Between the years of 1648 and 1650 Scotland was ruled by a group of ultra-Presbyterians from the south west of Scotland called the 'Whiggamores'. The Whiggamores administered the country as a kind of Protestant Taliban, ruling as a religious theocracy they purged the government of anyone who was in any way competent or useful and supplanted them with fundamentalist religious extremists, they were like the American Republican party.