of parliament or the privy council. The other confirmed that the power of calling, proroguing and dissolving parliament resided solely in the king, thereby rescinding the Triennial Act of 1640.⁶⁹ Five days later, parliament passed an act ratifying laws from James VI's reign making it illegal for subjects to assemble ‘to treat, consult and determine in any matter of state civill or ecclesiastick’ or to make leagues or bonds without the king's permission, together with a Militia Act asserting that it was the king's right alone to make war and peace and control the armed forces (though this did insist that his subjects should be ‘frie of the provisions and mantenance’ of such forces unless authorized by parliament or a Convention of Estates).⁷⁰ On 22 January parliament declared all acts passed by the Convention of Estates of 1643 – the body that had issued the Solemn League and Covenant – null and void.⁷¹

On 28 March parliament took the more dramatic step of passing a sweeping Rescissory Act, rescinding all legislation passed by ‘the pretendit Parliaments’ of 1640, 1641, 1644, 1645, 1646, 1647 and 1648, thereby putting the constitutional clock back to 1633, the last time a valid parliament was deemed to have sat. In the process, the Rescissory Act undid all the laws establishing Presbyterianism, though it did not define the legal framework within which the Church was to operate. An Act concerning Religion and Church Government, passed that same day, allowed for the continuance of sessions, presbyteries and synods until a future settlement was reached, but declared that it was the King's resolution to maintain the doctrine and worship of the Protestant religion as established in Scotland during the reigns of Charles I and James VI, adding that the King would ‘make it his care to satle and secure’ a frame of Church government that was ‘most agreeable to the word of God, most suteable to monarchicall Government, and most complying with the publict peace and quyet of the Kingdome’. In effect, it established that it was the king's right to settle the government of the Church.⁷²

In England, the political settlement had involved a return to the constitutional position of 1641, keeping the reforming legislation that had been enacted in response to royal initiatives in the 1630s. Scotland, by contrast, returned to 1633. Given that the troubles in Scotland had started in 1637, undoing everything enacted since the parliament of 1633 might seem a logical way of returning to the status quo ante. According to George Mackenzie of Tarbat, ‘a passionate cavalier’, all the acts passed by parliament since 1640 ‘were but a series of rebellions’. Moreover, the acts of January–March 1661 restored prerogatives to the king in Scotland – such as the right to appoint officers of state, to determine the sitting of parliament, and to control the armed forces – that he was acknowledged to possess in England. However, there were some moderate Cavaliers who thought that the legislation of the 1641 parliament should not have been rescinded, since Charles I had sat in that parliament and it was ‘dishonourable’ to his memory as well as ‘a dangerous preparative, to rescind all that had past in a time when the people were made to believe, that these Parliaments were warranted by his Majesty’.⁷³ Yet it was the Presbyterians who found most to object to about the constitutional settlement of 1661. Because the Reformation in Scotland (unlike that in England) had been carried out in resistance to the monarchy, the confirmation of the royal prerogatives and the attack on resistance in the legislation of 1661 embodied a condemnation (in Presbyterian eyes) of the principles upon which the Protestant state in Scotland had been founded. As the contemporary Presbyterian historian James Kirkton was later to complain, between them these measures condemned ‘all the resistance that ever hade been made to any of the antient tyrants; and more especially all that the estates of Scotland had done in the late Reformation’. They therefore ‘changed both the frame and principall of the people of Scotland’; in short, the Scottish parliament ‘hade done what they could to render their King absolute’.⁷⁴ Other Presbyterian apologists agreed. For Alexander Shields, the Restoration political settlement was a conscious attempt ‘to pervert and evert the well modelled and moderate Constitution of the State-Government… by introducing and advancing ane Arbitrary Tyranny’.⁷⁵

There was no need for a coronation in Scotland, since the Scots had already crowned Charles II in 1651. They did nevertheless commemorate the English coronation of 23 April 1661: the Scottish capital saw a lavish civic feast, loyal toasts at the market cross, and a huge bonfire at Holyroodhouse, while there were similar celebrations in other large towns throughout the kingdom.⁷⁶ To help cement the loyalty of the Scottish people to the restored monarchy, parliament passed an act stipulating that 29 May should ‘for ever be set apart as a holy day’ to commemorate Charles's birthday and ‘blessed restitution to his Government’: all work was to stop; public prayers were to be said in church; and the rest of the day was to be spent in suitable ‘lawfull diverteisments’. The act's preamble condemned what had happened over the previous twenty-three years (that is, since the National Covenant of 1638) as resulting in the ‘ruine and destruction… of Religion, the Kings Maiestie and his Royall Government, the lawes, liberties and propertie of the people and all the publict and private interests of the Kingdome’, and complained how when the King was driven out of his kingdoms not only were the foundations of Scotland's ancient constitution overturned but the Scots were also ‘exposed to be Captives and slaves to Strangers’ (an allusion to the Cromwellian conquest). There was no tradition of celebrating the king's birthday in Scotland, and 29 May had no special significance in the Scottish context, marking, as it did, Charles II's restitution to his government in London; yet, despite its being an English import, the Scots were being asked to celebrate Restoration Day as marking the return of Scottish liberties and Scottish independence. The Presbyterians would have nothing to do with it, being against all anniversary holy days in principle; they refused to keep Christmas or Easter, so they were hardly likely to ‘doe that for Charles [which] they scrupled to doe for their Saviour’. Nevertheless, Presbyterian complaints that this was ‘the most prophane day in the year’, given over to ‘riot, madness, swearing [and]… drunkenness’, suggest that it was celebrated in style by many. There were grand festivities throughout much of the kingdom in 1661. Edinburgh saw sermons in all the churches in the morning, followed by a sumptuous feast prepared by the city authorities for the nobility and principal members of parliament, and bonfires throughout the town in the evening.⁷⁷

At the Restoration the Scots also revived the commemoration of August (for James VI's deliverance from the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600) and 5 November (for James VI and I's deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot). The Scots had dared not commemorate either during the time of ‘the late Usurpation’, because both were celebrations of the Scottish monarchy; for the Scots, the Gunpowder Plot had been an attempt against the Scottish royal race ‘by sume Englishche traitouris’. The days therefore took on nationalist overtones after 1660, their revival after years of subjection to English rule marking deliverance from ‘thair bondage’.⁷⁸

There was to be no general indemnity in Scotland as there was in England (where only thirty-three individuals were excluded from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion of 1660), and Middleton and Glencairn showed a vindictive thirst for revenge. A number of prominent Protesters were pursued to death: the covenanter leader the eighth Earl of Argyll was executed in May 1661 for his alleged treasonable compliance with the Cromwellian regime; James Guthrie on 1 June for authoring his Causes of the Lord's Wrath; Samuel Rutherford died in prison in March of that year while awaiting trial for treason for his tract Lex Rex; and the Earl of Wariston, the author of the National Covenant, was executed in July 1663.⁷⁹ When parliament eventually did pass an Act of Indemnity, in September 1662, some 700 were excluded from the act's provisions and became liable to heavy fines ranging anywhere from £200 to £1,800 Scots, and totalling in excess of £1 million Scots (£83,333 sterling).⁸⁰

As with England, it proved difficult to put the monarchy in Scotland on a sound financial footing. In 1661 parliament granted what it thought would prove a generous settlement of £40,000 sterling (£480,000 Scots) per year for life, to be raised from customs and excise, though the yield fell below that anticipated.⁸¹ In 1663 parliament therefore granted the crown the right to impose customs and excise on foreign trade.⁸² Nevertheless, Charles still found his income inadequate. The situation was not helped by weaknesses in the Scottish economy, in turn made worse by the policies pursued by the English government. The special trading privileges that the Scots had formerly enjoyed with France, which had been taken away during the period of Cromwellian rule, were not restored at the Restoration.⁸³ Furthermore, the English Navigation Act of 1660 excluded the Scots from colonial trade, and, although the measure was designed primarily to hit the Dutch, England seemed unconcerned by the fact that the Scots were a major trading partner of Holland.⁸⁴ The situation was exacerbated by the second Anglo-Dutch War, of 1664–7, which caused a further depression in the Scottish economy. By March 1665 it was being reported that trading and traffic by sea had ‘ceased universallie… to the havy dampnage and wrak of the pepill’, as international commerce became disrupted and all the seamen of Scotland were pressed into the King's service – to fight in a conflict from which the Scots themselves had nothing to gain.⁸⁵ Yet, since the depression hit Charles's Scottish revenues, he had no option but to ask parliament for additional money – a risky proposition during a time of recession. In 1665 parliament voted a land tax of £666,667 Scots (about £55,000 sterling), to be raised over five years, to meet the extraordinary expenses associated with the Dutch war. In 1667 it reintroduced the cess (a covenanting innovation of 1645, which taxed the valued rental income of land rather than its capital value), providing an additional supply of £72,000 Scots (£6,000 sterling) a month, for a period of a year.⁸⁶ This assessment was to provide the basis for all future parliamentary subsidies during the reign.

Shortage of money weakened the coercive power of the state in Scotland. The remains of Monck's Scottish army were disbanded by 1662, and all the King could afford to keep was a small contingent of foot and horse guards, totalling some 1,200 men.⁸⁷ For internal security, the crown was forced to rely on the militia. In September 1663 parliament – ostensibly concerned about the international situation, and especially the threat to western Christendom posed by the Turks, who had already overrun much of central Europe – passed a remarkable act which not only reaffirmed that the king possessed the ‘sole power’ to raise, arm and command his subjects, but also made an offer of 20,000 foot and 2,000 horse to be raised by the shires ‘to be in readinesse’, at the king's summons, ‘to march to any parte of his dominions of Scotland, England or Ireland for suppressing of any forraigne invasion, intestine trouble or insurrection or for any other service whairin his Majesties honour Authority or greatness may be concerned’.⁸⁸ The government found law and order most difficult to establish in the Highlands, where clan chieftains such as the ninth Earl of Argyll and the earls of Atholl and Seaforth enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in their private fiefdoms. The military resources of the Highlands, however, were to be effectively harnessed by the Restoration regime on a number of occasions to deal with domestic discord in the Lowlands.⁸⁹

It was the religious settlement that proved most controversial. As in England and Ireland, full diocesan episcopacy was restored. However, there had never been a particularly powerful episcopalian tradition in Scotland. Charles wanted to restore bishops in Scotland in part to keep the religious establishment there in conformity with his other kingdoms and in part because bishops, being royal appointees, afforded the crown greater control over the Church than was possible under Presbyterianism. Among Charles's chief Scottish advisers, Middleton, Glencairn and Rothes (despite his covenanting past) all supported an episcopalian solution; Crawford remained staunch in his defence of Presbytery; Lauderdale, caught between his instinctive (and self-interested) loyalty to his royal master and his sympathies for Presbyterianism, could only suggest deferring the matter to the churchmen. But the voice of the churchmen was not to be heard. Following the Rescissory Act, the synods of Glasgow and Ayr, Fife, Dumfries, and Galloway all drew up resolutions against episcopacy and in favour of Presbyterianism; all were forcibly dissolved to silence their opposition. The synod of Aberdeen was alone in expressing support for episcopacy. No wonder the King remained resolute in his determination not to allow a general assembly to meet.⁹⁰ On 14 August 1661 Charles II sent instructions to his Scottish privy council informing it that, in accordance with the power placed in his hands by the Act concerning Religion and Church Government of 28 March, it was his intention ‘to interpose our royall authority for the restoring of that church to its right government by bishops, as it was by law before the late troubles’, in order to promote ‘its better harmony with the government of the churches of England and Ireland’; Presbyterianism he condemned as unsuitable ‘to our monarchicall estate’. The privy council issued a proclamation to this effect on 6 September. In other words, bishops were restored to Scotland by royal fiat – ‘the mere Effect of Royal Pleasure’, as the historian of the Presbyterian sufferings Robert Wodrow put it.⁹¹ The government hoped it would be able to persuade Resolutioner ministers to accept bishoprics under the restored Church; most refused, however, with the notable exception of James Sharp, who became archbishop of St Andrews. The result was an episcopate of largely second-rate men.⁹²

A legislative package formally re-establishing episcopacy was enacted during the parliamentary session of 1662. On 8 May the bishops were restored to parliament and to the Lords of the Articles. (The following year the Lords of the Articles were restored to the ‘forme and order’ used before the beginning of the troubles, where the key role in determining the committee's complexion was assigned to the bishops.) On 27 May parliament passed an act ‘for the restitution and reestablishment of the antient Government of the Church by Archbishops and Bishops’, and on 11 June this was followed with a measure restoring lay patronage and depriving all ministers appointed since 1649, unless they had subsequently applied for and received presentations from the former patrons and collation from their local bishop. June 11 also saw the passage of an act threatening with deprivation those who refused to commemorate 29 May. An act of 24 June required all masters, regents and professors of the universities and all ministers to acknowledge and comply with the government of the Church under episcopacy and forbade all private meetings or house conventicles. Another measure passed that day condemned as ‘rebellious and treasonable’ entering into leagues or covenants, taking up arms against the king, and putting limits on obedience, and declared the covenants of 1638 and 1643 unlawful; any who acknowledged the covenants or defended such principles were debarred from holding office. This was reinforced on 5 September with an act requiring all office-holders to subscribe a declaration renouncing the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant and affirming that they lay under ‘no obligation… from the said oaths… to endeavour any change or alteration of the Government either in Church or State As it is now established by the lawes of the Kingdom’.⁹³

