ABSTRACT
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a major essay on the covenanters, "The Pentland Rising" when he was just sixteen, honouring the bicentenary of the battle of Rullion Green, which saw a small army of covenanter rebels defeated by government forces under the command of Tam Dalyell of the Binns. The event is already cast as Gothic by Stevenson, the beginning of an emerging "gloom": Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deepest tragedies which followed it. It is, as it were, the evening of the night of persecution – a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the noonday when compared with the midnight gloom that followed. Covenanting histories are tied to the provincial parts of Scotland, and to a kind of pre-modern folk sensibility. The marginalization of Covenanters by history and modernity is precisely what lends the Covenanter Gothic its force.
