4 - Persecution

Summary

This chapter analyses the contested theme of persecution in the religious debates of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland. Within years of the episcopalian settlement of 1661–2, presbyterians began to describe the crown's efforts to enforce religious uniformity as ‘persecution’. Preachers, pamphleteers and lay worshippers complained that they were made to suffer as a result of their conscientious nonconformity. Responding to these allegations, episcopalians claimed that the punishments incurred by the dissenters were legitimate. Indeed, episcopalians argued that the presbyterians misused the vocabulary of persecution. This conflict of attitudes makes religious persecution a problematic concept for scholars of the late Stuart period. English historians have often depicted persecution as a regrettable but formative experience in the lives of Restoration nonconformists. In Scotland, where the suffering dissenters seemed vindicated by the subsequent re-establishment of presbyterianism, persecution gained a particular prominence in histories of the late seventeenth century. This presbyterian perspective was for long the dominant interpretation of the period, but historians sympathetic to episcopacy took a different view, arguing that the presbyterians' ‘persecution’ had been exaggerated, and that the destabilising effects of their nonconformity had been overlooked. More recently, political historians of Restoration Scotland have stressed that the crown's religious policies sought, however unsuccessfully, to prevent conflict and secure social stability. Yet even scholars aiming for impartiality have sometimes adopted the presbyterians' vocabulary of persecution.