Restoration (Scotland)

It was part of a wider Restoration in the British Isles that included the return of the Stuart dynasty to the thrones of England and Ireland in the person of Charles II.

As military commander of the Commonwealth's largest armed force, George Monck, governor-general in Scotland, was instrumental in the restoration of Charles II, who was proclaimed king in Edinburgh on 14 May 1660.

The restoration of the Scottish Episcopacy led to a series of conflicts between Presbyterians and the Bishops of the Episcopalian establishment, culminating in the persecution of The Killing Time.

The Covenanters and their English allies considered the Independent-dominated New Model Army a bigger threat than the Royalists and when the First Civil War ended in 1647, negotiated to restore Charles to power.

After Cromwell's victory in the Second English Civil War, he installed the Kirk Party as the government of Scotland, who then expelled Engagers from the General Assembly.

[2] This alliance ended with the execution of Charles in January 1649; as Calvinists, the Engagers and Kirk Party viewed monarchy as divinely ordered, making this an act of blasphemy.

[a][3] In February, the Scots proclaimed Charles II, King of Scotland and Great Britain and in the Treaty of Breda, agreed to restore him to the English throne.

In return, he accepted the Covenant and was forced to disown a rising by the Royalist leader Montrose, who was captured and executed; Charles never forgot this humiliation.

[4] After the Third English Civil War [b] ended with defeat in 1651, Cromwell decided the only way to guarantee peace was to destroy the power of the kirk and the Scottish landed elite.

Unlike England, 95% of Scots belonged to the kirk and shared the same Calvinist doctrine; conflict was primarily over governance, with the victors expelling their opponents.

[7] After defeating the Royalist Glencairn's rising in 1654, Monk's administration deliberately widened divisions within the kirk; the effects dominated Scottish political life during the Restoration and beyond, as those previously expelled returned to power and excluded their opponents.

When this proved incapable of producing a stable government in 1659 Monck opened negotiations with Charles II and began a slow march south with his army.

It was a general pardon for most types of crime that may have been committed by Scots, between 1 January 1637 and before 1 September 1660, during what the Act calls "the late troubles" (the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum).

[26] James Sharp, minister of Crail, who was in London to represent the interests of the Resolutioners, changed sides and accepted the position of Archbishop of St Andrews.

[32] The King sent his brother and heir to Edinburgh largely to remove him from London as a result of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681, during which the English "Country Party" attempted to exclude the openly Catholic James from the three British thrones.

Eight Episcopal clergy and James Dalrymple, Lord President of the Court of Session resigned and the leading nobleman Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll was forced into exile.

[9] In 1684 the remaining Society People posted an Apologetical Declaration on several market crosses, which informed servants of the government that they pursued the lives of its members at the risk of their own.

In response to this new element of outright political sedition, the Scottish Privy Council authorised extrajudicial field executions of those caught in arms or those who refused to swear loyalty to the king.

[35] This more intense phase of persecution, later known in Protestant historiography as "the Killing Time", led to dissenters being summarily executed by the dragoons of James Graham, Laird of Claverhouse, or sentenced to transportation or death by Sir George Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate.

The failure of an invasion, led by the Earl of Argyll and timed to co-ordinate with the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion in England, demonstrated the strength of the regime.

[9] In Edinburgh there were rumours of Orange plots and on 10 December the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, the Earl of Perth, quit the capital for Drummond Castle, planning an abortive escape to Ireland (he was later captured as he embarked for France).

A letter from James, received on 16 March, contained a threat to punish all who rebelled against him and declaring the assembly illegal, resulted in his followers to abandon the convention, leaving the Williamites dominant.

[40] The English protective tariffs on salt and cattle were harder to disregard and probably placed greater limitations on the Scottish economy, despite attempts of the King to have them overturned.

[48] Under the Commonwealth the English judges who took over the running of the legal system were hostile to the use of torture and often sceptical of the evidence it produced, resulting in a decline in witchcraft prosecutions.

[48] There may also have been a growing popular scepticism, and, with relative peace and stability, the economic and social tensions that may have contributed to accusations were reduced, although there were occasional local outbreaks until the statute supporting prosecutions was repealed in 1736.

[49] The loss of a royal court when James VI inherited the English and Irish thrones in 1603 and the hostility of the Kirk, meant that theatre had struggled to survive in seventeenth-century Scotland.

In 1663 Edinburgh lawyer William Clerke wrote Marciano or the Discovery, a play about the restoration of a legitimate dynasty in Florence after many years of civil war.

[55] The Restoration saw the introduction of a style of country house among the Scottish nobility that encouraged a move towards a more leisure-oriented architecture already adopted in continental Europe.

Smith's country houses followed the pattern established by Bruce, with hipped roofs and pedimented fronts, in a plain but handsome Palladian style.

[64] The five Scottish universities recovered from the disruption of the preceding decades with a lecture-based curriculum that was able to embrace economics and science, offering a high-quality liberal education to the sons of the nobility and gentry.