1 - Introduction

Summary

In the twilight years of Stuart absolutism and Scottish independence, the Restoration period witnessed the apogee of royalist sentiment. This book provides the first reconstruction of late-seventeenth century Scottish intellectual culture, starting with the widespread popular royalism that accompanied Charles II’s restoration in 1660 and closing with the collapse of royal authority that occurred when his brother, James VII & II, was driven from the throne in 1688. In doing so, this book restores to historical attention the richness and significance of the Restoration within Scottish history. For, until recently, historiographical orthodoxy tended to depict the entire seventeenth century as ‘a sort of grotesque interlude between the great ages of Reformation and Enlightenment’. Within that century, the Restoration period traditionally incurred particular opprobrium as an era of arbitrary government, state oppression, religious bigotry and fanatical rebellion. Situated between the excesses of the mid-century civil wars and the respectable settlement achieved by the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688–89, it appeared an uncomfortable historical aberration. As the early-twentieth century Historiographer-Royal of Scotland, Peter Hume Brown, lamented, Charles II’s return to power in 1660 marked ‘the opening of the most pitiful chapter of the national history’.

The causes of previous historiographical denigration are not difficult to elucidate. For although the Restoration was subsequently remembered by the eighteenth-century cultural connoisseur, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, as an age in which ‘religion and politics became totally confused’, an entrenched historiographical preoccupation with ecclesiastical affairs has ensured that politics and religion have too often been studied discretely. Secure in the knowledge that an episcopalian form of church government was abolished as a result of the Williamite Revolution in 1690, presbyterian apologists were quick to denigrate the Restoration religious settlement as flawed and tyranically erastian. As early as 1689, for example, the anonymous author of The Scotish [sic] Inquisition proclaimed his intention of speedily producing ‘a Martyrology of these times’ that juxtaposed the presbyterian Covenanters’ courage alongside the ‘Inhumanity, Illegality, and Severity of their Cruel and Bloody Persecutors’. Successive chronicles of the Covenanters’ sufferings amidst the carminated fields of Scotland between 1660 and 1690 soon followed. According to Robert Wodrow’s exhaustive early-eighteenth century account, Restoration Scotland presented ‘a very horrid scene of oppression, hardships and cruelty, which, were it not incontestably true, and well vouched and supported, could not be credited in after ages’.