As a result of this religious legislation, approximately one-third of the established ministry of about 952 were driven out of the Church. The western and south-western shires – the area south-west of a line from Glasgow, through Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire to the border with England (typically referred to simply as ‘the west’ by contemporaries) – were the worst hit. The synod of Dumfries lost over half its ministers; that of Glasgow and Ayr two-thirds; while in the synod of Galloway (comprising the counties of Wigtown and Kirkcudbright) 34 ministers were deprived in a total of just 37 parishes. The proportions were lower in the east, though a third of the ministry was driven out in the synod of Merse and Teviotdale and in that of Lothian and Tweeddale (that is, the area from Edinburgh down to the border counties of Roxburgh and Berwick). The most highly respected ministers from the presbyteries of Edinburgh and St Andrews also refused to conform. In contrast, there were very few deprivations in the ecclesiastically conservative areas north of the Tay.⁹⁴

The extent to which people were prepared to accept the changes in the Church also varied according to region. Episcopalians and Presbyterians agreed on doctrine and discipline (both were Calvinists), and forms of worship were very similar in church and conventicle; there were no ceremonies enjoined by the episcopalian Church, and no liturgy nor form of prayer, though the episcopalians tended to use the Lord's Prayer and say Amen and thought it proper not to wear their hats during the service.⁹⁵ As one Church of Ireland Protestant put it, those that ‘go under the name of Episcopall men’ in Scotland ‘would seem to us to bee rank fanaticks’.⁹⁶ In those parishes where ministers conformed, things must have appeared to continue much as always. In some areas, people were pleased to see the Presbyterian ministers go. Glencairn exaggerated when he claimed ‘that the insolence of the Presbyterian had so far dissatisfied all loyal subjects and wise men, that six for one in Scotland long'd for Episcopacy’; yet even Presbyterian leaders acknowledged that there was a significant reaction ‘agaynst the Covenant and work of reformation and Presbyterial government’ after 1660.⁹⁷ In some places there was a deliberate attempt to whip up anti-Presbyterian sentiment. On Restoration Day 1662 the magistrates and minister of Linlithgow, with the backing of the Earl of Linlithgow, staged an extravagant anti-Presbyterian ritual in the market place, involving a specially constructed four-pillared arch, on one side of which was a statue of ‘an old Hag’ holding the Covenant with the superscription ‘A Glorious Reformation’, and on the other a statue of a Whig holding the radical Presbyterian Remonstrance of 1650 in his hand. In the middle of the arch hung a tablet with the litany

From Covenants with uplifted Hands,

From Remonstrators with associate Bands,

From such Committees as govern'd this Nation,

From Church Commissioners and their Protestation,

Good Lord deliver us.

On the rear side was a Presbyterian cleric, brandishing Rutherford's Lex Rex and Guthrie's Causes of the Lord's Wrath, while round about lay ‘Acts of Parliament, Acts of Committees of Estates, Acts of General Assemblies, and Commissions of Kirk, with their Protestations and Declarations’ of the past twenty-two years. Above was written, ‘Rebellion is as the Sin of Witchcraft.’ After the minister had said a prayer, the whole contraption was set on fire, as the onlookers toasted the health of the King.⁹⁸

Nevertheless, in many areas – especially the south-west – locals bitterly resented the purge of the Church, and often did what they could to prevent the new ministers taking up their cures. There are reports of parishioners stealing the tongue of the church's bell to stop the bell being pealed to summon people to church, or barricading the church door to prevent the new incumbent from getting in. At Irongray, in Dumfriesshire, the new incumbent met such opposition when he tried to enter the church that he had to return under the protection of a party of armed soldiers, who were then pelted with stones by the women of the parish; the privy council later sentenced the ringleader, Margaret Smith, to be banished to Barbados. The women of Kirkcudbright put up similar resistance, though again to little ultimate effect besides earning some of their number a stint in the pillory.⁹⁹ People's reactions were shaped not just by loyalty to the old ministers but also by hostility to the new recruits, mainly young men from the north, who were widely regarded as unsuitable candidates: not just ‘ignorant’, but even of dubious moral character – in short, ‘the very Scorn of Reformation and Scandal of Religion’.¹⁰⁰ Even the episcopalian apologist John Sage acknowledged that there was a ‘too hasty Planting of Churches in the West… by which many Young Men were preferr'd’, some of whom were guilty of ‘Imprudent Conduct’.¹⁰¹ The result was widespread withdrawal from church throughout the south-west, as parishioners chose instead to attend the family worship and exercises of their outed ministers, or else those of Irish Presbyterian ministers who had fled to Scotland following the religious settlement in their own country. Often more people attended such meetings than could possibly fit into the minister's house, with the result that some of the deprived clergy had to preach outside or else hold their services in a field; hence the beginning of field conventicles.¹⁰²

Cold Friends and Violent Enemies – Lauderdale's Ascendancy

The settlement in the Church was accompanied by a change in the royal administration. Crawford resigned, rather than renounce the covenants; an attempt by Middleton in 1663 to exclude Lauderdale from the indemnity backfired and led to his own disgrace; while the ageing Glencairn died in 1664. From 1663 Lauderdale emerged with unrivalled control over affairs in Scotland – a position he was to enjoy until his fall in 1680. He was by all accounts a somewhat uncouth individual: ‘very big’, with his red hair ‘hanging oddly about him’; ‘His tongue was too big for his mouth,’ Gilbert Burnet tells us, ‘which made him bedew all that he talked to: and his whole manner was rough and boisterous.’ ‘Very learned’ and blessed with ‘an extraordinary memory’, he nevertheless ‘had a violence of passion that carried him often to fits like madness, in which he had no temper’. Burnet found him ‘the coldest friend and the most violent enemy’ he ever knew. Clarendon thought him proud, ambitious, insolent and imperious. The King liked him because of his political experience and because of his willingness to do everything that he thought would please the King. In large measure this meant vaunting the King's authority in Scotland and making sure that the Presbyterians posed no threat to the security of the restored regime.¹⁰³

During the period of his ascendancy, Lauderdale's stance on dissent underwent a series of dramatic shifts. Initially, while still dependent on the support of the increasingly hawkish Rothes (now Lord Treasurer) and Archbishop Sharp, who were backed from 1664 by the aggressive hardliner Alexander Burnet, archbishop of Glasgow, Lauderdale was prepared to fall in with a policy of repression. On 10 July 1663 parliament passed a severe act which not only ratified the ecclesiastical legislation of the previous year, but also laid down stiff fines for those who withdrew from church: those with land were to be fined a quarter of their yearly rent; those without, a quarter of their movable goods (with burgesses in addition forfeiting the right to trade and other associated privileges).¹⁰⁴ In January 1664 the crown, by dint of its own prerogative, controversially decided to revive the High Commission, with powers to suspend and depose ministers and to fine or imprison transgressors without indictment, though arguably this was in direct contravention of an act of 1584 which discharged ‘all New Courts not approven by Parliament’. Presbyterians thought the High Commission ‘odious and tyrannical’, because it used an ‘Arbitrary form of Inquisition and summary procedour without any shadow of Legal Process’ and on occasion resorted to savage punishments – such as scourging, branding and transportation – against the enemies of the episcopacy. The High Commission was dissolved after only two years. Not only had it proved ineffectual in dealing with dissent on the scale that existed in Scotland, but it had also served to make the episcopalian order even more unpopular than it had been before.¹⁰⁵

Conventicling activity in the south-west reached such a height that the government decided upon military intervention. Starting in 1663, it dispatched troops under the command of Sir James Turner to the south-west to collect the fines from those who refused to come to church. There was a series of such expeditions over the next few years, the most repressive being in 1666, when the government was concerned that Scottish Presbyterians might cause trouble at home during the time of the Dutch War. The fines exacted were often in excess of the already high statutory limits, and refusers were subjected to free quarter and the distraint of goods. Many not only were reduced to poverty but also experienced physical abuse at the hands of the soldiery.¹⁰⁶ One Presbyterian author, writing after the Glorious Revolution, compared the policy to Louis XIV's dragonnades against the French Protestants in the early 1680s, stating that this was one instance, at least, where ‘we were in fashion before France.’¹⁰⁷ To protect themselves, conventiclers started carrying weapons to their meetings, but this merely convinced the authorities that the Presbyterians were intent on armed insurrection and therefore of the need to step up repression.

