Chapter XVII
History of Protestantism in Scotland, and the Conflict of the Clergy with the Government.
THUS far the revolutionary movement awakened and stirred society to the core; but as yet the nation was much divided. On the one hand, the Earls of Morton, Glencairn, Athole, Mar, Lord Lindsay, Lord Hume, and others, with Moray as their leader, were supported by the reformed clergy. On the other hand, a section of the Protestant nobles who disapproved of the treatment of the Queen, still stood aloof and were assuming a decided attitude; while the Roman Catholic party were constantly active and looking for their opportunity. On all sides the elements of conflict were apparent.
On the 11th of August, 1567, the Earl of Moray, who had been recalled from France by his party, arrived in Edinburgh. After conferring with his friends, he consented to accept the regency, but before formally assuming the office, he wished to have an interview with the Queen. He was accompanied to Lochleven, by Morton, Athole, and Lord Lindsay; but the Queen naturally desired to see her brother alone, and her request was granted. What passed between them, is rather hard to ascertain. It has been reported that he reproached her for her conduct in the severest manner, that the Queen was extremely afflicted, and that after a long interview he left her to ponder over what he had said. Next morning the Queen and Moray again met. There was more sympathy between them; and at the Queen’s request Moray agreed to accept the regency.¹
¹ Sir James Melville’s Memoirs, pages 193‒194; Hosack’s Queen Mary, Volume I., pages 373‒375.
On the 22nd of August, Moray formally assumed office in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and having taken the oath required by the constitution, was proclaimed Regent. The following day the Council issued an order calling in all the seals, that they might be broken and destroyed, and new ones made with a legend appropriate to James VI.¹ The new Regent exerted himself to the utmost to restore order and administer justice in the nation. He commanded the leading men of the Merse to appear before the Council on the last day of August to concert measures for the quiet administration of justice within the East March. The Hamiltons offered some opposition to his authority within their territories, but it was easily overcome. Moray’s next aim was to get possession of the castle of Edinburgh. The Governor, Sir James Balfour, was bought over by a bribe, and the castle was then committed to Sir William Kirkaldy the laird of Grange. The Regent also struggled hard for the castle of Dunbar, and it fell into his hands about the end of September. The castle of Dumbarton, however, still held out for the Queen. Orders were issued for the surrender of many other castles; and great efforts were made to establish peace and order throughout the kingdom.²
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 548‒551.
² Ibid., Volume I., pages 551‒576; Stevenson’s Selections, pages 283, 291‒294.
Moray summoned a parliament which met at Edinburgh in December, 1567, “to treat on the affairs tending to the glory of God, the setting forth of the King’s authority, and for establishing good and necessary laws in the kingdom.” This parliament ratified the most important steps of the Reformation. The acts passed in 1560 which had never received the royal assent, were confirmed, and the Confession of Faith was inserted in the record of the parliamentary proceedings.¹ Henceforward the great revolution which had substituted Protestantism for Romanism in Scotland may be regarded as secured; though there were still many weighty and interesting matters relating to the polity and rights of the reformed Church, and the claims of her clergy, remaining to be settled, which afterwards led to a protracted struggle with the Crown.
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 3‒45.
The General Assembly met at Edinburgh on the 25th of December, 1567. All the members present agreed to a proposition that a certain number of ministers should be appointed to meet at any time with such members of parliament or of the Privy Council as the Regent should name, as a committee to advise on the affairs of the Church.¹ The reformed Church gave the Regent a firm and undivided support; and his government required all their aid. It was said that he took great trouble to pounce upon the thieves and vagabonds who distressed the people, and held courts of justice throughout the country; but that he took no such care to settle the differences and whims of the nobility, and thus failed to draw them into obedience to the King. For all the Regent’s energy and the success of his government, the army still required to be kept in the field. On the 14th of February, 1568, the lead on the cathedral churches of Aberdeen and Elgin, part of which had already been stolen, was ordered to be stripped off and sold, and the proceeds applied to maintain the King’s troops.² The Queen’s party continued exceedingly active. A considerable section of the people were still dissatisfied, and the Regent was often warned that trouble was brewing.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, page 113.
² Sir James Melville’s Memoirs, pages 198‒199; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 599, 608‒614.
In the beginning of May, 1568, the Queen escaped from her imprisonment in Lochleven, and proceeded to Hamilton. Her chief adherents were the Earls of Argyle, Huntly, Rothes, Cassillis; the Lords Harris, Livingston, Fleming, and Claud Hamilton.¹ In a few days she was at the head of a force of four or five thousand armed men. When the intelligence of Mary’s escape reached him, the Regent was at Glasgow holding justice courts. On the 3rd of May he ordered a muster of all the Crown vassals, for the preservation of the King’s authority and person, and for establishing justice and peace in the kingdom. He resolved at once to meet the danger, and marching out of Glasgow, took up a position at Langside. On the 13th of May the followers of the Queen gave him battle. His victory was complete, and Mary herself fled towards the Border;² and in an unhappy hour determined to throw herself upon the hospitality of the Queen of England.
¹ Keith, Volume II., pages 797‒799.
² Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 620‒622.
After the flight of the Queen, the Regent continued his efforts to restore order in the kingdom. This was no easy task. He had a host of enemies, and was always making more, for the peculiar position into which he had allowed himself to be put, necessarily multiplied his foes. When parliament was summoned to meet in July, 1568, the keenness of the struggle was intensified as soon as it became known that the enemies of the Regent’s government would be subjected to forfeiture. The Archbishop of St. Andrews was cited to appear before the Council, and having failed to appear, was declared a rebel and outlawed. The Earl of Crawford and others were also proclaimed rebels. Parliament met at the appointed time, but it was immediately adjourned to August, when proceedings of forfeiture were to be begun against the opponents of the government. From motives of policy, however, only a few were condemned, and hopes were held out to others, with the view of inducing them to submit.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 624‒634, 638; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 47‒58.
The General Assembly met at Edinburgh on the 1st of July, 1568. John Willock was chosen moderator, and the members proceeded to the business before them. They presented a number of articles to the Regent and craved reform of abuses. Among other things they complained that their stipends were not fully paid; and requested that the College of Aberdeen should be reformed, the corrupted office-bearers removed and others appointed in their places, so that the youth might be instructed in letters and godliness. They desired the Regent to adopt measures for the suppression of vice, that the plague of God might thereby be withdrawn from the nation. The Regent listened with respect to their requests and returned a favourable answer. This Assembly resolved that all the Catholics, who after due admonition refused to join themselves to the Reformed Church, should be cast out of the society of Christ’s body and excommunicated. But the Assembly which met in February the following year, presented to the Regent a series of similar articles praying that remedies might be adopted; and in reference to the Regent’s former proposal touching vice and crime, they added――“If his grace send us to the Justice-Clerk, experience has sufficiently taught us what he has done in any such matters.”¹ They meant that he had done nothing at all.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 123, 126‒129, 139, 140.
In the end of September, 1568, the Regent, accompanied by the Earl of Morton, Lord Lindsay, and other leading men of his party, passed to England to attend the conference at York touching Queen Mary. But it does not fall within the scope of my work to follow the story of that unhappy Queen after her flight to England; although it has been intensely interesting to some minds, it is not sufficiently important in its bearing upon the main subject to justify its introduction.¹
¹ This matter is treated in the histories of Tytler and Burton, very fully in Hosack’s Queen Mary, and in many other works which need not be enumerated.
When the Regent returned from England in the beginning of February 1569, he found his position in Scotland to be one of extreme difficulty. In the interval the Queen’s party had become more powerful and restless, and were employing every means in their power to harass his government and the unhappy people. Moray continued to act with energy, but some of his supporters deserted, and his enemies multiplied. Maitland of Lethington, who had fallen under the suspicion of the Regent, joined the Laird of Grange, the governor of the Castle of Edinburgh. Both of them threw in their lot with the cause of Mary, and thus the strongest and most important fortress in the kingdom passed into the hands of her party. It was mainly owing to this circumstance that the supporters of the Queen were able to hold out so long in Scotland. The other centres of her party were Huntly and the Gordons in the north, the Hamiltons and Argyle in the west, and some of the border clans. Thus hemmed in and hard pressed on every side, the Regent struggled on, and if his career had not been cut short, he would in all probability, with the assistance of the money of England, have overcome his enemies; but in the beginning of the year 1570, as the castle of Edinburgh was in the hands of the Queen’s adherents, he set out for Stirling; and on the 13th of January, when returning through Linlithgow, he was shot by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. The bullet passed through his body, and he died in a few hours. The assassin escaped on a fleet horse and rode to Hamilton Castle. Moray’s death was bewailed by the people and by the reformed clergy, who both regarded him as the arm of their safety.¹ To the party of the young King Moray’s death was a severe blow. He was an unscrupulous man, and his character will not bear close inspection; but he had great energy and some of the qualifications of a successful ruler; and with such means as he could command, he struggled bravely and worthily to maintain order and to administer justice.
¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., page 259; Buchanan, Book XIX., chapters 51‒54; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 644‒649, 654, et seq.; Volume II., pages 11, 20, 25, 37‒44, 51, et seq.
For several years after the death of Moray, the factions of the King and Queen kept the country in an incessant turmoil. The adherents of the Queen still held the castle of Edinburgh; and in May, 1570, the English Government sent a small force to Edinburgh, but instead of restoring order, it intensified rather the general wretchedness. The passion and hatred of the opposing parties went on increasing, but at length the enthusiasm of the Queen’s followers spent itself. In July, 1570, the Earl of Lennox was elected Regent. His election was approved by the English Government, and he received the unswerving support of the reformed clergy.
The General Assembly met at Edinburgh on the 5th of July, and passed an act commanding all the ministers throughout the kingdom to pray publicly in their churches for the preservation of the King’s person and authority, and to proclaim to the people that he should be universally obeyed. The Assembly further unanimously agreed to appoint a commission of their brethren to attend any conventions of the nobility which might be held, and to assist and consent to everything that should be treated, which tended to promote the glory of God, the preaching and ministering of the true religion, the authority of the King, and the common good of the nation. The Assembly also, having regard to the troubled state of the kingdom, appointed a number of their brethren to be sent to all the earls, barons, and gentlemen who had fallen off from the King’s authority, and by every lawful means to endeavour to win them back and to reconcile them to the government of his majesty.¹
¹ Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 23‒28; _Book of the Universal Kirk_, pages 177‒178, 182; Tytler’s History of Scotland, Volume VII., pages 327‒329.
In the midst of the strife in Edinburgh, about the middle of October, 1570, Knox sustained a shock of apoplexy, which impaired his speech; but he recovered so far as to be able to preach on Sundays. In one of his sermons in the month of December, he made some personal remarks on the proceedings of the Laird of the Grange, the governor of the castle, which led to a bitter quarrel between him and his old friend. Knox defended himself and insisted on his freedom of speech in the pulpit, but anonymous libels were circulated against him. He was accused of not praying for the Queen, and for maligning her name and her adherents. His brethren and friends prevailed upon him to leave Edinburgh for his own safety, and he went to St. Andrews early in May, 1571. The bishop of Galloway, Alexander Gordon, then filled his pulpit in Edinburgh, and preached in a strain more acceptable to the Queen’s party. It was reported that he prayed for the Queen on the ground of her extreme wickedness, thus――“All sinners ought to be prayed for: If we should not pray for sinners, for whom should we pray, seeing that God came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. St. David was a sinner, and so was she: St. David was an adulterer, and so was she: St. David committed murder in slaying Uriah for his wife, and so did she: but what is this to the matter; the more wicked that she be, her subjects should pray for her, to bring her to the spirit of repentance.”¹
¹ Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 54, 70‒88, 107‒120, 139‒141, 144; Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Knox, pages 250‒256; 1855.
The Castle of Dumbarton was taken from the Queen’s party in the beginning of April, 1571; and Hamilton, the archbishop of St. Andrews, was among the prisoners who surrendered. The Regent Lennox brought him to Stirling, where he was tried, condemned, and hanged on the 9th April. He was the last Roman Catholic Bishop ♦of St. Andrews. He had never ceased to assert his rights, and was therefore obnoxious to the reformed clergy and the King’s party. He was an active and able man in public life; and Lennox was glad of the opportunity to put him out of the way, but his execution was an act of cruelty and gross injustice.¹
♦ duplicate word “of” removed
¹ ♠Buchanan, Book XX., chapter 34; Dr. Grub’s Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, Volume II., pages 168‒169.
♠ “Buchannan” replaced with “Buchanan”
Both parties issued proclamations and counter-manifestoes, and there was much skirmishing about Edinburgh, which produced little result. The Regent summoned a parliament to meet at Stirling in August, 1571. The General Assembly met in the same town on the 6th of August. Knox, being unable to attend the meeting, sent a letter to his brethren. In this he referred to the graceless libels which had been circulated against him, and called on the Assembly to judge the matter as they would answer to God. As his natural strength was daily decaying, and he was looking for a sudden departure to that land where the weary find rest, he earnestly exhorted his brethren to be faithful to the flock over whom God had placed them, and to resist all tyranny to the last. The battle, he said, would be hard, “but they must withstand the merciless devourers of the patrimony of the Church.... God give you wisdom and stout courage in so just a cause, and me a happy end.”¹ This Assembly repeated the injunctions that prayer should be offered up for the King, and that the people should submit to his authority. Complaints were made, touching the oppression of the ministers and the people in the counties of Aberdeen and Banff, by the Earl of Huntly and his servants, and of their neglect to pay the stipends of the ministers.²
¹ Knox’s Works, Volume VI., pages 604‒606; _Book of the Universal Kirk_, pages 198‒199; Lord Lindsay’s _Lives of the Lindsays_, Volume I., pages 260‒291.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, page 201.
Parliament assembled at Stirling on the 25th of August. About the same time the Queen’s party held their parliament in Edinburgh. In the Queen’s parliament sentences of forfeiture were passed against the Earl of Morton, and other chiefs of the King’s party; while in the King’s parliament an act was passed which ratified all former acts in favour of the liberty and freedom of the reformed Church. Acts were also passed in favour of Morton and Lord Lindsay, as a reward for their resistance to the open enemies of the King, and in favour of those who had taken the castle of Dumbarton from the enemy. While the King’s party were thus helping themselves and mutually congratulating each other, a company of the Queen’s adherents, under the command of the Earl of Huntly and Lord Hamilton, marched from Edinburgh upon Stirling, and on the 4th of September, surprised them, and slew the Regent Lennox. Ten days after the death of Lennox, the Earl of Mar was elected Regent; but the Earl of Morton had by this time become the real leader of the King’s party.¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland Volume III., pages 58, 61, 65‒78; Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 247, 255‒258, 260; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 136, 138‒141. Calderwood says that the rebels in their parliament at Edinburgh forfeited upwards of two hundred persons.
The regency of Mar was of short duration. He died on the 28th of October, 1572. The Earl of Morton was then elected Regent; since the death of Moray he had been the ruling spirit of his party. Morton had been more or less deeply implicated in all the plots and political murders of the past twenty years. He was an ambitious, greedy, crafty, and unscrupulous man; but brave and determined like all his ancestors of the Douglas tribe. He courted the friendship of the English government; and in the spring of 1573, concluded an arrangement by which fifteen hundred English troops and a train of artillery entered Scotland, and assisted in the reduction of the castle of Edinburgh. The Queen’s party throughout the country were broken up, and most of the leaders submitted to the Regent. Her adherents in the castle held out bravely, but were at last reduced to despair, and surrendered in the end of May, 1573. The common soldiers were dismissed. Lethington, who had served so many masters, and attempted to play so many parts, died about the 7th of June, a week after the castle fell. The laird of Grange, William Kirkaldy, the governor of the Castle, was tried, condemned, and hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh.¹ Mary’s party in Scotland never after raised their heads.
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., page 77, et seq.; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 281‒285; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume II., pages 213‒219, 236, 237.
Maitland of Lethington’s recent biographer, has with much ingenuity and great literary power, attempted to prove that he was one of the very greatest statesmen of the period. “In fine, Maitland’s was one of the governing minds of the time in which he lived. The number of such men at any particular period is as a rule extremely limited――much more so than is commonly supposed. I am inclined to hold that, at the period of which I am writing, there were not above three or four men of distinctly original and creative force in the whole island, from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End. In England they had Cecil; in Scotland, John Knox and William Maitland. Cecil’s ‘brothers in Christ’――the envoys and emissaries of the English Government――were men of a specifically inferior order, who derived their inspiration from their master, and who, when deprived of his guidance, of the habitual support of his cautious but fertile brain, showed themselves, almost without exception, extraordinarily helpless.... There are eminent writers who would be prepared to place the Earl of Moray beside Knox and Maitland and Cecil. It appears to me that Moray belongs to another class altogether,――the class of men whose mutual processes are slow, involved, and dependent. It was a common saying, when he came to be Regent, that Moray was the hand and Morton the head; and during the earlier and brighter years of Mary’s reign, it might have been said quite as truly――with even greater truth indeed――that if Moray was the head, Maitland was the heart.
“I have said that a statesman in Lethington’s position must be judged less by his actions than by his aims. What were his aims? We shall see that they involved the determination of political and religious questions of the first importance:――How to diminish the power of an anarchical nobility, how to promote the union of the nations, how to secure the succession to a Scottish prince (to the throne of England), how to establish a religious peace on tolerable conditions――these were the problems to which, as a Scottish Protestant and a Scottish patriot, Maitland addressed himself.... His field was comparatively narrow; but the issues of the conflict in which he was engaged were momentous and far reaching.”
