The Killing Time was a period of conflict in Scottish history between the Presbyterian Covenanter movement, based largely in the southwest of the country, and the government forces of Kings Charles II and James VII. The period, roughly from 1679 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was subsequently called The Killing Time by Robert Wodrow in his The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution, published in 1721–22. It is an important episode in the martyrology of the Church of Scotland.
Background
In the century following the Reformation Parliament of 1560, the question of church government had been one of growing tension between popular opinion and the Monarch. While the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian in its legal status according to various acts of Parliament, King James VI had developed a compromise which tended towards an Episcopalian church government, but Calvinist theology.
When King Charles I acceded to the throne in 1625, his policy increasingly antagonised the nation by imposing High Church Anglicanism and Erastian state control over spiritual matters of the church. This culminated in the 1638 National Covenant which was a widespread popular expression of the nation's protest at the King's policy. Ultimately the Bishops' Wars resulted in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. On 5 February 1649, six days after the English Parliament executed the King, the Covenanter Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II "King of Great Britain, France and Ireland" at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh, but refused to allow him to enter Scotland unless he accepted Presbyterianism throughout Britain and Ireland.
In order to protect the Presbyterian polity and doctrine of the Church of Scotland, the pre-Restoration government of Scotland signed the 1650 Treaty of Breda to crown him king and support him against the English Parliamentary forces.
However, at his Restoration in 1660, the King renounced the terms of the Treaty and his Oath of Covenant, which the Scottish Covenanters saw as a betrayal. The Rescissory Act 1661 repealed all laws made since 1633, effectively ejecting 400 Ministers from their livings, removing patronage in the appointment of Ministers from congregations and allowing the King to proclaim the restoration of Bishops to the Church of Scotland. The Abjuration Act of 1662 …was a formal rejection of the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. These were declared to be against the fundamental laws of the kingdom. The Act required all persons taking public office to take an oath of abjuration not to take arms against the king, and rejecting the Covenants. This excluded most Presbyterians from holding official positions of trust. Essentially, this returned church governance to the situation that existed prior to the expulsion of the bishops by the Glasgow General Assembly in 1638 and overthrew the Presbyterian form of organisation favoured by the Covenanters.
Situation
Church ministers were confronted with a stark choice: accept the new situation or lose their livings. Up to a third of the ministry refused. Many ministers chose voluntarily to abandon their own parishes rather than wait to be forced out by the government. Most of the vacancies occurred in the south-west of Scotland, an area particularly strong in its Covenanting sympathies. Some of the ministers also took to preaching in the open fields in conventicles, often attracting thousands of worshippers.