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The contest over the identity of the Church of England in the mid-seventeenth century is often conceived from a purely English perspective. This article suggests that considering its neglected European dimension offers a new and fruitful angle on events. It goes on to offer some indicative snapshots of moments when foreign Reformed perspectives and contributions were important. The Covenanter rebellion and arguments over English church reform in 1638-42 were moments when invoking the support of existing European religious authorities formed an important part of both sides' legitimization. In the civil war, competition for continental religious endorsement was avidly pursued by both sides, with mixed results, while royalists also toyed with foreign divines' redefinitions of episcopacy. Complex ways in which foreign Reformed authorities were manipulated into seeming to support the Restoration settlement are flagged. It is noted that Continental divines' own perspectives on English events were notably autonomous and conflicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laura Stewart's Rethinking the Scottish Revolution frequently noted the important role played by women in shaping, driving, and sustaining the covenanting revolution of 1638–1651, and established new ground for examining female involvement in its political, ideological, and cultural legacies. Indeed, following the 1660 Restoration, Scottish politicians charged with managing public order would bemoan the dominant influence of 'fanatick wives' and 'silly women' over those around them and lament their leadership in public petitions, rabblings, and other forms of protest. With few notable exceptions, however, scholarship concentrating on this later period has often paid only limited attention to female nonconformity; noting women's presence as tolerated wives or spiritual correspondents of male leaders without appreciation of their independent participation and leadership. Purposefully written out of – or sanctified – by many of the canonic sources relied upon by historians of the era and left unnamed in edited primary sources, secondary literature frequently depicts female activists as detached from male counterparts yet united by the prescribed piety and gendered expectations of past and present scholars alike. This article will use new archival evidence and revisit edited sources to rediscover the authoritative voices of female covenanters between 1637 and 1715. Moving discussion beyond 'agency' as a satisfactory explanation for female participation in conventicles and other expressions of dissent, it will conclude that these women's cultural authority must be appreciated and integrated within future scholarship if we are to fully appreciate the true legacies of the covenanting revolution as a major, paradigmatic moment in Scottish History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Rutherford's letters draw on biblical imagery and idiomatic metaphors, including contemporary discourses of illness and medicine, to diagnose and promote the spiritual and physical health of individual believers and the Scottish Kirk. This essay examines how Rutherford used language to care for his correspondents enacting a form of literary cure through the letter as a communication technology. Interrogating Rutherford's use of language theologically, politically, and practically to negotiate God's providential care for his people, the traumatic splintering of the church and state in England and Scotland, and caregiving within covenanting communities, reveals how his epistolary practice expands knowledge of the church's historical provision of care, and the intersection of religious and medical caregiving in early modern Scotland. Rutherford's lexical and metaphorical creativity, rendering complex theological concepts emotionally intelligible and rhetorically effective, ensured his letters provided comfort to covenanted godly communities and underwrote their posthumous publication as a devotional and literary classic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complaining women overheard in conversation was a trope deployed in Renaissance literature to criticize public figures and hold them to account. This essay discusses why, and with what effect, an anonymous author used a female persona known to readers of the popular sixteenth-century satirist Robert Sempill in order to comment on the political crisis generated in Scotland by demonstrations against the imposition of the Prayer Book in 1637 and the signing of the 1638 National Covenant. Drawing on interdisciplinary studies of the polemical battle over the reputation of Mary, Queen of Scots, the essay will show how presbyterians appropriated the figure of the lowborn female truth-teller to propagate a partisan narrative about the meaning and interpretation of Scotland's Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 19th and 20th centuries, scholarship on the Scottish parliament was heavily informed by a narrative of 'failure', directed at