5 - The Politics of Religion

Summary

Orthodox historiography has largely tended to attribute blame for most of the political instability and civil strife experienced throughout Scotland between 1660 and 1689 to the unpopularity of the Restoration religious settlement which re-imposed an episcopalian system of church government on a predominantly presbyterian population. Correspondingly little attempt has hitherto been made, however, to examine the relationship between ecclesiastical divisions and political sympathies. The previous chapter demonstrated that differing degrees of practical political opposition did not necessarily preclude theoretical attachment to the Stuart monarchy. It is likewise far from clear that religious nonconformity instantly denoted political disloyalty. Opponents of prelacy were thus not invariably part of a truculent, outlawed and rebellious underground, for whom allegiance to ‘King Jesus’ forestalled loyalty to Charles II. Despite the claims of some episcopalian apologists in the aftermath of the Williamite Revolution which re-imposed presbyterianism, it was not necessarily the case during the Restoration that ‘he who hates a Bishop, can never love a King’ while ‘he who treads on a Mitre, will quickly pull off the Crown’. Nor did religious conformity always equate with committed support for the established church. Consequently, it is far from evident that active support for either the re-establishment of, or the maintenance of, episcopacy was a prerequisite for orderly government under Charles II.

This chapter considers the wider relationship between political allegiance and religious sympathies in Restoration Scotland. It begins by examining the various motives surrounding the decision to restore episcopacy that occurred amidst widespread anticlericalism in the aftermath of the civil wars. It then considers the ideological support for episcopacy articulated during the Restoration, arguing that the absence of any tradition of iure divino support for episcopacy in Scotland meant that the episcopalian establishment instead adopted a predominantly pragmatic, indifferentist and erastian attitude which ultimately undermined its own chances of survival. The third section investigates the increasing extent of state control over the church as the absence of iure divino defences of church government allowed the government to address more immediate problems of enforcing ecclesiastical discipline by embarking on a series of attempted indulgence schemes and accommodation projects. The fourth section explores the ways in which the vagaries of Restoration ecclesiastical policy prompted a number of internal episcopalian critiques from within the established church.