The achievements and later sufferings of the seventeenth-century Covenanting movement were for two centuries or more a core element of Scottish national identity: a pre-Enlightenment phenomenon which retained relevance and a high profile in post-Enlightenment Scotland. The movement emerged when Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston of Wariston drew up the National Covenant of 1638 in protest at Charles I’s attempt to bring the Kirk into conformity with the Church of England. During the British civil wars of the 1640s, a further measure, the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, served as an alliance between Scots Presbyterians and the Long Parliament. During the Interregnum and Restoration, the movement dwindled and fragmented, though the later Covenanters launched unsuccessful uprisings against Charles II and James VII and II, which led to further persecution by the Stuart regime. Scholars have explored Covenanting political thought in considerable depth, unpacking the biblical precedents, ideas of social contract, popular sovereignty, and the right of resistance to tyrannicide which underpinned their public declarations.

Covenanting survived into the eighteenth century. Those who claimed a Covenanting identity included not only the movement’s formal successors, the United Societies – also known as the Cameronians, or, later, Reformed Presbyterians – but also the much larger denomination of Seceders, who broke away from the Kirk in 1733. Dissatisfied with the Revolution settlement of 1690, the Union of 1707 and agrarian change, the United Societies threw down dykes, engaged in smuggling and threatened to rebel alongside a group of Jacobites, equally disgruntled but for different reasons. Covenanting was pushed further to the margins during the Enlightenment, as the Moderate literati within the Kirk sought to play down the militancy of Presbyterianism’s violent past. While the example of the Covenanters provided a measure of inspiration to Scottish and Irish radicals in the age of revolutions, as John Brims and Ian McBride have respectively argued, their uncompromising rigidity proved unconvincing for the polite mainstream of Presbyterian society.

Nevertheless, Covenanting proved remarkably resilient. Active Covenanting remained politically relevant in nineteenth-century Ireland and the United States where, as Joseph Moore and others have shown, it infused political struggles against slavery – a campaign which Covenanters in Ireland and Scotland supported – and constitutional struggles to reform the American republic’s secular foundations.