The Glorious Revolution (1688): James VII, the Catholic Crisis, and Scotland’s Protestant Reckoning
In the long and complex history of the British Isles, there are few moments more consequential—or more profoundly revealing of national anxieties—than the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was, in its English telling, a bloodless coup: swift, orderly, almost gentlemanly. But for Scotland, as ever, it was more complicated—shot through with religious dread, constitutional upheaval, and a painful reckoning with the limits of monarchy and the shape of national identity.
The crisis began not with armies or uprisings, but with something quieter and more insidious: fear. Fear of popery, of tyranny, of a return to the dark days before the Reformation. At its center was James Stuart, King of Scots as James VII and of England and Ireland as James II. A man of dignity and courage, but also of dangerous certitude, James was a devout Catholic in a kingdom that had long since aligned itself, spiritually and institutionally, with Protestantism. He had spent years in exile during the Cromwellian regime and had witnessed firsthand the costs of religious conflict. But rather than embracing moderation, James saw his reign as a divine mandate to reverse the course of history—and he did so with alarming speed.
Upon his accession in 1685, James moved to expand religious toleration in England and Scotland—not merely for dissenting Protestants, but most controversially, for Catholics. In Scotland, where Presbyterianism had been hard-won through war, martyrdom, and political revolution, this was incendiary. James appointed Catholics to key offices in the government, the military, and even universities. He suspended the penal laws that had restricted Catholic worship and hinted—at times baldly—that he intended to bring Scotland into alignment with continental Catholic monarchies.
“James was not content with toleration,” observed historian Michael Lynch, “he pursued Catholic integration into the political elite. It was a policy that struck at the heart of the Scottish Protestant establishment” (Lynch, 1992, p. 271). The Kirk, already suspicious of royal meddling since the Restoration, now saw itself under siege. Ministers warned from pulpits that Antichrist had returned. Political elites—many of whom had endured the persecutions of the previous regime—whispered in drawing rooms that James was planning a Catholic absolutism modeled on Louis XIV’s France.
The situation deteriorated with the king’s increasing reliance on Catholic advisors and his open defiance of parliamentary norms. When the Scottish Parliament resisted his religious policies, James simply bypassed it, ruling by royal proclamation and threatening to punish disobedient nobles. In 1687, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence in Scotland, granting religious freedom to Catholics and dissenting Protestants alike. But far from unifying the realm, this widened the chasm. Presbyterians viewed the Indulgence not as a gift of liberty, but as a Trojan horse—a prelude to Catholic domination.
Still, it was the birth of James’s son in June 1688 that transformed unrest into revolution. Until then, many Protestants had placed their hopes in Mary, James’s Protestant daughter by his first marriage, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. But the arrival of a Catholic male heir changed everything. Now, there would be a Catholic dynasty. The fear was no longer abstract—it was dynastic, generational, permanent. The English and Scottish elites, long adept at threading loyalty through the eye of religious conviction, found the tension intolerable. Something had to break.
It did—swiftly, decisively, and, for James, disastrously. In November 1688, a group of English nobles—later known as the “Immortal Seven”—invited William of Orange to invade England and “rescue” the kingdom from popery and tyranny. William, already a seasoned military commander and deeply alarmed by French Catholic expansionism, accepted. His invasion force landed in Devon, and English support crumbled around James like plaster from a crumbling ceiling. Betrayed even by his closest advisers, James fled to France.
In Scotland, the revolution echoed with both hope and uncertainty. On one hand, the Presbyterian cause had been vindicated—Catholic tyranny had been overthrown. On the other, Scotland’s constitutional future remained ambiguous. Would the new regime respect Scotland’s sovereignty? Would Presbyterianism be restored, or merely tolerated?
In April 1689, the Convention of Estates—a specially convened assembly of Scottish nobles, lairds, and burgh commissioners—met in Edinburgh. After tense debate, it declared that James had forfeited the throne by his abuses and his flight. William and Mary were offered the Scottish crown jointly, on condition that they accept the Claim of Right, a constitutional document that affirmed the rights of Parliament and the supremacy of Presbyterianism. Historian Rosalind Mitchison wrote, “The Claim of Right was not just a declaration of principles—it was a revolution in contract theory. The monarchy now existed only by consent” (Mitchison, 1982, p. 273).
The revolution did not go uncontested. In July 1689, John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee—once a feared enforcer of Charles II’s government—raised the Royalist banner in the Highlands. At Killiecrankie, his forces routed a government army but suffered a fatal blow when Dundee himself was killed. Though Jacobite resistance would continue in fits and starts for decades, it had lost its leader—and with him, its momentum.
The Glorious Revolution left Scotland with a paradox. It restored the rights of the Kirk, reinstated Presbyterianism as the national church, and introduced the foundations of constitutional monarchy. But it also deepened the cultural and political divide with England. Where England tolerated bishops and High Church rituals under William and Mary, Scotland rejected them. Where England moved toward centralization, Scotland clung to its distinctive institutions. The two nations, though ruled by the same monarchs, were increasingly diverging in spirit and structure.
Ronald Hutton summed it best: “The Revolution was glorious only in name. In reality, it was a rearrangement of alliances, a recalibration of power, and for Scotland, a reassertion of national—and religious—identity in the face of looming union” (Hutton, 2003, p. 212).
References
- Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History. London: Pimlico, 1992.
- Mitchison, Rosalind. A History of Scotland. London: Methuen, 1982.
- Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic, 1649–1660. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714. London: Longman, 2003.
- Harris, Tim. Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720. London: Penguin, 2007.