YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY POLITICS AND EELIGION A STUDY IN SCOTTISH HISTORY FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE REVOLUTION PUBLISHED BY JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW,. ^nblisltetrs to th£ ^nibetsit^. MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON. New York, ¦ The Macmillan Co. London, - SimpkiUy Hatnilton and Co. Cambridge^ Macmillan and Bowes. Edinburgh, Doug-las and Foulis. POLITICS AND EELIGION A STUDY IN SCOTTISH HISTORY FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE REVOLUTION BY WILLIAM LAW MATHIESON VOL. I. GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS JPnbiiahtra io the Strabecaitg 1902 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. PREFACE. In this work, without attempting to write a complete or detailed history, I have endeavoured to give such a sketch of the political development of Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution as may suffice;) to explain and illustrate some of its more important] factors — the potency of the national spirit, the relatione of Church and State, the growth of sentiments and opinions, the rise and conflict of parties, and the character and influence of leading men. I think that the question of Church government bulks too largely in most histories of this period. By two parties — the ultra-Presbyterian and the ultra-Episcopal — it was regarded as fundamental ; but the mass of the clergy, at all events when no question of allegiance was at stake, were more disposed to throw in their lot unreservedly with the Scottish people than to contend for principles of organisation with the civil power ; and the continuity of the national Church is thus to be looked for in a deeper current of thought and VI PREFACE feeling than that which was afi"ected by mere eccle siastical disputes. I have tried to trace the origin and progress of this moderate tradition — the tradition, whatever its faults, of patriotism, humanity, and culture — as well as of those volcanic elements which so often shook the Church to its foundation, and which, in the colder atmosphere of a later day, were to crystallise into the various forms of modern dissent. I am indebted to Mr. D. P. Heatley, Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh, for the helpful interest he has taken in the progress of the work. Edinburgh : October, 1902. PAGE CONTENTS. INTEODUGTION. THE FRENCH ALLIANCE. Hardships of the alliance, . \ Efforts of England to detach Scotland from France, 4 Henry VIII. and the Assured Lords, 7 -The rise of Protestantism, g Mary Stewart to marry Prince Edward ; the treaty broken off, 9 Hertford's punitive expeditions, \\ George Wishart ; assassination of Beaton, I3 Treachery of the Assured Lords ; Pinkie, 15 Mary Stewart betrothed to the Dauphin, Ig Misconduct of the French auxiliaries, I7 -Peace of 1550, the true starting-point of the Reformation, 18 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH. The Church its own worst enemy, I9 Archbishop Hamilton's Catechism a proof of this, 20 Influence of Sir David Lindsay, 22 The Church in extremis, ¦ 23 Origin of the worst abuses, 26 The nobles engross the wealth of the Church, 27 Their interests as affected by the Reformation,- - 29 Secularising policy of the Crown, 30 Mercenary spirit of the clergy, - 3I Redeeming features, - 31 vm CONTENTS CHAPTER L PAQE THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559. Phases of Reformation History, - - ** 1550. Apparent security of the Church at the peace of 1550, 35 Archbishop Hamilton's reforming energy, - 36 The "gude and godlie ballates," - - - 37 Relations of Mary of Lorraine with the Hamiltons, 39 1554. She supplants Chatelherault in the Regency, - 42 Consequent disunion of Church and State, 42 The Queen Regent supported by the Protestants, 43 Her dependence on France, - 45 Alien character of her administration, - 46 1558. Marriage of Mary Stewart to the Dauphin, 47 1555. The Protestants secede from the Church, - 49 1557. They take the aggressive ; the first Band or Covenant, - 50 1558. Crown matrimonial bestowed on the Dauphin, 52 Accession of Elizabeth ; Mary Stewart claims the English crown, 53 1559. Causes of the rupture between the Queen Regent and the Protestants, - - 54 CHAPTER II. THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560. 1559. The preachers summoned and outlawed, 5S Iconoclasm at Perth, 58 Place of Knox in the Reformation, 59 Ravages of the Reformers accounted for, 61 The Lords of the Congregation enter Edinburgh in arms, 62 Accession of Francis and Mary, 62 Maitland of Lethington joins the Congregation, - 63 Comparative strength of the two parties, - gg Weakness of the Protestant lords, g4 Apathy of the nation, g^ 1560. English intervention ; Treaty of Berwick, . 71 The English army at Leith, 74. Death of Mary of Lorraine, 75 Negotiations for peace, 7g CONTENTS IX THE REFORMATION PARLIAMENT. PAOB Treaty of Edinburgh, 78 Question of its legality, 80^ The gentry assert their right to be present, 81 The Confession of Faith ; anti-papal statutes, 83 The proceedings of the Parliament a violation of the Treaty, 84 The Scots anxious that Elizabeth should marry Arran, - 86 Elizabeth rejects Arran ; death of Francis II. , 89 End of an epoch, 89 CHAPTER III. JOHN KNOX. The nobles and the Book of Discipline, - 91 Negotiations preparatory to the Queen's return, 93 Mary's arrival at Leith, 1561, 95 Knox's protest against the Queen's Mass, 96 ^^-A born revolutionary, but called to build, not to destroy, 98 ^^^Incapable of tact or conciliation, - - 101 His apology to Elizabeth,- - - - 101 His denunciation of the Anglican service, 102 His attitude towards the provision for the ministry, lOi His overpowering force of character, - 105 How far a lover of truth,- 106 /His bitter uncharitableness, - 108 /-Too intolerant even for his own age. 111 His work, 113 CHAPTER IV. MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567. Maitland of Lethington, - 116 Testimony to his greatness, 117 His relations with Knox, 118 His enlightened patriotism, 122 1561. His efforts to establish the Scottish succession in England, 124 CONTENTS PAGE 126127 128128132133 1562. Proposed interview between Mary and Elizabeth Maitland's policy not fruitless, - 1563. Negotiations for Mary's marriage. The Leicester proposal, 1563-1565, 1565. Mary resolves to marry Darnley, - Moray's rebellion, - Maitland's attitude towards the Darnley marriage, 134 Mary's character and aims, ^35 Complicity of Maitland in the Marian tragedies, 138 1567. The murder of Darnley, 139 Maitland joins the coalition against Bothwell, 140 His reasons for consenting to the Queen's deposition, 141 His defiance of Elizabeth, - 145 „^ Establishment of the Reformed Church,- 147 CHAPTER V. CIVIL WAR, ' 1568-1573. The King's party in two sections, - 148 1568. Mary defeated at Laugside, and flies to England, 149 The York Conference ; Maitland repels the English overlordship, 150 Maitland and Norfolk prevail on Moray not to accuse the Queen, 152 Moray gives in the accusation, 153 New alliance between Moray and Norfolk, 154 1569. Perth Convention ; Maitland secedes from the King's party, 155 Character of Moray, 156 Maitland vindicates his consistency, 157 1570. Moray assassinated, 158 English troops sent to assist the King's party, 159 The war begins, 159 Maitland, in shattered health, the soul of the Queen's party, 160 His exasperation with Elizabeth and England, 161 His colleagues, Kirkcaldy of Grange and Lord Home, 162 His antipathy to Knox and the Kuoxians, 164 Avaricious spirit of the King's party, lg5 The Church identified with this party, 165 CONTENTS XI The clergy largely responsible for the ferocious character of page the war, 166 The nation has no sympathy with the fanatics, 168 1571. Execution of Archbishop Hamilton, ' 169 The Queen's party losing ground, 170 1572. Massacre of St. Bartholomew fatal to Mary's cause, 171 1573. Maitland and Kirkcaldy still hold out, 172 Edinburgh Castle bombarded by the English, 174 Surrender and death of Maitland, 175 Retrospect of his career, - 176 CHAPTER VI. THE NEW RELIGION. 'With the death of Maitland, political gives place to ecclesi astical history, - - 178 The Reformation primarily a moral, not an intellectual movement, 179 How far it asserted the right of private judgment, 180 A blow to the poetry of religion, 181 The appeal to Scripture, - 183 Moral discipline, 184 Growth of Puritanism, - 190 Observance of Sunday, - 191 Witchcraft, 194 Growth of a middle class,- 200 Material progress,- 202 Care of church buildings,- 204 Unpriestly character of the Scottish Reformation, 205 Influence on education, 206 J*' Demand for books, 208 CHAPTER VII. CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586. 1560. Knox not an advocate of spiritual independence, 211 1567. Acts of 1567 establishing the Reformed Church, 213 The ministers poorly endowed, and worse paid, 214 1564. The Church urges that the two jurisdictions be defined, 216 Xll CONTENTS PAGE 1572. Morton's Erastian policy, 1572-1578, 217 - — V The Second Book of Discipline, - 217 Andrew Melville, - 219 -1 1578. The Second Book of Discipline rejected by the State, 221 1580. Morton supplanted by Lennox; his execution, 1581, 222 Intrigues of Lennox for the restoration of Mary, - 223 1582. Archbishop Montgomery upheld by the State against the Church, 224 The clergy denounce Lennox as a papal emissary, 226 Raid of Ruthven ; banishment of Lennox, - 226 The Raid approved by the General Assembly, 228 1583. James escapes from the Ruthven lords, • 229 1584. Andrew Melville repels the jurisdiction of the Privy Council, 231 Nature and significance of his plea, 232 ,-The ' ' Black Acts," 235 y^^ Nearly all the miuisters subscribe the Acts, ' ' according to the Word of God," 236 1585. The Master of Gray induces Elizabeth to send back the Ruthven exiles, 237 James refuses to repeal the "Black Acts," 238 • 1586. Rise of a moderate party in the Church, - 240 CHAPTER VIII. CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603. 1586. The League with England, 242 Queen Mary sentenced to death, 243 . 1587. The clergy required to pray for her, and some refuse, 244 Effect on Scotland of the Queen's execution, 245 '1588. The Spanish Armada, 246 Lord Maitland of Thirlestane, 246 The Armada reconciles Church and State, 248 • 1592. Presbytery established by statute, 249 The Catholics intrigue with Spain, - 252 1594. They win the battle of Glenlivat, . 253 James denounced from the pulpit for favouring the Catholics, - 254 The clerical zealots bewail the lukewarmness of the clergy, 255 The King's popularity with the nation, . . 256 His religious policy at home the same as that of Elizabeth abroad, 258 Bothwell's attempts to capture the King . . 25ft CONTENTS xiii THE CRISIS OF 1596. PAGE , 1596. The High Presbyterians at the zenith of their glory, 261 The Catholic Earls permitted to return, - 262 Black's Case ; the Church repels the jurisdiction of the Council, 263 The courtiers seek to inflame the quarrel, 266 The " no-popery" riot of the 17th December, 267 A'HE ECCLESIASTICAL SETTLEMENT. John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir, 271 1597. Theocracy abjured by the Assembly at Perth, 273 The new Commissioners of Assembly, 274 Proposed representation of the Church in Parliament, 275 Parliament will admit the clergy only as prelates, 277 1598. The Assembly insists on popular representation, 278 1600. Three of the ministers made bishops, 280 The King's escape from the Gowrie peril ; extraordinary demonstration, 280 1602. The new bishops recognised by the Church, 282 Disinterestedness of the Presbyterian leaders, 283 CHAPTER IX. »<§ISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625. The superintendents not bishops, 285 Bishops appointed by Parliament, 287 1572. The hierarchy restored ; attitude of Knox, 288 — p- 1580. The Church repudiates Episcopacy, 290 Archbishops Montgomery and Adamson, 290 Growth of Moderatism, 293 Craig, Erskine, and Lindsay, 294 Relations of the English and the Scottish Church, 298 The Crown asserts its authority over the Assembly, 303 1605. The High Presbyterians hold an Assembly at Aberdeen, 304 1606. Fourteen of them tried for treason, 305 Andrew Melville banished, 306 The bishops restored to their estates, 307 The bishops as Constant Moderators, 308 1608. The Commissioners of Assembly re-appointed, .309 XIV CONTENTS PASS 1610. Assembly of 1610 ; Episcopacy re-established, 310^ The general desire for peace. The civil power encroaching on the spiritual, 313 1616. The King proposes the Five Articles, 315 1618. Perth Assembly ; the Articles adopted, - 316 The bishops reluctant to enforce the Articles, 317 1625. Miserable results of the King's policy, 1618-1625, - 318 CHAPTER X. /THE REIGN OP THE MODERATES. The ecclesiastical compromise, 321 Archbishop Spottiswoode ; his History, - 323 The ritualistic or High Church party, 326 r Bishop William Forbes, 327 The ritualists also latitudinarians, 329 Crighton, minister of Paisley, 330' The permanent element in the Church of Scotland, 332 Bishop Cowper, - 333 ¦^ Bishop Patrick Forbes, 334 ¦j The Bishops of Argyll and the Isles, 338 -i Dr. John Forbes, 339 i) Patrick Simson, 340 Instability of the moderate regime, - 341 The Moderates as characterised by their opponents, 342 Their services to the Church, 343 CHAPTER XI. v/THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638. The thirds of benefices, 345 Act of 1617 providing for the clergy out of the tithes, 346 Alleged tyranny of the tithe-owners, 347 1625. Charles I.'s Act of Revocation, 348 1629. Valuation and sale of tithes, 349 Discontent of the nobles, 351 CONTENTS XV PAGE "ZT 1633. Charles's visit to Scotland, 352 "Thwarteous humour " of the nobles in Parliament, 353 -IJ 1634. Lord Balmerino prosecuted for libel, 354 Low Church and High Church bishops, 355 Bishops Maxwell and Wedderburn, 357 A Nonconformist party within the Church, 359 "The Stewarton sickness," 360 t> 1636. The Book of Canons, 361 A new liturgy sanctioned by James VI. , but not introduced, 363 Charles rejects this liturgy, and orders the preparation of another, - 364 Character of Laud's Liturgy, 367 JJ 1637. The Liturgy imposed by royal proclamation, 369 Riot in St. Giles's, July 23, 1637, 370 Bishops and laymen at issue in the Privy Council, 372 The Council inundated with petitions against the Liturgy, 373 Petition that bishops be removed from the Council, 374 The second riot of October 18, 375 The malcontents allowed to elect Commissioners, - 376 The bishops withdraw from the Council, 377 Charles's "long boggling and irresolution," 378 i 1638. A royal proclamation answered with a protestation, 379 The Commissioners give place to the Tables, 379 The Covenant of 1581 revived, and extended to the late innovations, 380 Extraordinary enthusiasm evoked by the National Covenant, 382 CHAPTER XII. PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638. The Puritan compared with the Protestant revolution, 383 Rothes, Henderson, and Johnston, 386 Sufferings of the loyalists, 388 Charles's failure to satisfy the moderate Episcopalians, 390 Hamilton as Commissioner ; his instructions, - 390 He shrinks from demanding the renunciatioa of the Covenant, 391 Montrose as a Covenanter, 393 Aberdeen refuses the Covenant, 394 Charles vainly offers a purely clerical Assembly, 394 XVI CONTENTS PAGE ^ He surrenders everything but Episcopacy, and proposes a new Covenant, - 395 ^ Moderate Covenanters overborne by extremists, 396 /" The " she-prophetess," 397 Charles resolves to dissolve the Assembly as invalid, 398 Nominees of the Tables elected by a majority of laymen, 399 /The bulk of the clergy decidedly Episcopal, 399 ^The indictment against the bishops, 400 THE GLASGOW ASSEMBLY. /The Assembly meets, November 21, 401 /It claims jurisdiction over the bishops, 403 ^Hamilton exposes the irregularity of the elections, 403 -'' He dissolves the Assembly, and withdraws, 405 , Character of Hamilton, . 406 Character of Traquair, 408 The Assembly continues to sit, 409 The proceedings against the bishops, 409 Nature of the revolution, 411 / INTRODUCTION. The overthrow of Roman Catholicism in Scotland was so largely political in character, and proceeded so much from internal decay, that some account of the relations of Scotland with France and England prior to 1550, and of the condition of the Church, will form an appro priate introduction to this work. The Scottish people profited in many ways through intercourse with the superior civilisation of France ; but whether the State as such was a gainer by its alliance with that country is extremely doubtful. It was at the instigation of Philip the Fair that John Balliol, in 1296, threw off" his allegiance to Edward I. ; but Philip, though he had thus encouraged the Scots to strike for independence, contributed very little to their support. Whatever service he may have rendered during the first five years of the war was more than counterbalanced by his conduct in 1303, when he abandoned the Scots to their fate, and made his own peace with England. Philip lived long enough to see the national movement in Scotland crowned with suc cess, for he died just five months after the battle of Bannockburn ; but throughout these eventful years Bruce owed nothing to the friendship of France. It is an unpleasant feature of the alliance at this period that it INTRODUCTION seems to have waxed and waned with the fortunes of the weaker partner. Thus, having originated in the treaty between Balliol and Philip the Fair in 1295, it expired for practical purposes in 1303, and was revived at Cerbeil in 1326, only two years before the Treaty of Northampton, by which the independence of Scotland was formally recognised. As thus renewed indeed, the alliance was of great use to the Scots during their struggle with Edward HI. ; but this obligation was fully repaid at the beginning of the following century, when the Scottish auxiliaries rendered yeoman service to France on the bloody fields of Beaug^, Crevant, and Verneuil. The battle of Beaug^ was the first check to the victorious career of Henry V. ; and at Verneuil, the Malplaquet of the Hundred Years' War, the English, though they won the day, lost more heavily than the French. Under the influence of the Anglo-French wars the league altered in character, and, from the Scottish point of view, it altered for the worse. Hitherto it had been a bulwark, however unreliable, of the national indepen dence. What it was now may be seen in a quotation from Froissart : " King Philip imagined that the Scots would find the English too much employment at home for them to be able to cross the sea ; or, if they did, in too small numbers to hurt or molest him." Hatred of England, which still kept the old claim of feudal superiority suspended, like the sword of Damocles, above their heads, blinded the Scots to their true interest; and history records too many instances in which they plunged recklesslj into war on behalf of their old ally. There were times, indeed, when the readiness of the Scots to cross the Border proved somewhat inconvenient to France ; for, as Scotland was usually included in the FLODDEN 3 French treaties, a plundering foray .might cause diplo macy to bewail the collapse of its handiwork. Hence France sometimes incited the Scots, and sometimes held them back. The most remarkable instance of this two fold policy is to be found at the time of Flodden, when France first inveigled James IV. into undertaking his disastrous expedition, then curbed the national desire for vengeance by forcing on the Scots a most distasteful peace, and finally, a few years later, exhorted them to break that peace by a fresh invasion of England. It has been remarked that at the peace of 1514 " Scotland was, for the first time, treated as a needy and trouble some hanger-on of France." ^ In the year after Flodden such a change of policy was singularly inopportune ; nor can we wonder that the nobles should have declared in 1522 that "for no love, favour, or fair promises of the French king would they in any wise attempt war against j England or invade that country."^ It shows how unnatural the alliance had now become' that France cannot justly be blamed for these fluctu ations of policy, which were the inevitable result of the position she had attained as a great European Power, mistress of great part of Italy, and the rival of the Empire and England. In such circumstances French diplomacy could not be shaped according to the needs of a country so weak and isolated as Scot land ; but it was none the less unfortunate for the Scots that they should be tossed about as counters in a game of high political ambitions, which for them could have no material interest. James V. was only a year and a half old when his father was killed at Flodden ; and the Duke of Albany 1 Burton, The Scot Abroad, i. 142. ^Tytler's History of Scotland, v. 133. 4 INTRODUCTION was appointed Regent. Albany, though a Stewart of the blood-royal, had lived all his life in France. It was he who had negotiated the unpopular treaty of 1514, and the Scots bitterly resented the alien char acter of his administration. The Regency of Albany was the first of two experiments in the direction of governing Scotland as a province of France ; and the second, as we shall see, proved fatal.^ So far it has been possible to deal with the alliance merely as a question of relative advantage between two nations leagued together against a common enemy. But at a period considerably earlier than that which we have now reached the French ascendency in Scotland was threatened by that movement towards national consolidation, which marks the transition from the middle to the modern era. In the latter half of the fifteenth century the nations of Western Europe were awakening to a deeper consciousness of national unity. | The long war with England had completed the work of the crusades in consolidating the French monarchy ; Spain and Portugal had concentrated their power at the expense of the Moors, and the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 resulted a few years later in the union of Castile and Arragon. There is evidence of a similar movement amongst ourselves in the efforts made by English statesmen to undermine the power of France in Scotland. This struggle, conducted more frequently by diplomacy than by force of arms, may justly be regarded as a continuation of the Hundred iThe political history of the Franco-Scottish alliance is sketched by Hill Burton in The Scot Abroad, and by M. dieruel in the first chapter of his Marie Stuart et Catlm%7ie de MMicis. Michel's book, Les Ecossais en France, Les Fran^ais en Ecosse, as the title implies, treats the subject entirely from the social standpoint, from which, of course, the gain is all on the Scottish side. ENGLISH INTRIGUES 5 Years' War, from which it is separated only by the epoch of internal anarchy known to history as the Wars of the Roses. The York and Tudor sovereigns did not venture to revive the schemes of foreign domination, which had contributed to the fall of the house of Lancaster ; but they hastened to encounter France on another and more promising field. From the accession of the house of York down to the union of the crowns in 1603 there never was an English sovereign, with the sole exception of Mary Tudor, who at one period or another was not in league with a faction in Scotland. Edward IV. encouraged the Duke" of Albany, father of the Regent, in his designs on the crown of his brother James III. ; many of the nobles were won over to the same cause, and it was expressly stipulated that Albany, in the event of his success, should acknowledge the English overlordship and break off all connexion with France. Edward IV. was the first English king who distributed money for political purposes amongst the Scots ; Richard III. maintained a regular correspondence with the discon tented nobles ; Henry VII. recognised the Duke of Rothesay as king when he rose in arms against his father, and he probably countenanced the movement which led to the defeat and death of James III. in 1488. This policy of intrigue, which received a great development at the hands of Henry VIII. and Eliza beth, was carried on concurrently with an attempt to give effect to the natural unity of Britain by more statesmanlike means. The most obvious expedient for detaching the Scots from France was to bind them to England by matrimonial alliances ; and of such alliances — most of them merely projected- — we have a whole series extending over a period of eighty-five years, from INTRODUCTION 1475 to 1560. James III. sought the hand of Eliza beth, the widow of Edward IV. ; James IV., who in 1502 married Margaret Tudor, had been betrothed in infancy to Caecilia, Edward IV. 's daughter; Henry VIIL proposed a marriage between James V. and his daughter Mary, at a time when she was his only child ; Edward VI. was to have married Mary Stewart ; and finally, the Earl of Arran was proposed more than once as a husband for Elizabeth. The tendency of event/ thus clearly revealed was interrupted by the Floddem episode of 1513 ; but a more permanent obstacle to the recognition of British nationality was the spirit in which England addressed herself to the task of con ciliation. Henry VIII. was distractgd.. between his desire to gain the friendship of the Scots and his anxiety to render them innocuous as enemies So long as Scotland remained loyal to France, it was his interest to weaken her power to the utmost. During the regency of Albany, Lord Dacre, his agent at the Scottish Court, exerted himself with sinister success to foment every tendency to disorder, even making it his boast that he had four hundred outlaws in his pay who daily burned and ravaged throughout the country. But the most serious mistake of all arose from Henry's eagerness to anticipate the proposed union of the two kingdoms, so as to make it available at once as a barrier between France and Scotland. It was this that frustrated the negotiations for the marriage of Prince Edward to Mary Stewart. The Scots had no objection to a marriage which in the ordinary course of nature would have secured a common head to two otherwise independent kingdoms. England was too unpopular for such an alliance to be hailed with enthusiasm in Scotland, but there was prudence enough amongst the THE ASSURED LORDS 7 nobles to ensure its acceptance. Henry, however, had other ends in view. He had in his power several Scottish prisoners of rank, who had been captured at the rout of Solway Moss in 1542. These were now liberated on parole, and in company with the Earl of Angus, who had been in exile for fifteen years, were sent down to Scotland as sworn advocates of the royal policy. These " Assured Lords," as they were called, acknowledged Henry as lord superior, and pledged themselves to do their utmost to obtain for him the custody of the infant Queen, the administration of the kingdom during her minority, and the possession of several of the most important strongholds. In making these extravagant demands Henry was influenced by his desire to strike a blow at the French ascendency in Scotland — the more so, because England, in conjunction with the Empire, was on the verge of a war with France. The Scots were naturally quite unable to see why the results of the proposed marriage should be anticipated in this high-handed fashion. "I do per ceive," wrote Sir Ralph Sadler to Henry, " they have all one opinion, that, if she (the Queen) were once in your majesty's hands, howsoever the game should go, your highness, they say, would dispose the crown of this realm ; the title and freedom whereof methinks they be wholly bent to maintain, not willing to have the same subject to England, till by the consummation of the marriage God shall unite both realms in one dominion."^ Henry, in fact, was the victim of two conflicting aims. It was impossible to reconcile the Scots to England, and at the same time to secure such an influence over the government as would be an effectual bar to the French ascendency. The slightest 1 Sadler, State Papers, i. 99. See also p. 169. 8 INTRODUCTION suspicion of such a design was enough to rouse the national spirit, and to rehabilitate the French alliance as the more honourable alternative in a choice of evils. — At this point the new religion comes into view as a 'force to be reckoned with in politics. In Scotland the heretical tradition was far more nearly continuous than in England, and the Lollard movement fades almost imperceptibly into the Lutheranism of the Reformation. So late as 1494 thirty persons from Ayrshire, known as " the Lollards of Kyle," were tried, but apparently not punished, for heresy. There is, however, a line of demarcation between the old form of dissent and the new. Knox regarded Patrick Hamilton, who suffered death in 1528, as the proto-martyr of Protestantism in Scotland ; for Hamilton, it appears, was the first who fully grasped the doctrine of justification by faith, which was the fundamental dogma of the Reformation,^ and that in which it most unequivocally parted com pany with the Renaissance. In this year James V. took the government into his own hands, and the first phase of the new religious movement is rather more than conterminous with the period of his personal rule. King James regarded the Church as a useful but very degenerate institution, the bulwark of the monarchy against the nobles, which he would neither remodel in response to Henry VIIL, nor defend in its integrity at the instigation of the Pope. Thus he discountenanced heresy as the seed of revolution ; but, on the other hand, he upbraided the clergy with their vices, incited Buchanan to lash the monastic orders in his Fraur ciscanus, and in 1540 sanctioned the heaviest blow ever dealt at the falling Church by presiding over the repre- j sentation of Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates. It ^ Hume Brown's Knox, i. 46, 49.' GROWTH OF PROTESTANTISM 9 was impossible, however, to expose ecclesiastical abuses without promoting indirectly the theological revolt; and after James's death, a document was found amongst his papers containing the names of 360 of the nobility and gentry who had incurred the suspicion of Cardinal Beaton as favourers of the new religion. This remarkable testimony to the progress of at least potential Protestantism prepares us for that brief re hearsal ofthe Reformation which took place in 1543, at the outset of the following reign. In the infancy of Mary Stewart, the Earl of Arran, who stood next in the succession, was appointed Regent. His name was the first on Beaton's list, and Knox assures us that all men esteemed him the most fervent Protestant in Europe. Arran's first measures did not belie his reputation. Beaton was thrown into prison ; Protestants, such as Kirkcaldy of Grange, were admitted to high office ; two evangelical preachers were installed as court-chaplains at Holyrood; and the reading of the Bible in English was authorised by Act of Parliament. In autumn of the same year the people of Dundee, with the Regent's sanction, destroyed the houses of the Black and Grey Friars; the abbey of Lindores was also sacked; and similar outrages at Edinburgh were averted only by the intervention of the citizens. The flame of Protestant zeal burned brightly for a moment, but it was soon trampled under foot in the conflict of stronger passions. It so happened that the same Parliament of 1543, which communicated the Bible to the people, was that which sat in judgment on Henry's matrimonial proposals. The Parliament approved the principle of the marriage ; but it rejected every one of the preliminary conditions, and went almost as far as Henry in the opposite direction by 10 INTRODUCTION requiring that Scotland, even after the union of the crowns, should retain its ancient name and liberties under the guardianship of a native and hereditary ruler. Henry repudiated these terms with scorn. He had pre viously made the preposterous demand that Beaton should be delivered up to him for imprisonment in England, and he greatly scandalised the Scottish am bassadors by insisting on his right as lord paramount to be at once invested with the government. Henry's conduct evoked an outburst of popular indignation, and the people were not careful to distinguish between the politics and the religion of England. Protestantism was branded with the stigma of the Assured Lords, one of whom, Lord Maxwell, had introduced the Act for the free use of the Scriptures. The Regent Arran dismissed his two evangelical chaplains; the Cardinal regained his liberty; and the Church under his guidance became the soul of the opposition to the English marriage. Henry was forced to abate his demands. He consented that the Queen should remain in Scotland till she was eleven years of age, and he even went so far as to recognise, in a modified form, the alliance between Scotland and France. In this amended shape the treaty was ratified by the Regent in August, 1543. But the moral effect of the concessions was entirely nullified by the rumour of fresh dealings of a very questionable kind between Henry and his Assured Lords ; the popular agitation continued to increase ; and Arran at last took the step to which he had long been tending — he reconciled him self to the Cardinal and abjured the new religion. An incident of the time reveals the strength of the current to which he yielded. Henry was so incensed with what Sadler reported to him as " the revolt of the governor " that he seized certain vessels belonging to citizens of WAR WITH ENGLAND 11 Edinburgh, which had taken refuge in English ports. The citizens bitterly resented this; but when Henry offered to restore the ships on condition that they joined the treasonable conspiracy of the Assured Lords, they contemptuously rejected his offer, declaring that, rather than prove traitors to their country, they would sacrifice ships and goods and life itself In December the treaty was repudiated by the Estates on the ground that it had never been ratified by England ; and the close of the negotiations, like the beginning, bore wit ness to the interdependence of political and religious interests. The Parliament, which approved the marriage, had authorised the use of the English Bible : the Parlia ment, which now repudiated it, passed an Act for the repression of heresy. Thus the new religion was driven out of politics under stress of the national spirit ; and we shall find that it did not again assert itself till the influence of nationality, now opposed to it, had been enlisted in its favour. It was a victory for Catholicism — almost its last, and Cardinal Beaton might reasonably believe that he had saved both Church and State. The collapse of the negotiations made war inevitable, but it was still a question what form the hostilities would assume on the part of England. To a war of conquest, which would have been the logical outcome of his aggressive policy, Henry felt himself unequal, inas much as he was preparing for a great campaign in France, and could expect no material aid in Scotland from the Assured Lords ; and he was thus led to adopt, of all possible courses, the most useless and the most impolitic — he resolved merely to chastise the Scots for their undutiful conduct. The Earl of Hertford was despatched into Scotland on two burning and slaying expeditions — one in 1544, the other in 1545. The first s 12 INTRODUCTION expedition burned Edinburgh, and the town blazed for three days and nights. In his second expedition Hert ford claimed to have burned seven monasteries and religious houses, sixteen castles, five market-towns, two hundred and forty-three villages, thirteen mills, and three hospitals. Knox regarded the burning of Edin- ' burgh as God's judgment on the realm for Arran'f apostasy ; and Henry's apologist observes that " the necessity must be regretted which compelled measures of so extreme severity."^ It must indeed have been a singular necessity which forced Henry to make a gift of Scotland to France and the Pope, for such was the only result of his ferocious violence ; and the laird of Buccleuch may be taken as the spokesman of the entire nation, when he declared to Lord Wharton " that he would be glad to have the favour of England with his honour, but he would not be constrained thereto, if all Teviotdale were burnt to the bottom of hell." ^ James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, was the ancestor of a line of statesmen, whose vacillation and indecision of character have raised them to a singular pre-eminence in Scottish history. His religion was as problematical as were his politics ; and his conduct during the Dundee riots does not impress one with his qualifications for the task of ecclesiastical reform. His co-religionists were evidently as lukewarm as himself If there really was so large a body of Protestant opinion in the country as that represented by the 360 lords and gentlemen of Beaton's list, the facility with which it was absorbed into the patriotic movement organised by the j_ Church is really surprising. The faith of Knox was cast in a very different mould, as may be seen from his 1 Froude'a History of England, edition 1860, iv. 324. 2 Hill Burton's History of Scotland, iii. 238. GEORGE WISHART 13 eulogistic references to Henry VIII. and his designs on Scotland. It was not long, however, before the Reformation anticipated the stern and uncompromising character, in which it has stamped itself on the page of history. George Wishart is the link which connects the blighted Protestantism of 1543 with the Protestantism which triumphed in 1560 ; for the Dundee riots, which Arran countenanced, are said to have been the result of Wishart's preaching, and at a later time John Knox was one of his most devoted disciples. In Wishart we recognise the forerunner of the impending revolution ; and his career, though it had little influence at the time, was an element in the making of an important ecclesi astical tradition. He visited Switzerland in 1540 ; and his translation of the first Helvetic Confession is the earliest sign of Swiss as distinguished from German influence as a factor in the Reformation. ^ With much gentleness of disposition Wishart combined the inten sity and unconscious egotism of the religious enthusiast. He denounced the vengeance of Heaven on the people of Dundee, when they drove him from the town ; on the citizens of Edinburgh, when they rose, men and women, in defence of the friars ; and on Haddington, when, on the last night of his ministry, it turned a deaf ear to his preaching. After his expulsion from Dundee, he took refuge in the recesses of Kyle ; and his sermon of three hours' duration at Mauchline, to a great multitude in the open air, was probably the first instance in Scotland of a field-conventicle. The plague visited Dundee just in time to vindicate Wishart's reputation as a prophet ; but he showed his superiority to his own conception of 'Lorimer's Scottish Reformation, p. 97. Wishart's translation of the Confession is in the Wodrow Miscellany, vol. i. 14 INTRODUCTION the Deity by returning thither and ministering to the people so long as the epidemic lasted. Such heroism is by no means inconsistent with the darker side of Wishart's character. He was closely associated with Glencairn and the other lords of the English faction, though he more than once refused their offer to protect him by force of arms ; and there is some reason to believe that he was concerned in the conspiracy against Beaton's life. We know, at all events, that a person of the same name was an agent in the plot, and we know, also, that Wishart was constantly in the company of the Cardinal's bitterest enemies at the very time when they were compassing his death. It was at the house of one of these — Cockburn of Ormiston — that he was appre hended in December, 1545. Wishart was executed in March of the following year ; and two months later the Cardinal was assassinated by a party of nine, which surprised him in his own castle of St. Andrews. This crime, though no doubt stimu lated by the desire for vengeance, can hardly be regarded as an act of retribution for the death of Wishart. For three years Beaton's life had been aimed at by the emissaries of Henry VIII. ; and the immediate cause of his assassination was a personal quarrel with the Master of Rothes. " The tragedy of the Cardinal " is merely an incident in the development of that policy of intrigue, of which we have seen the beginning in the reign of Edward IV. Henry laboured for the assassination of Beaton, just as he had tried to kidnap Beaton's uncle, his predecessor in the primacy, and just as Lord Dacre, with Henry's sanction, had maintained a band of cut-throats and incendiaries for the purpose of embarrassing the Duke of Albany. The Assured Lords were prominent in this TREACHERY OF THE ASSURED LORDS 15 as in other parts of their master's business, and one of them, the Earl of Cassillis, had volunteered for the office of assassin, with stipulations as to the sufficiency of the reward. Maxwell was the only one of the faction who could be induced to return to England at the expiry of his parole. With the exception of Glencairn, they all drifted over to the national side ; but of most of them it must be said that they did not desert Henry until Henry, on the report of their faithlessness, had begun to treat them as enemies ; and their faithlessness was the result of their position as isolated units, impotent for mischief without the support of retainers more patriotic than themselves. To Scotland they proved very questionable allies. More than once they pledged their allegiance to the Government at the very time when they were renewing their engagements to Henry ; on one occasion their treachery caused the defeat of a Scottish army by a third of its number, on another it frustrated an invasion of England ; they incited Hertford to his second expedition, and actually advised him to march during harvest ; Glencairn fought a pitched battle with his countrymen only a few weeks after the burning of Edinburgh ; and though Angus won a signal victory for Scotland at Ancrum Moor, his conduct on that occasion proceeded less from patriotic motives than from a desire to take vengeance on a per sonal enemy. The death of Henry VIIL, in 1547, brought no relief to Scotland. Hertford, now Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector in the minority of Edward VI. , crossed the border in September of the same year, and entirely routed the Scots in the disastrous battle of Pinkie. Pinkie was a national disgrace — a massacre rather than a defeat; but the Scots believed, probably with good 16 INTRODUCTION reason, that they had succumbed rather to English gold than to English valour. The Assured Lords were at their old despicable intrigues ; two hundred lords and gentlemen had secretly pledged themselves to the service of England ; and there is a most suspicious statement jin Knox's History to the effect that the "professors of 1 the Evangel " attached themselves to the standard of Angus in the belief that the English would not deal hardly with an old friend.^ Angus, however, on that miserable day behaved like a Douglas and a true Scots man ; his phalanx of pikemen more than held their own against the English cavalry ; and, but for the incom petence of Arran, this success might have been the prelude to a decisive victory. Throughout the whole struggle it had been recognised by both parties that the loss of England was the gain of France. In the Parliament of December, 1543, which repudiated the marriage treaty, the ambassadors of Francis I. had promised assistance; in 1545 a con siderable body of French troops had been sent to Scotland ; and it was a French fleet which had avenged the murder of Beaton by the capture of the Castle of St. Andrews. The national disaster of Pinkie left the Scots more dependent than ever on their ancient ally. Immediately after the battle the Queen-Mother, Mary of Lorraine, proposed an appeal for aid to France ; and in February of the following year it was decided that, as the Queen could not safely be retained at home, she should be sent to the French Court, and that proposals should be made for her marriage to the Dauphin. Henry II. eagerly embraced this offer — according to one account " he leapt for blitheness, and was so blithe that it is incredible," partly at the prospect of extending his 1 Knox's Worlcs, i. 211. FRANCO-SCOTTISH DISSENSIONS 17 dominion, and partly because he hoped to create such a diversion as should facilitate the re-capture of Boulogne, which was then in English hands. ^ In token of his goodwill, he speedily despatched a force of 6000 men to the assistance of the Scots. In July, 1548, the Scottish Parliament formally approved the French marriage, on condition that it should be without prejudice to the rights and liberties of the realm ; and in August the same fleet which had brought the French troops to Scotland, carried Mary Stewart to France. Arran had some reason to resent this agreement, inasmuch as the Queen had been intended for his son ; but his influence now counted for little, and Henry II. was at pains to compensate him with the Duchy of Ch^telherault. For nearly two years the Scots and the French worked together at the task of expelling the English. It is remarkable that, with all their partiality for France, the Scots had little liking for French visitors. In 1385, 2000 French auxiliaries came over to assist in the prosecution of a war which Charles VI. had been at great pains to stir up between Scotland and England. They were not at all pleased with their reception ; and if we can believe Froissart, they went home in such bad humour that they wished " the king of France would make a truce with the English for two or three years, and then march to Scotland and utterly destroy it ; for never had they seen such wicked people, nor such ignorant hypocrites and traitors."^ On the present occasion the joint campaign was marred by still more serious differences. The troops of Henry II. — a mixed body of French and Germans — committed great excesses ; and a tumult, which they raised in 1 Dalrymple's Leslie (Scot. Text Soc), ii. 305. ^ Chronicles, Johnes' translation, ii. 56. B 18 INTRODUCTION Edinburgh, resulted in the death of the Provost, his son, and several of the citizens. It appears that the cavalry had to be kept idle in garrison in order to save the open country from their ravages ; and Mary of Lorraine complained to her brother the Cardinal that ill as she was, she could not venture to leave the army for fear that the Scots and the French would fly at each other's throats. ^ Nor should it be forgotten that, in turning to France after Pinkie, the Scots had been actuated rather by sheer necessity than by excess of love for an alliance which had lost much of its glamour. The French marriage had been adopted as a last resource ; and whoever has studied the Sadler State Papers must have perceived that the Scottish nobles regarded the breaking of the league with France as much the most practicable part of Henry's policy. At such a crisis, however, the nation could not afford to be critical. Whatever might be the disadvantages , cf the French connexion, they were as dust in the balance compared with the danger to the national independence ; and had the French Government under stood more clearly the tenure of its power in Scotland, its policy during the next ten years would have been conceived in a very different spirit. The war came to an end in April, 1550, on terms equally advantageous to both the allies ; for the English surrendered Boulogne and evacuated Scotland. The peace of this year is a memorable epoch in Scottish history. It is the true starting point of the Reforma tion, for it closed the long struggle for national .existence, and it was not till Protestantism had out lived its invidious political connexion that it could ' Teulet's Relations Politiques de la France et de VEspagne avec I'Ecosse au XVI.'Siicle, i. 208. THE CHURCH ITS OWN WORST ENEMY 19 hope to find favour with the Scots. Deeper far than any question of a change of creed was the determination of a high-spirited people to maintain the birthright of freedom bequeathed to it by heroic ancestors. At a prodigious cost of blood and well-being, in spite of merciless devastations and a defeat more pitiable than Flodden, betrayed by her natural leaders and dis tracted by religious dissensions, Scotland had been true to herself and to the spirit of an honourable tradition. Never again was the independence of the country to be called in question ; and the sequel showed that English statesmen had at last become convinced that, if they wanted the friendship of Scotland, they could have it only on terms which should recognise the partnership of two equal nations as the pledge of a closer union. Apart from political causes, there can be no question that the Roman Church in Scotland fell rather from internal weakness than from the assaults of heresy. The dogmatism of Knox, which supplied the material for the new Church, had very little to do with the ruin of the old. No doubt the religious principle, which triumphed in 1560, had long been at work, but its opera tion was feeble, and was confined to a small minority. We have had evidence of this in the national crisis which swept away the nominal Protestantism of 1543. A faith rooted in conviction would not so easily have succumbed, as may be seen from the fact that Wishart began his public ministry just when Arran was on the point of making his peace with Rome. It is evident indeed that Beaton, in drawing up his proscription list, did not distinguish between heretics and disaffected Catholics ; and the papal legate, who visited Scotland in 1543 and brought back a gloomy report of his mission, must also have ignored this distinction — 20 INTRODUCTION perhaps wisely, for the most dangerous enemies of the Church were those of her own household. Protestant ism, as the standard of revolt, had a natural attraction for the discontented ; there was a disposition to tamper with it in a spirit of protest, and thus, under favour able political conditions, the new sect might attain to an importance quite disproportionate to its actual strength. The soundness of this position is amply borne out by the proceedings of the Provincial Council which met at Edinburgh in 1552, and which applied itself to find a remedy for certain acknowledged, evils. It appears from the Statutes that ecclesiastical censures had fallen into general contempt, and that the churches were almost deserted on Sundays and holy days, even in the most populous parishes. It was therefore ordained that the parochial clergy should report absentees to the ^ dean, and that they should publish every Sunday from the pulpit the names of excommunicated persons. The Council recorded its conviction that heresy had been almost stamped out; but, as something must be done to secure the results of the victory, and as the clergy were not sufficiently learned to build up the people in the faith, it authorised the preparation of a catechism in the \ Scottish tongue, which was published a few months later in the name and at the expense of Archbishop Hamilton, Beaton's successor in the Primacy. The Catechism was intended to be read from the pulpit as a manual of religious instruction, and the object of the book evidently was to strengthen the position of the Church in a community ignorant, indifferent, and scorn ful ; not, indeed, at all corrupted by false doctrine, but breathing an atmosphere which still bore the germs of heretical teaching. In so far as it approaches the HAMILTONS CATECHISM 21 doctrinal issues at stake, its tone is precautionary rather than combative, and in the chapter on heresy there is nothing in the nature of a special application. Thus, whilst it exhorts the faithful to " put away vain curiosity and believe as the holy catholic kirk of God believes," it nowhere makes any reference to the Re formers, such as would have been inevitable and prominent, had th& Church been fighting for existence against the new opinions. Moreover, the Catechism displays a most remarkable liberality and independence of thought, which show how little the freedom of the Church had been diminished by external pressure, and which also confirm the view here taken of Protestant doctrine as diffusive rather than aggressive, an atmos phere rather than a creed. If, on the one hand, it accords special honour to the Virgin and vindicates the denial of the cup to the laity, on the other hand, it is silent on the prerogatives of the Pope, it adopts the Lutheran dogma of justification by faith, and it even; uses language borrowed from the homilies of Henry VIII./ and Edward VI. These peculiarities of the Catechism; are not easily explained; but they, at least, prove that the temper of the ecclesiastical authorities had not been embittered by controversy, and they are in perfect harmony with the main purpose of the book, which was to revive and to stimulate the religious consciousness of the people. Few works of the kind have more faith fully interpreted the permanent teaching of Chris tianity; and had the catechist been aware that he was recording the dying testimony of his Church, he could not have written with a sweeter serenity or in a milder and more charitable spirit.^ ' Archbishop HamiltojUs Catechism, edited by Thomas Graves Law. Dr. Law's Introduction is particularly valuable. 22 INTRODUCTION The evils which the Catechism sought to remedy were in one sense a protection to the Church, since the religious indifference of the people was an obstacle to the diffusion of heresy. Unfortunately, . however, for the hierarchy, there was one brilliant writer, who from the dawn of the Reformation to within a few years of its triumph never ceased to expose the corruption of the priesthood in a manner which even the most careless could not fail to appreciate. Sir David Lindsay's first work. The Dreme, appeared in 1528, the year of Patrick Hamilton's martyrdom; his last. The Monarchie, in 1553, and he died in 1555. Whether he was really a Catholic reformer of the Erasmian type, or whether, as is far more probable, he did not declare himself a Protestant only because the new religion in his day had not been rigidly defined, Lindsay, in spite of an occasional tendency to sermonise, writes mainly as a layman and a man of the world — one in whose eyes ecclesiastical abuses were not so much sinful as ridiculous to common sense and an outrage on common decency. Thus, with his varied know ledge, and his coarse but genial humour, he appealed irresistibly to the secular spirit of his day ; and it was probably due, in some measure, to his influence that the decline of the old religion so far overshot the progress of the new, and that the monasteries were thrown to the ground at a time when Pro testantism had evidently no hold on the nation at large. Lindsay's immunity from the wrath of his enemies, though explained to some extent by his social position and his intimacy with James V., is very remarkable. His Satire of the Three Estates was acted in 1540. A year or two before, Friar Killor had ventured to rebuke the conduct of the clergy in CLERICAL LICENSE 23 a drama of the Passion played before the king at Stirling, and he paid for his boldness by being burned as a heretic. We cannot, of course, accept satire as serious history ; but the substantial truthfulness of the picture presented to us in the comedy of the Three Estates is attested not merely by such zealous Catholics as Winzet and Abbot Kennedy, but by the remedial legislation of the Church itself As early as the beginning of the fifteenth century the vices of the cloister had provoked a severe remon strance from James the First, and the secular clergy soon vied with the regular in their repudiation of the law of chastity. So notorious did the matter become, that Lindsay represents the priests as enjoying an unfair advantage in that they were not subject, like the laity, to the restrictions of marriage. Many of the bishops were audaciously profligate — Cardinal Beaton is supposed to have had nine children, and Bishop Hepburn of Moray, who survived the Reformation, had undoubtedly ten, all by difiierent mothers ; and their incontinence was the more mischievous because it led them to abuse their rights of patronage by providing for their offspring at the expense of the Church. One of the scandals of the time was the nomination of prelates' sons, even in infancy, to substantial benefices. Even worse than the licentiousness of the clergy was their amazing incompetence. Every department of the Church bore witness to the general neglect of duty. Many of the abbeys were engrossed by the bishops, nlany were gifted away as rich sinecures to the sons of nobles. The parishes had always been too large to admit of the effectual Christianising of the people ; and the great majority of the livings had been "appro priated " to the bishoprics and monasteries, especially to 24 INTRODUCTION the latter, with the result that they were either left vaca'nt or entrusted to ill-paid vicars, and the churches in many cases allowed to fall into decay. It has been estimated that at the time of the Reformation there were only 262 parsonages as against more than 600 cures served, if served at all, by episcopal and monastic vicars. 1 The Abbey of Kelso had 36 churches, that of Arbroath 32, that of Paisley 28.^ Public worship had degenerated into a mere round of mechanical ceremonies, utterly unintelligible to the hearers. The parishioners seldom troubled to attend, and the scanty congregation indulged in laughter and noisy talk, or loitered for traffic or pastime at the church porch. Women were allowed to use even conventual churches as a market for their linen. Catholic and Protestant reformers alike denounced the parochial clergy as " dumb dogs " — men who could neither preach nor read, holders of an office which they knew not how to use. The neglect of preaching was indeed a glaring anomaly, for it impressed on the laity the fact that they paid dearly for a Church, which gave them nothing in return.* Such preaching as there was was done by the friars, and so absolute had become their monopoly of the pulpit that it was actually objected to Forret, vicar of Dollar, and one of the early martyrs, that he preached every Sunday to his parishioners. In 1559 the Bishop of Aberdeen, having asked the advice of his chapter on the question of ecclesiastical reform, was exhorted to provide for at least one sermon in every parish church before the beginning of Lent, and one more between that and ' Connell on Tithes, second edition, i. 70. ' Forbes's Chv/rch Lands and Tithes, p. 96. 3 "The law is plaioe, our teinds suld furnisch teichours."— Lindsay's Works, edited by Laing, ii. 148. A SPIRITUAL INTERREGNUM 25 Easter. Ai'chbishop Hamilton's Catechism was intended to supply the deficiencies of the clergy ; they were to read a portion of it every Sunday and holy day, and they were expressly warned " not to mount the pulpit unprepared, but frequently to rehearse beforehand what they were going to read, so that they might not by stammeriDg and stuttering become a laughing-stock to their hearers." ^ Such was the state of religion in Scotland in the first half of the sixteenth century, and it is to the forces generated during this period of spiritual interregnum that we must ascribe, not merely the violence of the Reformation, but also some of the most unlovely characteristics of the Reformed Church. It would certainly have been better for Scotland, could the religious tradition of the country have been preserved unbroken ; but the Reformers are not responsible for a disaster which was the work of their predecessors. Reverence for the past in such a case was hardly possible, and it is not surprising that the Reformed Communion, in its harshness of spirit and barrenness of taste, should long have borne traces of its posthumous origin. Perhaps the most serious of the evils, which have just been described, was the destruction of the parochial system through the growth of the monasteries ; but this evil, in common with many others, could not produce its full effect, till the monasteries had been perverted to secular uses. In Scotland the Church seems never to have been able to secure itself against the inroads of powerful laymen. Such livings as had not been engrossed by the bishoprics and the abbeys ' Bellesheim's History of the Catholic Church in Scotland, translated by D. O. Hunter Blair, ii. 215. 26 INTRODUCTION were mostly in the gift of the lord of the soil ; and in such cases the, desire of the landowner to provide for his relatives and dependents frequently defeated the efforts of the Church to insist on episcopal collation.^ So long, however, as the royal authority was exerted to preserve to the chapters and convents their rights of election, the evil was confined to subordinate offices. The choice of bishops and abbots was practically free ; for the royal right of recommendation was seldom exercised, and the prerogative of the Pope was limited to the issuing of a bill of confirmation.^ If the king did intervene, it was usually only to recommend to the electors one of their own number or to introduce an ecclesiastic whose learning and abilities were beyond dispute. James III., however, in 1473 established a most pernicious precedent by quashing the election of an abbot by the monks of Dunfermline and procuring the confirmation at Rome of his own nominee.* From this year down to the Reformation, a period of nearly ninety years, the wealth of the Church was at the mercy of the king and of all who could obtain his favour. The worst feature of the new system — for James's innovation soon became the regular usage— was not the mere extinction of electoral freedom, though of this the clergy loudly complained, but the bringing in of a new race of prelates — men of merely secular ambition, whose manner of life savoured little of the clerical calling. Henceforward the court, and not the '"At no time during the three hundred years which preceded the Reformation does it appear that the Scottish Bishops succeeded in making orders an indispensable qualification for a benefice." — Robertson's Statuta Ecclesiae Scoticanae, I. ccvi. 2Pinkerton, i. 413-15. ^ Leslie's History of Scotland, p. 40. THE NOBLES AND THE CHURCH 27 chapter or the cloister, was the true centre of eccle siastical life.^ In this " abusion of the prelacies " the nobles found their opportunity. They were poor, and the Church was immensely rich. The ecclesiastical property in Scotland is said to have been half of the national wealth, and the prelates, as one of the three estates, were assessed to the amount of one half of the public contributions. Even the pride of birth abated its pretensions with a view to participating in so splendid an inheritance. The wealth of the superior clergy induced even women of good family to live with them in a species of licensed concubinage. Their daughters, richly dowered with the alienated patrimony of the Church, were considered a good match for the sons of the nobility. Bishop Chisholm of Dunblane, the poorest of the Scottish sees, could afford to give his daughter £1000 on her marriage with Sir James Stirling of Keir, and Cardinal Beaton just before his death married his daughter to the Master of Crawford with a dowry of 4000 merks. But the scandalous abuse of patronage introduced by James III. enabled the nobles to engross the wealth of the Church by means which enhanced, instead of compromising, their dignity. The richest preferments were now open to any one who could make influence at court. We are told by a Catholic con temporary that, whenever any benefice fell vacant, the 1 Bishop Leslie shows very clearly how the evil was wrought. " The Court of Rome admitted the prince's supplications, the rather that they got great profit and sums of money thereby : wherefore the bishops durst not confirm them that was chosen by the convent, nor they who were elected durst not pursue their own right. And so the abbeys came to secular abuses," p. 40. Of James IV. it ia said, " Without counsel of spiritual estate he gave all benefices that vaikit in his time to his familiars .... whereof came great skaith on this realm " — Diurnal of Occwrrents, p. 4. 28 INTRODUCTION great men of the realm would press their claims to it with threats of sedition, and whoever obtained the prize would use it to promote sons or brothers more ignorant and more profligate than himself — so much so, that it was a question whether the abbot or his mule was the better fitted to discharge his office, or whether Balaam's ass might not have been superior in intelligence to them both.i It mattered little whether the beiaefice was bestowed in commendam, with no duty prescribed but that of consuming the revenues, or whether the scion of some noble house really did take orders with a view to obtaining it, for in either case the presentee was often a mere child, whose family appropriated the rents to their own use and left the convent to shift for itself. Dr. Magnus, the agent of Henry VIIL, was astonished to hear that John Hamilton, the future Primate, had been made Abbot of Paisley at the age of twelve ; and when Hamilton in 1553 resigned the Abbey to his nephew, the latter was only ten. James V.'s natural children were a good deal younger when their father appointed them to the five richest monasteries in Scotland — Holyrood, Kelso, Melrose, Coldingham, and St. Andrews. The great nobles had come to regard the abbeys as a provision for their younger sons. At the crisis of the Reformation we find a Hamilton in Paisley, another in Arbroath, and another in Kilwinning, a son of the Earl of Rothes in Lindores, a son of Argyll in Coupar- Angus, and a son of the Earl of Cassillis in Crossraguel, whilst the abbeys of Jedburgh and New- battle had been engrossed by the House of Kerr.* In view of such facts as these it is not surprising that the nobles should have failed to convince opponents of 1 Kennedy's " Compeudius Tractive," Wodrow Miscellany, i. 151. 