Abstract :
This article assesses the significance of Presbyterian ideas of church government in Scottish
politics after the revolution of 1688–90. While recent historians have revised our understanding of Scottish
politics in this period, they have mostly overlooked debates concerning religious authority. The article focuses
on what contemporaries called the ‘ intrinsic right ’ of the church : its claim to independent authority in
spiritual matters and ecclesiastical administration. The religious settlement of 1690 gave control of the kirk to
clergy who endorsed divine right Presbyterianism, believed in the binding force of the National Covenant
(1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), and sought to uphold the intrinsic right. An ambiguous
legal situation, the criticisms of episcopalian clergy and politicians, and the crown’s religious policies helped
to make the Presbyterians’ ecclesiological claims a source of instability in Scottish politics. Meetings of the
general assembly and, after 1707, the appointment of national fast and thanksgiving days were particularly
likely to spark controversy. More broadly, the article questions two narratives of secularization assumed by
many previous scholars. It argues that Scottish politics was not differentiated from religious controversy in
this period, and that historians have exaggerated the pace of liberalization in Scottish Presbyterian thought.
