Debate over the godliness and usefulness of having bishops
govern the Church of Scotland took place across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In part debate was intellectual and literary, being expressed in pamphlets and printed tracts and sermons. On occasion however argument about episcopacy spilled over into actual violence. Bishops and archbishops were attacked but in turn faced accusations of severity and of martyring their Presbyterian opponents.
Debate over episcopacy opened a space to contest and claim particular identities. The turns and counterturns of religious policy in seventeenth-century Scotland meant that Presbyterian ministers and episcopal clergy were alternately dispossessed and restored to office and power. Occasions of dispossession allowed clergy to present
themselves as martyrs, and the identity of martyr was in turn central to both Presbyterian and episcopal accounts of church authority