2 Keith's Church and State, i. 313-14. THE NOBLES AND THE CHURCH 29 their disinterestedness in the work of Reformation. They could hardly rebut the charge that the Church they denounced as corrupt beyond all hope of remedy had deteriorated largely through their own misdoing ; ^ and we can easily understand the exasperation of the faithful when they saw the Church overthrown, and the nobles more powerful than ever. Writers of a certain school have sought to minimise the importance of aristocratic avarice as a factor in the Reformation ; but in point of fact there are few revolutions recorded in history where the presence of self-regarding motives is so exceedingly obvious. We need not emphasise the very natural supposition that the illicit enjoyment of ecclesiastical revenues must have suggested schemes of spoliation. Even if we suppose that the nobles were without guile in the matter of covetousness, they could hardly be indifferent to what was required for the securing of privileges already gained. Had the Roman Church succeeded in reforming itself, as it strove to do, all the abuses on which the aristocracy had flourished for nearly a century would have been swept away. There would have been no more commendators, no more convents secured through child-abbots to rapacious parents, no more fortunes to be won with daughters of the episcopate. The nobles were the only section of the community which gained anything by the continu ance of the old system, and they might hope to gain more by the overthrow of the Church and the confisca tion of ecclesiastical property ; but the thing which was most of all opposed to their interests was the restoration '"They, who are the procurers, disponers, and upsteraris of sick monstrous farces to be in the Kirk of God, are the most principal cryers out on the vices of Kirk-men."— Kennedy's " Tractive," Wodrow Miscel lany, i. 151. See also Winzet'a Tractates, i. 7-9. 30 INTRODUCTION of the Church to its original purity. We should naturally infer from this that any attempt at conserva tive reform would only precipitate the impending revolution ; and such, if we can believe Bishop Leslie, was actually the case. The Provincial Council of 1559, the last ever held by the Ancient Church, passed many excellent statutes, the object of which was to enforce on the pseudo-ecclesiatics the performance of their duties ; and Leslie assures us that many young abbots and priors went over on this account to the Protestants, " fearing themselves to be put at, according to the laws and statutes." ^ It was under the sanction of the Crown that these abuses had sprung up, and the antagonism between the Crown and the nobles, especially in the reign of James v., contributed almost as much as royal favouritism to the secularising of the Church. The bishops were usually nominated by the king from the sons of the lesser barons. They were drawn from a class naturally disposed to look with jealousy on the great landowners, and this feeling of rivalry was stimulated by the royal policy which looked to the Church to maintain the balance of the State against the excesses of feudalism. Thus the bishops became statesmen rather than ecclesi astics ; they accumulated offices, political as well as spiritual, and maintained large and unruly households.^ For fifty years before the Reformation the office of Chancellor had never been held by a layman ; and Archbishop Beaton, uncle of the more famous Cardinal, 1 History, p. 271. 2 The Provincial Council of 1549 ordained "prelates .not to keep in their households notorious drunkards, gamblers, whoremongers, brawlers, night-walkers, bufibons, blasphemers, swearers."— Winzet's Tractates {^co\,: Text Soc), ii. 96. RAPACITY OF THE PRIESTHOOD 31 besides being Lord Chancellor, was Abbot of Dun fermline, Arbroath, and Kilwinning. With bishops made at Court in furtherance of a courtly policy, with abbots who were not Churchmen, and parsons who could neither preach nor read, the Church became thoroughly mercenary in spirit; and we have sufficient evidence of this in the harshness and rapacity of her relations with the people. The clergy had once been the most indulgent of landlords ; but now the strange spectacle was seen of poor tenants being evicted from the Church lands to make room for others who could afford to pay higher rents. The teinds were rigorously assessed on the peasantry, those in arrear being debarred from the communion, and on the death of every parishioner the vicar demanded his mortuary dues — the Kirk Cow and the Upmost Cloth, or coverlet. James V. vainly urged on the clergy the renunciation of this tribute, which was par ticularly odious owing to its being levied chiefly on widows and orphans. The prolixity and expense of the Consistory Courts, which' had a wide jurisdic tion in matrimonial and testamentary causes, evoked the most vehement discontent;^; and the laity com plained that their substance was wasted by rapacious priests, who in defiance of the law intrigued for benefices at Rome. The Church, of which these things can be said, was evidently hastening to its doom; but it would be foolish as well as uncharitable not to recognise that there were elements of vitality to the last in the ancient ecclesiastical system. The prelates were not ' " We man reforme thir consistory lawis Quhais great defame above the heavins blawis." — Laing's Lindsay, ii. 154. 32 INTRODUCTION ~ all profligate, and the clergy as a body were redeemed from disgrace by " certane lamps of pietie and haly- ness," such as Bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen, one of the brightest names in the whole compass of Scottish history, unwearied in well-doing, learned, devout, intensely patriotic, devoted to the duties of his diocese even in the highest political offices ; such as Abbot Myln, the first President of the Court of Session, and Bishop Reid of Orkney, and Ninian Winzet, the schoolmaster of Linlithgow. In one respect the Church was the victim of her own good works, for through her noble exertions in the cause ^of education she had fostered a spirit of inquiry in ^ almost all ranks of the people, which in these her last degenerate days was inevitably turned against herself At a time when Lindsay's poems were to be found in every pedlar's pack, there was evidently no lack of readers. Knox implies that in the Parliament of 1543 the lay members showed themselves more pro ficient in Greek than the clergy, and it was due to the influence of the Church that the upper and middle classes had become superior in intelligence to the bulk of the priesthood. Before the Reformation, schools had been planted under clerical superinten dence, if not in every parish, at least in almost every village with pretensions to be a town ; and the work was still in progress as the end drew near. A grammar school was founded at Crail in 1542, and another at Kirkwall in 1544;^ nor need one refer to those famous seats of learning, whose scanty endowments have sufficed to give light and leading to so many genera tions of Scottish students — Paupertas fecunda virorum. Two of the Universities — St. Andrews and 1 Grant's History ofthe Burgh Schools of Scotland, pp. 21, 43. THE UNIVERSITIES 33 Glasgow — were indeed founded before the decline of the Church had definitely begun, but St. Andrews traces two of its three colleges to the first half of the sixteenth century. In the history of higher education in Scotland names so seldom coupled as Elphinstone and Beaton, Reid and Hamilton, are honourably associated ; and it helps to bridge over the chasm between the old faith and the new, when we remem ber that the University of Edinburgh, though a post- Reformation college, originated in a bequest of the Bishop of Orkney in 1558. CHAPTER I. THE EVE OF THE EEFOKMATION, 1550-1559. The Reformation in Scotland — to use the term in its widest sense — falls naturally into three main divisions. From the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton in 1528 to the peace with England in 1550 the Protestant move ment struggled in vain against an adverse political tendency ; during the next ten years it went steadily forward till its progress was arrested at a time when it had overthrown the ascendency of the old religion without really securing its own ; and then comes a period of transition ending with the establishment of the Reformed Church in 1567, though the triumph of the latter was not complete in all respects until 1573. The second of these periods is dominated by political conditions, which are almost the opposite of those we found to be paramount in the first, the spirit of nationality being either quiescent or enlisted, nominally at least, on the Protestant side ; and indeed we shall find that religion was so far from being the only issue at stake that this period might be characterised in the German idiom of Mommsen as that of the politico- religious revolution. The third period, if not the most important, is probably the most attractive and the most POLITICAL CONDITIONS 35 picturesque; for here Protestantism is divided against itself; in the breaking up of the phalanx individuals force themselves on our attention ; and the period has thus a dramatic interest which has insured its popularity with all readers of Scottish history. It is with the second of these phases of the Reformation that we shall have to deal in this and in the following chapter. The miserable condition of the Church was acknow ledged by all parties; but at the peace of 1550 the balance of political forces was still decidedly in its favour, and few persons could have foreseen that the next ten years would suffice for the triumph of the revolution. Hitherto the Catholic cause had been singularly fortunate in the course of events. James V., in spite of his impatience of ecclesiastical abuses, had closely allied himself with the clergy, and after his death in 1542 the patriotic feeling of the country had revolted against the attempt to inaugurate the Re formation in concurrence with the aggressive designs of Henry VIII. In Cardinal Beaton the Church had found an able leader, who realised the identity of her interests with those of the State, and who proved capable of turning the coincidence to the best account. It might have been expected that the cessation of the strife with England, which had so long dammed back the tide of heresy, would of necessity endanger the Church ; but the course of the war had obviated the natural tendency of its conclusion, for the impolicy of Henry and Somerset in resorting to coercion, when mild measures failed, had almost annihilated the English party amongst the nobles, and had brought about a matrimonial alliance with France, which bade fair to be the strongest available guarantee of Catholic ascendency in Scotland. 36 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 We can thus understand the confident tone adopted by the Provincial Council of 1552; but Archbishop Hamilton was well aware that political defences were powerless to save the Church, except in so far as they gave scope and opportunity for the work of internal reform. What such men as he had most of all to dread was that the great mass of the ignorant and the scornful might become infected with a distinctly heretical spirit. Scotland, as a whole, was neither Catholic nor Pro testant. The gross incompetence of the priesthood had reduced the religious consciousness of the people almost to a vacuum, and it became a question whether the void would be recovered by the old religion or appro priated by the new. The Archbishop's Catechism was a most creditable attempt to win back for the Church her ancient heritage ; but it was merely the most important of a series of similar measures. Already in the Provincial Council of 1549, he had made provision for " teaching by more worthy masters," one result of which was the appointment of Ninian Winzet to the grammar school of Linlithgow. He completed and endowed St. Mary's College at St. Andrews with a view to its becoming a training-school for priests, and he ordained that each of the monasteries should set aside funds sufficient to maintain at least one of its . members at the University. He also made strenuous exertions to reform the morals of the clergy ; but his own private life was very far from blameless, though his licentious ness partook more of a*' domestic character than that of several of his colleagues; and the notorious Bishop Hepburn is said to have publicly defended the reten tion of his mistress by a reference to Hamilton's example.^ Historically these measures are interesting * Pitscottie Chronicle, p. 526. THE "GUDE AND GODLIE BALLATES " 37 merely as a record of good intentions ; but the Church may be pronounced fortunate in the reforming energy of the last of her primates, as in different circumstances she had been fortunate in the statesmanship of Beaton. In reality, however, the position of the Church was far more perilous than the mere chronicle of events would lead one to suppose, and a very little reflection will suffice to reveal an adverse tendency in those very circumstances, which on the surface appear the most favourable to the Catholic cause. The early Protestant movement had been emphatically repudiated by the country ; through the capture of the Castle of St. Andrews, in 1547, it had been deprived at a stroke of almost all its political chiefs ; and from that year down to the return of Knox in the autumn of 1555 it reckoned no one in its ranks who could be regarded as a great religious leader. But this apparent defeat was in the fullest sense a blessing in disguise, for it facilitated the diffusion of the new religion by emancipating it from the control of an unpopular faction. The anti-clerical spirit, which found its most perfect expression in Lind say's satires, was infinitely more popular than the dogmatic teaching of the early reformers, and nothing could be more fatal to the Church than that Lindsay's readers should be definitely enlisted on the Protestant side. We thus see at once the profound significance of those "gude and godlie ^ballates," 'which, in so far as they were the work of John Wedderburn of Dundee, are supposed to have been published between 1542 and 1546. This very singular literature, composed partly of metrical translations of the Psalms and of Luther's hymns, and partly of pious doggerel, grafted on licentious ditties and adapted to popular tunes, was the growth of many years, and some of it was evidently written at 38 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 the crisis of the Reformation, or even later ; but a canon of the Provincial Council of 1549, which enjoined search for books of rhyme, either heretical in tone or scandalous to the clergy, was probably aimed as much against Wedderburn as against Lindsay. The ballads circulated chiefly amongst the substantial burgher class, the nobles being mostly indifferent to the doctrinal question at stake, and the peasantry too ignorant to understand it ; they are said to have been popular for more than half a century, and a collected edition was published as late as 1621.1 The overthrow of the English Reformation through the accession of Mary Tudor in 1555 was another of those seemingly untoward events which stimulated the growth of Protestantism in Scotland. Whatever taint of disloyalty still clung to the Protestant party was dissipated through the restoration of Catholicism in England ; and the new opinions were sedulously propa gated by Protestant refugees, one of whom, John Willock, achieved a reputation second only to that of Knox. But it is in the sphere of domestic politics that the contrast between the fictitious strength of the Church, and its real weakness is most strongly marked. The English war, though it resulted in the triumph of Catholic counsels in Scotland, had nevertheless given rise to two tendencies, the development of which sufficed in ten years' time to establish the Reformation. The first of these, though not the more important, was a conflict of interests between the temporal and spiritual powers. From the time of Arran's so-called apostasy in 1543 to the death of Beaton in 1546, Church and 1 Professor Mitchell's The Wedderbums and their Work; Dalzell's Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century. THE REGENT ARRAN 39 State had cordially co-operated against the Protestants ; and after the Cardinal's assassination their union ought to have been still more complete, for Hamilton, the new Primate, was Arran's natural brother. Somerset's in vasion, however, had driven the Scots into the arms of France ; the betrothal of Mary to the Dauphin was a serious blow to Arran, whose son she was to have married, and it naturally gave great influence to Mary of Lorraine, the Queen Dowager, whose brothers were then in the ascendant at the French court. Students of English history may perhaps recognise in Arran the Rockingham of the Scottish Reformation — ^a man of great wealth, charming manners, and most indolent temper, whom his friends used as a tool, whilst pro fessing to defer to him as a leader. Knox taunts him with having sold the Queen to France ; and whether it was that he sacrificed his private interest to the national safety ,1 or that he really considered the duchy of Chatelherault as sufficient compensation for the blighted prospects of his family, it is certain that he not only did not oppose the French marriage, but even exerted himself in its favour. His partiality for France was, indeed, considerably cooled by the conduct of the French auxiliaries during the war ; ^ and it was probdbly this that gave rise to a rumour of his disloyalty at the court of Henry II. — a rumour which Mary of Lorraine, as late as January, 1550, contradicted in the most indignant terms, declaring that she had not " deux plus fidhles servi- teurs " than the Duke and his brother the Archbishop.* 1 Leslie, p. 204. 2 Teulet's Relations Politiques de la France et de VEspagne avec I'Ecosse av,XVI'Si'ide,\.%'i.% '"S'il est vrai que Ton a fait au Eoi un mauvais rapport de mon cousin. Monsieur le Gouverneur et de son frdre, je vous assurerai qu'il n'a point deux plus fiddles serviteurs qu'ils ne sont ; et quant a moi. 40 THE EVE OP THE REFOR^JATION, 1550-1559 The word serviteur was more in keeping with the Duke's real relation to the Dowager than with his official position as Governor of Scotland. Ever since the fatal battle of Pinkie, Mary had been the virtual ruler of the country. As early as 1544 she had been proclaimed Regent by a convention of the nobility ; and though this proceeding was quite irregular, and was declared null by Parliament a few months later, the time had come when her pretensions to have the name as well as the substance of power could no longer be disregarded. Both the chief parties in the State were favourable to the proposed change of rulers — the Catholics, because they regarded France as their best friend ; the Protestants, because Mary had gained their goodwill and because Chatelherault was odious to them as the brother of the Primate, and formerly an agent (though doubtless an unwilling one) in the persecutions of Beaton. -After the peace of April, 1550, the Dowager visited the French Court in order to seek assistance from Henry II. in her designs on the Regency. In this she was entirely successful ; and Henry exerted himself so warmly in the cause that he made converts of several of Chfi,telherault's personal friends, one of whom. Bishop Panter of Ross, the Scottish ambassador at Paris, was sent over to solicit the Duke's resignation, and suc ceeded at last in wringing from him a favourable answer. The Duke, it seems, had some misgivings as to his administration of the royal revenue ; he was tempted by Henry's offer to make the dukedom, of c'est ma faute s'ils ne font bien, car tout ce que je veux d'eux, je I'ai ; et il n'est gentilhomme de ma maison que me porte autant d'honneur et d'obSissance qu'ils le font." — The Queen Dowager to the Ducd'Aumale. Ibid., i. 214. THE REGENT ARRAN 41 Chatelherault 1 hereditary in his family ; and, above all, his brother, the redoubtable Primate, was, lying very seriously ill, speechless, and given over for dead. Archbishop Hamilton, however, lived to disappoint the hopes of his enemies, and to curse the Regent as " a very beast" for having surrendered the government at a time when there was nothing but a weakly girl between him and the Crown.^ Thus, when Panter, a few months after the Dowager's return in the autumn of 1551, called upon the Duke to fulfil his promise, all the previous negotiations proved to have been wasted labour. The Duke refused to resign ; and for nearly a year matters drifted on in uncertainty — the Dowager holding a crowded court at Stirling, and Chg,telherault a very meagre one at Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Mary Stewart appointed Henry II. , the Cardinal, and Duke of Guise as her curators for the government of Scotland ¦ — the Parliament of Paris having decided very gratuit ously that she had the right to do so; and these at once devolved their functions on the Queen Dowager. Thus the Duke found both Scotland and France united against him; the young Queen formally demanded his resignation ; and his few supporters dwindled away, until none were left to him but the Primate and Lord Livingstone. Resistance was evidently hopeless; and ' This point is somewhat obscure. Both Tytler and Burton, following Bishop Leslie, say that Arran got the dukedom in return for his resigna tion of the regency. In point of fact, he was created Duke of Chatel herault by Henry II. on February 8, 1548, the very day on which the betrothal of Mary to the Dauphin was approved by the Scottish Parlia ment — Knox's Works, i. 217, note ; and henceforward he is always mentioned by his new title in Knox's history and in the letters published by Teulet. Leslie's statement that Henry II. in 1550 made "a gift of the ducherie of Chattilliro in heritage to the Earl of Arran" is not necessarily inconsistent with this fact. 2 Sir James Melville's Memoirs, p. 21. 42 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 in the Parliament of April, 1554, he formally resigned the Regency into the hands of Mary of Lorraine. ^ It thus appears that the movement which placed the Queen Dowager at the head of the government, far from being a party movement, was the outcome of many conflicting interests. Unfortunately, however, both for herself and for her daughter, the Dowager failed to maintain her position as the choice of the nation ; and the man who did more than anyone else to bring about this result was undoubtedly Archbishop Hamilton. Unlike his brother, who easily reconciled himself to the new regime, Hamilton remained steadfast in opposition. The Duke's abdication had ruined his hopes of ruling Scotland vicariously, as Beaton had done before him, and he had also a more tangible grievance, inasmuch as the new Regent turned him out of the office of Lord High Treasurer to make room for her adherent, the Earl of Cassillis.^ It was easy for a man of his ability to find followers. As the good understanding between the Dowager and the Pro testants became more and more apparent, the hierarchy rallied round the Primate, whilst conversely the Dowager was forced by the Primate's hostility into closer relations with the Protestants. Thus the cleav age of religion cut off the civil from the ecclesiastical power; and Mary, contrary to her wishes and her interest, drifted into a position of direct antagonism to the Church. How wide the breach really was may be seen from the charge afterwards brought against her by the Lords of the Congregation that she gave prelacies ^ Leslie, p. 238, 245. Div/rnal of Occwrrents, p. 51. Chatelherault left a debt of £30,000, which Mary paid off in tive years. Chalmer's Life of Mary Queen of Scots, i. 23. 2 Crawford's Officers of State, p. 377. MARY OP LORRAINE 43 to Frenchmen, and where that was not possible, retained them as long as she could in her own hands, generally for three whole years. Of all the benefices that fell vacant from 1554 to 1559 the Lords declared that scarce two had been filled by Scotsmen. ^ ^ It should be observed, however, that the Queen Dowager had been brought into friendly relations with the Protestants long before her assumption of the Regency. She and Cardinal Beaton had each recog- nised in the other a formidable rival ; and as Beaton was French and Catholic in his sympathies, the Dowager found it good policy to be English and Protestant in hers. In this way there took shape a distribution of forces, which remained undisturbed down to the eve of the religious crisis.l Angus and the Assured Lords were the soul of the party which in 1544 had proclaimed Mary as Regent ; when she went to France in 1550 she was accompanied by such chiefs of the former English faction as Glencairn, CassUlis, Maxwell, and Sir George Douglas ; the Lord James Stewart, known to fame as the Regent Moray, began his political career as her adherent; Kirkcaldy of Grange and Maitland of Lethington were prominent on the same side ; Erskine of Dun, the friend of Wishart and Knox, was one of the Scottish commissioners at the Queen's marriage in 1558 ;|^and it was by consent of the Protestants, vainly opposed by the prelates, that the crown matrimonial was bestowed on the Dauphin.J Protestantism, or at all events the political party which-. was more or less identified with Protestantism, thus ^ enjoyed the favour of the government, and it is not surprising that during a period of eight years there / 1 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the reign of Elizabeth^' 1559-1560, Nos. 42, 45. / 44 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 should have been no executions for heresy. When the last victim perished in 1558, the Queen Regent pro fessed to have been ignorant of the tragedy. Arch bishop Hamilton, indeed, as Buchanan admits, was by no means prone to bloodshed; and the new religion, living rather in the ballads sown broadcast throughout the land than in the oratory of the pulpit, was less obnoxious than formerly to the ecclesiastical authorities. In this unobtrusive form, however, heretical opinions were rapidly spreading ; and when Knox returned to Scotland in 1555, after an absence of eight years, he declared that Protestantism had made so great progress that, unless he had seen it with his eyes, he could not have believed it.^ In sowing dissension between Church and State the war with England had undoubtedly prepared the way for the Reformation ; but this result was really in volved in another of far wider and more decisive import. The personal rivalry of Chatelherault and the Queen Dowager does not at all obscure the fact that Chatelherault stood for Scotland and the Dowager for France ; and it was on the use which France should make of the victory won in its interest, if not in its name, that the future must necessarily depend. With all her great gifts, the new Regent had to move in a path which was none of her own choosing. England and France had long been engaged in a struggle for ascendency in Scotland ; and when Mary of Lorraine first comes prominently before us, the struggle had entered on its last and its acutest phase. The infant Queen was the object of contention to the two nations ; and Henry II. , when the prize was borne towards him on the issues of the strife, had no inducement to be ^ Hume Brown's Life of Knox, i. 293. MARY OF LORRAINE 45 more disinterested than his late xival, Henry VIII. He wished to bind the Scots closely to France, just as Henry VIII. had sought to bind them to England. At a later time the Constable Montmorency took the king to witness that he had always opposed the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin, " fearing thereby to make our old friends our new enemies, as is like to come to pass this day ; " ^ but his counsel must have been very unpalatable, and was probably discounted as that of an enemy to the house of Guise. That the Queen Dowager should readily fall in with the designs of the Court is only what was to be expected of a French princess, whose position in Scotland was, indeed, singularly isolated. As a Catholic, she could not really identify herself with the Protestants, whilst, as the mother of the Queen, she was at variance both with the Hamil tons and with the hierarchy, her natural ally, which had a Hamilton for its primate. In such circumstances, the policy of leaning upon France must have seemed to her as natural as she soon found it to be disastrous. Mary of Lorraine was far from being the reckless and unscrupulous intriguer she has so often appeared to those who have studied her through the eyes of Knox. We have seen how she was led into an alliance with the Protestants, not abruptly with a view to snatching away the Regency, but as the result of circumstances which first forced on her such an alliance, and then caused her to adhere to it more and more closely. As she was not a Scotswoman, and as Mary Stewart was to be the sovereign of both realms, she doubtless believed that in 1 Sir James Melville's Memoirs, p. 78. On the ground that countries ruled by lieutenants usually rebel, the Constable would have married Mary to some duke or prince of France and sent them both to reside in in Scotland, p. 72. 46 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 assimilating Scotland to France she was merely con solidating her daughter's inheritance ; and here too her policy had its origin in the course of events. In the last years of the war the Scots had been wholly dependent on the support of their ally, and it was quite natural that the Queen-Mother should place great reliance on D' Oysel, the French ambassador, whom Buchanan describes as well worthy of her confidence — hasty and passionate, but withal a good and a capable man, more attentive to equity than to the pleasure of the Guises. The ambassador's authority, if not his influence, ought to have ended with the war ; but Mary, who had come to a definite understanding with the French Court, continued to defer to him as her chief adviser ; ^ and the nobles were naturally indignant that so much power should be wielded by the man, who in the quaint words of the chronicler " presented the king of France awen bodie at all counsallis and con- ventiounes." ^ D' Oysel held no official position in Scot land, but several of his countrymen were invested with offices of state which rendered them very obnoxious to the people. De Roubay, a lawyer of Paris, had the Great Seal in his keeping as vice-chancellor ; De Villemore was made a comptroller of the exchequer, and De Boutot governor of Orkney. Of these foreign officials, Buchanan tells us that De Roubay, owing to his attempt to introduce French laws and customs, was by far the most unpopular, but he adds that neither this man nor D'Oysel wrought any mischief which might not have been remedied. When the abbacies of Melrose and Kelso became vacant in 1558, through the 1 D'Oysel left Scotland in 1551, but returned in 1554. Knox's Works, i. 328, note. 2 Pitscottie, p. 513, " Ane man of singular guid judgment." THE QUEENS MARRIAGE 47 death of James V.'s eldest illegitimate son, they were assigned to the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Regent's brother. A French garrison was placed in Dunbar Castle, and also in a new fortress which D'Oysel had caused to be built at Eyemouth ; and there was even a proposal for the formation on the French model of a standing army, but the scheme, though it is said to have been favoured by some of the leading nobility, excited so much discontent that it was hastily withdrawn. The Scots had soon an opportunity of expressing in a practical manner their disapproval of these unwelcome innovations. In 1557 the Regent assembled an army at Kelso with a view to assisting France, which was threatened by the English and the Spaniards united temporarily under the sceptre of Philip II. The nobles had already assisted in certain Border forays, and they declared themselves willing to repel any attack ; but they absolutely refused to provoke war on a great scale by an invasion of England. This was the last time that Scotland was called upon to make the usual sacrifice on behalf of her ancient ally. As matters now stood in Scotland, it was evident that France had become the true centre of gravity in her political system ; and the outlook in that quarter was by no means re-assuring. On the 24th of April, 1558, the Queen of Scots was married to the Dauphin in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. In the treaty of marriage the Scottish commissioners had stipulated in the most rigorous terms for the maintenance of the national independence. Nevertheless, at the instigation of the Guises, some ten days before the ceremony, Mary secretly signed three documents, the substance of which amounted to this : that, in the event of her death without issue, the sovereignty of Scotland should be 48 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 vested in the King of France and his heirs ; that, if this proved impracticable, the King of France should enjoy the usufruct of the realm, until such time as he should have been reimbursed in all sums expended by him in Mary's defence and education ; and lastly, that all deeds which might hereafter be signed by Mary in contraven tion of these pledges were null and void. How far the real designs of the French Court were appreciated in Scotland, it might be difficult to say. We may think that a nation accustomed to the arrogant bullying of England would be slow to detect insidious attempts at dictation on the part of its traditional ally ; but jealousy of France was no new thing in Scottish history, and the country was not blind to many slight indications of policy all pointing ominously in one direction. The Scottish commissioners, although they recognised the Dauphin as King of Scotland, refused to agree that the regalia should be sent to Paris for the purpose of crowning him ; and when four out of the eight commissioners died before leaving France, their deaths were not unnaturally attributed to poison.^ In 1559, on the accession of Francis and Mary to the throne of both kingdoms, letters of naturalisation were issued by the French Government in favour of all * There can be no question that only four of the eight commissioners died, inasmuch as four. Lord James, Lord Seton, Erskine of Dun, and Archbishop Beaton, lived to play a prominent part in subsequent history. Yet the Lords of the Congregation, in a manifesto published a year after wards, assert that five died and three returned home in safety. — Foreign Calendar, 1559-60, No. 45. Hill Burton, strangely enough, says that only six commissioners were sent (vol. iii. 289). He errs also in saying that three of the commissioners died suddenly at Dieppe. Bishop Eeid of Orkney died on September 8th ; the Earl of Cassillis on November I8th ; the Earl of Rothes on November 28th ; and Lord Fleming, at Paris, on December 18th. — Diet, of Nat. Biography, Article on Cassillis. Bishop Panter of Eoss was one of the commission, but he did not go to France, and died in October, 1558. — Keith, i. 166. FRENCH AGGRESSION i9 Scottish subjects, and the Parliament of Paris in their act of verification adopted a very superior tone.^ France was represented in the guise of ancient Rome dispensing rights of citizenship to a subject people. Offence was also given by the method adopted in quartering the arms of Scotland with those of France, which was thought to be derogatory to the national honour. These various circumstances, trivial enough in them selves, were interpreted in the light of the Regent's alien methods of government ; but even with this invidious commentary, they might not have had much weight in Scotland, if the French connexion had con tinued to be favourable to the new^ opinions. Influences,, however, were at work on both sides tending to make this compromise no longer possible. Protestantism had outgrown the limits of toleration, whilst at the same time the consummation of the Queen's marriage and the close of the English war enabled the government tO' assume a more independent attitude. That the Regent had ever laid aside her repugnance to the new faith is exceedingly improbable ; but justice requires us to recognise that the Protestantism she strove to repress in 1559 was something very different from the Protes tantism she had tolerated in 1554. The existence of Protestantism in Scotland as a separate communion dates from the return of Knox in the autumn of 1555. Hitherto the Reformers had not scrupled, for the most part, to be present at the observances of the established religion ; but in conse quence of Knox's famous argument with Maitland on the 1 " Les roys de France, pour perpetuer leur domination, laquelle compte desjk plus d'ans que I'Empire Bomain, ont mieulx aym6 laisser la rigeur des anciens Grees et suyvre la doulceur et benignity des Bomains." — Teulet, Relations, etc., i. 316. D 50 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 unlawfulness of countenancing the idolatrous Mass, they now withdrew from the churches ; and in Kincardine shire they seem even to have taken an oath of mutual support and fidelity. After pursuing,, his labours in various parts of the country, Knox went back to Geneva in the following summer ; and the clergy, who had made a vain attempt to prosecute him as a heretic, burnt him in effigy at the Cross of Edinburgh. The impetus he had given to the religious movement sufficed to drive it forward in his absence. In Scotland at that period, and for long afterwards, there could be but one form of faith. ' As avowed dissenters meeting privately for worship, the Reformers must have been well aware that they must either return to the Church or make an open profession of the new opinions ; but as this last step was equivalent to a declaration of war against the established hierarchy, they did not adopt it 'without considerable hesitation. In March, 1557, they wrote to Knox at Geneva, entreating him to return, and declaring that in the face of a hostile government they were " ready to jeopard their lives and goods for the setting forward of the glory of God." When Knox, in response to this summons, had journeyed homeward as far as Dieppe, he received word that his friends had repented of their resolution, and could dispense for the present with his services. In reply he rebuked them for their faint heartedness, charged them with conniving at the Regent's attempt to subject the realm to " the slavery of strangers," and exhorted them to set their hand to the work of Reformation, " be it against kings or emperors." This was in October; and in the following December Knox's exhortations bore fruit in the first Band or Covenant, whereby the subscribers pledge themselves to "establish the most blessed Word of God and his MARTYRDOM OF MYLN 51 congregation," " forsake and renounce the congregation of Satan," and " declare themselves manifestly enemies thereto." The document was signed by the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn, and Morton, Lord Lorn, Erskine of Dun, and many others. Nothing could be plainer as a manifesto of revolution ; and it probably went beyond what was intended by the original promoters of the aggressive movement, for the Lord James and Lord Erskine, who signed the letter of invitation to Knox, were not subscribers of the Covenant.^ The men, who thus defied the powers of Church and State, were thoroughly in earnest. Wherever their influence prevailed, they abolished the Mass and caused the Prayer-Book of Edward VI. to be read on Sundays by the priest, or, if he refused, by some competent layman. In the spring of 1558 the ecclesiastical autho rities — though the Primate apparently was not active in the matter — made an unfortunate attempt to intimi date their opponents by putting Walter Myln to death at St. Andrews. Myln was a priest over eighty years of age ; and according to the traditional account, they had great difficulty in getting a judge to condemn him, a rope to bind him, and faggots to burn him.^ Too late to serve the purpose of its authors, the tragedy only exasperated the enemies of the Church. Evan gelical preachers taught publicly in Edinburgh, Leith, Dundee, and elsewhere ; and when several of them were summoned for trial before the bishops, the barons of the West appeared in arms at Holyrood, and presented 1 Knox's Works, i. 247-54, 267-74. ^Pitscottie, pp. 520-522. Knox in one place says that Archbishop Hamilton apprehended Myln and put him to death ; in another place he lays all the blame on Bishop Hepburn of Moray — " By his counsel alone was Walter My Ine our brother put to death." — Works, i. 308, 360. 52 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 a remonstrance, the reading of which they enforced by putting on their steel bonnets in the royal presence. Images were rudely handled ; that of St. Giles was "drowned" in the North Loch, and then burnt; and a procession of the clergy in honour of the Saint was dispersed by the mob in the streets of Edinburgh.^ , It is evident from this account that, before the Regent attempted to suppress Protestantism, the Pro testants, for very sufficient reasons, had set themselves to overturn the established religion. She still wished to temporise, for the reformed movement had broken loose before she was quite ready to dispense with its support. The martyrdom of Myln was almost contemporaneous with the Queen's marriage ; but the policy of the Regent required for its completion that the crown matrimonial, as the French called it, should be secured to the Dauphin. Matters came to a crisis at the meeting of Parliament on the 29th of November, 1558, when the Reformers proposed to bring forward certain articles of religion, and the surviving commissioners intimated the Queen's desire that her husband should have the crown. As the prelates, with Hamilton at their head, strongly opposed this request, the Regent made a supreme effort to conciliate the Protestants. By skilfully playing on their hopes, she induced them to discard their articles in favour of a protestation ; and the religious controversy being thus averted, it was agreed that the Dauphin should have the title of king during his wife's life. Argyll and Lord James were deputed to invest the prince with this coveted honour ; ^ The chronology of these events, which in Knox's History is very con fused, may best be studied in Calderwood's History of the Kirk and in Lorimer's Scottish Reformation. Tytler, misled by Knox, represents the episode of the steel bonnets (July, 1558) as leading up to the letter of invitation to the Reformer (March, 1557). ACCESSION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 53 but events soon transpired which prevented their de parture.^ Of all the arguments in favour of crowning the Dauphin, the one which had most weight with the Parliament was a promise on the part of Henry II. to support the Queen's claim on the English succession after the death of Mary Tudor. ^ Mary had died on the 17th November, and Elizabeth had already become Queen of England. It was Elizabeth alone that stood between the Queen-Dauphiness and the English crown ; and if Elizabeth were illegitimate, as the Catholics believed she was, the crown ought to have been hers. Henry II. was not slow to redeem his promise. As soon as Mary's death was known at Rome, his am bassador urged the Pope to disallow Elizabeth's title on account of the nullity of her father's marriage with Anne Boleyn ; and though this design miscarried through the intervention of Spain, with which country, in alliance with England, France was then at war, the French boldly asserted Mary Stewart's title during the negotiations at Cateau-Cambr^sis ; and they proclaimed it still more offensively after the Peace. Francis and Mary assumed the English arms, and the Dauphin, in ratifying a separate treaty with Spain, subscribed himself King of England.* The French were encouraged in these pretensions by the notorious weakness of their rival. Calais had fallen at the beginning of the year. When the news reached Scotland, the Dowager caused bonfires to be lighted in every town, and recommended Henry II. to attack Berwick, declaring that, if Berwick 1 Knox's Works, i. 309-14 ; Keith, i. 173, 174 ; Sir James Melville's Memoirs, p. 73. 2 Dalrymple's Leslie (Scot. Text. Soc), ii. 394 ; Calderwood, i. 417. 'Froude, vii. 66. 54 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 were captured, the French might march unopposed to London.i At the accession of Elizabeth in November, Berwick, though it required 4000 men to defend it, had a garrison of only 240.^ The English border was at the mercy of the Scottish moss-troopers, who rode from town to town at night selling their protection to terri fied citizens in view of the approach of an imaginary Scottish army. The French had some thoughts of making a descent on the Isle of Wight, but they knew well that this attempt, to be successful, must be sup ported by an invasion on the side of Scotland. Eliza- . beth, however, had declared for Protestantism ; and as the Scottish Reformers were not likely to favour an enterprise which had for its aim the establishment of the Roman faith throughout the two' kingdoms, their suppression was to be the first object of the French Court. After the Peace of C^teau-Cambr^sis, Henry II. had begun to prosecute his own heretics, and he wished the Queen Regent to deal summarily with hers. It is to these influences from abroad that our his torians ascribe the rupture between Mary of Lorraine and the Protestants, but their importance has probably been over-rated. In the spring of 1559 the Sieur de B^thencourt was sent into Scotland to procure the ratification of the Peace ; and according to Sir James Melville, who as the confidant of the Constable Mont morency had some reason to know, he carried with him instructions to the Regent to suppress the new religion, " and to begin in time before the heretics should spread any further, who by her gentle bearing had already over great place, as was reported to the king of France. . . . Whereat the Queen Regent appeared to be 1 Teulet, Relations Politiques, i. 300 ; Leslie, p. 264. ^Foreign Calendar, 1558-59, Nos. 169, 170. THE RELIGIOUS QUARREL 55 sorry." ^ Melville adds that the first result of B^then- court's mission was a proclamation requiring all subjects to participate with the Church in the observance of Easter. It has been shown, however, that in so far as this proclamation is concerned, Melville's account is at variance with the facts ; for the Treaty of Cfi,teau-Cam- br^sis was not concluded till the 2nd of April, whereas Easter fell that year on the 29th of March, and more- ever the Act of Oblivion, which was passed at the end of the struggle, is reckoned from the 6th of that month.* Obviously, then, the Regent had begun to oppose the Reformation before the arrival of B^thencourt's em bassy ; and if she was dissatisfied with the policy of the French Court, it must have been with the methods suggested, not the object. These probably were unscrupulous enough. At all events, when new envoys came over in September, they advocated the most sanguinary measures, such as a massacre of the nobility and a general conflagration of heretics, and against these measures both the Regent and D'Oysel did certainly remonstrate.* Mary's disposition towards the Reformers must necessarily have been profoundly modified, when they took the offensive in December, 1557, and probably from this period she secretly sup ported the hierarchy, as far as her daughter's interests would permit. It is remarkable that as early as March, 1558, Archbishop Hamilton in writing to -Argyll de clared that he had incurred the displeasure of the Regent through his want of severity towards the heretics ; * * Sir James Melville's Memoirs, pp. 76, 77. 2 M'Crie's Life of Knox, i. 432, 433. Melville's chronology, as M'Crie justly remarks, is utterly unreliable. A flagrant example of this is to be found on pp. 72, 73 of his Memoirs. ^Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, No. 619 ; Buchanan, iii. 128. * Knox's Works,!. 279. 56 THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION, 1550-1559 and possibly— though of this there is no evidence— thd execution of Myln in the following April was instigated by her as an answer to the Protestant challenge. The Lords of the Congregation afterwards declared that the Dowager had encouraged them to compromise themselves with the Church, and then, when she no longer required their support against the Hamiltons, had united with the Church to suppress them as heretics and traitors. To this she might very well have replied that she tolerated the religion of the Reformers so long as they continued to tolerate hers, and indeed for more than a year longer. Had she denounced the Protestant Band as a dissolution of the alliance and at once declared war, her conduct would have been irreproach able : it is the year of waiting, during which she dis guised her hostility with a view to securing the marriage of her daughter and the crown matrimonial for the Dauphin, that tells most heavily against her. But for us of to-day these party recriminations are of little moment. Reformation history has been so blighted and disfigured by invidious personalities that) we are apt to exaggerate the influence of individuals on the issues at stake. Fire and water were not more irrecon cilable than the old religion and the new, and the concessions made on either side were intended merely to postpone the inevitable conflict. On the one hand, Mary, in the interest of the French ascendency, had protected Protestantism till it was strong enough to defy both Church and State ; on the other hand, the Protestants, in order to secure her protection, had helped to establish a system of government, which they afterwards denounced in the strongest terms as in jurious to the honour and the independence of Scotland. CHAPTER II. THE WAE OF EEFOKMATION, 1559-1560. Everything now pointed to a rupture between the Government and the Protestants, and Archbishop Hamilton was quick to anticipate the Regent's change of policy. In the last days of 1558, when the business of the French marriage had been finally adjusted, he summoned several of the preachers to answer for their conduct at St. Andrews, whereupon, says a contem porary chronicle, " the brethren . . . caused inform the Queen Regent that the said preachers would appear with such multitude of men professing their doctrine as was never seen before in such like cases in this country. Then the Queen, fearing some uproar or sedition, desired the Bishop to continue the matter." ^ Soon afterwards a Provincial Council met at Edinburgh, and the Regent showed her sympathy with its proceedings by causing several of the statutes to be proclaimed at the market crosses — in particular, one which forbade any person under pain of death to preach or to administer the sacrament without authority from the bishop. The Reformers paid no regard either to this proclamation or to the one enforcing the observance of Easter ; and the 1 " History of the Estate of Scotland " : Wodrow Miscellany, i. 51-85. 58 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 townspeople of Perth gave defiance to the Government by openly embracing the new religion. This last occur rence exasperated the Regent ; and after some hesitation due to the threats and entreaties of the Protestant leaders, she summoned four of the preachers to appear at Stirling on the 10th of May. The Regent having thus supported the Primate in his original intention, the Reformers adhered to theirs ; and a body of five or six thousand men, though without arms, assembled at Perth in support of the accused ministers. In order to stay the advance of this peaceable host, Mary spoke plausibly to their envoy, Erskine of Dun, of taking " some better order " ; and then, when the preachers failed to appear on the day fixed, she put them to the horn, thinking, no doubt, that their readiness to appear in this very questionable shape was a much more heinous offence than if they had declined to appear at all.^ The Reformers at Perth, who had interpreted the allusion to " some better order " as a cancelling of the summons, believed themselves duped ; and Erskine's denunciations of the royal deceit having put a fresh edge on the usual sermons against idolatry, " the rascal multitude " inaugurated the Reformation in the shape best known to the general reader by pulling down the Charterhouse and the dwellings of the Black and Grey Friars. The leaders appear to have been somewhat 1 Knox, Works, i. 316-319. Sir James Crofts, writing from Berwick to the English Government, says, " The Regent commanded these preachers to appear before her at Stirling, and they being accompanied with a train of 5,000 or 6,000 persons, the Regent dismissed the appearance, putting the preachers to the horn." — Foreign Calendar, 1558-1559, No. 710. That this was the reason of the Eegent's action there can be no doubt, but apparently it was not the pretext. The English Government was not very accurately informed. Knox is said to have been preaching at Dundee, instead of at Perth ; and in another letter (No. 840) the outbreak of the troubles is said to have been at Dumfries. RETURN OF KNOX 59 scandalised by these excesses, to which, however, they were soon so completely reconciled as to sanction similar outrages in all parts of the Lowlands. Mary was naturally indignant, for the Charterhouse was the noblest building of the kind in Scotland, the foundation and the burial-place of James the First ; and the Reformers probably aggravated her wrath by publishing four manifestoes, addressed to herself, D'Oysel and the French officers, the Nobility, and the Prelates. In the first three of these they represent themselves as loyal subjects whom persecution had rendered mutinous, and, if it continued, might make rebels ; but in the last they speak of the clergy as " the generation of Antichrist, the pestilent Prelates and their shavelings," and threaten them as idolaters with " that same war which God commanded Israel to execute against the Canaanites." Thus they promised obedience on condition that they should be allowed to destroy the abbeys and overturn the established religion. John Knox had returned from the Continent just in time to take part in these opening scenes at Perth, having landed at Leith on the 2nd of May, 1559. A work such as this must necessarily have something to say on the character and influence of this extraordinary man ; but the subject will be treated more appropriately at a later stage ; for Kjiox, though a born revolutionary, was called by destiny to be a builder rather than a destroyer. His personality was too overpowering not to make itself felt at every stage of his career ; but he embodied in himself the religious principle which co-operated with many other forces to establish the revolution ; and it was not till this principle had parted company with its political and social allies that his influence could become supreme and distinct. In other words, though merely a 60 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 leading agent, and not the most important, in the triumph of the Reformation, he was, in a sense, the founder of the Reformed Church. The details of the struggle do not fall to be recorded here, except in so far as they may be necessary to illustrate a few of its outstanding features. It is re markable that for the first five months, though on three occasions hostilities were with difficulty averted, the quarrel was entirely bloodless, being no more than a war of manifestoes backed by displays of force and interrupted temporarily by agreements, which the Regent was persistently accused of having violated. Mary of Lorraine has become notorious as a truce- breaker. That she was no novice in the art of dissimu lation is evident from Sir Ralph Sadler's report of his interview with her in 1543 ;^ but in her dealings with the Reformers, apart from the words attributed to her by Knox, which must always be of questionable authen ticity, and in some cases are either plainly false or out rageously improbable, she seems at the worst to have sought refuge in language, which, though it may have been intended to convey a false impression, was not necessarily inconsistent with her subsequent conduct. Unlike Charles the First, she had no scruples which could prevent her being politic, but, like him, she was not strong enough to be faithfully conscientious,^ though it was her position that was weak, not her character. The Reformers, indeed, did not always adhere to their ' She also forged a letter in Chatelherault's name to Francis II. in order\ to compromise him with the English. Teulet printed it as " une nouvelle ^ preuve de la faiblesse de caractfere et de I'irrlsolution du due du Chatelle- rault." — Relations Politiques, i. 406. But the Dowager admits the forgery in a letter to the Ca.vAmal.— Foreign Calendar, 1559-1560, No. 906. 2 " Too conscientious to be politic, hardly strong enough to be faithfully ¦conscientious." — Stubbs on Charles I. ICONOCLASM 61 side of the bargain ; ^ and while loudly complaining of broken treaties, they persisted in a course of conduct . which made all compromise impossible. In the space of six weeks many of the noblest ecclesiastical buildings had been pulled to the ground. tThe Charterhouse at Perth ; St. Andrews Cathedral, the largest church in the country, which had been 160 years in building, which Bruce had seen consecrated and which he had endow^ed in gratitude for the victory of Bannockburn ; Scone Abbey, where for centuries the kings of Scotland had been crowned ; Cambuskenneth, and monasteries of lesser fame in every part of the Lowlands — all had met the same fate ; and such was the senseless fury of the mob, that in many cases they not only pulled down the cloisters, but even hacked and uprooted the trees in the convent gardens.^ Attempts have been made to mini mise these excesses on the ground that Protestantism at this period was so weak that Knox's denunciations of idolatry could not have had the influence attributed to them.^ The argument is at variance with the facts, but ¦even on a priori grounds it is entirely inconclusive. Protestantism was indeed weak, as we shall see ; but the spirit of contempt for the Church, which a word from Knox could inflame into iconoclasm, had diffused itself through the whole body of the people. The voice was the voice of Knox, but the hand was Sir David Lindsay's. Although the Congregation, as the Protestants now called themselves, vehemently repudiated the charge of rebellion, their proceedings were obviously incapable 1 See Wodrow Miscellany, i. 66. '^ Leslie, pp. 272, 275. The Queen Regent noticed this as " e?icore plus inhumain."— Teulet, i. 328. 3 Joseph Robertson in Quarterly Review, Ixxxv. 62 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 of any other interpretation ; and the question was set at rest on the 29th of June, when they entered Edin burgh in triumph, driving the Regent before them, seized the palace of Holyrood, and on pretence of stopping the issue of debased coins, took possession of the Mint. It was no secret to Mary that they had begun to correspond with agents of the English Govern ment ; and an event soon occurred which greatly in tensified the quarrel by strengthening the French ascendency and making it at the same time more obnoxious to England. On the 10th of July Henry IL was cut off in the flower of his age as the result of an accident in the tiltyard. According to Sir James Melville, he had resolved on a change of policy in Scotland — to throw over the Church and to " commit Scotismen's saules unto God " ; ^ but Francis and Mary, who now succeeded to the throne of the two kingdoms, had no such intention, and the Guises were resolved to root out heresy with a view to enforcing the claim of their niece to the English crown. From this point matters slowly, but surely, drifted into war. Assured of reinforcements from France, the Regent began to fortify Leith as a base of supplies, whilst the Congrega tion, relying, though with much less confidence, on Elizabeth, ventured to take firmer ground.. As early as the 13th of August they let Cecil understand that they were waiting only for a specific understanding with England to depose Mary from the Regency;^ and this step, professedly- in the name of the absent sovereigns, was actually taken on the 23rd of October. It was at this time that the rebels gained an accession to their ranks of the highest possible value in the ^Memoirs, p. 80. ^Foreign Calendar, 1558-1559, No. 1186. THE FRENCH FORCE 63 person of Maitland of Lethington, the Queen Regent's Secretary of State. '^ Even those, who think most un favourably of Maitland's subsequent career, will hardly deny that on this occasion he was justified in changing sides. An avowed Protestant, he had entered the Regent's service at a time when she was on good terms with the reformed religion ; he vehemently resented her anti-national policy ; and he was so odious, as a heretic, to the more extreme of the French Catholics that the Bishop of Amiens is said to have sought his life. He now became the political head of the Congregation, and their negotiations with England were conducted almost entirely by him. Of Maitland it will be necessary to say much in another place ; and if his name does not occur very frequently in the course of the present chapter, it is only because his policy during this period — the most prosperous, though not the most interesting of his career — was identical in all respects with that of the Protestant party. } The deposition of the Regent was equivalent to a declaration of war ; and it will be worth our while to compare roughly the strength of the opposing forces. When the contest began in May, 1559, the Regent had 2,000 troops at her disposal, 500 of which were Scottish soldiers in the pay of France, and the rest French ; but as many of the latter were Huguenots, their temper was by no means reliable. In August she received a reinforcement of 1,000 men, and in the course of the next five months contingents arrived at various times, amounting in all to about another 1,000. The whole French army in Scotland never at any time exceeded 4,000, and the number actually 1 Calderwood says that Maitland " conveyed himself out of Leith a little before Alhallow ^ye."— History of the Kirk, i. 553. 64 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 landed in English ships at Calais at the close of the war was returned as 3,500.^ The troops of the Con gregation, though on many occasions far more numerous, were a very fluctuating body ; but in almost all the elements that make for success in civil war the Protestants had an immense advantage. The Lord James and Argyll, who at first discoun tenanced the movement, joined it at the beginning of June ; in July they received assurances of support, and in August a large sum of money from England. In September the Earl of Arran, Ch^telherault's eldest son, who had fled from France to escape a prosecution for heresy, was smuggled across the Border by Cecil. This was the person whom Henry VIII. had once thought of as a husband for Elizabeth. Hints were now thrown out that the scheme might be revived ; and henceforward the whole weight of the Hamilton faction, except, of course, the Archbishop, who re mained loyally at his post, was thrown on the Protestant side. In November information reached London that of all the nobility the Earl of Bothwell and the Lords Borthwick and Seton alone adhered to the Regent.^ In spite, however, of this assured position con tinually increasing in strength the Protestants betrayed from the first a most remarkable lack of energy and determination. When they entered Edinburgh in arms on the 29th of June, they had evidently gone too far to recede, and their object ought to have been to bring the matter at once to a decisive issue. D'Oysel had retreated before them to Dunbar ; and such was the condition of his troops — all of them discontented for 1 Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 389, note. 2 Ibid. 1559-1560, No. 234. WEAKNESS OF THE PROTESTANTS 65 lack of pay and the Huguenots in open mutiny — that he had serious thoughts of giving up the struggle and retiring to France.^ Nevertheless, in the space of three weeks, he found himself strong enough to make a night march on Leith ; and the Lords of the Congregation were forced into a treaty, by which they agreed to evacuate the capital, and even to suspend for a time their hostility to the Mass and the religious houses. The Lords were unceasing in their appeals for aid to England ; and Cecil was justly indignant that they did so little to help themselves. Vainly had he warned them that an army was being raised against them in France, vainly exhorted them to drive out the few foreign troops then in Scotland and to secure the seaports, so that the newcomers, having no friends to welcome them, might not be able to effect a landing.^ The advent of Arran, from which great things were expected in London, did nothing ap parently to stimulate their efforts. They contented themselves with verbal protests, when the Regent began to fortify Leith, deplored their inability to raise a force in time of harvest, and then, when the works were completed, declared them so strong that they could not hazard an assault. Five months of purposeless inactivity, neither war nor peace, had greatly improved the position of the Queen Regent, who had received reinforcements, and had a port ready to receive more; and when hostilities broke out 1 Teulet, Relations Politiques, i. 330, 331. * " Will ye hear of a strange army coming by seas to invade you, and aeek help against the same, and yet permit your adversaries, whom ye may oxpel, keep the landing and strength for the others ? Which of these two is easiest, to weaken one number first, or three afterward ? Surely what moveth this to be forborne, I know not."