explaining why its members voted it out of existence in 1707. Part of the problem was the tendency to see any deviation from the practices of the Westminster parliament as weakness. By reappraising parliament in terms of its utility to those who comprised its membership, notably the titled peerage and the monarch, historians have revealed its adaptability and inventiveness, especially in times of crisis. This essay considers how fresh approaches both to what constituted the parliamentary record and what can – and cannot – be found within it have exerted a transformative influence on our understanding of parliament's evolving role in Scottish political life. Although the Reformation crisis of 1560 and the accession of the ruling house of Stewart to the English throne in 1603 effected profound changes on parliamentary culture, this essay emphasises how parliament sustained its legitimacy and relevance, in part, by drawing on past practices and ideas. Historians have become more attentive in recent years to the means by which social groupings ordinarily excluded from formal parliamentary activity were nonetheless able to engage with, and influence, its proceedings. Gaps remain in our knowledge, however. Some periods have been more intensively studied than others, while certain aspects of parliamentary culture are understudied. The writing of Scottish parliamentary history will continue to offer rich possibilities in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1652 Ayr became a garrison town for the Cromwellian army. The English occupation brought challenges for Ayr's kirk session, ranging from the misbehaviour of local residents to the presence of religiously heterodox soldiers. This article surveys social and spiritual responses to the Cromwellian invasion, asking what these responses reveal about the on-going meanings of and commitments to the covenants. It is argued that the occupation brought to the fore both the fragility and flexibility of the community's covenanter identity, which endured long after the covenanting revolution had ostensibly failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Scottish biographer John Boswell. Topics include a description of Boswell's journal in London, England for the period of April 21 to May 16, 1768 in the Yale editors "Catalogue," his final entry for May 16, 1768, his friendship with Edinburgh bookseller Alexander Donaldson, and a brief biographical background on covenanter Robert Trail.

In contrast to recent work on England and other parts of Europe, research on petitioning in early modern Scotland is still in its early stages, notably in respect of its political significance in a comparative context. This article investigates supplicatory activity in Scotland during a crucial period in which the petition came under intense scrutiny. The 1630s saw a determined attempt by King Charles I’s Scottish government to clamp down on the use of supplications to express criticism of royal policy; assertive, but carefully controlled, petitioning was one part of a resistance strategy that resulted in the downfall of the king’s regime. When a new government came to power in 1638 headed by the Covenanters, petitioning activity came to be seen as a potential challenge to their authority. Petitioning does not appear to have invoked ‘opinion’ in 1640s Scotland as has been claimed for England; the printed petition remained a rarity in Scotland. Nevertheless constitutional reform, combined with the wartime conditions of the 1640s, generated more recourse to petitioning, and the government recognized opportunities to enhance its claims to legitimate rule. A preliminary investigation of everyday petitions to the government during the 1640s shows how the narratives constructed by supplicants often sought to endorse its values and ideals, but that this type of petitioning was also used by supplicants to critique the government’s policies and hold it to its own rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a remarkable series of communal confessions that occurred in Ayr in response to the arrival of the plague in 1647, asking what this previously overlooked episode reveals about the local identities forged amid the national turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century. When the disease struck the bustling port on the south-west coast, Ayr had already cemented a reputation for political and religious radicalism, and the town was engaged in on-going defence of the covenants of 1638 and 1643. The minister at the time, William Adair, was a committed presbyterian in the early days of his forty-four-year career in the parish. Faced with the plague and its potential for devastation, Adair led his congregation in a week-long series of public, collective confessions, the details of which were meticulously recorded in the kirk session minutes. Though covenanter identity is often framed as a political and national endeavour, this article argues that the events in Ayr constitute an extraordinary yet widely relevant example of covenanter 'self-fashioning' as a fundamentally