On 20 July 1638, when the Covenanters arrived in Aberdeen with the aim of gathering further subscriptions for the National Covenant, they encountered their most formidable opponents to date: the Aberdeen Doctors. This group of ministers and academics – Robert Baron, John Forbes of Corse, William Guild, William Leslie, Alexander Ross, Alexander Scroggie and James Sibbald – who all held doctorates of divinity, raised a series of questions, or demands, challenging different aspects the National Covenant. They placed the central tenets of the Covenant under scrutiny. They questioned its necessity in light of the Scots Confession (1560) and given the removal of the Scottish book of canons and Scottish prayer book. They challenged the Covenanters’ interpretation of the Negative Confession (1581). They also disputed their positions on issues of episcopacy, the Five Articles of Perth and resistance to the king. The Aberdeen Doctors’ Generall Demands presented a robust challenge to the Covenanting position. As Salvatore Cipriano has shown, they were not the only opponents of the National Covenant – academics at Glasgow and St Andrews raised questions too – but the Doctors did offer some of the most substantial critiques of the Covenanters’ arguments. In November 1638 Robert Baillie lauded them as ‘the learnedest … of our opposites’.

Viewed through the initial period of conflict, the Aberdeen Doctors appear to have been resolute opponents of the National Covenant. Indeed, the image of the Doctors as a unified and defiant group of anti-Covenanting rebels has long been commonplace in the historiography. In his 1906–9 Hastie Lectures Donald Macmillan emphasised the Doctors’ homogeneity, noting that they shared ‘perfect concord and true friendship … working in harmony and dragging the same yoke … there was no jealousy among them, and their common aim was to aid the intelligence of their pupils and to bring them mutual help’. While this assessment pertained specifically to the Doctors’ joint intellectual endeavours, Macmillan also argued that ‘the views of Dr. John Forbes’ on the Five Articles of Perth ‘were shared, more or less fully, by the rest of the Aberdeen Doctors’. This tendency to amalgamate the views of the Aberdeen Doctors has contributed to a perception that the Aberdeen Doctors were a completely united group of anti-Covenanters.