— Cecil to the Lords of the Con gregation, July 28th, 1558. Foreign Calendar, 1558-1559, No. 1086. E 66 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 late in the autumn, the Congregation fared very badly. On the 6th of November, after several unsuccessful skirmishes, they were signally defeated in the suburbs of Edinburgh; and the same night they abandoned the city, amid the jeers of the populace, in such haste and confusion that they left their artillery standing in the streets. After this the French wrought their pleasure throughout the country, until the English fleet came north in January. In explanation of this long record of failure on the part of the Congregation, it has usually been thought , sufficient to say that the Scottish troops were inferior in discipline to the French, and that, being merely feudal levies, they could not remain in the field for more than three weeks at a time. These reasons, though pertinent enough, are hardly satisfactory. Even at the worst, a feudal force is capable of periodic renewal; and the Lords had always a considerable body of mercenaries hired with their own and with English money. Ten years had not elapsed since the nation had been at death-grips with the southern invader, and of the soldiers trained to arms in that desperate conflict the great majority must still have been available for service. Before the fortifications of Leith were completed, the Queen Regent was not at all formidable ; and the Protestant leaders, knowing the nature of their force and the advantage which every day wasted gave to their opponents, had every reason to act with vigour. The truth is — and almost every page of contemporary history bears witness to the fact — that the Lords of the Congregation profoundly distrusted their own cause. Protestantism was undoubtedly weak, both in the measure of support it received throughout the country WEAKNESS OF THE PROTESTANTS 67 and in the temper of many of its professed adherents.^ It was a growing force in some of the towns, eight of which are said to have been provided with pastors before September, 1559 ;^ but it had absolutely no hold on the peasantry, and the nobles, who almost all pro fessed the new faith for reasons peculiar to themselves, were feebly supported by their vassals. In the absence of any strong popular feeling, the feudal levies proved thoroughly inefficient ; the men came in in scant numbers and dispersed again on the first opportunity. After the deposition of the Regent, when the quarrel had plainly become irreconcilable, a spirit of misgiving pervaded the Congregation, which, on the first serious reverse, became undisguised panic. " The ministers of God's Word ceased not daily to preach and to exhort according to their duty, but the most part apparently took no great care of God's Word, for they began to weary, perceiving the matter to be difficult, and to draw to length." * The most secret plans of the rebels were betrayed to the enemy, and they strongly suspected the traitors to be of their own number ; the mercenaries mutinied ; the Duke began to tremble for his head, and his trembling infected many others. " Men did so steal , away," says Knox, " that the wit of man could not stay them." * ^ " L'immense majorite de la population, dans toutes des classes, s'^tait d6tach6e de I'ancienne religion, ou plut6t de la hierarchic, sans veritable enthousiasme pour la foi nouvelle. EUe 6tait pr§te a I'accepter, voire k piller pour elle 6glises et monastferes ; elle n'6tait pas prSte S, faire pour elle des sacrifices considerables." "Sans doute, la reforme religieuse n'6tait pas pour les ificossais d'alors une question nationale." — Philippson, Histoire du Rigne de Marie Stuart, ii. 170, 171. 2 M'Crie's Life of Knox, i. 284. 2 Wodrow Miscellany, i. 70. See also Buchanan. * Works, i. 464 ; Spottiswoode's History, i. 306. 68 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 There is little trace here of that enthusiasm and tenacity of purpose which we are wont to associate with the idea of a religious war; and the Lords were so entirely sceptical as to the power of Protestantism to win them support that they sought more and more to shift the course of the dispute into another channel. In all their later manifestoes they appealed to their country men as patriots rather than as religious zealots. They even took pains to show that, the oppression of the French being exercised on Papists and Protestants alike, religion could not be the main issue at stake.^ Again and again, with wearisome reiteration, they expatiated on the conspiracy of the Queen Regent and the French Court to extinguish the liberties and inde pendence of Scotland, and to reduce the country to a province of France. That they were right in this con tention cannot be denied ; but we may reasonably doubt whether the evidence then available was sufficient to give force to their arguments with the nation at large. Distrust of France had, indeed, long been sapping an alliance which was the growth of centuries, but in the absence of any palpable act of aggression the process could proceed but slowly. One would suppose, too, that these asseverations of patriotic fervour must have sounded somewhat hollow in the mouths of the Protestant lords. They were the representatives of a party which in recent years had shown itself singularly obtuse to the dictates of the national honour — a party which had incited Hertford to his merciless devastations, and which, even in the dark days after Pinkie, had offered to take service with the English invader.^ Several of the leaders of the Congregation had been in the pay of Henry VIIL Kirkcaldy of Grange had been 1 Spottiswoode, i. 296. ^^ytjej^ yj^ Appendix ii. APATHY OF THE NATION 69 one of Beaton's assassins ; and Cockburn of Ormiston, whom Bothwell intercepted on his way from Berwick with a supply of English money, had acted a far more odious part as an agent in Henry's schemes for " the killing of the Cardinal." The return of England to Catholicism under Mary Tudor had, indeed, dissevered Scottish Protestantism from its unpatriotic tradition ; but the Lords had compromised themselves in another quarter. They denounced the Queen Regent for the alien character of her government, and it was mainly through their concurrence that such a government had been established. In one of their manifestoes, for example, they reproached the Dowager with having supplanted Chatelherault in the Regency, and with having bribed the nobility to consent to her design,^ though it was notorious that the Protestants on that occasion had been her best friends, and if anyone was bribed, it was most probably themselves. No doubt, in their compliance with the Regent's French policy, the Reformers had acted only as practical politicians, who make concessions in one quarter in order to obtain them in another; but the people in every age and country has had a craving for consistency in its statesmen, and the antecedents of the Protestant lords could not fail to weaken their position as champions of the national freedom against the tyranny of France. In whatever way we may attempt to account for it, the small part played by the nation at large in this crisis of its political and religious history is very remarkable. Both the contending factions were dependent on external support, and the matter seems to have been regarded in Scotland as little more than a personal quarrel between the Regent and the nobility. ^Foreign Calendar, 1559-1560, No. 42. 70 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 Had Mary been able to enlist more native troops, she would probably have done so, but the number of Scots in her service seems actually to have diminished. In May, 1560, it was reported that the French "cannot get past six score Scots in wages " ; and after the surrender of Leith the English had great difficulty in protecting the garrison from the fury of the mob. On the other hand, Knox declared at the outbreak of the war that the Lords made no progress with their levies, partly indeed for lack of money, but also "because men have no will to hazard." Even Randolph, the English agent, who in general speaks very favourably of the Scots, thought it "great discontentation for a man to travail where so little love to God is or zeal to their country." At the beginning of 1560 it was believed in London that, if the neutrals of Lothian and Berwick shire could be induced to declare for the Congregation, the latter would be more than a match for the French. These people were supposed to be waiting for English intervention ; but England, at all events amongst the lower classes, seems to have been only one degree less unpopular than France. When Elizabeth's army had been some time in Scotland, Lord Grey of Wilton com plained that he could get no Scot to serve with hiin either for love or money ; and the English wounded were fain to lie in the streets of Edinburgh because the citizens refused, even for payment, to receive them into their houses. It was evident, however, from the first that, without English intervention, the Protestant move ment must inevitably collapse ; and Knox admitted this more than once in his correspondence with Cecil. ^ ^Foreign Calendar, 1559-1560, Nos. 138, 683, 1056; 1560-1561, Nos. 28, 46, 323. " If the English lie as neutrals, what will be the enji he (Cecil) may easily conjecture." — Knox to Cecil, August 6, 1559. ' POLICY OF ELIZABETH 71 The position of Elizabeth, who was a party to the great European treaty of Citeau-Cambrdsis in AprU, 1559, and had concluded a separate peace with Scotland only a few days after the troubles there began, was a very difficult one. In so far as the Reformers were rebels, she had no wish to countenance them ; and the Scottish Reformation was overshadowed in her eyes by the obnoxious personality of Knox and Goodman, both of whom had written against "the monstrous Regiment of Women," and had adopted the teaching of Calvin that rebellion against an ungodly sovereign was not merely justifiable, but a religious duty. On the other hand, she could not reasonably risk war with France on behalf of insurgents, who had not so far committed themselves that they might not at any moment become her enemy's loyal subjects. The policy she adopted was the outcome of these conflicting interests. She strove to embitter the dispute, and encouraged the Scots to throw off the Regent's authority, with reserva tion of their duty to their sovereign, whilst at the same time in the Earl of Arran she sent them a leader, whose right of succession to the crown and hope of marriage with herself covered the nakedness of rebellion with some show of dynastic policy. The collapse of the Protestant movement in November showed that furtive supplies of money were powerless to ensure its success ; and Elizabeth under the guidance of CecH, who firmly believed that the Scots at this crisis were England's first line of defence, ventured, after some hesitation, to act more boldly. Maitland, whom the Lords sent to plead their cause in London, was cordially received by the Queen. In January, 1560, a fleet was despatched to Leith to intercept the reinforcements which the Regent expected from France ; and on the 27th of 72 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 February a treaty was concluded at Berwick, which pledged the Queen to still more decisive measures. The treaty was signed by the Duke of Norfolk in name of Elizabeth, and by certain commissioners in name of the Duke of Chatelherault, second person of the Realm of Scotland and statutory heir to the crown, as well as of the other Protestant lords. Elizabeth agreed to send an army into Scotland to avert the conquest of that country by France, and the Scots on their part promised assistance to England in the event of a French invasion. They obtained this boon " only for preservation of them in their old freedoms and liberties and from conquest " ; and England promised never to desert them in the hour of danger " as long as they shall acknowledge their Sovereign Lady and Queen, and shall endeavour them selves to maintain the liberty of their country and the estate of the Crown of Scotland." Thus did Elizabeth seek to lay the spectre of rebellion ; and the sentiment of nationality, which had so long held England and Scotland at mortal defiance, was converted at last into a bond of union. ^ The Treaty of Berwick makes no mention of religion ; and indeed, though it saved the Reformation, it has in other respects a deeper and a more abiding interest. Cecil was no stranger to that idea of a united Britain, which Edward I. had rudely attempted to realise, and which Henry VIIL in all his dealings with Scotland had kept steadily in view.J " This one thing I covet," he wrote to the Duke of Chatelherault, " to have this isle well united in concord, and then could I be content to leave my life and the joy thereof to our posterity." ^ But Cecil, though he was true to Henry's ideal, was 1 Keith, i. 258-262, where the Treaty is printed in full. ^ Sadler, State Papers, i. 405. TREATY OF BERWICK 73 wise enough to profit by his failure. Personally he believed in the feudal superiority of the English crown, and even suggested it privately to his mistress as a ground of intervention in Scotland ; but not a word was said on this subject at Berwick, and the claim henceforward dropped into oblivion, never again to be seriously revived. The conduct of the Scottish com missioners, one of whom was Maitland of Lethington, showed, indeed, that in their opinion nothing could really secure the future of their country which did not vindicate its past. Refusing to treat on English ground, they met Elizabeth's agents on benches erected in the middle of the Tweed, and through their excessive punctiliousness the negotiations were actually com pleted on the Scottish side of the river. ^ Henry VIII. had required that the strongholds of Scotland should be delivered into his hands during the minority of Mary Stewart ; but now it was stipulated that whatever for tresses the English might win from the French should be either demolished or given up to the Protestant lords, and that they should raise no new fortifications without consent of the estates. When we consider the extreme weakness of the Protestant party at this period and the character of its former relations with England, these facts may well impress us as an eloquent testimony to the success of the struggle against Henry VIII. and Somerset. The work had been toilsome and bloody, but it did not require to be done again. In the modest British fashion our ancestors sought to signalise the importance of the Berwick treaty. Eliza beth's army, 7,000 strong, entered Scotland at the end ' Burton, iii. 367. Burton represents the coming of th& fleet as a result of the Treaty of Berwick. In reality, the fleet had been in the Forth since the 15th of January. 74 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 of March; and when the combined army advanced to the assault of Leith on the 7th of May, it was required that each Scot of gentle blood should take an English man of like degree by the hand.^ Thus "at last, though long, our jarring notes agreed " ; nor could the new and better day have been more happily inaugurated than by Scotsmen and Englishmen going hand in hand into battle against a foreign foe. The Treaty of Berwick might be of good augury for the future, but it seemed to have involved England in a very thankless task. Lord Grey had not advanced further than Prestonpans when he heard that Elizabeth, influenced by the arrival of Monluc, Bishop of Valence, to mediate between the Dowager and the rebels, was anxious to have the matter settled without bloodshed, whilst Norfolk, the Queen's Lieutenant on the Borders, exhorted him " both in that sort and in further order of expedition." ^ To add to his vexation at these contra dictory orders, he was disappointed in his allies. He found the nobility " painful and willing," but too weak to be of any real service, and the common people so ill- disposed that, as we have seen, he could not get them to serve with him either for love or money. The French, indeed, played into his hands by making two vigorous sallies, in the first of which they were repulsed and in the second victorious ; but it was not till the " abusing, dissembling treaty" had been discarded through the Bishop's failure in his project of mediation that a general assault was ordered on the 7th of May, and then, in spite of the happy incident just referred to, it was repulsed with a loss to the assailants of more than 1 Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, No. 37. Intercepted letter of the Dowager to D'Oysel. 2 Ibid., 1559-60, Nos. 948, 950. DEATH OF MARY OF LORRAINE 75 1,000 men. Meanwhile, Philip of Spain had been threatening to intervene ; and this caused great alarm to several of Elizabeth's ministers, particularly to Dr. Wotton, who declared it had never been intended that the English alone should drive out the French ; and now, in the helplessness of the Scots, they might have the Spaniards on their hands as well.^ Elizabeth, how ever, disbelieved in the Spanish scare ; the defeat of the 7th stiffened her resolution, and resulted only in the moving up of reinforcements from Berwick. The French fought most gallantly ; but their provisions were running short, the troops which ought to have doubled the strength of the garrison had perished at sea in the previous December, and Philip's schemes came to nothing with the destruction of his navy by the Turks. A few days before the baffled assault, the French Government, unable to send, further succour and threatened with a rising of the Huguenots, had sent over De Randan to treat for peace. Elizabeth had no desire to prolong a war which had opened so poorly ; and Cecil and Wotton were sent down to discuss pre liminaries with Randan and Monluc, first at Newcastle, and then at Berwick. They had not been three days at work when news reached them from Scotland that the French cause had lost by far its ablest and its most devoted champion. Mary of Lorraine had long been in failing health. In April she was far gone with dropsy; and on the approach of the English army Lord Erskine offered her an asylum in the Castle of Edinburgh, which he held in the Queen's name against both the belligerents. Though her life was fast ebbing away, the Dowager worked on with unfailing energy to the last, animating the garrison 1 Foreign Calendar, 1559-60, No. 985. 76 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 of Leith to sustained effort, and appealing for succour to her brothers in France. The Scots declared she did more harm than 500 Frenchmen; and Throckmorton, writing from Blois only three days before her death, urged Cecil for God's sake to have her removed from the Castle, for " she hath the heart of a man of war." On the 8th of June she was visited at her own request by several of the Protestant leaders. In broken utterances she besought them not to judge her harshly, to believe that, though loyal to France, she had sought the good of Scotland too ; and then, feeling her utter loneliness, she prayed them not to be far from her while she lived. Thus two days passed ; and on the morning of the 11th the booming of minute guns from the batteries at Leith announced that the end had come. The death of the unbending Dowager removed the chief obstacle to peace, for the French commissionersj, though invested with very large powers, had been instructed to defer on all points to her decision. On the 17th the diplomatists on both sides met in con ference in Edinburgh. The purely military question gave rise to little difficulty ; but, though the French were quite prepared to surrender Leith and to withdraw from the kingdom, Cecil was determined not to let them go until he had extorted from them at least two political concessions. One of these was so important in itself and was obtained in so ample and explicit a manner, that we can well believe Cecil's statement that it was the fruit of much bitter contention. Monluc and ^ Randan consented that Francis and Mary should not only recall all public documents stamped with the arms of England, but should abstain from using the said arms " in all times coming " — a provision which might be read so as to bar Mary's claim to the English NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE 77 crown on the death of Elizabeth. There remained, however, another and a still more serious difficulty. Cecil demanded the insertion of a clause to the effect that nothing in the treaty then in progress should be interpreted to the prejudice of the Treaty of Berwick, this being the most effective way of securing the safety of the Protestants, and being also a tacit avowal of that extinction of French influence in Scotland, which had long been a principal object of the Tudor policy. The latter reason would have been enough to make the proposed clause odious to the French, even if there had not been the further objection that Francis and Mary could hardly be expected to recognise the right of their subjects to enter into treaty with a foreign power ; and indeed Monluc and Randan had been specially instructed not to suffer any allusion to the Anglo- Scottish alliance. On this point, then, the negotiations broke down — a suggestion that the clauses of mutual protection in the Berwick treaty might be interpreted as between the French and English sovereigns being rejected by the Frenchmen on the ground that they had no authority "to make any such new league." On the 2nd of July Cecil and Wotton wrote a long letter to the Queen, in which they informed her that the conference was at an end) and that they had sent instructions to Norfolk to advance with the main army from Berwick. The letter had been sealed, but not despatched, when Cecil made a final endeavour to conciliate the French ; and writing again the same night he announced the success of his effort. The French commissioners, as the result of a separate negotiation, had granted a long list of con cessions to the Scots ; they consented that they should appear in the treaty as made to the Scots at the inter cession of Elizabeth, and that Francis and Mary should 78 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 promise to fulfil their obligations, provided that the Scots on their part performed theirs. Thus the link between England and Scotland was recognised impli- citiy, if not in words ; and Cecil wrote complacently to his mistress that " content with the kernel, h£ had granted the shell to the French to play withal." ^ J It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this memorable treaty, which not only secured indirectly the triumph of the Reformation in Scotland, but laid the foundation of an empire which has survived the wreck of creeds, and in our day is strong in the memories of the past and in the hope of a still greater future.j3Like most other historical landmarks, it was an end as well as a beginning. The struggle of French and English in Scotland may justly be regarded as a continua tion of the Hundred Years' War, from which, indeed, it is separated only by the hiatus in English foreign policy caused by the Wars of the Roses ; and thus the Treaty of Edinburgh, concluded little more than two years after the fall of Calais, may be said to have finally decided on a basis of compromise the mediaeval rivalry of France and England. The English had been driven out of France, but, on the other hand, the French by English hands had been expelled from Scotland ; and, not only so, but they had been forced to recognise 1 Keith, i. 287-308; Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, Nos. 261, 262, 311. Both Tytler and Burton say that the concession as to the arms of England was easily obtained, which hardly agrees with Cecil's statement : " This article was stifly denied until by threatening it was gotten." — Ibid. No. 261. Professor Hume Brown (Life of Knox, ii. 82) represents the French as saving their dignity by treating with the rebels at the intercession of England. So, indeed, one might suppose from the text of the treaty as ingeniously worded by Cecil ; but in reality the clause in question, far from being a victory for France, was a most distinct humiliation, the com missioners having received positive instructions " not to mingle matters of Scotland with England in the treaty, nor dishonour their king by noting that he is forced by the Queen to observe anything to his subjects." TREATY OF EDINBURGH 79 England as the heir to the place they had forfeited in the affections of the Scottish people. Cecil justly regarded his work at Edinburgh as the fulfilment of his noble aim "to have this isle well united in concord." In a letter to Elizabeth he declared " that the treaty would be no small augmentation to her honour in this beginning of her reign, that it would finally procure that conquest of Scotland, which none of her progenitors with all their battles ever obtained ; namely, the whole hearts and goodwills of the nobility and people, which surely was better for England than the revenue of the crown." ^ In these words we have the stronger nation gracefully acknowledging to the weaker its baffled ambition after two centuries and a half of not un generous warfare ; and though in the light of history Cecil's exultation may seem somewhat premature, it must surely be admitted that British nationality was recognised, in germ at least, if not in form, when that unfortunate alliance was cut asunder which had so long distracted the energies of our nation, and withheld it from the path of its imperial destiny. The concessions granted to the Scots in their separate treaty or " Accord " with the French were of the fullest and most liberal character. The withdraw^al of all French troops, except 120 to be divided between Dunbar and Inchkeith ; the dismantling of Leith and Dunbar, and a guarantee that no new fortifications should be raised without consent of the Estates ; a council of ten to be nominated equally by the Queen and the Estates from twenty-four persons chosen by the Estates ; no foreigner to be admitted to political or judicial office; and a general amnesty from March 6, 1559, to be framed by the Estates, with power to niake what exceptions they 1 Tytler, vi. 170. 80 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 pleased — these concessions might surely satisfy the most determined opponent of French influence in Scotland. In addition to these, however, there was another con cession, the meaning and extent of which were keenly discussed at the time, and are still a point of some difficulty to the historian. It was agreed that the Estates should assemble on the 10th of July, 1560, and that they should adjourn from that day to the 1st of August, provided that no business should be transacted before all hostilities had come to an end ; and in one of Cecil's despatches it is expressly stated that the object of the adjournment was to give time for the country to be cleared of men of war.^ In the interval the French commissioners were to order a despatch to Francis and Mary to inform them of this concession and to solicit their concurrence ; and then follows the statement, " and this assembly shall be as valid in all respects as if it had been called by the express commandment of the King and Queen." The despatch accordingly was sent;^ but as no reply had been received by the 1st of August, the Parliament spent eight days in discussing the legality of its own existence. One party urged that in the absence of a royal commission no Parliament could lawfully meet, another that the meeting of Parliament in such a case was the very circumstance provided for in the Accord ; and this opinion being the verdict of the majority, the House proceeded to business.* On the ^Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 315. *The Cardinal of Lorraine told Throckmorton that Francis had received letters from his commissioners " of the 7th July," and these were probably the despatch in question. — Foi-eign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 411. ' Spottiswoode, i. 325. There is no mention of this discussion in Knox, in Calderwood, or in Randolph's letters. But Spottiswoode had reason to know, his father being a leading Reformer, and it is certain that uo formal business was transacted before the 9th. WAS THE PARLIAMENT LEGAL ? 81 whole, the majority was probably right ; for, if the Parliament could legally constitute itself on the 10th of July without " the express commandment " of the sovereign, there seems to be no good reason why it could not, under the same conditions, set to work on the 1st of August. Moreover, the time allowed for com munication with the French Court was so exceedingly short — if it was not wholly inadequate — that the message was probably rather a matter of courtesy than of serious import ; ^ and we have seen that the holding of the Parliament was made conditional, not on the tenour of the reply, but on the cessation of hostilities. If, however, the Parliament was not in itself illegal, it evidently might become so by violating the provisions of the Accord ; and this indeed we shall find to have been the case.^ In one respect the Parliament of 1560 was a signal innovation on the established usage ; for the inferior gentry, impelled doubtless by their interest in the new religion, successfully asserted their right to be present*. The constitutional status in Scotland of the lesser barons 1 Throckmorton expressly tells us that the distance from Edinburgh to Melun, a place about 25 miles from Paris, was " fifteen or sixteen good journeys." — Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 412. 2 Professor Hume Brown refers to Teulet, Papiers d'Etat, i. 606, as evidence that Francis II. regarded the Treaty of Edinburgh as perfectly valid, and "if the Treaty of Edinburgh was valid, its terms necessarily imply the legality of the Parliament of August." — Life of Knox, ii. 87, note. This is a misreading of the letter of Francis to the Bishop of Limoges. Francis says he means to abide by the treaty, not because it is valid, but " pour le repos uuiversel de la chrestient6 et bein et tran quillity de mon royaulme." Indeed, the whole tenour of the letter implies that Francis might have repudiated the treaty, if he had chosen so to do ; and assuredly Francis would never have admitted that the legality of the Parliament was implied in the terms of the treaty, for he proposed to send over commissioners to hold the Parliament legitimately. — Francis II. to the Estates of Scotland, November 16 ; Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 712. F 82 THE WAR OP REFORMATION, 1559-1560 — but here they were called simply barons — seems to have been precisely the same as it was in England,' where their right to attend Parliament in person had been affirmed by the Great Charter, and proving burdensome, had been exchanged for that of electing representatives. In Scotland, however, the Act of 1427, which required two commissioners to be sent from each shire, was wholly inoperative till it was re-enacted in 1587, so that the lairds, being no more zealous in such matters than the English squirearchy, had almost ceased to be an integral part of Parliament. On no occasion had more than thirty been present, and during the 1*1 years which preceded the Reformation hardly any of them had appeared at all, and none without a special writ.^ But in this Parliament the names of no less than 110 barons are recorded, "with many other barons, freeholders, and landed men without all armour," 2 and the great majority of these can have received no writ of summons. The French commis sioners had laid down that '*it shall be lawful for all those to be present who are in use to be present without being frightened or constrained " ; and though the clause was plainly intended to be precautionary rather than restrictive, the resort of so unwonted a multitude might easily be construed as an attempt at that intimi dation which the clause had been framed to prevent. During the week which preceded the formal opening of the Parliament Knox preached daily in St. Giles's from Haggai on the building of the Temple, and the first effect of his discourses was to reveal the possibility of a schism in the Protestant party. Some of his 'Keith, i. 316,317. "'Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 428. Instructions given by the Estates to Sir James Sandilands, their envoy to the French Court. THE CONFESSION 83 hearers were far from being favourably impressed, and Maitland sarcastically remarked : " We mon now forget ourselves and bear the barrow to build the houses of God." Others, however, took the matter so much to heart that they met in conference and agreed upon a petition to the Estates, which was evidently inspired, if not written, by Knox himself. In this document they prayed for the total abolition of the Roman doctrine and ritual. That this might not seem too sweeping a reform, they undertook to prove that " in all the rabble of the clergy there is not one lawful minister," but that all of them are " thieves and murderers, rebels and traitors, living in whoredom and adultery, and doing all abominations without fear of punishment" ; ^ and anyone who might be disposed to expect better things of them in future was assured of his mistake. The petition also glanced at the monstrous abuses caused by the purchase of benefices at Rome ; and Knox tells us that, when it was read in Parliament, many of the nobles "abhorred a perfect Reformation," because they had unjustly possessed themselves of the patrimony of the Kirk. Dissension on this point, however, was happily averted; for the petitioners were merely directed to draw up a statement of the doctrines which they wished the Parlia ment to confirm, and in the space of four days they returned with the document known to ecclesiastical historians as the Scottish Confession. The Confession was read on the 17th of August; and unlike the petition which gave rise to it, and another and more pretentious document presented a few months later, it was received with enthusiastic approval, the nobles, with' some five exceptions, declaring that in this faith they would live and die, and many offering to shed their blood in its 1 Knox, Works, ii. 89-92. 84 THE WAR OP REFORMATION, 1559-1560 defence. A week later, three Acts were passed abolish ing the authority of the Pope within the realm and prohibiting the celebration of Mass under very heavy penalties— confiscation of goods, banishment, and, for the third offence, death. Thus, when the Parliament was dissolved, or at all events rose, on the 27th, the ancient ecclesiastical system had been swept away, and nothing more substantial than a form of doctrine had been established in its place. ^ Whatever may have been the justice or the ex pediency of these proceedings, they were certainly at variance with the provisions of the Accord, which, though it had not expressly limited the jurisdiction of the Parliament, had done so implicitly beyond all reasonable doubt. The last article provided that, as the French commissioners had no power to determine any thing with regard to religion, "some persons of quality" should be chosen in the ensuing Parliament to make "remonstrances" on this subject to the King and Queen, and to know their pleasure therein. Religious legislation seems thus to have been debarred ; for obviously there could be no use in petitioning the sovereign for a reform of religion, when the Parliament had already settled the matter in its own way. There was, however, another and a more stringent article to which the French Government invariably appealed in proof of its assertion that the Scots had violated the treaty. This article required that reparation should be made to any bishops, abbots, or other ecclesiastics who might complain of injury to their persons or goods, and that in the meantime they should be free to enjoy their revenues without violence or molestation. Accordingly, three of the bishops sent in a petition for redress ; but not choosing apparently to face so hostile an assembly, THE TREATY VIOLATED 85 they failed to appear in its support, whereupon the Parliament declared itself absolved from blame, and issued a decree for "the stay of their livings." Inter preted in any broad sense, the article could mean only that the hierarchy was to be secured against further attack ; nor is it easy to see by what means greater injury could have been done to the whole body of the clergy than by abolishing the Mass and thus interdict ing them from the discharge of their functions. If in these proceedings the Protestants infringed the letter of the treaty, there was another in which they violated its spirit, and that, too, in a very essential point. They must have been well aware that the French commis sioners had received positive instructions not to re cognise the Anglo- Scottish alliance, and that Cecil had contrived to compromise the matter only when the negotiations had practically been broken off. In spite of this, the Parliament, at the instance of the English Government, passed an Act in confirmation of the Treaty of Berwick. The Act is said to have passed unanimously ; but we know from Randolph that great efforts had been necessary to win over many of the nobles ; ^ and Maitland, though he strongly supported the measure, admitted to Cecil that it would highly irritate the French.^ It must appear somewhat extraordinary that the Protestants, whose weakness had been so conspicuous in the late war, should thus have challenged France to a renewal of the struggle ; but their conduct is ex- 1 Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, No. 418. 2 Ibid. No. 461. Cecil sent down a draft of the Act, " before the receipt whereof, upon a five days, the treaty was by the Estates confirmed, in form nothing disagreeing from the advice contained in Cecil's letter." —Ibid. No. 469. Maitland to Cecil, August 29. 86 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 plained to some extent by the hope, which Elizabeth had done much indirectly to encourage, of a marriage between herself and the Earl of Arran. It was this which had prevailed upon the waverers to concur with the majority of the Parliament in confirming the Treaty of Berwick. From the first the Protestants had looked to this marriage as the seal and reward of their amity with England ; in the general repugnance to France the project was widely popular ; and Maitland declared that "the very Papists can be content for the accomplishment thereof to renounce their god the Pope." ^ Chatelherault was so intoxicated with the grandeur in store for his family that he could talk of nothing else ; and the signature of his brother the Archbishop is the first of those appended to the document in which the Estates announced their purpose to Francis II. Precisely how much was intended by the promoters of the scheme it might be difficult to say. In their letter to Francis the Estates urged that Arran was one of his own sub* jects, that he had been educated in France, and that France through this marriage would be assured of the friendship of England.^ There can be little doubt, how ever, that, if the scheme had succeeded, the Scots would have thrown off their allegiance to Mary Stewart and raised Elizabeth and Arran to the throne of the two kingdoms. Statesmanship must have approved such a consummation ; the extreme Protestant party would have been content with nothing less ; and through the overthrow of the Roman Church the French connexion had become more anomalous than ever.^ 1 Foreign Calenda/r, 1560-61, No. 523. 2 1^^ jj^^ 479, 'There was a rumour — nothing more — that, in the event of the marriage taking place, the Guises "will cause the French Queen to renounce her title for ever to Scotland " in return for a renunciation, on RATTFICATION REFUSED AT PARIS 87 The prospect of union with England renders the violent proceedings of the Parliament more intelligible, in so far as they reflect on the policy of its leaders ; but even had no such prospect existed, these proceedings must still have been the same. The Church was so far gone in decay, the nation so utterly indifferent to its fate, the preachers so vehement against it, and the nobles so deeply interested in its overthrow, that no attempt to substitute reform for revolution could have had any chance of success ; and when the treaty had to be violated in spirit through the renewal of the league with England, the observance of its stipulations in favour of the hierarchy w^as not of much importance. The French, however, made a dexterous use against Elizabeth of the conduct of her Scottish allies. When her ambassador in France pressed for the ratification of the treaty, he was told that, as the Queen had chosen to identify herself with the Scots, it was but reasonable that the Scots should fulfil their obligations before the French king ratified the treaty with England. If Elizabeth wished the treaty to be confirmed, she must either find means to recall the Scots to their duty or renounce her league with the latter by suffering them to be left out of the treaty.^ Apart from this difficulty with France, there was a party among the Scottish Reformers whose inflexible spirit was not likely to meet with Elizabeth's approval. England had reconciled herself to Scotland on terms which are in the highest degree creditable to the Elizabeth's part, of her title to Calais. — Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, No. 27. Mr. Henderson, in his article on Arran in the Dictionary of National Biography, makes the serious mistake of attributing these words to the Scots instead of to the French. ^Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 534. 88 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 wisdom and generosity of English statesmen ; and Elizabeth had reason to expect that the Reformation she had saved from ruin would be carried out with some regard to her wishes. Knox and his colleagues, however, were not likely to be influenced by such considerations as these. Randolph wrote that he had talked with them all on the question of an uniformity of religion throughout the two realms, but had little hope of any good result — he found them "so severe in that they profess, so loath to remit anything of that they have received."^ If Randolph's advice had been accepted, the Confession would not have been brought forward so soon ; and Maitland and Wynram, when the work was presented to them for revision, thought it advisable to re-write the chapter dealing with the obedience due to the civil magistrate. When the confirmation of the Treaty of Berwick was proposed to the committee of the Parliament known as the Lords of the Articles, the members resolved that Elizabeth's goodness towards the realm far exceeded their power to recompense, and " therefore " suit should be made to her to embrace the opportunity now offered for binding the two kingdoms in perpetual friendship. Maitland apologised to Cecil for the conduct of his countrymen in thus requiting one boon by asking another. He knew that Cecil was as anxious for the Arran marriage as he was himself; but he also knew that Cecil did not wish the matter to be hurried forward against the certainty of failure. However, since he could not prevail upon his colleagues to act more warily, Maitland consented to be one of the three ambassadors who left Edinburgh for London on the ^Knox, Works, vi. 119. ELIZABETH REJECTS ARRAN 89 11th of October.^ Elizabeth had no intention of marrying Arran ; but the Protestant party in England was so strongly in favour of the match that she took refuge in delay ; and it was not till the 8th of December that the ambassadors were apprised of her decision in terms of courteous refusal. When she gave this answer, Elizabeth was probably not aware of the death of Francis II. , which had taken place near mid night on the 6th ; and though he was known to be seriously ill, Throckmorton had written on the 1st that his physicians declared him to be out of danger. But the news, when it came, must have confirmed her in her repugnance to the Scottish marriage. The importance to England of the friendship of the Scots was now greatly diminished, whilst the latter were likely to act more independently through the severance of their connexion with France. These two events — Elizabeth's rejection of Arran and the death of Francis II. — marking, as they do, the highest point reached by the united forces of the Pro testant movement, afford a convenient halting place in the study of the Reformation. Much progress had still to be made, for the Reformed Church, as distinct from the reformed religion, had to wait seven years for its recognition by the State. But these were years of strife and bitterness, potent for evil, the damnosa hereditas of three generations. The failure of the 'On the 7th December the ambassadors presented a memorial to the Privy Council, in which these lines occur : " United strength, by joining the two kingdoms, having also Ireland knit thereto, is worthy considera tion. By this means Ireland might be reformed and brought to per fection by obedience, and the Queen would be the strongest Princess in Christendom upon the seas, and establish a certain monarchy by itself in the ocean, divided from the rest of the world."^ — Foreign Calendar, 1560-61, No. 784. 90 THE WAR OF REFORMATION, 1559-1560 Arran scheme, which was almost certainly intended to initiate a political revolution, and the return to Scotland of its Catholic Queen, formed a coincidence well cal culated to cause a schism in the Protestant party, since the politicians could no longer hope to keep in line with the religious extremists. We shall find that such a cleavage, foreshadowed to some extent by the effect of Knox's sermons on the building of the Temple, did in fact take place ; and the history of the last phase of the Reformation groups itself naturally round two outstanding figures — John Knox, on the one side, and Maitland of Lethington, on the other. CHAPTER III. JOHN KNOX. If the Parliament of August, 1560, had been content with abolishing a Church to make room for a creed, it was not the fault of the Protestant pastors, who had taken care to provide themselves beforehand with an elaborate scheme of ecclesiastical polity. The Book of Discipline was compiled towards the end of May, while the siege of Leith was in progress and the hierarchy still intact ; and if Knox's hearers were aware of its contents, they could be at no loss to interpret his sermons on the building of the Temple. In addition to its penal laws of conduct, the Book of Discipline comprised a plain stipulation that the Church lands should be surrendered for the support of the ministry and the schools ; and the latter part of the Book was probably more odious to the nobility than the former, being obviously far harder to evade. In the turmoil of revolution the nobles had tightened their grasp on the wealth of the Church ; for many of the prelates had been induced to alienate part of their estates in the hope of securing whatever was left. Hence the Book of Discipline was kept in the background ; neither the sermons of Knox nor the petition, to which they gave «2 JOHN KNOX rise, sufficed to bring it before Parliament ; and it was not till January of the following year that its adoption by the first General Assembly was endorsed by any lay authority, and then only by a majority of the Privy Council. That so many as thirty lords and barons should have put their names to the Book is somewhat surprising. Maitland declared that many had signed it implicitly — " in fide parentum, as the bairns are bap tised " ; and it is certain that more than one of the subscribers stirred the indignation of Knox in after years as " merciless devourers of the patrimony of the Kirk." The ministers had some reason to resent the selfish ness of their lay associates ; but, if their demands had been a little more moderate, they might perhaps have been more successful. As the property of the Ancient Church has been reckoned at one half of the national wealth, it would certainly have been a liberal endow ment for a handful of Protestant pastors ; and the nobles enjoyed privileges under the old ecclesiastical system which they could not hope to retain under the new. The Lords of the Congregation once assured Cecil that "they sought heaven rather than earth" ;^ and if Knox had not been of this opinion, he could hardly have supposed that they would really make such concessions as would place them, after all their efforts, in a worse position than they had occupied before the struggle began. The Church lands were destined to be an object of much bitter contention ; but the dispute was eclipsed for a time by the new interests that were crowding up on the political horizon. When the news of Elizabeth's rejection of Arran reached Edinburgh with the return of the ambassadors ' Foreign Calendar, 1558-1559, No 1028. POLITICAL PARTIES 93 on the 3rd of January, 1561, the Scots had for some time been aware of the death of Francis II. ; and Maitland frankly admitted to Cecil that the conjunction of these two events, the one following so close on the other, " makes many to enter on new discourses." ^ The aspect of affairs was indeed profoundly altered. The failure of the Arran scheme was a blow to the Reformation on the political side, just as the" death of Francis, though the preachers were exulting over it as inimical to the house of Guise, was a blow on the religious side. The hope of uniting the two kingdoms under one Protestant monarchy was now at an end, and the Scottish Reformers had to reckon with the return of their Catholic Queen. Towards the end of February we find Maitland writing to Cecil in a more hopeful strain. The country was divided into three factions. Those who had been neutral in the late war (as Mary had foreseen from the first) were entirely at her devotion ; the Hamiltons stood out for an assurance that she would marry the Earl of Arran ; whilst a third party were disposed to welcome her on the sole condition that she came with no foreign force ; for they were confident that "ways enough" would be found to disarm her hostility to the Reformation.^ What these ways were Cecil could be at no loss to conjecture. As soon as the French king's death was known in London, Maitland had approached him with a proposal that Mary should be recognised as Elizabeth's successor ; ' and since then, he had written twice to the same effect. In making this suggestion Maitland had his own ends to serve, for no one was more deeply pledged than he to the amity of the two realms ; but that in so doing he rightly interpreted the wishes of hi& ^Foreign Calendar, 1560-1561, No. 875. ^ Ibid. No. 1033. 'Tytler, vi. 244. 94 JOHN KNOX countrymen there can be no question. We have seen how all parties in Scotland, Protestant and Catholic alike, had set their hearts on Arran as a husband for Elizabeth. Now that that scheme had been frustrated and the union with France dissolved, it was almost inevitable that the Scots should revive in one form or another those pretensions of their Queen, with a view to enforcing which they had consented, two years before, to bestow the crown matrimonial on the Dauphin. Though the interests of Protestantism had formerly been opposed to such a policy, they could now apparently be secured by no other means. If the Queen was to come back, and to come back a Catholic, the two religions could be reconciled only through a common political aim. With the English succession before her eyes, Mary would be in no mood to quarrel with her PrO' testant subjects ; -and they would look to her. Catholic as she was, for the fulfilment of their national aspirations. Thus, as the months wore on, the drift of political opinion in Scotland became more and more apparent. Queen Mary had persistently refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh ; and when she told Throckmorton that her decision must be deferred till she was i^ a position to consult her own subjects, she probably knew very well that the Scots did not wish her to ratify it. ' Elizabeth was so much of this opinion that she wrote in no measured terms to the Scottish Estates, warning them that, if it was through their counsel that the ratification was withheld, she would be as careless to keep the peace as they should give her cause. ^ The treaty, indeed, had become somewhat of an anachron ism ; for it had been concluded at a time when the Septs were quite prepared to depose Mary, and when ' Keith, ii. 38. RETURN OF QUEEN MARY 95 her exclusion from the English throne was essential to the fruition of their hopes for the Earl of Arran. Now that the Stewarts, and not the Hamiltons, were to be the instrument of union, Cecil's diplomacy would have been more welcome had it been less successful. As the treaty stipulated that Mary, " in all times coming," should abstain from using the English arms, she could not ratify it without renouncing her place in the succession, and could not refuse to ratify it without seeming to persevere in her former pretensions to Elizabeth's crown. There could be little doubt which of these alternatives was the more welcome to the Scots in their present humour ; and when Lord James, the leader of the " precise Protestants," wrote to Elizabeth on the 6th of August, suggesting that " midway" which Maitland had already suggested,^ the union of all the Reformers on this basis was apparently complete. The "precise Protestants" would doubtless have been loath to offend so strong a guardian of the faith as Queen Elizabeth"; but, on the other hand, they had a stronger motive than their associates for disarming Mary's hostility to the new religion. Queen Mary arrived at Leith early on the morning of Tuesday, the 19th of August, 1561. She had not been expected till the end of the month ; but as soon as the guns of the little squadron had made themselves heard behind the thick veil of fog, the citizens flocked down to the beach to bid her welcome, the Protestants being as eager as any. As the news spread, the nobles hurried in from the country; bonfires blazed at night, and a great company of psalmists made merry under the windows of Holyrood House. A few days, however, sufficed to disclose a root of bitterness of which the 1 Tytler, vi. 245. 96 JOHN KNOX politicians had taken too little account. On the first Sunday after the Queen's arrival the zealots of Fife raised an outcry against the royal chaplains when they prepared to celebrate Mass ; and on the Sunday follow ing John Knox " thundered out of the pulpit" in such a manner that Randolph " feared nothing so much as that one day he would mar all." ^ " That one Mass," he said, " was more fearful to him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm of purpose to suppress the whole religion." ^ Knox's mode of reasoning was exceedingly simple. The Bible had con demned idolatry as worthy of death ; the Mass was idolatry ; and therefore to set it up again, even in the privacy of the Royal Chapel, was to draw down on the land the vengeance of an offended Deity. To oppose this, however, the politicians had a syllogism of their own, equally compact, and to modern minds much more convincing. Scotland must have a sovereign ; the only sovereign it could have was Mary, and Mary happened to be a Catholic. Knox probably failed to see the signi ficance of Elizabeth's rejection of Arran; but whether he saw it or not is of no great moment, for in all his actions he w.aa-goye3:n£d-Jis:-a_Iaw of-condnct which was no more applicable-J:;o_Scotland in. August, '1561, than to Scotland at any other period, either. JigfOTejjr since. If Knox had denounced the policy of compromise as essentially unworkable, and if it could be shown that he had some alternative to propose which promised better, the fact that the policy failed would, no doubt, be an ^ Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, No. 455. — Randolph to Throckmorton, August 26th. The date of this letter shows that Knox had been vehe ment enough even before the second Sunday. 2 Works, ii. 276. THE APOSTLE OF HEBRAISM 97 argument in his favour,^ though even in that case it might be necessary to protest that the failure of moderate counsels is no proof in itself that they ought never to have been adopted. To look at the question in this light, however, would be to misapprehend alto gether the issues at stake. Knox undoubtedly suspected Mary from the first as of " a crafty wit" ; but the sum of all his denunciation of the Queen's Mass was that such a thing would so inevitably provoke God's anger that its toleration must in all circumstances be politi cally inexpedient. As he himself said, it was a contest .between "flesh and blood" and "the truth of God" ; that is to say, between secular statesmanship and the simplicity of religious zeal. Apparently, then, it must make a great difference in our estimate of Knox whether we regard him from the personal or from the historical standpoint. Of Knox as the apostle of Hebraism, the glory of a class of men so happily described by Matthew Arnold as those who walk fearlessly^ and resolutely by the best light they have, wdthout ever pausing to enquire whether after all that light be not darkness, something might be said herCjWcre it not that so much has been said already; for whatever honour accrues to, that type of character in its highest manifestation may justly be ascribed to him, and in most liberal measure. Unless, however, we are content to be mere hero-worshippers, mistaking in our homage to strength the means for the end, it ' " Even in the point of worldly wisdom events were to prove that Knox had seen deeper into the possibilities of things than the politicians themselves." — Hume Brown's Knox, ii. 159. 2 Knox's personal courage has often been impeached. He was too conscious of his own powers to be at all ambitious of the crown of martyr dom ; but a coward, in any sense of the word, he assuredly was not. G 98 JOHN KNOX must always be a question whether the Hebraist, who admittedly is not a man of many parts, found the true field for his activity; and perhaps, if we put this question with regard to Knox, the answer may not be quite so favourable to him as might at first sight appear. We may take for granted, probably, that Nature in tended Knox to be the leader of a revolution; at all events, she had admirably equipped him for the task, and had sent him into Scotland at a time when something considerable in that shape was urgently required. Never theless Destiny in this case would seem to have been at cross purposes with Nature. It has already been remarked more than once that the decline of the old faith had overshot the growth of the new ; that a moribund church had been kept standing by favourable political tendencies ; that the people had learned to despise the Mass long before the Reformers had taught them to abhor it as a form of idolatry ; that the monasteries were destroyed mainly by disaffected Catholics; that, in short. Protestantism in Scotland was a formative rather than a disintegrating force. If this is true of Knox's creed, it is also true of Knox himself as a factor in the evolution of that creed. He, toOj was a builder rather than a destroyer. Though he was born in 1505, he was forty-one years of age before he came forward as a religious teacher ; and by that time the first phase of the Reformation — what one may call the anti-national phase — was practically at an end. Lindsay had published most of his principal works, and the psalms of Wedderburn were already in the hands of the people. Knox's ministry in 1546 was confined to the castle of St. Andrews ; and from that year, with the exception of less than a twelvemonth from autumn. HIS SHARE IN THE REFORMATION 99 1555, to July, 1556, he was absent from Scotland till May, 1559, when the struggle with the Queen Regent had just begun. Knox, indeed, may fairly be said to have launched the Reformation on the tide of civil war. The outbreak took place in his absence ; but it was owing to Jiis^ersonal exhortations that the Protestants in 1555 had seceded from the Church ; and his letter from Dieppe in October, 1557, was followed by their defiance of the established religion in the following December. But the movement, which had received its first impetus from him, soon passed altogether out of his guidance. He^ was not in sympathy with the patriotic spirij^ which, with the force of a great tradition behind it, was the really decisive element in the revolution. ^What a revolution of the Knoxian stamp would have been like we may easily imagine. It would have been a popular movement ; the masses, fired by the oratory of the pulpit, would have flocked to the standard ; and religion, voiced ever in deeper and stronger tones, would have been the battle-cry throughout. Such was the movement of the Covenant in the following century; for by that time Scotland had ceased to be an inde pendent kingdom, and Calvinism had struck its roots through the mass of the people, both peasants and townsmen; but such the Reformation assuredly was not. The people did not rally to the voice of Knox ; there was no enthusiasm for the cause, and a lafge party, even in the Lothians, remained oto^tely' neutral ; religion gave place to patriotism~^'as the dominant force till eventually it dropped almost out of sight ; the barons and burghers of the Congregation were dependent from the first on external support ; and when at length the English intervened to overthrow the French ascendency in Scotland, they complained of their allies 100 JOHN KNOX as so weak that the work devolved entirely on their own shoulders. In a movement of this sort, dependent for its success on a combination of discordant forces, Knox was evidently out of place. When the war began in the autumn of 1559, Maitland supplanted him as secretary of the Congregation ; he was so obnoxious to Elizabeth, the mainstay of the cause, that Cecil thought it necessary to suppress his letters ; and he himself tells us that, as his colleagues judged him "too extreme," he had withdrawn altogether from the counsels of the party. The success of the movement implied, of course, the overthrow of Catholicism ; but when the battle was won, the motley host, with which Knox had been carried to victory, fell rapidly to pieces. The nobles were content with having secured the Chiireli_land&_th£ rabble with having pulled _down_ the monasteries, the patriots of all classes with having expelled the_Frencli. These last, indeed, promised to hold together longer than the rest ; for, with the union of the crowns in sight, they had no motive to arrest the triumph of the Reformation. But, when Francis died and ElizabethX rejected Arran, the patriots preferred their country to | their religion ; and thus the company of zealous lairds I and burghers, which had formed Knox's personal follow- / ing, was left, shorn of allies, to_ protests againstjhe j Queen's Mass, and in virtue of that protest to become y ' the nucleus of the Reformed Church. Knox, then, was called to build on ground, which had been cleared for him mainly by the hands of others ; and w^hat qualifications he had for the task, besides dauntless zeal and unimpeachable honesty of purpose, it may be well briefly to enquire. Certainly Knox was no visionary enthusiast ; the bent of his mind was so far HIS APOLOGY TO ELIZABETH 101 eminently practical that it never swerved from the object immediately before him ; and his earnestness, which otherwise would have run wholly into fanaticism, was strangely tempered by a sense of humour. JJnfortu- nately^Jiowever, for the success of his efforts, his ^^IPiE^ loyalty, j).a.what-he considered the revealed will of Qqd rendered him as inflexible to the plastic power of circumstance as the most^ rigorous theorist.; and though a compact force of this nature may be of great use as an, engine of revolution, its value in the making of institu tions' is "surely" open" to question. For what we call secuIaf~staEeamanship Knox always professed the most vehement scorn ; " politic heads " filled with worldly prudence were his especial aversion ; and he ascribed the triumph of the Reformation in 1560 to the fact that he and his friends had laid aside their own wisdom as "mere foolishness before the Lord," and had "followed only what they found approved by himself" ^ Whether he really believed that his fellow-workers had adopted his own iron law of conduct may perhaps be doubted ; but that he himself acted on it at all times, to the extent of repudiating anything in the nature of tact, conciliation, or compromise, there is evidence enough to show. Thus in his famous apology to Elizabeth for The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women — a, work which Calvin suppressed at Geneva even during the reign of Mary Tudor — we find him writing in this style : Elizabeth is to ground her title on the eternal providence of God, who, contrary to nature and without her deserts, has exalted her head ; she is to forget her birth and all title depending thereon, and to remember how, for fear of her life, she declined from Christ in the day of his battle.^ This letter was ^ Works, ii. 264. 2 yfTgrks, ii. 28-31. 