Kirsteen M. MacKenzie's new study is a comprehensive history of the covenanting interest—composed of adherents of the 1643 Anglo-Scottish Solemn League and Covenant—and its fortunes across England, Scotland, and Ireland during the mid-seventeenth century. Ranging widely across the scholarly landscape, the book takes as its starting point the “idealistic blueprint for a union between all three kingdoms” (10) contained in the 1643 covenant and sets out to assess its supporters’ efforts to enact that agenda over the following two decades. In the process, MacKenzie explores the attempted implementation of Presbyterian church government in all three British kingdoms, post-regicidal efforts at a “patriotic accommodation” (99) between royalist and Presbyterian anti-Commonwealth agitators, and the Scottish kirk's struggles under the Cromwellian religious settlement of the mid-1650s.
The book is divided into six chapters that together present a roughly chronological narrative of British politics from 1643 to 1663. (The second and third chapters both cover the later 1640s and early 1650s.) Beginning with the 1638 Scottish National Covenant, MacKenzie maps the “formation of networks and contacts” (6) between religious sympathizers across the archipelago that shaped the September 1643 signing of the Solemn League and Covenant. Next, she turns to the multipronged covenanter campaign to reform the Scottish and English churches between 1643 and 1646 while showcasing parliamentarian attempts to jump-start an aggressive Presbyterian settlement in Ulster. Despite Independent resistance in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, MacKenzie shows, the covenanting interest succeeded in crafting a new Anglo-Scottish liturgy while turning increasingly to London Presbyterians for support. The press and pulpit provided additional resources for the embattled coalition, but ultimately it was not enough; despite the covenanters’ best efforts, the mid- to late 1640s witnessed a series of setbacks from which the covenanting cause never recovered.
From there, MacKenzie turns to the decline, and ultimate failure, of covenanting policies between the later 1640s and the Restoration. Beginning with the controversial 1648 engagement between Charles I and a sizeable coalition of Scottish allies, MacKenzie explores how unsuccessful attempts to form a royalist-Presbyterian alliance and unrelenting pressure from Commonwealth opponents proved devastating for the covenanting interest. Paradoxically, however, as she notes, Presbyterianism flourished under the Protectorate during the mid-1650s. This was especially true in Ulster, where Presbyterian church government reemerged “like a phoenix from the ashes” (136) between 1653 and 1655. Yet the Commonwealth's religious program emerged without the covenanters’ consent, as dissenting Scottish divines such as Patrick Gillespie became privileged state consultants while MacKenzie's protagonists were left out in the cold. Eventually, she argues, despite overtures from the covenanting interest, Charles II completely “disestablished and detached” (184) Presbyterian church government from the state at the Restoration.
The Covenant has drawn considerable scholarly commentary in recent decades, and the seminal work of Edward Vallance and Allan Macinnes appears frequently in MacKenzie's footnotes. Unfortunately, Laura Stewart's magnificent Rethinking the Scottish Revolution (2015) appears to have been published too recently to be incorporated fully. However, MacKenzie very adeptly manages the rather large body of local studies on the implementation and disestablishment of Presbyterian church government during the period. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book, as she provides a much-needed synthesis while insisting on the significance of local factors to the broader covenanting project as well as to its eventual failure. The result is, essentially, a three-kingdoms narrative of Presbyterian church government during the mid-century decades. This is a genuinely novel contribution, and MacKenzie pays close attention to the ways in which the “multiple links” (200) between England, Ireland, and Scotland served to strengthen covenanting principles while also ensuring that they were received differently across the archipelago.
A few issues disrupt the book's presentation, including minor factual errors and a frustrating bibliographic formatting scheme. What is most sorely missed is an analysis of the covenanting interest after 1663. As Stewart and Vallance have shown, the Covenant remained a polemical touchstone for decades after the Restoration, and MacKenzie's archipelagic perspective might have made a valuable contribution to scholarly understandings of that phenomenon. All told, however, this monograph marks a meaningful contribution, raising new questions about the British implications of the 1643 Anglo-Scottish alliance. It will be important reading for years to come.