The aims of Lethington as stated above by Skelton, invites comment:――1. There is no evidence that Lethington ever made any real effort to reduce the power of the nobles; but there is evidence that he used the influence of his official position, and also exerted his talents and wit, to enhance the power and the wealth of the nobles in connection with the landed property of the old Church. In the face of such evidence, it is surprising that his elegant panegyrist should have ventured to advance this, as one of the leading aims of the great statesman of the period. 2. It may be true that Maitland aimed to promote the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland; yet it is evident that some of his efforts in this direction were short-sighted, impracticable, and inconsistent. 3. Touching his aim to establish a religious peace in Scotland on tolerable conditions, it may be fairly questioned whether he was capable of appreciating and realising the real conditions of the problem. Most of Lethington’s efforts in this department were imperfectly conceived, or unrealisable in the circumstances, and consequently proved utter failures. It seems a rather curious historic phenomenon that one of the three greatest governing minds of the Reformation period in Britain, has somehow left so few traces on the nation of the result of his faculties. The fact is, that Lethington was a clever, glib, and scheming politician, but in no sense a great and wise statesman; and his recent biographer has glorified the Laird of Lethington by investing him with many virtues, which are quite inconsistent with his public career.¹
¹ Maitland of Lethington, By J. Skelton, Volume I., pages 333‒336.
The polity of the Reformed Church so far as yet developed, tended to leave a blank in the chief council of the nation. As the bishops, abbots, and other orders of the Roman clergy died out, the spiritual estate ceased to be represented in parliament. Knox was not decidedly opposed to a gradation of rank among the ministers of the Church; the democratic polity of presbyterianism was not matured in the First Book of Discipline, nor in any work emanating from the Reformed Church of Scotland in the reformer’s lifetime. At this stage, however, the most interesting point centred around the territorial possessions and the wealth of the ancient hierarchy. The nobles, the old orders of clergy, and the reformed preachers, were all scrambling according to the measure of their power and opportunity for what each imagined to be their share of the endowments which the piety of bygone generations had consecrated to religion. For all the preaching against idolatry and the monuments thereof, there was one idol not as yet extinguished――the golden calf. The aristocracy had recourse to various expedients to reach the revenues of the great benefices, and it must be admitted that in the end they succeeded.
For the settlement of this matter, an extraordinary meeting of the barons, superintendents, and ministers, was held at Leith in January, 1572. They assumed the powers of a General Assembly, and resolved to hand over the business to a committee of six, viz.:――John Erskine, John Winram, David Lindsay, John Craig, Andrew Hay, and Robert Pont, authorising any four of them to meet with those appointed by the Privy Council, the Earl of Morton, Lord Ruthven, the Abbot of Dunfermline, Mr. James M‘Gill, Sir John Bellenden, and Colin Campbell of Glenorchy, and to ratify whatever they might determine agreeable to their instructions. The joint committee met on the 16th of the same month, and agreed upon a form of polity for the Church, known as the Leith Concordat. It was agreed that the names and titles of archbishops and bishops, and the bounds of the dioceses, should not be altered, at least until the King’s majority or the parliament consented to another arrangement. The document went on to state, that persons promoted to bishoprics should as far as possible have the requisite scriptural qualifications; that they should be elected by a chapter or assembly of learned ministers; that archbishops and bishops should have no greater jurisdiction than the superintendents already had, and that they should be subject to the church and the General Assembly in spiritual matters, as they were to the Crown in temporal; that in the admission of persons to spiritual functions in the Church, they should at least take the advice of six of the best learned of the chapter; that all the archbishoprics and bishoprics then vacant or which hereafter became so, should within a year and a day after the vacancy be filled up with qualified persons not under thirty years of age; and that the dean, or failing him, the next in dignity among the chapter, should be vicar-general during the vacancy. Concerning the abbacies, priories, and nunneries, it was concluded that no disposition of these benefices should be made, nor any grants out of the funds of the same till it was ascertained what portion of the rents consisted in churches and tithes, and what portion of temporal lands, and until provision was made for the ministers properly belonging thereto. Touching the person holding the title and receiving the fruits of the benefice, it was agreed that he should fill the place of one of the ecclesiastical Estate in parliament, and have the style of abbot, prior, or commendator; that all such should be learned and qualified for their office, and that to secure this end, on the recommendation of the King, they should be tried and admitted by the bishops. It was further agreed that when the present members of the convents were all departed this life, the ministers of the churches belonging to the abbey or priory should then act as the chapter of the commendator in the administration of the property and rents of the establishment, and that if these commendators should be found worthy, they might be promoted to act as senators for the spiritual estate in the Court of Session.
There were proposals also for dealing with the rights of lay patrons, with benefices in the patronage of the Crown, and for the disposal of the smaller benefices throughout the kingdom. The latter were to be conferred only on duly qualified ministers, and churches were to be planted throughout the realm, residence secured, and pluralities prevented. The revenues of provostries, prebendaries, and chaplainries in college churches, if founded upon lands or annual rents, it was proposed to apply to the maintenance of bursars at the grammar schools and universities; and a form was drawn up for the election and appointment of bishops.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 203‒205, 207‒232. It is very justly observed by Dr. Grub, that the scheme agreed on at Leith bore a remarkable resemblance to the external polity of the church as it existed before the Reformation in Scotland. Ecclesiastic History of Scotland, Volume II., page 179. Regarding the confused and anomalous points of the system as then proposed from the Episcopalian standpoint, see Russel’s History of the Church in Scotland, Volume I. page 300, and for a strictly Presbyterian view of the matter, compare Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume I., pages 145‒151.
The proposals of the Committee, were immediately confirmed by the Regent and the Council, and an attempt was forthwith made by the government to carry out the scheme they embodied. On the 6th of February, 1572, the chapter of St. Andrews met and elected John Douglas to be archbishop of that ancient see. Douglas was also rector of the university and provost of St. Mary’s College, and besides, he was a man advanced in years. Knox merely protested against the accumulation of offices in the person of one man. Some of the other sees were filled up, but the new bishops were simply the tools of their patrons. They had consented to assume the title with only a very small portion of the episcopal revenues, the greater part being retained in the hands of their masters――the nobles.¹ To secure the richest portion of the benefices to the court, the nobles, and their friends and dependents, was the motive in which the whole scheme originated; and if the Reformed Church had yielded it would have destroyed its usefulness, and ended in a despotism of a degrading character. But a strong party of the clergy were thoroughly opposed to the scheme, and although the struggle between them and the Crown was protracted and severe, the liberties of the Church and the freedom of the nation eventually triumphed.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, page 241; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 205‒207; Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 269‒285, 286, 323, 324.
When the Articles came before the General Assembly, which met at Perth in August, 1572, that body unanimously agreed that such names as archbishop, dean, archdeacon, chancellor, and chapter sounded scandalous to the ears of many of the brethren, and recalled the ring of popery, and protested that while recognising the names, it did not mean to ratify, consent, or agree to any kind of superstition, but wished rather that the titles should be changed for others less offensive. The Assembly protested also that the articles and heads of the Leith Concordat were only to be received as interim, till a more perfect order could be obtained at the hands of the King, the Regent, and the nobility, for which they were to press whenever an opportunity occurred.
Knox addressed a letter to the Assembly containing a number of suggestions. He exhorted them to contend earnestly for the truth and for the liberty to express it, to endeavour to recover the patrimony of the Church, to petition the Regent to have all the vacant bishoprics filled up according to the order agreed on at Leith, but especially to complain that the bishopric of Ross was given to Lord Methven. He urged also that the Assembly should pass an act, ordering all the bishops admitted under the new articles to give an account of the whole rents of their sees and their intromissions therewith once every year; and that the present Assembly should determine the jurisdiction of the Church, as that part of the polity had long been postponed.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 244, 246, 247‒250; Knox’s Works, Volume VI., pages 619‒622.
For some time Knox had been in feeble health, but his spirit continued vigorous to the last. When the strife between the two contending parties was at its height, he had retired to St. Andrews, as we have seen, but by the end of August, 1572, he had returned once more to Edinburgh and resumed his preaching in St. Giles. When the intelligence of the massacre of the Protestants in Paris on the 25th of August arrived, he was deeply moved. A proclamation was immediately issued in the Regent’s name, calling on the Protestants to meet at Edinburgh on the 20th of October. Every congregation in the kingdom was directed to send one or more commissioners to consult and deliberate upon such matters and overtures as might be proposed, tending to protect and mutually to defend the professors of the Gospel within the kingdom, “from the furious rage and lawless cruelty of the bloodstained and treasonable Catholics, the executors of the decrees of that devilish and terrible Council of Trent.”¹ On the appointed day a number of the ministers and barons assembled. Among other things, they proposed that a national fast should be held, to begin on the 23rd of November and continue to the end of the month, that thereby the wrath of God might be mitigated. They desired that all the Catholics without exception should be summoned before the Council and the commissioners of the Church, to give confession of their faith, and that all who did not conform to the reformed religion, should be punished according to the acts of parliament. For resisting the Catholics in and without the country, they proposed that a league should be made with England and other reformed kingdoms, for their mutual defence, and the maintenance of the true religion against all its enemies; as it was only by banding themselves together that they could hope to thwart and frustrate the endless machinations which were constantly forming against them. “At this time the ministers then in Edinburgh did most vehemently inveigh against this most beastly and more than treasonable fact; whereat the French ambassador, called La Crocke, was not a little displeased, because that his master the King of France should be called a traitor, and a murderer of his own subjects, under promise and trust; but especially against John Knox, who had pronounced in his sermon, and had declared the same to the ambassador to tell his master, that the sentence is pronounced in Scotland, against that murderer the King of France, that God’s vengeance shall never depart from him nor his house, but that his name shall remain an execration unto the posterity to come, and that none that shall come of his loins, shall enjoy that kingdom in peace and quietness, unless repentance prevent God’s judgments.”²
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 168‒169.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 252‒254; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 227‒230; Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 401‒402.
On Sunday the 9th of November, 1572, Knox officiated at the induction of James Lawson as his colleague and successor. His voice was weak, and he never again appeared in public. On the 11th of the month he was seized with a severe cough, but continued cheerful. Richard Bannatyne, his faithful servant, attended him. He was surrounded by his family, and visited by many warm friends. He died in peace and full of hope on the 24th of November, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. On the 26th of the month his body was laid in the grave in the churchyard of St. Giles.¹
¹ Bannatyne’s Journal, pages 262‒254; Knox’s Works, Volume VI., pages 634‒560. In these full details of the last days of the Reformer’s life are given.
The character of Knox is manifested in his work, although the manner of performing it is a fair subject for criticism. But there is a prior point which must be noticed. In that and in all ages of recorded history, when a revolution is preparing and even after it is carried through, those who oppose it with all their power and still strive to resist its outcome, and those who struggle with all their energy to hasten and accomplish it, cannot both be animated by identical ideas, principles, and sentiments. The two contending parties must be influenced and swayed in varying degrees according to the strength or the feebleness of their sentiments, the firmness of their belief, the clearness of their ideas, and the grasp which they have of their principles; or their course of action may be partly controlled by the object and ends towards which they look, as these may be conceived from different points of view: as when one party regards the commemoration of the saints as an essential article of religion while the other does not, and so on through many other articles of belief. If then the God of the one party is exactly the God of the other, they at least desire to take different ways of approaching Him. It is the distinctive and characteristic glory of Roman Catholicism to proclaim that it has never changed its creed nor its principles; both are constantly assumed to be infallible. But Protestantism admits of change, and recognises the laws of development and progress, of corruption and decay, in religious systems as in everything else; and endeavours by a process of gradual elimination to advance towards the conception of a supreme moral ideal to which all theology should eventually subordinate itself.
Those who looked upon the Reformation as an evil, and on Protestantism as a heresy which deserved to be condemned and stamped out, could see in Knox only an embodiment of wickedness. For this reason their libels on his character may be justly disregarded. It is a fashionable thing to talk in modern phrases about toleration, and then proceed to stigmatise the Reformers of the sixteenth century for their bigotry, dogmatism, narrowness, and ignorance; but this is neither just nor in accordance with true historical ideas. In the great religious revolutions of the world toleration has had little place; and for ages the expression of difference of religious opinion has been punished as a crime. There is only one way of fairly appreciating the character of all great religious Reformers. To form a true estimate of their character, a thorough knowledge of the state of society in which they lived, and of all the associated circumstances, is a preliminary requisite. It is in the degree which the Reformer’s ideas and sentiments rise above those of his own age that his character must be measured, not by the standard of a later age. That Knox’s ideas were higher and purer than those current among the ruling class of Scotland is a fact, which any one who desires may verify for himself. That he was animated by a firm belief in a righteous and just God who rules the universe, cannot be doubted. His moral ideas were in some respects in advance of those of his age, but some of them were crude, erroneous, and even savage, and as a thinker he takes no rank. Owing, however, to his natural sagacity and shrewd common sense, and to his deep feeling of the realities and the responsibilities of human life, some of his practical views were singularly clear, far-reaching, and well developed.
In common with all great men and religious reformers, Knox exercised a wonderful sway over his followers, and inspired them with confidence in the hour of danger and of battle. He always avowed his opinions openly, and acted on them with a bold and fearless independence; yet in matters of doctrine he was not rigidly dogmatic. The Reformation Confession of Scotland is remarkable for the acknowledgment of its own fallibility.¹ It was only what he emphatically believed to be the inspired word of God, and necessary for the Church and the good of the nation, that he insisted on being adopted by others. To blame him for not embracing a tolerant policy is simply to forget the state of society and the circumstances of the times; and if he had followed such a course, the Reformation in Scotland would never have been accomplished, while he himself would certainly have been crushed. He was greedy of power and impatient of the least opposition. But he believed that he had a message from God, and that it was his imperative duty to proclaim and enforce it, and in this he toiled with untiring industry and energy. There are some of the lighter shades and graces of life which he seems to have been incapable of appreciating, and he certainly showed a disposition to limit the amusements and the enjoyments of others; but this arose from his deep sense of the realities of human life and the gravity of its manifold duties. Among his friends, and in the family circle, he could on occasion unbend and disport himself in an exceedingly social and agreeable manner; he had indeed a humourous and peculiar comic side which comes out in many forms in his writings.
¹ See under page 104.
John Knox, in conjunction with his contemporaries, brought blessings to the people of Scotland which they have never forgotten. Although he was extremely strong in assertion and firm in his own convictions, it should be remembered that he was still stronger in denial and negation. He swept off at once the accumulated mass of legends, traditions, and ceremonies which had enslaved the mind and obscured the glory, purity, and truth of Christianity.
Much of the energy of the leading men among the clergy was still devoted to the improvement of the polity of the Church, and to the planting and the organisation of congregations throughout the country. As yet the practical establishment of the reformed worship was in many places only imperfectly accomplished. The disorder which accompanied the revolution itself, and the internal struggle of the contending factions of the King and the Queen which followed it, had all contributed to leave the Church in a state of disorganisation. The new clergy, with all the power and means at their command, were ardently and incessantly labouring to remedy these evils; but they were met at every turn with the inexorable fact, that it is a much easier matter to destroy the forms and institutions of a religious system than to construct others to replace them. The history of mankind has shown that the genius of destruction is more common than the genius of appropriate construction; hence the curious spectacle presented in the history of Scotland, the constantly recurring tendency and the efforts of the party at the head of the government to return to the forms and modes of the old system of church polity. As the practical solution of the problem involved great secular as well as religious issues, it was hotly contested between the Crown and the clergy for many generations. There was an element of democracy inherent in the very heart of the Reformation; but the Reformers in Scotland went beyond their contemporaries in the admission of democratic principles. Knox maintained that the King and the ruling political powers were responsible to the people, and that if they abused the trust committed to them, the people might lawfully depose them and appoint others in their place. Similar principles were taught by Buchanan. Thus it was that the Reformation in Scotland assumed an intensely political importance, but always in connection with religion and the polity of the Church.
The rarity of original construction among the leaders of the revolutionary movement is very remarkable. Even by Calvin, the greatest master of dogmatic form that the Reformation produced, religion, secular government, and morality were all mixed up and regarded as integral parts of one and the same system. In fact, it could hardly have been otherwise, for philosophy had no separate and independent existence. A Church distinct from and independent of the State was a conception quite alien to the modes of thinking which prevailed among the Reformers. On the other side, a government distinct and independent of the Church was an idea scarcely entertained by the statesmen of the sixteenth century. They all seemed to be more or less possessed with the notions common to theocracies, that the Church and the State as being both under the direction of God, should be associated together. The idea of a theocracy is grand and inspiring in contemplation, but in practical operation it turns out that the Church and the State both claim a supremacy; and they often come to hold very different views as to what is, or is not, the will of God. For the intelligent apprehension of the history of Scotland during the next one hundred years, it is necessary to have a clear conception of this theocratic principle. The struggle of the Crown to establish Episcopacy, and the opposition of the Presbyterian clergy; the Covenants, the Solemn League and Covenant, with many of their attendant tragedies, had their origin in the theocratic notions which were gathered out of the Old Testament, and attempted on both sides to be applied to forms of society and circumstances which were beyond their scope.
After the fall of the castle of Edinburgh, the Regent Morton succeeded in restoring comparative quietness in the kingdom. He was known to be inclined towards the hierarchy of bishops; not from principle but from ambition and greed. The management of the thirds of benefices he took out of the hands of the collectors appointed by the Church, and then united a number of parishes under one minister, who was assisted by readers to whom a trifling stipend was paid. When the Church complained of these abuses, he accused the ministers of seditious and treasonable speeches, refrained from attending their assemblies, and began to question their right to meet and pass acts without his express permission.¹ But crafty and astute as Morton was, he miscalculated his power, and utterly failed to comprehend the intense earnestness and honesty of purpose by which the reformed clergy was animated.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 292‒293, 296‒305; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 304‒306.