102 JOHN KNOX written on the 14th of July, 1559 ; and three weeks later, he told Cecil that, if the English continued to be neutral, the Protestant cause in Scotland must inevitably eoUapse.i As the apology was forwarded to Cecil for presentation to the Queen, it probably did less harm than the author had any right to expect. Elizabeth's detestation of Knox is quite intelligible. It was mainly that of the crowned head for the republican ; but it was also that of the stateswoman for one whom she believed to be an irresponsible fanatic. The triumph of the Reformation in Scotland was so much the work of English statesmen and. of En.glish soldiers that religious conformity with England.. w^OJlld certainly have been its logical result. We have seen that Randolph had discussed this subject with Knox to little purpose during the Parliament of August, 1560; and Knox's intractability was soon to be more publicly avowed. It was hoped by those, who encouraged her in her designs on the English succession, that Mary would be led by this means to embrace the Protestant religion ; and both Maitland and Lord James believed that nothing would conduce so much to this end as a meeting between their sovereign and Queen Elizabeth. Knox, in his abhorrence of the Queen's Mass, might have been expected to approve of this scheme ; but as Elizabeth might prevail upon Mary to join the Church of England, and as that Church retained " some dregs of Papistry," he vehemently attacked the Anglican service in one of his serrtions, and in Randolph's words " gave the cross and candle such a wipe that as wise and learned as him self wished him to have held his peace. He recom pensed the same with a marvellous vehement and pierc ing prayer in the end of his sermon for the continuance ^Foreign Calendar, 1558-1559, No. 1134. ATTACKS THE ANGLICAN SERVICE 103 of amity and hearty love with England." ^ This incident is eminently characterigticgf Knox, who had no idea of that mutual concession between opposing aims, which goes to form what we call a jpolicy. He wished Mary to become_a_PrQtestant, and_Jbe wished Scotland to be in friendship with England ; but, if Mary was thinking of going over to Protestantism on the Anglican side, then he must warn her and her subjects against the " dregs of Papistry," even though in so doing he should imperil the amity of the two realms, and even though Mary as an Anglican Protestant would have been preferable in his eyes to Mary as a Catholic. To denounce the "dregs of Papistry " could not be wrong ; and it was for Provi dence to reconcile such denunciation with the conversion of the Queen and the welfare of the kingdoms. The sermon had much more serious consequences than the apology. If the English and Scottish Churches were afterwards at deadly feud, it cannot be said that Knox did anything to avert the conflict. The man who could thus wantonly attack the sister Church at a time when it promised to be of service in the great business of his life, was not likely to concede anything to his opponents at home. If Knox did not get all he wanted in matters of religion, it was of no avail to give him less. When the Scots received Mary to her kingdom, they had stipulated only for mutual toleration : it was an advance on this principle, when the Privy Council provided that two-thirds of the ecclesiastical revenues — or of what was left of them — should be secured to the clergy of the old Church for life, and that one-third should be divided between the Crown and the Protestant pastors. The provision thus made for the ministry may have been very inadequate — 1 Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, No. 883. 104 JOHN KNOX though many lords, it was said, had not so much to spend — but more than this the Church did not receive even after the deposition of Mary in 1567 ; and coming from a Catholic Queen, the concession was most valuable in itself as a recognition of the right of the new religion to be supported by the State. The Romanists, seeing the matter in this light, declared that there now wanted nothing but the meeting of the two Queens to over throw the Mass and all.^ But Knox was implacable. " I see two parts freely given to the Devil," he said from the pulpit, "and the third must be divided betwixt God and the Devil " — that is, betwixt the ministers and the Queen — " an unsavoury saying," he admits, " in the ears of many."^ Equally uncompromising was his attitude towards the Protestant nobles of his own party. If he could not force them to comply with the Book of Discipline as regards the patrimony of the Church, he would at least subject them to its penal laws of conduct. Thus, in 1563, we find the Lord Treasurer of Scotland doing penance for an amour before the whole congrega tion, Knox "making" the sermon;^ and in 1567 the Countess of Argyll had to appear in sackcloth during service in the Chapel Royal at Stirling for having assisted at the Catholic baptism of the Prince.* Knox's feud with the nobles was destined to last longer and to end less successfully than his struggle with Mary Stewart ; and one can hardly wonder at their reluctance ' Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, No. 746, note. =* Works, ii. 310. 3 jn^ ^i. 527. * Even Froude admits the impolicy of this proceeding : " The public dis grace of high-born sinners could hardly have assisted in producing the peace for which so much else was sacrificed ; and something of the storm about to break over Scotland may be traced to an absence of worldly wis dom in the new-born Church." — History, viii. 303. HIS GREATNESS 105 to endow a church which was already strong enough to humiliate them so bitterly in the eyes of the people. These blunders — if such they -v^ere — may well sur prise us in one who has been credited with so much practical sagacity. Practical Knox was, for he always knew his own mind and never parted company with facts, in so far at least as they came within his range of vision ; but of his sagacity one would like to see better proof He was certainly mistaken in the character of his associates amongst the nobles ; he so entirely mis understood the struggle with France that he was capable of describing it as a triumph of zeal over worldly wisdom ; and if he was right in his reading of Mary Stewart, he read her by the blaze of passion, not by the light of intellect. Had Mary been the most harmless of simple-minded Catholics, the mere fact that she maintained " that idol the Mass " would have been enough to make her dangerous in Knox's eyes. The Scottish character is admittedly a strong one, and of that character in its hardest, strongest, and coarsest fibre no better example can be found than Knox. Only a nation, which had been hammered for centuries on the anvil of unequal and almost continuous warfare, could have produced such a man ; and only in such a nation could he have found followers as strong and unbending as himself. His greatness is beyond dispute. A mere preacher, without birth or wealth, of no great learning, and with ideas in no way superior to those of his class, by sheer force of will he made himself a power in Scottish politics so potent and so enduring, that no statesman could afford to disregard it either in his own day or in the days that were to come. It was, of course, as an orator that he most strongly impressed the mind of his age. Contemporaries speak of him as 106 JOHN KNOX "thundering cannon-shot" out of the pulpit, as able in an hour to put more life into them than six hundred trumpets, as so vehement even in his old age that he was like to break the pulpit in pieces and to fly out of it ; and the effect of such eloquence may have seemed greater to them than it really was. At all events, Randolph speaks of Knox as ruling the roost and all men standing in fear of him at a time when, so far as we know, his denunciation of the Queen's Mass produced no appreciable result ; and Throckmorton probably never made a greater mistake than when he supposed the Reformation to be due entirely to Knox's preaching. And well were it, if in this slight analysis we did not require to proceed further. But it is the penalty of those, who cultivate only one side of their nature, that their vices are at least as numerous as their virtues; and if Knox was vehement, narrow, uncompromising, he was likely to have other qualities of a much more questionable kind. We are accustomed to think of Knox as a lover of truth ; and in the sense of fidelity to the best that was in him, or to w^hat he believed to be such, no man ever served it more faithfully ; but of that other and rarer form of truth, which consists of sobriety of judgment, clearness of vision, " seeing things as they really are," he was not so much devoid as utterly incapable. His writings are merely Knox with all his intensity reflected in type — true to nature indeed, but only to that small segment of it, which happened to be embodied in Knox himself It required no small audacity in the use of words to speak of the " monstriferous empire of Women " as " amongst all enormities that this day do abound upon the face of the whole earth the most detestable and damnable " ; of the Mass as " the most abominable HOW FAR A LOVER OF TRUTH 107 Idolatry that ever was used since the beginning of the world " ; of Queen Mary as being surrounded by " murderers and such men as are known unworthy of the common society," at the very time when she had banished the Protestants who had murdered David Riccio ; and of the rich dresses worn by the Queen and her ladies at the opening of Parliament as calculated to " provoke God's vengeance, not only against these foolish women, but against the whole realm." ^ Carlyle says of Knox's History of the Reform>ation that it inspires " everywhere a feeling of the most perfect credibility and veracity " ; but Carlyle's feelings in a matter of this sort were not likely to be those of the unbiassed critic. The truth is, that Knox's book is much more valuable as literature than as history. It is not only that he is guilty, doubtless in good faith, of misstatements and errors in chronology, which are surprising in an author who writes history, to some extent, of his own making, but that he is credulous, and something more than credulous, to the full measure of his personal antipathies. The sinister sayings, which he puts in the mouth of Mary of Lorraine, were obviously based on mere rumour ; one or two, such as her song of exultation on beholding the dead bodies of her enemies at Leith from the battle ments of Edinburgh Castle, may be put aside as physically impossible ; and others as impossible in the sense that they do violence to our knowledge of human nature. Of this class let one example suffice. We have seen that, of the eight commissioners who represented Scotland at the marriage of Mary Stewart with the Dauphin, four — ^the Earls of Cassillis and Rothes, Lord Fleming, and Bishop Reid of Orkney — died in France on their way home. According to Knox, when the ' Works, iv. 368 ; ii. 265, 381, 421. 108 JOHN KNOX Queen Regent heard the news, she exclaimed, "What shall I say of such men ? They lived as beasts, and as beasts they die ; God is not with them, neither with that which they enterprise."^ It would be difficult surely to find a statement in any history more out rageously improbable than this. The men, of whom the Regent is said to have spoken thus, were her personal friends ; several of them had been active in procuring her the Regency ; and all of them had died in the discharge of a mission, which to her and her family was of the highest possible service. The sister of Lord Fleming was one of the four Maries, who had accom panied the Queen to France ; Cassillis is described by Buchanan as "excellent ... in all virtues pertaining to a nobleman";^ and Bishop Reid was so very far from having lived as a beast that his rectitude was the theme of his contemporaries, and the monuments of his enlightened liberality may be seen in Kirkwall and in Edinburgh at the present day. What Knox was in private life does not concern us here. If he was naturally tender, diffident, genial, humane, it can only be said that his absolute loyalty to his mission was the death of his better self; and it is as the man with a mission that he has entered into the making of Scottish history. Randolph in 1562 writes thus of his attitude towards Queen Mary : " He is so full of mistrust in all her doings, words, and sayings, as though he were either of God's privy council that knew how he had determined of her from the beginning, or that he knew the secrets of her heart so well that neither she did or could have for ever one good thought of God or of his true religion." ^ In- ^ Works, i. 265. ^ Chameleon, p. 12. 3 Foreign Calendar, 1562, No. 1266. HIS FANATICISM 109 stances of the same bitter uncharitableness might be cited, almost to any extent, from the History of the Reformation. For Mary of Lorraine, dying unbe- friended in the castle of Edinburgh, reconciling herself to her enemies and praying them not to leave her whilst she lived, he has not a word of pity. Of Bishop Reid, we are told that he died with his coffers of gold on either side of him ; ^ and the story, even if it be true, is particularly ungenerous, for Knox must have known that, if the Bishop amassed money, it was for no ignoble purpose. And fortunate must have been the convert to this relentless creed, if in losing some of the milk of human kindness, he did not acquire other qualities of a very different character. It is primarily to Knox's teaching that we must ascribe that ascendency of the Old Testa ment over the New which has left so large and so dark a stain on the history of the Scottish Church. The Book of Discipline mentions incidentally as worthy of death, not merely murder, but blasphemy, adultery, perjury, " and other crimes capital " ; ^ and it was one of Knox's grievances that he could not prevail upon the State to proceed against adulterers with the full rigour of the Jewish law.^ Whether he would really have had Mary Stewart put to death as an idolatress may certainly be doubted ; but when she had fallen • Works, i. 264. '^Ibid. ii. 227. 'The Parliament of 1563 enacted that "notoure and manifest com mitters of adultery in any time to come" should be put to death, provided they had been duly admonished to abstain from the crime; " for other adultery " the acts already made were to sufiice. — Thomson's Acts, ii. 539. Knox's comment on this is " the acts against adultery . . . were so modified, that no law and such law might stand in eodem predicamento ; to speak plainly, no law and such acts were both alike."-^ Works, ii. 383. 110 JOHN KNOX from her high estate, he denounced her so furiously from the pulpit as guilty of adultery and murder that the more moderate of the nobles almost despaired of being able to save her life. Facts soon came to light which showed that Mary was not the only guilty person, that the murder of Darnley had not been the merely personal crime it was at first supposed ; but Knox was inflexible. Writing to Cecil, " with his one foot in the grave," he exhorted him to "strike at the root";^ in his public prayers he deprecated God's vengeance, " for that Scot land hath spared and England hath maintained the life of that most wicked woman " ; ^ and after Moray's assassination, he declared that the only blot on his memory was " the foolish pity," which had stood be tween his sister and the penalty of her crimes.* Mary may have been all that her enemies said she was ; but she probably never did so much harm to Scotland as in being the cause of such a spirit in Knox. The ruthless severity of his teaching was rendered doubly degrading by those threatenings of plague and famine which on this and similar occasions were continually proclaimed in its support. That we ought to shed blood, even blood justly forfeited, because, if we do not shed it, a worse thing will befall ourselves, may be either super stition or policy ; but it is not religion. The reader may be disposed to regard such a doctrine as merely the expression in theological language of the necessity of capital punishment. But murders had been committed in Knox's own day in Scotland which he would have been loath, indeed, to visit with any such penalty. He certainly approved of the assassination both of Cardinal Beaton and of David Riccio ; and if he was not a party to the plot against the latter, it was a singular coin- ^ Foreign. Calendar, 1569-1611, No. 594. ^ Works, vi. 510. ^ Ibid. 369. TOO INTOLERANT EVEN FOR HIS OWN AGE 111 cidence that Riccio should have perished during a public fast, when Knox was declaiming from the pulpit on such subjects as the slaying of Oreb and Zeb and the hanging of Haman.^ The inference is exceedingly ob vious. If it was lawful to assassinate Riccio, because he was an enemy to the faith, and on the same principle to take up arms, as Knox's friends did with his entire approval, against the Queen's marriage with Darnley, it could depend only on the capacity of the new king to be formidable, whether his assassination should be regarded as a heinous sin or as a righteous judgment ; and even if we could remove the Darnley murder alto gether out of the category of political crimes, it would not extenuate Knox's merciless severity towards one, whose view of the lawfulness of assassination approxi mated in practice so closely to his own. Knox's denunciations of the Queen were delivered at a time when they were not likely to pass without protest. Mary had been deposed and her infant son crowned king as James VI. in 1567 ; but a party was soon formed in her favour, and the quarrel developed ultimately into civil war. In 1571 anonymous letters appeared -^some thrown into the Assembly, some nailed on the church doors — accusing Knox of bringing religion into contempt through his railing against the Queen, and of splitting the Church into factions by inter mingling civil and profane matters with the Word of God in his sermons.^ The spectacle of the pulpit con verted into a drumhead, of the prophets paraded every Sunday as recruits for King James against his mother, seems indeed to have considerably scandalised some of Knox's own friends. When his secretary, Richard Bannatyne, asked the Assembly to pass an Act ¦• Tytler, vii. 28. ^ Calderwood, iii. 44. 112 JOHN KNOX approving of his speeches against the Queen, the members answered discreetly that "they would bear their part of the same burden with him," but the Act was refused ^ ; Craig, one of his colleagues at Edinburgh, was so obstinately neutral that the congregation dis pensed with his services ; and when Knox returned to the city, after more than a year's residence at St. Andrews, in 1572, he thought it necessary to stipulate that he should not be required " to temper his tongue."* St. Andrews, indeed, had not answered to his expecta tions as a place of retreat. Bannatyne mentions as a thing very reprehensible in the minister of that town that he " used sic generality, as, alas ! the most part of the ministers do," that his sermons were equally appli cable to all parties.^ Knox, of course, preached on a different plan, and his discourses on Daniel proved so distasteful to the heads of the University that they conceived for him " a deadly hatred and envy." These men were evidently well acquainted with the Reformer's character. An incident having occurred in the Univer sity which caused much ill-feeling between St. Salvator's and St. Leonard's, the provost of the former college wrote to Knox, requesting him not to allude to the matter from the pulpit until both parties had been heard. Nevertheless, on the following Sunday, Knox vindicated his right to intervene, protesting, somewhat irrelevantly, that the colleges were no more exempt from his censure than any other place.* Of the bitter ness generated by this and other such disputes we have evidence in the protestation of a certain Archibald 1 Calderwood, iii. 46. 2 jj){^ 333. ^Memorials of Transactions in Scotland (1569-1573), by Richard Banna tyne, Secretary to John Knox (Bannatyne Club), p. 256. *^Ibid. p. 258 APPEALS TO THE FUTURE 113 Hamilton " that neither he nor any other faithful in the university be thrallit to any minister who exempts himself from order and godly discipline;^ and in Knox's farewell message to the Assembly — " Above all things preserve the Kirk from the bondage of the universities." ^ Thus in weariness and contention the life of the great Reformer drew towards its close ; ^ and if he complained of the age as ungrateful, it was not without reason that he looked for his vindication to the ages that were to come.* In view ofthe great mass of uneducated opinion, which was still outside the pale of the Church, the power of fanaticism was not likely to perish from inanition ; and through the parochialising of Scottish politics, which was one result of the Union of the Crowns, a generation was to arise which was more in harmony than his own with Knox's spirit. And now to sum up. John Knox, then, was a man of overpowering force of character, hard, narrow, un reasonable, honest to the verge of insanity, who at the head of a great popular movement might have shaken the gates of Rome, but who in the course of events was called, not to lead, but to organise, not to destroy, but to build. The influence of so perverted a destiny could not be wholly good. It was not merely that all the violence and hatred and uncharitableness, which might have been useful enough as the fuel of revolution, were infused bodily into the new Church, but that the Church itself was founded on principles which forbade all hope ' Ibid. p. 263. 2 Calderwood, iii. 222 ' He died November 24, 1572. * " What I have been to my country, albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth." — Calderwood, iii. 54. H 114 JOHN KNOX of its Stability. The Reformation, which triumphed in August, 1560, was a comprehensive and a many-sided movement, no less political than religious ; but the Reformed Church, which took shape in August, 1561, was an institution so exceedingly limited in scope that it could accommodate — at all events with comfort- only a very small minority. To say that Knox founded the Reformed Church is no doubt true, but only in the sense that the Reformed Church, as he founded it, had its origin in dissent; for the men, who protested with Knox against the Queen's Mass, had probably less in common with the rest of their countrymen than if they had differed from them on points of speculative theology. Had Knox diverged from the beaten track of Calvinism and persuaded others to do the same, he could not, as the founder of a sect, have more truly fostered sectarianism than by endowing a minority of the Reformers with his own absolute spirit. Knox, in fact, was the first dissenter ; and we shall find his spiritual progeny dissenting, abjuring, and protesting at every stage of the Church's history. This, of course; was as far as possible from the end which he himself had had in view. Indeed, the strongest proof of Knox's failure as an ecclesiastical statesman is the signal con trast between the permanence of his spirit and the barrenness of his ideas. Aiming at the establishment of a theocracy, he endowed his Church with so hard and absolute, so intense and uncompromising a character that its claims were rejected by the State in his own day, and that in the hands of his immediate successors it was reduced to struggle for independence within its own borders. The conflict of Church and State, which was entirely opposed to Knox's ideas, was the outcome of his spirit ; for the failure to dominate THE FATHER OF SCOTTISH DISSENT 115 the State resulted naturally in a jealousy of State interference. Whatever it might be in form — and it was not till the eighteenth century that dissent could be openly avowed — the Knoxian Church was essentially the Church of a minority ; and thus we are confronted with the singular paradox that the man, whose ideal was a theocracy, a Civitas Dei, has become a parent of schism, the father of Scottish dissent. CHAPTER IV. MAITLAND AND MAEY STEWART, 1561-1567. Maitland was unquestionably the most brilliant figure in the politics of his time and country — a scholar, a wit, a courtier, a diplomatist, and a statesman. He traced his descent from an Anglo-Norman family which had crossed the Border in the days of William the Lion and had fought for the land of its adoption against Edward 1. His father, who long survived him and died at the age of ninety in 1586, was Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, in East Lothian, whose zeal in collecting, early Scottish poetry is commemorated in the name of ; the Maitland Club. At the time of the Queen's return Maitland was a young man of about three-and-thirty, who had already achieved a great political reputation. As Secretary of State to Mary of Lorraine, he had seen service both in France and in England, and had repre- sented Scotland in the negotiations at Cateau-Cambrfeis|| In the autumn of 1559, as we have seen, he went over to the Lords of the Congregation, and from that period to his death in 1573 his life may be studied in the history of the time. At the Parliament of August, 1560, he presided as " harangue-maker" or speaker, nor could the honour have been more happily bestowed; for maitland's genius 117 the Scottish Reformation, in so far as it was a political movement dependent on the support of England — and such in the main w^e have found it to be— was the work of Maitland more than of any other man. Whether they loved or feared him, contemporaries are unanimous in their testimony to Maitland's power. Buchanan refers to him 4s " a ybung man of prodigious ability." Randolph shrank from meeting him in con ference at Berwick — " To meet with such a match your Majesty knoweth what wit had been fit." ^ Elizabeth described him as " the flower of the wits of Scotland " ; and when she thought him overmatched by Sussex in a literary encounter, she declared herself more pleased with the latter " than if he had won an action in the field." ^ Throughout the civil war, which resulted, in the long run, from the deposition of Mary Stewart, Maitland eclipsed all his associates in the cause of the captive Queen. Knox denounced him as " the chief author of all the trouble raised both in England and Scotland " ; * Morton called him " the whole forthsetter of the other side " ; * and Randolph wrote to Cecil that he might easily see who had enchanted the " whole wits" in Scotland.^ Bannatyne, who goes out of his way occasionally to " confound his politic head," speaks of him as " soul to Athol," " soul to Home," " soul to all the godless band " ; and he even ventures to be a little profane when he describes Chatelherault as pouring forth " his complaint or else his prayers " before " the great god, the Secretare." * 1 Froude, vii. 225. ^ Ibid. ix. 322. ' Calderwood, iii. 234. < Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 849. * Ibid. No. 877. " Memorials, p. 38. Froude says of Maitland that he was probably " the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all Britain,'' and that he " would at any age of the world have been in the first rank of states- 118 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 In his History Knox first mentions Maitland— " a young man of good learning and of sharp wit and reasoning"— as one of those whom he persuaded to secede from the Church in 1556. These two men must needs have been as far apart as the political and the religious sides of the Reformation ; but in reality the gulf between them was very much wider. Maitland's was the most conspicuous and incomparably the best furnished of those "politic heads," which Knox so vehemently abhorred ; and no community of purpose could long have united natures so essentially opposed., Religion, as a system of belief, can hardly be reckoned as an element in so personal an antagonism. No doubt Maitland betrays his affinity to the great minds of the Elizabethan age by his essentially modern spirit, and he was too good a scholar not to participate in their pagan modes of feeling ; but if he had not cared some thing for Protestantism, he would hardly have declared for it so early as 1556, and he had as thorough a knowledge of the Scriptures as any preacher of his time.^ It pleased Knox in after years to denounce him from the pulpit as an atheist and an enemy to all religion, who had said that heaven and hell were mere inventions men." — History of England, ix. 165, 317. Elsewhere he speaks of " his in tellectual cultivation, uuusual in any age and unexampled in his own."— Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character. Froude, however, is not very consistent in his references to Maitland. Thus, in vol. ix. of the History, p. 317, he describes him as " a passionate Scot, proud of his own intellect, and prouder of his country, to which he devoted himself with a tenacity of purpose that no temptation of private interest could affect " : and in vol. x. p. 210 we are told that Maitland " among his splendid qualities wanted faith in all great principles." Is patriotism not a great principle ? 1 " II 6tait homme k discuter les questions de politique avec Cecil, et les textes bibliques avec Knox." — Philippson's Marie Stuart, i. 246. HIS RELATIONS WITH KNOX 119 to frighten children ; ^ and when Maitland defended himself on the ground that he had been instructed from his youth in the fear of God, Knox returned the charac teristic answer, that " it was not education that made a true Christian man, but the illumination of the soul by God's spirit."^ Of such illumination, in the technical sense, Maitland probably had little enough ; but he might have been content to acknowledge the superiority of Knox in his proper sphere, if Knox had abstained from interfering with him in his own. Whether or not he believed in the all-sufficiency of reason, he certainly believed it to be indispensable in political affairs. He regarded politics as a fine art, the natural vocation of an aristocracy, which required for its proper exercise, not irierely the widest practical experience, but all the varied culture of Greece and Rome ; and the notion that a few plebeian preachers should presume to domi nate the State, in virtue of some inner light peculiar to themselves, was too preposterous in his eyes to be taken seriously. Thus at the building of the new theocracy Maitland played the part of Sanballat the Horonite to Knox's Nehemiah. He scoffed at the Book of Discipline as " a devout imagination," and he was greatly entertained with the idea of the Duke having subscribed it. If Knox was to have his way with the Church lands, " the Queen," he said, " would not get at the year's end to buy her a pair of new shoes." When some had been moved to tears by the proclamation of coming judgments, "We must recant and burn our bill," said Maitland, " for the Preachers are angry " ; and on one occasion he so com pletely forgot to be sarcastic, that " in open audience he gave himself unto the Devil, if that ever after that day 1 Calderwood, iii. 231. ^ Ibid. p. 233. 120 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 he should regard what became of Ministers ... let them bark and blaw as loud as they list." ^ It was Maitland's misfortune, however, to be involved in at least one full-dress debate on the subject of the Queen's Mass, with the account of which Knox's History closes, in so far as it was written with his own hand ; and the case for the defence is probably more intelligible to us than it was to Knox. If the people lived virtuously, Maitland could not believe that they would be plagued for the idolatry of their ruler ; and if God was so ready to send plagues. He could doubtless suppress the sovereign's idolatry without the people requiring to move in the matter. To the precedents cited by Knox from the history of the Jews, Maitland replied, as a modern would have done : " The facts were extraordinary and ought not to be imitated " ; " they were singular motions of the spirit of God and appertain nothing to this our age." If the Jews had destroyed idolatrous kings and rooted out their whole posterity, they had done so at God's special command; and in other cases he doubted whether they had done well. True, as Knox said, they had prospered ; but prosperity was not always evidence of the divine approval.* Probably in the opinion of the audience Knox had the better of the argument ; for in his own province he was invincible, and Maitland could only protest feebly against a method of reasoning, which the spirit of the age, reflected doubtless to some extent in himself, did not permit him to disallow. Indeed, one cannot read the narrative of this and other such encounters without perceiving that Maitland had a humorous sense of his own helplessness, and was alive to the futility of the 1 Knox, Works, ii. 128, 297, 310, 418, 421. 'Ibid. ii. 425-461. AN IDEALIST 121 whole discussion. " Prove that," he would say to Knox, " and win the play." Elsewhere we read that Maitland " smiled and spoke secretly to the Queen in her ear " ; or that Maitland leant on the Master of Maxwell, and said, "I am almost weary." Against such an opponent as Knox sarcasm was much more effective than argument ; and these pitched battles required more ponderous artillery than any that Maitland loved to use. And yet, as Sanballat the Horonite, he was playing a part, which, however it might suit his abilities, was far from corresponding with his real nature. The cynicism he affected was merely the natural gaiety, which had lost its sweetness at the breath of unreason ; and it is not difficult to understand the exasperation, with which he regarded opponents, who would make no concessions, and would accept of none, which fell short of absolute surrender. Naturally he was a gay and a genial man, welcome both at the English Court and in the festivity of these early days at Holyrood — " banqueting upon banqueting," as Knox called it — a man, who could recommend love-making, even to Cecil, as a sovereign remedy for all ills, and who was never so much troubled with affairs of state that he had not at least one merry hour out of the four-and- twenty.^ It need hardly be said, however, that the Maitland, who fills so large a space in the history of the Reforma tion, was neither a cynic nor an elegant trifler, but a man thoroughly in earnest. Much as Maitland and Knox differed in almost all respects, there was one in which they entirely agreed. Both were idealists ; and they were the only two men of their time, with ability enough to make them a power, each of whom had set 'See his charming letter to Cecil, February 28, 1564. Tytler, vi. Appendix xxi. 122 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 one object before him, which he followed with unwaver ing resolution to the end. In the case of Knox singleness of aim resulted naturally in inflexibility of practice ; for Knox's ideal was the outcome of his own narrow intensity, and could be attained only by methods as uncompromising as itself Maitland was a spirit touched to larger, if not to finer issues. Of unclouded intelli gence, resourceful, sanguine, confident in his own abilities, he pressed towards the goal by paths so many and so devious that Buchanan was able to satirise him as a type of inconsistency and faithlessness — as changeful in his political principles as the chameleon in its colour. He was quick to know the best road ; but he was too apt to believe that no road could be too bad or too circuitous for him. That such a man should have been so grossly and so generally misunderstood must be ascribed mainly to the complexity of his ideal and to the extreme fidelity, with which he followed it hither and thither through the maze of competing interests, utilising each of them so long as it would serve his purpose. He did not care greatly for Protestantism, except in so far as it might facilitate the union of the two kingdoms ; and he would support no scheme of union which did not secure the honour and the greatness of his native land. Thus he moved in a sphere of his own, apart alike from the mere unionist, from the patriot in the narrower sense, and from the rigid Protestant. Like all ideals in politics, which are not stamped as hopelessly impracticable, Maitland's conception of union was far from being the creation of a single brain. We have seen how the earlier Protestant movement had failed utterly through its association with the aggressive policy of Henry VIII. ; and how at the crisis of the Reformation England had intervened to save Scottish HIS PATRIOTISM 123 nationality, when it was endangered by the designs of France. That Scotland's natural destiny should be fulfilled through the same spirit, which had sufficed in the past to preserve its independence, was an idea so entirely true to the best traditions of the country, that it could not fail to fascinate such a mind as Maitland's. For Maitland was as Scottish to the core as birth and lineage and sentiment could make him. His ancestor. Sir Richard Matalant, had held the castle of Thirlstane against Edward I., and his grandfather had fallen at Flodden. To him, as to his Elizabethan kindred, the country of his birth was neither a pinfold of the uni versal Church nor a mere province of the republic of letters, but a land most emphatically his own, with a long train of heroic memories behind it, and before it the dawn of a broader day. If he looked forward to the time when Great Britain should be the strongest power upon the seas, and should form " a certain mon archy by itself in the ocean, divided from the rest of the world," ^ he also looked back with pride to the days when Scotsmen, in their determination to live free and independent, had builded better than they knew. But to hold the balance equally between the two sides of so delicately poised an ideal was a task too great for Mait land's contemporaries, and eventually even for himself His was a nobler weakness than that which the poet has called the " last infirmity of noble mind " ; and if death took him early in the bitterness of failure, it may have been that he loved Scotland, not wisely, but too well. As Maitland had been the first to suggest the means of reconciling Mary both with England and with her own Protestant subjects, the working out of the new policy devolved mainly on him. Soon after the Queen's ^See p. 89, note. 124 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 return he was appointed her Secretary of State, and he and Lord James divided between them the government of the realm. From 1561 to 1564 inclusive Maitland spent a considerable part of each year in London ; and both by letters to Cecil and in personal interviews he urged upon Elizabeth the importance of recognising Mary as her successor. Able and persistent as it was, his diplomacy was less decisive in its results than in its influence on his ow^n career. When Maitland was forced to turn from Arran to Mary Stewart as the instrument of his policy of union, he embarked on a course, which was destined in the long run to bring him into conflict with England. The question of the Arran marriage had been one of political expediency ; that of the Stewart succession was a question of rights — of rights which the Scots had formerly been content to waive, but which they were now resolved to push to the uttermost. How entirely the aspect of affairs had changed may be seen from the letter of instructions, with which the nobility furnished Maitland, when he started for London in September, 1561. The nobles were glad to find that their Queen bore Elizabeth no ill-will for the refusal of a safe conduct to Scotland, and much relieved that the blame of so unusual a proceeding was not imputed to them. Elizabeth would no doubt reciprocate such kindly feelings ; but if, as was not to be supposed, she should use any discourtesy towards their sovereign, they would know how to conduct themselves in so just a quarrel. 1 A month later, we find Maitland writing to Cecil that he found in his mistress " a good disposition to quietness, but therewith joined a careful regard to her own estate and a courage such as will be loath to forego her right. "2 1 Keith, ii. 73-74. '^Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, No. 588, note. THE SUCCESSION DISPUTE 125 Negotiations for union, begun in this spirit, might conceivably end in a very different result — especially as the assertion of rights was parried by a complaint of wrongs. As Mary found the Scots no more favourable than herself to the Treaty of Edinburgh, she still refused to ratify it ; and thus, with the full approval of her subjects, she was in the invidious position of claiming the nearest place in the English succession without hav ing formally withdrawn her pretensions to Elizabeth's crown. Maitland made light of this difficulty. The treaty might be revised so that the clause as to the arms of England should apply only to Elizabeth's life time ; and meanwhile, if Elizabeth resented the with holding of the ratification, Mary too had something to complain of. Henry VIIL, in default of the issue of his own children, had left the crown to the descendants of his sister, Mary of Suffolk, to the prejudice of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland ; and until the injury to the Stewarts had been redressed by Act of Parliament, it was hardly fair to speak of injury to the House of Tudor. "^ Mary's claim, however, involved interests wider even than the fate of a dynasty. The English Protestants were indignant with the Scots for conspiring with their Catholic Queen to repudiate a treaty, which had been purchased by English blood and treasure, and was the seal of their deliverance from a foreign yoke. On the other hand, even if Maitland had been less of a Scots man, he could hardly have yielded in so vital a point. Elizabeth had told him plainly that she could not recognise Mary as her successor for fear of assassination ; and if she could not face this danger in order to obtain the ratification of the treaty, she was not likely to face it when the treaty had been signed. « Froude, vi. 526. 126 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 The Treaty of Edinburgh had been the work of Cecil; and how little disposed Cecil was either to cancel or to recast the result of his labours may be inferred from the tone of Maitland's letters. There had been many means of " a godly conjunction " ; and if this, which had most hope of success, was to go the way of all the rest, they must accept it as God's will that the two nations were ever to be a plague to each other. He had consecrated himself to the uniting of the isle in friendship ; for five or six years he had shot at no " scope " but this ; and ever as one occasion failed, he began "to shuffle the cards anew, always keeping the same ground." ^ The two Governments were still far from any point of approximation, when Elizabeth created a welcome diver sion by proposing a personal interview with the Queen of Scots. Mary caught eagerly at the suggestion ; and with the exception of the Catholics, who trembled for the Queen's Mass, and of Knox, who feared to lose the Mass in the Anglican service, her subjects were as anxious for the meeting as she was herself There was some hope that she might yield to Elizabeth in the matter of religion ; and as she was not to be pressed to ratify the treaty, it looked as if Elizabeth had decided to recognise her claim. But the meeting, which was fixed for July, 1562, at Nottingham, was fated never to take place. In May the war of religion broke out in France, and Elizabeth was prevailed upon by her Council not to dash the hopes of the Huguenots by showing favour at such a time to a daughter of the House of Guise. Thus the meeting was postponed to the autumn ; and as the autumn, far from bringing peace to France, found Elizabeth in arms with Conde against the Guises, it was postponed again. Meanwhile 1 Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, Nos. 632, 910. MAITLAND S POLICY NOT FRUITLESS 127 the news reached Scotland that, when Elizabeth in October was at the point of death, only one member of her Council had raised his voice in favour of the Stewart succession. The knowledge that so little had been gained by more than a year's diplomacy was almost a deathblow to Mary's hopes ; and though Mait land was despatched again to London in the following February, he succeeded only in preventing anything being done to her prejudice by the English Parliament. We must not suppose, however, that Maitland's labours had been fruitless because they had failed in their ostensible object. If his negotiations had achieved nothing abroad, they had at least sufficed at a most critical time to maintain the Protestant ascen dency in Scotland. It is true that Mary had never laid aside her hostility to the Reformation, that she had assured the Pope of her determination to restore his authority, and that she was corresponding secretly with the enemies of Protestantism on the Continent. On this ground it has been argued that Knox's vehe mence was after all the best policy, and Maitland's attempt at conciliation very much the reverse. The argument is certainly a strange one. Mary might be faithless — and her Secretary, whatever he might protest in public, had his own suspicions ; but another sovereign than Mary Scotland could not have ; and if she was aiming at the restoration of Catholicism, it was the more credit to him, who by flattering her personal ambition for his own large and statesmanlike ends had induced her to postpone her design. At the end of 1564 Mary had been three and a half years in Scotland ; and during that period she had not only not assailed the reformed religion, but had granted a provision for the ministry, had overthrown I^ntly, the leader of 128 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 the Catholic nobles, had suffered the Archbishop of St. Andrews to be at least nominally imprisoned, and had confirmed the law against the celebration of Mass. Anxiety to protect the rights of the Scottish crown in England was not the only motive of Maitland's mission to London in the spring of 1563. Queen Mary was now thinking seriously of marriage ; and the person she desired above all others as a husband was Don Carlos, the son and heir of Philip II. of Spain. Maitland conferred on this subject with De Quadra, the Spanish ambassador at the English Court ; and on the same errand he went over to France to entreat the good offices of the Cardinal of Lorraine. Neither the Cardinal nor Catherine de Medici, however, had any desire to further a scheme which might have united both England and Scotland with the great Spanish Empire in one omnipotent monarchy ; ^ and it was owing to the persistent hostility of France, favoured by what came to be known of Don Carlos' personal character, that Mary lost the prize of her ambition. At the close of 1563 all hope of the Spanish marriage was practically at an end ; but by that time it had given place to other and less pretentious schemes. It was to Maitland during his embassy ofthis spring that Elizabeth first suggested the Earl of Leicester, or, as he then was. Lord Robert Dudley, as a husband for Queen Mary ; and a year later, the Earl of Lennox obtained a permission to return to Scotland, of which he availed himself in the following September. Lennox had been an exile ever since he had made war on his native country in the service of Henry VIII. As he had suffered for Eng land, he was restored through the good offices of the English Government ; but the father of Lord Darnley, ' Philippson, Historic du Rigne de Marie Stuart, ii. 180. THE LEICESTER PROPOSAL 129 who Stood next to Mary in the line of succession and was the favourite of the English Catholics, was no ordinary refugee ; and Elizabeth, realising too late the consequences that might ensue from his return, sought vainly at the last moment to detain him in England. It is obvious that Maitland's schemes of union might be accomplished, either through the Tudor Government or through the large body of disaffected Catholics. As a Protestant, the ascendency of whose party in Scotland had been secured by English aid, he had naturally inclined to the former alternative ; but, under the influ ence of blighted hopes and wounded patriotism, he was rapidly drifting round to the latter. How keenly the Scots resented their failure to establish the Stewart suc cession may be seen from the fact that even so strong a Protestant as Moray — Lord James had been created Earl of Moray in 1562 — approved of the Spanish mar riage, than which there could be no more serious menace to Elizabeth's throne. Maitland, indeed, told De Quadra that his mistress might gain little by her recognition, unless she married some prince, who was powerful enough to enforce her rights.^ When, therefore, Eliza beth, in March, 1564, formally proposed Leicester for the hand of the Queen of Scots, her offer was received in no very complaisant mood. If Maitland and Moray had been resolute before in support of the Stewart succession, they were inexorable now, when a marriage was proposed for their Queen, which, without the estab lishment of her claim by Act of Parliament, would be utterly inconsistent with her dignity. Maitland harped so continually on this theme that Elizabeth told Sir James Melville " that he did always ring her knell in her ears, talking of nothing but her succession."^ i Froude, vii. 51. ''Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 865. I 130 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 The Leicester scheme brought to a crisis the dispute which had long been pending between the two Govern ments. A letter of Maitland's to Cecil shows that he entered on the negotiation with little hope of success. As he had found Cecil more careful not to hurt himself than to say anything which might advance the common cause, he had not during the last twelve months dealt so rashly in these affairs as he was wont to do. He was ready, however, when he saw opportunity, to return to his accustomed method. If a conjunction was really meant, and if Cecil would endeavour to draw it on, there would be no lack of conformity on the side of Scotland ; but " if time was always to be driven without further effect than had followed upon any message passed between them these three years, he should in the end think himself most happy, who had least meddled in the matter." ^ In November a conference was held at Berwick between Maitland and Moray on the one side, and Randolph and Bedford on the other, which, however, did so little good that the Scottish statesmen, on their return to Edinburgh, wrote a joint letter to Cecil, in the course of which they pro tested that, if the negotiation failed for lack of friendly dealing on his part, he should not think it strange if they turned about and sought to save their credit with the Queen as best they could. ^ It was probably this passage, endorsed in the margin as "a threat ening," which induced Cecil to "go roundly to work" with his two correspondents. If Mary would accept Leicester, he professed his belief that Elizabeth would make inquisition of her sister's right, and " as far ' Maitland to Cecil, June 6, 1564:.— Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 462. ^Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 845. THE LEICESTER PROPOSAL 131 as shall stand with justice and her own surety, would abase such titles " as might conflict therewith. This he called plain speaking ; only they must remember that such promises were made subject to the approval of the English Parliament. ^- Cecil had a difficult part to play ; but he could be in no doubt as to the effect of these vague assurances on Maitland and Moray, when they replied that, if this was all he could promise with regard to the succession, they would not only not persuade their mistress to the Leicester match, but would speak not a word more con cerning it. He had reproached them with bargaining for a kingdom in terms of union. Might they not retaliate that he, in refusing to bind himself to such terms, was trying merely to set an Englishman on the throne of Scotland 1 ^ Though the cause seemed hopeless, Maitland con tinued to labour for its success. The matter had not so many difficulties, that Cecil might not remove them all if he chose. Mary must have some equivalent for making so mean a marriage at Elizabeth's dictation ; but if her title were once secure, he should deem Leices ter a better match for her than even the King of Spain or the King of France ; and happy should they be to co-operate in a work of union which would be more glorious to them in all time coming than if they had fought for conquest or for independence in the days of old.' These appeals, however, produced no effect. In March, 1565, Elizabeth announced her final decision in terms which were even more disappointing than those of Cecil's letter ; for she declared that, until she herself had married or had resolved not to marry, the suc- 1 Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 864. ^ /jj^. No. 877. ^Ibid. Nos. 882, 957 ; Tytler, vi. 317. 132 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 cession must remain unsettled. ^ Maitland and Moray, who had been "worked up to great agonies and passions," saw at once that the end had come. The former politely intimated to Randolph that he could not counsel his mistress "to drive any more time"; and Moray, we are told, was " the sorrowfullest man that can be." ^ Meanwhile Lord Darnley had followed his father to Scotland; and Mary, who was now convinced that nothing was to be gained by Elizabeth's goodwill, re solved to dare her displeasure by allying herself with the hope of the English Catholics. In April Maitland was despatched to London to announce her intention of marrying Darnley, and to solicit Elizabeth's concur rence. The matter was formally debated at a meeting of the English Privy Council ; and the Council unani mously condemned the match as prejudicial to both sovereigns and to the weal of the two nations. Opposition, however, was to be feared at home as well as abroad. The Queen's resolution to marry Darnley brought her into conflict with Moray, and in her manner of executing it she gave offence to Maitland. Moray had for some time been growing alarmed at the tendency of the succession dispute to bring about a rupture with England. His show of firmness in the recent negotiations had probably been discounted by Cecil as a concession to his masterful colleague ; for on the eve of the Berwick conference he had secretly sent assurances of his devotion to Queen Elizabeth.^ He was a more zealous Protestant than Maitland, and he had some reason to dread the consequences of a match 1 Froude, vii. 248. ^Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 1047 ; Tytler, vi. 306. 2 Froude, vii. 225. MORAY'S REBELLION 133 which was welcomed by the English Catholics, and was formally approved by the Pope and the King of Spain. When, therefore, neither Elizabeth's remonstrances nor his own availed to turn Mary from her purpose, he set himself to organise a resistance, which took shape, indeed, but only when too late for its primary object. Mary and Darnley were married early on the morning of July 29, 1565 ; a month before, Moray had joined hands with Knox by countenancing a protest of the General Assembly against the Queen's Mass ; and in the middle of August he and his friends Chatelherault, Argyll, Glencairn, and others convened at Ayr to concert measures for a rising. If the Congregation in 1559 had been dependent on external support, Moray and his party were powerless without it. The mass of the Protestants were kept aloof by renewed promises of toleration ; the Lennox faction was strong enough to hold the Hamiltons in check ; and Mary and Darnley monopolised between them all hope of a Scottish suc cession in England. Thus, after a fugitive insurrection of a few weeks, known to tradition as the Run-about- Raid, the rebels threw up the game ; and October found them on the other side of the Border. Elizabeth had encouraged them witlv-the most explicit assurances of support. She had sent them money, had despatched a warship to the Forth, and had kept 300 men in readi ness at Carlisle;^ but she declined to pledge herself further to so weak a movement ; and when Moray went up to London to plead the common cause, he was publicly disowned and insulted in presence of the French and Spanish ambassadors. If Maitland, as Randolph believed,^ was on the point of joining the insurrection, his distrust of Cecil had no 1 Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, Nos. 1491, 1556. ''Ibid. No. 1557. 134 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 doubt deterred him; and Moray's treatment at the hands of Elizabeth must have confirmed his worst suspicions. The probability is, however, that he was never at all in doubt as to his course of action. On the assumption, at which he had now arrived, that Elizabeth would never do anything for the Stewart succession, the Lennox alliance was the best that could be made ; and it is one of many facts all pointing in the same direction that Darnley's first night in Scotland was spent at Lethington.^ On the other hand, a Catholic queen contracting a marriage, which had the approval of Catholics at home and abroad, would require careful guiding — the more so, as Mary had recently shown a preference for other counsels than Maitland's ; and the amity of England, however little might be gained by it, was not to be lightly thrown away. The true key to Maitland's position is probably to be found in one of Randolph's somewhat contradictory reports. On the 3rd of May he writes that the Secretary was suspected to be more favourable to Darnley than he would seem, but that the Lennox faction spoke despitefuUy of him, because he had written to Moray " that he should persuade the queen to make no haste in the matter, but keep it in the stay it was, when he left it."^ Haste, however, was to be the chief characteristic of Mary's con duct. Maitland was on his way back from London, when he was met at Newark by despatches from the Queen, which required him to return at once and tell Elizabeth that she had resolved to marry where she pleased with the consent of her Estates, and then to seek assistance ' Skelton's Maitland of Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stewart, ii. 144. It surely says much for Sir John Skelton's breadth of judgment j that he should be the apologist both of Mary and of her great minister. ' ^Tytler, vi. 330. CHARACTER OF MARY 135 at the French Court. In defiance of these instructions, he continued his journey, overtook Sir Nicholas Throck morton, the English ambassador, at Alnwick, and instead of staying him, as he had orders to do, proceeded with him to Edinburgh.^ Sir Nicholas was Mary's tried friend, and a strong supporter of her right of succession. He had heard from Randolph how the affair was being pushed on in Scotland ; and when he communicated the news to Maitland, the latter was so indignant that he " never saw him in so great perplexity and passion, and would little have believed that for any matter he could have been so moved." ^ The difference between Mary and Maitland on the question of the Darnley marriage had its roots in an antagonism of personal character. If they pursued the same aim, they could do so only in a different spirit. Mary was no stateswoman. With so entirely feminine a mind as hers, Maitland, when he came into contact with it in politics, could have no real sympathy. She wished to be Queen of England, and in that wish he cordially supported her ; but, while Maitland regarded the Stewart succession as a means of healing the breach of centuries in a manner most honourable to Scotland, with Mary it was wholly a matter of personal ambition. 1 M. Philippson (vol. ii. 357) is unsparing in his condemnation of this "black and impudent treason" — more especially as Maitland showed Throckmorton the Queen's letters. But Throckmorton was one of Mary's well-wishers ; and M. Philippson admits (p. 351) that Maitland had some reason to be angry. In good truth, could anything be more outrageous than that Mary should despatch her principal minister to solicit Elizabeth's consent to a marriage, which, unknown to him, she had already concluded "sous Vimpuldon d'un aventurier Stranger" % M. Philippson believes that Mary was secretly married to Darnley in Riccio's chamber between the 7th and the 10th of April ; and on the 13th she sent Maitland to London. ^Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 1159. 136 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 She had as little patriotism as Knox, and she was far from being as devoted a Catholic as Knox was a Pro testant.^ How easily she had accommodated herself to the Reformation we have already seen. In after years she married Bothwell, whose humour it was to pose as a zealous Reformer; she married him according to the Protestant rites ; and she consented at his request to give up her Mass and to recall the permission she had granted in 1566 for the public exercise of the old religion. To Bothwell, indeed, she sacrificed both her creed and her ambition ; but at the time of her marriage with Darnley the love of power was still her pre dominant passion. Indignant that she had gained so little by her policy of conciliation at home and abroad, she resolved to break with Protestantism both in Scotland and in England, to defy Elizabeth, to restore Catholicism, and to humble the power of the nobles. In one respect wounded patriotism was carrying Maitland in the same direction ; but he moved in too large an orbit for his impetuous mistress. Unwilling to throw aside one project of union before he had made sure of another, he would have had her avoid an open quarrel with Elizabeth till she had consolidated her party amongst the English Catholics ; he had no desire to overthrow the Reformation ; he had a great regard for the aristocracy ; and a man less qualified to be the pliant tool of despotism it would be difficult to conceive. For some time before the Darnley marriage Maitland's influence with the Queen had been visibly declining ; and in David Riccio, a Catholic and a foreigner wholly dependent on her favour, she had 1 " For her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of action, she cared much ; for her creed she cared something ; for her country she cared less than nothing." — Swinburne : Miscellanies. CHARACTER OF MARY 137 found a servant, who had no ideas of his own and no interests which could conflict with hers. It was only the accident of her birth that had made a politician of Mary Stewart. A strong, fearless, generous, revengful, high-spirited woman, she felt too keenly the joy of living to care much for distant and impalpable results ; and as politics proved more and more disappointing to her love of power, the flood of passion within her overflowed into another channel. From the time, when she resolved to marry Darnley — from motives of policy indeed, but in a very impolitic spirit — she was no longer the patient schemer of her early days in Scotland ; and the assassination of Riccio in March, 1566, which dissipated her dreams of absolu tism, and added hatred to contempt for a brutal and imbecile husband, cut her finally adrift on the downward course. Thus for two years Scottish history was absorbed into the biography of this brilliant woman ; and it'was fortunate for Maitland that at such a period his own private life was more than usually interesting. In September, 1564, we hear of him as suitor to Mary Fleming,'^ one of the four Maries ; and in October of the following year Randolph writes to Cecil that the Secretary " has leisure to make love, and in the end, as wise as he is, will show himself a fool." ^ As Maitland did not marry his second wife till January, 1567, his folly must have required two and a half years for its probation ; and we know enough of the union so well tested in the making to be sure that it proved a happy one. It would be idle, however, to deny that there was a darker side to Maitland's life during these two eventful years. That the drama then in progress was not at all ^Foreign Calendar, 1564-1565, No. 680. ^Ibid. No. 1638. 138 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 to his liking may be inferred from the attitude towards him of all the leading actors. With Mary he had now little influence ; Riccio was his natural enemy ; Darnley was never tired of denouncing him to the Queen; Bothwell regarded him with the most bitter detestation, and as early as February, 1563, is said "divers ways" to have sought his life.^ In point of scrupulosity Maitland was certainly not superior to the men of his age and country. If he had never been in favour of hasty and violent expedients, it was doubtless only because they were wholly unsuited to the ends he had in view ; and at a time, when statesmanship had abdicated its functions, he could have no objection to get rid of his enemies by helping them to exterminate each other. Although he was careful to conceal his designs, he undoubtedly helped Darnley to make away with Riccio, and Bothwell to make away with Darnley. The guilt of these tragedies is too widely diffused to be of much use to those, who delight in the personalities of history. Both Knox and Cecil were cognisant of the plot against Riccio ; ^ and Moray's share was no less criminal and much more hnmiliating than Maitland's. In order to facilitate his return from exile he not only joined the conspiracy, but even pledged himself to obtain the crown matrimonial for the man whose marriage with the Queen he had taken up arms to prevent ; and he so completely deceived Mary that, on his arrival the day after the murder, she welcomed him as a deliverer. Unlike Maitland, he did not commit himself on paper to the design against Darnley ; but he allowed words to be used in his presence, the import of which he could not fail to understand ; and the conspirators must have ' Foreign Calendar, 1563, No. 370 ; Randolph to Cecil. 