Over the course of the early modern period Protestant polemicists engaged themselves in searching for historical precedent to explain their very existence and to buttress their increasingly vehement arguments against the Catholic Church and the papacy. History was a treasure trove of examples that were ‘appropriated and used as though there were no temporal distance’, with little sense of what we may now consider anachronism. As antagonisms between Catholics and followers of reformers such as Luther and Calvin grew in volume, so too did the need to establish a historical precedent for these ecclesiastical newcomers. Reformers were desperate to cast their actions as restorations of a lost past rather than innovations as Protestants across Europe attempted to ‘recapture a lost era of apostolic purity … and primitive simplicity’. In England, an interest in finding historical precedents to justify the royal supremacy and Church settlement created a type of ‘Protestantized antiquity’ that firmly rooted the new theologies in the legal and cultural milieu of their host territory. In addition to emphasising their own historical roots, Reformers insisted that the Catholic Church had bastardised true doctrine and built up centuries of false practices not contained in the Bible. Reformation entailed significant rewriting and appropriation of Christian history.

In Scotland, controversies about the ‘pre-history’ of the Reformed Church had been put to bed by the start of the seventeenth century – Scotland was a Protestant country and, the polemicists insisted, always had been. From the last decades of the sixteenth century, the type of Protestantism at stake became the focal point of scholarly discussion. On the one hand, writers such as the future archbishop of St Andrews, John Spottiswood, referenced a ‘non-papal non-presbyterian’ type of Church brought to Scottish shores by the disciples of John. This protected Scotland from claims that it owed its Christianity to English missionaries (and was therefore subservient to Canterbury or York) but also underlined how an episcopal hierarchy had historical precedent. Conversely, other writers emphasised nascent forms of presbyterianism that had originated in Scotland. Writings by George Buchanan highlighted the significant role of the culdees – an equivalent of lay elders – in the early Scottish Church. These writings were picked up with enthusiasm by subsequent opponents of episcopacy, culminating in the subscription of the National Covenant in 1638 and the General Assembly at Glasgow at the end of 1638 that abolished Scotland's episcopal structure.