Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland 1689–1716

355 Pages·2013·2.964 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Stephen

Defending the Revolution
The Church of Scotland 1689–1716
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
DefenDing the Revolution
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
Dedicated to
my wife Elaine
daughters Jillian, Clare and Rachel
and grandchildren Kate and Daniel
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
Defending the Revolution
The Church of Scotland 1689–1716
JeffRey Stephen
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Jeffrey Stephen 2013
Jeffrey Stephen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Stephen, Jeffrey, Dr.
Defending the revolution : the Church of Scotland 1689-1716 / by Jeffrey Stephen.
.d pages cm
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ir llA history--18th century. 3. Scotland--Church history--17th century. 4. Scotland--Church history-
.pu -18th century. 5. Scotland--politics and government--17th century. 6. Scotland--politics and
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sicn BX9071.S74 2014
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.31 iSBn 9781409401346 (hbk)
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
Contents
Introduction: Prelude to Revolution:
The Reckless Reign of James VII and II 1
1 Presbyterianism’s Glorious Revolution 19
2 The Kirk, by Law Established 77
3 Purging and Planting:
The Commissions for the North and South 113
4 Coping with Union 153
5 Anti-Jacobite and Anti-Union; the Presbyterian Dilemma 205
6 Home and Foreign Mission 247
Conclusion 291
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
This page has been left blank intentionally
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Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:20.
Introduction
Prelude to Revolution:
The Reckless Reign of James VII and II
The ignominious haste in which James VII fled to France in December 1688 was
a fitting testament to the way in which he had squandered the good will with
which his brief reign had begun. The exclusion crisis seemed a distant memory as
his peaceful accession was enthusiastically celebrated in both kingdoms.1 Colin
Lindsay, third Earl of Balcarres recalled, ‘Never King succeeded to a throne
more with the love and esteem of his subjects than your Majesty’.2 Indeed, James’
reign began from a position of considerable strength. Any sense of his own
vulnerability evaporated when he successfully crushed two rebellions launched
simultaneously by exiles in Holland. In Scotland it was led by Archibald
Campbell, ninth Earl of Argyll, and in England by the eldest illegitimate son
of Charles II, James Duke of Monmouth. Far from being weakened, James
emerged from this early violent episode with his authority greatly enhanced.3
The elections that followed his accession had produced an overwhelmingly
Tory parliament, ‘probably the most co-operative and exuberantly monarchist
parliament of the century’.4 It provided James with a secure financial basis by
.d granting him the same revenues enjoyed by Charles, augmented by revenue to
e
vre pay off his brother’s debt. The first Scottish parliament of the new reign was
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gir llA .p andA thllo trhoiungghs icno nitssi dleegriesdla, tJiaomn edsi rceocuteldd angoati nhsatv Per wesibsyhteedr iafonr d ai smseonrte.5 auspicious
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orG start to his reign. His failure to build on it and his ultimate downfall can be
sicn attributed to his relatively modest aim of granting religious freedom and
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T .3 1 The ‘exclusion crisis’ refers to an episode in English politics in which a Whig-dominated
1
0 parliament between 1679 and 1683 tried and failed to prevent the accession of Catholic James in
2
© th favour of his eldest and Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange.
giryp 2 Colin, Earl of Balcarres, Memoirs Touching the Revolution in Scotland, MDCLXXXVIII–
oC MDCXC (Edinburgh, 1841), p. 2.
3 Ibid., p. 2.
4 John Miller, The Glorious Revolution (New York, 1983), p. 6.
5 The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, eds T. Thomson and C. Innes (Edinburgh, 1814–75),
vol. 8, pp. 459–60; Ian B. Cowan, ‘The Reluctant Revolutionaries: Scotland in 1688’, in Eveline
Cruickshanks, ed., By Force or Default: The Revolution of 1688–89 (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 66.
Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
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2 Defending the Revolution
political rights to his fellow Catholics.6 In doing so James chose to identify
himself with the one issue that could and did destroy his reign.7 Anti-popery
was the one thing that united the different political and religious groups in both
kingdoms. Was James motivated by a genuine spirit of religious toleration or
did he intend using it as a means to overthrow the Protestant establishment
and restore Catholicism? The traditional Whig view had no doubts that James
intended to establish an absolute monarchy and restore Catholicism, a position
more recently maintained by Dutch historians like Wout Troost who argued
that ‘James was anything but a tolerant ruler’. Others have similarly maintained
that it ‘would be an anachronism, to see in James II an enlightened prince avant
la lettre’, that he dreamt ‘of an ultimately recatholicized England, under the
absolute rule of his Catholic royal House of Stuart’, and that the indulgence ‘was
considered, probably correctly, as merely a quasi-principled manoeuvre to put
power in the hands of Catholic favourites’.8 Challenging the Whig view, Eveline
Cruickshanks has argued that James and after him his son ‘were the precursors
of Enlightened European rulers, who believed in genuine religious toleration
for all their subjects’.9 Likewise, Ian Cowan wrote of James that ‘His belief in
toleration appears to have been genuine’.10 Studies by John Miller have revealed
James as a complex individual whose ‘advocacy of complete toleration, then,
6 James was born and raised an Anglican but converted to Catholicism in his mid-thirties.
He was convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true church, as he explained to
his daughter Mary in 1687, ‘Surely it is only reasonable that this Church, which has a constant
succession from the time of the apostles to the present, should be more in the right than those
.d private men who, under the pretext of reformation, have been the authors of new opinions …
e
vre It was this consideration which principally led me to embrace the communion of the Roman
ser sth Cbeh aunr cihn,f atlhliebrlee bCehinugr cnho, oort hoetrh ewrhwiicshe wclhaiamt os,u orr s acvaino uclra siamid, icnafnanlloibti bliet ya, nfdor t hthee graet ems uosft H neelcle wssoaurilldy
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ir llA prevail against her …’ Lettres et Memoires de Marie, Reine d’Angleterre, ed. M. Bentinck (The
.p Hague, 1880), pp. 7–8.
