In England the Quakers had a grand service to perform for the nation, in bearing the brunt of the fierce assault made on liberty of conscience. Whilst other dissenters temporised and resorted to stratagems to conceal the fact that they still continued to meet to worship God, the Quakers openly dared the wrath of the authorities, and took gladly the penalties of their faithfulness. In Scotland this faithful service was somewhat varied. In 1662 Episcopacy was established by law, and Presbyterianism put down. But the Covenanters were not easily coerced. They took up arms in defence of their religious liberties. They met to worship God with pistols in their belts, to defend themselves from the troopers sent to break up their meetings and to arrest their preachers. The consequences were conflict and bloodshed. Loyalty to God was confounded with disloyalty to the crown. The Quakers were not slow to condemn this mode of asserting the rights of conscience. Besides complicating the issue, they deemed it inconsistent with faith in God, who was quite competent to vindicate his own cause without appeal to the sword. They set the example of passive endurance of persecution, using only spiritual and peaceful means in resisting interference with the conscience. They appealed to the consciences of their judges; they petitioned the king's council, asserting their loyalty to the throne. But whilst these assertions of loyalty and condemnations of arms won clemency from the Council, they exasperated the Presbyterians; so that in spite of the fact that they had a common foe to fight, they wasted their strength in persecuting their stoutest allies, the Quakers. In 1661 the "drunken parliament" had met in Edinbro, and vested all executive authority in the king; so that the power of the Council was unlimited. We see, then, the profligate ministers of a dissolute monarch, with Lauderdale at their head, extending protection to the Quakers whom they despised and ridiculed; and checking the rage of exasperated Covenanters, and the violence of domineering clergy.
Soon after his marriage, Robert Barclay narrowly missed a first taste of prison life. The "monthly meeting" at Aberdeen (the gathering of the local congregations for denominational business, always preceded by worship) was entered by officers sent by the magistrates to disperse the assembly. They violently dragged to the Council House all the men who were present. There the magistrates endeavoured by fair words to induce them to give up their meeting, and then let them go. If they had had more experience of Friends they would have anticipated what followed. In spite of their recent arrest, the released Friends simply returned to the meeting, and resumed their worship. Soon the officers "appeared again, and with greater fury than before dragged them back to the Council House, where the provost and council reprimanded them for contumacious resistance of civil authority, using much threatening language. But Friends were preserved in a tranquil and innocent boldness, so that 'neither the big words nor yet the barbarous deeds' of their opponents could make them flinch from an honest confession of the true reasons for their conduct." They were all sent to prison, except Patrick Livingstone, and the young laird of Ury. To the eager martyr spirit of the latter, this exemption was quite disappointing. Young as he was, and so recently married, he would gladly have shared the hardships of his brethren.