– 22 July 1680) was a leader of the militant Presbyterians, known as Covenanters, who resisted attempts by the Stuart monarchs to control the affairs of the Church of Scotland, acting through bishops.

On 16 April 1675 he, his brother Michael and his parents were summoned to appear at the local court, charged with "keeping conventicles at the house of John Geddie in Falkland" and "withdrawing from the parish church".

After a brief period employed as private chaplain to the wife of Sir William Scott of Harden in 1675, Cameron was dismissed from service for refusing to attend the parish church on the Sabbath.

The year 1679 was one of continuing confrontation between the Covenanters and the authorities, culminating in the assassination of Archbishop Sharp, the so-called Rutherglen Declaration and the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge.

Here is the head of a faithful minister and servant of Jesus Christ, who shall lose the same for his Master's interest; and it shall be set up before sun and moon in the public view of the world.

"[13]Joined by Donald Cargill, another exile from Rotterdam, Cameron helped draw up a band (bond of mutual defence) in March 1680, which eventually carried 27 signatures of the group who formed the nucleus of his loyal following.

[14] By April the Scottish Privy Council reported to James, Duke of York, who feared Covenanter meetings as "fore-runners of rebellion", that new measures were being planned against the "fanatics" who were "running out again to field-conventicles in several parts of the kingdom".

[15] On 22 June 1680 Cameron, accompanied by 20 followers, including David Hackston, wanted for his part in the murder of Archbishop Sharp, rode into the town of Sanquhar in Nithsdale.

After singing a psalm at the cross, Michael Cameron read aloud the Sanquhar Declaration, calling for war against Charles II, denounced as a "tyrant", and the exclusion of his openly Roman Catholic brother James from the succession.

"[20] After being paraded through the main street behind Cameron's head displayed aloft on the end of a pole, Hackston was sentenced and two days later brutally executed at the cross.

The troop was subsequently renamed the 26th (Cameronian) Regiment of Foot and continued to serve the British Crown until its disbandment in 1968 as part of a post-imperial reduction in the size of Britain's armed forces.

Viewed by royalists, episcopalians and moderate presbyterians as narrow-minded zealots, the Cameronians saw themselves as emulating the early Christian martyrs by holding steadfastly to their beliefs in the face of their enemies' cruelties and contraptions of torture and execution.

Cameron's most recent biographer follows a tradition in seeing their struggle as one of religious and civil liberty in the face of an hereditary monarchy and therefore an early expression of republicanism.