The General Assembly met at Edinburgh in March, 1574, and concluded that the bishops should be subject to the discipline of the Assembly, the same as the superintendents in all points. Among the evils which this Assembly enumerated and desired the assistance of the government to remedy, were specified some books issued by the Jesuits and others which contained manifest blasphemies against God and His revealed truth, and were daily brought into the country by Poles and others to the offence of the Church. The Assembly passed an act against simony in the Church, and unanimously declared――“That all such persons as either buy or sell benefices, or use any other kind of bargaining thereon, either directly or indirectly, should be deprived of all function in the Church; and the discipline of the Church to be laid upon them with the utmost rigour and severity; and the buyers and sellers, or otherwise coupers of the benefices to lose the same for evermore.”¹ This act was much required. It is reported and recorded in many forms that Morton and the nobles carried the traffic in benefices to an enormous length.²
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 294, 306, 310‒311.
² Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 445, 585‒587; 184‒185, et seq.
It was daily becoming more manifest that the clergy would throw off what remained of the forms of Episcopacy. The existing state of the Church was extremely confused and unsatisfactory. A convention of the Estates in the beginning of March, 1575, voted that inconveniences had arisen, and were likely to increase, from the want of a proper government in the Church; and a committee was appointed to draw up a form of polity agreeable to the Word of God, and adapted to the state of the kingdom.¹ The General Assembly met on the 7th of March the same year, and appointed a committee of their number to meet with the Regent’s commissioners, and to reason and confer on the jurisdiction and polity of the Church. The draft of whatever scheme was proposed the committee were directed to lay before the Assembly. Andrew Melville was a member of this committee, which was reappointed from time to time, and at last produced the Second Book of Discipline.²
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 89, 90.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 326‒332; Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume I., pages 158, 159; 1819.
The Assembly met again at Edinburgh in August, 1575, and according to custom the trial of the bishops and superintendents was begun, when John Dury, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, rose and protested that the trial of the bishops should not prejudge what he and others had to propose against the name and office of a bishop. At a subsequent sederunt Andrew Melville addressed the Assembly in support of Dury’s proposition; his speech was attentively listened to, and it produced a marked impression. The question was next proposed, Whether the bishops as then placed in the Church of Scotland had their function in the Word of God or not; and whether the chapters appointed for electing them should be tolerated in a Reformed Church? For the better discussion of the questions, the Assembly appointed John Craig, minister of Aberdeen, James Lawson, minister at Edinburgh, and Andrew Melville, principal of the University of Glasgow, on the one side; and George Hay, commissioner of Caithness, John Row, minister of Perth, and David Lindsay, minister of Leith, on the affirmative side of the subject. In two days the committee reported that they did not think it expedient at present to answer the first part of the question directly; but they were of opinion that if any bishop was chosen without the qualifications which the Word of God required, he should be tried by the Assembly anew and so deposed. Touching the office of a bishop or superintendent, they reported that the name of bishop is common to all who are appointed to have the charge of a particular flock in preaching the word and administering the sacraments, and exercising discipline with the consent of the elders; and that this is the chief function of bishops according to the Word of God. But out of this number some might be chosen to visit and oversee, besides their own congregation, within such reasonable bounds as the General Assembly might appoint to them; and in these districts to admit ministers, with the consent of the other ministers, and the approval of the congregations concerned: and also to admit elders and deacons when necessary, with the consent of the people; and to suspend ministers for reasonable causes, with the consent of their brethren of the province. A full discussion of the report was deferred to the next Assembly.¹ There were six bishops present in the Assembly, none of whom seems to have offered any defence of Episcopacy.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 331, 340, 342‒343; Spottiswood, Volume II., 200‒201.
When the Assembly again met at Edinburgh in April, 1576, the question of the bishops was discussed anew. After a long debate the propositions laid by the committee before the last Assembly were affirmed; and the bishops who had not as yet received the charge of a particular congregation were ordered to make choice of one. There was much reasoning touching the districts of the various bishops, superintendents, and commissioners. It was agreed that the existing districts were too large for them to overtake, and it was arranged to allot only such a district to each as he could duly oversee, and with this aim a new distribution of districts was proposed. The persons who visited such districts whether called bishops, superintendents, or by other names, were interrogated at every General Assembly, and required to render an account of their proceedings.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 352‒356, 358‒359.
Questions and points concerning the patrimony of the Church came before almost every Assembly. At this time it was asked, whether the Assembly should proceed against those who unjustly possessed the patrimony of the Church and the poor, and if so, how far? The Assembly unanimously concluded that they might be proceeded against, first by way of doctrine and admonition, and if in this way no remedy was obtained, then to try the censures of the Church against them. The Assembly reappointed the committee on the polity of the Church, and enjoined its members to hold meetings at St. Andrews, Montrose, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Stirling, and to invite all ranks of the people to attend and give their opinion on the proposed polity.¹
¹ Ibid. pages 360‒362.
The French Protestants who had taken refuge in England from persecution, addressed a letter to their brethren in Scotland, bewailing their sad condition, and desiring that the money which had been collected for them among the Scots should be sent to them. The Assembly had delayed sending it, because much of what had been promised, was not yet collected; but it was resolved to forward at once the sum in hand to the persecuted Frenchmen.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, page 356.
In 1577 the General Assembly met twice at Edinburgh, and on both occasions the book on the polity and jurisdiction of the Church was discussed. The various heads of the subject were put into form and read in the Assembly, and sanctioned by the majority; but the book itself was still reserved for further reasoning. The Regent was asked to attend the Assembly, but he excused himself on the ground that he was otherwise occupied. The Assembly, however, resolved to lay the proposed polity before him. Morton, however, who had never been very popular, was now tottering towards his fall. Early in 1578 he resigned the regency; and the government was committed to a Council of twelve men and the young King, then in his twelfth year.¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 115‒117, 120; Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 677‒679; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 383‒385, 391, 393, 394.
The popular party of the clergy were very active. In 1578 they held three General Assemblies. These enacted that the bishops in the Reformed Church of Scotland should henceforward be called by their own names, and the chapters were prohibited from making any new elections of bishops, under the penalty of deprivation of their offices. All the bishops were ordered to submit themselves to the General Assembly for reformation, and if they refused after admonition, they were to be excommunicated; indeed the ruling party in the Church pursued the bishops with astonishing energy. In the General Assembly which met at Dundee in July, 1580, the subject of bishops was proposed for discussion, and full liberty given to all the members to reason on the matter and express their opinion. After this the Assembly unanimously found that the office of a bishop, as then used and commonly understood, had no warrant nor ground in the word of God. It was therefore declared that this pretended office should be terminated, as being unlawful in itself――a corruption and an invention of men. All the bishops were charged to demit their office at once, to cease from preaching or administering the sacraments or in any way exercising the functions of pastors, until they received admission anew from the General Assembly, under the penalty of excommunication. So energetic were the measures of the Church that within a year all the bishops had submitted except five;¹ the democratic spirit had become so strong and determined that the Episcopal party had no longer any chance of retaining their position in the Church.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 408, 409, 413, 423‒425, 432, 433, 453; Dr. Grub’s _Ecclesiastical History of Scotland_, Volume II., pages 210, 211; Dr. M‘Crie’s _Life of Melville_, Volume I., pages 162, 163.
In 1579 the General Assembly had presented a long address to King James VI., putting him in remembrance of things pertaining to the advancement of God’s glory, the welfare of the Church, and the common good of the nation. In this they pointed out to him his duties to the Church, and warned him of his perils. Referring to the translation of the Bible, which under the direction of the Assembly, had been newly printed and dedicated to his highness, they went on to say:――“This holy book of God should be set forth, and printed within your own realm, to the end that in every parish church there should be kept at least one, to be called the common book of the Church, as a most meet ornament for such a place, and a perpetual register of the Word of God, the fountain of all true doctrine, to be made patent to all the people of each congregation, as the only rule to direct and govern them in matters of religion, as also to confirm them in the truth, and to reform and to redress corruptions wherever they may creep in; certainly we have great occasion both to glorify the goodness of God towards this country, and highly to extol and commend your highness’s most godly purpose and enterprise. Oh! what a difference may be seen between these days of light, when almost in every private house the book of God’s law is read and understood in the Vulgar language, and the age of darkness, when scarcely in a whole city, without the cloisters of monks and friars, could the book of God ever be found, and that in a strange tongue of Latin, not good, but mixed with barbarisms, used and read by few and almost understood and expounded by none; and when the false named clergy of this realm abused the gentle nature of your highness’s grandfather of worthy memory, made it a capital crime to be punished with the fire to have read the New Testament in the Vulgar tongue; yea, and to make them more odious to all men, as if it had been the detestable name of a pernicious sect, they were called New Testamenters.... Call for the wisdom of Solomon to endue your grace with a spiritual spirit, as well in the civil policy as in advancing the spiritual policy of the Church; imitate the fervent faith of Jehosaphat putting his whole trust in the Lord and believing his prophets; imitate the diligence of Jehoash, in repairing the house of the Lord; follow godly Ezekias in rooting out all monuments of idolatry, making the book of the law of God, a long time ignored and left in silence, yea, utterly forgotten, to be publicly read and accepted by the people and recommended to their posterity. To such diligence as this did the prophets of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi exhort the princes of the Jews.... This is a matter most worthy of your royal heart, a purpose proper for the exercise of the vivacity of your divine and high genius.... All other glory at last shall decay, and all commendations that result from other princely acts, are either not of long duration, or commonly mixed up with such things as are also deserving of blame; but the honour of this act shall endure for ever, and shall be fully approved by Him whose judgment must be equal and right, who is the eternal Lord of lords and King of kings; whom with most humble hearts and instant prayers we beseech to bless your majesty with continual and daily increase of His abundant blessings both spiritual and temporal; and to maintain in wealth and prosperity your princely estate to the praise and glory of His holy name, your assured salvation, the comfort and quietness of this country, the overthrow of the power of Satan and the advancement of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Amen.”¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 441‒448.
While the clergy were busy abolishing the remaining fragments of Episcopacy, they were, as we have seen, intently engaged in maturing their own scheme of church polity. It had been laid before several Assemblies, and its various chapters and heads had been discussed, altered, amended, and rendered as perfect as possible. It was adopted by the Assembly which met at Edinburgh in April, 1578. This polity, which then became the authorised form of church government in Scotland, is known by the title of the Second Book of Discipline; it was placed before the King, but it was not ratified by the Privy Council nor by Parliament. The Reformed Church, however, acted upon it, and inserted it in the Register of the Acts of the General Assembly in 1581.¹
¹ Ibid. pages 408, 409, 432, 487‒512; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 414‒418; Melville’s Diary, pages 87‒116.
This book of polity is a comparatively short but logical and compact treatise. It contains thirteen chapters, each of which is again divided into a number of short expository statements of the different points of the general heading or doctrines to be established. It is essentially a deductive work, and presents an admirable example of that method of exposition. In the general scope and spirit of the book there are many points of difference between it and the First Book of Discipline: the earlier book was a meritorious and comprehensive production, but some parts of it were ill arranged and not fully developed, and several other matters were simply introduced to meet the exigencies of the time. There is a notable difference in the view taken of the authority of the civil power in the two books, touching ecclesiastical matters; in the latter the distinction between the Church and the State is far more fully worked out than in the earlier work. The first book, as we have seen, gave a large share of power to the people in the election and control of their ministers; the second book also gave a share of power to the people, but divided it between the judgment of the eldership and the consent of the congregation. It deals less with doctrine and more with the external form and order of the Church than the first book. But according to the second scheme, the Church would be altogether independent of the civil government, and the civil government would in things spiritual be subject to the orders of the Church. “This power and ecclesiastical polity is different and distinct in its own nature, from that power and policy which is called the civil power, and belongs to the civil government of the Commonwealth; albeit they are both of God, and tend to the same end, if they be rightly used, namely, to advance the glory of God, and to have godly and good subjects. This power ecclesiastical flows immediately from God and the Mediator, Christ Jesus, and is spiritual, not having a temporal head on earth, but only Christ, the only spiritual King and Governor of His Church. Therefore this power and polity of the Church should lean upon the Word of God immediately as the only ground thereof, and should be taken from the pure fountains of the Scriptures, hearing the voice of Christ, the only spiritual King, and being ruled by His laws.... Notwithstanding, as the ministers, and others of the ecclesiastical estate, are subject to the civil magistrate, so ought the person of the magistrate in spiritual matters to be subject to the Church, and in ecclesiastical government.
“The Civil power should command the Spiritual to exercise and perform their office according to the Word of God. The spiritual rulers should require the Christian magistrate to administer justice and punish vice, and to maintain the liberty and quietness of the Church within their bounds.... The magistrate ought neither to preach, minister the sacraments, nor execute the censures of the Church, nor yet prescribe any rule how it should be done, but command the ministers to observe the rule commanded in the Word of God, and punish the transgressors by civil means. The ministers do not exercise civil jurisdiction, but teach the magistrate how it should be exercised according to the Word.” This style of illustration by contrast is much employed in the Second Book of Discipline. “The magistrate ought to assist, maintain, and fortify the jurisdiction of the Church. The ministers to assist their princes in all things agreeable to the word, provided they do not neglect their own charge, by involving themselves in civil affairs.
“So it appertains to the office of the Christian magistrate to assist and fortify the godly proceedings of the Church in all behalfs, and to see that the public estate of the ministry be maintained and sustained, according to the Word of God. To see that the Church be not invaded nor hurt by false teachers or hirelings, nor their places occupied by dumb dogs and idle bellies. To assist and maintain the discipline of the Church, and to punish them civilly that will not obey the censures of the Church. To make laws and constitutions agreeable to the Word, for the advancement of the Church and her polity, without usurping anything that does not belong to the civil sword, but belongs to the offices that are ecclesiastical.... And although kings and princes who are godly, sometimes by their own authority, when the Church is corrupted and all things out of order, may place ministers and restore the true service of the Lord, after the example of some of the godly kings of Judah, and divers godly kings and emperors also in the light of the Gospel; yet where the ministry of the Church is once lawfully constituted, and those that are placed in offices perform their duties faithfully, all godly princes and magistrates ought to hear and obey their voice, and reverence the majesty of the Son of God speaking by them.”¹
¹ The Second Book of Discipline is printed in the _Book of the Universal Kirk_; in James Melville’s Diary; and in the third volume of Calderwood’s _History of the Church of Scotland_.
This treatise laid down the lines of Presbyterianism, that form of church government and organisation which has taken the firmest hold upon the national mind. For some time the Assemblies had been taking steps and labouring incessantly to complete this organisation, but much still remained to be done and various obstacles had yet to be overcome. The most pressing difficulty was the want of a sufficient number of qualified ministers. In 1567 there were upwards of a thousand parishes and churches in Scotland under the charge of two hundred and fifty-seven ministers, one hundred and fifty-one exhorters, and four hundred and fifty-five readers. Thus a number of parishes had neither ministers nor readers. There were only 868 persons, including the superintendents, for all the churches of the country. In 1574 there were two hundred and eighty-nine ministers and seven hundred and fifteen readers engaged in the religious instruction of the people, but there were many complaints that a number of those who had charge of churches were not qualified for the office. To meet the aim of the Presbyterian polity in 1581 a rearrangement of the parishes was proposed. Excepting the Diocese of Argyle and the Isles, it was resolved to reduce the number of parish churches to six hundred, and to divide these into fifty presbyteries――“twelve churches to every presbytery, or thereabout.” But for some time it was found to be impracticable to carry this scheme fully out, although the unwearying perseverance of the leading ministers was rewarded with a considerable measure of success. It was agreed to abolish the office of reader, and gradually to replace it by regularly ordained ministers. The General Assembly of 1580 concluded that all the readers who had been two years in office should be tried and examined by the superintendents and commissioners, and if they were found unqualified to be pastors and to preach the word, to depose them; and in 1581 it was resolved that no new readers should hereafter be admitted in the Church. We find, however, that there were still readers in the Church at the end of the century. Many of the readers had belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, but they were not allowed to administer the sacraments or to solemnise marriage. Still there was a lack of qualified ministers. This was owing partly to the small and uncertain provision assigned to the ministry, and partly to the disturbing circumstances of the times. Even in 1596 there were four hundred churches destitute of ministers. In Argyle and other parts of the Highlands the doctrines of the Reformation were only very imperfectly introduced, and in some of these portions of the kingdom the people long remained Catholics. “Besides the Diocese of Argyle and the Isles, of which no rentals were ever given up, there are in Scotland nine hundred and twenty-four churches.” But several of them were very small, and many of the churches were demolished. The Diocese of Argyle and the Isles seems to have stood in a rather distant attitude towards the Reformed Assemblies of the Church. In 1586, one of the petitions presented by the Assembly to the King ran――“That the bishops and commissioners of Argyle and the Isles may be subject to attend upon the General Assemblies, and to keep their synodial meetings as in other parts of the realm, which is a furtherance of the King’s majesty’s obedience, since otherwise they appear to be exempted out of his dominions.” Since the Reformation, however, the means of diffusing religious instruction had been immensely increased; and the facilities for acquiring information were steadily widening.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 6‒7, 261‒264, 351‒352; Miscellany of the Wodrow Society, Volume I., pages 325‒328; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 455‒457, 479, 480‒487, 523, 530‒533, 549, 513, 535, ♦627, 661.
