In July of that year he went with other commissioners to Aberdeen in the vain attempt to induce the university and the presbytery of that city to subscribe the National Covenant, and in the following November sat in the general assembly at Glasgow which abolished episcopacy in Scotland.

Though a staunch Covenanter, he was a zealous Royalist, preaching before Charles I in Edinburgh, and stoutly advocating the restoration of the monarchy in the time of the Commonwealth.

Cant's frequent and bitter verbal attacks on various members of his congregation led in 1661 to complaints laid before the magistrates, in consequence of which he resigned his charge.

[4] Cant endeavoured to get up supplications to the Privy Council from the North against the Service Book October 1637, and accompanied Henderson of Leuchars and Dickson of Irvine to Aberdeen, with this view, towards the end of that year.

In July 1638 he was appointed by the ‘commissioners at the tables,’ with two other ministers (Dickson and Henderson) and three noblemen (Montrose, Kinghorn, and Cowper), to endeavour to bring the people of the north into sympathy with the presbyterian cause.

The ‘Aberdeen doctors’ were famous in the church for their opposition to the covenant, and prepared certain questions for the commissioners, which led to a wordy series of answers, replies, and duplies on either side.

‘He had once been a captain,’ says Wodrow, who tells the story, ‘and was one of the most bold and resolute men of his day.’ His dauntless courage, with his stirring popular eloquence, gave him a wide fame.

He was described as the most actively convinced supporter of the Covenant in the North of Scotland, a man of great moral earnestness and courage, and was one of those summoned before the Privy Council, 9 December 1662, for seditious carriage.