The Isles by Norman Davies

Author:Norman Davies
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-10-12T23:00:00+00:00

In Scotland, the King did not need restoring so much as reinstating. He was recrowned at Scone in 1661 for good measure. The Scottish Privy Council was filled with ministers of various hues. The bishops returned to their empty sees, the judges to their benches. And the Scottish Parliament made up for a decade of involuntary inactivity by passing four thousand acts in its first year.

As in England, however, religion proved the most contentious of issues. The Scottish Presbyterians, who had dominated the country for a generation and who had once persuaded Charles II to sign the Covenant, were hoping to preserve their supremacy. But it was not to be. Whether through the machinations of the King’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, or simply through imitation of the ‘Cavalier mood’ in Westminster, the Scots Parliament opted for a thoroughgoing Anglican-style settlement. Episcopacy was to have a monopoly. No independent conventicles, and no unordained presbyters, were to be permitted. Whereas the English Act of Uniformity caused the Church of England to lose about a tenth of its clergy, its Scottish equivalent caused the Church of Scotland to lose up to a third. Once again, illegal conventicles multiplied. Two armed Presbyterian risings, in Kirkcudbrightshire in 1666 and the Cameronian Rising of 1679–80, gave notice of future trouble. Yet Charles II, who had little love for his northern kingdom, left its affairs in the hands of ministers, principally of John Maitland, first Duke of Lauderdale (1616–82), and the unofficial viceroy of the Highlands, Archibald Campbell, ninth Earl of Argyll.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.