♦ “927” replaced with “627”
Although Morton had resigned the regency, he was still greedy of power and struggled to regain it; but his enemies were closing in around him and plotting his ruin. The young King naturally had his favourites. They were constantly with him, and aroused the suspicion of the Protestants and the clergy. In the year 1579 Eme Stewart, a cousin of the king, arrived from France. He was kindly received by his royal kinsman, with whom he soon became a great favourite. The two were always together, and whatever interested the King and engaged his attention was sure to interest his cousin. The result was that Eme Stewart speedily rose to greatness. First, he was made an Earl, and shortly after, Duke of Lennox. Then he was appointed High Chamberlain; and in order that his wealth might be commensurate with his rank, the once rich Abbey of Arbroath was freely granted to him. To complete his influence in the councils of the kingdom he was made governor of the Castle of Dumbarton. About the same time a Captain James Stewart, another of the King’s favourites, came upon the scene. In the spring of 1581 he was elevated to the rank of Earl of Arran, and put in possession of a portion of the estates of the house of Hamilton. As long as Morton was at liberty, however, these two upstarts were insecure; they therefore contrived to compass his destruction.¹ The new Duke of Lennox was known to be a Roman Catholic, and it was whispered that he had come to Scotland as a secret emissary of the Pope. To allay the suspicion of the clergy he professed that he was converted and joined the Reformed Church. But the popular mind was not satisfied. It was still feared that a scheme was being formed among those about the court to bring back the old religion; and to calm this apprehension, at the request of the King, a document was prepared, and signed by himself, the Duke of Lennox, and the other members of the royal household in March, 1581. Hence this paper has sometimes been called the King’s Confession, the First Covenant, and in later times the Negative Confession, from its extremely condemnatory character. It was a most vehement protest and denunciation of many of the tenets of the Roman Church, and it concluded with these words, “And because we perceive that the peace and stability of our religion and Church depends upon the safety and good behaviour of the King’s majesty, as upon a comfortable instrument of God’s mercy granted to this country, for the maintenance of His Church, and the administration of justice among us: we protest and promise solemnly with our hearts, under the same oath, hand write, and pains, that we shall defend his person and authority with our goods, bodies, and lives, in the defence of Christ’s Gospel, the liberty of our country, the administration of justice, and the punishment of iniquity, against all enemies within and without this realm, as we desire our God to be a strong and merciful defender to us in the day of our death, and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: to whom with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory eternally. Amen.”²
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 237, 248‒254; Spottiswood, Volume II., page 266, et seq.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 515, et seq.; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 501‒505; _Collection of Confessions_, pages 101‒107. 1722. This confession was drawn up by John Craig, one of the ministers of Edinburgh.
About the beginning of the year 1581 the Duke of Lennox accused Morton of complicity in the murder of Darnley, the King’s father; and the fallen regent was taken and imprisoned, first in the Castle of Edinburgh, and afterwards in Dumbarton Castle. He was brought to trial on the 1st of June; and on his own confession that he was privy to the plot for the murder of Darnley, was condemned and beheaded on the 2nd of June. Morton faced death as he had faced life, and died with characteristic firmness.¹
¹ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume II.; Melville’s Diary, pages 116‒118.
Lennox and Arran were now supreme in the court and in the government. But, as usual in the history of Scotland, a party of the nobles entered into a bond against the favourites to crush them, take the King into their own hands, and hold the reins of government themselves.¹ Some time, however, elapsed before the project was matured. This interval afforded Lennox an opportunity of trying his skill in the affairs of the Church. On the death of Boyd, the Archbishop of Glasgow, the disposal of the see was given to Lennox; and although the regulations which recognised Episcopacy had been abrogated by the General Assembly, and virtually abandoned by the court, they were revived by an act of the Privy Council. The Duke offered the see to various ministers upon the condition of their giving over to him the revenues, and agreeing to accept an annual pension; and at last the offer was accepted by Robert Montgomery, the minister of Stirling. To the reformed clergy this simoniacal paction was extremely odious. The matter came before the Assembly in October, 1581, and in spite of Lennox, the court party, and the King, Montgomery was subjected by the Church to a form of treatment which made him glad to submit, and in the end to supplicate for permission to take the charge of a congregation, instead of the Archbishopric of Glasgow. The King’s favourites and the court party had not reckoned on the determined stand which the clergy made against them; and were greatly enraged at being defeated.²
¹ The bond contained the names of the Earls of Gowrie, Mar, and Glencairn, Lord Lindsay, the Master of Glamis, and a number of others.
² Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., pages 474‒477; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 524, 525, 529, 532, 539, 541‒547, 557‒566, 569, 571, 575, 578, 580, 583, 590, 599, 607, 609, 691, 700‒701, 709.
The feeling of uneasiness amongst the people, springing out of a fear that the Catholics were preparing plots, continued. The adherents of the old faith were very active; some of the most ardent of those who had fled to the Continent after the Reformation were then returning; and the court was showing a decided leaning towards Episcopacy. The reformed ministers were not silent. They frequently expressed their sentiments and opinions in the pulpit with irritating plainness. Walter ♦Balcanquhal, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, in a sermon which he preached in October, 1581, said,――“That within these few years Popery had entered into the country, not only in the court, but in the King’s hall, and was maintained by the tyranny of a great champion, who was called Grace; and if his grace would oppose himself to God’s Word, he should have little grace.” For this sermon he was called before the King’s Council, but he declined to recognise their right to try him for anything which he had spoken in the pulpit, and offered to submit the matter to the General Assembly. His case came before the Assembly, and his brethren, after inquiry among the preacher’s session, unanimously found that there was nothing wrong in his sermon; “but that it was solid, good, and true doctrine.”¹
♦ “Balcanquhall” replaced with “Balcanquhal”
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 527‒529, 540, 542‒543.
By the freedom which they took in the pulpit the ministers of Edinburgh were extremely annoying to the dominant faction, who had the King’s ear. John Dury charged the King himself to his face for exchanging presents with the Duke of Guise, “that cruel murderer of the saints.” When he ascended the pulpit, he made the church resound with his denunciations of the bishops, the King, and his favourites, who ruled the kingdom. Dury was at first an exhorter in Leith, and though not a learned man, he had much energy and intense earnestness of purpose. He could wield a weapon on the field of battle, as well as preach a sermon in the pulpit. It was on the evening of Wednesday, the 23rd of May, 1582, in the Cathedral Church of Edinburgh, that he made his great attack upon the court faction. “I pray you,” he said, “what should move Guise, that bloody persecutor, that enemy unto all truth, that pillar of the Pope, to send this present by one of his trustiest servants to our King? not for any love, no, no, his pretence is known.... What amity or friendship can we look for at his hands who has been the bloodiest persecutor of the professors of the truth in all France, neither was there any notable murder or havoc of God’s people, but what he was at in person. And yet for all this, the Duke and Arran will needs have our King to take a present from him. If God did threaten the captivity and spoil of Jerusalem because their King Hezekia did receive a lure and present from the King of Babylon, shall we think to be free when committing the like or rather worse?” In his prayers, he prayed that the Lord would either convert or confound the Duke. For his sermon he was called before the Privy Council, and banished from Edinburgh by an Act of Council. When the General Assembly met in June, 1582, he placed the whole process against him before it, and the members of the Assembly found nothing amiss in what he had spoken. “The whole Assembly found nothing in him but sound, true, and wholesome doctrine; and that he was upright and honest in his life and conversation.” As the King had banished him from the capital, the Assembly gave him liberty to preach wherever providence might cast his lot, until he should be restored to his own flock.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 576, 578, 580; Calderwood, Volume III., pages 620, 622‒625; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume III., pages 335, 489. Dury was called before the King and Council at Dalkeith――“Where he narrowly escaped being slain by the duke’s cooks, who came out of the kitchen, with spits and great knives to take his life, as he often told me.”――Melville’s Diary, page 129.
The plot against the King’s favourites was at length ripe for execution. The King was very fond of hunting, and on August 22, 1582, his Majesty, by invitation, proceeded to the grounds of Ruthven Castle, in the neighbourhood of Perth, to enjoy his favourite amusement. When the sport was concluded for the day, he went to Ruthven Castle as the welcome guest of its noble lord. Everything passed off in the most agreeable fashion, and his Majesty at last retired to rest. The following morning, when he arose and looked abroad, he was alarmed by the throng of armed men around the place, and when he wished to depart, discovered that he was a captive. The Earl of Arran was seized and imprisoned; and the Duke of Lennox was warned to leave the country without delay. This affair is known in history as “The Raid of Ruthven.”
The King was permitted to step about, but he was attended by a body of well-armed followers to preserve his royal person from danger. In a few days he was removed to Stirling, and in October was conveyed to Holyrood House. A Parliament was then held at Edinburgh on the 19th of October, and an act of indemnity, or rather a vote of thanks to the chief actors in the enterprise, was passed. This was a farce which the aristocracy often played. They proclaimed that, under the providence of God, they were moved to attempt the reform of many abuses in the State, which threatened to subvert the established religion, and were equally perilous to his Majesty and the crown.¹ By the most ardent Protestants and the clergy, “The Raid of Ruthven” was regarded as a deliverance for the Church, and the ministers declared their satisfaction from the pulpits. When the General Assembly met at Edinburgh on the 9th October, 1582, the members heartily approved of the proceedings of the Earl of Gowrie and his adherents, and passed an act declaring “that the prosecution and following out of the said good and godly cause, all particulars put aside, is and shall be most acceptable to all that fear the majesty of God aright; and to all who tender the preservation of the King’s Majesty, most noble person, and estate, and loves the prosperous and happy success of this troubled nation.” The members of the Assembly were therefore recommended to explain the affair, and the proceedings of the noblemen connected with it, to the people throughout the country.²
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 326‒331.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 591‒592, 594‒596; Melville’s Diary, page 134; Sir James Melville’s Memoirs, pages 282‒283.
During the time that the King was in the hands of Gowrie and the barons who joined him, the government was carried on pretty much in accordance with the views of the Church. When ambassadors arrived from France in January, 1583, the Presbytery of Edinburgh appointed some of the ministers to go to the King and admonish him to beware of them. The King thanked the preachers for their friendly admonition, but said that he must show the common courtesies to the ambassadors of his old ally, the King of France; but promised, however, to use no great familiarity with them. The ♦distinguished strangers were permitted to celebrate the mass, and their celebration of it excited the popular displeasure; the ministers of the capital declaimed bitterly against them, especially against La Motte, a knight who wore a white cross on his shoulder, which they called the badge of Antichrist. Indeed, such was the feeling aroused against them that the representatives of the King of France could scarcely appear on the streets without being followed by the jeers and hooting of the mob. The King desired the magistrates to entertain them at a banquet before they departed; but the ministers were extremely opposed to it, and immediately proclaimed a fast to be kept on the day of the banquet. On that day the preachers in St. Giles made the walls resound with their denunciations. Three ministers, in succession, mounted the pulpit, and, without intermission for four hours, thundered out maledictions against the nobles and the magistrates who waited on the ambassadors, and took part in the banquet.¹
♦ “distintinguished” replaced with “distinguished”
¹ Calderwood, Volume III., pages 694, 697, 698, 699, 700; Spottiswood, Volume II., page 298.
Despite the vigilance of his keepers, the young King contrived to escape in the end of June, 1583, and to throw himself into the Castle of St. Andrews. The power of the Ruthven party was shortly after terminated. The King issued a proclamation on the 30th of July, touching the Raid of Ruthven, and announcing that he had resumed his independent authority. Referring to the Raid, he expressed his willingness to forget the offence and grant forgiveness to all concerned in it, if they should timeously profess their penitence; and for some time several of the nobles implicated in the Raid continued members of the Privy Council. But on the 23rd of August the Earl of Arran reappeared in the Council, and shortly resumed his power and influence in the government; and he seems to have instigated the young prince to prosecute to the utmost those concerned in the Raid of Ruthven, and at last, on the 31st of March, 1584, it was denounced as high treason. By this time, a number of those implicated in the Raid had been tried one by one or collectively, and sentenced to banishment or imprisonment, and disgraced. But the hatred of the Earl of Arran’s rule had become general, and a new plot, sanctioned by a bond, was formed against him, in which the Earls of Mar, Angus, and Gowrie, the Lords Lindsay, John Hamilton and Claud Hamilton, the Master of Glamis, and others, were associated. They resolved to seize Stirling Castle, and then to raise a general insurrection. On the 10th of April, Mar and Glamis, with a body of their followers, captured Stirling Castle; but on the 15th of April, the Earl of Gowrie was arrested by Colonel Stewart at Dundee, and immediately conveyed to Edinburgh. The capture of Gowrie somewhat disconcerted the insurgent nobles. Arran, with a strong force, advanced against them, and on the 24th of April, they fled from Stirling, leaving only a garrison of twenty-four men in the Castle. The following day, a proclamation was issued for the pursuit and capture, dead or alive, of the Earls of Mar and Angus, the Master of Glamis, and other rebels; but they escaped by Lanark to Kelso, and crossed the border into England. The King and his army appeared before Stirling, the small garrison left by the insurgents surrendered the Castle, and on the 28th of April, their captain and other three men were hanged. On the 2nd of May, the Earl of Gowrie was tried for treason at Stirling by a jury of his peers, including ♦Argyle, Arran, Crawford, and others; he was convicted, and beheaded the same day beneath the castle wall. The same month an Act of Parliament was passed for disinheriting his posterity, and in August an act of forfeiture was passed against the Countess of Gowrie. From May 1584, till Midsummer 1585, Arran was the supreme ruler of Scotland, and his policy was clearly manifested in the two short sessions of what is known as the “running” Parliament, and in the proceedings of the Privy Council during the brief period of his sway.¹
♦ “Argyll” replaced with “Argyle” for consistency
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 301‒304; Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., pages 574, 585, 590, 602, 608, 611, 614, 644, 651‒662.
Meanwhile the apprehensions of the clergy had risen to an unusual height. They had applauded the Raid of Ruthven, and some of them still continued to reiterate their former sentiments on that enterprise. John Dury, who had returned to Edinburgh, was ordered to retire beyond the Tay, and to abide in Montrose. In the middle of February, 1584, Andrew Melville, one of the chief leaders of the clergy, was cited to appear before the Privy Council, touching seditious language which he had uttered in his sermons. When he came before the Council, he at once offered to give an account of the sermon upon which he was accused, and after he had done this, the Council resolved to proceed with the trial. Melville then protested and declined to answer, on the ground that the case ought in the first instance to be tried by the Presbytery. The reading of his protest seems to have greatly irritated Arran and the King. On the second day of the trial Melville lost his temper, and told the King and Council that they had taken too much on themselves to control the servants of a Master far higher than they were. That they might see their rashness, he took a Hebrew Bible from his girdle, and throwing it down on the table challenged his judges to try conclusions on that and then they would see their folly. The record states that he “proudly, irreverently, and contemptuously declared that the laws of God and the practices observed within the country were perverted and not observed in this case.” The court ordered him to enter as a prisoner into the Castle of Blackness within ten hours, under the penalty of being proclaimed a rebel and an outlaw; but Melville preferred to choose his own place of imprisonment, and immediately fled to Berwick, which in those days was the city of refuge.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., page 631; Melville’s Diary, pages 141‒144; Scott’s Narrative, page 51.
The contest between the Crown and the clergy had now reached a crisis. Archbishop Adamson, acting in concert with the King and Arran, was busy concocting a plan for the reintroduction of Episcopacy and the destruction of the Presbyterian polity, which had been rapidly completing its organisation. Adamson drew up a series of articles for the constitution of the Church and the acceptance of the Government. According to this scheme, which recognised in emphatic terms that the King was head of the Church, and that it was therefore his prerogative to appoint the order of her polity, the government of the Church consisted, subject to the headship of the King, in the power and authority of the bishops, whose office is of apostolic institution and in accordance with the primitive purity of the Church of God. On the other hand, it was pointed out that presbyteries in which laymen associated with the ministers, were in fact a continual source of sedition. No General Assembly was to be allowed to meet without a license from the King.¹ These ideas were instilled into the mind of the young King at this impressionable period of his life, and throughout the rest of his career he never ceased to hold and enforce them to the utmost of his power.
¹ Calderwood, Volume IV., pages 53‒55; Dr. Grub’s Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, Volume II., pages 232‒234; Melville’s Diary, pages 151‒153.
Rumours of impending calamities to the Church and the nation filled the land. In the beginning of May several of the most energetic preachers fled to Berwick, and joined Melville and the banished lords. When Parliament met at Edinburgh on the 19th of May, 1584, these gloomy forebodings were fully realised. A series of acts were passed which placed in the hands of the King powers quite unprecedented in Scotland. One act declared that the King had an absolute power and authority over all ranks in the kingdom, and that he was supreme judge in all matters civil and religious. Another enacted that to speak against any of the proceedings of Parliament should be accounted treason; a third, that all the acts and judgments of the church courts, if unsanctioned by Parliament, were to be held as unlawful, and all meetings of the people to consult and deliberate on any matter, either civil or ecclesiastical, without the King’s special licence, were declared criminal and deserving the severest punishment. A fourth act placed the chief ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the hands of the bishops. A fifth commanded that no person whatever should dare to comment upon the proceedings of the King and Council, either in sermons or declamations, in public, in private, or in familiar conversation; nor at all presume to utter any false and slanderous statements to the reproach, the disdain, or the contempt of His Majesty, or to the prejudice and dishonour of his highness and his parents and worthy progenitors, under the penalty of the laws against the makers and tellers of lies. And that these royal prerogatives which by the gift of heaven belonged to his highness and to all his heirs and successors on the throne should continue unimpaired, it was deemed absolutely necessary to condemn Buchanan’s History of Scotland and his Jure Regni apud Scotos; and therefore all persons who possessed any copies of these books were ordered to deliver them to the royal officers within forty days, “that they might be purified of the extraordinary matters which they contained.”¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 292‒296; Calderwood, Volume IV., page 38, et seq.