2 See pp. 110-111. MURDER OP DARNLEY 139. supposed that what they were doing had his entire approval. Few deeds of blood have been more swiftly and more terribly avenged than the murder of Darnley ; and Maitland's assent to the crime was a prodigious blunder both in his own interest and in that of his sovereign. The Queen had lived so unhappily with her husband that her guilt was at once suspected both in France and England ; and in the latter country the prospects of the Stewart succession were suddenly overcast. When the conspirators laid their account with some such result as this, it did not occur to them that Mary would virtually plead guilty by marrying the murderer, Bothwell. Her partiality for this man had long been notorious ; but, if Maitland had for a moment supposed that the Queen, whose ambition it had been to match wdth the heir of the Spanish Empire, would throw herself away on a profligate baron, the husband of a woman, whom he had married only a year before, he would have been slow indeed to burden his conscience to so little purpose. Bothwell's adroitness in turning the murder to his own personal advantage placed his accomplices in a very awkward position. Not only Maitland, but Argyll, Sir James Balfour, and Huntly had signed a bond for the removal of the " young fool and proud tyrant by one way or another " as a measure of state ; and the plot had been revealed both to Moray and to the Earl of Morton. With the exception of Huntly, they were all more or less eager to arrest the career of Bothwell ; and yet it was certain that, if any movement took shape against him, it would turn on his being the author of the late king's death. Darnley was murdered on the morning ofthe 10th February, 1567. In the beginning 140 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 of May, as the real motive of the crime became more and more apparent, the nobles began to draw together at Stirling ; on the fifteenth of that month Mary was married to Bothwell; and at Carberry Hill on the fifteenth of June, in the scorching heat of a midsummer Sunday ,1 she bade farewell to her husband and his few dispirited followers, and gave herself up to the con federate lords. In the evolution of these events Maitland hesitated longer over his course of action than any of his fellow conspirators. Though Bothwell knew him to be his enemy and kept him in daily fear of his life, he remained with the Queen till the 6th of June ; and when the Earl of Athol would have taken the lead in avenging the murdered prince, Maitland was honest enough to dissuade him.^ Once, however, he had gone over to the Confederates, he had, of course, to adopt the official phraseology ; and it need not surprise us to find him asking aid from Cecil " for the further execution of justice against such as shall be found guilty of an abominable murder."^ It was doubtless with a view to concealing the hypocrisy of such language that Bothwell was allowed to escape unopposed from the field of Carberry Hill. And yet the murder may really have seemed " abominable " to Maitland, when he saw that it had relieved the Queen of one obnoxious husband only to make room for another. Maitland's appearance in arms against the Queen is easily explained — he strove to dissolve her ruinous marriage with Bothwell as he afterwards strove to avert 1 It seems that one cause of the lords' success in the averted battle at Carberry was that " they were supported with store of drink, whilk was a great relief against drowth in sik exceeding heat of the year." — Historic of King Jamas ihe Sext (Bannatyne Club), p. 12. ^Foreign Calendar, 1566-1568, No. 1170, May 4 ; Drury to Cecil. ^Ibid. No. 1330. maitland's defence 141 its consequences. It is more difficult to understand why he should have concurred with the lords in forcing Mary to abdicate in favour of her son. According to the account which he himself gave several years later, the lords, when they rose in rebellion, had no intention of deposing Mary ; and if she had consented to put away Bothwell, they would have remained true to their allegiance. They had supposed that the whole nation would approve of her imprisonment at Lochleven as the best means of sequestrating her from her husband ; but, when they found that a majority of the nobles adhered to the Queen against themselves, they were forced in self-defence to take shelter under the authority of the young king. This, however, was "but a fetch or shift" devised to meet a passing emergency — as if one were to leap from a burning boat into the sea, and then in fear of drowning were to clutch again at the boat ; he had always represented the matter in this light to Moray ; and many could bear him witness that within a month after the latter accepted the Regency, he had pressed him to come to terms with the Queen. ^ This apology, on the face of it, is not very convincing, and in one respect it may easily be disproved ; for, though the lords professed to have taken arms merely to avenge the murder of Darnley and to deliver the Queen from Bothwell, the desire of some of them — and these probably the majority — to crown the prince had so long been known in England that Elizabeth had expressed her disapproval of it as early as the middle of May.* Maitland, however, had a far stronger plea in reserve ; 1 Calderwood, iii. 79-87 ; interview between Maitland and certain representatives of the King's party in May, 1571 ; also Maitland to Sussex, July 16, 1510.— Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 1144. 2 Tytler, vii. 101. 142 maitland and MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 and the true explanation of his conduct is one, which, at the time when these words were used, it was not con venient to mention. More urgent than any question as to the fate of Mary's crown was the question of her personal safety. For many weeks she was in the most serious danger, partly because Knox was daily infusing into the people his own merciless spirit, and partly because the Hamiltons, who professed to be her friends, were really anxious for her death. When Throckmorton came to Edinburgh to intercede on Elizabeth's behalf for the captive Queen, he heard some things, which greatly astonished him. He had supposed that the Confederates had provoked opposition through their severity to the Queen ; and Maitland assured him, on the faith of a Christian man, that if they took Mary's life, all who now opposed them would be at their side in two days. That very morning Archbishop Hamilton and Huntly, with the concurrence of Argyll, had sent to propose that she should be put to death ; " and to be plain with you," he added, " there be very few amongst ourselves, which be of any other opinion." ^ Of that honourable minority, Maitland himself was by far the most conspicuous memr, ber. Buchanan, indeed, has asserted in the Chameleon that he " would have had the Queen slain by Act of Parliament," and that he even solicited some men " to gar hang her on her bed with her own belt."^ .No grosser falsehood is to be found in that mendacious pamphlet. Both Throckmorton and Sir James Melville ^ Tytler, vii. 144 ; Throckmorton to Elizabeth, August 9, 1567. ''Chameleon, pp. 17, 18. When Randolph, some years later, taxed Maitland with this charge, he merely echoed Buchanan. See his letter (undated) to Maitland and Kirkcaldy in Strype's Annals, vol. ii. appendix ix. He was not in Scotland from June, 1566, to the early part of 1570, and cannot be regarded as an independent witness. MARY'S "BURNING FEVER" 143 represent Maitland as the chief of those who were "best affected " towards the Queen ; according to Throck morton, he had " travelled with sundry of the wisest to make them desist" from all proceedings against her;^ and he alone of the Council — " fortified with a very slender company in this opinion " — would have had her restored to liberty, and to her royal estate, under secu rities for the banishment of Bothwell, and the preserva tion of the prince.^ To Bothwell, however, Mary was obstinately, if not heroically, faithful ; ^ and Maitland, who wished her to be queen of all the world, and bitterly lamented to Throck morton his inability to help her,* was forced to treat her as temporarily insane — " one sick of a vehement burning fever," refusing everything that would do her good, and requiring everything that would work her harm. Sir James Melville tells us in his Memoirs that his brother, Sir Robert, was sent by Maitland and several others to the Queen at Lochleven to advise her to comply with the demand for her resignation, on the plea that any thing she did in prison would be legally invalid. The Secretary no doubt believed that something must be thrown to the wolves, which were pursuing his mistress to the death ; but he can hardly have failed to see that her resignation of the crown was the likeliest of all 1 Skelton, ii. 259. ^fceith, ii. 685 ; Throckmorton to Cecil, July 19, 1567. 2 " She will by no means yield to abandon Bothwell for her husband, nor relinquish him ; which matter will do her most harm of all, and hardeneth these lords to great severity against her." — Throckmorton to Elizabeth, July 18, 1567 ; Robertson, appendix xxi. * " Do you not see that it doth not lie in my power to do that I fainest would do, which is to have the Queen my mistress in estate, in person, and in honour ? " — Maitland's words as reported by Throckmorton to Cecil ; Skelton, ii. 259. 144 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 means to win it back. He knew that the Hamiltons wished Mary to be put to death, because there would then be nothing " but the little king betwixt them and home." But he also knew that they had hesitated between this scheme and one for her marriage with the Duke's son, the Commendator of Arbroath ; and if Mary saved her life by resigning the crown, and the govern ment was administered by the opposite faction in name of the prince, they would seek her restoration in their own interest. Such, at least, was the course of events ; and whether he foresaw it or not, Maitland could not wisely have acted otherwise than he did. It was not Maitland who betrayed Mary, but Mary who, in her frenzy of love for Bothwell, betrayed both herself and him. On July 24, 1567, Mary abdicated in favour of the prince, and appointed the Earl of Moray to be Regent during her son's minority. On the 29th James was crowned at Stirling; on the 11th of August, Moray, who had been in France since the murder of Darnley, arrived at Edinburgh ; and on the 22nd he was formally proclaimed Regent. These proceedings gave great offence at the English Court. Throckmorton expostu lated and protested at every step ; and when Elizabeth realised the conclusion, to which events were tending, she ordered him to tell the lords that she would make an example of them to all posterity, if tfeey determined anything to the deprivation of the Queen.^ Elizabeth's interference was keenly resented by Mait land. The crowning of the prince was not his policy, as Throckmorton very well knew ; but he had come to regard it as the only way of escape from a perilous situation, and he was very indig- ^ Foreign Calendar, 1566-1568, No. 1526. ANTI-ENGLISH FEELING 145 nant that he and his friends should be denounced as "perjured rebels and unnatural traitors" for play ing a part, which they cordially disliked, in their sovereign's interest. From the tenor of Throckmorton's letters we may easily see how far the patriotism of the Scots — at all events as interpreted by Maitland — was getting the better of their instinct of union. The lords, it seemed, feared Elizabeth more than the French or any contrary faction at home ; they remembered her treatment of Moray and the other refugees ; and they were fully per suaded that, if they ran her fortune, she would leave them in the briars. They would not allow Throck morton to have access to the Queen, because they had just refused that favour to the French ambassador; and Elizabeth's dealings with them hitherto had not been such that they could afford to dispense with the amity of France. It was useless to speak of sending the prince to England, unless his right of succession was estab lished in Parliament ; otherwise they would act as those who give the sheep to be kept by the wolves ; and the subjects of such a queen as Elizabeth might see " a strange and dangerous issue," if all their goods {i.e. heirs to the crown) were adventured in one ship. If sincere, as doubtless they were, Throckmorton's re monstrances on behalf of Mary were very injudicious ; but Maitland believed, and did not scruple to say, that he was playing the part of the Hamiltons — speaking always of liberty, but having nothing less in his heart. They could not restore Mary in her present infatuation for Bothwell ; and if Elizabeth was resolved to insist on so unreasonable a demand, she might make war, if she chose. Threats would accomplish nothing ; for they were the subjects of 146 MAITLAND AND MARY STEWART, 1561-1567 another prince, and knew not the Queen of England for their sovereign.^ As Mary was a Catholic, and the party which opposed her was mainly, though not entirely, Protestant, the success of the revolution brought with it the establish ment of the Reformed Church. This in itself was a very desirable result ; but unfortunately it was accom plished in a manner which detracted very greatiy from its value. Mary was more than a Catholic. Contrary to her own wishes, she had become the embodiment of compromise in Scotland, the hope of all who believed that religion, however vitally important, is not the sum and substance of a nation's life; and her fall was a triumph of extreme principles, tempered only in practice by the sagacity and the selfishness of their professed adherents. It is true that Mary was by no means a martyr to her faith, that she fell rather through her indifference than through her devotion to Catho licism ; but this consideration could have no weight with men who regarded every evil that befell their adversaries as evidence of the divine displeasure. The reformed clergy were the natural patrons of all attempts against a Catholic queen. Moray had sought the co operation of Knox in his rising against Darnley ; Riccio had been helped to his end by sermons on the hanging of Haman; four days before they crowned the prince, the 1 Substance of letters, July 12, August 22, 1567 ; Robertson, appendix xxi.; Tytler, vii. 155-157 ; Keith, ii. 742-744. Maitland's speeches, as re ported by Throckmorton, are the best proof both of his eloquence and of his overpowering force of character. Even Bishop Keith was impressed : " In all Lethington's discourses the great man still shines." — ii. 744, note. These letters, it may be observed, do not at all support Fronde's conten tion that, if Elizabeth had recognised James as her successor, Maitland would have thrown over Mary Stewart. He merely insists that the child could not be sent to England on any other condition. THE CHURCH ESTABLISHED 147 lords had pledged themselves in the Assembly to root out idolatry, and to confirm the Reformation statutes ; and the Parliament of December, 1567, which established the new Church, declared that the Queen " was privy art and part of the actual device and deed of the murder of the king, her lawful husband." Of the December Parliament something will be said in another place ; but it may be mentioned here that in this, as in the more famous Parliament of 1560, Maitland delivered the opening address. Now, however, he looked rather to the past than to the future, for the close of the Reformation had not fulfilled the promise of its birth ; and when he reminded his hearers that they had attained to their present liberties " sleeping as it were upon down beds," they may have accepted it as a dexterous vindication of his own policy. He had made them wait; and in waiting they had got without bloodshed what Knox would have had them seize earlier at the cost of civil war. CHAPTER V. CIVIL WAE, 1568-1573. Historically, the year 1567 is memorable for the final establishment of the Reformation in Scotland ; but con temporaries may very well have doubted whether the work of that year would be attended by such decisive results. The return of Mary Stewart had arrested the progress ofthe Reformation in 1561 ; and it was by no means certain that the deposed queen might not one day be restored to power. Religion was still dependent for its future on political forces, the course of which was only slightly within its control. The triumph of Pro testantism, which was involved in the success of the revolution, was very far from being its primary object. Amongst the most prominent leaders were Catholics, such as the Earl of Athol and Lord Home, the former of whom protested against the religious legislation of 1567 as he had protested against that of 1560 ; and the party was really divided into two sections — those who had avenged the murder of Darnley to the ruin of the Queen, and those who had utilised that crime as a means of separating her, in her own interest, from Bothwell. To the first section belonged the Earls of MARY IN ENGLAND 149 Moray, Morton, Lennox, and Glencairn ; to the second, Maitland, his brother-in-law, the Earl of Athol, Kirk caldy of Grange, and Lord Home. That the Confederates held together so long as they did was due to Mary's devotion to her obnoxious husband. On the 2nd of May, 1568, she escaped from her island prison in Loch leven ; on the 13th the royalists of the Hamilton faction were routed at Langside, and she herself fied southward, ninety miles, to the verge of Solway, whence next morning she took boat to the Cumberland shore. As Mary's "vehement burning fever" had not yet abated, she failed to profit at this crisis from the dis union of her opponents. She was known to be eager for revenge, and though Bothwell was now an exile in Denmark, she was as devoted to him as ever. She de spatched a message to him on the night of her escape ; and she wrote to him again, urging his return, after her flight into England. The coalition, however, did not long survive the consequences of its victory at Langside ; and the blow, which dissolved it, came from a very unexpected quarter. ' Elizabeth had beguiled Mary to England through her extravagant professions of friendship ; and she showed herself so hostile to the new Government that Maitland once hinted to Throckmorton that they might be forced in self-defence to reveal the true history of the Darnley murder. But, with Mary in safe keeping at Carlisle, Elizabeth's policy rapidly as sumed a new face. Moray was virtually recognised as Regent ; the English wardens on the Border encouraged him in those severities against the royalists which Maitland was deprecating as the seeds of civil war ; and when Mary offered to dispel the aspersions of her enemies, Elizabeth seized upon this as the pretext for a 150 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 judicial investigation, in which commissioners appointed by both parties should plead before certain other com missioners appointed by herself Whether the Queen or the Regent was to be the defendant in this singular suit, it was too suggestive of Edward I.'s adjudication at Berwick to be at all popular in Scotland ; and, moreover, the question of Mary's guilt had already been decided against her by the Scottish Parliament. Maitland strenuously opposed the sending of commissioners ; and if in the end he yielded so far as to go with them, it was partly because Moray thought it dangerous to leave him behind, and partly because he was anxious to render " such extreme folly" as innocuous as possible. His object was to ensure such a defence of the late revolution as should justify it merely as a movement against Bothwell and his marriage with the Queen ; and he hoped to gain this through his influence with the friends of the Scottish succession in England, to whom, as he was aware, the Queen's own commissioners were almost unknown.^ It was thought that Moray himself would conform to this scheme; but discovering at the last moment that he " was wholly bent to utter all he could," Maitland wrote in great alarm to Mary at Bolton, enclosing copies of the letters to be produced against her, which his wife had procured, and assuring her of his desire to be of service.^ When the proceedings opened at York on October 5, 1568, an incident occurred, which must have con firmed the Scots in their worst suspicions. Mary's commissioners, before taking the oath, protested that their mistress, as a sovereign princess, could recog nise Elizabeth as arbiter only, not as judge ; and either 1 Melville's Memoirs, p. 205. 2 Tytler, vii. 196. THE ENGLISH OVERLORDSHIP 151 in anticipation of this protest, or in reply to it, Moray and his associates were required to acknowledge the feudal superiority of the English crown ; " whereat," says one who was present, "the Regent grew red and wist not what to answer, but the secretary Liddington took the speech, and said that in restoring again to Scotland the lands of Huntingdon, Cumberland, and Northumberland, with such other lands as Scotland had of old, that gladly should homage be made for the said lands ; but as to the crown and kingdom of Scotland, it was freer than England had been lately, when it paid St. Peter's penny to the Pope." ^ It is significant that on this the last occasion on which the English over lordship was ever publicly avowed, it should have been repelled by Maitland ; for no one realised more vividly than he, the strenuous advocate of union, that national greatness can be built only on the foundations of the past. Queen Mary looked forward with confidence to the result of an inquiry, in which her subjects were to be called to task for their undutiful conduct ; and she had some reason to believe that the worst charges would not be preferred against her. Moray himself had connived at the murder ; of his fellow commissioners, Morton was only one degree less guilty than Maitland, and Bishop Bothwell of Orkney had actually celebrated the marriage between his titular namesake and the Queen ; and what is stranger than anything else, the president of the English commission, which was to sit in judgment on the revolt against Mary's third husband, and perhaps also on the murder of the second, was himself desirous of being married to her as his fourth wife. The Duke of Norfolk, though a Protestant, was the hope of the 1 Melville's Memoirs, p. 206. 152 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 English Catholics; and the Catholics were already intriguing for his marriage with the Queen of Scots. On the eve of the conference he had sent Mary assur ances of his goodwill, which she in turn had communi cated to Maitland; and she had heard indirectly, and apparently without displeasure, of his matrimonial aspirations. It appears from an entry in Cecil's Diary that Maitland had originally preferred Norfolk to Darnley^ — doubtless on personal grounds — as a husband for the Queen ;^ and he now entered so heartily into the marriage project that it was supposed in some quarters to have originated with himself On the fifth day of the conference, the first three having been spent in preliminaries, Maitland and Norfolk rode out together on pretence of hunting ; and it shows how little truth there is in the story of his duplicity towards the Regent that Maitland himself urged the Duke to make a confidant of Moray. This Norfolk, after some hesitation, consented to do ; and next morning, in a private interview with Moray, he strove to dissuade him from proceeding to extremities against the Queen. He said that Elizabeth did not mean to pronounce sentence, whatever might be alleged against her; nothing, therefore, would be gained by the accusation ; and to blacken Mary's name might prejudice her son's title and her own to the crown of England. Moray entered so much into the spirit of these remonstrances that he kept them secret from all but Maitland and Sir James Melville; in the presence of the former he pledged himself to Norfolk not to accuse the Queen ; and on October 11 he replied formally to the indictment of Mary's commissioners on the minor plea of her marriage with Bothwell. J Skelton, ii. 148. * THE WESTMINSTER CONFERENCE 153 So far all seemed to have gone well ; but affairs entered on a new phase when Elizabeth dissolved the conference and ordered it to be resumed at Westminster, ostensibly on the ground ofthe delay caused by communi cating with the commissioners at so great a distance from Court, but really because she had learned some thing of Norfolk's dealings with the Queen. She had never desired that Mary should emerge without blemish from the ordeal ; and the discovery of Catholic intrigues at home, coinciding with the news of Alva's first successes in the Netherlands, disposed her to still greater severity. Moray's position on his arrival in London was by no means a pleasant one. While Maitland was continually reminding him of his promises to Norfolk, Elizabeth, on the plea that his defences were wholly inadequate, urged him to impeach the Queen as an accomplice in the murder ; his own colleagues pressed •him in the same direction, and having been informed of his secret practices at York, they had divulged them to Cecil. Thus, torn asunder between the two parties, he resolved to yield something to both : he allowed his secretary to bring the writ of accusation to the council- chamber, but he intended not to present it till he had made sure of his ground. To encourage him, the Lord- Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, declared that, if the Queen were found guilty, he should be continued in the Regency, and she either detained in England or delivered into his hands; but it seems he was still hesitating, when, according to Sir James Melville, Bishop Bothwell, with the connivance of the secretary. Wood, snatched the indictment from him, and carried it to the table. Maitland was absent at the time ; but, when he came in and was told what had happened, he " roundit in the Regent's ear that he had shamed himself, and put his 154 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 life in peril by the loss of so good a friend and his reputation for ever. . . . Master John Wood winked upon the Secretary Cecil, who smiled again upon him ; the rest of the Regent's company were laughing upon other ; the Secretary Lethington had a sair heart." ^ In support of his accusation Moray brought forward the famous Casket Letters, which had been privately exhibited to the English commissioners at York; and Norfolk's warning that Elizabeth did not mean to decide one way or another, was made good in form only, not in substance. Cecil delivered judgment to the effect that neither party had succeeded in proving its charges against the other ; but, whilst Mary was detained a prisoner, her brother went home with Elizabeth's approval to his government in Scotland. But, if Moray had secured his political future, he had done so at a very considerable cost. In accusing the Queen he had broken with the moderate section of his own party ; he had highly offended Norfolk, whose friends in the north of England were conspiring, as he knew, to assassinate him on his way home ; and he happened to be in great need of money. When, there fore, Maitland reasoned with him on his lapse from honesty, he affected to listen in a very penitent spirit ; and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, on the ground that " his gentle nature " had been abused by Cecil and his own colleagues, contrived to patch up a reconciliation between him and Norfolk. In this second engagement Moray gave his cordial assent to the Duke's marriage with Mary ; he promised to further the scheme in ^Melville, p. 212. Melville's Memoirs, written from memory in his old age, are not to be relied on in points of detail. But he was thoroughly honest and a shrewd observer ; and he may be safely trusted for the substance of transactions, in which he himself was an actor. THE PERTH CONVENTION 155 Scotland, and he sent Sir Robert Melville to negotiate in his name with the Queen ; in return for which con cessions the Duke became surety in his favour to Elizabeth for a loan of £5000. By this means Moray secured a safe passage to the Border—the Earl of Westmoreland making a demonstration on the way to convince him of the danger he had escaped ; and at the same time he disarmed the hostility of Mary's adherents in Scotland. He reached Edinburgh on the second of February, 1569 ; and in July — though much had happened in the interval — the value of his promises to Norfolk was brought sharply to trial. In that month a convention was held at Perth to consider certain proposals of Elizabeth for the Queen's return, and a request of the Queen herself that judges should be appointed to pronounce on the validity of her marriage with Bothwell. Elizabeth's proposals were not taken very seriously ; but the question of the Bothwell marriage divided the Confederates for the first and last time on a clear and decisive issue. The two parties, which had hitherto held the same road, had now come to the parting of the ways. Mary had recovered from her " vehement, burning fever " ; Bothwell was an exile ; she was willing, even anxious, to be released from him ; and to force her to this the Confederates professed originally to have taken arms. In spite of his engage ments to Norfolk, Moray influenced the Perth Conven tion to reject Mary's request ; ^ and Maitland, taunting his opponents with that inconsistency, which was hence forward to be the principal charge against himself, withdrew with his brother-in-law to Blair Athol. In September Moray retaliated by having him accused as ^"Lethington and the rest of her favourers opposed mightily, and raged, but prevailed not." — Calderwood, ii. 490. 156 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 one of Bothwell's accomplices in the murder ; and a few weeks later, when the Norfolk conspiracy was detected and crushed in England, he made his peace with Elizabeth by sending her all the Duke's letters. If he really supposed that his late colleague would consent to act a similar part, he had to acknowledge his mistake. Maitland, he told Cecil, " had flatly denied in any sort to be an accuser of the Duke of Norfolk." ^ Moray's dealings with Norfolk are one of several stains on a character, which, if not more than conventionally good, was still further from being great. A precise Protestant, decorous beyond the verge of austerity, with a household which is said to have been more like a church than a court, he was sufficiently sinful to connive in his own interest at the sins of others ; he had little sense of honour ; and his religion, though sincere, was of too coarse a texture to hamper him in the niceties of political life. As a statesman, he seldom acted on his own initiative. Sir James Melville, who used to quote Solomon to him " at all erroneous occasions," describes him as so much at the mercy of his associates "that, as company chanced to fall about him, his business went right or wrong " ; ^ and what Melville observed in the details of personal intercourse is apparent even to us in the outline of history. It was not that Moray was weak — for he was an able administrator, and in the rough work of the Reformation war he acquitted himself admirably, but that his nature, cold, formal, cautious, excellent only as a type of mediocrity, was continually overborne by natures stronger and more prodigal than ^Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 499. 2 Memoirs, p. 222. Melville is confirmed by Hume of Godscrof t, who says that "Morton did many things without Murray, but Murray nothing without Morton." — Houses of Douglas amd Angus, ii. 198. CONSISTENCY OF MAITLAND 157 his own. The zeal of Knox, the passionate insight of Maitland, the imperious temper of Elizabeth — to each of these he submitted in turn ; and through his sub- , servience to England, natural enough in so good a Protestant, he compromised both his personal dignity and his country's honour. As we have now come to the end of Maitland's crooked dealing, it may be well to sum up the case against him. If Bothwell could be prosecuted only as the murderer of Darnley, and if Mary's deposition was the only means to save her life and perhaps also to restore her to power, the question is not whether Maitland betrayed Mary, but whether, in his fidelity to her, he did not deceive his associates. That he did deceive them is exceedingly improbable. He made no secret of his desire to have Mary restored ; he laboured inces santly to effect a compromise ; and Moray could not plead ignorance of his designs when he brought him to the conference at York. Maitland, however, had done enough to blot out his rectitude in the eyes of those who had no wish to see it ; and the charge of incon sistency did not come amiss from the Earl of Sussex, who as one of the English commissioners had seen him in company with the accusers of the sovereign, whose champion he now was. To the taunts of Sussex Mait land replied in a very characteristic vein. Even if it were true that he had changed his mind, that in itself was no argument against him — non pudet nos errores nostros revocare ; unwavering conviction was a virtue only in marters of faith ; in politics circumstances were all important, and good and evil could be interpreted with reference to that standard alone. For himself, however, he was independent of such logic. Though forced to rank himself with the enemies of the Queen, 158 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 he had always been her friend, as they themselves very well knew ; and he had "never changed his course from first to last."i Although the Perth Convention, by splitting up the King's party, threatened to re-kindle the civil war, which had been smouldering ever since the battle of Langside, hostilities did not break out till nearly a year later. So long as Moray lived, Maitland and his friends were reluctant to break formally with one who was their old associate and a regent of their own choosing. Moray, however, was assassinated at Linlithgow in January, 1570, and from this point events moved rapidly towards the inevitable conflict. Moray had made himself exceedingly unpopular through his subservience to England. When Northum berland fled across the Border in November, 1569, after a vain attempt to sustain the Norfolk conspiracy by force of arms, the Regent shut him up in Lochleven Castle, and the mere rumour that he intended to sell him, as Morton afterwards did, " to the scambles," drove the Scots nearly frantic.^ Meanwhile Westmore land, the other leader of the rebellion, was ostenta tiously befriended by the Queen's faction ; and in February, 1570, he was joined in exile by Leonard Dacres, who had fought a pitched battle with the Government troops on the banks of the Gelt in Cumber iand. Elizabeth found here a welcome opportunity. In April she despatched the Earl of Sussex and 1 Froude, ix. 320-322 ; Skelton, ii. 368 ; Foreign Calenda/r, 1569-1571, No. 1144. — Maitland to Sussex, July 16, 1570. ^ " All sorts, both men and women, cry out for the liberty of their country, which is to succour banished men as they themselves have been received in England not long since, and is the freedom of all countries, as they allege." — Hunsdon to Cecil, Dec. 30, 1569 ; Foreign Calendar, 1569- 1571, No. 566. THE WAR RENEWED 159 Lord Scrope with two several forces into Scotland, ostensibly to chastise those who had harboured her rebels, as she had harboured Mary's rebels in former days, but really to humble the Queen's party, which through the accession of Maitland and his friends had become inconveniently strong.^ Sussex and Scrope did their work well, wasting and burning the whole countryside from Berwick to the Solway. As the Scottish Borderers had recently made several forays into England, these excesses might possibly be justified as a measure of retaliation ; but this pretext w^as no longer available, when next month Sir William Drury ad vanced to Edinburgh, and in company with Morton proceeded to destroy the lands and houses of the Hamiltons throughout West Lothian and Clydesdale. With Drury on this occasion went the Earl of Lennox ; in June Lennox was made Lieutenant-Governor, and in July, on the recommendation of Elizabeth, he was formally elected Regent. All hope of peace was now at an end. In the eyes of the national party Lennox was " a sworn Englishman," who had betrayed his country to Henry VIIL, and was now come, with English soldiers, to rule over it as Elizabeth's nominee ; he was the mortal enemy of the Hamiltons, and as the father of Darnley he had publicly accused the Queen at York. In August the war broke out, and Lennox gave a melancholy foretaste of its character by storming Huntly's castle of Brechin and hanging thirty-two of the garrison. At the outset the nation was divided in a manner which suggests the Wars of the Roses and the civil war of the following century in England. Although ' " The King's party daily decays, and if the matter be left to them selves, the whole will shortly be on the Queen's side." — Sussex to the Queen, April 23 ; Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 840. 160 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 the King's party included the Earls of Lennox, Morton, Mar, and Glencairn, with some half-dozen of the inferior nobdity and a fair proportion of the gentry, its chief strength lay in the small middle class, which had been organised by Knox and was a power in all the principal towns. On the other side, strong in the north and west and on the Borders, were the great houses of Hamilton, Argyll, Huntly, Sutherland, and Athol, the bulk of the aristocracy, both nobles and lairds, and the mass of the commons. Without the support of England the King's party must speedily have col lapsed, and yet in the opinion of Sussex the strength of Mary's adherents would be as nothing, if only the Secretary could be taken from them.^ It seemed, indeed, as if the truth of this prediction must shortly be tried, for Maitland was already struggling with the disease, which was soon — but none too soon for him — to cut short his career. " I doubt nothing so much of him," writes Randolph in March, 1570, "as I do of the length of his life. He hath only his heart whole and his stomach good, with an honest mind, somewhat more given to policy than to Mr. Knox's preachings. His legs are clean gone, his body so weak that it sustaineth not itself, his inward parts so feeble that to endure to sneeze he cannot for annoying the whole body."^ In this crippled condi tion, unable to walk or even to stand, and carried from place to place in a litter, Maitland became the mainstay of his party, as essential to it as the axle to the wheel ;* and so great was the resort to his ' Foreign Calenda/r, 1569-1571, No. 903. 2 Tytler, vii. 266, 267. ^ Calderwood, ii. 544, who tells us that Maitland " was lusty enough at his table, both at noon and even." PATRIOTISM AND RELIGION 161 bedside that his lodging in Edinburgh was called the school, and in allusion to its situation, the Queen's lords were known as " the lords of the Meal Market." At every stage of its progress the Scottish Reforma tion showed a tendency to fall asunder into two parties — the men to whom Protestantism was all in all, and the men who did, indeed, care for Protestan tism, but who cared for Scotland more. In the days of Cardinal Beaton the national party had triumphed over the religious party ; in the days of Mary of Lorraine the two parties had fought side by side against France and Rome ; and the division of interest, which had begun again with Knox's protest against the Queen's Mass, and had ever since been growing more and more acute, now culminated in civil war. It was in vain that Sir James Melville urged that to maintain a party for the Queen, whilst she remained a prisoner, would only compromise her friends in England and make her captivity the more rigorous ; for Maitland had resolved, if France and Spain and the English Catholics could do it, to dethrone Eliza beth and to put Mary in her place. Elizabeth it was who had frustrated his two great schemes of union — the Arran scheme and the succession scheme ; he believed that she was detaining Mary merely to strengthen her own power in Scotland or to weaken the country through civil war ; and in excess of wrath he was reported to have said that he would make her " sit on her tail and whine." ^ " It breaks my heart," he writes on one occasion, " to see us at this point that ^Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 933.— Sussex to Cecil, May 17, 1570. These were probably the words which so greatly shocked Buchanan {Chameleon, p. 24), who, however, was a pitiful railer against his own Queen. L 162 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 Englishmen may give us law as they will." ^ He had loudly protested against the advance of the English army, and the bitter indignation with which he contem plated the ravages of the invader — 90 castles utterly destroyed and 300 villages — is apparent from his letter to Sussex. This was the third journey the English had made into Scotland since his lordship came to the Border ; he was glad the troops were to be recalled, as it was meet they should have a breathing space and some rest betwixt one exploit and another ; if the amity between the realms permitted of such a phrase, he wotdd say that they had reasonably well acquitted themselves of the duty of " auld enemies," and had burnt and spoiled as much ground in Scotland as any army of England did in one year these hundred years, which might suffice for two months, though they did no more.^ Of Maitland's coadjutors, the bravest and the most conspicuous was undoubtedly Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange. Kirkcaldy was a brilliant soldier, old in service both at home and abroad, whom Henry II. in Melville's hearing had characterised as "one of the most valiant men of our time." Of his zeal for the Reformation he had early given proof as one of the slayers of Cardinal Beaton. His Protestantism was so undoubted that Knox referred to him from the pulpit as a star fallen from heaven ; and even Knox never thought so badly of his old associate as not to have an assurance of mercy for his soul. Politically his career is not altogether a blameless one ; but as a man and a soldier he had qualities which won for him the esteem and admiration both of friends 1 Maitland to Bishop Leslie, August, 1570.— Skelton, ii. 349. 2 Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 1016 ; Tytler, vii. 275-276. THE queen's lords 163 and foes.^ Closely associated with Kirkcaldy was Lord Home, more Papist than Protestant, brave and honourable,^ and a Scotsman of the old school, whom Sussex had made a mortal enemy of England by seizing and occupying his houses of Home and Fast Castle. These two men, with the Earl of Athol, had been very conspicuous against the Queen in the days of her infatuation for Bothwell. Athol had set the crown on the prince's head; Home had been one of the Council of Regency, and both he and Kirkcaldy had greatly distinguished themselves at the battle of Langside. Kirkcaldy, indeed, having received the Castle of Edin burgh from Moray under an obligation to hold it faith fully for the King, was denounced, not unnaturally, as the worst traitor of all. To the other wing of the party belonged the Hamiltons and Argyll. Outwardly con sistent in their devotion to the Queen, they were now supporting her for the same reasons of policy which had formerly led them to plot against her life. Their loyalty, though good enough of its kind, did not wear so well as that of their allies ; and Maitland, Kirk caldy, and Lord Home, the opponents of Mary in her hour of folly, were the only men of note who remained with her to the last. Despite the obvious tendency of his political schemes 1 " He was humble, gentle and meek like a lamb in the house, but like a lion in the fields ; a lusty, stark, and well-proportioned personage ; hardy, and of a magnanym courage ; secret and prudent in all his enter prises, so that never ane that he made or devised mislucked when he was present himself ; and where he was victorious he was very merciful and naturally liberal, and enemy to greediness and ambition, and friend to all men in adversity, and fell oft in trouble to debate innocent men from such as would oppress them."— Melville's Memoirs, pp. 257-258. 2 " An utter enemy to the thieves and void of corruption " is Bedford's testimony to Home's dealing on the Border.— i^om^m Calendar, 1564- 1565, No. 410. 164 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 — a tendency which he regretted as inevitable in a choice of evils— Maitland had no desire to overturn the established religion; but he had a profound antipathy to Knox, and to the class which Knox had inoculated with his own theocratic ideas. One of the manifestoes of the party vindicates its Pro testantism in this. contemptuous manner : They did not mean to uproot religion, themselves being the chief establishers thereof — " Yea, to condescend further (as the iniquity of the time craves), if the noblemen now convened, which are of the first places and greatest number, should pretend (as they mean not) to seek alteration of the state of religion, as is seditiously bruited and reported, alas ! in whose power besides should it consist to withstand it ? " ^ And on another occasion, when a deputation of ministers waited on Maitland and his friends in the Castle of Edinburgh, the latter " marvelled that they would take upon them to have anything to do with the government of the State, which appertained nothing unto them." ^ Of a dispute, in which Knox and Maitland were ranged on opposite sides, it might safely be said that no compromise was possible ; but there was this difference in the temper of the two factions, that, whilst Maitland again and again suggested schemes of accommodation, Knox's party invariably rejected Maitland's schemes without bringing forward any of their own. The in flexibility of the King's lords did not proceed altogether from religious zeal ; and if we are to believe what is said of them by their political friends, they were but a sorry crew. Sir James Melville asserts that the 1 Eannatyne's Memorials, p 29. ^ Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 1714. THE KINGS LORDS 165 attempt of these men to monopolise the offices of state, coupled, indeed, with the intrigues of England, was the sole cause of the war. Elizabeth confessed on one occasion that she knew not how to justify Lennox against the aspersions of the enemy ; — a Parliament was to have been summoned to treat of peace, and that Parliament had done nothing but pass sentences of forfeiture, contrary to express agreement.^ Sussex warmly protested against the outlawry of ])»Iaitlahd in time of truce ; ^ Randolph and Drury exhorted their friends " to use more moderation in dealing with the opposite party " ; * and so staunch a Protestant as Lord Hunsdon declared his belief that the King's party would " never agree to any composition by treaty " — some because they had " more respect to be revenged than regard to the commonwealth," some because they were "resolved to keep such offices, spoils, and authority as they possess by these troubles." * This last reason seemed so conclusive to Hunsdon that he returns to it again and again in his letters to Cecil. Devotion from very different motives to a common cause was almost the sole bond of union between the King's lords and Knox, who was never tired of de nouncing them as " merciless devourers of the patrimony of the Kirk." That the reformed clergy should have thrown their weight into the scale against Mary Stewart is not surprising, and they spared no effort to make their power felt. Knox, as we have seen, gained an evil notoriety by his extravagant railing against the Queen. Ministers were ordered by the Assembly to rebuke any of their parishioners who ^ Fordgn Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 1776. ^ Tytler, vii. 283. 3 Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 259. * Ibid. No. 302. 166 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 might adhere to the Queen's side.^ They were to pray publicly for the King, and all who hindered them in the discharge of this function were to be " excommunicated and holden rotten members, unworthy of the society of Christ's body." ^ In July, 1570, a deputation was appointed to labour for the conversion of the Queen's lords, and " to certify them that disobey [that] the Assembly will use the sword against them, which God has committed unto them." ^ The ministers of Edin burgh, we are told, hated their own parishioners of the adverse party no less than if they had been professed Papists ; and at the close of the struggle the Queen's citizens had to do public penance for their defection, standing bareheaded at the church door, and afterwards in the place of repentance.* All this, however contrary to modern ideas, may have been good policy at a time when the interests of the Reformation were certainly at stake ; but, if we may not complain of the partisanship of the clergy, its tendency was sufficiently deplorable. In a pastoral letter, issued on the eve of the war and undoubtedly the work of Knox, it was declared that the evils then affiict- ing the country were due to the sparing of a wicked woman, in whom the devil himself had been let loose, and the Queen's adherents were warned that, if they remained obdurate, they would be given up "to the power of Satan, to the destruction of the flesh." ^ In 1571 George Buchanan, who, though a layman, had been moderator of the Assembly, published "An Admonition to the True Lords," in which with un conscious irony he complimented his noble friends on their " mercifulness in victory," their " clemency in 1 Calderwood, ii. 542. 2 Ibid. iii. 3. 3 jfyi^ pp 3^ 4, * Historic of King James the Sext, pp. 79, 148. ^ Calderwood, ii. 482-483. FRUITS OF FANATICISM 167 punishing and facility in reconciliation " ; and, this policy having failed, recommended them to try another "kind of medicine." '^ In the Parliament of January, 1573, a petition was presented to the Lords of the Articles, in which the Queen's lords are referred to as "ordained by God to be punished to death for their abominable deeds that no tongue can express";^ and Morton mentioned as one of the reasons, which induced him to consent to the execution of Kirkcaldy, " what has been and daily is spoken by the preachers, that God's plague will not cease until the land be purged of blood." 3 When such a spirit as this was at work in the King's party, it need not surprise us that the war was very cruelly conducted on one of the two sides, and eventually, by way of compensation, on both. It was Lennox who hanged thirty-two of his prisoners at Brechin and ten more at Paisley; and though Lennox himself was assassinated after a battle, this was done against the express command of Kirkcaldy, one of whose friends lost his life in the attempt to save him.* All the evidence, indeed, goes to show that whatever barbarity was practised on the Queen's side, was practised mainly, if not entirely, in the spirit of retaliation. Thus, when five of their soldiers had been taken and hanged by the enemy, the Queen's lords sent a drum to Leith, "desiring that fair wars may ^ Calderwood, iii. 116, 117. ^ Bannatyne, p. 305. ' Tytler, vii., Appendix xii. * This was Spens of Wormiston, whose character is thus described in the Diwrnal of Occurrents : " He was in all his life so gentle, so humane, so kind, so hardy, and so prosperous and happy in all his wars, that his like eithlie could not heretofore be found"— p. 249. The author himself was evidently on the King's side (p. 300), and one would have been glad to know the name at least of one, who in those stormy times preserved so sober a judgment and so kind a heart. 168 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 be used";^ when Captain Cullen was beheaded on Leith Links, they threatened to make reprisals ; ^ and on one occasion, when they hanged two of their prisoners — a third was spared only at the intercession of Maitland — they took God to witness that they were compelled " to do as their enemies does to them." ® If it is satisfactory, it is also somewhat exasperating, to know that the fanaticism, which caused so much misery and bloodshed, was confined to a very small minority. When Knox refused to comply with those who reminded him that it was a minister's duty to pray for all them that are fallen, "the maist part of the people grudgit ; " * his colleague Craig lamented that there was no neutral person to make peace between the two factions,* and when the Assembly passed an Act against praying for the Queen, he, to his great honour, protested against it.* The peasantry were as yet almost unaffected by the new religious fervour ; and even in the towns the " precise Pro testants," who took their politics as well as their religion from Knox, were a far smaller body than is commonly supposed. They were the majority in Dundee — " the Geneva of Scotland," as it has been called, and also in Perth, St. Andrews, and Stirling ; but in Edinburgh they were undoubtedly weak. From a letter of Drury to Cecil in January, 1571, we learn that " the greatest part of the townsmen, especially the craftsmen," were wholly at Kirkcaldy's devotion.'^ When Edinburgh was besieged by the King's party, about a tenth of the burgesses, chiefly of the richer class, went over to the enemy's camp at Leith. It was these men who com- 1 Bannatyne, p. 232. ^ Diurnal, p. 233. ^ Ibid. p. 294. ^ iWwTOaZ, p. 201. 8 Calderwood, iii. 76. "iJiMTOO?, p. 236. ' Foreign Calendar, 1569-1571, No. 1505. ARCHBISHOP HAMILTON 169 mitted the worst atrocities of the war ; and their cruelty was inspired mainly by the conduct of their own fellow citizens. For the people of Edinburgh displayed the utmost zeal in the Queen's cause. Kirk caldy held a " wappinschaw," at which they mustered in arms 600 strong ; all of them, merchants and craftsmen alike, were eager at every skirmish to come to blows with the enemy; and they took such labour upon them in watch and ward and digging of trenches " that it was ane marvellous thing to behold." ^ Of the many who lost their lives in this miserable war, there was one at least who requires some special notice. In April, 1571, the King's party gained their first great success — and a brilliant exploit it was — the capture of Dumbarton Castle. Archbishop Hamilton was among the prisoners ; and within four days he was tried and executed on a charge of being accessory to the murder of Darnley and of the Regent Moray. It was Hamilton's misfortune to accede to the Primacy at a time when the Roman Church in Scotland was tottering to its fall, and what creditable exertions he made to avert the catastrophe we have elsewhere seen. Though at one time the most formidable opponent of Mary of Lorraine, he cordially supported her at the crisis of the Reformation ; and he was the only one of the prelates who remained with her to the end.^ Once the Church had fallen, however, he proved a better friend to the house of Hamilton than either to his own reputation or to the Catholic cause. He supported his nephew's suit for the hand of Queen Elizabeth ; he would have had Mary put to death after her surrender at Carberry Hill; and he confessed on the scaffold that he had instigated the assassination of Moray. 1 Diurnal, pp. 231, 232, 252. 2 Foreign Calendar, 1559-1560, No. 738. 170 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 Chatelherault, the Primate's brother, had the rare good fortune for one in his position at that time in Scotland to die in his bed ; and his is the only career of note which is conterminous with the whole cycle of Reforma tion history. Proscribed by Beaton as a Protestant before the accession of Queen Mary, he lived to see both the end of her reign and the ruin of her cause. ^ The capture of Dumbarton, the key to the Firth of Clyde, was a serious blow to the Queen's party, since it destroyed their best hope of obtaining succour from abroad. A few months later, the disaster had almost been good. On the morning of the fourth of September, 1571, a detachment from Edinburgh Castle succeeded in surprising the King's lords at Stirling. Lennox, Morton, and all the other leaders, save Mar, were easily taken prisoners, and the enterprise was wrecked only by the conduct of the Borderers, who dispersed at the critical moment in quest of spoil. Money was sent occasionally to Maitland and his friends from Flanders, and especially from France, in payment of the Queen's dowry, but aid of a more substantial kind was hardly to be expected. France and Spain suspected each other's intentions. France was hampered by marriage, negotiations with England ; and though Alva medi tated a descent on the Aberdeenshire coast, and even sent officers to survey the harbours, he was too cautious to venture much for a waning cause. The Queen's party owed its preponderance at the outbreak of the war to a conviction that Mary would eventually be set free. This conviction was kept alive for a time by delusive negotiations for her release ; but as these failed one after another, it gradually declined, until in October, 1571, after the detection of the Ridolphi con- 1 Chatelherault died in 1575. MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW 171 spiracy, the English Government announced that all hope of the Queen's return to power must be considered at an end. In August of this year Argyll went over to the King's side, and he took with him Cassillis, Lord Boyd, and the Catholic Earl of Eglinton. Argyll and Boyd obtained, each of them, "a fat kirk benefice," and the Assembly consented to divorce Argyll from his wife with a view to his marrying Lord Boyd's daughter.^ For a year longer the struggle continued without intermission, and the daily skirmishing between Edinburgh and Leith being rather more than conter minous with this period, it was the bloodiest phase of the war. On the 31st of July, 1572, a truce was con cluded for two months, which was afterwards extended by successive prolongations to the end of the year. As by this truce the Queen's party virtually surrendered the town, though not the castle, of Edinburgh, and as it was signed at a time when they had gained some con siderable successes in the north, their wisdom in assent ing to it is open to question. An event, however,. occurred about this time on the continent, the conse quences of which were sufficient in themselves to wreck finally the Queen's cause. In the last days of August, 1572, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was raging in all the principal towns of France, and the news, when it reached Scotland early next month, created a profound impression. Pro testants and Catholics alike were filled with horror ; there was an immediate outcry for " a straiter league with England " ; ^ the clergy thundered from the pulpit, ^ Historic of King James the Sext, p. 85. "There was none that was. brought under the king's obedience but for reward either given or pro mised." — Diwrnal, p. 238. 2 Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 578. 172 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 and nine months later, they were as loud in their denunciations of the crime as though they had heard of it but the day before. ^ Knox, though he had little more than two months to live, was able to join in the chorus of execration, and he must have regarded this appalling tragedy as justifying to the full his own violent methods. Such, at least, was the judgment of his followers ; and it is to the excitement of this great crisis that we may trace, in germ at least, the Covenant of 1581 and its more famous revival in 1638. Knox died on the 24th of November, and on the same day Morton succeeded Mar, who had been Regent since the death of Lennox in September, 1571. Morton was the ablest and the strongest man of his party; and through his influence Elizabeth was induced formally to recognise the young King, to send money, and to pledge herself, if necessity arose, to send troops also. This blow, enforced by the effects of the massacre, completely broke up the Queen's faction. In February, 1573, at Perth, the Hamiltons and Huntly made their peace with the Government, and their example was followed in April by Lord Seton and the Earl of Athol. Meanwhile at Edinburgh the truce had run out ; and before daybreak on the first of January, 1573, a gun was fired from the Castle in token of defiance. The Hamiltons and Gordons, however, had already deserted the cause by obtaining an extension of the truce in their owm favour ; and from this date the Castilians, as they were called, alone remained in arms for the Queen of Scots. Maitland had been an inmate of the Castle since April, 1571. His health, as we have seen, had long been completely shattered, and he was now so weak that, when the great guns were fired, he had to 1 Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 1035. MAITLAND HOLDS OUT 173 be carried down to the vaults below David's Tower. ^ What agony the siege must have been to one in his condition we may easily imagine ; and his obstinacy in holding out to the last, so very singular in a cam6leon politique,^ is not easily explained. According to Sir James Melville, Morton, looking to the security of his own power, wished rather to divide the Queen's adher ents than to bring them all to terms ; and when Kirkcaldy " stood stiff on his honesty and reputation " not to sacrifice his associates, he turned, with what success we have just seen, to the Hamiltons and Huntly.^ At the beginning of March, when they were called upon to surrender after the general pacification, the Castilians did, indeed, offer to acknowledge the King's authority, provided the Castle should remain in Kirkcaldy's hands and Elizabeth be security that they should be restored to their possessions, and have money to pay their debts ; * but they must have known that these terms had no chance of being accepted, and a few days before, Maitland and Kirkcaldy, ignorant of what had been concluded at Perth, had exhorted Huntly to remain firm, assuring him that France would send help, and that Elizabeth would not dare to intervene.^ As to what France would do and Elizabeth would abstain from doing, Maitland may have had his own opinion, whatever he might say to encourage Mary's friends. His was undoubtedly a sanguine spirit ; but, as the shadows fell more darkly about him in those last years of sickness and defeat, he saw clearly, though without flinching, what the end must be.* ^Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 763. 2 So M. Philippson styles Maitland. ' Memoirs, p. 251. * Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 816. "^Ibid. No. 784. ^As early as August, 1571, he writes thus to Archbishop Beaton, 174 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 Elizabeth soon proved that for once at least she had been sincere in her promises to Morton. Officers came from Berwick to survey the Castle, and they were followed on the first of April by a force of pioneers. That Maitiand and Kirkcaldy, with only 160 men, some of them not trained soldiers, all of them worn out with over-work, and badly supplied wdth water, really meant to hold the rock against Scots and English combined, was regarded as well-nigh incredible. Killegrew, Eliza beth's ambassador, was "at his wit's end to consider their case," and could only suppose that their hearts had been hardened to an ill destiny.^ Maitland was believed to have "enchanted" Kirkcaldy; but even Maitland, it was thought, "would not abide" the cannon, w^hich were on their way to Leith. The cannon arrived towards the end of April ; and on the 27th, when they were formally summoned for the last time, the Castilians hoisted the royal standard, and " returned answer that they would keep the Castle for Queen Mary, although all Scotland and half England had sworn the contrary."^ For nearly three weeks the besiegers were occupied in mounting their guns, the garrison meanwhile doing what they could to hinder them. On Trinity Sunday, the 17th of May, at two in the afternoon, the Engfish batteries opened fire, and the firing continued until eight Mary's ambassador in Paris : " Whatsomever opinion we have had that a great number of Scotland favoured the Queen and misliked of her enemies, yet by experience we find but few that take the matter to heart. Many we found that, in private conference with their friends, would lament her cause, and by words profess that th^y wish well to her majesty and seem to mislike the present Government ; but now we have put the matter to that point that deed must try who will set forward her cause and who not, we find very few who put their hands to the plough." — Quoted by Burton, v. 65-66. ^Foreign Calenda/r, 1572-1574, No. 871. ^Ibid. Nos. 922, 923. SURRENDER AND DEATH 175 at night. The attack seems to have languished some what till the 21st; but the cannonade of that morning was the prelude to a six days' almost continuous bom bardment. By the 24th two of the largest towers had been shattered to pieces ; on the 26th the blockhouse on the long slope facing the High Street was carried by assault after three hours' desperate fighting ; and on the 29th, when 3,000 large shot had been thrown into the Castle, when the battlements had been pounded into " a sandy brae," when the last spring of water had been cut off, and the soldiers in desperation were ready to hang Maitland over the walls, the end came, and Kirkcaldy surrendered to Sir William Drury, the English com- mander.i The heroic garrison, now reduced to 100 men, were allowed to march out with their arms and baggage ; the officers retained their swords, and for several days went at liberty. Morton, however, was determined to have the chief offenders ; the clergy clamoured daily for their blood ; and eventually by order of Elizabeth they were given up. Lord Home's life was spared, but Kirk caldy was dragged to the gallows — Drury protesting in vain, and all the English officers lamenting the loss of so worthy a captain. A brother of Kirkcaldy perished with him ; and Maitland, felix in opportunitate mortis, narrowly escaped the same fate. There can be little doubt that he "departed at the pleasure of God," as the chronicler quaintly puts it ; but the reports current at the time are a sad commentary on the close of a great career. Sir James Melville notices the rumour that "he took a drink and died, as the old Romans ^ Birrel in his Diary remarks that " there was a very great slaughter amongst the English cannoniers, sundries of them having their legs and arms torn from their bodies in the air by the violence of the great shot." —Dalyell's Fragments of Scottish History, p. 21. 176 CIVIL WAR, 1568-1573 were wont to do";^ and Cecil, now Lord Burghley, writes of him as " dead from his natural sickness, being also stricken with great melancholy, which he conceived of the hatred that he did see all his countrymen bear towards him since he came out of the Castle."