Scottish Covenanter Persecution and the Killing Time

After the Covenanter rising of 1679, the Scottish government intensified efforts to enforce royal control over the church and suppress unauthorised field conventicles. Soldiers, courts and local officials pursued ministers and adherents who rejected the episcopal settlement.

The years of greatest repression, especially under Charles II and James VII, became known in later Presbyterian memory as the Killing Time. Executions, imprisonment, fines and military policing deepened political and religious divisions that survived into the Revolution of 1688.

Bonnie Dundee views this conflict through a young servant from a Covenanting background who enters the household of John Graham of Claverhouse, one of the officers most closely associated with enforcing royal policy.