The clergy had become aware that these acts were preparing, and some of them went to the Parliament House, with the intention of protesting for the rights of the Church, but the doors were closed against them. When the Acts were proclaimed at the cross of Edinburgh, three of the ministers, Lawson, Pont, and Balcanquhal, protested publicly against them as injurious to the former liberties of the Church. These acts had been passed in great haste, the parliament having sat but two days, and passed forty-nine acts; and the King and Arran made a bold attempt to carry them into effect. For some time nothing was heard of but arrests, trials, hornings and forfeitures. These measures unquestionably expressed the intentions of the party in power. Orders were issued to apprehend the preachers who had protested against the acts, but they had saved themselves by flight. Soon after more than twenty ministers took refuge in England; and there was then a pretty large party of Scots in Berwick, Newcastle, and other parts of that kingdom.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., page 668; Miscellany of the Wodrow Society, Volume I., pages 411‒419; Calderwood, Volume IV., pages 64‒65, 72; Melville’s Diary, pages 167‒172.
The King and his party having now asserted their supremacy, resolved to crush the rebellious nobles and the bold preachers. Parliament again met in August, 1584, and passed thirty-eight acts to strengthen the hands of the government. A process of treason against the banished lords and others associated with them was carried through, and their property was forfeited to the Crown. An act was passed which commanded all beneficed men, ministers, readers, masters of colleges and schools, to subscribe and faithfully promise that they would humbly and dutifully submit to the King, and obey the acts of the last parliament; and to show their submissive spirit, they were ordered at once to obey the bishops and the commissioners appointed by the King to rule over them in all religious matters, under the penalty of forfeiting their stipends.¹ All the ministers between Stirling and Berwick were summoned to appear at Edinburgh, on the 16th of November, 1584, there to attest their submission to the will of the King. This was a very hard measure, and many of the ministers refused to comply with it. When Craig and other leading preachers were before the court, Arran asked them, how they durst venture to be so bold as to find fault with the acts of parliament; Craig answered that they durst find fault with anything which was repugnant to God’s Word. Upon this Arran started to his feet and threatened that, “he would shave their heads, pare their nails, cut their toes, and make them an example to all rebels.” After some further debate, Craig and the most of his brethren signed the deed, with a clause which was added――“agreeable to the Word of God.” Erskine of Dun, the venerable superintendent, also signed it, and used his influence in persuading others to conform. On the 2nd of January, 1585, it was proclaimed that all those who had not subscribed the acts of parliament were then offered the last opportunity of doing so; and that in the event of their declining, their stipends would be withheld, and their persons punished for contempt of the laws.²
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 331‒333, 336‒346, 347.
² Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., pages 701‒704, 712, et seq.; Calderwood, Volume IV., pages 198‒200, 209‒211, 246‒247; Fifth Report of the Commissioners on Historical manuscripts, page 636.
But neither the rage of Arran, nor the kingcraft of James, could stifle thought and feeling. The ministers, however, were extremely hard pressed. The laws against them were rigorously enforced; and even the wives of the refractory preachers were turned out of their houses, and commanded to leave the country.¹ By such means the King and his associates fondly imagined that they would crush the spirit of the clergy and the people; and an onlooker might well have thought that the clergy were completely subdued; but the inner springs of the movement the King with all his craft and acts was unable to touch. It was here that he failed. He could enforce compliance with certain things; but it was beyond his power to control the motives, the ideas, and the convictions; and it is these which ultimately prevail.
¹ Miscellany of the Wodrow Society, Volume I., pages 432‒437.
One of the inner political peculiarities of the history of Scotland appears in the rapid rise and fall of the factions of the nobles who ruled the country, or rather the king. This process of action and reaction was always at short intervals producing sudden and unexpected changes at the centre of authority. Looking merely at the external features of these manifestations, they seem to be capricious, irregular, and extremely confused; but when we extend our view over a series of centuries, and learn to appreciate the position and the power of the aristocracy, these surprising changes in the government become intelligible and full of sequence. In this light, the long series of unforeseen changes in the government, the seizures, the imprisonments, the depositions, and the murders, of the kings are seen to be the results of a movement springing out of the social and political organisation of the nation. In other words, the aggregates of society in Scotland had for ages circled round the nobles, but often in separate and conflicting groups; hence the comparative weakness of the Crown arose partly from its having to contend with the freaks of these natural and traditional centres of power.
Lord Maxwell had been for many generations the leading local noble in Dumfries and its neighbourhood, and had frequently held the office of Warden of the Western March. On the 29th of April, 1581, John, Lord Maxwell, was appointed to that office by the King and Council. A supporter of Lennox and Arran, immediately after the execution of the Regent, he was created Earl of Morton, and on the 5th of June, 1581, he obtained a charter granting the Earldom to him. The new Earl was at feud with John Johnstone of Johnstone, a powerful border laird, and formerly a Warden of the Western March; and on the 26th of May, 1582, a royal proclamation ordered them not to appear with their armed followers in Edinburgh――“to a day of law appointed to be held on the last day of May.” On the 19th of November the Earl of Morton was deprived of the Wardenship of the Western March, and his rival, Johnstone of Johnstone, was appointed to the office. The Earl of Morton was subsequently charged with many misdemeanours, and denounced as a rebel. In the winter of 1585 he appears as the leader of a border revolt against Arran’s government; and in April a muster of the loyal vassals of the Crown was ordered, and then to proceed against him, while the gift to Maxwell of the Earldom of Morton was revoked; and therefore he was at war with the King and his government. Maxwell had a thousand armed men in the field, and the banished Lords at once saw their opportunity, and joined him. In the beginning of November, 1585, they returned, and having collected their adherents, met Maxwell at Selkirk. Thence they marched on Stirling with a force of eight thousand men. The King and Arran were at Stirling when the rebels appeared before it. Arran fled towards the Highlands; while the King, notwithstanding all his craft and the astuteness of his favourites, had no alternative but to receive the proffered homage of his rebellious nobles, and pardon them.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume III., pages 376, 487, 531, 534, 540, 739; Bannatyne Miscellany, Volume I., page 119; Melville’s Diary, pages 223‒225; Sir James Melville’s Memoirs, pages 384‒385.
With the nobles most of the exiled preachers had returned, and the hopes of the Protestant clergy were somewhat brightened. But if they expected much aid from the party whom they had befriended, they were quickly disabused. The nobles told them that first of all their own estates must be restored, and that when they were, they would work intently for the Church. This was the characteristic form of the policy of the aristocracy towards the reformed clergy, when a party of the clergy had interests of their own at stake, they were ready to promise assistance to the clergy; but, excepting a few individual nobles who appeared from time to time, there was no real religious principle or living conviction amongst them from the beginning to the end of the conflict. The clergy themselves, however, continued to struggle on, and fought manfully for the redress of their grievances. The Parliament met in the beginning of December, 1585, and restored the estates of the nobles who had been disinherited for their rebellion. But the despotic acts of 1584 were left untouched. The only act in favour of the Church was one which restored all the ministers and masters of colleges to their offices and possessions.¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 383‒387, 395.
It has become apparent that the King had an enormous amount of self-conceit; and that he was filled with a passion for polemics. He had been so flattered and puffed up by those who had lately associated with him, that he verily thought he could settle theological questions, make a commentary, or handle a text better than all the preachers and professors in the kingdom. About the beginning of the year 1586 he attended worship in the High Church of Edinburgh, when Balcanquhal the minister made some derogatory remarks touching the authority of bishops. James immediately rose from his seat and asked him what Scripture he had for his assertions. The preacher said he could adduce sufficient proofs from Scripture for what he had stated. The King vehemently denied this, and offered to pledge his kingdom that he would prove the contrary, and he added that it was the practice of preachers to busy themselves with such matters in the pulpit, but he was aware of their intentions, and would look after them. The interlude continued for a quarter of an hour, after which the King resumed his seat and heard the sermon to the end. Balcanquhal was subsequently sent for, and in the palace his Majesty had the satisfaction of engaging him for more than an hour.¹ It should be stated, however, that the preachers sometimes provoked the King. A short time before this incident, James Gibson, the minister of Pencaitland, preached a sermon in Edinburgh, and uttered the following statement――“I thought that Captain James Stewart, Lady Isabel his wife, and William Stewart, had persecuted the Church, but now I have found the truth, that it was the King himself. As Jeroboam and his posterity were rooted out for staying of the true worship of God, so I fear that if our King continue in his present course, he shall be the last of his race.” For this, Gibson was brought before the Privy Council and imprisoned. He was afterwards liberated, and for a time suspended by order of the General Assembly.²
¹ M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume I., pages 340‒345.
² Register of the Privy Council, December, 1585; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 688, 690, 699, 709‒712.
The General Assembly met at Edinburgh in May, 1586. The King attended at the election of the moderator, and gave his vote in favour of David Lindsay, the minister of Leith, who was in consequence chosen. There had been no General Assembly for a long time, and there was much business to transact; but the proceedings ended in a compromise which was satisfactory to neither party. Discussions were held concerning the office of a bishop, the discipline of the Church, the limits of the jurisdiction of the Synods and Presbyteries, and a scheme for the division of the whole country into Synods and Presbyteries was adopted. The King’s Commissioners and the members of the Assembly held long communings; the King had one chief object always in view――to keep the Episcopal element in the Church. Bishop Adamson, who had been irregularly excommunicated by the Synod of Fife, appeared before the Assembly and submitted. He promised to behave himself for the future, and to submit his life and doctrine to the trial, the judgment and censure of the General Assembly, and upon which, and no other condition, were bishops to be recognised in the Church.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 645‒684. “In this Assembly was first seen what fear and flattery of the Court could work among weak and inconstant ministers.” Calderwood, Volume IV., page 583. Compare Melville’s Diary, page 249.
But the nation was not as yet fully under the discipline of the Reformed Church. A considerable section of the people still adhered to the Roman Catholic religion in the remote districts of the West and North. There was also, as we have seen, a lack of qualified ministers to overtake the work throughout the country. Besides, the reformed system of organisation had scarcely come into full operation when the diverging views of the King and his government began to obstruct its development.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 658‒661.
At this time a number of French Protestant ministers had taken refuge in Scotland from the severe persecution which was raging in their own country. The General Assembly employed Andrew Melville to write a letter assuring the exiled preachers that the Assembly would do everything in its power to assist them and to render their sojourn agreeable. The magistrates of Edinburgh allowed the French refugees to meet for worship in the common hall of the College, and allotted stipends to their ministers. Collections also for them and their brethren in England were made in the parishes throughout the kingdom.¹
¹ Ibid., pages 655‒657.
When it became known in Scotland that Queen Mary was to be executed, the King issued an act of council ordering the ministers at all their preachings and meetings to pray for his mother in this form, “The Lord illuminate and enlighten her spirit, that she may attain to the knowledge of His truth, for the safety of soul and body, and preserve her from the present peril.” Some of the ministers, especially those of Edinburgh, refused to pray but as the spirit moved them. The King seems to have been disappointed at this, and on the 3rd of February, 1587, he appointed Archbishop Adamson to preach in St. Giles, and after a little scene, the bishop was allowed to go on with his prayer and his sermon. The truth is, that James was far more concerned and interested about his own succession to the English throne than about his mother’s death.¹
¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume IV.; Calderwood, Volume IV., pages 606‒607; Moysie’s _Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland_.
The unfortunate queen herself was endowed with a courage and a spirit which, in the final scene of her chequered career, astonished and dismayed all her enemies. Never had martyr exhibited a grander spectacle of fortitude than did Mary Stuart in the closing act of her fitful life. And she has had her reward. Her bearing upon the scaffold shed a glory around her which has been transmitted and worshipped by her admirers down to the present. But amongst the people of Scotland she was at the time of her execution but little regarded.
The parliament which met at Holyrood House in July, 1587, ratified all the acts passed in favour of the reformed religion during the minority of the King. An act was passed against seminary priests and Jesuits, and all the enemies of the reformed religion. The temporal lands of the bishoprics, abbacies, and priories, which then remained unappropriated, were annexed to the crown; but the chief gainers by this act were the nobility, as it secured to them the lands which they had obtained since the Reformation. By this measure, whether the King perceived it or not, a severe blow was given to Episcopacy, as it really divested the bishops of the right to sit in parliament by their landed titles, and thus cut from beneath them the strongest ground for their continuance.¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 429‒437.
Meanwhile the Presbyterian clergy were persevering in their attacks on the bishops, and were fast becoming masters of the field. They were making incessant efforts also for the utter suppression of the adherents of Catholicism. An extraordinary meeting of the General Assembly was convened at Edinburgh in February, 1588, for the purpose of arousing the nation to a sense of its danger from the threatened Spanish Armada. Andrew Melville, as moderator of the last Assembly, opened the proceedings with an address, in which he explained the reasons for their meeting. The alarming nature of the crisis had attracted a great concourse of members who were all animated with one spirit. They drew up an extremely dark picture of the state of the kingdom: “It was an exceedingly great grief to all such,” they said, “as have any spunk of the love of God and his Christ, to see Jesuits, seminary priests, and other teachers of popery and error, to be so long suffered to pollute this land with idolatry, corrupt and seduce the people, and spread abroad their poisonable doctrine; to see practisers and traffickers against the true religion, and the present liberty of this realm, to be received, maintained, and entertained; to bring to pass their most dangerous devices and plots, and the receivers, the entertainers, and the maintainers, and the professed favourers of both the one and the other, so to abound everywhere; and not only to be tolerated with impunity, without executing of the laws of the country against them, but also to have special credit, favour, and furtherance, at the court, in the session, in the burghs, and throughout the realm, in all their affairs. And, on the other hand, to behold the true Word of God contemptuously despised by the great multitude; His holy sacraments horribly profaned by private, corrupt, and unlawful persons; the discipline of the Church disregarded, the persons of the ministers and the office-bearers within the same stricken, menaced, and shamefully abused, themselves beggared, and their families shamefully hungered. And yet, notwithstanding, neither the laws against idolatry nor vice were put into execution, neither sufficient laws made for the liberty and welfare of the Church, nor such as are made put into effect for removing of these fearful enormities.” The records then enumerate a number of Catholics by name who were spread throughout the country. In the north, where the Earl of Huntly was supreme, the reformed religion had as yet taken comparatively little hold upon the people. Many of the parishes in this region had no ministers, and even where there were readers and pastors, they found it extremely difficult to perform their functions. In Lennox, at this time, there were twenty-four churches, and not four ministers amongst them all.¹ The Assembly appointed a commission to visit the north, south, and west, to introduce order and discipline, plant qualified ministers, and establish the authority of the Church.
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 703, 715‒724.
The Scots made every preparation which their limited means afforded to defend themselves, if the Spaniards should attempt to land in Scotland. For some time great uneasiness was felt among all ranks of the nation. Time passed on, and the Spaniards at last landed in Scotland, but not in the character of a conquering army. Early one morning, before the fate of the Armada was known, James Melville, the minister of Anstruther, was informed that a ship filled with Spaniards had entered the harbour and were imploring aid, and the authorities requested his advice as to how they should act towards them. The principal inhabitants of the town were at once assembled, and when the real condition of the Spaniards was ascertained, the Scots treated them with all the kindness and hospitality in their power. Afterwards they obtained a license and safe conduct from the King to return to Spain.¹
¹ Melville’s Diary, pages 260‒264.
But the reformed clergy continued their endeavours to put down the Jesuits and seminary priests, who were protected by some of the local nobles. A convention of the chief ministers was held at Edinburgh in January, 1589, to devise and recommend measures to the government. Andrew Melville was chosen chairman of the meeting, and his nephew James acted as clerk. The meeting petitioned the government to purge the land of all Jesuits and priests; and before separating they appointed a number of their brethren as commissioners to meet every week in Edinburgh, and consult upon matters relating to the Church. In the spring of this year the Earl of Huntly and other Catholic lords broke out into rebellion. They collected their followers and met at Aberdeen in April, but the King marched in person against them, and the insurrection was for a time suppressed.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 740‒744; Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume II., page 171, et seq.; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 54‒55.
The Presbyterian party was now almost masters of the position. The Synods and Assemblies were enforcing the discipline of the Church with a firm hand. They demanded conformity of polity and doctrine, and the discipline was brought to bear upon the highest as well as upon the humblest in the land.¹ In the pulpit the ministers were extremely outspoken and freely rebuked the King and the chief officials of the government. Mr. Robert Bruce, when preaching a sermon in Edinburgh in the presence of the King said――“What could the great disobedience of this land mean now while the King was at home, seeing that some reverence was borne to his shadow when he was absent? He answered, it meant a universal contempt of the subjects; therefore he willed the King to call to God, before he either ate or drank, that the Lord would give him a resolution to execute justice upon malefactors, although it should be with the hazard of his life. Which if he would courageously attempt, the Lord would raise anew to assist him, and all these obstacles would vanish away, otherwise he would not be suffered to brook his crown, but every man will have one.” Others of the ministers were equally explicit in warning the King of his sins.²
¹ Book of Universal Kirk, pages 771, 773, 777, 781.
² Calderwood, Volume V., pages 129‒130, 139.
