In November 1678, the leading English Whig politician, the earl of Shaftesbury, delivered a speech to the House of Lords, remarking on the political and constitutional state of late-seventeenth century Europe. In his opinion, although subjects of all the northern countries enjoyed ‘an undoubted and inviolable right to their liberties and properties’ by law, he observed that the Scots had ‘outdone all the eastern and southern countries’ by having their ‘lives, liberties and estates sequestered to the will and pleasure of those that govern’. At a time when fears of popery and arbitrary government were being increasingly articulated in England, Scotland seemed to offer firsthand evidence of what might be expected, should the absolutist propensities of the Stuarts be allowed to proceed unchecked. Shaftesbury ensured that forty printed copies of his speech were immediately dispatched to Edinburgh, where, according to the English Tory, Roger North, their arrival provided ‘a Trumpet Signal’ to disaffected factions in Scotland, giving them ‘cause to think there was a Party in Parliament, already formed to assist and sustain them’.

News of Shaftesbury’s speech penetrated widely within Scotland. At home in Brodie Castle in the Highlands in April 1679, the presbyterian laird, Alexander Brodie of Brodie, recorded how a recent visitor had ‘raisd my spirit a litl’ by showing him a copy of the speech, drawing attention to ‘the tyranni and arbitrari gouernment usd and exercisd in Scotland’ and indicating that ‘they could expect noe better in England’. Alarmed by the impact of Shaftesbury’s address, the duke of Lauderdale’s Anglican chaplain, George Hickes, doubted whether the speech had in fact ever been delivered, but contended that even if it had, Shaftesbury would have desisted from doing so ‘had he known the true state of Scotland, which few Englishmen do’. For, as Hickes alleged, Shaftesbury’s ignorance prevented him from foreseeing ‘the evil effects, which it immediately had, in encouraging the Covenanters to Assassinate, Massacre and Rebel’. Such apprehensions intensified the following year, when James, duke of York, was sent to Scotland to remove him from the volatile political atmosphere generated by Whig parliamentary attempts to remove him from the line of succession on account of his Roman Catholicism.