local, communal process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the era of the American Civil War, James McMaster (1820–1886), the editor of the New York Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register, advanced the view that the Lincoln administration was a "Puritan" military dictatorship, seeking to impose "Yankee" (New England) policies at the expense of Southerners, Catholics, and the U.S. Constitution. McMaster saw Puritan repression in direct attacks on Catholic freedoms such as the silencing of bishops, the conscription of Catholics to fight a perceived unjust war, and the suppression of Catholic political dissenters. McMaster's criticism of the North, which was initially mixed with criticism of the Confederacy, was at first moderate (by the standards of the time). As the war progressed, though, McMaster's attitude grew more radical as he developed Confederate sympathies, fervent racism, and sympathy with mob violence. Causes of this radicalization include McMaster's pre-war experience with Know-Nothings and other enemies of Catholicism, the death of his Unionist political hero Stephen Douglas, his family background amid sectarian Protestant quarrels, and most significantly, McMaster's friendship with Confederate fellow-prisoners during his imprisonment by the Lincoln administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the initial opposition to the National Covenant from the masters of the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen in 1638. It has generally been assumed that opposition to the Covenant among the intellectual elite was confined to the Aberdeen Doctors. The resistance in universities, however, was much more extensive. Only Edinburgh University, located in Scotland's revolutionary centre, supported the covenanting movement from the outset. In elucidating the widespread nature of opposition in universities, this article draws on a corpus of previously overlooked manuscript and printed sources, especially pertaining to the covenanter's debates with intransigent academics at St Andrews and Glasgow, before setting the Aberdeen Doctor's resistance within the context of this wider academic hostility to the covenanting movement over the course of 1638. Though the universitie's resistance was by no means coordinated, it, nevertheless, represented a pressing concern as the covenanters pursued a national movement. In examining these early intellectual arguments against the Covenant, this article illuminates university master's stark differences with the covenanters over the nature of kingly authority, church government and religious ceremony. Because the universities trained Scotland's ministry and magistracy, these intellectual disagreements had pressing consequences. Thus, far from a minor encumbrance to the covenanting movement in 1638 that resulted in the subscriptions of the masters of Glasgow and St Andrews and the purge of the Aberdeen Doctors, the universitie's resistance to the Covenant proved foundational to the covenanter's subsequent aggressive supervision of higher education within the construction of their fledgling confessional state in the 1640s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few sources have survived relating to the borough of Sunderland in the seventeenth century. However, during the Civil Wars Sunderland was noticed for its support of Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. A Puritan elite, led by George Lilburne, had established Sunderland as a radical borough by the 1630s. Good relations between Sunderland and the Covenanting Scots began in 1639 and continued throughout the Bishops’ Wars (1639–41) and the first British Civil Wars (1642–46). This was unusual in the North East of England as most of County Durham, Northumberland and Newcastle upon Tyne would remain loyal to King Charles I. A trade blockade of Newcastle, Sunderland and Blyth during 1643–44 was quickly lifted at Sunderland after the Scots garrisoned the town in March 1644. This gave Sunderland a temporary, but advantageous, lead over their rivals in Newcastle. Sunderland’s port was crucial for supplying the Scottish Covenanting army and Parliamentarian forces during 1644–46, and the coal mines along the River Wear proved a vital source of revenue for paying the army. The borough’s leaders were well rewarded for their loyalty and, unlike other leading supporters of Parliament in the North, they did not object to paying for the Scottish occupation of the North East. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study carefully examines in context the three occurrences of the רג in the Damascus Document (hereafter: CD). CD 6:21 and CD 14:3-6 treat the רג as an insider and a worthy participant in the session of -the Many- (CD 14:3-6) - albeit as a member on the lower end of the communal hierarchy. The article argues that CD-s patent openness towards the רג is derived from its scriptural interpretation, which integrates two Levitical love commands (Lev. 19:18, 34) and Deut. 24:14 into a single unit. While Lev. 19:34 commands love for the רג, demanding his fair and amicable treatment, he is still set apart from the -true- insiders, namely the Israelites. CD, however, radically narrows the distance between the רג and the neighbour by recasting the רג as a genuine insider who is to be loved and cared for as a brother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The short and militarily inglorious rebellion launched in May 1685 by Archibald Campbell, 9th earl of Argyll against the regime of James VII and II is often overlooked, partly on account of its rapid disintegration and partly because outside events - not least the much more famous Monmouth rebellion in south-eastern England - tend to draw attention away from it. Yet in ignoring the rising, historians risk missing its value as a tool for understanding the social and political dynamics of late-seventeenth-century Scotland. This article presents a reassessment of Argyll's rebellion from that perspective, demonstrating how the insurgency and the government counter-attack threw the ongoing processes of Highland/Lowland convergence into sharp relief, while also revealing the nature, and limitations, of Stuart pretensions towards monarchical 'absolutism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the national commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Scottish Reformation in i860, the political scientist, Patrick Edward Dove, delivered an address on 'Scotland After the Reformation'. In this address, Dove created a teleology of Scottish nationality, linking the medieval Wars of Independence with the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9, via the Reformation and the Covenanters. This Scottish Sonderweg stands as a powerful example of how nineteenth-century Scots saw their past as holding deep significance for the present, with the Scottish nation standing as England's equal throughout history. Rather than being parochial navel-gazing, such an interpretation of the past reflected the nineteenth-century vogue for constructed national histories, connecting a series of emblematic golden ages sustaining the nation across time. Furthermore, Dove's speech indicates that it was the Glorious Revolution -- not 1707 -- that saw the true moment of union between Scotland and England's distinct yet intertwined religious and constitutional paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the formation of the British composite monarchy in 1603, a distinctive pattern of Scottish constitutionalism emerged in which a desire to maintain the Scottish realm and church encouraged an emphasis on the limitation of the monarch by fundamental law, guaranteed by oaths. The Covenanters attempted to use the National Covenant and the 1651 coronation to force the king to maintain the Presbyterian church as defined by law. Restoration royalists emphasised the untrammelled power of the king, but in the Revolution of 1688-89, the Claim of Right was presented with the oath of accession as a set of conditions designed to re-establish the Scottish realm as a 'legal limited monarchy' with a Presbyterian church. Reforms in 1640-41, 1689-90 and 1703-4 placed statutory constraints on the royal prerogative. The making of the union relied on a reassertion of monarchical sovereignty, though Presbyterian unionists ensured that the new British monarch would be required to swear to uphold the church as established by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the Scottish parliament have paid little attention to shire elections because of an apparent lack of local source material. This article explores some of the reasons for this perception and argues that sheriff court records contain considerably more evidence than has been appreciated hitherto. It demonstrates that these records provide details of the electoral process, the regularity of elections, the numbers of electors, external interference in elections and internal divisions within the electorate, local responses to national political events, and attitudes to representation through such things as levying taxes locally to reimburse representatives' expenses. It challenges the once widely-held view that the lesser nobility, who comprised the electorate, were uninterested in parliamentary participation, suggesting instead that the statute of 1587, by which shire representation was established, was reasonably successful. Finally, it considers the potential for further research in these and other records which, it is argued, will provide a much deeper understanding of 17th-century Scotland's parliamentary history in particular and political history in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the role of religion, romanticism, and evangelicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which was reflected in the works of Scottish writers. An analysis of the peom "The Course of Time" by Robert Pollok is presented. Pollok's works were influenced by religious environment, Calvinism, and talks about his connection with Covenanters. Scottish romanticism has portrayed the connection between religion and Scottish writing.