It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1665 the exiled minister John Brown produced a lengthy tract, which was smuggled into Scotland from Holland, documenting the sufferings of the covenanters, justifying the resistance to Charles I during the late wars, and insisting that every private man had the right to use force against magistrates turned tyrants.¹⁰⁸ Then, in November 1666, Presbyterian malcontents took Turner captive at Dumfries and proceeded to march on Edinburgh to demand concessions, their ranks swelling to about 1,500 to 2,000 men at their peak, before a combination of defections, disagreements and bad weather forced them to retreat. Government forces eventually put down the remaining insurgents (probably only 8–900) at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills on 28 November, killing about 50 and capturing another 120. Those arrested were brought for examination to Edinburgh, where, according to the covenanter historian Alexander Shields, they were ‘treated so treacherously and truculently, as Turks would have blushed to have seen the like’. The council used torture – in this case the ‘boot’, a metal contraption affixed to the lower leg which could be gradually tightened so as to crush the bones of the individual under examination, which Rothes believed was ‘the only torture used in this kingdome’ – to try to extract information from those who refused to tell what they knew of the conspiracy.¹⁰⁹ At the same time it dispatched General Tom Dalziel to the south-west with 3,000 foot and 8 troops of horse to pacify the region.¹¹⁰ The soldiers not only took free quarter but even used torture in their examinations of suspected conspirators or accomplices. One commander, Sir Mungo Murray, ordered two farmers to be tied to a tree by their thumbs and left hanging overnight, for allegedly giving shelter to two rebels; they would almost certainly have died had not some soldiers, out of compassion, cut them down. When alleged Pentland rebel David McGill, from the parish of Dairy in Ayrshire, managed to evade arrest by slipping away disguised in women's clothing, the soldiers seized his wife, ‘bound her, and put lighted Matches 'twixt her Fingers for several Hours’; she lost one of her hands, and died a few days later. One man, who had been in Lanark on the day that the rebels had marched through that town, was shot by soldiers when he said he could not name any of those involved in the rebellion.¹¹¹

However, such was the depth of support in the south-west for the rebels that the authorities were able to apprehend very few of the ring-leaders. In the end, the government decided to execute just thirty-six of the rebels (although that total would undoubtedly have been higher if more had been captured); others deemed guilty were banished to Barbados or Virginia, while a further fifty-six were indicted for high treason in absentia and declared fugitives. The whole effort was designed to instil fear into the region, and it did achieve some results: fines came in, and some nonconformists were induced to return to church out of fear.¹¹² But the cost was tremendous. The economy of the region – at a time when Scotland was experiencing an economic recession brought on by a disruption to trade caused by the Anglo-Dutch War – was devastated, and there was simmering discontent.¹¹³ Tracts urging resistance continued to appear, maintaining that the kings of Scotland derived their authority from the consent of the people and that the people had the right to call their rulers to account if they exceeded their duty or failed to live up to their side of the contract (which was to preserve the people's rights from injury or oppression). More disturbingly, in July 1668 the Pentland rebel James Mitchell launched an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews.¹¹⁴

Convinced that repression was not working, Lauderdale decided to shift to a policy of moderation. He sought to break free from dependence upon the episcopalian interest in Scotland, using the Pentland rising as a way of discrediting Rothes and Archbishop Sharp, and to tie Presbyterians to the interests of the crown by granting concessions based on the royal prerogative. On 7 June 1669 Charles II granted his first Scottish Indulgence, authorizing the Scottish privy council to reappoint outed ministers who had lived peaceably either to their former parish churches (if they were vacant) or to other vacant livings, though they were to receive their stipends only if they accepted collation from their bishop.¹¹⁵ Under its provisions, a mere forty-two Presbyterian ministers were reinstated. The episcopalian interest was nevertheless deeply alarmed. Sharp thought the Indulgence violated the legislation of 1662 re-establishing episcopacy, and with Rothes's assistance he managed to keep indulged ministers out of his diocese. Alexander Burnet of Glasgow went so far as to get his clergy to frame a remonstrance against the Indulgence in September 1669. The council had the remonstrance suppressed, and in December Charles dismissed Burnet, replacing him by Robert Leighton, bishop of Dunblane, a supporter of concessions, who became first commend of the see of Glasgow in 1670 and then, from 1672, archbishop.¹¹⁶

The Indulgence was followed in October 1669 by the Act of Supremacy, which confirmed that the King and his successors might ‘setle, enact, and emit such constitutions, acts and orders, concerning the administration of the externall government of the Church, and the persones imployed in the same, and concerning all ecclesiasticall meitings and maters to be proposed and determined therin, as they… shall think fit’, and rescinded all laws that were inconsistent with ‘his Majesties supremacie’. The act was deeply resented by the Presbyterians, who thought it set up Charles II in Christ's stead. But it was also a substantial blow to the position and prestige of the Scottish episcopate, who felt that they should be consulted by the King on matters of Church policy and alleged that it made the ‘king our pope’. According to Lauderdale, not only was the King now ‘Soveraigne in the Church’, with the right to appoint all bishops and ministers, but he could also ‘remove and transplant’ clerics at will, a power he did not enjoy in England. On the same day, another Militia Act confirmed the King's ability to raise a force of 22,000 men to police not just Scotland, but also England and Ireland. In November 1669 Lauderdale confidently boasted to Charles II that ‘never was [a] King soe absolute as you are in poor old Scotland’.¹¹⁷