^ In spite of the pathetic entreaties of his wife, his body lay long unburied ; and when or where his bones were laid finally to rest, we do not know. Of the Scottish Reformation in its hour of triumph, a movement religious indeed, but less religious than political, Maitland was unquestionably the most repre sentative figure ; for, far beyond all his contemporaries, he embodied its two outstanding motives — the sense of nationality and the instinct of union. Had Elizabeth accepted Arran, had Francis II. lived and Mary never come in person to the Scottish throne, the Reformation, with Maitland at its head, might have continued to un fold itself on such lines as these. This, however, was not to be. The return of Mary quickened the patriotism of the Scots ; her return as a Catholic divorced the political from the religious side of the Reformation; and her personal failings gave the preponderance to the latter. Henceforward Maitland was committed almost inevitably to the pursuit of the impracticable. In his succession scheme he sought to reconcile Mary to Elizabeth and to her own Protestant subjects ; to save her from Bothwell, he joined the Confederates at Car berry ; to save her from Knox, he consented to her deposition ; and he perished finally in the attempt to undo the fetters, with which, in his loyal rebellion, he himself had bound her. With all his matchless skill in ^ Memoirs, p. 256. 2 Froude, x. 212. Maitland was not "found dead after the surrender," as Burton states. He died at Leith on July 9, six weeks later. A SHATTERED IDEAL 177 diplomacy, Maitland was too much of an idealist to be a successful statesman ; and his ideal could not come to fruition at a time when the cold shadow of Puritanism was already creeping over the land. In him and in Kirkcaldy of Grange the long struggle for national independence claimed the last of its victims. The embodiment of a period of transition, looking with the same passionate insight both before and after, he made it his aim to carry Scotland, with all its traditions unim paired, into the bosom of the larger life ; and wide as the channel of union was, wide as the Scots themselves had made it, it was not wide enough for him. M CHAPTER VI. THE NEW EELIGION. We have seen that it would be a great mistake to regard the Scottish Reformation as merely the birth and de velopment of the Reformed Church. Between the Refor mation — aristocratic, cynical, statesmanlike, patriotic — and its protege the Church there was a very real conflict ; and it was not till the Church had emerged victorious from the vortex of Reformation politics that she could hope to be the mistress of her own career. With the death of Maitland in 1573, religion obtained a supremacy in the public life of Scotland, which was not overthrown for more than a hundred years. Mait land had looked primarily to a union of the crowns ; but the spirit in which he worked — the spirit of nationality attuned to large and imperial ends — was the spirit, not of 1603, but of 1707. At this point, then, we enter on a new period. We have traced the ante cedents of the Reformation and its progress to victory against France and Rome ; we have studied in Knox the conflict of the religious with the political element, in Maitland the development of the latter ; and it falls now to attempt some analysis of Scottish Protestantism as a preface to what must henceforth in the main be ecclesias tical history. ; ERASMUS AND LUTHER 179 It is now generally admitted that the religious revolution ofthe sixteenth century was primarily a moral, not an intellectual, movement. It was not so much the outcome of the New Learning as a reaction against the premature liberalism, which in Italy had paganised the Church, and in every country had aggravated the corruption of manners by discrediting, without replacing, the ancient faith. Thus in one sense the Reformation was a confession of failure, since it cast a blight of futility on that revival of humanism natural to men whose eyes had been opened to the greatness of a vanished world. How entirely opposed was the religious movement to its literary antecedents may be inferred from the fact that Luther made the original depravity of human nature the corner-stone of his theological system. To some minds with strong Hellenic sympathies, the Reformation has appeared merely as a sullen and angry sea rolling between us and the sunlit shores of the Renaissance ; and assuredly it was the misfortune of Europe that it was too far gone in moral deterioration to be regenerated by Erasmus instead of Luther. Goethe said of Luther that he " threw back the intellectual progress of man kind for centuries by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide questions which ought to have been left to the learned." Under the influence of religious fervour thought warmed into conviction, and conviction, when the heat had gone out of it, crystallised into dogma. The monks were not wrong when they said that Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it, nor was Erasmus wrong when he said that he had laid a hen's egg, whereas the result of Luther's incubation was not a hen but a gamecock ; for the participation of the masses was really all that was needed to convert Erasmian ideas into Lutheran convictions. 180 THE NEW RELIGION At the same time it is easy to see how the Reforma tion developed that liberalising tendency which has made it one of the greatest epochs in the progress of the human mind. The Roman Catholic, linked as he was to an infallible Church, believed not merely in an absolute standard of truth, but in the accuracy of a long series of decisions based thereon, which were as much the creation of the ecclesiastical authorities as the common law of England is the creation of English judges. The Protestant accepted indeed the absolute standard, but he interpreted it either independently or in the light of precedents, which, for him, were instructive merely, not authoritative. Thus the weight of tradition was rolled back to a point, at which it limited without repressing freedom of thought ; and the liberty of interpretation which the Reformers permitted to themselves, if not to their successors, went far to compensate for their sub servience to the written Word. The difference between, the Church conceived as the depositary of divine truth and the Church conceived as divine only in so far as it approximates to that truth, is the secret of the intellec tual superiority of Protestantism; for the latter conception, on the face of it wavering and elastic, prepared the way for that progressive multiplication of sects, which, however prejudicial in the long run to true culture, is none the less evidence of continuous mental vitality. So far, then, the Reformation involved a recognition of the right of private judgment. But it is remarkable that this right was asserted by the Reformers, not as essential to the Christian life, but as an extraordinary expedient designed to meet a special emergency. Asi the founders of a new religious system, they claimed to examine for themselves the inspired writings; but THE RIGHT OP PRIVATE JUDGMENT 181 the system, which embodied the results of their in vestigation, was to be accepted henceforward without question. With the exception of Zwingli and Socinus, all the leaders of the movement repudiated the idea of religious toleration. When Calvin in 1553 had Servetus burnt for heresy, even the mild Melancthon wrote to congratulate him, and Beza published a treatise in justification of the crime. ^ The Book of Discipline requires that all doctrine repugnant to the Evangel "be utterly suppressed as damnable to man's salvation." The authors of the Scottish Confession declared in their preface that, if any man could point to anything in their work which he believed to be contrary to Scripture, they would either convince him of his error or defer to his objection ; but this preface was omitted when the Confession was re-enacted by Parliament in 1567, and the Act of that year declares that those who in all time coming shall believe the Confession, and those only, are the true and holy Church of Christ Jesus. ^ Thus Knox and his colleagues promulgated as absolutely authoritative, and under heavy penalties, a document in which they themselves had admitted the possibility of error. It thus appears that the Reformation was favourable to intellectual progress in so far as it involved the acceptance of a principle, which, however the Reformers might seek to limit its application, was really the negation of finality in matters of faith. In other respects, too, the movement stimulated inquiry; for it impaired the poetry of feligion, the subtle charm which disarms criticism, by popularising those theo logical conceptions which had hitherto been familiar 1 Lecky's Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, ii. 50. 2 Innes's Law of Creeds in Scotland, pp. 25-27. 182 THE NEW RELIGION only to scholars. The Catholic Church, which for centuries had been the mind of Christendom, abounded in vague and often contradictory ideas, originally no doubt the work of theologians, but known to the people only through the literature of devotion as interpretations of the lights and shadows of the religious life. Thus, for example, the dogma of original sin might almost be said to be true as a recognition of the tragedy of fate when it was held loosely and in conjunction with other beliefs expressive of human dignity and hopefulness, whereas it became profoundly false, when it was adopted as a creed to the exclusion of every opposing doctrine. The Reformers,, in fact, made the people potential sceptics in making them theologians ; for the finer touches of the religious spirit could not be reproduced in the language of the schools. The contradiction we have observed in the theory of the Reformation is only one of many ; for the strength of the movement lay not in its ideas, but in the sincerity of purpose, which would have made even worse logic a success in practice.^ Themselves the offspring of moral indignation, the Reformers affected to despise good works ; and the twofold aspect of their teaching, as an exaltation of dogma over conduct, and at the same time an incentive to free thought, has made the evolution of Protestantism much more difficult and painful than it might otherwise have been. Even the rehabilitation of the Bible gave at first little promise of its efficacy as a means of mental enfranchisement. "'Whatever direct superiority. . . Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness. ... Its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory." — Matthew Arnold : Culture and Anarchy. THE APPEAL TO SCRIPTURE 183 Knox on more than one occasion declared that the new religion was independent of argument, being based on Scripture, whereas the old faith required to "be laid to the square rule of God's Word." ^ He thus laid himself open to the attack of Ninian Winzet, whose arguments against the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures were never answered, probably because from the Protestant point of view, as then understood, they were really unanswerable. The Reformers claimed to have attained to finality in matters of faith ; and Winzet showed them in language which recalls two famdiar lines of Shakespeare,^ that their absolute standard of truth was as variable and as diverse as human nature itself. The day was then far distant — if indeed it has yet dawned — when Protestantism could cite the author of the Four Score Three Questions as a witness in its favour ; but in that uncritical age the habit of bringing all disputes in doctrine to the touchstone of Scripture was rather a help than a hindrance to freedom of thought. In Scotland the sermon grew to such proportions that it gave a name to the entire service ; for more than a century the land resounded with the din of theological discussion ; and though in itself the controversy tended to no important result, the mental activity it involved was a training of very considerable value. But whatever intellectual gain, immediate or remote, may have been involved in the appeal to Scripture, it would seem to have had at least two very unfor tunate results. In the first place, through the literal interpretation of the inspired text, it generated that 1 Works, ii. 139. 2 " In religion What damn6d error, but some sober brow ^ Will bless it and approve it with a text." 184 THE NEW RELIGION hard and inflexible temper which we have had occasion to study in the case of Knox. On mere academic grounds the Roman Church was right in the stress it laid on tradition ; for this principle, in collating early teaching with early practice, was a concession to the true spirit of history. At the lowest, tradition is always practicable, whereas new opinions, based on Scrip ture apart from its commentary in the hearts and lives of past generations, are apt to be very much the reverse. In some respects the Reformation had the same effect on Scotland as the Revolution on France; for it brought into power a class of men who had had no training in politics, and whose arbitrary use of the Bible was no more beneficial in practice than the enthusiasm of French politicians for abstract ideas. Whatever may have been the relative merits of the law of Moses and the philosophy of Rousseau, the supporters of both systems were equally inflexible in their efforts to translate theory into the language of fact. How deplorable was the influence of the Church during the war between King James and his mother we have already seen ; and in the social as in the political sphere the intractability of the Reformers was rendered worse then inconvenient through their devotion to the history of the Jews. Their theology was sufficiently evangelical ; but in their records of moral discipline we are reminded of what Macaulay says of a Scottish statesman of the Revolution, that though he was con tinually quoting Scripture, there is nothing in all his writings to show that he had ever heard of the New Testament. Of work done in this spirit we have a good example in the case of Aberdeen. The kirk- session of Aberdeen came into existence in November, MORAL DISCIPLINE 185 1562; and on the 10th of December they issued what professed to be an expansion of the Decalogue as a complete code of morals for the town. Having deplored their legal incompetence to punish fornication, or even adultery, with death, they took measures against " such rotten members" as might be found guilty of these sins. Fornicators for the first offence were to make public repentance ; for the second, to be carted and ducked ; and for the third, to be banished. Harlots, "adulterers manifest and openly known," bards," com mon scolds, slanderers and backbiters for the third offence, were all to be banished ; and drunkards for the third offence were to be excommunicated. . Those who absented themselves from church on Sundays were to pay sixpence to the poor ; and the elders and deacons, under a penalty of two shillings, were to attend both the Sunday and the weekday preachings. There was to be no discussion of the Scriptures, "no fly ting or chiding " at time of meat ; and the heads of households were to make provision against swearing — those who could afford it to pay a fine, and servants and children to receive " ane palm on the hand." This comprehen sive decree was enforced and supplemented by many subsequent ordinances. In March, 1568, the elders and deacons took a solemn oath to keep secret the proceed ings of the session ; and at the same meeting the order of public repentance for adultery was thus determined : The, adulterer was to present himself on three several Sundays at the church door clad in sackcloth, bare footed, barelegged, with his offence inscribed round a crown of paper on his head; he was to stand before the pulpit during the sermon, and at its close was to resume his place at the door, as a spectacle to the con gregation as it dispersed. In 1603 it was ordained that 186 THE NEW RELIGION a bailie and two of the session should pass through the town every Sunday, either before or after noon, and should search houses at their discretion, with a view to reporting all who were absent from church.^ What was done at Aberdeen was done with more or less severity in every Lowland parish. The kirk -session of Perth would not allow an unmarried woman to live alone or two sisters to keep house together for fear of scandal ; and it ordained that female delinquents of the usual type should be first imprisoned, and then exposed at the market cross "fast locked in the irons two hours, their curchies off their heads, and faces bare, without plaid or other covering."^ , The ecclesiastical court known as the General Kirk of Edinburgh seems to have allowed itself a very wide latitude in the exercise of discipline. We read of persons making public repentance for exporting wheat or for lending money at interest ; and for at least three years after Kirkcaldy had withdrawn from the town to the Castle in July, 1572, the Queen's citizens were being perse cuted by the Church. Thomas Macalyne, a Lord of Session, complained that, though he had remained in the town with Kirkcaldy " of ane most just fear," and though on this ground the Assembly had decided in his favour, he was still excluded from the communion. Even the women who had been in the Castle were forced to make repentance ; and so late as July, 1575, we find a certain David Gregor doing penance, bare- 1 Ecclesiastical Records of Aberdeen (Spalding Club). In the year 1792 fines were still levied on immorality in a parish at the gates of Aberdeen. — Statuta Ecclesiae Scoticanae, ii. 286. In the parish of Mauch line, Ayrshire, public penance was not abolished till 1809. — Edgar's Old Church Life in Scotland, i. 301. 2 Perth Kirk-Session Register, Spottiswoode Miscellany, vol. ii. DISCIPLINARY LEGISLATION 187 headed in a grey gown, for having borne arms in the Queen's cause.^ Whatever power the Church may have had to secure respect for its own decrees was largely reinforced by the authority of the State. Many Acts of Parliament were passed in aid of ecclesiastical discipline, as ex amples of which may be mentioned a very severe law of 1567 against fornication, an Act of 1579 for the observance of Sunday, and an Act of 1581, which provided that swearers for the third offence should be banished or imprisoned for a year and a day at the king's pleasure, and that censors should be appointed in the market places of all boroughs to apprehend the users of "abominable oaths. "^ These and similar laws were sometimes extended by the Church courts in a. very arbitrary fashion ;* and the magistrate who hesitated to enforce them was liable to be proceeded against by the Church. But the most effective way in which the State assisted the spiritual power was by attaching civil penalties to the sentence of excommunication. In this respect the Reformed Church merely served itself heir to the legal endowment of its Catholic predecessor. In 1572 excommunicated persons were declared to be infamous, incapable of holding office or of bearing witness ; and by an Act of the same year, based on one of James V., it was provided that all who had been excommunicated for forty days should be charged under ^ " Buik of the General Kirk of Edinburgh," Maitland Miscellany, voL ii. ; Historic of James the Sext, p. 148. '' Act. Pari. iii. 25, 138,212. ' Thus the Kirk-Session of Perth, having resolved to compel attendance at the Thursday sermon, required the Dean of Guild and Deacons " to- appoint the penalty expressed in the Act of Parliament for breaking of the Sabbath day to be taken up of the contraveners of this ordinance." — Spottiswoode Miscellany, ii. 257. 188 THE NEW RELIGION letters of Council to reconcile themselves to the Church, which if they failed to do, they were to be outlawed as rebels.^ To reconcile the rigour and activity of this censorship of morals with its small apparent result is perhaps the most perplexing problem of the Scottish Reformation. With all its great qualities, Scotland has never stood high either in chastity or in sobriety among the nations of Europe ; and the ecclesiastical records bewail at all times the abounding iniquity of the people. Un questionably to a great extent and over a long period the censorship was practically inoperative. Complaint was made to the Assembly in 1573 that "the nobility will not receive discipline, men of poor estate for the most part contemn it" ; ^ and the secular power was always slow to exert itself in support of the Church. Nearly forty years after the Reformation, in 400 parishes, exclusive of Argyle and the Isles, there was neither minister nor reader ; in a far greater number there can have been no minister ; and where there was no minister the kirk-session was not likely to have much vitality.* In the course of the next century, 1 Act. Pari. iii. 76.* As early as 1242 we find Alexander II. by a mandate to his sheriff and bailies of Traquair directing that persons excom municated for forty days should be imprisoned till they made satisfaction to the Church. — Statuta Ecclesiae Scoticanae. ^ Booke of the Universal Kirk, i. 284. 3 Row, p. 174 ; Birrel's Diary, date 1596. So late as this year the Assembly ordained " that every minister be charged to have a session established of the meetest men of his congregation." — Calderwood, v. 403. In 1572 the staff of the Church consisted of 252 Ministers, 157 Exhorters, and 508 Readers ; and in that year there was only one minister in the whole county of Peebles. — Keith, iii. 56, note. From a table printed in Mackenzie's History of Galloway for the period 1567-1573 there would seeip to have been only four ministers in the whole of Wigtown and Kirkcudbright, and of these two were replaced by readers. In 1588 there were " scarce three " ministers in Stirlingshire, and out of 24 DISCIPLINFf'A FAILURE 18» however, the influen^ of the clergy immensely in creased ; and their/failure to raise the moral tone of the people cannQtj^.^e ascribed in the long run to want of power. Much stress has been laid on the tendency of the Calvinistic theology to subordinate strictness of life to soundness of doctrine ; ^ but though the system of discipline may have been weakened through the enforcing of good works in the session and their dis paragement in the pulpit, the system itself was incurably bad. It was a system without tenderness and without pity, suited only to enthusiasts, repellant to strong natures, and to weak natures positively pernicious. The humiliation inflicted on female trans gressors was the death of all modesty ; it became the most fruitful cause of infanticide ; and on this and other grounds it was condemned by the Duke of York, after wards James VIL, as a practice that "rather made scandals than buried them."^ Nor should we fail to note that a certain unnatural vice made its appearance in Scotland soon after the Reformation, which is said to have been quite unknown there before. In 1570 two men were burnt at Edinburgh for this offence; * and the vice grew to alarming proportions in the noontide of Puritanism about the middle of the next century. Apart from its severity, the censorship was the winnowing of a sect, not the moulding of a nation. It is obvious, indeed, that a Church, in which a minute code of morals was not merely inculcated as an ideal but parishes in Dumbarton not four had ministers. In 1596 the majority of the parish churches — that is, the 400 without minister or reader — are described as " altogether destituted of all exercise of religion." — Calder wood, iv. 663, 664 ; v. 421. 'Lecky's Rationalism, i. 431. ^ Chambers' Domestic Annals, ii. 414. ^Diurnal of Occivrrents, pp. 185-186 ; James the Sext, p. 64. 190 THE NEW xT{ELIGION enforced as a system of police,^ e*,9uld not in any real sense be the Church of the majority; and no further explanation is needed of the phenomenfftt^o invariable in Scottish ecclesiastical annals-^a small cd! "choice professors" testifying in vain against the sins of a back-sliding people. The Church did not become less stern or less in tolerant with its progress in years, but the contrast so often drawn in this respect between the Reformers and their immediate successors is more apparent than real. The Reformers were the offspring of moral confusion and anarchy ; and their rigour is rather disguised than relaxed by a certain freedom of tone, which finds ex pression in the " godlie ballates " and in the poems of Sir David Lindsay. Knox, with all his austerity, had the saving gift of humour ; but, though he could laugh heartily at the vices of the old priesthood, he treated the shortcomings of his contemporaries in anything but a mirthful spirit. He speaks contemptuously of the law which prescribed death only in the last resort as the punishment of adultery. He declaimed from the pulpit against " excess, riotous cheer, banqueting, immoderate dancing," and he rebukes even the pious Moray for the extravagance of the banquet at his marriage.^ The truth is, that Knox was as much of a Puritan as his own greatness and the greatness of his age permitted him to 1 Thomas Malcolm put in the Tolbooth for two hours and to pay a fine for having called Thomas Brown a "loon carle." — Perth Kirk-Session Register, p. 236. For cursing the Turks because they had not detained John Campbell a prisoner, John Beittoune to stand one Sabbath bare legged and barefooted in a hair gown at the kirk-door, and then in the place of repentance.^ — Irving's History of Dumbartonshire, p. 569. William Atken to stand two days in sackcloth in the place of public repentance for disguising himself on the last day of the year. — Cameron Lees' Abbey of Paisley, p. 258. '' Knox, Works, ii. 314, 362, 383. PURITANISM 191 be ; and Puritanism gained rapidly in power with the subsidence of the national spirit and the shrinking up of the Church into a separate community. In 1574 we find the General Kirk of Edinburgh restraining festivity at weddings, especially the " pompous convoy of bride and bridegroom "; '^ and it became usual to exact a money security that no more than a certain sum should be spent on each marriage. Slowly, and with great difficulty, the old festivals were blotted out of the calendar. The May Games, which even before the Reformation had been prohibited as a source of dis order, were rigorously suppressed ; and the Queen's citizens must have greatly scandalised their precise brethren by reviving in their absence the old sports of Robin Hood and Little John.^ In the year 1574 at Edinburgh there were no fewer than three fasts, each of eight days, during which the diet of the people was supposed to be only " bread and drink with all kind of sobriety" ; * and it is characteristic of Scottish Puritanism that the thanksgiving for the defeat of the Spanish Armada took the form of " an universal fast." * In one respect, and in one respect only, the practice of the Reformers was distinctly less rigorous than that which prevails, after the lapse of three centuries, in our own day. The grim Sabbatarianism, as anti-Jewish in spirit as it is directly unchristian, which long outlived the discipline of Geneva and promises in a modified form to survive even its theology, was unknown in Scotland during the lifetime of Knox. All the leading Reformers — Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Zwingli, Beza — denied the permanent obligation of the fourth com mandment ; and the Scottish Confession does not refer 1 Maitland Miscellamy, i. 104, 116. ^ Diurnal of Occwrrents, p. 263. 3 Maitland Miscellany, i. 97, 105, 111. * Calderwood, iv. 696. 192 THE NEW RELIGION at all to this precept in its summary of the law of works. Before the Reformation a Sunday market was the custom in most of the Scottish burghs; the day was appointed for the practice of archery by an Act of 1457 ; and in the sixteenth century, if not considerably earlier, its religious character was almost obliterated through the general contempt for the services of the Church. Hamilton's Catechism in 1552 declared that the want of respect for Sunday was a fruitful source of evil ; ' and the Reformers, looking to the observance of the day and not to its sanctification, were content to enforce attendance at church, and more implicitly than ex pressly, a cessation of work during the hours of service, Knox on Sunday evening visited Calvin during a game of bowls, and with several other guests enjoyed the hospitality of Randolph f and it is somewhat remarkable that Sunday suppers were common amongst the clergy even during the Sabbatarian frenzy of 1649.* The Comedy of the Prodigal Son was performed on Sunday at St. Andrews as late as August, 1574.* It was not till 1569 that the Council of the Canongate ordered the taverns to be closed, and not till 1598 that the Council of Aberdeen prohibited the holding of a market " in time of sermon." ^ But Knox's refusal to sacrifice the Sunday to the Sabbath was so little in keeping with his general attitude towards the Old Testament that it need not 1 Law's edition, p. xv. ^ Dean Stanley's Lectures on ihe History of ihe Chv/rch of Scotlcmd, p. 99. * Chambers' Annals, ii. 182. * The Assembly, however, took note of this incident, and in the follow ing March it prohibited the acting of scriptural plays, and directed that no play of any kind should be performed on Sunday. — St. Andrews Kirk- Session Record (Scot. Hist. Soc), i. xlvi. 396-397, note. * Chambers' Annals, i. 58, 329. SABBATARIANISM 193 surprise us to find some of his followers — for example, the kirk session of Aberdeen in 1562 — identifying the two days at the expense of the former ; and once the Sunday had been brought within the scope of the fourth commandment, the spirit of Puritanism might be trusted to translate the Jewish festival into the Christian day of gloom. The Act of 1579, which pro hibited working on Sunday under a penalty of 10 shillings, and "gaming and passing to taverns" under a penalty of 20,^ was the first of a series of Sabbatarian statutes. The new principle, however, gained ground slowly, owing as much to the laxity of the Church as to the habits of the people. It was not till 1586, and then only in the morning, that marriages were forbidden on Sunday by the kirk-session of Perth ; ^ and " play Sundays" were not abolished by the Presbytery of Aberdeen until 1599.* A certain David Wemys, when incarcerated in that year by the kirk-session of St. Andrews for dancing on Trinity Sunday, said " he never saw that dancing was stayed before ;"* and in the same year at Perth four men were admonished for playing golf on Sunday — the offence being that they had played "in time of preaching."^ The Sunday market at Dal keith was not abolished by Parliament till 1581, at Crail, till 1587, in inland towns generally, till 1592;* and the growth of Sabbatarianism seems to have pro ceeded at a very unequal pace in different parts of the realm. Thus, in 1592, when the ministers of Edinburgh were vainly trying to stop the Monday market on the 1 Act. Pari. iii. 138. ^ Spottiswoode Miscellany, ii. 253. The Book of Discipline required marriages to be solemnised on Sunday forenoon. ^ Eccles. Records of Aberdeen, p. 169. * St. Andrews Kirk-Session Record, ii. 893. * Spottiswoode Miscellany, ii. 281. ^ Act. Pari. iii. 238, 507, 548. 194 THE NEW RELIGION ground that people living at a distance addressed them selves to the journey on the previous evening,^ markets were still held on Sunday at Forfar, Aberdeen, and in many country towns. At Aberdeen the Sunday market was not finally abolished till 1603, and even then the sale of vegetables was permitted after four in the after noon.^ Amongst the consequences of the Reformation in Scotland it is necessary to include one, the blackest and the most pernicious, which on the continent is not specially associated with the Protestant movement The belief in witchcraft and in the duty of suppressing it, though of very ancient origin and long prominent in the proceedings of the Inquisition, was first sedulously propagated by the Church towards the end of the fifteenth century; and Innocent VIIL, whose bull Summis Desiderantes was issued in 1484, launched a crusade against the powers of darkness, which was stimulated by his successors and the unmitigated horrors of which no words can describe. In some places the executions for sorcery were so numerous as seriously to reduce the population. In Geneva 500 persons were | burned in three months ; in the bishopric of Wartzburg 800, in the Italian province of Como 1,000, within a single year ; and at Toulouse, the seat of the Inquisition, ¦ 400 witches were burned at a single execution.* The Reformation, which broke out when the witch mania was at its height, did nothing to allay the flame. Both Luther and Calvin supported the delusion ; and it was under Protestant auspices that wdtchcraft, apart from its consequences to life and well-being, was first made a capital offence both in Scotland and in England. Scot- 1 Historic of King James the Sext, p. 255. ^ Eccles. Records of Aberdeen, p. 28. ^ Lecky's Rationalism, i. 4-5. > WITCHCRAFT 195 land no doubt owed its comparative immunity from the superstition to the religious torpor, which so long preceded the Reformation. The Act against " witch craft, sorcery and necromancy " was passed in June, 1563 ; and two witches were burnt a few weeks later. ^ Moray in his progress to the north in 1569 burned certain witches at St. Andrews; and he burned "another company of witches " at Dundee on his way back.^ A witch was burned at St. Andrews during Knox's resid ence there in 1572; but the executions do not appear to have been numerous during the next eighteen years. In the autumn of 1590 some 200 witches and sorcerers were found to have conspired with the Devil, whom they met at midnight in the church of North Berwick,* to wreck the King and his young bride on their voyage from Denmark. Thirty persons were executed at this time in Edinburgh; in 1597 twenty -four at Aberdeen alone, and many in other parts of the country.* The human agony indicated by these figures lies, not in the death of the victims — ^for in most cases, though not in all, they were strangled before being committed to the flames — but in the hideous tortures applied to establish their guilt. Women were stripped naked and pricked all over with long pins in order to discover the point of insensibility which was supposed to be the Devil's mark; 1 Knox, Works, ii. 391. 2 Diurnal of Ocourrents, p. 145 ; King James the Sext, p. 40. In spite of this admission, we are told on p. 242 of the latter chronicle, that the law against witchcraft was not enforced till 1590. ' Sir James Melville refers to " their meeting by night in the kirk of Northberwick, where the devil, clad in a black gown, with a black hat upon his head, preached unto a great number of them out of the pulpit." —Memoirs, p. 395. Calderwood (v. 116) gives the text of the Devil's sermon : " Many go to the market, but all buy not." *"Ane great number of witches brint through all the parts of this realm in June 1597 yea.rs."— Chronicle of Perth (Maitland Club), p. 6. 196 THE NEW RELIGION they were kept in torment for many days, studiously debarred from sleep, and their mouths lacerated with the four prongs of an iron hoop, known as a witch's bridle, which bound them upright to a staple in the wall.i Men and women alike had their legs crushed with wedges in the " boot," their heads " thrawn " with a rope, their fingers twisted in the thumbscrews, even their nails torn off with pincersj Some experience of such torture induced Doctor Fian, "Registrar to the Devil, that sundry times preached at North Berwick Kirk," to make a confession, which, when released from pain, he immediately recalled, and which no subsequent ingenuity of his tormentors, diabolical as it was, could bring him to re-affirm. [In 1594 a woman named Alison Balfour was executed at Kirkwall, who had borne her own agony without flinching, and had been induced to confess through seeing her husband, her son, and her daughter successively tortured before her. The daughter was a child of seven, and the mother at the stake asked pardon of God for a false confession. ^ Thomas Palpla, another of the Kirkwall victims, is said to have been tortured in the boots twice a day for fourteen days, and in the interval to have been scourged till he had " neither flesh nor hide." These atrocities, approved and even superintended by the clergy as a legitimate anticipation of the pains of hell, were only one result of a superstition, which continued to be a source of misery and of degradation long after the belief in magic had passed away. > See Pitcairn's Crimindl Trials (Bannatyne edition), ii. 50, where the instrument is minutely described. * Pitcairn, ii. 373-377. The dying declaration of this poor woman, who had been kept in " vehement torture " for 48 hours, has a pathos which no words can express. Two ministers and a reader were present at her execution. WITCHCRAFT 197 If we knew no more of witchcraft than is revealed in the extorted confessions, it might have been supposed that the only witches were those who, in the agony of torture, were content to proclaim themselves such. With all its extravagance, however, the delusion had a substratum of fact. Some of its victims were mere lunatics, who, in the simplicity of madness, were as ready to describe their hallucinations as the judges to believe them.^ Not a few technically were witches in the sense that they either acted as such in good faith or sought thus to impose on the credulity of others ; and it is very remarkable that the convictions recorded are as often for the abusing of the people by pretensions to witchcraft as for witchcraft itself.^ When the evil first became serious does not appear. The Book of Discipline makes no mention of witchcraft in its allusion to crimes worthy of death ; and Knox, though he implies that the Act of 1563 was one of several Acts designed to propitiate the Church, does not allude to it when he mentions the others.* There can, however, be little doubt that witchcraft, in all its varieties of insanity, illusion, and imposture, proceeded from the influence of the new theology on an ignorant and hitherto irreligious people, upsetting the reason of some, warping that of others, and disposing all to credit the potency of Satan in the infliction, the averting, and the cure of evil. Expanding with the boundaries of the Church, it spread as the under- current of Puritanism to its flood-mark in the next century ; and the clergy, when ^See the famous case of Bessie Dunlop in Pitcairn, ii. 49-58, and Chambers' Annals, i. 108-111. ''Pitcairn, ii. 50. For illustrations, see the records of the Aberdeen Trials in the Spalding Miscellany, vol. i. 3 Knox, Works, ii. 383. 198 THE NEW RELIGION confronted with the results of their own teaching, only gave strength and publicity to the illusion by their efforts to suppress it. An Act of Assembly in 1573 enjoined all bishops, superintendents, and commissioners for the planting of kirks to summon such persons as might be suspected of taking counsel with witches, and to cause them to make public repentance in sackcloth.^ All preliminary proceedings in cases of witchcraft were conducted by the clergy.^ The kirk-sessions were required to submit the names of all reputed witches, together with the evidence against them, to the various commissions of assize ; and where persons had been implicated through the confessions of others, an inquest was ordered in their respective parishes as to the truth of the charge.* Accusers were usually cited to appear in person before the session ; but a box is said in some cases to have been placed at the church door for the purpose of receiving anonymous accusations ; * and the Presbytery of Aberdeen in 1603 ordered each minister, with two of his elders, to take the oaths of the inhabi tants within his charge as to what they knew of witches and consulters therewith.^ In 1597 the tragedy of the witch prosecutions was intensified by a new and horrible device. In that year a certain Margaret Atkin was granted her life on a promise to make a general discovery of witches, whom she professed to know by a secret mark in their eyes. How many lives were sacrificed to this delusion we are "^ Calderwood, iii. 299. 2 Thus, Sir James Melville says of the North Berwick witches, "James Carmichell, minister of Haddington, has their history and whole deposi tions." — Memoirs, p. 396. ^ Spalding Miscellany, i. 185-187. * Dalyell's Darker Sttperstitions of Scotland, p. 624. ^Eccles. Records of Aberdeen, p. 191. WITCHCRAFT 199 not told ; but for several months Atkin was employed in detecting witches, and at Glasgow " divers innocent women, through the credulity of the minister, Mr. John Cowper, were condemned and put to death." ^ Even tually the fraud was exposed, and its author died a confessed impostor. It is said to have been in conse quence of this miscarriage of justice that the Privy Council in August revoked all commissions of witchcraft granted to particular persons or to any number of per sons severally as well as conjunctly, and provided that in future such commissions should be granted only to "three or four conjunctly at the fewest." ^ The employment of witches as King's evidence did not commend itself to the clergy at large ; * and it is almost incredible, after what had occurred, that some of them should have revived the practice, a few years later, in a still more monstrous form. Nevertheless, in 1607 we find the Privy Council refusing an application for a commission of witchcraft on account of " the exceeding great slander " that had arisen through ministers bringing professed sorcerers with them into church and consulting them with regard to the honesty of their parishioners, whereby ' Spottiswoode, iii. 66-67. The Presbytery of Glasgow threatened with the stocks those who traduced the ministry of the town as the authors of the late executions. — Maitland Miscellany, i. 89. ''Privy Council Register, v. 409-410. ' The Presbytery of St. Andrews agreed on " a supplication to be made to his Majesty for repressing of the horrible abuse by carrying a witch about," and resolved " to request the magistrates of St. Andre,ws to stay the same there." — St. Andrews Kirk-Session Record, ii. 801, note. This was on September 1, and may have been prompted by the Act of Council, August 12, which showed that the civil power had taken alarm. Next year, 1598, the Assembly resolved " to advise with his Majesty, if the carrying of professed witches from town to town to try witchcraft in others be lawful and ordinary trial of witchcraft or not." — Calderwood, V. 685. 200 THE NEW RELIGION they had caused the death of men and women hitherto undefamed.^ " From this, the darkest page in the history of the Scottish Reformation, it is a relief to turn to others of a brighter and more hopeful character. Whatever may have been the tendency of the new discipline, it was a form of pressure to which certain classes of the com munity proved much more amenable than others. /It has been said that " the Protestantism of Scotland was the creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been created by Protestantism " ; ^ and though neither of these statements can be accepted \ without qualification, they both contain a large element of truth. In its origin the Reformation in Scotland was undoubtedly an aristocratic movement, for it was established as the result of a political revolution, of which the nobles were the natural leaders, and in concurrence with certain social tendencies which affected the aristocracy more than any other class. We have seen, however, that there was always a considerable section, the nucleus of a great ecclesiastical party, strong in the burghs and amongst the smaller land owners, to which the religious side of the movement was really of the first importance. With some reservation in favour of Leith, where the people as early as 1543 were " noted all to be good Christians," * Dundee must be regarded as the original home of Protestantism in Scotland. It had eagerly welcomed the preaching of Wishart ; it produced the " gude and godlie ballates," sometimes called the " psalms of Dundee " ; the desire of its citizens to obtain translations of the Bible 1 Dalyell's Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p. 661. 2 Froude's Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character. ^ Sadler State Papers, i. 242. SOCIAL CHANGES 201 was remarked by the English during the invasion of 1547 ; and in 1558 they are described as excelling all the rest of the Reformers in zeal and boldness.^ The fervour of Dundee, reflected more or less in all the eastern seaports, found many converts amongst the gentry of Forfar, Kincardine, Fife, and Lothian ; and the zeal of the barons or lairds is attested by their presence in unprecedented numbers at the Parliament of 1560. \ It has been a principal object of the three preceding chapters to show how this band of zealots drifted asunder from the mass of professing Protestants ; and the growth of Puritanism deepened and perpetuated a division, which had originated in the selfishness of the aristocracy, and in the return to power of a Catholic Queen. Between the nobles who would not receive discipline and the " men of poor estate " who contemned it,^ was the small community of "professors" governed in each district by the minister and his council of elders ; and /&Q. eminent historian has observed that the influence of the reformed clergy had as much to do with the training of the middle class in Scotland as the strong government of the Tudors with the training of the same class in England.* It was due to the clergy that the townspeople and their associates amongst the gentry obtained a peculiar organisation, which, under the guidance of a zealous minority, brought them into conflict with the nobles, with the mass of the people, and especially, as we shall see, with their natural ally, the Crown ; and at a very early stage this democratic tendency was remarked by an acute observer. "Methinks," wrote Killegrew to Lord ' Wodrow Miscellany, i. 54. 2 See p. 188. 3 Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 265. 202 THE NEW RELIGION Burghley in 1572, "I see the noblemen's great credit decay in that country, and the barons, boroughs and such-like take more upon them." ^ But, if the Reformation consolidated the power of the middle class, it was not very favourable to that material well-being on which the ascendency of such a class must ultimately depend. It is true that during the infancy of the new Church a considerable increase took place in the national wealth. Killegrew, in the letter just quoted, speaks of the navy of the Scots as "so augmented as it is a thing almost incredible." In the same year they are described as enjoying "great traffic and favour" at Ostend, as having there 14 or 15 sail, and 50 or 60 at Bordeaux.^ Before the end of the sixteenth century, several of the merchants and gold smiths of Edinburgh had attained to comparative opulence. George Heriot, whose name still lives in his magnificent hospital, became jeweller to the King in 1597. The Duke of Holstein was entertained to a banquet in the house of Bailie Macmoran in 1598 ; and King James on more than one occasion lodged in the fine mansion of Robert Gourlay. To Thomas Foulis, another wealthy burgess, the Crown was repeatedly indebted for advances of money. About the year 1594 the royal debt to Foulis amounted to over 26,000Z. Scots ; and in 1601 James owed 180,000^. to Foulis and two other merchants.* But the material progress to which these facts bear witness must be ascribed far less to the Reformation than to the good government of Moray, of Morton, and of James himself A Church which ^Foreign Calendar, 1572-1574, No. 634. ^Ihid. Nos. 578, 766. 3 Chambers' Annals, i. 253, 255, 295, 297. The grandeur of Gourlay's house is apparent from the woodcut at the end of this volume of the An/nals. MATERIAL PROGRESS 203 exerted itself to stop the exportation of wheat and the lending of money at interest ; which protested on Sabbatarian principles against a Monday market, and through fear of religious contagion against the trade with Portugal and Spain ; which required the merchant to close his booth during two forenoons in the week, to make Monday a pastime-day for eschewing of the profanation of the Sabbath, and to observe fasts of a week's duration — such a Church can hardly claim to have promoted the interests of trade. We shall find the commons in the course of the next century winning their way to a short-lived supremacy in the State ; but the religious spirit, which gained this position for the , industrial class, was the most serious of all obstacles to industrial progress. It was due to the growth of Puritanism with its interminable dissensions that the choicest fruits of the Reformation were reaped only in the age of the Revolution ; and the colonising projects of 1698 were as much the outcome of peace with England as were the negotiations for union of the policy of Maitland. Nor should we forget that the commons of Scotland had been trained for centuries in even a sterner school than that of kirk-session and presbytery. The long struggle for national existence was of necessity a popular struggle ; and frequent invasions forced even the humblest to take an interest in politics. The same set of causes, which prolonged the feudal organisation in Scotland, fostered also a spirit which in certain circum stances might be fatal to the feudal principle. During- the discussion of Henry VIIL s matrimonial scheme in 1543 the unflinching patriotism of the people was the one element in the case which no statesman could afford to disregard ; and the lords of the English party assured Sir Ralph Sadler " that, whensoever they brought in 204 THE NEW RELIGION Englishmen, all their own friends and tenants, or at least the greatest number of them, will utterly leave them."i / /'The Reformed Church was the outcome of the national character embodied to excess in the genius of Knox ; and it is not surprising that an institution, which had so many of the vices of strength, should also have had some of its virtues. Conspicuous in both categories was a certain fearless independence of spirit, as thoroughly honest as it was harsh and crude, the result of shattered traditions and of that long interregnum which had prevailed between the collapse of the old faith and the triumph of the new!^- We have seen that the destruc- - tion of the monasteries was the outcome rather of • Catholic contempt than of Protestant zeal ; and the Reformers, though they cared nothing for the aesthetic associations of the old buildings, were quite alive to their utility as places of worship. The Book of Discipline exempted parish churches and schools from its condemnation of the monuments and places of idolatry. In 1562 an Act was passed for "upholding and repairing parish churches." In 1570 the Assembly called the commendator of Holyrood to account for allowing the Abbey to become ruinous, and some of his churches to be turned into sheepfolds ; and in the same year it issued a general order "for reparation of kirks decayed.^ The men who valued churches only in so far as they were capable of being turned to good account, were not likely to allow any peculiar sanctity in the clerical office. The Book of Discipline discarded even the apostolical rite of the imposition of hands on the very ^Sadler State Papers, i. 255. ^ Quarterly Review, Ixxxv. ; Calderwood, ii. 534 ; iii. 1. INFLUENCE OF LAYMEN 205 practical ground that the necessity for it had expired with the miracle. In the Knoxian theocracy cleric and layman differed in degree only, not in kind,^ and not invariably even in degree. Erskine of Dun was for thirty years superintendent of Angus ; in 1572 Andrew Graham, another layman, was made Bishop of Dun blane ; and Buchanan presided more than once as Moderator of the Assembly.* In August, 1573, the Assembly was so crowded with laymen — nobles, Privy- Councillors, commissioners of provinces, towns, and kirks — that the clergy had to be accommodated outside the bar ; and in the following spring the Regent Morton was invited, not only to attend himself, but to bring all " of whatever estate " who might happen to be with him.* The same fierce light, which exposed the sanc tities of private life, beat also on the functionaries of the Church. The superintendent was tried every six months by the Assembly ; the minister was examined against the session, the session against the minister ; and the people were challenged from the pulpit to assail the reputation of both. Priestcraft could not exist in such an atmosphere ; and the clergy, true to the funda mental contradiction of Protestantism, insisted both on the right of the Church to interpret the Bible and on the duty of the people to study it for themselves., The Parliament of 1579 enacted that each householder worth 300 merks of yearly rent, and " all substantious yeomen 1 Winzet speaks of Knox and his colleagues as renegades who had renounced " their priesthood given them by the sacrament of order." — Winzet's Works, i. 58. " In 1600 a schoolmaster was elected and sat as moderator of the Pres bytery of Glasgow. In the absence of the minister an elder sometimes acted as moderator of the kirk-session. — Edgar's Old Church Life in Scotland, i. 187. ' Cunningham's Church History, i. 482-483. 1 :206 THE NEW RELIGION and burgesses" worth 500Z. in land and goods, should have a Bible and psalm-book in the vulgar tongue, under a penalty of ten pounds ; and next year an official was commissioned by the Council to search every house in the realm for the two books inscribed with the owner's name.^ It was hardly inconsistent in practice with the spirit of this legislation that the Book of Discipline should have required the suppression of false doctrine or that a persecuting clause should have been inserted in the coronation oath. To a people not at all inclined to question the so-called essentials of the faith enough of the Bible remained unappropriated to provide ample scope for discussion ; and there was the greatest possible difference between the irrational superiority of the Catholic priest and the argumentative pre-eminence of the Protestant minister. -^Happily, however, for Scotland, the shadow of clerical obscurantism has never been suffered to darken the lives of its people ; and the zeal for education which had distinguished the ancient hierarchy, even in its most degenerate days, survived to be almost the sole link of continuity between the old Church and the new. Knox in the Book of Discipline sought to improve upon the existing system of parish schools, burgh schools, cathedral schools, and universities ; and though the clergy could do little in this direction owing to their failure to recover the patrimony of the Church,^ they did what they could. In 1562 'the Assembly urged that schools in burghs should be maintained from "sources hitherto devoted to idolatry;" in 1563 it ^ Chambers' Annuls, i. 133. 2 Part of the wealth of the Abbey of Paisley was applied to the founda tion of a Grammar School in the town. — Cameron Lees's Abbey of Paisley p. 231. This, however, was an exceptional case. EDUCATION 207 required same order to be taken for the sustentation of poor scholars; in 1563, 1571, and 1574 it issued com missions, however futile, for the planting of schools in Moray, Banff, Inverness, and all the northern shires ; ^ and the fines levied by the kirk- sessions were frequently applied to assist students in the prosecution of their studies. The Universities gained much in efficiency under an ecclesiastical system, poorer indeed, but far more vigorous than that which had given them birth. In 1563 a petition was presented to Parliament "in the name of all that within this realm are desirous that learning and letters flourish," praying for a reform in the administration and the curricula of the various colleges ; and it was mainly through the vigilance of the General Assembly that the objects of the petition were ultimately attained. In 1579 the University of St. Andrews was entirely re-organised ; and similar reforms were soon afterwards introduced at Aberdeen. The new scheme was the work of Andrew Melville, Knox's successor in the leadership of the Church, under whose influence the Scottish Universities began to attract students from both England and the continent.'^ The University of Glasgow was revived, or rather re-opened, by Melville when he became its Principal in 1574. In 1582 a sum of 4,000 merks, which was all that remained of the 8,000 left by Bishop Reid to found a coUege in Edinburgh, was recovered by the Town Council, and with the King's consent applied to its original purpose. It was mainly through the exertions of James Lawson, one of the ministers of the city, that the new High School was completed in 1578. Hebrew was first publicly taught in Scotland at Perth in 1561 ; and Andrew Melville, who as a boy had learned Greek 1 Grant's Burgh Schools, pp. 78-79 208 THE NEW RELIGION in the school of Montrose, gave great prominence to both Greek and Hebrew in his scheme of academic reform.^ To the influence of the Reformation must also be ascribed the growing demand for literature, which caused the Church to claim a censorship, in 1563 over religious books, and in 1574 over all books whatsoever.^ Of some 300 works printed in Scotland during the seventeenth century, only 34 had appeared before the Reformation.* In 1592 there were at least seven booksellers in Edinburgh, exclusive of im porters. Fourteen complete editions of Sir David Lindsay's works were issued between 1558 and 1614, nine of these being printed in Scotland; and Buchanan's History went through three editions in three years.* These various facts testify to the real worth of the Reformed Church — its honesty, its manliness, its exuberant vitality ; and whatever evils may have attended the growth of Puritanism, an institution so sound at heart might fairly hope to survive the vices of strength, and in the long run to flourish in its virtues. Nowhere perhaps is the contrast so happily illustrated as in Scotland between the intellectual poverty of the Reformation and the rude abundance of its intellectual results. Identical in habit of mind with his Catholic predecessor, superior only in a certain moral earnestness which was grossly abused, the Scottish Protestant had nevertheless stumbled on a principle, which led him through the twilight of the new theology from darkness ^M'Crie's Lives of Knox and Melville. '' Booke of ihe Universal Kirk, i. 35, 310. ^ Dickson and Edmond's Annals of Scottish Printing. * Lee's Lectures, Appendix xii. INTELLECTUAL GAIN 209 to light. On the inclined plane of the Reformed Church all beliefs were continually in motion towards the touchstone of Scripture ; and within the compass of an uncritical age that barrier to freedom of thought was practically no barrier at all. CHAPTER VII. OHUKCH AND STATE, 1560-1586. During the lifetime of Knox, and for six months after his death, the clergy had to reckon with two classes of opponents — those whose patriotism made them in different or hostile to the reformed religion and those who upheld the supremacy of the State and their own material interests against the claims of the Reformed Church. So long as the war continued between Queen Mary and her son, the clergy could not afford to quarrel with their lay associates; but when the Castle of Edin burgh was taken in 1573 Protestantism ceased to be in serious danger; and thus the conflict we have traced between the Reformation and the new Church was succeeded by one, as serious and far more permanent, between the Church and the State. We shall fail to understand the theory of spiritual independence as it took root in Scotland, unless we bear in mind that it was rather forced on the Church by the necessities of her position than adopted of her own free will. At the outset, in the struggle with France and Rome, political and religious forces had been closely associated ; and the theocratic ideas which Knox had imbibed at Geneva tended directly to the fusion of SPIRITUAL INDEPENDENCE 211 the two. Knox indeed was so far from asserting the native inviolability of the Church that he expressly denied it. " Who dare esteem," he writes on one occasion, " that the civil power is now become so pro fane in God's eyes that it is sequestered from all intromission with matters of religion ? " And he takes pains to prove that " the reformation of religion in all points" belongs of right to the civil magistrate. If these words stood alone, they might not be of great importance, for they occur in that Appellation which Knox addressed to the nobility against the sentence passed on him in his absence by the ecclesiastical authorities. They are amply confirmed, however, from other sources. Thus the Confession declares that magistrates are God's lieutenants, appointed after the manner of the kings of Judah not only for civil policy, but for maintenance of the true religion ; and both in doctrine and in external order the Reformers acknow ledged the jurisdiction of the State. The Confession, drawn up at the bidding of Parliament, was voted and approved, not on the authority of the Church, but on its own merits ; and the authors of the Book of Discipline submitted it to the judgment of the Council, exhorting them to reject nothing which they could not disprove by God's Word. In this allusion to the paramount authority of the Scriptures, unimportant as . it Seems, we have the key to the whole subsequent dispute. As the Church to the old priesthood, so was the Bible to the reformed clergy. It was not the power of a spiritual corporation that was at stake, but the supremacy of a divine law to which clerics and laymen were to be alike subordinate ; and Knox, in failing to fence off the Church from the State, had meant only to provide for the absorption of the latter. 212 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 We have seen how it fared with Knox's theocratic schemes. Scotland, though a small State, had lived too full a life to be fashioned anew on the Genevan model ; and the controversy between Knox and Maitland on the lawfulness of the Queen's Mass initiated the long struggle between statesmanship and dogmatism, between the guardian of many interests and the champion of one. With some slight intermissions, the cleavage now made opened wider and wider. The Book of Discipline, which the State refused to sanction, was enforced by the Church within its own province ; and in the first Assembly after Mary's return, when the lords questioned the right of the Church to convene without the Queen's "consent, Knox made the famous reply : " Take from us the freedom of Assemblies, and take from us the Evangel ; for without Assemblies, how shall good order and unity in doctrine be kept ? " ^ These words have the true ring of the impending conflict ; but it is evident that Knox was looking to the danger of schism within the Church itself, and not to a rupture between the Church and the State. ^ However deep-seated may have been the antagonism between Knox and Maitland, it was something in the nature of an accident that Scotland should have been saddled in the first year of the Reformation with a Catholic sovereign; and the deposition of Mary removed the chief obstacle to the progress of the Church. >The Parliament of December, 1567, which ratified the achievements of the political revolution, is also an 1 Works, ii. 296. 2 It is in his spirit, not in his ideas, that Knox anticipates the future ; and it has been well said by the author of a most instructive book that " in perusing every page of his History we feel heaving under our feet the ign.es suppositos of many a future explosion."— Innes's Law of Creeds, p. 23, note. STATUTES OF 1567 213 epoch in ecclesiastical history. In deference to the doubts which had been raised as to their legality, the Reformation statutes were re-enacted ; the Confession was adopted as the test of Church membership ; no one was to be admitted to office at the pleasure of the Crown or to the practice of the law, who did not profess the reformed religion ; those only were to teach, whether in colleges and schools or privately, who had been licensed by the superintendent of the diocese ; and the kings of Scotland at their coronation were to take an oath binding them to maintain the true religion as now established, and to root out heretics and enemies to the true worship of God. So far the Church had no reason to complain ; but in the roll of ecclesiastical legislation there was one very serious omission. In the Assembly of the previous July the Anti-Marian leaders had pledged themselves to " labour and press to the utter most" that the Church should be "put in full possession of its patrimony " ^ — a phrase covering both the tem poralities and the tithes. Nevertheless Parliament, though acknowledging the right of the Church to the tithes, enacted merely that the thirds of all benefices should be paid first to the ministers, the surplus being given to the Crown ; and the Church, on the strength of this hypothetical surplus, had to assign certain of its revenues for the King's useX A year and a half later, we find the Regent Moray lamenting to the Assembly his inability to put the Church in exclusive possession of the thirds. He laid the blame on the Estates, who feared for their purses in the event of the Crown being deprived of ecclesiastical support ; and he reminded the Assembly that the Church was greatly interested in the maintenance of the royal authority.^ It was something, 1 Calderwood, ii. 379. 2 Calderwood, ii. 499-500. 214 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 however, that the thirds were now to be levied by collectors appointed by the Assembly instead of by the Crown ; and the advantage of this to the clergy may be inferred from the bitterness of their complaints after they had allowed the old mode of collection to be revived, six years later, by the Regent Morton.