The Assembly, now technically illegal, continues to meet until December 20.

Its proceedings show how much more radical feeling had become since the Covenant had been first signed in February.

All that James and Charles had worked for over the past forty years—the Liturgy, the Canons, the Five Articles of Perth and the Court of High Commission—is swept away.

Even more significant, Episcopacy itself is abolished and the bishops condemned and excommunicated one by one.

Presbyterianism is declared to be the one true government of the Church of Scotland.

This, it must be stressed, is a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution, for the bishops stand condemned not just as church officials but also as officers of the crown.

The historian Leopold von Ranke is later to compare the defiance of the Glasgow Assembly to that moment, a century and a half later, when the French National Assembly resisted the commands of Louis XVI.