The King himself was in a state of almost utter poverty. During the revolutionary period the revenue of the Crown had decreased; and the unseemly squabbles in the court, together with the King’s inability to punish notorious criminals, and his leniency towards the Catholic Earls, had all tended to lower him in the eyes of the people. Harassed by these circumstances and uncertain which way to turn, the idea seems to have crossed his mind that he might regain the esteem of the people by cultivating the friendship of the Church. The leaders of the clergy were only too eager to let such an opportunity slip. When the General Assembly met in May, 1592, it was resolved to petition Parliament to pass an Act which should recognise the polity and the liberties of the Church.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 786‒787; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 140‒162.
Parliament met at Edinburgh in June 1592, when the petition of the General Assembly was laid before it. The Assembly craved that the acts passed against the discipline and the liberty of the Church in the year 1584, should be repealed, that the discipline which had been in use should be ratified, and that the act of annexation should be reduced, and the patrimony of the Church restored. An act was accordingly passed which confirmed all the liberties and privileges granted by the King and the regents in his name to the Reformed Church as then established in the kingdom. The act recognised and sanctioned the general assemblies, synods, presbyteries, and particular sessions of the Church. The General Assembly was to be allowed to meet once a-year, or oftener, if necessary, the time and place of the next meeting to be fixed by the King or his Commissioner, or if neither of them should be present, by the Assembly itself. Then followed a special abrogation of acts passed in bygone ages in favour of the Roman Catholic Church, which were prejudicial to the Reformed Church and her discipline within the realm. Acts of the Parliaments of James II. and James III. were specially pointed out as recognising the authority of the Pope and holy days, but these and all other acts authorising the interference of the Pope were declared to be for ever annulled. It was distinctly stated that the act passed in the Parliament of 1584, concerning the royal supremacy, should be in no way derogatory to the privileges of the office-bearers of the Church, touching the heads of religion, points of heresy, excommunication, appointment or deprivation of ministers, or any censures warranted by the Word of God. The act of 1584 relating to the bishops was also repealed.¹ Thus the legal establishment of Presbyterianism, for which the leading men among the clergy had so long fought, was at last obtained. Although the settlement was far from complete, it has always been regarded by the Presbyterian body of Christians as an important step in national reformation. But the Reformed Church of Scotland did not consider either this, or any other Parliamentary sanction as the basis of her religious constitution. This had already been laid down and so far fixed in her Confession and in her Books of Discipline; but all her internal regulations she considered to be founded upon higher grounds than any earthly authority. Still in that age, when the traditions of the old system were by no means extinct in the country, and while the energy of Roman Catholicism was successfully recovering its lost ground in other parts of Europe, it will be seen that it was no small advantage for the Reformed Church of Scotland to obtain a firmer and more public establishment of the principles of Protestantism.
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 541‒543.
Chapter XVIII
Continuation of the History of Protestantism.
THOUGH the clergy had obtained the sanction of the government to their form of Church polity, the public mind was still agitated. The air was filled with rumours of plots and conspiracies on the part of the Jesuits, and of projected invasions for the overthrow of the Reformed religion and the massacre of the Protestants. The zeal of the clergy against the Catholics was intense and implacable. They were much annoyed at the lenity of the King towards the Catholic Earls of Huntly, Errol, and Angus, and were constantly on the outlook for their enemies. In the month of November, 1592, they appointed a committee to sit in Edinburgh during the emergency in order to watch over the Church. To sharpen the feeling of the people, they proclaimed a fast to begin on Sunday, the 17th of December, “That by true humiliation and unfeigned repentance, the fearful judgments of God that hang over this land may be prevented.” During the fast the pulpits resounded with denunciations of the Catholics, the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the remissness of the King and the government in not executing justice upon malefactors and murderers. According to Calderwood, the effect of the fast was immediately manifested in the apprehension of George Ker, a doctor of laws, who was connected with a strange conspiracy. On the 27th of December, Andrew Knox, the minister of Paisley, having learned that Ker was ready to proceed to Spain, traced him to Glasgow, thence to the Island of Cumbrae, and apprehended him on the ship in which he was about to sail. Ker’s baggage was searched, and some packets of letters of a suspicious character being found, he was conveyed a prisoner to Edinburgh. Among the letters, several signatures of the ♦Earls of Huntly, Errol, and Angus, were found at the bottom of blank slips of paper. Graham of Fintry, an associate of Ker’s, was shortly after apprehended. Ker was tortured, and on the first stroke of the boots confessed the conspiracy. This mode of extracting information destroys any degree of credit which might otherwise attach to the statements of the accused individual, but it was enough in the heated temper of the clergy and the people, to arouse their passions and feelings to a pitch of great excitement. The Privy Council, after examining the letters, had no doubt of their authenticity. The King, then at Stirling, was requested to return to Edinburgh. The people clamoured for the trial and execution of Ker; and the authorities issued a proclamation ordering all Jesuits and excommunicated persons to depart from Edinburgh within three hours, under the penalty of death. Upon Sunday the 7th of January, 1583, the King attended church, and Robert Bruce, the preacher, exhorted him “that now was the time to execute justice,” or else, said he, “the chronicles will keep in remembrance King James VI. to his shame.” A meeting of the Protestant barons and ministers was held, and they called upon the King to prosecute and punish the traitors. Ker escaped; but Graham was convicted of conspiracy, and on the 10th of February, he was executed to appease the rage of the people, but in vain. On the night after his execution, a bill was posted up in a conspicuous part of the capital, which asserted that all the preparations against the Catholics would end in nothing, for the greatest criminals had been allowed to escape by the connivance of the Court.¹
♦ “Early” replaced with “Earls”
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 167, 168, 171‒193, 214‒230; Melville’s Diary, pages 306‒307.
Towards the end of February, 1593, the King, at the head of an army made a demonstration against the Catholic Earls, but it resulted merely in the Earls of Huntly and Errol withdrawing to Caithness. Many circumstances indicated that the King intended to treat them leniently, and there were obvious reasons for this policy in the existing state of things. The Crown of Scotland was never strong, and the craft of James VI. was little fitted to enhance its importance. The nobles, on the other hand, were unusually distracted by feuds and factions, springing out of a variety of causes, social and political, as well as religious. Since the Reformation their landed possessions had frequently changed hands. The national records of the time are full of forfeitures, revocations, and confirmations, of landed estates; and naturally the plots of those who had been defeated and ruined were incessant. About one-third of the nobles were still more or less firmly attached to the Roman Catholic religion.¹ From these circumstances a mass of difficulties arose which reduced the Crown to the most miserable straits, and placed the King in the most ridiculous plights. Unfortunately, James had neither the sagacity to appreciate the tendency of his age, and to follow and moderate it, nor grasp of principle and firmness of character to turn it aside. His thin narrow mind was filled with little conceits and possessed with the most childish notion of his own power and prerogatives; while the moral side of his character was even worse than the intellectual, indeed, he had little regard either for truth or honesty. Yet, he was continually tampering with the Church, and in his own underhand and crafty fashion endeavoured to impress his notions upon her, and to install the bishops as executors of his will.
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III. throughout; Register of the Privy Council; Tytler’s History of Scotland, Volume IX., pages 65‒111, 376‒382.
The reformed clergy boldly insisted on the complete submission of the Catholics, and the entire extirpation of their faith. The General Assembly which met at Dundee in April, 1593, called upon the King and the government to punish all the Catholics in the country, according to the laws of God and the laws of the realm. They insisted “That Parliament should declare all the Jesuits and trafficking Catholics to be guilty of treason, and that the same penalties should be enforced against all persons who harboured them, not for three days, as the law then stood, but for any time, however short. That all those whom the Church found to be Catholics, although not excommunicated, should be debarred from holding any office in the kingdom; and also debarred from all access to his Majesty, and from the protection of the laws; and that the consequences of horning and all other social penalties should follow upon such a declaration, as upon the sentence of excommunication: that an act of council should be immediately made thereon, till the next Parliament, when it should be passed into a law.”¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, 798‒799, 802‒803.
When the petition in which these demands were embodied came before the King, he refused to grant it. In his answer he reminded the petitioners of his right to appoint the day and the place of the Assembly, and desired them to pass an act prohibiting every minister from declaiming in their pulpits against himself or the proceedings of his council. He also wished the ministers to name six of the wisest of their number, that from these he might select two to serve in his own household. Nothing, he said, would afford him more pleasure than to hear through the clergy what was doing in all parts of the country, for whoever were their enemies, were his enemies; he would be highly delighted, not only to hear from time to time about the practices of the Catholics and the Spanish faction, but also about Bothwell, whenever they had any information of him, because his whole course of action was directed against his Majesty’s person, and the total subversion of all religion.¹
¹ Ibid., pages 805‒806.
Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, was a near relative of the King. But he was restless, daring, and unscrupulous; and had repeatedly thrown the King into fits of terror for his life, by sudden and unexpected attempts to make him a prisoner. Bothwell was known to have entered into plots with the Catholic party, the Protestant party, and with Queen Elizabeth; but he lacked the strength of character and intelligence to carry out any great enterprise; while his exploits with the King, although extremely annoying and fearful to the royal personage himself, often assumed a rather ridiculous and comic form, and had no effect whatever on the main current of history.¹
¹ Sir James Melville’s Memoirs, pages 414‒416; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 117‒132, 138, 140, 134, 177, 258; Melville’s Diary, pages 277, 294‒326.
Parliament met in July 1593, but the process against the Catholic lords failed. The King’s advocate informed the commissioners of the Church that the summons was informal, and the evidence against them insufficient, and that it was impossible then to forfeit them. An act was passed against the mass, and a searching inquisition was ordered to be made for all Catholics. But this did not satisfy the clergy; and they freely expressed their sentiments in the pulpits to the people. On the Sunday after the close of the parliament, John Davidson said in his sermon, “It was a black parliament, for iniquity was seated in the high court of justice: the arch traitors having not only escaped, but in a manner were absolved, as it was alleged that no evidence could be adduced against them. The absolving of the wicked, imported the persecution of the righteous, except God restrained the adversaries. Let us pray, that the King by some sanctified plagues, may be turned again to God.”¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV.; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 255‒256.
The King was still averse to proceed to extremities against the Catholic Earls. But the more ardent Protestants and the clergy had come to the conclusion, that it was impossible for the old and the new religion to exist together in Scotland. They therefore deemed it necessary to employ the power of the Church against the Catholics. The Synod of Fife met at St. Andrews on the 25th of September 1593, and agreed to a resolution to excommunicate the Earls of Huntly, Errol, Angus, Lord Home, and others of their adherents. This sentence was ordered to be intimated in all the congregations throughout the kingdom. The Synod concluded its proceedings by exhorting the pastors to prepare themselves by prayer and diligent study of the word, for the solemn fast which was to be observed in every parish of the realm.¹
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 259‒265; Melville’s Diary, pages 309‒310.
The excommunication of the Earls highly displeased the King, and there was much contention between him and the clergy concerning it. The Earls themselves then supplicated the King to put them on their trial for conspiracy, and complained that they had been excommunicated and were treated as traitors, without having been offered an opportunity of vindicating themselves. When everything is taken into account, it certainly was hard that they should be compelled either to renounce their own religion and sign the Protestant confession, or submit to banishment and utter ruin. These, however, were the alternatives which the clergy were determined to exact. From the standpoint of modern ideas, the proceedings and the demands of the Protestants would be pronounced wholly wrong; but at the time the prevailing ideas, and the religious notions of truth and error, were far more influenced by the pressure of circumstances than they are in the present. With their aim, and from their point of view, the single line of policy which they followed was thoroughly logical and honest according to their light. On the 17th of October the leading ministers and their adherents met at Edinburgh to consult and prepare to face the threatened danger. They appointed six of their number to request the King to take order with the excommunicated Earls, and they freely expressed their regret that he had permitted those cast-off persons to come into his presence. The King gave them no thanks. He upbraided the members of the Synod of Fife for excommunicating the Earls. But the representatives of the clergy told him, that if their enemies took up arms, they had resolved to meet them face to face. “This,” they said, “we are minded to do, although it should be with the loss of all our lives in one day; for certainly we are determined that the country shall not brook us and them both, so long as they are God’s professed enemies.”¹
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 270, et seq.; Melville’s Diary, pages 110, 111; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume IV., page 44.
Matters were rapidly running to a crisis. Both parties were mustering their followers in all parts of the country. To the religious elements of the struggle, there were added the bitter and revengeful feelings springing out of long-standing family feuds, and if once the swords were drawn, the results would prove disastrous in the extreme to all alike. This was well known to the government; and a committee of the Three Estates, along with six of the leading clergy, met to deliberate on the state of affairs. After some animated debates, the King, on the 26th of November, pronounced what was called “The Act of Abolition,” touching the accused Earls. This act stated that the true religion, which was established in the first year of his Majesty’s reign, should be the only one professed in Scotland; and that those who had never embraced it, and those who had declined from it, should either conform to it, before the 11th of February, 1594, or depart from the country to such places as the King should direct, and there to remain till they professed the truth and satisfied the Church. During their banishment, they were to retain the full possession of their estates. All accusations against them were annulled. The Catholic Earls were ordered to inform the King and the Church, before the 11th of January, which of the alternatives they meant to accept.¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV., pages 46‒48; Spottiswood.
This act pleased neither party. The Earls were not disposed to renounce their religion, nor to retain it only at the cost of exile: while the clergy and their adherents were extremely annoyed at this temporising line of action, and immediately expressed their disapproval of it from their pulpits. On the 30th of November, 1593, Mr. Balcanquhal touched upon the practices of the court, in his sermon, and recalled the judgments of God that had fallen upon some of the chief actors――“as upon Bothwell who had died like a dog; and upon the Queen who was beheaded that day twenty years, after she had caused her husband to be murdered.” On the 4th of December, the ministers of the Presbytery of Edinburgh met to consult upon the Act, and many faults were found in it. Some proposed to amend it, but Pont thought it should be disannulled, for the reason that if they amended it, it would be called their work. Upon Sunday, the 16th of December, Mr. Robert Bruce in his sermon, in the presence of the officers of State and the Justice-Clerk, said “The King’s reign would be troublesome and short if he did not abolish the Act of Abolition.”¹
¹ Calderwood, Volume I., pages 288‒290; Melville’s Diary, pages 312, 313.
The clergy stood constantly on their watch-towers, ready to descry the enemy. When the General Assembly met at Edinburgh in May, 1594, Andrew Melville was chosen moderator, and the Assembly immediately proceeded to deal with the case of the Catholic Earls. Some persons in Perth, who had resetted them, were sharply called to account for their conduct; but they confessed their offence, and satisfied the Church. The Assembly unanimously avowed and ratified the sentence of excommunication passed by the Synod of Fife against the Catholic Lords, and ordered this to be intimated to every congregation in the kingdom. As the Catholic Earls had disregarded the Act of Abolition, and were persisting in their unholy and unlawful courses, the Assembly petitioned the King to confiscate all their lands, and annex them to the Crown; and then to muster the feudal array of the realm for the purpose of pursuing and defeating them.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 819‒821, 828‒834.
Parliament met in June 1594, and though the Catholic nobles were then in open rebellion, they had friends in Parliament. Andrew Melville appeared for the Church before the Lords of the Articles, and insisted upon strong measures being taken. He told the King to his face, “That many thought it a matter of great weight to overthrow the estate of three so great men. I grant that it is so; but yet it is a greater matter to overthrow and expel out of the country three far greater, to wit, true religion, the quietness of the commonwealth, and the prosperous state of the King.” Addressing the Lords, he said――“If ye can get us a better commonwealth than our own, and a better King, we are content that the treacherous lords be spared; otherwise we desire you to do your duty.” The majority of the Lords of the Articles voted for the forfeiture of the Earls, Parliament passed the act, and they were proclaimed traitors and rebels. The Earl of ♦Argyle was commanded to assemble his vassals and to wage war against them. But the Earls of Huntly and Errol attacked the hastily collected and undisciplined army of ♦Argyle in Glenlivet, on the 13th of October, and after a severe struggle, ♦Argyle was completely defeated, and his followers fled in confusion.¹
♦ “Argyll” replaced with “Argyle” for consistency
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV., pages 56‒61; Tytler’s History of Scotland, Volume IX., pages 168‒172; Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume II., pages 48‒50.
The King had advanced to Dundee when tidings of ♦Argyle’s defeat reached him, and he at once pushed forward with his army to Aberdeen. There some of the local chiefs, who were at feud with Huntly, joined him. On this occasion, Andrew Melville and a number of the most ardent preachers accompanied the army, and by their exertions and example contributed to bring the expedition to a successful issue. Huntly found himself unable to face the royal army and fled to Caithness. His stronghold, the Castle of Strathbogie, was dismantled; the Castle of Slaines, the seat of the Earl of Errol, and other mansions were also defaced. On returning to Aberdeen, the King caused a number of the Earl of Huntly’s adherents to be executed, and proclaimed a general pardon to all who had been with him at the Battle of Glenlivet, providing they paid the fines imposed by the Council. After making arrangements with the view of securing peace in the north, the army was disbanded, and the King returned to Stirling on the 14th of November, 1594.¹
¹ Register of Privy Council; Melville’s Diary, pages 318‒322; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 348‒357.