^ If the funds thus assigned by Parliament had been fully available for the support of the ministry, they might very possibly have proved sufficient ; for it is remarkable that in July, 1568, when the Assembly suggested that the government should be sustained on the two parts held by the Papists, or in other words by the lay impropriators, they declared that the " super- plus" was wanted not for the ministers, who desired no more than their reasonable stipends, but for the schools and the poor.^ Unfortunately, however, owing to difficulties in collection and other causes, the Church never enjoyed more than a part of its legal endowment. In the towns the ministers seem to have been fairly well paid — Knox at all events had a salary much superior to that of a Lord of Session ; * but the country ministers — most of them without manse or glebe, officiating in churches which in 1571 were described as open to wind and weather and " more like sheep-cots than the house of God " — were in a deplorable condition. In a petition of the same year the lot of the clergy is characterised as worse than that of beggars in that, though equally 1 Cqnnell on Tithes, i. 95-96. Queen Mary had placed all small bene fices, not exceeding 300 merks- in yearly rental, at the disposal of the Assembly; and this grant was confirmed by the Parliament of 1567. —Ibid., i. 94. '' Booke of Universal Kirk, i. 133. ' Knox's stipend was 400 merks — a sum estimated as equal in 1800 to £562. Besides this, he was allowed either a house or house-rent. — Lee'a Lectures, Appendix viii. POVERTY OF THE CLERGY 215 poor, they were not allowed to beg ; ^ and the Assembly in 1576, when it was asked whether a minister or reader might keep " an open tavern," replied merely that those who did so should observe decorum.^ In such circumstances great difficulty was experienced, not only in obtaining recruits for the ministry, which was largely due to a lack of qualified persons, but in holding the clergy to their posts. In 1563 a certain John Sharp was ordered to re-enter the ministry on pain of censure ; in the same year Acts were passed against those who " had left their charges and entered into other vocations more profitable for the belly " ; * and in 1570 it was decreed by the Assembly that all ministers, as well candidates for the office as those already placed, should pledge themselves never to abandon their calling under pain of infamy and perjury.* The distribution of ecclesiastical property, though it left the government and the clergy as rival claimants to the ' thirds, was calculated on the whole to unite them against a common enemy. The nobles, who despised discipline, had little respect for the authority of the Crown ; and it was due to them that Church and Crown were provided with a revenue far inferior to the pretensions of one, and perhaps to the combined needs of both. Unhappily, however, the antagonism of principle between the Church and the State was more powerful to create friction than their community of interest to promote accord. The fusion of the two ^Bannatyne's Memorials, p. 181. 2 Calderwood, iii. 377. A hundred years later. Archbishop Leighton deplored "that some of the clergy in the north of England were driven to keep alehouses, the very men 'who should have strenuously endeavoured to keep themselves and others out of them.'"— Pearson's Life, p. ciii. 3 Knox, Works, ii. 337. * Calderwood, iv. 2. 216 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 jurisdictions had not answered the expectations of Knox, who had failed either to establish the Book of Discipline or to abolish the Queen's Mass ; and it was natural in such circumstances that the demand for a separation of powers should come from the Church. As early as June, 1564, a committee was appointed by the Assembly "to reason and confer anent the causes and jurisdiction pertaining to the Kirk." ^ The Parlia ment of 1567, which defined the ecclesiastical juris diction in general terms as consistingi of the preaching of the Word, the correction of manners, and the adminis tration of the sacraments, appointed a commission, of which both Knox and Maitland were members, to con sider what other special points should appertain to the jurisdiction, privilege, and authority of the Kirk.^ The Assembly responded to this appeal by appointing a standing committee of its own ; * and from this date until the Second Book of Discipline was presented to Parliament in 1578 the Church never ceased to press its claims to a jurisdiction independent of the State. To those who study it in the proceedings of the General Assembly, the action of the ministers during these ten years has all the appearance of a genuine movement towards spiritual independence — a move ment for which ample warrant might have been found in the voluntary status of the Church from 1560 to its establishment in 1567. And certainly, conjoined with very different motives, there was a real fear of State interference in matters of religion. In 1568 the Assembly prohibited the circulation of a book in which the sovereign was described as " Supreme Head of the Primitive Kirk " ; * and when Morton became Regent ^ Booke of Universal Kirk, i. 50. ^Calderwood, ii. 390. ' nid., ii. 396. * Ibid. ii. 423. THE REGENT MORTON 217 towards the end of 1572, the Church had some reason to tremble for its liberties. The Earl of Morton, whom we have met as the destroyer of the Queen's faction, was too strong a ruler to tolerate any plea of exemption from the royal authority. Intellectually far inferior to his great rival, and without that rich imagination which in Maitland exalted the patriot and the loyalist over the imperial statesman, he grasped more firmly the true meaning of the Reformation as a pledge of union with England ; and to Maitland's jealousy of clerical inter ference he added a strong bias towards Anglican Episco pacy and the supremacy of the Crown over the Church. To Morton the General Assembly was an object both of suspicion and contempt. He questioned the right of the clergy to convene the lieges without his permission. When they sent deputations — sometimes three in a day — to request his presence, he said he " had not leisure to talk with them";^ he told "the most zealous brethren" that there would be no peace or order in the country until some of them had been hanged;^ and he is said to have appointed a joint commission of clergy and laymen, which for twelve or thirteen days debated the question whether the supreme magistrate should not be head of the Church as well as of the Commonwealth. * Morton's aggressive attitude must have quickened the anxiety of the Church to erect a barrier against the encroachments of the State ; and such a barrier the Second Book of Discipline professed to be. The object of this famous document is to draw a broad distinction between the civil power or the power of the sword and the ecclesiastical power or the power of the keys. The 1 Calderwood, iii. 385. ^ Melville's Diary, p. 47. ' Hume of Godscroft's Houses of Douglas and Angus, ii. 243. 218 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 ecclesiastical power is said to flow from God immediT ately and to be spiritual, not having a temporal head on earth, but only Christ, the head and only monarch of the Church. The two jurisdictions cannot ordinarily co exist in the same person. The magistrate judges external things only ; the spiritual ruler judges both the affection and external actions in respect of conscience. Ministers are subject to the judgment of magistrates in external things, magistrates to the discipline of the Church in matter of conscience and religion. The Second Book of Discipline was the work of Andrew Melville ; and Melville, many years later, summed up its purport in the course of his speech to King James as " God's silly vassal " : " There are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king nor a lord nor a head, but a member." ^ Indeed, the substance of the Book is quite opposed to that conception of two equal and co-ordinate powers which is suggested by its general tone, and especially by the continual balancing of the civil jurisdiction against the spiritual. The magistrate is to judge external things only, the minister both motive and action in respect of conscience. The magistrate is neither to use any spiritual function nor to prescribe the manner of its exercise, whereas the minister, though not himself exercising the civil jurisdic tion, is to teach the magistrate how it should he exercised according to the Word.^ The magistrate is to ' Melville's Diary, p. 245. 2 After this, it is pleasant to read in M'Crie that the Second Book of Discipline " encourages a friendly co-operation between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, but ... at the same time avoids the confounding ANDREW MELVILLE 219 assist, maintain, and fortify the jurisdiction of the Church, to make laws for its advancement, to secure the Church in the enjoyment of its patrimony, to enforce its censures by civil penalties ; and in general, where ministers do their office faithfully, he " ought to hear and obey their voice and reverence the majesty of God speaking by them." This scheme is obviously something quite different from that separation of the spiritual from the civil power on which the Church was supposed to have been engaged during the ten pre ceding years. The theocracy of the First Book of Discipline is merely re-affirmed in the Second, with this difference, that the inspired law, which cleric and layman were to acknowledge individually without dis tinction, is now to be imposed on the State through the agency of a strong and well-organised Church. Andrew Melville was a reproduction in a smaller and much poorer mould of the great man who had preceded him in the leadership of the Church. Knox's broad aims had been conceived in so narrow a spirit that they had shrunk from the Christianising of a nation to the founding of a sect ; and Melville, accepting the new conditions, sought to organise the sect with a view to re-conquering the nation. Hence both the strength and the weakness of the post- Reformation Church — its theocratic pretensions and its claim to internal freedom, its rash assaults on the independence of the State, and its clamorous anxiety for the preservation of its own. Besides being a good Latinist, Melville was an accom plished Greek and Hebrew scholar. Spottiswoode, with covert sarcasm, describes him as " learned chiefly in the of their limits."— ii/e of And/)-ew Melville, i. 124. An author, so thoroughly master of his subject, is fully entitled to his opinions, how ever intolerant they may be. 220 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 tongues " ; and one must admit, however nobly he may have used it in the cause of education, that his learning was not of that diffusive kind which makes wide " the inward service of the mind and soul." /Inferior only to Knox in headlong zeal, in fierceness of spirit, and reck less vehemence of speech, Melville had engrafted on these gifts of nature the quality which we should now call doctrinaire. It has been said that, whilst the First Book of Discipline " seemed to grow out of the times, the Second aims at elaborating a system from the New Testament, without reference to circumstances." ^ Thus it abolishes the reader ^ no less than the superintendent, though at that time the readers were at least twice as numerous as the ministers, and the ministers were hardly equal in number to a third of the parishes. Under the influence of Melville the Church became more harshly theological, more fiercely polemical than it had been in the days of Knox. It was he who gave currency to such phrases as " the power of the keys and the power of the sword," " Christ the only head of his Church," " bishop another name for pastor " ; and the ceaseless canvassing of these barren themes fore shadowed, if it did not anticipate, the time when the spirit of religion should survive only in enthusiasm for its outward forms. The Second Book of Discipline was approved by the Assembly in April, 1578, and was presented to Parfia ment in the following July. The Lords of the Articles ^ Cunningham's Church History of Scotland, i. 444. 2 The reader maintained his position for a long period, despite an Act of Assembly in 1581 that "no one in time coming should be admitted as such." One of the last who held the ofiice was James Paterson, the transcriber of the manuscript of Gordon's Scots Afairs in the Library of Aberdeen University, who died about 1800. — Preface to Gordon's Scots Afairs (Spalding Club). OPPOSITION TO MORTON 221 evaded the demand for ratification by referring the Book to a mixed commission of clergy and laymen ; and the proceedings of this commission, which sat at Stir ling throughout the last week of the year, proved as futile and indecisive as its promoters could have wished. A few unimportant clauses were unanimously admitted ; all the rest were either passed over or referred to further reasoning; and in 1581 the Church had so little hope of a wider recognition of its claims that it caused the Book to be registered in the Acts of Assembly, ad perpetuam rei memoriam. On the same principle Knox had inserted the First Book of Discipline in his History of the Reform^ation. The State could afford to disregard the theocratic pre tensions of the Church till it encountered them in practice ; and we shall find that the first pitched battle between the two jurisdictions was fought on a narrower and more definite issue. In spite of the ruin which had overtaken the Queen's cause in 1573, there were still some who waited only for opportunity to avenge its defeat. The chief of these unquiet spirits were Maitland's brother-in-law the Earl of Athol, his younger brother John, and Sir Robert Mel ville, the uncle of Kirkcaldy of Grange. Athol and Argyll were the heads of a coalition which compelled Morton to resign the Regency in 1578 ; but Morton, though no longer Regent, soon recovered his power ; Athol died ; and Mary's friends were reduced almost to despair, when they were reinforced by a new and some what doubtful ally. In September, 1579, Esm6 Stuart, Seigneur d'Aubigny, nephew of the late Regent Lennox and the King's cousin, came over from France. Osten sibly he came merely on a visit of congratulation to his royal kinsman ; but history has more than confirmed 222 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 " sundry vehement presumptions " that he was a pupil of the Jesuits and an emissary of the Duke of Guise. Handsome, affable, and accomplished, he made an easy conquest of the King, then ih his fourteenth year ; and within a few months he had become Commendator of Arbroath, Earl of Lennox, Lord High Chamberlain, and Captain of Dumbarton Castle. The rise of Lennox boded ill to Morton — the more so as the stranger hastened to throw aside that profession of Catholicism which gave so great an advantage to his rival. In 1580 he declared himself a convert to the established religion, and requested the Assembly to procure him a Protestant chaplain ; and next year he put his name to that exhaus tive execration of all things papal which the Presby terians of the next century were content to revive as the confession of their faith. ^ By such cumulative mendacity he completely pacified the Church, he deluded the veteran diplomatist, Randolph, and he caused even his friends abroad to doubt the reality of his imposture. Morton, whose stern rule had long been tolerated only as the lesser of two evils, was now in a perilous position ; and having been detected in a treasonable correspon dence with England, he was tried and condemned on a charge of being accessory to the murder of Darnley. On June 2, 1581, his head fell on the scaffold; and the clergy discovered too late that in the " great opposite to the Book of Policy " they had lost their most powerful protector and the stoutest champion of the Protestant faith. ^ 1 The Negative Confession of 1581 became, with some additions, the National Covenant of 1638. ^In his last interview with the clergy on the day of his execution, Morton maintained that in his controver.sy with the Church he had " followed that opinion that he thought to be best at that time, in con- INTRIGUES OF LENNOX 223 In August the Earl became Duke of Lennox ; and having disposed of Morton, to the intense delight of the Catholic world, he addressed himself to the constructive work of his mission. His first object was to renew the league with France ; but as France had not recognised James, and could not decently renounce his mother, it was necessary to provide for the association of the two, if not in the government, at least in the royal title. Mary, however, insisted that the association should pro ceed as an act of grace from herself; and as this would imply the illegality of the government, which had existed in Scotland since 1567, Lennox could gain few adherents to the scheme amongst the nobles. Moreover, to make the scheme workable, James would have to become a Catholic, and of that there was little promise. Under stress of these difficulties Lennox was led to embark on wilder projects, which had the enthusiastic support of the Jesuits, but which, though adopted by the Duke of Guise, were hardly even approved by the King of Spain. The government was to be seized in the Queen's name, and if James refused to concur, he 1^ was to be sent abroad and married to a Catholic princess. Foreign troops were to be landed in Scotland, either papal or Spanish ; the Duke of Guise was to make a descent on the Sussex coast ; and Lennox, as he himself assumed Mary in March, 1582, was to lead an army in pe^won to her relief.^ 'After the destruction of Morton, Lennox committed piimself, whether for political or for personal ends, to a ^quarrel with the Church. In a subsequent chapter sideration of the estate of all things as they were." — Calderwood, iii. 565. Mr. Henderson has a very able vindication of Morton's policy in the Dictionary of National Biography. 1 Froude, chapter Ixv. 224 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 some account will be given of the circumstances which gave rise to the establishment of Episcopacy in 1572. It may suffice here to mention that Melville, ever since his return from Geneva in. 1574, had laboured to over throw the new hierarchy ; that the Assembly, after much pruning of the episcopal office, had abolished it — so far as it could dispense with the statute law — in 1580; and that the Second Book of Discipline expressly disallowed the " fashion of these new chosen bishops." On the death of Archbishop Boyd of Glasgow in June 1581 Robert Montgomery, minister of Stirling, was appointed as his successor ; and it soon transpired that he had agreed to surrender the revenues of the see to the Duke of Lennox on the promise of an annual pension equal to one-fourth of the whole. The Assembly sought to checkmate Mont gomery by ordering an inquiry into his ministerial conduct ; and meanwhile, it prohibited him from meddling further with the archbishopric. The Presby tery of Stirling, to which the inquiry was referred, suspended him for non-appearance ; for disregarding this sentence he was saved only by his submission from , being excommunicated by the Assembly; and in June/ 1582, having revived his episcopal pretensions, ^^gy actually was excommunicated by the Pi"esbyte;'gpQijj . ^ Edinburgh. As Montgomery was upheld by thOilpgat power, these proceedings entailed several sharp^pg-fc counters between the Church and the State. T Synod of Lothian, the Presbyteries of Stirling, Glasgow,! Dalkeith, Linlithgow, and Edinburgh were summoned before the King ; and true to their formula of the headship of Christ, they refused to recognise the King and Council as judges in an ecclesiastical dispute. Oh three several occasions the Government vainly inter- THE MONTGOMERY CONFLICT 225 vened to stop the proceedings in the Assembly. Montgomery inaugurated his second attempt on the archbishopric by coming to Glasgow Cathedral with a large company of gentlemen, whom the Council had summoned to his support, and by occupying the pulpit to the exclusion of the ordinary preacher. The Presby tery, being about to censure him for this offence, were required by the Provost to desist in the King's name ; and when the Moderator declined to give way, he was pulled violently out of the chair and hustled off to prison. Soon afterwards John Durie, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, for abusing the Duke in his sermons, was expelled from the city. These events afforded sufficient provocation to Andrew Melville, who in the Assembly " inveighed against the blood guUie (knife) of absolute authority, whereby men intended to pull the crown off Christ's head and to wring the sceptre out of his hand." Meanwhile, the excommunicated prelate was ostentatiously befriended by Lennox, who scornfully asked a deputation of ministers whether he was to obey them or the King.- On July 13, 1582, the sentence against Montgomery was annulled by royal proclamation ; but when, a few days later, he ventured tjfco appear in Edinburgh, he was set upon by certain 38C6^.asses and rascals of the town,"^ and had to fiy for his isuif.e to the Duke's house at Dalkeith.^ eif The controversy was much embittered by the fact that the ministers had obtained some knowledge of the Jesuit plot. As early as October, 1581, when Mont gomery's case was first mooted in the Assembly, Balcanquhal, one of the Edinburgh ministers, preached 'Moysie's Memoirs (Maitland Club), p. 37. King James was vastly entertained with this incident, when he heard of it a,t Perth. 2 Calderwood, iii. 577-634 ; Spottiswoode, ii. 282-289. P 226 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 a sermon in which he said that popery "was maintained in the King's hall by the tyranny of a great champion who was called Grace. But if his Grace continued in opposing himself to God and his word, he should come to little grace in the end."^ Soon afterwards Lennox quarrelled with his chief supporter, the Earl of Arran ; and while the dispute lasted, Arran did not scruple to incite the clergy against the Duke as an enemy to the faith. ^ In the following January John Durie exposed the association scheme from the pulpit; in May, alarmed by the arrival of an emissary from the Duke of Guise, he attacked both Lennox and Arran in the most violent terms ; and on July 27 the clergy received positive information from France that Lennox had applied to the Duke of Guise for a garrison of 500 men.* Mean while a coalition to separate the King from Lennox had been formed by Gowrie, Mar, Glencairn, and other Protestant lords ; and the conspirators, sufficiently alarmed by the news from France, were hurried into action by a timely warning from Bowes, the English ambassador, that Lennox, at the instigation of the Guises, meant to arrest them on a charge of treason.* James, with neither Lennox nor Arran in his company, happened to be hunting in the neighbourhood of Perth. On August 22, 1582 of he was decoyed to Gowrie's Castle of Ruthven ; and next morning when he essayed to go forth, he found himself a prisoner. For nearly ten months James remained in the custody of the Ruthven lords. Lennox made but a feeble resistance ; the King himself, fearing for his own life, if the Duke 1 Spottiswoode, ii. 284. 2 jjj^ p_ 2gj_ 3 Calderwood, iii. 594, 620, 634. A contemporary account of Durie's sermon of 23rd May is given in Tytler, viii., Appendix viii. * Tytler, viii. 107. RAID OF RUTHVEN 227 remained obdurate, urged him to depart ; and before the end of the year he w^as on his way to France. The Raid of Ruthven ensured the triumph of the Church in its conflict with the State, and rescued Protestantism from no ordinary danger. On Septem ber 4 a proclamation was issued in the King's name, declaring that he had never intended to restrain the free preaching of God's Word or to infringe the liberty and jurisdiction of the Church courts.^ On the same day John Durie made a triumphal entry into Edinburgh. He was escorted from the Nether Bow to the High Church by a great multitude singing the 124th Psalm ; and the Duke was so enraged at the sight that he vented his indignation at the expense of his beard. In a manifesto published at Stirling the Ruthven lords enumerated the dangers to the true religion, the crown and the commonwealth, which had induced them " to repair to his Highness' presence and to remain with him." They accused Lennox of plotting to subvert the religion, of involving James in a negotia tion with his mother to the prejudice of his own crowr of persuading him to assert a right of jurisdiction 11 matters purely ecclesiastical, of corrupting his morals and provoking him "to tarry from the sermons of godly preachers." The Duke issued a counter-proclamation denying all the charges and denouncing his adversaries as traitors, who had forcibly possessed themselves of the King's person ; to which, with an audacity superior even to his own, the lords retorted that the "alleged detaining of the King's Majesty's person by force and against his will " was " a manifest lie." ^ We have it on the authority of James Melvdle that the Church had not been concerned, " neither art, 1 Calderwood, iii. 649-651. ^ Ibid. iii. 651-673. 228 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 part, read, nor counsel," in the enterprise at Ruthven ; ^ and perhaps on that account it was the more grateful to its self-constituted champions. The Assembly of October, 1582, unanimously voted the Raid to be " good and acceptable service to God," the King, and the country ; it required every minister to commend the "good cause" to his congregation, and all who should oppose it either in word or deed to undergo the censures of the Church.^ At so critical a time the action of the Assembly may have been as politic as it certainly was courageous and honourable ; but it was unfortunate for its own future that the Church should have endorsed so violent a method of subjecting the kingdom of King James to the kingdom of Christ. The Ruthven lords looked to Elizabeth as the patron and the mainstay of their party ; and at the beginning of 1583 they sent John Colville, chanter of Glasgow and ex-minister of Kilbryde,* to seek assistance in London. Neither this embassy, however, nor another which Colville with two associates undertook in May, produced the desired result. Elizabeth did not conceal her approbation of what the lords had done ; but to the great disappointment of both Walsingham and Bowes, she made but a meagre response to their demands for money ; and Colville pleaded to little purpose that his friends had no means of paying the 300 men of the royal guard, and that without a guard James could not be kept in safety, or in other words a prisoner.* Meanwhile, the French spared no effort to retrieve the reverse they had suffered in the expulsion of Lennox. 1 Melville's Diary, p. 95. ''Booke of Universal Kirk, ii. 594-596. ^Colville had deserted the ministry, because he would not "profess poverty." — Calderwood, iii. 430. * Tytler, viii. 145 ; Froude, xi. 327. COLLAPSE OF THE RUTHVEN LORDS 229 On January 1, 1583, La Mothe F^n^lon arrived at Berwick on his way to Edinburgh ; and three weeks later, Meynville, another French envoy, landed at Leith. Seconded by the King, and liberally supplied with money, these men easily organised a party against the Ruthven lords ; Gowrie himself became an object of suspicion to his associates ; and on June 27 James escaped from Falkland to the castle of St. Andrews, where his friends joined him on the following day. Elizabeth now reaped the fruits of her expensive parsimony. The Duke of Lennox had died in Paris ; but his henchman, the Earl of Arran, succeeded to his place, and his son, a boy of thirteen, was recalled from France. Before the end of the year the English party had almost disappeared. Gowrie alone, who, if he had not connived at the King's escape, submitted immediately thereafter, was suffered to remain at Court ; his associates were banished, some to France, some to Ireland ; and Colville, preferring flight to submission, took refuge at Ber-wick. Bowes and Walsingham, how ever, were little disposed to acquiesce in the collapse of their schemes ; and with the same instruments which had overthrown Lennox they now sought to overthrow Arran. The " decourted noblemen " were easily per suaded to attempt a repetition of their achievement at Ruthven ; and Colville, as before, acted as their medium of communication with the English Government. But Arran was not so easily outwitted as Lennox. He had friends amongst the conspirators who kept him informed of all their plans ; and when Gowrie, who on March 2 had been ordered to leave the kingdom within fifteen days, lingered week after week at Dundee — the Court afraid that he would not go, and his friends afraid that 230 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 he would — Arran sent Colonel Stewart with some horse to apprehend him. Gowrie was captured on April 15, after so vigorous a resistance that Stewart had to call out the townsmen and to land guns from the ships in the harbour.^ Two day's later, Gowrie's friends, the Earl of Mar and the Master of Glamis, seized the Castle of Stirling. They were joined by the Earl of Angus ; and on the 22nd they proclaimed their resolution to deliver the King from "that godless atheist, bloody Haman, and seditious Catiline, James Stuart, called Earl of Arran." ^ On the 25th James himself advanced from Edinburgh at the head of 12,000 men ; and the lords, having no more than 300, fled by Lanark and Kelso to the Border. Thus, of the " lords reformers," Gowrie alone remained in the King's hands ; and on May 2, 1584, he was tried for treason, condemned, and beheaded. The result of these events was to dissolve the short lived harmony between Church and State. The quarrel indeed had broken out anew, even before the King's escape from the Ruthven lords. Much as Gowrie and his friends must have dreaded the influence of the French envoys, they could not in decency oppose their reception at Court. The more zfealous of the clergy, however, were deterred by no such scruples. Meynville greatly exasperated them by asserting his privilege as an ambassador in the celebration of Mass. F^n^lon was entertained by the city of Edinburgh to a farewell banquet, at which his colleague was also present. The session had proclaimed a fast for the same day; and on February 4, 1583, whilst the magistrates were making merry with their guests, the clergy declaimed for four hours against both in the 1 Hume of Godscroft, ii. 322. 2 Calderwood, iv. 28. MELVILLE BEFORE THE COUNCIL 231 church of St. Giles. ^ In December of this year Parliament, which, like the Assembly, had approved the Raid of Ruthven, condemned it as treason ; and the new turn of affairs caused considerable havoc amongst the leaders of the Church. Durie was banished to Montrose ; Andrew Melville fled to Berwick; and after the execution of Gowrie, he was joined in exUe by several of his colleagues. The cause of Melville's flight is worthy of particular attention. In February, 1584, he was called before the Privy Council to answer for a sermon, in which, alluding to the fate of James the Third, he had vindicated the right of the ministry to apply " God's mercy and judgments " to the reproof of princes. On the first day he gave what he declared to be a faithful report of his sermon ; but on the second he declined the jurisdiction of the Council on the ground that for words spoken in the pulpit, whether treasonable or not, a minister should be tried in the first instance by the Church courts. This proceeding so enraged the King and Arran, now Lord Chancellor, that they are said to have indulged in " roarings of lions and messages of death," till the whole palace resounded ; whereupon Melville, " never jarring nor dashed a whit," told them "they presumed over boldly in a constitute estate of a Christian kirk ... to take upon them to judge the doctrine and control the ambassadors and messengers of a King and Council greater nor they, and far above them." And then, by way of proving their incompetence, he threw down a Hebrew Bible, and challenged the Council to judge him by that, if they could. The Council, finding themselves to be judges in the case, ordered him to be confined in Blackness Castle ; and Melville, 1 Calderwood, iii. 699-700 ; Spottiswoode, ii. 298. 232 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 making a feint of obedience, slipped away to Ber wick.^ Melville's plea had often been advanced before, though never in so formal a manner ; and the question it raised went to the very root of the controversy between the Church and the State. His nephew vainly argued that litigants frequently repelled the Council in favour of the Court of Session 2 — as if there could be any analogy between preferring one to another of the King's courts, and appealing from the King's own Council to a court in which he had no authority at all. Melville knew better what was involved in his theory of the two kingdoms ; and the fact that he denied the King's jurisdiction only in the first instance was a concession to that merely nominal equality of Church and State which we have found to be characteristic of the Second Book of Dis cipline. If the guardians of the Church were entitled to denounce everything to its prejudice in affairs of state, the King, in defence of lay interests, was equally entitled to complain of the conduct of the Church. So much was admitted even by the extremists of the Melville school. But they maintained that, whilst the State must apply for redress to the Church courts, these courts, as against the State, were entitled to act entirely on their own initiative. Thus for a proclama tion held to be injurious to the Church the King's advocate, eighteen months before, had been called to account by the Assembly,* whereas for a sermon alleged to be seditious Melville refused to plead before the 1 Melville's Diary, p. 101 ; Calderwood, iv. 3-12. ^Dialogue between Zelator, Temporiser, and Palemon, attributed to James Melville. — Calderwood, iv. 302. This argument is eagerly adopted by M'Crie— i. 207. 3 Calderwood, iii. 679-680. DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES 233 Council. The Presbytery or the Assembly was to judge, in the first instance, whether a minister had injured the State. Neither of these courts was at all likely to convict the accused ; and if they did not convict him, the State could not exercise its right of jurisdiction without the certainty of a conflict with the Church. Such a claim must necessarily have been repudiated by the civil power ; and it cannot be defended histori cally except on grounds entirely different from those on which it was advanced in practice.^ Unfortunate as was the tendency of the ecclesiastical movement, its methods were comparatively wholesome. Theocracy was not to be established without a revolution ; and thus the pioneers of spiritual despotism were compelled to rely mainly on democratic forces. /The Scottish Parliament — a one-chambered House, at the mercy of the King and the nobles, and existing only to register the decrees of its own Lords of the Articles — could be but the most inadequate expression of the national life. On the other hand, the General Assembly, entirely popular in character and pervaded by a strongly Puritan spirit, fulfilled many of the functions of a Scottish House of Commons ; and in the towns, where religion savoured most of politics, the want of newspapers was made good to some extent in the bi-weekly sermon. The per sistence of these agencies — the Assembly and the Pulpit — against the efforts of the State to extinguish their freedom was infinitely more important than that they should succeed in the purpose for which Melville was attempting to use them. It was not desirable at ^"The weakness of the cause of the ministers lay in this, that they defended on religious grounds what could only be justified as a political necessity." — Gardiner's History of England, i. 55. 234 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 that particular time — whatever it might be in the long run — that the power of the Crown should be diminished. The country required a strong ruler as urgently, and for the same reason, as England under the kings of York and Tudor ; and Moray did well to remind the clergy that their interests and those of the Crown were sub stantially the same. It would be unjust, however, not to recognise that the alliance of the clergy with the people, or rather with the middle class, had its origin in causes older, more permanent, and more honourable than their conflict with the State. A crowded and representative Assembly was the natural outcome of a non-sacerdotal Church. The Second Book of Discipline in this respect made no change. It restored indeed the ceremony of ordination, which the First had discarded ; but the main purpose of the Book, as has been admirably said, is to distinguish, not between cleric and layman, but " between the lay man acting by authority from his brethren as an officer of the Church, and the layman possessed by indepen dent title of civil power or influence."^ It was just this non-exclusivenesss of the clergy, however, that made them' so thoroughly obnoxious to the civil power. Under cover of religion, they absorbed politics into the pulpit, and politicians as lay elders into the Assembly ; and what they had wrested from the State in the lust of spiritual domination they refused to restore on the plea of spiritual independence. The modern advocates of this plea in Scotland are justified in tracing their descent to Melville ; but it is an eloquent testimony to the triumph of the State that their only anxiety should be to retain what the aggressive Melville regarded merely as his first line of defence, ^ Duke of Argyll's Presbytery Examined, p. 46. THE "black acts 235 The flight of Melville and the execution of Gowrie were followed by one of those violent reactions which were the natural result of the extreme tension then existing between Church and State. In May, 1584, in a Parliament " almost ended before it was well heard of," the Estates professed to ratify the reformed religion, and at the same time to deprive it of its theocratic character. After an Act confirming the " sincere preach ing of the Word and administration of the sacraments," the King and his Council were declared to be judges competent to all persons, spiritual and temporal, in all causes ; whoever declined the jurisdiction of King and Council, or sought to impugn the dignity and authority of the Three Estates was to incur the pains of treason ; all assemblies and conventions not authorised by Parlia ment or by the King's express license were discharged ; the power of the bishops was ratified and approved ; and no person, either in sermons or familiar conferences, was to utter anything to the reproach of the King and Council, or to meddle in affairs of State. ^ When these statutes, popularly known as the "Black Acts," were proclaimed at the Market Cross of Edinburgh, Pont and Balcanquhal protested against them ; and immediately afterwards Balcanquhal and two other ministers fled to Berwick, whither they were followed by James Melville. 2 Not content with promulgating these rigorous laws, the King and Arran took measures to ensure their ^ Act. Pari. iii. 292. 2 Robert Pont was a Lord of Session as well as minister of St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh. Spottiswoode (ii. 315), followed by several modern writers, is mistaken in saying that Pont fled with the other ministers ; in the following December, being then in ward, he was one of nine ministers who presented a remonstrance to the King. — Calderwood, iv. 211. 236 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 acceptance on the part of the Church. In November all the ministers between Stirling and Berwick, on pain of being deprived of their livings, were required to sign a declaration that they would comply with the late Acts of Parliament and yield obedience to the bishop of the diocese. Only eleven ministers could be induced to subscribe ; and the contumacy of the rest was punished by a general suspension of stipends. Towards the end of the year, however, Craig, Duncanson, and Brand, the three royal chaplains, were permitted to subscribe " according to the Word of God " ; and Craig was so much pleased with this reservation that he wrote a letter, endorsed by the King, urging his brethren to avail themselves of it. The brethren made haste to comply. In a few weeks all the ministers south of the Forth, t except ten, had submitted ; and meanwhile, Erskine of Dun was busy gaining subscribers in the North.^ When Erskine, a man of high character and exceptional wealth, could exert himself in such a cause, there must certainly have been other than sordid motives at work ; and we shall find, indeed, that the excesses of the High Presbyterians had greatly injured their cause. A considerable body of refugees, lay and clerical, had now collected beyond the Border. In deference to the protests of the Scottish Government, they were removed successively from Berwick to Newcastle, from Newcastle to Norwich, and from Norwich to London. Adversity appears to have quickened the piety of the nobles. At the request of the Earl of Angus, James Melville drew up a miniature Book of Discipline to be " used in the Company of those Godly and Noble Men of ' Calderwood, iv. 209-211, 246-247, 351 ; Melville's Diary, p. 135 ; Tytler, viii. 220. THE MASTER OF GRAY 237 Scotland " ; and it is said to have been faithfully observed.^ The exiles were indebted for their return to a very unpromising instrument. Patrick, Master of Gray, was a brilliant and most accomplished courtier, reputed to be the handsomest man of his time,^ and known to the historian as the most faithless of many un scrupulous politicians. He had spent several years in Paris ; and he returned to Scotland, on the last of three occasions, with the young Duke of Lennox in November, 1583. The trusted counsellor of Queen Mary and the Duke of Guise, he made his way at the Scottish Court by betraying the schemes of both ; and in furtherance of the same policy he was sent on an embassy to London in the autumn of 1584. James was anxious that the banished lords should be given up or at all events expelled ; and he authorised Gray, as the price of this and other concessions, to make known to Elizabeth what he had revealed to himself of the Catholic intrigues. But Gray in his own interest did not scruple to betray James and Arran as well as Mary. In order to displace Arran, he privately urged Elizabeth to send back the exiles ; and finally, as a shorter road to the same end, he conspired with Leicester to kill him.* Elizabeth, however, looked coldly on the assassination scheme ; and she was unwilling to risk a rupture with James by forcing him to face his rebels. Meanwhile, Arran was striving to secure himself with assistance from France ; and Gray at last forced Elizabeth's hand ^ Amongst other items, it prescribed four sermons in the week, common prayers twice daily, a chapter and psalm at dinner and supper, and a week's fast every month. — Melville's i^jarj/, p. 125. ' His beauty was of the feminine type familiar to us in the portraits of Claverhouse. 5 Froude, xi. 581. 238 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 by threatening to desert the English cause for the French. Towards. the end of October the lords were a,llowed to make their way to the Border. The Arran Government had become exceedingly unpopular in Scot land, partly through its own demerits, and partly through a frightful visitation of the plague ; ^ and on November 2, 1585, the lords, with 8,000 men, •entered Stirling in triumph. Arran fled ; and it is evidence of the sole vein of statesmanship in Gray's reckless intrigues that his fall was followed by the con clusion of a defensive league with England. The representatives ofthe Raid of Ruthven, including several of its actual leaders, such as Mar and Glamis, were now again in power ; and the politics of the party, sanctified by more than a year's training under James JMelville's rule of discipline, were expected to work mightily for the relief of the Church. To this, however, the young King was a serious obstacle. James, in his twentieth year, had arrived almost at the maturity of his powers, and James was prepared to insist on the principle established in the previous year, that religion was one thing and theocracy another. The ministers at his own request presented in writing their objections to the Acts of 1584 ; and he himself defended them in a short but vigorous paper, the composition of which is said to have occupied him for twenty-four hours. He acknowledged Jesus to be the Head of the Church ; in matters merely ecclesiastical and impertinent to his calling — "matters of doctrine in religion, salvation, heresies, or 1 " Thus God prepared the people at home that summer." — Melville's Diary, p. 148. According to Hume of Godscroft, the plague began im mediately after the flight of the ministers ; and " after their entry into Stirling it ceased, not by degrees or piecemeal, but in an instant " — " a notable wonder," which Hume ranks next to the defeat of the Armada. — ii. 372-373. THE "BLACK ACTS CONFIRMED 239 true interpretation of the Scriptures " — he disclaimed all right of judgment ; and for such matters, secured to the Church by the first Act, he promised never to call any preacher in question.^ Thus in the Parliament of December, though an Act of restitution was passed in favour of the banished ministers, the " Black Acts," far from being repealed, were fortified by a new law against seditious speeches. With the exception of the Earl of Angus, the Ruthven lords easily accommodated themselves to the King's humour ; and James Melville was so unprepared for their polite indifference that, by his own account, he "looked like one that had fallen out of the lift, he was so amazed." Melville's friends, indeed, were not the whole of the new Government, which comprised, as parties to the late revolution, the head of the banished house of Hamilton, Lord Maxwell, the Catholic Warden of the West Marches, and such of Arran's own associates as had contributed to his fall — Maitland, Sir Robert Melville, and the Master of Gray. But no excuses could exempt either the King or his councillors from the wrath of the restored clergy. " We ran to the lords, every one after another, and sometimes all together," writes Melville, " we discharged our consciences to them ; we threatened them ; worried them, and cursed them." At the close of the Parliament three ministers — Watson, Howieson, and Gibson — declared from the pulpit that the King, like Jeroboam, the seducer of Israel, would be rooted out and conclude his race, if he maintained wicked Acts against God ; and Gibson added that he had once taken Arran to be the perse cutor of the Church, but he now saw it was the King himself 2 St. Andrews was the stronghold of the High 1 Calderwood, iv. 459-463. ^ Moysie's Memoirs, p. 56 ; Calderwood, iv. 487. 240 CHURCH AND STATE, 1560-1586 Presbyterians. The Provincial Synod of Fife met there in April, 1586; and James Melville, in his opening sermon, furiously attacked Archbishop Adam son, who " with a great pontificality and big counte nance," was sitting beside him. The Synod, in the usual form, decreed that the Archbishop should be esteemed "as an ethnic or publican " ; and Adamson retaliated by excommunicating the two Melvilles and several other ministers. The Melvilles, however, had no longer the support of an undivided Church. By permitting the use of Craig's reservation, James had induced the great majority of the ministers to subscribe the Acts of 1584 ; and in virtue of this wise concession, he had reconciled them, not indeed to the abjuration of extreme principles, but to the necessity of modifying them in practice. Amongst these chastened spirits the exiles were far from being honoured as martyrs for the faith. Craig spoke of them contemptuously as the " peregrine ministers " ; and in reply to the taunts of Gibson, he preached a sermon in which he inculcated obedience, even to tyrants, as a religious duty. When the Assembly met in May, 1586, David Lindsay, " a man wise and moderate," ^ and the King's own choice, was elected to the Chair. Arch bishop Adamson, on promise of good behaviour, was released from the sentence pronounced against him by the Synod of Fife ; and Episcopacy, though in a very attenuated form, was once more accepted by the Church. In this Assembly, writes Melville in his Diary, " was first espied what the fear and flattery of Court could work in a Kirk amongst a multitude of weak and incon siderate brethren." 1 Spottiswoode, ii. 299. CHAPTER VIII. CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603. We have now traced the rivalry of Church and State up to the point at which it enters on a new phase through the rise of a moderate party within the Church itself Hence forward, in ordinary times, the zealots were but feebly supported by their own colleagues; and in 1599, when the Church had surrendered all her most important pre tensions, one of them declared, with some reason, that she had yielded not " so much to the Bang as to some ministers whom it became to be otherwise occupied." ^ The Assembly of 1586 had shown a fairly tractable spirit ; and a change in the foreign relations of Scotland augured well for the continuance of this accord between the clergy and the Crown. James's first quarrel with the Church had been occasioned by Jesuit intrigues at Court ; and he was now giving pledges for his fidelity to the faith. In 1585 Philip II. had begun to prepare for that vast undertaking known and prayed for amongst the Catholics as " the enterprise of England." In May of that year, before the return of the exiles, and whilst Arran was still in power, Elizabeth made certain pro posals to James for their mutual defence ; in July a ^ Calderwood, v. 738. Q 242 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 Convention of Estates at St. Andrews empowered the King, and such of his Council as he might appoint, to negotiate a " Christian league " with England ; and this commission was ratified in the same Linlithgow Parlia ment, which so exasperated the Melvilles by strengthen ing, instead of repealing, the Acts of 1584. In his speech to the Convention James warmly commended the alliance as the first step towards a league of all Protestant Powers against the "bastard Christians" of France and Spain. ^ The commissioners of the two kingdoms met at Berwick in the following summer ; and the treaty was proclaimed there on July 5, 1586. It was no mere coincidence that, during the progress of the treaty, events were taking place in England calculated to subject it to the severest strain. The English Government was anxious to disarm the hostility of James in the event of its being necessary to take certain proceedings against his mother. Two months before the proclamation at Berwick, Queen Mary, unknown to herself, had been detected in those intrigues with Babington for the assassination of Elizabeth, which were to cost her her life. Babington was arrested in August, 1586 ; and he and his accomplices — fourteen in all — were executed next month. For her share in this conspiracy the Scots were pre pared to see Mary closely imprisoned ; and James, on this view of the case, had no motive to interfere. He had never known his mother, and to his knowledge, he had never seen her. He knew — for the English Govern ment, having seized Mary's papers, had sent him a copy of the will — that she had disinherited him in favour of Philip of Spain ; ^ and he knew also that she had recommended her friends in Scotland to seize him and 1 Calderwood, iv. 373-375. 2 Froude, xii. 177. QUEEN MARY SENTENCED TO DEATH 243 hand him over either to Philip or to the Pope.^ But a very different spirit prevailed at Holyrood, when the news came that Mary had been tried by a commission of peers, found guilty, and sentenced to death. In all haste William Keith was despatched to London ; and when Keith reported the ill success of his mission, James sent him instructions so strongly worded that Elizabeth, on hearing them, burst into a paroxysm of rage. The nation was profoundly moved. Lord Claud Hamilton swore that, if Mary's life was taken, he would cross the Border with 5,000 men and set Newcastle in flames ; and the populace of Edinburgh were so excited that James and his ministers could not stir abroad without being assailed with cries for vengeance and execrations of the English Queen.^ But James, in the interest of his succession in England, soon repented of his message to Keith. In December he sent Sir Robert Melville and the Master of Gray — the friend of Mary and her bitter enemy — to present fresh remonstrances and to apologise for the violence of the last ; and Gray, by his own confession, made the worst even of this con tradictory mission by quoting to Elizabeth the terrible adage — Mortui non m,ordent. As James's temper cooled and the news from England became more and more alarming, the popular fury rose so high that the Council deemed it necessary to make an ordinance against seditious speeches and libels ; * and it says something for the hardihood as well as for the bigotry of the High Presbyterians that at such a crisis they ventured to defy both the nation and the King. On February 1, 1587, prayers were ordered to 1 Mary to Charles Paget, May 20, 1586 ; quoted by Tytler, viii. 265-268. 2 Robertson, Appendix xiii. ^ Privy Council Register, iv. 141. 244 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 be made for Queen Mary in all the churches; and James, knowing how such a subject might be abused in the pulpit, was careful to prescribe the exact form of words. After their usual prayer for himself, the clergy were to " pray also to God to illuminate the queen, his said dearest mother's soul with the light of his only verity, and to preserve her body from all apparent evil."^ With this order a certain number of the ministers refused to comply, partly because they regarded it as an intrusion of the civil power, and partly because it limited their freedom of speech. The ministers of Edinburgh, not content with a mere refusal, induced a certain John Cowper to occupy the pulpit at the very hour when Archbishop Adamson, by order of the King, was to preach the Wednesday sermon. This man showed so little disposition to give place that James sent an officer of the Guard to fetch him out ; whereat* " Mr. John raschit mightily upon the pulpit," and declaring that that day would bring a plague upon the city and rise in witness against the King in the day of judgment, he came down the stairs, and all the women, with great clatter and uproar, went out of the church.* This pitiful episode was turned to good account by Adamson, a man of great ability and the most eloquent preacher of his time. Amongst the audience there may have been some of those "Queen's citizens" who had fought and suffered for Mary under Maitland and Kirkcaldy of Grange ; and as the archbishop discoursed on the duty of Christians to pray for all men, he was heard in silence and with deep emotion. 1 Privy Council Register, iv. 140. ^ " The haill wyfis removit with a great clamour." — Moysie's Memoirs, p. 59. Row, who was present and remained, says : " All almost ran out of the kirk, especially the women." — History of the Kirk (Wodrow edition), p. 116. See also Spottiswoode, ii. 356, and Privy Council Register, iv. 142. THREATS OF VENGEANCE 245 Five days later — on February 8, 1587 — Mary Stewart was beheaded in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. It is said that James could not quite conceal his joy at finding himself "sole king"; but throughout the country the news continued for some time to make a profound impression. Sir Robert Carey, Elizabeth's own cousin, hastening down with apologies,^ was stopped at Berwick ; the Master of Gray, convicted of treachery during his late mission, was disgraced and banished ; and, as the summer wore on, the Scottish Borderers in six successive forays carried fire and sword across the English frontier. At the meeting of Parliament in July the Chancellor Maitland, who, with his dying brother, had held out to the last for Mary in the Castle of Edinburgh, made an impassioned speech ; and the Estates offered in the King's quarrel with England to spend both goods and life.^ But James, though out wardly in sympathy with his people, had no intention of breaking the league. Even to avert his mother's execution he had refused to threaten England with war ; and he could not make war now, except to gratify a thirst for vengeance, in which personally he did not share at all. In this summer of 1587 Philip's Armada had been on the point of sailing ; and, apart from his designs on religion, it was well known at Holyrood that Philip meant not only to dethrone Elizabeth, but to •Elizabeth made a scapegoat of Secretary Davidson, who, she pretended, had sent off the warrant without her knowledge or approval. He was disgraced, and condemned by the Star Chamber to pay an enormous fine. ''Tytler, ix. 8, 13, 14. The author of the History of King James the Sext echoes what James himself admitted to be the voice of "the many " : " More just occasion had never prince on the earth nor this had . . . War indeed should never be so eschewit that any slander should ensue upon our negligence." — p. 236. 246 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 supplant James as her successor by himself In such a state of things there was but one course, not for Protestants only, but for all loyal Scotsmen ; and Maitland, devoted as he had been to Mary, was true at this crisis to the league with England. Towards the end of May, just when the Armada was leaving the Tagus, James himself advanced against Lord Maxwell, who was levying troops for the King of Spain, and, with the aid of an English battering train, reduced his castle of Lochmaben. About the same time the Estates, after speeches both by the King and Maitland, resolved that preparations should be made for resisting the Spaniard. Thus in July, 1588, when English seamen were vindicating their title to that supremacy of the seas which was to be the strength and the glory of a united kingdom, Scotland stood prepared, if necessary, to fight in the same quarrel. Watches were set at the ports ; beacons were piled upon the hills ; and in every shire the lieges were being mustered and drilled.^ The career of Maitland of Lethington seems almost to repeat itself backward in the case of his younger brother John, the ancestor of the Earls of Lauderdale. Both statesmen were essentially, and above all things, patriotic. As the minister and the champion of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, and heir-presumptive to the British crown, the elder Maitland, in his dealings with England, had drifted from friendship, through baffled diplomacy, into war. His brother, associated with him in his failure, was destined ultimately to achieve his success. Coming into power with other friends of Mary through the influence of the Guises after the fall of Morton, he had represented those foreign interests, which were working towards the restoration of the 1 Spottiswoode, ii. 383-385. MAITLAND OF THIRLESTANE 247 exiled queen. But as the minister of King James, the successor of Mary and her rival, he was borne forward to a point at which the interests of Scotland once more coincided with those of England. At the crisis of 1588 he was so much the mainstay of the English and Protestant cause that the Catholics were continually plotting his death ; and the Armada, directed against both Elizabeth and James, was the counterpart of that design of the Guises to annex Scotland and to conquer England, which had made Lethington the leader of the Congregation. Since the year 1584 John Maitland had been Secretary of State ; in 1587 he became Lord High Chancellor ; and from this period — with the exception of one year — to his death in 1595 he exercised so great an influence over the King that James was at pains publicly to absolve him from the imputation of " leading him by the nose, as it were, to all his appetities." ^ In 1590 he was raised to the peerage as Lord Maitland of Thirlestane. With no pretensions to the genius of his elder brother. Lord Maitland possessed many of his personal qualities. He resembled him in his literary tastes,* in his gift of ' Spottiswoode, ii. 401. ^ He was the author of several poems both in Latin and English, and Spottiswoode describes him as " a man of rare parts, of a deep wit, learned, full of courage." — ii. 464. A certain degree of culture was by no means uncommon at this period amongst the Scottish aristocracy. The Regent Morton had a fine taste for " planting and building,'' especially for the laying out of gardens. The Earl of Gowrie was " a scholar, fond of the fine arts, a patron of music and architecture." — Tytler, viii. 173 ; and Hume of Godscroft speaks of walking with him in his gallery, " newly built and decored with pictures." — ii. 318. Of Arran, Lord Hunsdon wrote to Burghley, " One of the best tongues that I have heard. He has a princely presence. Latin is rife with him and sometimes Greek." — Froude, xi. 494. Dr. Matthews, Dean of Durham, wrote thus to Burghley of the Earl of Bothwell, the maternal nephew of Queen Mary's third hus band : " This nobleman hath a wonderful wit and as wonderful a 248 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 sarcasm, in his love of mirth and raillery, and in his charming manners. /To immense capacities for work he added a fund of unfailing good sense, which caused Lord Burghley to describe him as " the wisest man in Scotland " ; and to Burghley we find him writing quite in his brother's style of "this microcosm of Britain, separate from the continent world, naturally joined in situation and language, and most happily by religion." H Thirlestane was no more favourable than Lethington to the theocratic pretensions of the Presbyterian clergy. In 1585 he drew up certain articles, subsidiary to the Acts of 1584, to be subscribed by all preachers and office-bearers in the Church, amongst which occurs the somewhat curious one that they should not allege the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when called to account for any of their acts or speeches, but on the contrary should " grant their offences as men and humbly crave pardon as subjects." * Next year, after the Synod of Fife had excommunicated Archbishop Adamson, he counselled the King to leave the ministers to their own courses, saying " that in a short time they would become so intolerable as the people would chase them forth of the country." * But Thirlestane's relations with the clergy improved with the development of his politics, just as Lethington's in the same way had gone from bad to worse. In August, 1588, before the defeat of the Armada was known, cordial messages passed between the Court and the Assembly ; and the hatred borne ^ towards the Chancellor by the entire Catholic and volubility of tongue . . . competently learned in the Latin; well languaged in the French and Italian ; much delighted in poetry." — Tytler, ix. 96. Sir James Melville, the Master of Gray, arid the fifth Earl Marischal, founder of Marischal College, Aberdeen, were all accomplished men. For Lord Menmuir, the most accomplished of all, see p. 271. 1 Tytler, ix. 49. ^ Calderwood, iv. 350. ^ Sppttiswoode, ii. 343. PRESBYTERY ESTABLISHED BY STATUTE 249 Spanish faction brought him more and more into harmony with the Church. In January, 1589, the ministers obtained the royal assent to a petition, in which they craved large powers for the trial and prose cution of Papists ; ^ it was mainly to their exertions that James attributed the quietness of the country whilst he was absent on his matrimonial expedition to Denmark from October of this year to May of the next ; in the following August he raised a storm of exultation in the Assembly by warmly commending the Scriptural purity of the Kirk * ; and almost immediately afterwards the Council issued stringent orders against certain ecclesias tical offenders — excommunicated persons, abusers of the sacraments, and troublers of ministers in the discharge of their functions.* In the growth of these friendly relations between the clergy and the Crown we have the key to that famous Act of 1592 — " the ratification of the liberty of the true Kirk," which is commonly regarded as the Presbyterian charter. This Act was admittedly the work of Maitland ; 1 Calderwood, v. 2. ^He is said also to have spoken contemptuously of the Anglican service as " an ill said Mass in English, wanting nothing but the liftings," i.e. the elevation of the Host. The only contemporary authority for the speech in this sense is Scot — Apologetical Narration (Wodrow edition), p. 57 — who is copied almost verbatim by Calderwood, v. 106. James Melville, who was Moderator of this very Assembly, makes no mention of the speech, and on this ground it is rejected as spurious by Mr. Grub. — Ecclesiastical History, ii. 252. It is difficult to believe that James could have maligned the Anglican ritual at a time when, in deference to the complaints of Elizabeth, he was trying to restrain the clergy from praying for the persecuted Puritans. But, in the circumstances, his eulogy of the Presbyterian Church is very probable. Spottiswoode omits both eulogy and censure, and the speech, as he gives it, has quite a different turn.— ii. 409-410. ' Privy Council Register, iv. 521. The significance of this and other edicts is well explained by Professor Masson in his admirable Preface. 