Conclusion

Summary

After ‘presbyterian’ and ‘episcopalian’ confessional identities became entrenched by the Act of Settlement (1690) which established presbyterianism as the state religion, Scots on both sides of the divide sought to claim Robert Baillie as their own. In 1747, for example, the staunch episcopalian and Jacobite Thomas Ruddiman offered Baillie unexpected praise as the ‘only [Covenanter], who had the Courage and Conscience to deny, that the first Subscribers to that [Negative] Confession did abjure Episcopacy’. For Ruddiman, Baillie was ‘one of the most learned, and I say too little, when I add, the most honest in that famous Convention [i.e. the 1638 Glasgow Assembly]’. In this light, Baillie could be refashioned as a brave critic of Covenanting Scotland's dangerous radicalism: a minister with principled beliefs who had refused to succumb to the prevalent anti-episcopal hysteria of 1638. By contrast, nearly a century later, in December 1842, the secessionist minister Thomas M'Crie wrote to David Laing thanking him for publishing his new edition of Baillie's Letters and Journals. As M'Crie wrote, ‘I have perused with the highest anticipation and delight your masterly and elaborate Memoir of Baillie … I rejoice to think that we have been furnished with such an Antidote to the numerous misrepresentations which have issued from Jacobite and deeply prejudiced pens.’

M'Crie expressed hope for an ‘antidote’ to misrepresentations of Baillie, but in the end, Laing's edition achieved this by silencing Baillie's distinctive voice. This biography has sought to recover Baillie's voice by situating his vast and understudied corpus of writings in context. Baillie was a characteristically nuanced and dynamic thinker, steeped in the broader intellectual traditions of Reformed Europe. Far from exemplifying a ‘typical’ Covenanter, analysis of Baillie's ideas has revealed the superficiality that attaches to most claims regarding the unity of the Covenanting movement. There was no uniform ‘Covenanting ideology’ that integrated swathes of Scottish presbyterians, much less their English and Irish sympathizers.