The Catholic Earls were reduced to despair, and they quitted the country in the month of March, 1595. The Protestants, however, did not relax their efforts. They knew that the Catholics would renew their plots. When the General Assembly met at Montrose in June, 1595, an order was issued to the presbyteries throughout the country to proceed against the Catholics within their bounds and excommunicate them, and to enforce the penalties of the law upon all who had offended, and on any who held intercourse with those who were absenting themselves from the sacraments on the plea that they were at deadly feud with their neighbours; indeed there was still a considerable amount of social anarchy in the country which seemed to defy all restraints and remedies.¹ Owing to the enormous iniquity and sins of the nation, the Assembly ordered a general fast to be held in all the churches throughout the kingdom on the first two Sundays of August. The ministers were enjoined to put the causes of the fast fully before the people. They were chiefly――“The great and present danger that the Church, the commonwealth, and the King standeth in through the wrath of God, not only kindled against us, but also justly burning and devouring us up already by sundry fearful plagues and punishments ... the deep conspiracies and daily confederacies of the faction of the known adversaries to religion, to the King, and to the country, and threatening to root us out from being any more a nation, and the breaking and removing of our two estates of Church and Commonwealth.” The Assembly also resolved that it was their duty to sympathise with the Protestants of other Churches.²
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 846‒848.
² Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 853‒854.
The clergy were in continual fear of the return of the Catholic nobles and the renewal of their intrigues. When the General Assembly met at Edinburgh in March 1596, the King attended in person, and is reported to have delivered a speech in which he regretted that the ministers were so poorly paid. A list of the crimes, the sins, and the iniquities, of all ranks in the nation was drawn up by this Assembly. It presents a frightful state of society, and will be more fully examined elsewhere. The King, we learn, was in the habit of swearing, and set a bad example to all around him. He had also a habit of conversing with those beside him in the church during the time of sermon, and was therefore earnestly recommended to hold private meditation with God in spirit and conscience. The offences in the court and judgment seat were:――“a universal neglect of justice both in civil and criminal causes――by a system of granting remissions and respites for slaughter and other hideous crimes; and no execution of the laws against vice, nor in favour of the Church. Most of the judges in civil matters were declared unqualified for their office, either in respect of knowledge or conscience, or both; and when any office became vacant, the worst men were advanced to it both in high and low positions. The Court of Session was charged with buying pleas, delaying justice, and bribery, which was palpably to be seen by sudden conquests――by the extraordinary quickness in obtaining property which had become so common.”¹
¹ Ibid., pages 859, 872‒878.
In the summer of 1596, the Catholic Earls had secretly returned, and there were indications that the government would restore them. Huntly had forwarded overtures to the King offering submission and praying to be absolved from the sentence of excommunication. At a meeting of the nobles and some of the clergy it was agreed that Huntly might, under certain conditions to be drawn up by the King and the Privy Council, be received. But the majority of the clergy were opposed to this resolution; and the commissioners of the last General Assembly met at Cupar in Fife, and sent a deputation to remonstrate with the King on the evil consequences which were likely to result from the measures which his Council were pursuing. The King assured the ministers that the Catholic Earls should obtain no favour, until they had satisfied the Church. The ministers, however, had no faith in the King’s promises; and sixteen of their number from different parts of the country were selected to sit in Edinburgh, and along with the ministers of the capital, to watch over the reformed religion. This body immediately proceeded to action, and summoned Seaton, the President of the Court of Session, to appear before the Synod of Lothian to answer for his conduct, touching the recall of the Earl of Huntly. The President offered some resistance, but found it necessary to come forward and satisfy the Church.¹
¹ Melville’s Diary, pages 368‒371; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 439‒450.
The King quickly saw an invasion of his royal prerogatives in these proceedings. He endeavoured to convince the clergy of the justice and mercy implied in his proposals to restore the Catholic Earls, but in vain. The clergy were inexorable; and their firmness strengthened him in his intention to remodel the government of the Church, whenever an opportunity occurred. While the feelings of both parties were running high, and recriminations were passing from mouth to mouth, Mr. Black, one of the ministers of St. Andrews, delivered a sermon on the threatened triumph of idolatry in Scotland. Alluding to the prelacy established in the adjoining kingdom, he said: “The Queen of England was an atheist; the religion professed in that kingdom was nothing better than an empty show, gilded by the injunctions of the bishops; and not content with this pageant at home, they were persuading the King to set it up in Scotland. As for his highness, none knew better than he did of the meditated return of the Catholic Earls, and therein he was guilty of manifest treachery. But what could they look for? Was not Satan at the head of both court and council? Were not all kings devil’s bairns? Were not the Lords of Session miscreants and bribers, the nobility cormorants, and the Queen of Scotland a woman whom for fashion’s sake they might pray for, but in whose time it was vain to hope for any good.”¹
¹ Moysie’s Memoirs, page 128; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 453‒454.
For this Black was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. But the ministers knew that a blow was aimed against the liberties of the Church, that the King was bent on limiting freedom of speech in the pulpit; and they therefore advised him to decline the authority of the Council, in the first instance, on the ground that it was a spiritual subject. On the 10th of November, 1696, he obeyed the summons and appeared before the Council; but he denied that the court had any right to try him. “He was ready,” he said, “to give a confession and stand to the defence of every point of the truth of God which he had uttered ... yet seeing I am not at this time brought to stand before your Majesty and council, as a judge set to cognise and discern upon my doctrine; and though my answering to the said pretended accusation might import with the manifest prejudices of the liberties of the Church, and acknowledging also of your Majesty’s jurisdiction in matters that are merely spiritual, which might move your Majesty to attempt further in the spiritual government of the Church”; and so on. Afterwards he gave his reasons at length for declining the jurisdiction of the court. Enraged at this refusal of the preacher to recognise his supremacy, the King issued a proclamation commanding the commissioners of the Church to leave the capital and return to their flocks within twenty-four hours, under the penalty of rebellion. At so critical a time the ministers were not disposed to obey this royal order, as it was deemed rather arbitrary. They resolved therefore to remain and watch over the safety of the Church. Some of them went to the King to try the effect of a personal interview, but he insisted stoutly that they should allow his claim of supreme jurisdiction, as the condition of stopping the process against Black. The ministers could not agree to this, which would have been almost equivalent to a renunciation of their Protestantism; so the charge against Black was recast, and his trial proceeded. He was found guilty, and the measure of his punishment referred to the King; meanwhile he was ordered to be confined beyond the North Water.¹ The ministers then proclaimed a fast to avert the impending danger and judgments, “When the doctrine was sounded powerfully, and stirred up a mighty motion amongst the people of God.” The King seems to have considered this as a personal affront, and issued an order commanding the commissioners to depart from the capital; and announced that the ministers must subscribe a bond to obey the King and the Privy Council, before they received their stipends. At the same time Black was ordered to enter into ward.²
¹ Register of the Privy Council, November and December; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 454‒498.
² Register of the Privy Council; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 498‒502; Melville’s Diary, pages 510‒515.
The commissioners left Edinburgh on the 15th of December, 1596, and were no sooner gone than the King again thought of trying his craft on the ministers of the capital, who he imagined would be more manageable when alone. He accordingly invited them to an interview, but in reply they said that unless the commissioners were recalled as openly as they had been dismissed, there could be no communication between the court and them. The King’s flatterers continued to keep him upon the line of thought towards which he had always inclined; and he next commanded twenty-four of the most ardent Protestants among the citizens to leave Edinburgh within six hours. The excitement in the capital then became extreme. On the 17th of December a rumour spread that Huntly had been at the Palace of Holyrood, and the alarm of the preachers was intense. Balcanquhal was ascending the pulpit for the week-day sermon when this story was told to him, and unaware of its falsehood, he commented on it in his discourse, and aroused the feelings and passions of the congregation to the highest pitch. At the close of his sermon, he called on the barons present not to disgrace their names and their ancestors, but to meet the ministers immediately in the Little Church. A crowd had already collected there, and when the barons were seated, the preacher addressed them on the dangers to which the Church was exposed by the return of the Catholic lords. He reminded them of the rigour lately shown to the faithful professors of the reformed religion, and desired them to hold up their hands and swear to defend their faith against all opposers.¹
¹ Spottiswood, Calderwood, Volume V., pages, 510‒511.
A deputation was sent to the King, who at the moment was in the Tolbooth with the Lords of Council. When admitted, they informed him that they were sent by the barons convened in the Little Church, to lay before his Majesty the imminent dangers which threatened religion. “What dangers see you,” said the King, “and who dares to assemble against my proclamation?” Lord Lindsay replied, “we dare do more than that, and will not suffer religion to be overthrown.” The clamour increased, and a number of the people rushing into the room, the King started to his feet in great alarm, and without giving any answer, ran down the stairs and ordered the doors to be shut. The deputation returned to the Little Church, where one of the ministers had been reading the story of Haman and Mordecai; and when it was announced that the King had given no answer, the multitude were furious. The tumult thickened, and Lord Lindsay shouted at the top of his voice not to separate, that their only hope of safety was to remain and send notice to their friends to come and assist them. Some cried “to bring out the wicked Haman;” others shouted, “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” One of the crowd cried, “Fy, Fy, save yourselves, the Catholics are coming to massacre you, To arms! to arms! bills and axes.” The seething mob rushed hither and thither in wild confusion. Some fancied that the King was a prisoner, and ran to the Tolbooth; others, imagining that their ministers were being murdered, flew to the church; some knocked on the Tolbooth door, and called for President Seaton and other councillors to be delivered up to them, that summary punishment might be executed upon the misdoers. At last the provost of the city arrived. He addressed the multitude, and advised them to go quietly to their homes; and thus the uproar which threatened to be dangerous was quelled without serious mischief.¹
¹ Moysie’s Memoirs, page 131; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 512‒513; Bruce’s Sermons, pages 173‒176, 1843; Birrel’s Diary.
After the King’s courage had revived, he determined to let the ministers and the citizens feel the weight of his wrath. The following morning he left Edinburgh for Linlithgow; and there issued a proclamation which described the disturbance of the preceding day as a treasonable uproar, excited by the ministers; and ordered the courts of law to leave the capital, which was no longer a fit place for the administration of justice. At the same time he commanded all the barons to depart to their own homes, and not dare again to assemble until they had received his permission.¹
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 514, 515.
This unexpected move on the part of the King, cowed the citizens and cooled their ardour. The burgesses and craftsmen saw in it the decay of the town, and the loss of their trade, and were therefore ready to yield, and implore his Majesty’s clemency. The clergy, on the other hand, were prepared to brave the tempest. When all the people were in despair, Mr. Robert Bruce ascended the pulpit, and upbraided them for their timidity. He said, “A trial shall go through all men, from the King and Queen to the council and nobility, from the session to the barons, from the barons to the burgesses, yea, to the very craftsmen. The love of all men shall be seen, both towards God and the religion. Sorry am I that I should see such weakness in many of you, that ye dare not so much as utter one word for God’s glory and the good cause.... I am heartily sorry that our holy and gracious cause should be so obscured by this late tumult, and that the desperate enemies should be emboldened to pull down the crown off Christ’s head.... Let us suffer cheerfully, and in the meantime stand to the cause. The Lord so bear us out that, if the greatest were sitting there, we shrink not to admonish them with all reverence.... The Lord prepare us in mercy, enlarge the narrow bounds of our wretched hearts that they may be capable, and multiply His holy and divine unction on them, that His glory may break out, and shine on our constancy and holy perseverance; and, on the other side, that the tokens of His hot and just wrath may break up and begin in the heart of the enemy, and awaken their conscience, and open their mouths to confess their own turpitude, to the honour of the good cause, and the glory of Christ for ever.” The ministers invited Lord Hamilton to place himself at the head of those who had embraced the cause of the Church; but he modestly declined the honour, and sent the letter of invitation to the King. The citizens of Edinburgh dispatched humble messages to the King to appease his wrath, and solicited him to return to his capital, but in vain. The only answer he returned was an announcement, that ere long he would come to Edinburgh, and let them know he was their King. The Provost was meantime ordered to imprison the ministers; and the tumult was declared to be treason by an act of the Privy Council. A rumour arose that the city was to be sacked, razed, and sown with salt. But on the 1st of January 1597, the gates and streets were occupied with bodies of armed men, and the King re-entered the capital with all the pomp and circumstance of a conquering hero. The magistrates and the citizens offered the most complete submission, but the King declined to accept it. A convention of the Estates at Holyrood anew denounced the disturbance as a treasonable riot and ordered the Provost and Bailies to be imprisoned in Perth before the 11th of February, and there to remain till they were tried.¹
¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh; Register of Privy Council; Birrel’s Diary; Calderwood, Volume V., pages 515‒521, 530, 535‒538.
The day of the trial was at last fixed for the 5th of March, 1597; and the case was then put into this form:――two of the bailies, the treasurer, the dean of guild, four of the council, the town clerk, and four of the deacons, were summoned to attend their trial, as representing the city. On the appointed day they all appeared, except one, who, it was alleged, had the King’s dispensation; but the plea was overruled, and they were all found guilty of not fulfilling the order of the council, which required thirteen to be present. The city was denounced, the burgesses declared rebels, and all their public property forfeited to the crown. This sentence filled the capital with dismay; the magistrates threw up their offices and refused to act, and for fifteen days the city was without either magistrates or ministers. After this the provost, the magistrates, and the deacons were admitted into the King’s presence at Holyrood, and on their knees besought his highness to take pity on the city as they had thrown themselves entirely upon his mercy. The King severely reprimanded them, and after expatiating long on the enormity of their offence, he ordered them to retire, till he should resolve upon their doom. When recalled, they were commanded to give up to his Majesty the houses in the churchyard where the ministers used to dwell, who were henceforth to live separately; to protect the Lords of Session during their sittings under a penalty; to give up the lower council house for exchequer chambers, and to pay a fine of twenty thousand marks.¹ Such was the enormous punishment which the wisdom of James VI. deemed it necessary to inflict upon the inhabitants of Edinburgh for a harmless hubbub, which it was impossible for them to have foreseen or prevented, and for which the King himself and his courtiers were more to blame than any one else in the kingdom.
¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV., pages 103‒109.
This severe punishment of the people of Edinburgh enabled the King to extend his influence and power over the Church. For a time the chief ministers of the capital were silenced and put out of the way. Two of the most active had fled to England, and other two were in Fife. James had thus gained ground in the direction of the object which he had in view――the establishment of Episcopacy. He was aware that any overt attempt to reintroduce the bishops would be firmly resisted; and in accordance with the statecraft and pedantry on which he prided himself, a series of fifty-five questions were drawn up and published in the name of the King,¹ touching the polity of the Church, and appointing a General Assembly to be held at Perth on the last day of February, 1597. Those questions were drawn up by Secretary Lindsay, and they were issued with the intention of casting discredit upon the established government of the Church. The points raised in this long string of questions involved among other matters the great and difficult problem of the relations of the Church and State, a subject on which the King and the clergy held directly opposite views. The Church, in all spiritual things, claimed a supremacy over the civil government, as Jesus Christ was her Head and King, and the word of God her guide, to these only was she bound to render obedience. But the weak side of this principle, as then understood, came out clearly in the realities of political and practical life. The proceedings of the Church were held to be independent of the civil government in form and doctrine; and yet, according to the theory of the Church, the civil authorities must enforce the decisions of the spiritual courts by the infliction of secular penalties, as when a person was excommunicated all the legal machinery of the land was to be employed to crush him. This singular confusion of ideas was one of the main embittering stings in the long conflict of the Church and State in Scotland. It seems to have originated from the theocratic conception embedded in the Old Testament, already noticed, as influencing the form and spirit of the reformed religion. Thus it was that the Church and the King both claimed to be directly under God, and each consequently thought they were supreme. According to some of the notions of the time the King was accountable to God alone, and therefore his authority must be above all persons and courts in the kingdom. At this period the social advantages of the contention were nearly all on the side of the Church, and it was with the aim of turning the balance in his own favour that the King proposed the questions.
¹ They are printed in the Book of the Universal Kirk, and in Melville’s Diary, pages 390‒403.
The clergy of the age had no idea of a Church existing separately from the State. They were continually calling on the King and the government to pass laws relating to the establishment of the Church, and also on points of discipline and doctrine; and many acts of parliament, and of council, were passed on these matters from the Reformation to the end of the century. But the conditions of society, and the circumstances in which Protestantism found itself placed, rendered the sanction and support of the State necessary to its existence; and even if an idea of the complete separation of the Church and State had arisen in the minds of the Reformers, it could not have been realised anywhere in Europe for long after their day.
The King’s questions were industriously circulated among the presbyteries and synods. The leading ministers, however, were opposed to the discussion of them, because they wished to hold by the existing polity and discipline. The Synod of Fife drew up instructions for the guidance of the commissioners of all the presbyteries within its bounds, who were to attend the ensuing Assembly at Perth; and the Presbytery of Edinburgh did the same. The tenor of these instructions were directly adverse to the renewed discussion of the polity of the Church.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 903‒911.
When the Assembly met at Perth, after a long debate on the manner of appointing a General Assembly, the majority agreed to hold the meeting to be a lawful General Assembly. The proposals submitted by the King were then considered. They were hotly contested; but in the end the King gained his object. It was carried by a majority, that the King or his commissioner might propose any point of the external polity of the Church which he desired to be reformed; that the ministers in their sermons should refrain from rebuking individuals by name, and from introducing political subjects in their discourses; that they should hold no unusual meetings without his Majesty’s consent; and that in all the chief towns the ministers should be chosen with the consent of the King. The rest of the King’s questions were postponed to the next Assembly, on the understanding that in the meantime they should not be condemned either in pulpits, synods, or presbyteries. These conclusions were ratified by the parliament then sitting in Perth.¹ The King had thus gained a footing in the General Assembly, which he retained, until it became a mere organ of the court, and the clergy opposed to his measures were kept in the background for many years.
¹ Ibid., pages 895‒896; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume IV., pages 110‒112; Melville’s Diary, pages 403‒411.
Another General Assembly met at Dundee on the 10th of May, 1597, when the Assembly at Perth was declared lawful, and its proceedings were ratified. The court party had made great exertions, but it was with difficulty that they carried their measures. The King was present, and he obtained the consent of the Assembly to a standing commission of fourteen ministers, who were to meet with his Majesty and consult and deliberate on all matters concerning the Church.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 924‒928.
