James Sharp

Assassinated on 3 May 1679 on Magus Muir in Fife by Covenanter militants; the killing opened the killing time of Scottish religious persecution.

Overview

James Sharp, minister and professor, had betrayed the moderate Covenanter cause to negotiate the Restoration settlement and became Archbishop of St Andrews and enforcer of episcopacy against the Presbyterian kirk. On a road journey from Edinburgh to St Andrews his coach was stopped by a band of radical Covenanters hunting for a persecuting sheriff. Recognizing the archbishop, whose severity they despised, they killed him and his daughter on Magus Muir. The government answered with field executions and the repression remembered as the killing time, while the assassins deed fed both presbyterian martyrology and loyalist horror. Sharp remains a divisive figure: to his enemies the Judas of the kirk, to his church a murdered metropolitan. The site is marked to this day.