In preparation for an upcoming meeting of the Scottish parliament, the first since his return to British shores, in December 1660 Charles II instructed his parliamentary commissioner, John Middleton, 1st earl of Middleton, to ‘indeavor that our Antient Royall prerogative be asserted’, ‘just Liberties of our people [be] setled as they enjoyed them under our Royall ancestors’. This sense that Charles II's government represented a conscious turning back of the clock to the constitutional and political conditions prevailing before the Covenanting revolution pervaded the political culture of late seventeenth-century Scotland. Historians, however, have seldom been taken in by such protestations of official amnesia, recognising instead that the Restoration state was very far from being a perfect resurrection of its ante bellum forerunner. Simultaneously, continuities with the 1640s can also be traced; as Gordon Donaldson influentially put it as long ago as 1965, the Covenanting revolution in some ways ‘found its fulfilment rather than its negation under Charles II’. Building upon such thinking, this chapter explores how the experience of the Covenanting period influenced political developments during the Restoration. It will begin by surveying the constitutional settlement of the early 1660s, considering the ways in which it represented both a reaction against the Covenanting state and a continuation of it. The chapter will then move on to explore the Covenants’ role in helping map out a Restoration-era political philosophy that emphasised stringent repression of seditious sentiment under the aegis of a strong monarchy. Finally, the chapter will trace the influence of these two factors in shaping the institutions and political culture of the Restoration, focusing in turn on Church–state relations, government militarism, the role of parliament and the rise of what might be termed the ‘impersonal’ state.

Reaction and Retention

The Restoration settlement, as it emerged during the course of Charles II’s first parliament between 1661 and 1663, was unambiguously conservative in ethos. A model was provided by parliament itself, not only because elections to it were carefully managed to ensure a royalist majority, but also because its very structure was based on the pre-1638 legislature rather than its more empowered Covenanting successor. Symbolic of this change was the resurrection of the Lords of the Articles, the notorious steering committee through which James VI and Charles I had sought to control the legislative agenda.