The seventeenth century was one of the most dramatic periods in Scotland's history, with two political revolutions, intense religious strife culminating in the beginnings of toleration, and the modernisation of the state and its infrastructure. This book focuses on the history that the Scots themselves made. Previous conceptualisations of Scotland's "seventeenth century" have tended to define it as falling between 1603 and 1707 - the union of crowns and the union of parliaments. In contrast, this book asks how seventeenth-century Scotland would look if we focused on things that the Scots themselves wanted and chose to do. Here the key organising dates are not 1603 and 1707 but 1638 and 1689: the covenanting revolution and the Glorious Revolution. Within that framework, the book develops several core themes. One is regional and local: the book looks at the Highlands and the Anglo-Scottish Borders. The increasing importance of money in politics and the growing commercialisation of Scottish society is a further theme addressed. Chapters on this theme, like those on the nature of the Scottish Revolution, also discuss central government and illustrate the growth of the state. A third theme is political thought and the world of ideas. The intellectual landscape of seventeenth-century Scotland has often been perceived as less important and less innovative, and such perceptions are explored and in some cases challenged in this volume. Two stories have tended to dominate the historiography of seventeenth-century Scotland: Anglo-Scottish relations and religious politics. One of the recent leitmotifs of early modern British history has been the stress on the "Britishness" of that history and the interaction between the three kingdoms which constituted the "Atlantic archipelago". The two revolutions at the heart of the book were definitely Scottish, even though they were affected by events elsewhere. This is Scottish history, but Scottish history which recognises and is informed by a British context where appropriate. The interconnected nature of religion and politics is reflected in almost every contribution to this volume.SHARON ADAMS is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Freiburg. JULIAN GOODARE is Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh.Contributors: Sharon Adams, Caroline Erskine, Julian Goodare, Anna Groundwater, Maurice Lee Jnr, Danielle McCormack, Alasdair Raffe, Laura Rayner, Sherrilynn Theiss, Sally Tuckett, Douglas Watt

The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergence of London as a major publishing centre. The subscription of the 1638 National Covenant occurred within this context and further politicized subordinate social groups that included women. Unlike in England, however, public debate was contained. A remodelled constitution revivified the institutions of civil and ecclesiastical governance, enabling Covenanted Scotland to pursue interventionist policies in Ireland and England - albeit at terrible cost to the Scottish people. War transformed the nature of state power in Scotland, but this achievement was contentious and fragile. A key weakness lay in the separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, which justified for some a strictly conditional understanding of obedience to temporal authority. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution explores challenges to legitimacy of the Covenanted constitution, but qualifies the idea that Scotland was set on a course to destruction as a result. Covenanted government was overthrown by the new model army in 1651, but its ideals persisted. In Scotland as well as England, the language of liberty, true religion, and the public interest had justified resistance to Charles I. The Scottish revolution embedded a distinctive and durable political culture that ultimately proved resistant to assimilation into the nascent British state.

Explores the transformative reign of the Catholic King James VII and the revolution that brought about his fall.

During the Scottish Revolution (1637-1651), royalists and Covenanters appealed to Scottish law, custom and traditional views on kingship to debate the limits of King Charles I's authority. But they also engaged with the political ideas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic intellectuals beyond the British Isles. This book explores the under-examined European context for Scottish political thought by analysing how royalists and Covenanters adapted Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic political ideas to their own debates about church and state. In doing so, it argues that Scots advanced languages of political legitimacy to help solve a crisis about the doctrines, ceremonies and polity of their national church. It therefore reinserts the importance of ecclesiology to the development of early modern political theory.

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

In this historical study, Jonathon D. Beeke considers the various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed expressions regarding the duplex regnum Christi (the twofold kingdom of Christ), or, as especially denominated in the Lutheran context, the “doctrine of the two kingdoms.” While a sampling of patristic and medieval sources is considered, the focus is on select magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century and representative intellectual centers of the seventeenth century (Leiden, Geneva, and Edinburgh). A primary concern is to examine the development of these formulations over the two centuries in question, and relate its maturation to the theological and political context of the early modern period. Various conclusions are offered that address the contemporary “two-kingdoms” debate within the Reformed tradition.

1714 was a revolutionary year for Dissenters across the British Empire. The Hanoverian Succession upended a political and religious order antagonistic to Protestant non-conformity and replaced it with a regime that was, ostensibly, sympathetic to the Whig interest. The death of Queen Anne and the dawn of Hanoverian Rule presented Dissenters with fresh opportunities and new challenges as they worked to negotiate and legitimize afresh their place in the polity. Negotiating Toleration: Dissent and the Hanoverian Succession, 1714-1760 examines how Dissenters and their allies in a range of geographic contexts confronted and adapted to the Hanoverian order. Collectively, the contributors reveal that though generally overlooked compared to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 or the Act of Union in 1707, 1714 was a pivotal moment with far reaching consequences for dissenters at home and abroad. By decentralizing the narrative beyond England and exploring dissenting reactions in Scotland, Ireland, and North America, the collection demonstrates the extent to which the Succession influenced the politics and touched the lives of ordinary people across the British Atlantic world. As well as offering a thorough breakdown of confessional tensions within Britain during the short and medium terms, this authoritative volume also marks the first attempt to look at the complex interaction between religious communities in consequence of the Hanoverian Succession.

What did it mean to be a Covenanter?

Showcases the latest research on Scotland's rural economy and society. Early modern Scotland was predominantly rural. Agriculture was the main occupation of most people at the time, so what happened in the countryside was crucial: economically, socially and culturally. The essays collected here focus on the years between around 1500 and 1750. This period, although before the main era of agricultural "improvement" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was nevertheless far from static in terms of agrarian development. Specific topics addressed include everyday farming practices; investment; landlords, tenants and estate management; and the cultural context within which agriculture was "imagined". The disastrous famine of 1622-23 is analysed in detail. The volume is completed by a comprehensive survey of recent historiography, setting agricultural history in its broader context.

A landmark account that reveals the long history behind the current Catalan and Scottish independence movements A distinguished historian of Spain and Europe provides an enlightening account of the development of nationalist and separatist movements in contemporary Catalonia and Scotland. This first sustained comparative study uncovers the similarities and the contrasts between the Scottish and Catalan experiences across a five-hundred-year period, beginning with the royal marriages that brought about union with their more powerful neighbors, England and Castile respectively, and following the story through the centuries from the end of the Middle Ages until today’s dramatic events. J. H. Elliott examines the political, economic, social, cultural, and emotional factors that divide Scots and Catalans from the larger nations to which their fortunes were joined. He offers new insights into the highly topical subject of the character and development of European nationalism, the nature of separatism, and the sense of grievance underlying the secessionist aspirations that led to the Scottish referendum of 2014, the illegal Catalan referendum of October 2017, and the resulting proclamation of an independent Catalan republic.