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Prayer Book. He was not alone in thinking that the Book needed attention, and it may have been falling out of use through neglect in the early seventeenth century. James’s new Book went through three drafts after having been commissioned at a General Assembly in 1616, the final one closely resembling the English Prayer Book. However, although it was ready for printing in 1619, it was never issued, a reflection of hostility to these changes in the form of worship. In the meantime the Five Articles of Perth (enjoining the observance of the main holy days in the Christian calendar, kneeling at communion, private communion, private baptism and confirmation by bishops) had caused serious difficulty at a General Assembly in 1617. Although they were bullied through an assembly at Perth in 1618 and a parliament in 1621, they were not subsequently enforced, and in securing consent James had promised not to promote any more changes. In the meantime the Prayer Book was dropped.36

By the 1620s Scottish Presbyterianism stood in a rather uneasy tension with the episcopal authority favoured by the crown. Episcopal authority was not particularly welcome, and for sound historical reasons many thought that Scottish Christians could not depend on the crown to promote godliness. But changes in church government were of far less immediate and widespread concern than changes to forms of worship – James had secured some success in turning back the tide of Presbyterianization in the kirk, but had been forced to leave off attempts to change the liturgy. Many Scottish Protestants had by the 1620s developed a pretty austere view of appropriate forms of worship. Unlike many other Protestant churches, for example, it had abandoned the celebration of Christmas. This strand of opinion was again at odds with the preferences of the monarch. A greater emphasis on ceremonial was likely to be seen as a retreat from reformation, particularly if it was associated with the authority of bishops, and there were also plenty of vested interests hostile to the increasing political and administrative power of the bishops. Crucially for the mobilization of the Covenanting movement, the Presbyterian system had deep roots in Scottish society: kirk sessions exercised an often quite effective control over the lives of the local population and integrated local worship into a national church. It was probably parochial self-determination, as much as the precise content of worship, that mattered.37

The Scottish Reformation had left unresolved tensions about both the internal organization of the kirk and its relationship with the secular power of the monarchy. There was a strong but not unchallengeable case that the purity of Scottish religion depended on the independence of the kirk from monarchical and episcopal control. At the same time, in the localities, a Calvinist discipline had developed with a far closer embrace of social life than had been achieved in England.

These big issues in Reformation politics acquired a particular edge in the years following the outbreak of war in Bohemia in 1618. What became the Thirty Years War engulfed much of the Holy Roman Empire, which dominated central Europe, and involved armies from the whole continent. Lands gained for Protestantism in the sixteenth century fell to Catholic forces, and for some publicists this came to represent a battle for the future of the true religion.38 Of course, it was in reality both more and less than this, but the implications of that battle were relevant in every place of worship in Christendom. As Protestant armies fought for the future of the true religion, so creeping popery at home seemed more shocking. Many Scots left to fight these wars in the 1620s and 1630s,39 and the battle on the home front was not neglected.

At the same time Calvinist orthodoxy was challenged by forms of Protestantism which questioned predestinarian theology, and placed a greater emphasis on ritual and edification. These tendencies were denounced as ‘Arminian’, creating an association with a bitterly divisive controversy