Lauderdale's efforts to comprehend Presbyterian ministers within the Church establishment were accompanied by the pursuit of even tougher measures against those who remained active in their dissent. At the beginning of August 1669 the council issued a proclamation requiring heritors to report any who held conventicles on their land.¹¹⁸ Reports of attacks on the houses of episcopalian ministers in the south-west (by Presbyterians, the government assumed, though the Presbyterians blamed highwaymen) led parliament in late November to pass an act making parishes liable for offences committed against incumbent ministers.¹¹⁹ On 13 August 1670 parliament made assaults on ministers or attempts to rob their houses a capital offence.¹²⁰ That same day it also passed a savage Act against Conventicles. This stipulated that unlicensed outed ministers who held religious meetings were to be imprisoned until they either posted bonds for 5,000 Scots merks (£175 sterling) or else agreed to leave the kingdom and never return. Those who attended such conventicles were to be subject to a sliding scale of fines, dependent upon social status: heritors were to pay a quarter of their rent; tenant farmers £25 Scots; cottars £12 Scots; servants a quarter of their annual wage. The master or mistress of any house where such a conventicle was held were to be fined double these amounts, while magistrates of royal burghs where conventicles were kept were to be liable to such fines as the Scottish council thought fit to impose. Any unlicensed minister who preached at field conventicles, including conventicles held ‘in any house wher ther be more persons’ than the house could contain ‘so as some of them be without Doors’, was to ‘be punished with death’. Anyone who helped arrest field conventiclers, on the other hand, was to get a reward of 500 merks for every person he seized and to be ‘indemnified for any slaughter… committed in the apprehension and secureing of them’. Presbyterians complained that the unscrupulous could simply post someone outside the door of a house conventicle, thereby converting it into a field conventicle; the act therefore exposed ‘the Lives of them that so meet… to the mercy of their most malicious Enemies’. Those present at field conventicles were to be fined double the amount for house conventicles. To encourage local officials to be diligent in enforcing the law, they were to be allowed to keep all the fines levied on those under the degree of heritor. The act was set to last for only three years in the first instance, since it was hoped its severity would soon reduce people to obedience, though the King could extend its operation if he thought fit.¹²¹ A few days later parliament passed another act against those who withdrew from church, slightly reducing the scale of fines laid out in the act of 1663, though, like the Conventicle Act, allowing local officials to collect the fines of those who were not heritors and also requiring long-term recusants to subscribe a bond renouncing resistance, on pain of banishment. It too was to last for only three years.¹²²

Lauderdale agreed to such measures both to defuse criticism that he was being too soft on dissent and to encourage the process of accommodation by warning Presbyterians of the dire circumstances should they refuse to comply. He remained committed to the policy of accommodation. In September 1672 the King issued a second Indulgence for Scotland, increasing the scope of the first; it provided for the appointment of two outed ministers to those parishes still vacant, as well as an additional one to serve alongside those already indulged in 1669. As a result, a further eighty-nine Presbyterians were indulged, most of them in the west and south-west.¹²³ The second Indulgence, however, was accompanied by an act reviving for a further three years the legislation of 1670 against conventicles and withdrawing from church.¹²⁴

Nevertheless it was becoming clear by now that Lauderdale's strategy was not working, and the political cost was proving high. Many Presbyterians disliked the Erastian implications of the Indulgences and continued to hold meetings outside the law, and even actively sought to discourage people from attending the services of those outed ministers who now seemed willing to make a compromise with episcopacy. Field conventicles increased as churches were deserted, while some ministers found themselves subjected to physical abuse: Archbishop Leighton learned that some of the incumbents he appointed to vacant parishes in the west were ‘beaten and stoned away’.¹²⁵ On the episcopalian side, Rothes, Burnet and Sharp all condemned the Indulgences for undermining the position of the Established Church and threatening the security of the state. In 1674 the synod of Edinburgh drew up an address warning of the increase of schism and conventicling and the intrusion into parishes of ‘irregular preachers’ who offered the people ‘what doctrines they please’.¹²⁶ Meanwhile, the political tide had turned in England, with parliament's successful attack on Charles's English Indulgence in 1673. Lauderdale was the only member of the Cabal to survive the crisis, but, on the defensive in England and facing increasing opposition in Scotland from those who not only disapproved of his policies but also resented his monopoly of power and patronage, he found it necessary to pursue measures that could gain him more political support. He therefore abandoned concessions and called for the strict enforcement of all laws against dissent. Leighton resigned as archbishop of Glasgow in August 1674, and Burnet was reinstalled.

The result was a progressive tightening of the screw. On 18 June 1674, in response to an order from the King, the Scottish council issued a proclamation requiring heritors to have their tenants subscribe a bond promising not to violate the 1670 Conventicle Act; if the tenants refused, the heritors were to eject them, or face punishment for the offence themselves. Masters were similarly held accountable for their servants, and burgh magistrates for burgesses and inhabitants.¹²⁷ Meanwhile, the fines laid out in the legislation of 1670 began to be imposed in full. In Renfrewshire alone in 1674–6, eleven landlords were fined a staggering £368,031 13s. 4d. Scots for conventicling and nonconformity.¹²⁸ In July and August 1675 the Scottish council decided upon the legally dubious policy of appointing garrisons in certain specified houses in the Presbyterian trouble spots for the purpose of suppressing conventicles, thereby effectively imposing military rule in time of peace.¹²⁹ Then, on 2 August 1677, the council reissued the bond, this time also holding masters and heritors accountable for their servants and tenants observing the laws against withdrawing from church and against illegal marriages and baptisms. The landowning elite bitterly resented being held liable for the behaviour of people over whom they felt they had little control. The heritors of Lanarkshire, following the lead of the Duke of Hamilton, unanimously agreed to refuse the bond. Elsewhere, many decided not to comply. The gentry of Ayrshire and Renfrewshire suggested that a better way of keeping the country quiet would be to extend and enlarge the liberty allowed to Presbyterians.¹³⁰

The government, however, alarmed by the growth of conventicling activity and reports of ‘extraordinary Insolencies’ perpetrated against the orthodox clergy (such as ‘usurping their Pulpits’ and verbal and physical threats), was in no mood to conciliate. Although Lauderdale favoured indulgence, he backed down in the face of opposition from the bishops. The King was also against concessions, refusing to sacrifice ‘the Laws to the Humours and Fashions of private men’. The government therefore decided upon military intervention. Following a suggestion from the Scottish council, on 11 December 1677 Charles ordered the raising of a Highland Host, which was to be sent to reduce the Presbyterian heartlands ‘to due Obedience… by taking free Quarter from those that are disaffected’, disarming all suspected persons, and enforcing the bond. Wodrow had a sinister interpretation of the government's motives, believing that, with Charles II under pressure in England to disband his standing army, ‘it was concerted in the Cabin-council, that all Measures should be taken to exasperate the Scots Phanaticks… to some Broil or other, that there might be a Pretence to keep up the Standing Forces’, at least in Scotland. Not that we should accept Wodrow's charge at face value, since he was clearly imposing a restrospective Whig gloss; however, his remarks do shed some insight into the suspicions that many in England came to harbour about the King's intentions.¹³¹

