History of the Scottish Covenanters; part 5. 🏴
Image: Scots gathered in a Conventicle in defiance of the 1664 Conventicle Act; art by J. R. Skelton.
In the aftermath of the English Civil Wars, things seemed to return to normal when Oliver Cromwell died and Parliament suddenly decided to invite back to England and its throne. Scots of all walks supported the 1660 Stuart Restoration, including the Covenanters, who were happy to see their old ally’s luck improve. The new regime in London prosecuted several people who’d been involved in the of Charles I Stuart and had them tortured to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Cromwell and two associates were also exhumed and posthumously tried as traitors, their bodies hung in public and beheaded.
But if the Covenanters imagined that the king’s change in fortune bode well for them, they were grievously mistaken. Charles proved to be a petulant child with no regard for their religious concerns. He betrayed them and again imposed Episcopalianism on Scotland by force. Hardliners resisted this by gathering in secret, illegal church services known as Conventicles. State persecution pushed the Covenanters into several armed rebellions between 1666 and 1680, during which they drafted the famous Rutherglen and Sanquhar Declarations. These revolts were brutally crushed by the Scottish government, and persecution intensified with property confiscations, imprisonments, and judicial murder, during what became known as the Killing Time (1679-1688). Notably, while Presbyterians were murdered in Scotland for not wanting to acknowledge the king as a sort of new pope, were allowed total religious freedom by both Charles II and his Catholic son and successor, James VII & II (1685-1688). The latter would eventually be overthrown by his English subjects in the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which the Scots had no involvement. Those events gave rise to the Jacobite Movement, and the first such rebellion broke out in both Ireland and Scotland in 1689 to try and restore James to the throne. Having been persecuted during his reign and that of his father, most Presbyterians had no reason to support James, so the Jacobite rebels tended to be mostly Catholic or Episcopalian. The majority of Scots gladly accepted the new king, Dutch prince William III of Orange. William restored in Scotland in 1689, and the Covenanters more or less ceased to exist as a movement after that. Still, many hardliners continued to mistrust the new government and congregate in Conventicles. One faction left over from the 1679-1680 Sanquhar rebellion —known as the “Cameronians”— even separated from the Church of Scotland to form a new congregation, known as the “Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland”. A similar trend has continued to this day, as the Scottish Kirk sadly came increasingly under the influence and control of the British government, and therefore, increasingly corrupt and liberal. Hardliners and the sincerely religious have broken away from the Church of Scotland for that reason, starting with the Great Disruption of 1843, and forming many new and smaller churches (i.e. like the “Free Church of Scotland” and the “Free Church of Scotland [Continuing]). This then concludes the history of the Scottish Covenanters.
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