The 1640 General Assembly of the Kirk, dominated by Covenanters, was keen to discover something amiss in the doctrine of the Episcopalian John Forbes of Corse. Ultimately they were forced to admit his orthodoxy, even while deposing him for his refusal to subscribe the National Covenant. Modern scholars have succeeded where Forbes's contemporary antagonists failed, representing Forbes as the champion of a party that was, to one degree or another, out of step with the Calvinist orthodoxy of the day. This article examines Forbes's theology at points where his disagreement with contemporary reformed thought has been claimed, and draws implications from its findings for our knowledge and understanding of seventeenth-century Scottish theology more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The covenanters are often considered to have been unrelenting opponents of episcopacy. In the Glasgow Assembly of 1638, when nearly all covenanters voted to 'remove and abjure' episcopacy in the kirk, the Glaswegian minister Robert Baillie was the sole named dissenter. Baillie's subsequent conformity to the covenanting regime after 1638 and his ultimate acceptance of the restored episcopate after 1661 have led historians to claim that he was pliantly obeying those in power. In order to offer an alternative explanation, this article explores the contours of Baillie's writings on episcopacy in the periods 1637-9 and 1658-62. His views were informed by hatred of the Laudian episcopate and his belief that scripture described a lawful form of episcopacy similar to the superintendents of the post-reformation kirk. Whilst Baillie protested against the restored episcopate in 1661, the reasons for his subsequent submission suggest one explanation as to why many presbyterian ministers acquiesced in Charles II's Erastian kirk settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antislavery activity of the religious fringe of Atlantic Presbyterianism, Covenanters, has been neglected. Covenanters produced longstanding articulations of antislavery rooted in seventeenth-century Scotland. In America, Covenanters created an ignored alternative to traditional paradigms of slavery debates. They were antislavery Biblical literalists. In the American South, their support of the American Colonization Society (ACS) was an attempt to maintain their faith, and they believed the ACS was their brainchild. Everywhere, Covenanters utilized antislavery to maintain connection to their Old World religious traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to the Prayer Book rebellion, Charles I decided to march against Scotland with an English army mainly composed of county levies. As the county militias rested only on the royal prerogative, conscripted soldiers of their trained bands were permitted to provide substitutes. An unexplored bundle of military papers in the Bodleian Library documents the circumstances of the recruitment during the First Scots' War for a part of Lincolnshire. The deputy lieutenants' investigation into the recruitment shows a variety of ways in which conscripts effected their exemption from military service. They are evidence that the vast majority of soldiers declined to join the expeditionary force and paid significant bribes to the recruiting officers to avoid conscription. This suggests that the substantial men who normally served in the trained bands of their county dodged war service at all costs, and casts doubt on the popularity of Charles I's decision in Lincolnshire - and possibly the entire country - to go to war. It also raises the question whether men who complained about the financial burden of Ship Money, but were willing to spend a fortune to be exempted from being drafted, objected to this levy on political and not financial grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been fashionable for scholars to focus upon the Scottish identity of Covenanters in America. Indeed, Covenanters, themselves often focus upon and celebrate their ‘Scottishness.’ Yet, Covenanting in America owes much – indeed, its existence – to Ireland and to Irish immigrants. This piece explores that forgotten history and its implications for Covenanter identity and for the state and future of scholarship surrounding Covenanters in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the legacy of covenanting language and imagery in Northern Ireland. Although the media has spent the last 40 years portraying Ian Paisley as the political heir of Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Free Presbyterian Church is much more of a seventeenth century Protestant extremist than a modern political figure. As such, Dr Paisley has consistently turned to the 1638 Scottish Covenant as the only true document that informs Ulster Protestantism. Despite the fanfare surrounding its appearance in 1912, the Ulster Covenant is a forgotten relic of the Unionist past compared to the enduring legacy of the Great War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anna Ross (1848–1933), an heir of the Covenanters, used her pen and Bible teaching to promote Convenanter sensibilities in Canada. The rise of biblical higher criticism changed the theological landscape Anna Ross' defence of the Covenanter heritage revolved around the Bible as the Word of God. Faced with this new challenge Ross reformed the Covenanter tradition to speak to a new time and set of issues. While in continuity with the holy heritage Ross consciously enlarged its call. This expansion allowed her to find in the Covenanter heritage answers to the challenges of natural disasters and the proper treatment of immigrants, making her a covenanting incarnation of the Presbyterian Everywoman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two small traditionally Calvinist denominations which united in 1858 to create the United Presbyterian Church of North America failed to merge in the early 1820s. In the earlier talks, significant doctrinal similarities highlighted irreconcilable points of difference among these American churches built largely by Irish immigrants. Negotiators especially differed over covenanting. Sharply differing doctrinal emphases helped define denominational distinctions in appealing to immigrants and their children as they considered competing strategies of assimilation into American life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the importance of historical memory in fostering cultural persistence in both marginalised and immigrant communities. In particular, it examines how the memory of a sacralised history was used to anchor the United Societies, Cameronians, and Reformed Presbyterian Covenanters in a transcendent and unchangeable past, giving them a sense of stable identity and legitimacy in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]