A force of about 8,000 men assembled at Stirling on 24 January 1678 – some 5–6,000 Highlanders, the rest being regular soldiers or militiamen.¹³² The mere threat of military intervention led the heritors of Fife to submit, while in Dumfriesshire all ‘save some few pitifull persons signed’. Elsewhere, however, most held out. In Glasgow, only 153 took the bond; in Renfrewshire only 2 gentlemen and 3 burgesses subscribed; in Lanarkshire all but 19 of the 2,900 heritors and feuars refused.¹³³ The Highlanders were therefore dispatched to Glasgow and thence to Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire. Presbyterian apologists have painted a dismal picture of terrible atrocities allegedly committed by the Highland Host: murder, rape, torture, theft, illegal exactions of money, and physical abuse – even ‘cutting off Fingers and Hands’. If much of this is apocryphal, as some modern historians have contended, plunder was certainly fairly extensive, with soldiers taking anything from money to possessions to livestock. Wodrow calculated that the heritors of Ayrshire suffered losses totalling well in excess of £200,000 Scots.¹³⁴ One local correspondent observed that all he could write was ‘anent oppressions, robberys, exactions, and stresses of law’;¹³⁵ another complained how ‘the best part in the Kingdome’ had been ‘impoverished and almost laid waist by a Crue of Barbarous and Savage men of another language, custome and of no religion’.¹³⁶

Such intimidation nevertheless proved largely ineffective, so in mid-February the council passed an act imposing lawburrows on those who still refused the bond. Lawburrows were essentially bonds to keep the peace: an individual in conflict with a neighbour could swear before the courts that he was in fear of bodily harm and have his neighbour find sureties not to cause him (or his family) any trouble or molestation. They were thus a not uncommon way of resolving disputes between private persons, and the sureties involved were normally quite trivial sums. For the king to demand lawburrows of his subjects, however, was more controversial, for it was tantamount to declaring that he was ‘in Dread of them’. Moreover, the penalty demanded in this instance was enormous: those pressed with law-burrows would forfeit two years' valued rent if they attended a conventicle or otherwise failed to keep the peace.¹³⁷

Critics of the government challenged the legality of the actions taken against the Presbyterians. On 28 March the Earl of Cassillis presented a detailed paper to the court in London, complaining about the Highland Host, the bond and lawburrows, which he had been assured, he said, ‘were illegal, and not warrantable, either by the Statutes or Customs of the Kingdom of Scotland’. The taking of free quarters, he went on, was against the Militia Acts of 1661 and 1663, which had provided that the Scottish people were to be free from the provision and maintenance of any armies or garrisons, while he had refused the bond himself because he believed it ‘was found on no Law’.¹³⁸ Several papers appeared alleging that the council had ‘no Power to press this Bond’, and that no such bonds might be imposed without parliamentary warrant. John Blackadder, the deposed minister of Troqueer and now a leader of field conventicles, denied that a council edict was sufficient to make masters and heritors answerable beyond what any law had hitherto obliged them, or that it could make men's private rights of possession void for refusing to take a bond which no law required. Two leading lawyers, Sir John Cunningham and Sir George Lockhart, both of whom had actually subscribed the bond, told the government in London that they thought ‘the imposing of it and the Lawborrows was contrary to Law’. Towards the end of May, Hamilton, together with Lord Cochrane, Sir John Cochrane and Lieutenant-General Sir William Drummond, met with the King to put their case against the bond, in which they insisted that ‘Masters could not be obliged to turn their Tenants out of their Land’ for attending a conventicle, since parliament had prescribed that the punishment for such an offence was to be a fine.¹³⁹

The King withdrew the Highlanders at the end of February and the rest of the forces towards the end of April, when he also cancelled the bond and lawburrows. Pressure from within Scotland, however, had little influence on his decision; Charles was responding to developments within England, where parliament was criticizing Charles's build-up of troops and raising the spectre of rule by a standing army. The Committee of the West, which oversaw the operations of the militia, was told that the King fully approved its proceedings, but that ‘Affairs in England, where the Militia made a mighty Noise, made a present disbanding of them necessary’.¹⁴⁰ Charles persistently stood by the actions he had taken in Scotland. He wrote to his Scottish council in March approving all it had done: the law regarded field conventicles as ‘Rendezvous of Rebellion’, and the refusal to suppress them ‘did justly oblidge yow to look upon theire shyres as in a state of rebellion’.¹⁴¹ He had no time for Hamilton's complaints of May, bidding him and his associates to ‘returne to their country and live quiatly and peaceably under the government’, and afterwards he wrote again to his Scottish council to confirm his approval of its proceedings and his dissatisfaction with those who had alleged they were illegal. ‘Wee will upon all occasions’, he insisted, ‘proceed according to our laws against such as endeavour to lessen our prerogatives, oppose our laws or asperse our Privy Councill.’¹⁴²

The privy council similarly denied that it had gone beyond the law. In answer to the Earl of Cassillis's complaint of 28 March, it insisted that the 1661 provision against free quarter applied only ‘to regular times’, but the western and south-western shires were ‘in a state of rebellion’, given the large number of armed men who assembled ‘almost weekly’ in field conventicles. Moreover, the 1663 Militia Act had provided for the militia to be used to suppress ‘intestine trowble or insurrection’. Lawburrows were ‘expresly warranted’ by an act of 1429, and universal lawburrows by one of 1449. With regard to the question of the bond being pressed without law, the council insisted it was only ‘offered’ but not ‘pressed’, and further claimed that no express law was needed to authorize it, since the king and council might do whatever was necessary to secure the peace of the country, ‘providing it be not against expresse laws’.¹⁴³ Lord Advocate Mackenzie, writing in 1679, claimed that making heritors responsible for their tenants was justified by an act of 1529 which recognized the obligation that lay upon ‘all vassals by the feudall Law of entertaining non upon their superiour's lands who shall disobey him’. Anticipating the objection that this law was obsolete, Mackenzie insisted that, although laws whereby subjects were bound to one another might run into desuetude, ‘Lawes wherby wee ar tyd to the King’ could not; nor could ‘publict Lawes relating to the Saftie of the Kingdom’.¹⁴⁴

Field conventicles resumed as soon as the troops were removed, while some who had subscribed the bond publicly repented. Dragoons were once more dispatched to round up conventiclers. Those arrested were allowed their freedom on condition they subscribed the bond, but few did; many ended up being banished to the colonies.¹⁴⁵ At Whitekirk in Haddingtonshire, towards the end of May, a soldier was killed when the King's forces tried to disperse a meeting. The government therefore decided to make an example of the perpetrators and had two of the conventiclers, James Learmont and one Temple, indicted ‘for being art and part’ of the murder. Neither of them had killed the soldier, though Temple had been wearing a sword, while Learmont, though unarmed, had shouted instructions to those who were armed. At first the jury found the pair guilty simply of being at a field conventicle, and the court had to send the jurors back not once but twice to reconsider before they found them guilty of murder. Learmont was executed at the Grassmarket on 27 September; Temple was banished. Many legal experts were ‘alarmed’ at such ‘a terrible stretch’ of the law ‘and a most arbitrary decision’.¹⁴⁶ Instead of serving as a deterrent, such vindictiveness simply induced conventiclers to make greater efforts to defend themselves. In August 1678 John Welsh and at least twelve other nonconformist ministers (one report said thirty-six) held a huge conventicle of some 10,000, lasting three days, at Maybole, near Ayr, where they ‘preached up the Solemn League and Covenant and the lawfulness, conveniency and necessity of defensive arms’. Both before and after sermon they carried out various military drills and armed exercises, declaring they would ‘defend themselves if opposed by his Majesty's forces’. One alarmed contemporary heard they were planning another such conventicle at Fenwick, a mere 34 miles from Edinburgh, and wondered where it would all end. ‘What if they should beat his Majesty's forces, take possession of this principal city, fine, imprison and banish all that oppose them in the first place and in the next all that will not concur with them?’ he pondered. ‘A peaceable government’ would be overturned, and ‘his Majesty's power questioned and limited’. Was ‘this to turn swords into ploughshares?’ Was ‘it not rather to make swords of pruning hooks, and instead of the turtle to set up the alarm of war in our land?’¹⁴⁷

