THE WS SOCIETY ONLINE EXHIBITION 2024

James Anderson’s friend, colleague in historiograhy and correspondent Robert Wodrow was a Scottish minister, whose writings about the persecution of the Covenanters in the years after the Restoration created a new mythos and focus of Scottish national consciousness capable of succeeding that of the Antient Monarchy. The influence of his seminal History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland would endure for centuries and was felt, for instance, in the years of debate and dispute that preceded the 1843 Disruption.

Wodrow’s connection to the persecution of the Covenanters was personal and began at his birth in the Trongate, Glasgow, which took place as soldiers searched the building for his father, Professor James Wodrow, whose life he would go on to write. Robert Wodrow was a leading figure in the fight to defend the rights of the Church of Scotland in the aftermath of the 1707 Union. His attitude to his great work – that it was as much a collection of materials for a history as a history in itself – mirrored James Anderson’s:

This History, or rather Collection of Materials for an History, contains a large Number of Facts, and well attested Accounts, which will set the Circumstances of Presbyterians, during Twenty eight Years, in a clearer Light than hitherto they have appeared, and, if possible, may stop the Mouths of such who have most groundlessly aspersed this Church, and do Justice to the Memory of those excellent Persons of all Ranks, who, as Confessors and Martyrs, were exposed to the Fury of this unhappy Time. [Wodrow’s Preface to the History]

He seems also to have forseen the influence his book would have:

It may also, through the divine Blessing, be of some Use to revive our too much decayed Zeal for our Reformation-rights, to unite all the real Friends of the Church of Scotland, from the Observation of the various Methods used by Enemies to divide and ruine her, and serve to quicken our just Warmth against Popery and every Thing that tends to bring us back to the dismal State described in the following History.

The book’s subscribers came from all levels of the Church of Scotland, and well beyond. James Anderson was one of their number, and the book was probably in cultural terms the most important Scottish publication of the period that gave birth to the Signet Library.

Wodrow left to posterity three unpublished works – the Life of his father, eventually published in 1828; Memoirs of Reformers and Ministers of the Church of Scotland, and Analecta: or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences, mostly relating to Scotch Ministers and Christians, both put into print by the Maitland Society in the immediate aftermath of the 1843 Disruption of the Church. He also left a voluminous correspondence, some of which was also published during the tumultuous 1840s and a mass of original primary source and manuscript material.