The investigation of political and religious ideas pursued in this book has constructed an evocation of shared sensibilities rather than a series of detailed expositions of individual texts. In doing so, it has drawn on an extensive range of sources, the large majority of which have not previously been used in this manner. Such sources have included anonymous political memoranda, sermon notebooks, manuscript legal depositions, private correspondence, commonplace- book reflections, diary entries and bardic poetry, together with printed works encompassing a heterogeneous range of subjects from political thought and religious reflection to theoretical jurisprudence and natural and moral philosophy. While the adoption of this approach was partly dictated by the diffuse nature of the extant source material, it was also conceived with the aim of generating as comprehensive and contextualised an account of late-seventeenth century Scottish intellectual culture as possible. By closely wedding the study of political and religious ideas to the constitutional and ecclesiastical circumstances in which they were articulated, this book has therefore aimed to reconstruct the mental world of Restoration Scotland with nuance and precision.

Juxtaposing formal political theorising alongside informal political commentaries has inevitably produced some surprising insights. To take one brief example, in June 1684 the University of Oxford formally thanked Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh ‘for the service he had done his Majesty [Charles II] in writing and publishing Jus Regium’. Examined in detail in the third chapter of this book, Mackenzie’s tract has widely been regarded as representing the epitome of political theorising in defence of absolute Stuart kingship. A more attenuated and pragmatic impression of Mackenzie’s royalism emerges, however, from consideration of his professional conduct as Charles II’s Lord Advocate. The year after Jus Regium was published, a characteristic vignette of Mackenzie was provided by the Covenanter, Alexander Shields, who had recently been interrogated before the Privy Council by Mackenzie in an attempt to ascertain whether or not Shields endorsed ideas recently expounded in manifestoes issued by more extreme elements of the Covenanting movement. Describing the conduct of the Privy Councillors involved, Shields recorded that ‘severalls admired’ the fact that Mackenzie ingenuously acknowledged that they did not ‘owne all ye administrations’, while others descended from the bench to ‘bid me be tender of my life & take advice’, apprising Shields that ‘Sr George ye K. Advocat was a man yt could give advice.