The conditions prescribed for the absolution and admission of the Earls of Huntly, Errol, and Angus, came before this Assembly; and a commission was appointed to receive them into the Church. The ceremony of their reconciliation to the Church, and their restoration to their estates, took place at Aberdeen in the Old Church on the 26th of June, 1597. The church was crowded. Immediately before the sermon, the three earls publicly subscribed the Confession of Faith. After the sermon, they rose and with a loud voice confessed their defection and apostacy, and professed their present conviction of the truth of the Protestant faith, and their resolution to adhere to it. The Earl of Huntly then declared before God, the King, and the Church, his penitence for the murder of the Earl of Moray. The three earls were then absolved from the sentence of excommunication and received into the bosom of the Church. They next communicated in the Protestant form, and solemnly swore to keep order in all respects and to execute justice within their territories. The following day their reconciliation was proclaimed at the cross amid a multitude of the people, who shouted for joy, drank their health, and tossed their glasses in the air.¹
¹ The Laird of Gight was also reconciled. In the garb of a penitent he threw himself upon his knees before the pulpit, and there implored pardon for supporting Bothwell, and prayed to be released from the sentence of excommunication. Scott’s Narrative, page 98; Analecta Scotica, page 299; Spalding Club Miscellany, Volume II., page 60.
The four ministers of Edinburgh, who had sought refuge in flight, were permitted to return, and began to preach in their own churches in July, 1597. The King was all the more bent on his project of improving the polity of the Church, as the democratic elements of Presbyterianism were extremely hateful to him. It was soon shown what he intended to effect by the commission of ministers. He called them together at the Palace of Falkland, and having summoned the Presbytery of St. Andrews to appear before them, they reversed two of its judgments. The King with his commissioners next proceeded to the University of St. Andrews, and instituted an inquiry into the teaching of the professors. The commission manifested an intention to find matter for censure against Andrew Melville, the rector of the new college and professor of divinity; and, though nothing was proved against him, he was deprived of his rectorship.¹ The King had at last got his foot pretty fast upon the chief university and the Church. He aspired to be the supreme dictator in literature as well as religion.
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 550‒654; Melville’s Diary, pages 417‒419; Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume II., pages 111‒117.
Parliament met at Edinburgh in December, 1597, and the Commissioners of the Church presented a petition, asking that the ministers should be permitted to vote in parliament as the third estate of the realm. This was the way which the King took to restore the order of bishops and episcopacy; and the presbyterian clergy at once saw the drift of the proposal, and attempted to oppose it. But parliament passed an act authorising the King to appoint such pastors as he thought fit to the office of bishop or abbot, and conferred upon them the right to vote in parliament as in past ages. In keeping with the petty craft of the King, it was left to himself and the General Assembly to determine the limits of the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops.¹ It was well known that there would be much opposition to this act among the clergy, and the commissioners endeavoured to represent what they had done in the most favourable light.
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV., pages 130‒131.
When the Assembly met at Dundee in March 1598, the question of the bishops, and their voting in parliament in the name of the Church, was hotly discussed. The King’s party had made great efforts to pack the Assembly, yet there were still members present whom his majesty wished to exclude from the debate. At the beginning of the Assembly, when Andrew Melville’s name was called, the King challenged it, and said that he could not agree to the admission of one whom he had restricted from attending on Church courts. Melville, of course, defended his right to be there; and was supported by the venerable Mr. Davidson, who reminded the King that he was present only as a Christian, and not as the President of the Assembly. The King then, with his characteristic tactics, declared that he would not allow the business of the Assembly to proceed till Melville retired; and accordingly he was ordered to confine himself to his lodgings; but when it was found that his brethren repaired to him, he was charged to quit Dundee under the penalty of rebellion. After a week spent on the complaints given in against the commissioners, and a number of other matters, the chief question was introduced by a speech from the King. He reminded the Assembly of his own services to the Church; how he had laboured to remove controversies, restore discipline, and increase the patrimony of the establishment; and how that in order to secure this, it was now necessary that she should have a voice in parliament. He therefore desired the members to discuss every point of the act lately passed on the subject. The question whether ministers should have a vote in parliament was then debated at great length, and the affirmative was carried by a majority of ten. It was further agreed that the number of the representatives of the Church should be fifty-one, about the same number as under the Roman Catholic system. Their election was to belong partly to the King and partly to the Church; but this and other details were referred for consideration to the presbyteries and synods, and then to the delegates of the synods, who were to meet with the theological professors, and, in the presence of his Majesty, to reason and conclude on the points undecided; and if they could not agree, the whole matter was to be again put before the General Assembly.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 932, 940, 942‒946; Melville’s Diary, pages 439‒441.
The resolutions in the southern Presbyteries and Synods showed a strong opposition to Episcopacy, and an attempt to confine the powers of their representatives in Parliament within narrow limits. When the discussions in the provincial meetings were concluded, and their deputies chosen for the conference, several meetings were held with the professors; but the result was not satisfactory to the King. He then summoned the leading ministers of the kingdom to meet at Holyrood in November, 1599, where with their brethren of the commission they opened a debate upon the whole subject. The chief proposition was, whether it was lawful for ministers of the Gospel to have a seat in Parliament? A long and hot discussion ensued, which naturally enough ended in settling nothing. Those who took the affirmative side argued that the Gospel was not intended to destroy civil polity, that the ministry were a part of the State, and ought therefore to be represented in Parliament, as well as any other class; that it was reasonable that they should assist in framing and passing the laws by which they were to be governed; that ministers were not prohibited from discharging the social duties of life, and that to debar them entirely from secular business would be to carry the doctrine as far as the Catholics had done, when they forbade the priests to marry. It was also pointed out that, as matters had actually stood for some time past, the Commissioners of the Church had waited on meetings for fixing stipends, and often presented petitions to Parliament, and that General Assemblies had repeatedly craved that no one should vote in Parliament for the Church without their commission. Those who opposed the proposition maintained, on the other hand, that though the Gospel by no means sought to destroy civil polity, Christianity was distinct from it, and might exist under any form of government; that a seat in the high council of a kingdom constituted no part of this religion; and that the ministry was not a civil corporation, nor recognised as a distinct body in the State, but only as a portion of the general community, and the ministers, like their fellow-citizens, were already represented in Parliament by the commissioners of the shires and the burghs. The performance of the natural duties of domestic life, and the social duties which devolved upon them all, was a different matter, they said, from being directly engaged in the offices of the government; and the presenting of a petition occasionally, had little resemblance to a regular attendance in Parliament. They knew little of the importance of the ministerial function, who thought that it was compatible with the holding of civil offices, and the worldly titles and dominion which it was sought to import into the Church were not in harmony, they maintained, with the injunctions of the Gospel, but opposed to the leading example of Jesus Himself, who professed that His kingdom was not of this world. It was suggested that the elders and deacons might be commissioned by the General Assembly to vote for the Church in Parliament, if it was necessary, which, however, was not admitted. It was urged also that no General Assembly, before the last, had ever solicited a seat for the ministers in Parliament; and since 1580, the Church had objected to bishops and other ecclesiastical persons sitting in Parliament in her name. The meeting ended where it began. The King saw that he could gain nothing by it, on the second day he broke it up, and announced that he would leave the matter to the ensuing General Assembly.¹ The scheme for the establishment of Episcopacy meantime continued to be pushed on.
¹ Calderwood, Volume V., pages 745‒761.
James had at last got the preachers of Edinburgh, who had for long been rather free in their comments on him and his government, pretty well under his hand. But he was greatly mortified to meet with a rebuff in a quarter where he least expected it. He had deprived the popular preacher, Mr. Robert Bruce, of a part of his stipend. Bruce sued the Crown before the Court of Session, and got a decision in his favour. James appealed, appeared at the bar in person, and ordered the judges to give their votes against Bruce. Seaton, the President, then rose and said: “It is my part to speak first in this court, of which your highness has made me head. You are our King, we your subjects, bound and ready to obey you with our lives and substance; but this is a matter of law, in which we are sworn to do justice according to conscience and the laws of the realm. Your Majesty may indeed command us to the contrary; in which case I, and every honest man on this bench, will either vote according to conscience, or resign and not vote at all.” Lord Newbottle next rose and said: “It had been spoken in the town, to his Majesty’s great slander and theirs, who were his judges, that they dare not do justice to all classes――a foul imputation, to which the lie that day would be given; for they would deliver an unanimous opinion against the crown.” For this the King was utterly unprepared, and proceeded to use the most childish arguments, taunts, and threats; but in vain. The judges re-affirmed their decision in favour of Bruce, and the abashed monarch, flung out of court, vowing vengeance and raging like a maniac.¹
¹ Tytler’s History of Scotland, Volume IX., pages 289‒291. It is noted by Tytler, that Seaton was a Roman Catholic. The King, however, by the most deplorable means afterwards managed to deprive Bruce of this part of his stipend. There are full details of this matter in the Life of Bruce, published by the Wodrow Society, along with his Sermons, pages 80‒83; and in Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume II., pages 169‒171.
Much interest was felt throughout the country in the General Assembly which met at Montrose on the 28th of March, 1600. Both parties had exerted themselves to the utmost to bring up their men, and there was a very full attendance of members. It was well known that the decision of the Assembly would fix the fate of the establishment. The Presbyterians were confident of their superiority in point of argument and debating power. Andrew Melville attended the Assembly as the representative of the Presbytery of St. Andrews; but he was called before the King, who asked him why he persisted in coming to the Assemblies after his Majesty had prohibited him. Melville answered that he had a commission from the Church, and it was his duty to discharge it, on higher grounds than the command of any earthly monarch. He was not allowed to take his seat in the Assembly, but he remained in the town and assisted his brethren with arguments and advice.¹
¹ Melville’s Diary, pages 468, 485; Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume II., pages 144‒146.
The debate on the proposition of ministers voting in parliament was resumed. Many arguments were adduced against it and backed by references to the Scriptures, the writings of the reformed divines, and the decision of general councils. The court party finding themselves fairly vanquished by their opponents in the field of open discussion, then shifted their ground, and affected to condemn the union of sacred and civil offices, and asserted that the ministers who were to sit in parliament, would have no civil charge, but would simply be present to watch over the interest of the Church. But they were quickly driven from this position; and at last retired behind the maxims of their master, and asserted that the King alone makes the laws, and the estates only gave him advice. When the discussion reached the words of the act of parliament which restored “the office, estate, and dignity of bishops,” the discussion became too hot, and the King intimated that this point had been already settled by the last General Assembly, which at once terminated the debate. If the general question had been put to the vote, it seems probable that the scheme would have been defeated; yet, by one device and another the Assembly sanctioned the measure. A series of restrictions were framed by the Assembly to keep the commissioners, who were to vote for the Church to their duty; but the King had no intention of observing these customs. His object was the re-establishment of Episcopacy, and he filled up several of the bishoprics; although, in spite of all his efforts, he failed to materially alter the presbyterian organisation of the Church, till after his accession to the throne of England.¹
¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 954‒956; Calderwood, Volume VI., pages 2‒21.
However much the policy of James the VI. has been admired,¹ it is a fact, that for many years he distracted the reformed clergy by his childish notions and his scheme of Church polity. Much of the energy of the ministers, which but for him might have been employed in the instruction of the people, was wasted without producing any good results. The higher aims of religion were neglected, and the introduction of the reformed religion into the Highlands was greatly retarded.
¹ “Those who wish to perceive the glory of James’s reign must carefully attend to this part of his history. It was at this time that he found a stage on which he could exert his distinguished talent, and stick the doctor’s chair into the throne. It was at this time that he acquired that skill in points of divinity, and in the management of ecclesiastical meetings, which afterwards filled the English bishops with both admiration and shame, and made them cry out that they verily thought he was ‘inspired.’ Never did this wise monarch appear to such great advantage, as when, surrounded with his own northern men, he canvassed for voters with all the ardour and address of a candidate for a burgh; or when presiding in the debate of the General Assembly, he kept the members to the question, regaled them with royal wit, calling one ‘a seditious knave,’ and another ‘a liar,’ saying to one speaker ‘that’s witch like,’ and to another ‘that’s anabaptistical,’ instructing the clerk in the true geographical mode of calling the roll, or taking him home to his closet, helping him to correct the minutes.”――Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, Volume II., page 152.
The reader of Scottish history soon becomes familiar with the plots of the aristocracy against the Crown. The 5th of August, 1600, was memorable for an event of this character, known as the Gowrie conspiracy. The Earl of Gowrie of that time was the grandson of Lord Ruthven, who acted a leading part in the Riccio tragedy. It seems, for the evidence is imperfect, that Gowrie intended to imprison the King and then rule the kingdom in his name, as had often been done before. Very few persons were aware of the plot; hence the doubts of its reality, and the natural suspicion that it was got up by the King himself. The main facts were, that the Earl of Gowrie decoyed the King to his house; and after dinner conducted him into a room in which the Master of Ruthven handled him rather roughly, but the nobles who accompanied the King coming to his rescue, after a short scuffle, the Master and his brother, the Earl of Gowrie, were both slain in the house. The family of Gowrie, of course, was utterly ruined. The King insisted that all men must believe that his escape was miraculous. The ministers of Edinburgh, who had not quite so high an idea of the King as he had of himself, refused to admit that there was any conspiracy at all, and would not give thanks to God for his Majesty’s deliverance in the exact words dictated to them. Five of them were therefore removed from the capital. With one exception they afterwards submitted and professed to believe in the conspiracy. The exception was Robert Bruce, who refused to believe in this conspiracy, and was banished.¹
¹ Tytler’s History of Scotland, Volume IX., pages 329, 351‒358; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 1000‒1002; Register of the Privy Council; Bruce’s Sermons, Life, pages 84‒96, 188‒196.
The King manifested his vanity and want of common sense in connection with this affair more than in any of his proceedings. Granting that the conspiracy of the Earl of Gowrie was real, it was not an unusual occurrence or one which stood alone. At the utmost it was simply one of those projects which were from time to time attempted by the nobles against their kings. It is not surprising therefore that some of the clergy and the people should have failed to see anything miraculous about the matter; and especially those who knew how great an adept the King was at making conspiracy and treason out of a harmless affair, such as the recent example of the tumult in Edinburgh. The King issued a mandate to change the week-day religious service in all towns to Tuesday, the day on which the event happened. Nor was he content with this. An Act of Parliament was passed which ordained that the fifth of August should be observed yearly――“In all times and ages to come, as a perpetual monument of their humble, hearty, and unfeigned thanks to God for his miraculous and extraordinary deliverance from the horrible and detestable murder and parricide attempted against his Majesty’s most noble person.”¹
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV., pages 213‒214; Book of the Universal Kirk, page 1061.
Notwithstanding that the King continued his efforts to complete his scheme of Church polity, his success while he remained in Scotland was very limited; and he looked eagerly forward to the time when he could command greater resources for the accomplishment of his projects.
Queen Elizabeth died on the 24th of March 1603. The same day the King of Scots was proclaimed her successor. For some time the English had been looking toward the rising sun; and James immediately prepared to go and take possession of the throne. If he did not fulfil all the expectations of his new subjects, this was perhaps more their own fault than his, for if they had moderated their hopes and expected little, they would not have been disappointed. On the 5th of April James began his journey, and entered London on the 6th of May, greeted by the shouts of his English subjects.
Before proceeding further, it seems appropriate to ask what is the ultimate problem of the Reformation in relation to the development of Civilisation? The first thought that strikes one is the extreme complexity of the problem. The influence of the Reformation was felt throughout the entire organisation of the nation. The domestic, the social, the moral, the political, and the intellectual relations of the people were affected by it, not less profoundly than their religious practice and faith. Their whole circle of thought and action was moved to its centre. This revolutionary movement, then, must have a connection with the philosophy of the human mind. But the historical manifestation of the mind, for obvious reasons, is exceedingly difficult to handle; when it is applied to nations or communities, and not merely treated as a history of systems. There have been various elaborate philosophical systems emanating from individuals and schools, which have had comparatively little effect on the progress of the race, or on the civilisation of independent nations. The philosophy of the Reformation, however, whatever it was, deeply affected the people; and this at least is an indication of its reality. In its essence the Reformation was a religious movement springing out of the devout feeling and aspiration of the people, which was then associated with the belief in the divine revelation of the Bible. It opened to the individual a free access to the heavenly promises offered in the Gospel, and thus for the time satisfied the inherent cravings of his being and the deepest emotions of his mind; warm thrills of joy passed through his soul, till his nature was renewed and he lived in peace and hope. Another tendency of the movement was to withdraw the senses from the mere external emblems and material forms of worship, in order to concentrate the mind on the essential dogmas and the doctrines of religion in their ideal modes. Hence religion became more allied with morality and the understanding; but this was rather a result which ensued in the subsequent development of Protestantism than a special aim of the Reformers.
The search for the ultimate problem of the Reformation suggests the question of the relative efficacy of the religious feelings, the moral sentiments, and the intellectual ideas, as factors in the development of civilisation; in other words, the comparative potency of religion, morality, and science, in advancing social organisation, the development, the progress, and the happiness of mankind. Upon the evidence adduced in the first volume, and especially on the evidence in the preceding chapters of this volume, the following tentative deduction is proposed:――That the supreme sustaining power of the Reformation throughout was the moral sentiments and ideas, coupled with the religious feeling and aspiration. In the succeeding chapters of this volume more evidence will be advanced and summarised, and finally the various steps of the generalisation will be explained and formulated.