u
orG 7 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland, James V–James VII (Edinburgh, 1965), p. 381. According
sicn to Bruce Lenman, ‘In the last two years before the Revolution James had by his violently
arF Catholicizing policies, and the autocratic government which he saw as the only way to make those
& ro policies work, fatally alienated not only the nobility of Scotland, but also every other influential
lya group in the country’. See Bruce Lenman, ‘The Scottish Nobility and the Revolution of 1688–
T
.3 1690,’ in Robert Beddard, ed., The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991). Likewise, Robert Paul
1
02 Barnes wrote that James’ insistence on converting his kingdoms to Catholicism through the
©
th issuance of broad religious indulgences was, ‘perhaps his greatest tactical blunder’. See Robert Paul
g
iryp Barnes, ‘Scotland and the Glorious Revolution of 1688’, Albion; A Quarterly Journal Concerned
oC with British Studies, 3/3 (1971), p. 119.
8 Wout Troost, William III, the Stadholder-King. A Political Biography, trans. by J.C.
Grayson (Ashgate, 2005).
9 Eveline Cruickshanks, ‘Religion and Royal Succession – The Rage of Party’, in Britain in
the First Age of Party 1680–1750: Essays presented to Geoffrey Holmes (Cambridge, 1987), p. 22.
10 Cowan, Reluctant Revolutionaries, p. 68.
Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
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Prelude to Revolution: The Reckless Reign of James VII and II 3
was born of an odd mixture of motives and circumstances and it is unlikely
that James saw any great inconsistency in his conduct’. His sudden conversion
from persecution to toleration was ‘a sufficient argument against claims that he
consistently favoured toleration’. Yet, Miller maintains that throughout his life,
James ‘expressed what seems to have been a genuine aversion to persecution for
conscience sake’. Miller rejected the view that James’ promotion of toleration
was an example of popish duplicity. Through his conversion to Catholicism,
James had joined a ‘small, largely quiescent and intermittently persecuted
minority. To improve that minority’s condition, the temperamentally intolerant
James was driven to argue for toleration’.11 J.P. Kenyon concluded that ‘James’s
policy of toleration was so disastrous, politically so counter-productive, that
we just have to assume a quite strong element of moral sincerity behind it’.12
Likewise, J.R. Jones has written: ‘James did not intend, and lacked the capability,
to destroy the established Church of England. But he undoubtedly believed
that by inaugurating universal religious liberty – the first ruler of England to
do so – he would be creating conditions that would be advantageous for the
advance of Catholicism’.13 According to Paul de Barillon, the French ambassador
in London, James had expressed the view that ‘the Anglican Church is so
little removed from the Catholic that it should not be difficult to bring the
majority of them to declare themselves openly … they are Roman Catholics
without knowing it’.14 There can be no doubt that ‘tolerant’ and ‘enlightened’
are attributes that sit uneasily with his policy towards Presbyterian dissenters
in Scotland. His reign was characterised by heightened persecution particularly
during a period remembered as the ‘Killing Times’. As Tim Harris pointed out,
.d ‘It was in Scotland that James really betrayed the limits to his belief in toleration’,
e
vre and that his ‘professed’ belief in it was ‘a rationalization, though one which he
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gir llA own political and personal reasons’.15
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sicn 11 John Miller, ‘James II and Toleration’, in. Eveline Cruickshanks, ed., By Force or Default:
arF The Revolution of 1688–89 (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 14, 19. William Speck also argued in his
& biography of James that he ‘was genuinely committed to religious toleration’, and that ‘his main
ro
lya concern was to secure religious liberty and civil equality for Catholics’.
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.3 12 J.P. Kenyon, ‘Introduction,’ in Eveline Cruickshanks, ed., By Force or Default? The
1
02 Revolution of 1688–89 (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 2.
©
th 13 J.R. Jones, ‘James II’s Revolution: royal policies, 1686–92’, in Jonathan I. Israel, ed., The
g
iryp Anglo-Dutch Moment, Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991),
oC p. 70.
14 Miller, ‘James II and Toleration’, p. 14.
15 Tim Harris, Revolution; The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London,
2006), pp. 481–2. John Miller also pointed out that in pursuit of toleration James’ treatment
of the Anglican Church was far from tolerant and he became increasingly authoritarian and
vindictive. Miller, James II, p. 21.
Stephen, Jeffrey. Defending the Revolution : The Church of Scotland 1689-1716, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1207020.
Created from nottingham on 2021-03-11 00:12:35.