'King of Scotland': Lauderdale and the Restoration North of the Border

In early April 1657 John Maitland, then Earl of Lauderdale (1616-82), wrote from his prison in Windsor Castle, one of the several places he had been confined in ever since his capture by Cromwell’s troops after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, that ‘my days of action I think are at an end’. His mood seems to have been one of stoic resignation, rather than despair, as reported by James Sharp, a leading Scots Presbyterian. But Lauderdale’s career was far from over: in a very real sense it had hardly even begun.