Charles had conceived a violent dislike to Presbyterianism, and with his experiences of it the dislike was not unnatural.  It was not, he told Burnet, a religion for gentlemen, and he found few among his court to contradict him.  Scarcely had he settled himself in his capital when the Presbyterians were upon him.  Sharp had already been some months in London as ambassador of the moderate party, the party of the old Resolutioners.  But an easy way of reconciling Sharp’s conscience was soon found.  It is not precisely clear when the bargain was struck which was to convert the chosen champion of the Presbyterian Church into an archbishop, but struck it was, and in no long time.  He had by Monk’s advice visited Charles at Breda, and some suppose that the first interview completed the transformation.  If so, he managed to delude his party very skilfully.  His letters to the Assembly, though the light of subsequent events enables us to translate them more clearly than was possible at the time, were full of wise counsel, of apparently honest confessions of the many difficulties he foresaw in the way, and of protestations of fidelity and firmness which were no less implicitly believed.  “I told him,” said his colleague Robert Douglas, a man of very different stamp, when Sharp went up to London later for his ordination, “I told him the curse of God would be on him for his treacherous dealing; and that I may speak my heart of this man, I profess I did no more suspect him in reference to Prelacy than I did myself."[10]

Meanwhile the extreme party had not been idle.  It will be perhaps most convenient henceforth to distinguish them as Covenanters:  to call them Whigs, as Burnet and other historians of the time call them, would not convey to modern ears the significance it had for their contemporaries.  Even those stern and unbending Tories of whom Mr. Gladstone was once the spokesman have long ceased to regard the men who are still sometimes called Whigs as the most fanatical members of the body politic.  It would be no mere fanciful application of modern terms to distinguish the two parties of the Scottish Church as Liberals and Radicals; but it will for many reasons be best henceforth to write of them as Presbyterians and Covenanters.

The Covenanters, then, had not been idle.  Shortly after the Restoration they had, through a deputation of their elders and ministers, called upon their brethren of the Church to unite with them in an address to the King, praying him, as a member of the Covenant with themselves, to remember his obligations to that sacred institution and zealously to prosecute its blessed work in all his three kingdoms.  Toleration in things religious was especially denounced as a vast mischief disguised under the specious pretence of liberty for tender consciences.  Schismatics were to be stamped out as sternly as Papists and Prelatists; and by Schismatics were meant all men, members of their own Church no less than of others, who ventured to differ from them on any point of doctrine whatsoever.