The seventeenth century: crown and Covenant; the ballads

Abstract

After the union of the crowns, Scotland was disrupted by conflict for almost ninety years as the struggle between Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics and extreme dissenters continued. For the people in the northern part of the kingdom, the Civil War, the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement were only further episodes in a cause which had started, as far as they were concerned, with the triumph of the Kirk in Mary’s reign and the Declaration of Faith in 1560. These disputatious years devoured the intellectual and creative energies of two generations to the exclusion of almost everything else. Among Scottish writers, Drummond and Urquhart are of some note, and of course the oral ballad-tradition must not be forgotten, but, even so, there are no Scots writers to equal Donne, Marvell, Milton and Bunyan. Perhaps the best poetic expression of the turbulent times everywhere in the north came from the biting verses of Iain Lom, who used a more vernacular Gaelic than the old bards had favoured, and whose work looks forward to the flowering of Gaelic verse in the next century.