The commotion radiates out from Edinburgh across…

The commotion radiates out from Edinburgh across the rest of Scotland like a great wave caused by a rock thrown into a silent pool.

Montrose makes the feelings of many of his fellow peers plain when he describes the Service Book 'emerging from the bowels of the whore of Babylon'.

Robert Baillie, the minister of Kilwinning in Ayrshire, expresses the mood of the nation in more measured terms: '...there was in our land never such ane appearance of a sturr; the whole people thinks Poperie at the doores...no man may speak for the king's part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, farr above any thing I could ever have imagined.'