Particularly galling to the Presbyterians was that, while they were experiencing the full brunt of increasingly severe legislation, the Scottish prelates seemed largely unconcerned about the Catholics. An act of 1567 had outlawed the celebration of the mass, stipulating the punishments of banishment and death for the second and third offence, while an act of 1661 had confirmed the prohibition against the mass and ordered all mass priests to leave the country within one month, under pain of death.¹⁴⁸ Furthermore, the legislation of 1663 against withdrawing from church would also have applied to Catholics. However, the laws against popery were but sporadically enforced. Indeed, during the administration of the Cabal, Catholics in Scotland enjoyed what was in effect ‘a Kind of Toleration’. In 1671, for example, while unlicensed Presbyterian conventicles were being harassed in the south-west, the Catholics in the north were busy setting up mass houses and worshipping in the open. Perhaps most insensitively, the council was even willing to employ Catholic noblemen in the drive against Presbyterian dissent. In February 1677, for example, it gave a commission to the Catholic Lord Maxwell to apprehend Presbyterian conventiclers and preachers in Dumfries, Wigtown and Kirkcudbright. ¹⁴⁹

Scottish Policy and the British Problem

The position of the restored monarch was both stronger and at the same time more vulnerable in his northern kingdom than it was in England. The crown's theoretical powers were certainly greater in Scotland, and parliament provided less of a check on the King's freedom of manoeuvre. There is a genuine sense in which the King in Scotland was absolute. On the other hand political and (particularly) religious tensions were more acute than they were in England (where they were hardly insignificant), and domestic peace seemed more fragile. The government was perhaps justified in fearing what might happen if satisfactory measures were not taken to deal with the problem of dissent. A warning had already come with the Pentland rebellion of 1666, and the fact that conventiclers continued to meet in large numbers – armed – and that some even published works advocating resistance, understandably caused alarm. Yet successive attempts to deal with the problem had failed and had probably only made matters worse. It is revealing that, despite the supposed absolutism of the monarchy in Scotland, Charles's chief minister, Lauderdale, often found his own freedom for manoeuvre quite restricted. The need to court the episcopalian interest forced him on more than one occasion to abandon his preferred policy of conciliation. Being driven into the hands of episcopalian hardliners, on the other hand, not only made him political enemies among the elite, but also risked provoking widespread disaffection in certain areas of the country. There were, in other words, fundamental structural problems facing the Scottish polity that made the kingdom difficult to rule and perhaps even inherently unstable.

Lauderdale's monopoly of power and patronage, coupled with the policies he chose to pursue, made him many political enemies in Scotland. By June 1678 it was being said that the kingdom was divided into ‘three several interests’: ‘the Episcopal and Court interest’, headed by Lauderdale, and ‘the interest of religion and presbytery’, at the two poles, and a third ‘interest for liberty and privileges’, headed by Hamilton.¹⁵⁰ Even the likes of Atholl and the Earl of Queensberry, who in the 1680s were firmly in the court and episcopal interest, had moved into opposition to Lauderdale, having broken with him over the bond and the Highland Host. Lauderdale also displayed a ruthless determination to enhance his own power and that of his royal master at the expense of other members of the Scottish ruling elite. For example in August 1677, when he learned that Chancellor Rothes held his office ad vitam (for life), and could not easily be removed, he got the King to write a letter to the Scottish council declaring that henceforth all officers of state should serve during royal pleasure, and inviting present state officials to renounce their rights for life. All complied, and signed a declaration to this effect on 4 September.¹⁵¹

Yet Scottish policy was not simply part of a Scottish problem; it also became part of a larger British problem. As people in England grew increasingly alarmed by the spectre of arbitrary government during the 1670s, what was going on in Scotland emerged as a growing source of concern. In April 1675 the English House of Commons petitioned Charles to dismiss Lauderdale from his counsels, accusing him of seeking to promote ‘an arbitrary form of government over us’, as evidenced by his supposed claim (in reference to the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence) that the King's edicts were ‘equal with laws’. They were also worried that the Scottish Militia Acts gave him command of a force of 22,000 which could be marched ‘into any part of this kingdom, for any service’, and which they learned he had threatened could be used to tame the critics of royal policy in England. On this occasion Charles stood by his minister, and Lauderdale survived the attack.¹⁵² However, Shaftesbury, a prominent spokesman for the country opposition and a future leading Whig, was monitoring the situation in Scotland closely. In his papers is a letter from Edinburgh, dated 10 September 1675, detailing the abuses and oppressions of Lauderdale north of the border and accusing him of threatening ‘to overthrow all our [Scotland's] liberty’.¹⁵³ Shaftesbury would again raise the cry of the threat to liberty in Scotland during the Exclusion Crisis.

Throughout the Restoration period, the government remained haunted by the prospect that discontented elements in all three kingdoms might unite against the crown, with Scotland leading the way, as in the late 1630s and early 1640s. At the end of 1677 Sir Cyril Wyche, in the Dublin administration – bemoaning the perilous state of affairs in Scotland and complaining how ‘discontented great men’ in all three kingdoms had set up in alliance with disaffected Protestant nonconformists – proclaimed that he thought the situation was ‘very like the case in the beginning of the late Revolutions’.¹⁵⁴ Within Scotland, the episcopalian interest, sensing the vulnerability of its position in the face of Presbyterian dissent, naturally looked to England for support.¹⁵⁵ The King himself was prepared to tap resources in Ireland and England to manage discontent in Scotland. Thus in 1674 and again in 1677, when faced with reports that the Scottish south-west was threatening once more to erupt in rebellion, Charles hastily mobilized troops in Ulster and at Berwick-upon-Tweed to be ready to move into Scotland at the slightest sign of trouble.¹⁵⁶ In short, the developments in Scotland also had implications for England and Ireland; the Scottish problem was, in other words, also a three-kingdoms problem.

