Previous accounts of the ‘Radical War’ have been rather more concerned with gauging its size and scale than determining where it came from. Attempts to answer either of these questions are complicated by the nature of the source material on which historians must rely. This falls into four categories: first, material generated by government and local political elites, found in local archives and Home Office papers; secondly, press reports contemporaneous with the events they describe; thirdly, legal material, including precognitions of those examined for their involvement in the rising and the lengthy account of the trials of the special commission of oyer et terminer; and fourthly, personal accounts, frequently printed long after the events they purported to describe.

This chapter will use all of these sources to provide a brief narrative of the ‘Radical War’. It will then move on to consider the genesis and resolution of what should be considered the end point of a significant crisis within Scottish society. It will offer an interpretation that lies somewhere between two existing extremes. The attempted rising did not amount to the full-scale spy-fomented separatist-nationalist insurgency of Ellis and Mac a'Ghobhainn's Scottish Insurrection, but nor was it quite the ‘futile revolt of a tiny minority’ dismissed in Thomis and Holt's account of revolutionary threats in Britain or the ‘pathetic storm in a teacup’ of the recent volumes of the History of Parliament.