Dissent After Disruption

On 18 May 1843, the retiring moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, David Welsh, led a procession of some two hundred evangelical Presbyterian ministers from St. Andrew’s Church in Edinburgh to the nearby Tanfield Hall, where they and several other clerics and elders constituted themselves as the Free Church of Scotland. This moment, the “Great Disruption”—“the most important event in Victorian Scotland”—had profound implications for Scottish society, transatlantic Protestantism, and the future of organized religion in Britain (p. 1). Yet, as the author of this excellent book and other eminent historians have recognized, far less attention has been paid to its aftermath as has been afforded to the conflict that preceded it. This new study is, then, a vitally important historiographical intervention, providing as it does the first detailed account of Scottish Presbyterian dissent in the wake of the Disruption. In addition to the establishmentarian Free Church, the book takes as its focus the voluntaryist United Presbyterian Church, which emerged as a union of the United Secession and Relief churches to become Scotland’s third-largest Presbyterian denomination at its founding in 1847. With the Free and United Presbyterian churches negotiating union by the early 1860s, the intervening twenty years represent, for the author, a critical “transitional period” that demands closer scrutiny (p. 3). Indeed, if the Disruption marked “the final death blow of the vision of Scotland as a covenanted nation” and 1863 the “start of a new era for Presbyterianism” culminating in the reunion of the Church of Scotland in 1929, what can those twenty years tell us about contemporary ecclesiologies, political alignments, and social change in nineteenth-century Scotland (p. 10)?

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