Nevertheless, Scotland was coming to be appreciated as a potential source of strength for the crown, which might be used to buttress its position within Britain as a whole. We can see this reflected in the debates over a possible union with England in the late 1660s. Initially, in 1668, a commercial union was proposed, as a way of dealing with the recession that had hit Scotland as a result of the Dutch War and also of addressing Scots’ complaints over their exclusion from trade under the English Navigation Act of 1660. The talks came to nothing, but in 1669–70 the emphasis shifted to political union, involving the merger of the two parliaments into one, with the Scots being promised the benefits of free trade in compensation for loss of sovereignty. The idea met with little support in either country: the Scottish ruling elite thought it would be political suicide, the English parliament proved decidedly unenthusiastic, while Charles himself does not appear to have been serious, using the talks simply as a subterfuge to distract attention from his own concurrent negotiations with Louis XIV.¹⁵⁷ Some feared that political union would enable Charles to increase his power over his parliament at Westminster by intruding a solid voting block of pliant Scots, thus rendering him ‘as absolute in Brittain as the French king… was in France’.¹⁵⁸ Yet union in Scotland by those who championed absolute monarchy. As Lord Advocate Mackenzie put it in his Memoirs, there were many in Scotland who thought union destructive to the King's interest, ‘seeing whilst the Kingdoms stood divided, his Majesty had two Parliaments, wherof the one might always be exemplary to the other, and might, by loyal emulation, excite one another to an entire obedience; and, if either should invade the royal prerogative, or oppose unjustly their Prince just commands, the one might prove a curb to the other's insolence’. It would be misguided for the King, they felt, to ‘extinguish a Kingdom’ which could prove ‘so serviceable to him… a Kingdom wherein he might, by his prerogative, govern much more absolutely than in England’, where his power over the Church ‘was as absolute… as could be desir'd’, and where he had ‘more influence upon our Parliaments than in England’.¹⁵⁹ Charles was indeed to appreciate the value of being able to play Scotland off against England, using his parliament in his northern kingdom as ‘a curb to the other's insolence’ to great effect during the Exclusion Crisis, as we shall see later in this book.

CONCLUSION

We have seen how in England many people who initially welcomed the Restoration had their expectations disappointed; not only were there winners and losers, but many of those who lost out had to pay a huge price for having done so. Yet the sufferings in England seem mild in comparison with those in the Stuarts’ other two kingdoms. In both Ireland and Scotland many people who by instinct would have identified themselves as loyal supporters of the Stuart monarchy came to feel that they were being denied basic rights or protection at law. In Ireland, huge numbers of Catholics were left dispossessed as a result of the working out of the Act of Settlement and the Act of Explanation, being denied the right even to prove themselves innocent of treason in a court of law so as to have a hope of reclaiming ancestral lands which had been taken from them in the 1640s and '50s. Catholics and Protestant nonconformists alike were treated as second-class citizens, facing restrictions on their ability to engage in trade, hold office under the crown, or even practise their faith – though in fact both groups were allowed a considerable degree of de facto religious tolerance, which meant that, ironically, in Ireland purely religious issues (as opposed to secular issues which tended to divide people along confessional lines) were never quite as explosive as in England or Scotland. In Scotland, a significant proportion of the population – the overwhelming majority in the south-west – became liable to prosecution under a spiteful penal code because of their adherence to Presbyterianism, and large numbers of people were brutalized at the hands of government troops or officers as the Restoration regime sought to eradicate what it took to be a subversive Presbyterian threat. As a result, the Presbyterians of the south-west responded in the way that we would expect people who had been brutalized to respond: they rose in rebellion, which of course merely confirmed the government's suspicions that the Presbyterians did pose a subversive threat. It became a vicious cycle. While those in England were worried about potential threats to cherished English liberties through the regime's fondness for France, its attempt to establish a standing army and subvert the independence of parliament, and the prospect of a popish successor, and while a minority of the population were genuinely suffering in their lives, liberties and estates during the periodic enforcement waves against Protestant dissent, in Ireland and Scotland the suffering was much greater and more widespread (in the sense that it touched a much higher percentage of the population).

The divisions and tensions that emerged in Restoration Ireland and Scotland were partly related to attempts by the restored monarchy to deal with problems that were of an intrinsically Irish or Scottish nature. But they were also part of a broader British problem. As we have seen, by far the greatest source of contention in Restoration Scotland related to the settlement in the Church. Yet episcopacy was restored north of the border after 1660 not just because it afforded the King greater control over the Church than did Presbyterianism, but also because Charles was determined to bring the Scottish ecclesiastical settlement into line with that achieved in both England and Ireland. In other words, it was a British agenda which forced the pace of the ecclesiastical settlement north of the border. Likewise the land settlement in Ireland was shaped partly by British considerations – a desire not just to keep the Protestant interest in both Ireland and England placated, but also to reward those loyal supporters of the crown within England when English sources of patronage proved insufficient. Time and time again we have seen how initiatives in one kingdom were dictated by developments in another. The periodic clampdowns against Catholics in Ireland, for example, were typically triggered by increasing anxieties in England about the threat of popery. Likewise, the attempts to bolster the authority of the crown in Scotland – we think here of the Militia Acts, the Supremacy Act and Lauderdale's boast about how absolute the King was in Scotland – were in part undertaken to compensate for the crown's awareness of its weakness (in practice) in England. Yet the government's attitude towards the problem of Presbyterian dissent in both the north of Ireland and the south-west of Scotland was tempered by a realization that, if unduly provoked, the two groups might unite in resistance to the restored regime, while the crown found it necessary to withdraw the Highland Host from the Scottish south-west in 1678 in part because of concerns about adverse political repercussions in England. Indeed, English people's growing fears about the alleged threat of popery and arbitrary government in the 1670s were shaped to a significant extent by anxieties about what seemed to be going on in Charles's other two kingdoms, where the threat of popery and arbitrary government seemed real enough.

Put like this, it might seem that the Restoration simply restored the old British problem which had bedevilled the Stuart monarchy in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, certain qualifications need to be made to this view. In the first place, although the Restoration settlements in all three kingdoms were backward-looking, they in fact restored each kingdom to a different phase of its historical development. In England the clock was put back to 1641; in Scotland to 1633; in Ireland to an intermediary situation – pre-Civil War on the constitutional front but not on the landholding front, since a significant number of those who had benefited from the changes in landownership in the 1640s and '50s were able to hold on to their estates (or else were compensated for having to give them up). This asynchronous Restoration across England, Scotland and Ireland means that there was no simple return to the pre-Civil War order when viewed from a three-kingdoms perspective. The three kingdoms had never stood in the same sort of relationship to each other in the past as they were to by 1665–6, say, with the result that the nature of the British problem was different from what it had been before. We should also be wary of talking about the later-Stuart multiple-kingdom inheritance as if it was inevitably a problem. It could certainly create problems, as we have seen in this chapter and as we shall see again in the following chapter. Yet it could also work to the crown's advantage, if the King were shrewd enough to know how to play his separate kingdoms off against each other. We have already seen hints in this chapter that Charles II and his advisers recognized this – notably in the discussion over the proposed plans for union between Scotland and England in 1669–70. We shall see in subsequent chapters that knowing how to play the three-kingdoms card to the crown's advantage was to prove crucial to Charles's success in defeating the challenge of the Exclusionist movement.