Unrepentant Papists: Catholic Responses to Cromwellian Toleration in Interregnum Scotland RYAN BURNS Northwestern University Abstract The Cromwellian regime has long endured a one-dimensional reputation for anti-popery. Historians are beginning to challenge this view, pointing to the relative absence of religious persecution during Oliver Cromwell’s tenure as Lord Protector. Cromwell massacred Catholic rebels at Wexford and Drogheda in Ireland, but he did not compel Catholics to attend Protestant churches, and does not seem to have hunted priests as vigorously as his predecessors. This article explores the impact of Cromwellian rule on the Catholic community in Scotland, where the military governor George Monck granted Catholics a significant degree of efective toleration. Monck prohibited the Presbyterian church from subjecting Catholics to ecclesiastical discipline, and actively intervened to protect Catholics if kirk sessions and other church courts summoned them anyway. In return, many Catholics ostentatiously professed their loyalty to the commonwealth. Although Monck did not repeal Scotland’s penal laws, his intervention demonstrates that the commonwealth’s liberty for ‘tender consciences’ trickled down to those formally excluded from it. Cromwellian ofcials in Scotland would not allow any institution to coerce one’s inward beliefs, even if it meant defending known Catholics from a Protestant kirk. I n the late autumn of 1651, a Jesuit priest in Aberdeen dispatched a piece of extraordinary news. The city had fallen that September to the New Model Army under the leadership of George Monck, and the Jesuit John Smith reported that Monck was protecting local Catholics from their Presbyterian neighbours. 1 Monck’s subordinate, Colonel Robert Overton, would soon issue a cease-and-desist order to the Aberdeen presbytery, forbidding the presbyters from disciplining the Catholics Alexander Irvine and John Makewen. 2 On 6 October 1651, Monck issued an order prohibiting Scots from enforcing any oath not authorized by the commonwealth. At a stroke, Monck had 1 Scottish Catholic Archives, Aberdeen University Library [hereafter SCA], BL/1/6/15, James Gray to Robert Gall, 14 Dec. 1651. James Gray was Smith’s alias. 2 ‘A summons given by the presbytery of Aberdeen to Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum’, in C. H. Firth (ed.), Scotland and the Commonwealth: Letters and Papers Relating to the Military Government of Scotland, from August 1651 to December 1653 (London, 1895), pp. 348–9. The presbytery also summoned Irvine’s wife and children. C  2018 The Author. History C  2018 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd