The attitudes and actions of those Scots who remained committed to the Covenants after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 have been examined many times. Indeed, so much has been written about these ‘later Covenanters’ that my question might seem unnecessary. They can be characterised as critics of the new regime in Church and state, whose conscientious adherence to the Covenants left them on the fringes of mainstream Scottish society until the revolution of 1688–90. Yet few historians have paused to consider the difficulties of definition posed when we write about ‘Covenanters’ in the Restoration period. This chapter discusses three such problems, with the aim of encouraging scholars of seventeenth-century Scotland to be more careful and critical in their choice of vocabulary. My own preference, it will become clear, is to limit the use of the word ‘Covenanter’ to the years before the Restoration. Even readers who are unconvinced by my reasons for doing so will benefit from considering who should be classified as a Covenanter after 1660.

Devoted Covenanters among the office-holding elite were excluded from power under Charles II, but many ordinary Scots experienced little disruption after their leaders repudiated the Covenants. Despite the restoration of episcopacy, some Scots did not consider it necessary to dissent from the established Church in order to remain true to the Covenants. Nor did many Scots in this period have occasion to swear the National Covenant or the Solemn League and Covenant. There was a spectrum of attitudes consistent with the Covenants, and yet some historians discussing the years after 1679 have used the term ‘Covenanter’ to refer exclusively to the Cameronians, a radical minority. Scholars have too often accepted without question this group's noisy assertions of Covenanting purity. The chapter concludes by arguing that the label ‘Covenanter’, because of the unexamined assumptions on which it rests, has encouraged misleading interpretations of Restoration presbyterianism, in which the voices of extremists drown out those of more moderate Scots.

Covenanters and Dissenters

We should begin with a provisional definition and a couple of distinctions. By ‘Covenanter’, I mean adherents of the National Covenant (1638), the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and the movement of political and ecclesiastical reform to which these engagements gave rise.