Contemporary historiography now widely accords the Church of England an absolutely decisive role in the events that led to the collapse of the monarchy of James II and the ensuing revolution. No such consensus has formed regarding the participation of the Church of Scotland in the revolutionary crisis that engulfed James's northern kingdom. This is somewhat ironic given the divergent fates of the neighboring ecclesiastical establishments. The Church of England, of course, retained its establishment, episcopal structure and liturgy unaltered, relinquishing only its legal monopoly on religious worship and the communion of some six hundred of its most devoted and illustrious prelates and clergy to a bitter schism. The Church of Scotland, meanwhile, was completely transformed. Jeffrey Stephen's marvelous and formidable new monograph, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland, 1689–1716, may well stand as the definitive account of that revolutionary transformation.

Defending the Revolution is, first and foremost, a political history of Scottish Presbyterianism from the waning days of the Restoration “Killing Time” through the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1715. Stephen places the Scottish Presbyterians at the center of the Glorious Revolution; they were, he affirms, “ready and radical revolutionaries” (25). However, while he is prepared to concede that the Presbyterians did not, like the bishops and clergy of the Church of England, actually initiate the events that destroyed James's rule, he will by no means acquiesce in their being labeled “reluctant revolutionaries” by historians. In Stephen's telling, Scottish Presbyterians masterfully (and consistently) seized the opportunities provided by James's serial missteps in Scotland as well as events unfolding elsewhere in the British Isles. Indeed, the Scottish Presbyterians capitalized brilliantly on the freedom afforded them in James's second Declaration of Indulgence (July 1687), rebuilding their shattered church virtually from the ground up after a generation of vicious persecution. Particularly across southern and central Scotland, Presbyterians reclaimed parishes, rebuilt meetinghouses, reestablished presbyteries, and re-called their exiled clergy from abroad. This Presbyterian resurgence took an ugly turn at James's flight in December 1688. As in England, violent anti-Catholic rioting was commonplace in the cities. But to this was added in Scotland inter-Protestant violence, particularly in the west, where Presbyterian mobs “rabbled” the Episcopal clergy from their livings, subjecting the ministers, and occasionally their wives and children, to torrents of physical and verbal abuse. In the capital, Presbyterians thrived in the political vacuum left by the collapse of James's regime—even forming spontaneously the kinds of revolutionary clubs and societies that Hannah Arendt long ago considered the most remarkable feature of political revolution. This extraordinary mobilization—not to mention, a modified franchise that extended the vote to all Protestant burgesses—left the Presbyterians with a commanding position in the Scottish Convention called in early 1689.

On this parliamentary foundation, Stephen argues, Presbyterians proceeded to overturn the Restoration ecclesiastical settlement and reestablish the Scottish Kirk. Given the virtual demographic parity between Presbyterians and Episcopalians in Scotland, as well as William of Orange's own predisposition for a moderate Episcopal settlement, how, Stephen wonders, were the Presbyterians able to triumph so completely? He argues that the pervasive Jacobitism of the Scottish Episcopal clergy made their inclusion within the ecclesiastical settlement virtually impossible. The abolition of prelacy in July 1689 inaugurated a twelve-month period in which the prevailing ecclesiastical regime was undone: the royal supremacy was nullified; the ejected clergy restored; the Westminster Confession of Faith affirmed; Presbyterian church government reconstructed; and finally, patronage to church livings outlawed in July 1690. Stephen considers the ecclesiastical settlement a virtually unmitigated “triumph” for Presbyterians (75), one in which they managed to secure every goal save for the ratification of the Westminster catechism and the Directory of Worship. All of this, it must be stressed, was accomplished even before the General Assembly of the Church convened.

The remainder of Defending the Revolution deals in illuminating detail with the consolidation of this Presbyterian victory. In spite of the favorable settlement at Edinburgh, much of Scotland north of the Tay remained beyond the reach of the Presbyterian Kirk. Stephen reexamines the work of the much-maligned commissions for the north and south, appointed by the General Assembly, to root out scandalous and erroneous ministers. Long considered an engine of Presbyterian persecution of Scottish Episcopalians, Stephen considers their work a vital tool of ecclesiastical discipline and expansion—undertaken in the face of hostility from William and the Anglican bishops at his court, who were perceived as attempting to engineer the comprehension of the unreconstructed Episcopal clergy within the established Church. While the court was content with a declaration of political loyalty and a somewhat equivocal affirmation of orthodoxy, the Church insisted on strict doctrinal and liturgical conformity. In this, the Church came to rely heavily on its commanding interest in the Scottish Parliament, which provided a bulwark against the Erastianism and latitudinarianism putatively emanating from the court. As Stephen shows, the Parliament at Edinburgh was indispensable in shoring up the decisions of the General Assembly, furthering the work of national reformation, and lending material support for the policy of inland mission to the Catholic and Episcopal Highlands.

From this perspective, the full measure of the crisis posed by union becomes apparent. The ecclesiastical revolution in Scotland, underpinned by the intimate working relationship between Church and Parliament, could not expect to prosper in the custody of an Anglican Parliament at Westminster. And predictably, the years that immediately followed the union witnessed a battery of legislation that undermined much of the Presbyterian Revolution: the establishment of religious toleration in Scotland; the imposition of an unscriptural oath of allegiance on the clergy; and finally, the restoration of patronage. As Stephen shows, however, Presbyterian disenchantment with union, though palpable, was never sufficient to impel the Church of Scotland toward the cause of the Stuarts—despite the best efforts of Jacobites to exploit its disaffection. Indeed, the Church's steadfast support of the Hanoverian succession allowed Presbyterians to exploit the Rebellion of 1715 to press fully the extirpation of Episcopalianism in the Jacobite north.

Unlike much of the current scholarship on the Glorious Revolution, Jeffrey Stephen's Defending the Revolution is not remotely concerned with the modernizing implications of the crisis and its settlement. On the contrary, Stephen depicts the ecclesiastical revolution as a backward-looking affair: the definitive restoration of the reformed tradition in Scotland, the fulfillment of the ideals of Knox, the reformers, and the covenanters (76). Theirs was a vision of national life permeated in its every aspect by godly Protestantism. The revolution thus arrested “the ecclesiastical see-sawing” (292) of early modern Scotland and ensured that Presbyterianism would form the basis of Scottish civic identity for centuries. Situated between the religious heroism of the Killing Time and the liberal genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, the reputation of this age in Scottish history, Stephen acknowledges, has been less than favorable. But he powerfully demands its reconsideration. After all, the Presbyterian revolutionaries of 1689 had been able to do that which eluded the likes of Samuel Rutherford or Richard Cameron: they had made their revolution permanent.