Introduction

Summary

In 1661, Robert Baillie was languishing with an illness that would soon claim his life. Yet his troubles did not end with his health. Throughout his life, Baillie had witnessed riots, revolution and regicide, all whilst tactfully maintaining his standing as a minister in the Church of Scotland. He began his life as a loyal subject of James VI and I and he was to die in August 1662 as a loyal subject of Charles II. In the intervening years, however, Baillie had emerged as one of Scotland's most adept critics of Charles I's ecclesiastical policies and as a leading voice of the Covenanting regime. At the end of Baillie's tumultuous career, it was his life as Covenanter propagandist that came back to haunt him. Writing in September 1661 to John Maitland, earl of Lauderdale, at the royal court, Baillie was anxious to disclaim responsibility for the republication of an inflammatory pamphlet that he had written years earlier entitled A Parallel or briefe comparison of the liturgie with the massebook (1641). In his Parallel, Baillie had cunningly argued that the essential facets of Roman Catholic worship were contained in the controversial Prayer Book that had been drafted by Archbishop William Laud of Canterbury and members of the Scottish episcopate, and which had provoked rioting on its introduction in July 1637. Hearing that ‘these observations on the Scottish Service-book I writ twenty-four years ago’ were now reprinted in London, Baillie beseeched Lauderdale that ‘there is not a word of them reprinted but the title-page alone, by some cheating printer there, to make some old copies of the first and only impression sell’. Begging Lauderdale to ‘clear my innocencie to his Majestie’, Baillie explained that although he had ‘written halfa- dozen little tractats against Books and Bishops, and near as many against Sectaries … I would be loath now to reprint any of them’.