250 CHURCH ANd\ STATE, 1586-1603 and the clergy believed that they owed it rather to the exigencies of Maitland's position than to his good will. On February 7, 15921, the Earl of Moray, son- in-law of the Regent, was attacked and slain by the Catholic Earl of Huntly; a tremendous outcry arose from all the pulpits; and Maitland, who had given orders for Moray's arrest, and was suspected of being privy to the murder, felt the full force of the storm. But if this incident was the occasion of the Act in favour of Presbytery, it can hardly have been the cause. Amongst the Privy Council Papers there is one dated August 11, 1590, in which it is recommended that the jurisdiction of the Kirk, its Assemblies and discipline, should be authorised by Act of Council and Convention, if any such should be held, before the next Parliament;^ and the statute of 1592 was so far from being a mere surrender that Spottiswoode describes it as passed " in the most wary terms that could be devised." * Its object evidently was to establish Presbytery as a system of ecclesiastical government, and at the same time to discountenance its theocratic pretensions. Thus, whilst the Act of 1584 in favour of the bishops was expressly annulled, the Act asserting the royal supremacy remained 'intact, subject only to a declaration that it should not be prejudicial to the privilege given by God to the spiritual office-bearers in the Kirk ; and whereas hitherto the Assembly had appointed its own time and place of meeting, this right was now to be exercised by the King or his commissioner, and only in the absence of both by the Assembly itself In 1584 James and Arran had sought to distinguish between religion and theocracy ; and in 1592, except for the substitution of ^ Miscellaneous Privy Council Papers : Register, iv. 831. ^History, ii. 421. PERSECUTION OF CATHOLICS 251 presbyters for bishops, James and Maitland adhered to the same principle. And yet, outcome as it was of a deliberate policy, the settlement of 1592 is rather an episode than an epoch in the history of the Scottish Church. The King and the clergy had been brought into line through the imminence of a common danger ; but unfortunately this danger developed in such a way as to become the cause of a new and more serious quarrel. In Scotland the destruction of the Armada stimulated rather than extinguished the strife of creeds. King James had always been regarded by the Catholics less as an enemy than as a possible ally ; until the Master of Gray over turned it in 1584, the association scheme had a fair chance of success ; and the league with England, for which Gray's treachery opened the way, had been strained almost to breaking through the general indig nation aroused by the fate of Mary. Maitland's impassioned speech to Parliament in July, 1587, greatly encouraged the friends of Spain ; and despite the passing of several anti- papal statutes, it was not till the expedition against Lord Maxwell in the following May that Scotland was definitely committed to the Protestant side. Henceforward the only hope of the Catholics was in succour from abroad. In Scotland the penal laws were even more severe than in England ; and James, though he tried hard to mitigate them in practice, was now greatly hampered by his alliance with the Church. In every parish suspected persons were sought out by the kirk-session, and compelled, not merely to come to church, but to sign the Confession of Faith ; and this test even Huntly, the leader of the Catholics, was forced to subscribe. Early in 1589 the English Government 252 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 intercepted letters from Huntly, Errol, Maxwell, and Mary's friend, the Protestant Lord Claud Hamilton, to Philip and the Duke of Parma, in which they offered, with the aid of 6000 Spaniards, to co-operate in a new invasion of England ; and these letters were handed to the King at noon on February 27, whilst he was sitting in the Court of Session, and several of the conspirators with him. James at first did not take the matter very seriously ; but when he heard, six weeks later, that Huntly and Errol were levying an army in the north, he marched in person against them, and without striking a blow, scattered their forces at the Bridge of Dee. At the end of 1592 a new conspiracy was brought to light through the seizure on the Clyde of several letters, and in particular of eight empty schedules subscribed by Huntly, Errol, and Angus, which obtained prodigious notoriety as the " Spanish Blanks." The Catholic Earls had easily compounded for their first offence, and it was not James's intention to make them pay heavily for this. Advancing to Aberdeen at the head of his troops, he drove the rebels before him into the wilds of Caithness ; but their estates, nominally forfeited, were placed for the most part in the hands of loyal kinsmen; and at the Parliament of July, 1593, he refused on one pretext or another to have them attainted for treason. The Earls now offered to prove their innocence with regard to the " Spanish Blanks," and they were ordered to appear at Perth on October 24. But James cancelled the summons as soon as he perceived that the Catholics and the Protestants were preparing to convert the assize into a trial of strength ; and on November 12 a commission of the estates gave its assent to the Act of Abolition, by which the whole proceedings against the Earls were BATTLE OF GLENLIVAT 253 dropped, and they and all other Papists were required either to conform or to live abroad on the produce of their lands. This Act gave great offence to the Church ; but Huntly and Errol were as little disposed to accept the conditions as the clergy to approve them as pro portionate to their crimes. In January, 1594, they were declared to have wilfully deprived themselves of the benefit of the Act ; and in June, having disobeyed a summons to enter their persons in ward, they were condemned by Parliament, attainted and outlawed. Through the influence of the clergy the Earl of Argyll, a youth of eighteen, and the brother-in-law of the slaughtered Moray, obtained a commission to pursue the King's rebels, Huntly and his friends, with a force much smaller, but having some field- pieces and much better drilled, officered, and armed, encountered Argyll near Glenlivat on October 3, 1594 ; and after two hours' desperate fighting, they entirely defeated him, with a loss to the royalists of some 600 men. King James had reached Dundee when Argyll himself brought him the news, and pushing on to Aberdeen, he took an ample revenge. Huntly and Errol fled, as before, into the wilds of Caithness ; their castles were sacked and blown up ; and in the spring of 1595 they were forced, or per mitted, to take refuge abroad. This result appeased for the time being a most bitter contention between the High Presbyterians and the King. The evident reluctance of James to extirpate the enemies of the faith had exasperated these ex tremists to the last degree. On the ground that they had been students for some time in the University of St. Andrews, the Synod of Fife took upon itself 254 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 to excommunicate the Catholic Earls in September, 1593. In April of the following year a certain John Ross declared from the pulpit that James was a repro bate king, of all men in Scotland "the finest and most dissembling hypocrite," and that, like his prede cessors, he would come to a bloody and untimely end ; and the Assembly, whilst nominally censuring him for this monstrous sermon, declared that " there is just cause of a sharp rebuke, and threatening of heavier judgments . . . than hath been or might have been uttered by him." ^ The chief spokesman of the High Presbyterians at this period was a man even more furious and headstrong than Andrew Melville. John Davidson had been chosen by the Presbytery of Edinburgh to excommunicate Archbishop Mont gomery in 1582. The Duke of Lennox used to call him " un petit diahle" ; he was known at Court as " a thunderer " during his residence in London with the Ruthven lords ; and he was cordially detested by the King, who said on one occasion that " if he knew there were six of his judgment in the Assembly, he should not bide in it more than in Sodom or Go- morrha." * On the Sunday following the Parliament of July, 1593, in which the Papist Earls escaped for feiture, Davidson " prayed that the Lord would compel the King, by his sanctified plagues, to turn to him ere he perish." * The Parliament of June, 1594, not only attainted the Earls, but ordained " wilful hearers of Mass " to be put to death, and Papists, who refused to satisfy the presbyteries, to be summoned before the Council* But, when James intimated these measures to the Presbytery of Edin- 1 Historic of King James the Sext, 318-326 ; Calderwood, v. 300-306, 322. 2 Calderwood, vi. 184. ' Ibid. v. 256. * Act. Pari. iv. 62, 63. WANING FANATICISM 255 burgh, Davidson said : " One dead, if it were but to execute Mr. Walter Lindsay for his idolatry, would do more good than all his letters and the commis sioners both." Next Sunday he reminded the people of Charles IX., who on the eve of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew had done more for " the good cause " than James ; and pointing to the King's seat, he referred to him as " rather vaunting himself than humbly craving mercy for his sins on his knees, mth tears, as he should have done."^ Happily, however, there were many within the Church, to whom such vicious and irresponsible rail ing was daily becoming more and more offensive. The ministers as well as the chief citizens of Edin burgh, "miscontent with his rough application," had long been anxious to get rid of Davidson ; and to that fiery spirit the coldness and moderation of his brethren was a continual theme of reproach. In the Synod of Fife, on the day before it excommunicated the Catholic Earls, he said " he thought a great part of the ministry the merriest and carelesest men in Scotland"; in June, 1594, he inveighed against "the courses of corrupt ministers," accusing them of admitting all and sundry to the Holy Sacrament, of winking at the profanation of the Sabbath, and of " not faithfully meeting with sin in kirk and country " ; and Andrew Melville in the previous year had com plained " that the ministry was all turned to a kind of ' Calderwood, v. 337, 338. Davidson and Bruce were supposed to have inherited the Knoxian gift of prophecy. " Some of the things that they foretold," says Burnet, " came to pass ; but my father, who knew them both, told me of many of their predictions that he himself heard them throw out, which had no efiect ; but all these were forgot, and if some more probable guessings which they delivered as prophecies were accom plished, these were much magnified." — History of His Own Time, i. 31. 256 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 politic dealing, and that he never thought to have seen such a general defection and coldness in his days." ^ It may be well to note here that in all their struggles with the Crown the High Presbyterians had to deal with an opponent, the area of whose power and influence was far wider than theirs. The Scottish Church at this period was very far from being conterminous with the Scottish nation ; and there can be little doubt that the nation stood with the King against the Church, just as the people of England in after days supported George III. against the Whigs. In the chronicles of the time we find many indications of an effusive loyalty, which, though by no means discountenanced by the Melville school, was in strange contrast to its prevailing spirit. When James, on assuming the government, made his public entry into Edinburgh in October, 1579, he was received by the magistrates at the West Port under a canopy of purple velvet, and by 300 of the principal citizens in gowns of velvet and silk ; the streets were strewn with flowers, the houses hung with tapestry and " painted histories " ; quaint pageants met him at every turn ; and the City presented him with a cupboard of plate worth 6000 merks.* At the birth of Prince Henry, James's first born, in February, 1594, there was such rejoicing in all parts — bonfires, festivity, and dancing — " as if the people had been daft for mirth " ; * and we 1 Calderwood, v. 192, 238, 262, 337. In 1595 David Black, of whom we shall hear immediately, denounced the majority of his brethren as " Pint- ale ministers, belly-fellows, sycophants, gentlemen ministers, leaders of the people to hell, and [said] that a great part of them were worthy to be hanged." He did not deny having used these words. — St Andrews Kirk- Sesdon Record, ii. 815-816, note. 2 Historic of James the Sext, p. 179 ; Moysie's Memoirs, p. 25 ; Calder wood, iii. 458, 459. ^ Moysie's Memoirs, p. 113, EDINBURGH LOYAL 257 shall see later how the King's escape from a serious danger evoked a still more extraordinary demonstration. The High Presbyterians had the support of a large and zealous minority in all the principal towns ; but even here the following of Andrew Melville was hardly greater than that of Knox in the first few years of the reign. Hume of Godscroft tells us that the courtiers relied chiefly on the people of Edinburgh, who " took everything as from the King, whatsoever was com manded in his name." When Gowrie's friends had seized the Castle of Stirling in 1584, and James was preparing to march against them, the citizens raised a corps of 500 muskdteers ; and such was their reputation for loyalty that Hume coolly records it as a special intervention of Providence directed towards the return of the exiled ministers that some 20,000 of them were carried off by the plague.^ In the autumn of 1592 the clergy raised a great commotion in Edinburgh by pro hibiting the merchants from resorting to Spain till they could do so without fear of the Inquisition, and by having the wool market changed in the interests of their new Sabbath from Monday to Wednesday. The merchants promised to obey as soon as they had settled their accounts in Spain ; but the shoemakers defeated, or helped to defeat, the second scheme by besetting the ministers' houses, and threatening, unless the Monday market was restored, to chase them out of the town. This incident caused much mirth at Holy- rood, where it was said that " rascals and souters " had more power over ministers than the King ; * and it made 1 Houses of Douglas and Angus, ii. 331, 372. The actual number of the victims of the plague is probably that given by Birrell— " 1400 and some odiA."— Diary, p. 23. 2 Spottiswoode, ii. p. 432. The author of the Hist of James the Sext R 258 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 a deep impression on Davidson, who said, " I fear more the multitude and body of Edinburgh to be persecutors of me and my brethren, and their readiness to concur to take our lives from us than I fear the Court, unless they repent."^ Much as James deferred on most occasions to the Chancellor's advice, his policy towards the Catholic Earls was entirely his own. Maitland had been driven from Court through the intrigues of the young Queen in August, 1592. He was restored to full power in October of the following year ; but when, at the instigation of the clergy, he remonstrated against the Act of Abolition, the King " called him often a beast," and would hear of no change in the Act.* Queen Elizabeth was hardly less earnest than the clergy in exhorting James to more vigorous measures ; and yet in the interests of the Scottish Crown he was merely adopting the same line of policy on which she herself invariably acted in her rela tions with foreign Powers. Much to the chagrin of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth had always shrunk from com mitting herself to the defence of Protestantism abroad ; and James was too conscious of his own weakness to act vigorously in the same cause at home. He had no sympathy with the religious persecution which had driven the Earls to revolt ; he was anxious to wean them from their dependence on Spain ; and Andrew Melville accused him with good reason of favouring says that the Monday market was allowed to continue because it was found that the majority of the " mercat folks " did not begin the journey till Monday morning ; but the wrath of the shoemakers may well have been a contributory cause. It was on this occasion that the rhyme was circulated against the clergy, which describes them as " wolves clad up in -widow's weeds," and as " prescribing points as scribes in everything." — Analecta Scotica, ii. 171, and Calderwood, v. 177, note. 1 Calderwood, v. 339. ' Ibid. v. 289 ; see also p. 382. BOTHWELL S ESCAPADES 259 the Catholics with a view to holding the ministers in check. But James had to reckon with a third antagonist in his audacious cousin, Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell. This man was a nephew of the Regent Moray ; and it pleased him for a time to pose as a zealous Presbyterian. He was one of the Ruthven lords, whom he joined immediately after the Raid, and apparently the least obnoxious to the King ; he conferred secretly with Gowrie's friends at Kelso on their flight to England in April, 1584 ; and he was one of the first to join them on their return. After the execution of Queen Mary he and Lord Claud Hamilton were the most zealous pro moters of an invasion of England ; and in furtherance of the same scheme he joined the Catholic conspiracy of 1589, which collapsed so ignominiously at the Bridge of Dee. Bothwell's politics, however, had a strong personal bias. He utterly detested Maitland ; and his feeling in this respect was shared by nearly all the high nobility, in whose eyes the Chancellor, despite his long descent, was a novus homo — in Bothwell's own phrase, " a puddock-stool of a night " usurping the place of the " ancient cedars." ^ To capture the King, or at all events to separate him from Maitland, he made so many wild attempts, and was believed to be planning so many more, that the Court lived for a time in almost daily fear. On the night of December 27, 1591, he beset Holyrood Palace, and w^as endeavouring with fire and crowbars to break into the royal apartments, when the ringing of the town bell warned him to make good his escape. Six months later, he failed in a similar attempt at Falkland; but in July, 1593, he appeared again at Holyrood, and for several hours had the King 1 Calderwood, v. 156. 260 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 at his mercy. In these exploits Bothwell was the self- constituted champion of the Church, and a source of attraction to its least reputable members. The notorious John Colville was his constant companion ; Hunter, minister of Carnbee, was deposed for deserting his flock in Bothwell's service ; John Ross, soon after delivering his infamous sermon, was apprehended, breechless, and with plaid and pistols, presumably on his way to join him ; and another of his followers was Jerome Lindsay, son of the minister of licith.^ The Edinburgh clergy turned him- to good account in their sermons as one of those " sanctified plagues " designed to chastise the King for his clemency to the Catholic Earls ; they long refused to excommunicate, or even to denounce him ; and Bruce, one of their number, declared from the pulpit that " the Lord Bothwell had taken the protec tion of the good cause, at least the pretence thereof, to the King's shame, because he took not upon him the quarrel." * At last, however, reduced to great extremity and denied a refuge in England, he was feign to renew his old alliance with Huntly ; and this step completed his ruin. In February, 1595, he was excommunicated by the Presbytery of Edinburgh ; and in April, after lurking for some time in Caithness, he left Scotland, never to return. In October of this year Lord Maitland died. He had long been the principal bond of union between the Crown and the Church ; King James wrote his epitaph in English, and Andrew Melville in Latin ; and his loss, though compensated for a time through the flight of both Bothwell and Huntly, was soon to be keenly felt. The next year, 1596, has some pretensions to be 1 Calderwood, v. 326, 298, 299. ''Ibid. 295. PRESBYTERY AT ITS ZENITH 261 regarded as an annus mirabilis in the history of the Church. In the preceding December Davidson had prophesied that the King, the nobles, the clerical moderates, and the populace would all be severely punished.-^ It was Davidson's own party, however, which in the zenith of its glory was to be brought low ; and the King, " the profane ministry," and " the re bellious multitude," far from being punished themselves, were to be the instruments of its fall. " The Kirk of Scotland," says Calderwood, "was now come to her perfection and the greatest purity that ever she attained unto both in doctrine and discipline, so that her beauty was admirable to foreign Kirks. The assemblies of the saints were never so glorious nor profitable to every one of the true members thereof as in the beginning of this year." * These words refer chiefly to the proceedings of the Assembly which met at Edinburgh on March 24, 1596, and which, on the motion of Davidson, held a diet of humiliation for the sins of the clergy. On the 30th 400 persons assembled for this purpose-— " all ministers or choice professors " ; and Davidson preached in such a manner as to make the meeting from his own point of view a phenomenal success. Such sighs and groans had not been heard at any fast since the Reformation, " and tears were shed in such abundance that the place might justly be called Bochim."* The "profane ministers" — sonie at least who were after wards regarded as such — seem to have viewed these proceedings with very qualified approval. Pont, the Moderator, withstood the proposed fast; Rollock, the Principal of the University of Edinburgh, refused pointedly to make the sermon ; and Thomas Buchanan — Calderwood remarks that he came to a violent end — 1 Calderwood, v. 387. ^ Ibid. 387, 388 ; Scot, p. 65. ^ ^^^^ p_ gg. 262 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 scoffed openly at the preacher's discourse. Diets of humiliation were appointed to be held throughout the country; but though the Synod of Fife set a notable example, the order was not universally observed. Meanwhile the quarrel of Church and State was on the point of breaking out anew. The finances of the Crown were sadly out of order ; and in the previous year James had appointed eight Commissioners of the Exchequer, popularly known as the Octavians, to whom he granted powers so unlimited in the disposal of the revenue that he was said to have left nothing to him self but the mere title of King. These men, serving without salary, entered on their functions with the utmost vigour. They made many enemies by supplanting rival officials, and cutting down the expenses of the royal household ; and it greatly aggravated their unpopularity that the religion of several of them was vehemently suspected. Much excitement prevailed at this time both in England and Scotland through the report of that second Armada, which Howard, Essex, and Raleigh destroyed soon afterwards in the harbour of Cadiz ; and James, in view of this new peril, was far from satisfying the demands of the Church. He refused, as a means of raising troops, either to seize the estates of the exiles or to exact payment from those who had become surety for their good behaviour abroad ; the Countess of Huntly was continually at Court ; the Earl himself returned secretly in June ; and in August a Convention of Estates, on his own petition supported by Lord Urquhart, the chief of the Octavians, decided that on certain conditions he should be allowed to remain. Against this decision the representatives of the Church protested in vain ; and Andrew Melville, in a private interview with the King next month, delivered the THE CHURCH PREPARES POR WAR 263 most famous of his many speeches on the subject of the two kingdoms.^ But the clergy were far from being content with mere protests. On October 20, 1596, the Commissioners of Assembly despatched a circular letter to all the presby teries, warning them that Huntly and Errol, intent on war and massacre, had obtained license to return, appointing the first Sunday of December to be observed as a universal fast, and intimating that a representative committee would sit permanently at Edinburgh. On the same day they summoned Lord Urquhart to answer before the Synod of Lothian for his intrigues in favour of Huntly. James had suffered much of late from Andrew Melville's harangues, and these proceedings quite exhausted his patience. To a deputation of ministers he said that " Papists might be honest folks and good friends to him," and that there could be no peace till the bounds of the two jurisdictions had been defined. He insisted that they should cease to talk politics from the pulpit, that the Assembly should neither convene nor make laws without his consent, and that synods and presbyteries should confine themselves to a censorship of morals.* When these words were reported to the Commis sioners on November 11, they accepted them as a declaration of war against " the liberty of Christ's kingdom " ; and on the same day they received notice how the assault was to be made. On the complaint of Bowes, the English Resident, inspired by James himself, David Black, minister of St. Andrews, had been cited to appear before the Council for a sermon, in which he had said that Elizabeth was an atheist, and the English religion a mere show directed wholly by the bishops, 1 See p. 218. ^ Calderwood, v. 451-453. 264 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 who had persuaded the King to introduce the same into Scotland.^ Black had got into trouble the year before for abusing the King's ancestors ; and Andrew Melville, who had then defended him on the old theocratic basis, was still the presiding spirit. On the 18 th, the day of his trial. Black presented a declinature in writing sub scribed by all the Commissioners ; and the case was then adjourned till the last day of the month. Elizabeth at this period was making common cause with the Scottish clergy against the Catholic Earls ; and Bowes, having taken action unwillingly, was easily persuaded to let the matter drop. Meanwhile, however, the Commissioners of the Church had taken a very bold step. They had sent a copy of the declinature to every presbytery in the realm, requiring all ministers to sign it, and each copy to be returned by means of a faithful pastor who might be of use to them in their delibera tions. In a short time about 400 signatures are said to have been obtained.* This was a direct challenge to the Government ; and James, " mightily incensed," replied to it in the most vigorous terms. On the 24th three proclamations were drawn up, which, after a vain attempt at compromise, were published, three days later, at the Market Cross. By these all persons were prohibited from convening at the desire of the clergy, the Commissioners were ordered to leave Edinburgh within twenty-four hours, and Black was summoned to appear on a new charge. Black's case was a crucial one for the Court. The Crown lawyers had been busy collecting evidence against him, and the articles of the indictment extended over a period of three years. He was charged, inter alia, with having said from the pulpit that " all kings ' Gardiner's History of England, i. 57, note. ^ gg^^^ p_ 72. BLACK BEFORE THE COUNCIL 265 were devils and come out of devils" ; "that the devil was the head of the Court and in the Court " ; that the Lords of Session were "miscreants and bribers," the Privy Council " holiglasses, cormorants, and men of no religion " ; and that he prayed " for the Queen merely for the fashion's sake, seeing no appearance of good in her time."^ When he appeared on the 30th, Black presented a second declinature even more extravagant than the first, in which he referred to the office-bearers of the Church as "placed in their spiritual ministry over kings and kingdoms, to plant and pluck up by the roots, to edify and demolish." * To this document, read over "with post haste" and at once rejected, the Council replied with an interlocutur, finding themselves to be judges in the case. A great number of St. Andrews people were called as witnesses, about twenty- six of whom deponed that all the charges were true ; * and on December 2 — the interval having been spent in fruitless negotiations — Black was found guilty, and ordered to await the King's pleasure beyond the Tay. These proceedings had been carried on under a tremendous fusilade from the Edinburgh pulpits ; and the Court, thus furiously assailed before the people, was feign at times to sue for mercy. Thus on December 1 we find the King, after a sleepless night, requesting "that the dint of the doctrine might stay that day " ; instead of which, " the doctrine passed forward and sounded mightily" — the brethren having declared that it "could not be blunted, unless there was an evident appearance of amending the wrongs." On 1 Moysie, p. 128 ; Spottiswoode, iii. 21. The silence of all the Presby terian writers as to the charges is very significant. See p. 256, note. 2 Calderwood, v. 478. ^ Moysie, p. 128. 0 266 C5URCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 the 5th James again " craved a truce in the doctrine " ; and this time the brethren " accorded to the truce and leaving off the sharpness of application." The King's proposals on this occasion were as ample as they could well have been, short of absolute surrender. He offered to recall the three proclamations of November 27, and as regards the interlocutur, to give a promise in writing that it should not be used against the Church, until the whole question had been discussed in a lawful assembly. On the other hand, he insisted, as due to his own honour and that of the Queen, that Black should be at least formally punished. But the clergy, standing to the unlawfulness of the entire process, would not hear of any penalty, no matter how light ; and so, breaking off the conference, they betook themselves once more to " that spiritual armour which was given them, potent in. God for overthrowing these bulwarks and mounts erected for the sacking of the Lord's Jerusalem."^ James in much less figurative language ordered Black to retire beyond the North Water and the Commis sioners once more to leave Edinburgh — an order which they did not venture to disobey.* The quarrel had thus reached a critical stage, when through certain intrigues at Court it was brought to a sudden and very dramatic issue. The Cubiculars or lords of the Bed Chamber, who had suffered most from the new regime of retrenchment and reform, were anxious to discredit it by some popular outbreak. For this purpose they played a double game, and they played it with considerable skill. They filled the ministers or their friends with such fear of the Octavians as Papists and enemies to the Church that a watch was set nightly round their houses ; to the Octavians they 1 Scot, p. 79. 2 Calderwood, v. 483-498. RIOT AT EDINBURGH 267 represented the watchers as lying in wait to take their lives ; and when, in consequence of such reports, twenty-four of the most zealous burgesses were ordered to leave the town, they told the ministers that this had been done at the instigation of Huntly, who, they falsely alleged, had been with the King at Holyrood the previous night. ^ These intrigues succeeded admirably. On the morn ing of Friday, December 17, Balcanquhal assailed the Octavians from the pulpit in the most violent terms ; amongst the audience were several nobles and lairds ; and, alluding to the zeal of their fathers in defence of the Congregation, he exhorted them to convene after service in the Little or East Church of St. Giles. When the ministers came to the church, they found it so crowded that they could hardly obtain entrance. Bruce made an impassioned speech, at the close of which the people swore with uplifted hands to stand fast in defence of the faith ; and a deputation was then despatched to lay their grievances before the King. James received the deputation in the Upper Tolbooth ; and their address being somewhat unman nerly, he left them without giving an answer, and went down to the lower house. Meanwhile, in the East Church the people had been listening to the story of Haman and Mordecai; on the return of the baffied envoys there was more clamour and gesticulation in token of their " covenant with the Lord " ; and at this moment " a messenger of Satan," and, doubtless also the Cubicu lars, came to the door and shouted, " Save yourselves, there is a tumult in the gate." At these words the whole assemblage rushed out of the church ; friends, hastily armed, flocked to them from the neighbouring houses ; 1 Calderwood, v. 510-511. 268 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 and in a few moments the streets were filled with an excited mob, some shouting, " The sword of the Lord and of Gideon," and others, at the doors of the Tolbooth, "Bring forth the wicked Haman." Before this, "some devilish officious person," probably another agent of the Cubiculars, had told James that the ministers were coming to take his life; and when the tumult arose, the craftsmen hearing and seeing so many " choice professors " in arms, turned out in a body in defence of the King. Led by a sturdy blacksmith, John Watt, deacon of deacons, or, in modern phrase. Convener of the Trades, they formed a guard round the Tolbooth ; and when James, in response to their cries, appeared at a window, they " offered to die all in one moment for his Majesty." But a riot so aimless and incoherent could not last long. The Provost, without much difficulty, persuaded the people to disperse ; and soon after noon, in the midst of the loyal craftsmen, James returned in safety to Holyrood.-^ The ministers had done their best to pacify the tumult ; but their subsequent conduct showed clearly that they did not perceive how great an advantage it had given to the King. About five in the evening they sent a deputation to Holyrood, which either failed to gain admission or did not venture to seek it, requiring not only the recall of everything done to the prejudice of the Church during the last five weeks, but also that an Act of Council should be made approving the action of the clergy and their lay associates in the course of that day. Early next morning the Court withdrew to Linlithgow, and a proclamation was published at the Cross ordering all strangers to leave Edinburgh, the ^Scot, pp. 83-85; Calderwood, v. 511-513, 561-563; Spottiswoode, iii. 27-30 ; Birrel's Diary, pp. 39-40 ; Moysie, pp. 1,30-131. VIOLENCE OF THE ZEALOTS 269 Lords of Session and other judges to be in readiness to depart, and the nobles and lairds not to convene without the King's license. But the High Presbyterians remained defiant and undismayed. On Saturday they wrote a letter to Lord Hamilton, exhorting him to put himself at their head ; and Hamilton, returning the original, sent a copy altered for the worse — whether with or without his knowledge — to the King. Sunday was observed as a public fast ; and John Welsh from the pulpit of St. Giles declared that King James was possessed with a devil, and that, one being removed, seven worse devils had entered in. Welsh w^as a son- in-law of Knox ; and he advocated resistance by adducing Knox's famous parallel of the children laying hands on an insane father.^ On Monday, hearing that a warrant had been issued for their arrest, the four ministers of Edinburgh fled from the town. The clergy had thus played directly into the hands of the King, whose object it was to represent the riot in such a light as would justify an attack on the privileges of the Ch-urch. With this view he affected to be vehemently incensed against the whole town ; even the vafiant John Watt, coming with three others to plead for his fellow-citizens, was dismissed with threats ; the > Spottiswoode, iii. 34 ; Forbes' Records (Wodrow edition), p. 405, John Welsh, " a man altogether apostolic, of rare both learning and piety," as Baillie calls him, was not only a prophet, but a worker of miracles. On one occasion at supper, when " a debauched Popish young gentleman " had interrupted his edifying discourse by laughing and making faces, he charged " the company to be silent and observe the work of the Lord upon that profane mocker," who immediately "sank down and died beneath the table." One of his friends once " saw clearly a strange light surround him" ; and he restored a youth who was supposed to have been dead for forty-eight horns.— Select Biographies (Wodrow Society), i. 12, 29, 35, 36. Bruce also was something of a thaumaturgist ; but it is very doubtful whether either of them had that reputation in his own day. 270 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 Court of Session sat at Leith under orders to remove in a few weeks to Perth ; and when James entered Edinburgh on January 1, 1597, a large force of Borderers was posted in the streets. The appearance of these troops, or rather the report of their coming, created such consternation that the booths were closed, and both merchants and craftsmen, taking their goods with them, shut themselves up fully armed in some of the strongest houses.^ At length, at the price of 30,000 merks, the town succeeded in making its peace with the King. On March 22 the agreement was proclaimed ; and next day, amidst much music and bell-ringing, James drank to the magistrates, and the magistrates to him. In January of this year, to his own great loss, he dismissed the Octavians, or rather permitted them to resign. Edinburgh had thus been punished vicariously for the sins of the Church ; and this policy was well calculated to strengthen the reaction which was growing stronger every day against the High Presbyterian party. In truth, the disturbance of December 17 had far more influence on the relative position of parties within the Church itself than on the policy of the King. James had previously decided on vigorous measures ; for, six days before the riot, the Commissioners of the Church received notice that missives had been prepared for the calling of a Convention of Estates and a General Assembly to resolve all points at issue between the Church and the Crown.* But the riot, which merely coincided with the designs of the King, was a blow, and a fatal one, to his opponents. The extremists were driven from power ; and the moderate party, supported by the Crown on the one side and by the nation on the ^ Birrel's Diary, p. 41 ; Melville's Diary, p. 253. ^ Scot, p. 79. LORD MENMUIR 271 other, mounted at once into an ascendency, which re mained unbroken, and not even seriously challenged, for forty years. ^ The new epoch was to be one of peace and order, of widening intelligence and a serener spirit ; and in this respect it was worthily inaugurated by the brilliant statesman, who had succeeded Maitland in the confidence of the King. John Lindsay, second son of the ninth Earl of Crawford, and ancestor of the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres, had been admitted a Lord of Session, with the title of Lord Menmuir, in 1581, and a Privy Coun cillor in 1589. In 1595 he was appointed one of the eight Lords of Exchequer ; and in the following year he became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and Secretary of State. It was he who drafted the Acts of 1587, which secured to the representatives of the lairds or lesser barons that right of admission to Parliament which the whole order had asserted in 1560 ; and in 1596 he drew up an elaborate scheme, known as the " Constant Piatt," and described by James Melville as " the best and most exact that ever was devised,"^ for providing all the churches in Scotland with perpetual local stipends. Lord Menmuir's abilities were acknowledged on all hands to be of the highest order. He excelled both as a legislator and as a lawyer ; he was reputed the ablest financier of his time ; his knowledge of mineralogy procured for him the office of Master of the Metals ; and he was the inventor of a contrivance, patented in 1600, for raising water from mines. Spottiswoode describes him as " a man of exquisite learning and a sound judgment " ; * and Melville as " for natural judgment and learning the greatest light of the policy and counsel of Scotland." * An accomplished Greek and Latin scholar, with a > Diary, p. 229. " History, iii. 77. '" Dia/ry, p. 290. 272 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 partiality for Plato, he wrote with ease in French, Italian, and Spanish ; much of his leisure was given to gar dening, architecture, music and poetry ; and his library at Balcarres, including the collection of state papers pre sented to the Faculty of Advocates in 1712, is sufficient evidence of his historical and antiquarian tastes.^ We have seen that James, some time before the riot at Edinburgh, had resolved to come to an understanding with the Church ; and Lord Menmuir, with a view to exposing the worst abuses, had drawn up a list of fifty- five questions, for the discussion of which an Assembly was appointed to be held at Perth on February 29, 1597. These questions — many of them conceived in a vein of Socratic irony — included such as the fol lowing : — Whether the external government of the Church may be disputed, salva fide et religione ; whether, except for notorious vices previously rebuked in private, a minister may denounce men by name from the pulpit ; whether a minister may use further applica tion than is necessary for his own flock, or whether the whole world is the flock of every particular pastor ; whether a minister is bound by his text, or may speak all things on all texts ; whether summary excommunica tion is lawful in any case ; whether the civil magis trates may intervene to stay proceedings in Church courts to the prejudice of the State. As soon as the questions were published, the Synod of Fife proceeded to answer them in the true theo cratic style ; and perhaps the Assembly might have adopted the same tone, if care had not been taken to regulate both its composition and its zeal. As few ministers could afford to travel far, the character of each Assembly depended a good deal on its ^ Lord Lindsay's Lives of the Lindsays, i. 375-377, et passim. THEOCRACY RENOUNCED 273 place of meeting ; and the Government had selected Perth in the hope of seeing the High Churchmen of the south outnumbered and outvoted by their ruder colleagues. Sir Patrick Murray, one of the Cubiculars, was despatched beforehand to proselytise in the King's interest; and when the Assembly met, James trod so skilfully in the steps of that ." apostle of the north" that he won over all the northern ministers, and not a few of the southern ones also. It was debated first of all whether they should regard themselves as a lawful General Assembly, the last Assembly having appointed another to meet at St. Andrews in April. James Melville, arguing in the negative, bade fair to carry his point ; but the question was decided against him mainly through the influence of Nicolson, his bosom friend and an old opponent of the Court, who had been closeted with the J^ing on the previous night. After long discussion, the Assembly returned a submissive answer to such of Lord Menmuir's queries as were proposed to them by the King — including all those mentioned above except the last, which was deferred with the others to further reasoning. It was also agreed that in all the principal towns no minister should be admitted without the consent of the King and the congregation. The theocratic ideal, which had been dominant in the Church since the days of Knox, was thus practically abjured. Certain commis sioners were appointed to deal with Huntly, Errol, and Angus, the three Catholic Earls, whose return had been the cause of the late commotion ; and these commis sioners having reported favourably to the Assembly which met in May at Dundee, the Earls were formally received next month into the society of the Church. ^ ^ Melville's Mary, pp. 264-266 ; Calderwood, v. 606-622. S 274 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 In this Dundee Assembly ^ it was resolved that pres byteries should not meddle with anything not con fessedly belonging to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and also that, where the King took exception to pro ceedings in presbyteries as prejudicial to the State or to private rights, such proceedings should be suspended during the royal pleasure. Even more memorable than these two important Acts was the commission granted to fourteen ministers, or to any seven of that number, to confer with the King with a view to the planting of certain churches and the carrying out of Lord Menmuir's " Constant Piatt," and generally to advise the King on all matters affecting the weal of the Church and the maintenance of the royal authority. Such commissions, or commissions very similar, had been regularly appointed since that of 1594 described by Row in the light of subsequent events as " the first evident and seen wrack of our Kirk."* But the former commissions had breathed the High Pres byterian spirit ; and during the late conflict, when the Commissioners of Assembly were acting as the Church's council of war, James had fulminated pro clamations against them, as authorised to consult only, and not to exercise jurisdiction. It was this very power, however, that he wanted for the com mission of this year. With the exception of James Melville and one or two others, its members were all favourable to the new order of things — so much 1 During this Assembly the King had a stormy interview with Andrew Melville. The King, says James Melville, " began to deal very fairly with my uncle, but thereafter entering to twitch matters, Mr. Andrew broke out with his wonted humour of freedom and zeal, and there they heckled on till all the house and close both heard, mikle of a large hour. In end the King takes up and dismisses him favourably." — Diary, p. 273. 2 History, p. 162. PROPOSED CLERICAL REPRESENTATION 275 SO that Calderwood denounces them as " the King's led horse," and Scot as "a wedge taken out of the Kirk to rend her with her own forces " ; and James, conceding something in form to the theory of the two kingdoms, proposed to exercise through these men that supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which had hitherto been exercised, at the cost of so much friction, by the Privy Council.^ Of their willingness to undertake this function, which was formally assigned to them in the next Assembly, the Commissioners soon gave proof by removing Black from St. Andrews, and by suspending his colleague, Robert Wallace, who had railed against Lord Menmuir in the style now happily going out of fashion ; and at the end of the year they still further gratified the King by presenting a petition that the Church as the first estate * should be admitted to have voice in Parliament. Decisive as were the results which attended this peti tion, there was nothing at all novel in the petition itself We have seen that in the last days of the Catholic hierarchy most of the abbacies and priories had passed in all but name into the hands of laymen. After the Reformation, the abuses of the old Church coinciding with the democratic character of the new, it seemed probable that all the great benefices, including the bishoprics,* would be converted into temporal lordships ; 1 Spottiswoode, iii. 63. 2 The Church was the first estate, and the bishops are so called in the Act of 1662 restoring prelacy ; but it is worthy of notice that in the pamphlets of this period the clergy are invariably called the third estate, perhaps because they were the only one of the three that had fallen into abeyance. 'In 1567 Bishop Gordon of Galloway resigned the see in favour of his son John ; and this resignation not taking effect, another son, George, succeeded to the bishopric on his father's death. — Grub, ii. 200. 276 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 and it was to avert this result that Knox and his colleagues had consented to the restoration of Episcopacy in 1572. But the new hierarchy was soon repudiated by the Church, and ultimately, as a mode of ecclesias tical government, by the civil power ; laymen, without any commission from the Church, continued, in right of their titles, to sit and vote in Parliament as the first estate; and in the very Parliament of 1592, which established Presbyterianism, as in subsequent Parlia ments, we find, as Lords of the Articles pro clero, various bishops, abbots, and priors. To remedy so anomalous a state of things certain proposals were made. In 1592 the Assembly protested, as it had done in 1589, that the pseudo-ecclesiastics should no longer be permitted to vote in name of the Church ; and in the ensuing Parliament the clergy vainly petitioned that this privilege should be trans ferred to them.^ It was laid down by Lord Menmuir in his " Constant Piatt" that the whole tithes of the realm should henceforth be assigned to the support of the ministry ; and as this would leave nothing for the prelacies — the temporalities having been previously annexed to the Crown — he proposed that commissioners should be sent from the presbyteries sufficient with the prelates to make up the first estate, and when the pre lates had died out, to constitute the whole. By this means he hoped to strengthen that counterpoise to the power of the great nobles, the creation of which had been the object of his Acts of 1587 in favour of the smaller gentry. But the nobles, who had violently opposed the former scheme, were equally hostile to this ; and the petition of the Commissioners was granted only in terms which entirely altered its scope. In December, 1 Bowes to Burghley, June 6, 1592, quoted by Mr. Gardiner, i. 67. REPRESENTATIVES TO BE PRELATES 277 1597, an Act was passed that such ministers as the King should please to appoint to bishoprics or other prelacies should be admitted to Parliament, that all bishoprics should henceforth be granted only to actual preachers, and that the authority to be exercised by the new prelates within the Church should be determined by the King with the advice of the Assembly, without prejudice meanwhile to the established discipline.^ Thus, whilst Lord Menmuir had aimed at a popular represen tation of the clergy, Parliament would admit only a spiritual aristocracy appointed by the Crown to keep the clergy in check. Such an answer to their petition ex posed the Commissioners to the charge of having betrayed the Presbyterian system ; and it was thought at the time, and afterwards asserted by the Commis sioners themselves, that the Estates hoped to secure the rejection of their offer by making it in so unpalatable a'form.* In the Synod of Fife the two Melvilles insisted that presbyters as such would never be admitted to Parliament. " Equo ne credite, Teucri," said David Ferguson, one of the original ministers of the Church ; and Davidson "said merrily, 'Busk, busk, busk him as bonnily as ye can and bring him in as fairly as ye will, we see him well enough ; we see the horns of his mitre.' " * In spite, however, of its practical rejection by Parlia ment, the Commissioners adhered to their original plan ; and an Assembly to consider the whole matter was held at Dundee in March, 1598. In this Assembly James protested that he meant not to bring in " Papistical or Anglican bishops," but merely to give the clergy such weight in Parliament as would enable them to secure their own interests ; and on this and all similar occasions 1 Calderwood, v. 669-670. ^ Scot, p. 98. 3 Melville's Dvamj, p. 289 ; Calderwood, v. 680, 681. 278 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 the necessity of obtaining an adequate provision for the ministry was the great argument in favour of the scheme. The north country ministers mustered in full strength ; James did not scruple either to solicit votes in private or to intervene in the debates ; and at last, led by one whom Melville calls "a drunken Orkney ass,"^ the Assembly decided by a majority of ten that fifty -one representatives should be chosen to vote for the Church in Parliament. The details were to be adjusted in a Convention composed of three delegates from each synod and six university doctors ; and in such a Con vention held at Falkland in July it was agreed that the representatives of the Church should be selected by the King out of a leet of six nominated by the Assembly for each vacancy ; and amongst other restrictions, that they were to be responsible to the Assembly, were to , propose nothing either to Council or Parliament without its consent, and in rank and function were to remain ordinary pastors. Except as regards the number of representatives, in which the decision of the Estates was necessarily final, this plan had almost nothing in common with that which had been approved by Parliament ; and James had to reconcile the two as he best could. In spite of his old predilection for Episcopacy, it is probable that he had honestly resolved to make trial of Lord Men muir's popular first estate; * but Parliament had refused to consider this scheme, and it had never been intended either by Lord Menmuir or himself that the Church's representatives should be the mere delegates of the Assembly. In the autumn of this year, owing to an evil report of its contents, he was forced to publish his Basilicon Doron; and in view of what Melville calls the ' Diary, p. 291. ^ Lord Menmuir died on September 3 of this year, 1598. COMMISSIONERS, NOT PRELATES 279 " Anglopiscopapistical conclusions" of that work, the friends of Presbytery had some reason to tremble for its fate. James, however, still hoped that the decision of the Assembly might be manipulated in such a way as to satisfy both himself and the great lords. In November, 1599, in a conference at Holyrood supplementary to that of Falkland, it was debated whether the representa tives of the Church should be elected for life and whether they should be called bishops. When the Melville party refused to give way on either of these points, James told them sharply that he could not dispense with one of his estates, and if the Church would not gratify him, he would have recourse to in dividuals who would do their duty to him and the country.^ In March, 1600, the Assembly met at Montrose, for which this conference had been intended, vainly enough, to prepare the way. James took a keen interest in the debates ; and he received the clergy in so many private audiences that the courtiers complained that they could not obtain access.* But enough had happened between this Assembly and the last to create serious alarm ; and the schemes of the Court made little progress. Not only were all the Falkland restrictions or 'caveats' confirmed, but two more were added — the Church's representatives were to be called Commissioners, not Bishops, — and it was carried by a majority of three that they were to be annually elected. Through his influence, it is said,* with the Clerk, James contrived to have this last resolution so far altered that the representative was required merely to submit his commission every year to the Assembly to be continued or withdrawn as the Assembly, with the King's consent, should think good. "Thus," says Calderwood, "the Trojan horse, the 1 Calderwood, v. 761. ^ gcot, p. 113. = Ibid. p. 114. 280 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 Episcopacy, was brought in, busked and covered with caveats, that the danger and deformity might not be seen." ^ In reality, however, the decision of the Assembly was a defeat for the King ; * and James practically admitted this by having recourse to the alternative with which he had threatened his opponents at Holyrood. In October, 1600, in a convention of delegates from the various synods, he nominated three of the Commissioners to the sees of Caithness, Ross, and Aberdeen ; and the new bishops sat and voted in Parliament next month. On August 5 of this year occurred the memorable incident at Gowrie House. Whatever may be the true explanation of that strange affair — whether it was that Gowrie and Ruthven had conspired to kidnap the King and carry him off by boat to Fast Castle, or that James had provoked Ruthven by referring to his intimacy with the Queen, or that Ruthven, as James himself suspected, was really insane — the fate of the two brothers is hardly more certain historically than that Ruthven had sealed the fate of both by violently assaulting the King. But Gowrie, the friend of Beza, a young man "of great expectation and much respected by the professors"* was dear to the High Presbyterian remnant both for his father's sake and his own ; and when the ministers of Edinburgh were required to give thanks for the King's escape, they refused to do so in terms implying Ruthven 's guilt. When they were •" Calderwood, vi. 20. ^ " The whole of the labours and intrigues of the last three years had been thrown away, and James had done nothing more than he might have done immediately upon the passing of the Act of Parliament in 1597." — Gardiner, i. 77. Mr. Gardiner's is practically the only modern account of these transactions, and, needless to say, a most excellent one. 3 Calderwood, vi. 27. A LOYAL DEMONSTRATION 281 referred to James's own letter, Bruce said coolly that they could not read the letter and doubt of its truth ; and a little later, he had the assurance to ask the King whether he had a design to slay Gowrie and his brother.^ Except for some uproar at Perth, of which town Gowrie had been Provost, these suspicions were vehemently repudiated by the nation at large. It was nearly eight o'clock on a dark and rainy evening before James could get clear of the town ; but he had not ridden four miles towards Falkland when he was eagerly welcomed by crowds of his loyal subjects both on horse and foot. At Edinburgh, next day, after Lindsay, the King's favourite minister, had preached to a great multitude from the Cross, " the people with discovered heads praised God"; the bells w^ere rung ; the thunder of the Castle guns was echoed from the ships at Leith ; and the whole town resounded with the rattle of musketry, with blowing of trumpets and beating of drums. When night fell, bonfires blazed on every hill, far and near, on both sides of the Forth ; in Edinburgh every house was illuminated; and the townspeople testified their joy "in sic manner the like was never seen in Scotland, there was sic dancing and merriness all the night."* When James created his three bishops, two months later, he repudiated the system established with his own approval in the last Assembly ; and the extra ordinary enthusiasm of this loyal demonstration may have emboldened him to take so decisive a step. But .such an encouragement was hardly needed. For three years the Commissioners had wielded almost the whole ' Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, ii. 308. 2 Birrel's Dioury ; Calderwood, vi. 46. When James landed at Leith on August 11, he was received with a salvo of cannon and musketry "as if he had been new born." — Calderwood, vii. 50. 282 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 power of the Church ; and to the majority of the Commissioners the decision of the Assembly was hardly less distasteful than to James himself At Dundee in 1598 Rollock had " said plainly that lordship could not be denied to them that were to sit in Parliament and allowance of rent to maintain their dignities " ; ^ and eight of RoUock's colleagues were so much of his opinion that they suffered the episcopal estate to be restored in their own persons. James had won over the Synodal Convention by promising to recall the Act of Annexation ; but this Convention had no authority to act in name of the Church, and the new bishops were not recognised by the Church at all. Yet so powerful had the royal influence now become that two years later we find the Assembly giving up its own scheme of parliamentary representation, and adopting that of the King. The Assembly of 1602 resolved that ministers should be appointed to all the prelacies; and it expressly endorsed the action of the Convention by choosing certain brethren "tobe adjoined" to those previously nominated, out of whom the King might fill up the vacant bishoprics.* Nothing more was wanted to com- 1 Calderwood, v. 697. ^ Calderwood, vi. 179. Mr. Gardiner seems to have overlooked this Act when he speaks of the King appointing new bishops "without the slightest pretence of conforming to the mode of election prescribed by the Assembly." — i. 305. The whole subject is very perplexing ; but it seems to me that when the Assembly approved the action of the King in the Synodal Convention, it distinctly abandoned the mode of election which it had formerly prescribed. In that case, however, the 'caveats' would have fallen to the ground, whereas in this very Assembly of 1602 they were admitted to be still in force. — Calderwood, vi. 176. The truth perhaps was that neither the King nor the Assembly cared to admit that their joint labours had been as fruitless as in fact they were ; and thus they sought to represent as one two schemes of representation which were entirely distinct. This seems to be the design of Spottiswoode, whoj after mentioning all the provisions laid down by the Montrose Assembly SERVICES OF THE MELVILLE PARTY 283 plete the triumph of the State, which had not only defeated and disarmed its rival, but in these protracted negotiations had succeeded at last in dictating its own terms of peace. As the prelates had no functions assigned to them in the government of the Church, the Presbyterian system still remained intact ; but we shall see in the next chapter how the Crown, having prevailed upon the Church to accept bishops, used them to deprive it of its internal freedom. Andrew Melville had thus lived to see his spiritual kingdom overrun and conquered by the State ; but he and his friends had worthily acquitted themselves in a higher sphere than that of ecclesiastical politics. His own services to education were great and enduring. At Kilrenny, in Fife, his nephew built a manse almost entirely at his own expense, bought up the teinds as an endowment for the parish, and paid the salary of the schoolmaster out of his own stipend. Black distin guished himself by his zeal in building churches and providing for the poor ; and Howieson, one of the three ministers who compared the King to Jeroboam, endowed a school at Cambuslang. But none of Melville's col leagues acted so nobly in this respect as John Davidson. At Prestonpans, where he settled after leaving Edin burgh, he served for many years without salary, he built at his own expense a handsome church, a manse, a school, and a house for the master, to furnish a stipend for whom he bequeathed all his movable property, including a large collection of books; and it appears from his will that, when death overtook him, he had as to the election of representatives, says coolly : " And now there rested no more but to nominate persons to the bishoprics that were void." — iii. 82. If no more ' rested,' why did James procure the assent of the Convention, and why did Gladstanes and Blackburn apologise to the local courts for having accepted the bishoprics ? / 284 CHURCH AND STATE, 1586-1603 resolved to sell his whole patrimony, and devote the proceeds to the support of the church and ministry of the parish.^ Whatever may be thought of the principles of the Melville school, these deeds speak for them trumpet- tongued ; and assuredly there was much of value for the future in their teaching as well as in their noble lives. It has happened to Melville, as to others of greater name, that what he himself prized most in his work has proved to be of far the least permanent value. The whole question of Church government was sub ordinate in his eyes to his design of making the Bible as interpreted by the clergy the supreme law of the land. And yet, whilst his spiritual empire fell to pieces in his own day and was restored by his successors only to write its own condemnation in practice, the Presbyterian framework, on which this superstructure was raised, has defied all efforts to uproot it from his age to ours. Melville was as happily illogical as Knox ; and as Knox's protest against authority has proved the most powerful solvent of his own iron-bound creed, so the theocracy of Melville was really incompatible with his idea and Knox's of an unpriestly Church. There could not, permanently at least, be two kingdoms, so long as men involved in the business of the State were per mitted as lay elders to wield authority in the Church. It is to this fearless openness of Presbytery that We must attribute its masculine spirit and its rude but vigorous intellectual life ; and the time has not yet come when we can afford to forget the protest of Melville's party that the Church cannot be an estate in Parliament, since it includes, not the clergy only, but the whole body of the people. ^ M'Crie's lAfe of Andrew Melville, CHAPTER IX. BISHOPS AND PEESBYTERS, 1572-1625. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the temper of the Scottish Church and its relations with the State pointed unmistakably to a change in its system of government ; and in order to appreciate this movement, it will be necessary to glance briefly at the origin and progress of Episcopacy in Scotland. Although in strictness the Reformed Church as organised by Knox was neither Episcopal nor Presby terian, it approximated far more nearly to the latter type than to the former. It is true that the superin tendent discharged many of the 'functions of a bishop, whilst the weekly exercise for " prophesying," or inter preting the Scriptures, gave little promise of the presbytery — a form which it did not begin to assume till 1581, and which is not expressly assigned to it even in the Second Book of Discipline. But there was no reason in the nature of things why the deliberative meeting should not become an ecclesiastical court, whereas the bishop and the superintendent, despite their external resemblance, were as far apart as a priestly and a non-priestly church. The office of the superintendent was meant only to be temporary ; he 286 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 was subject both to the trial ofthe Assembly and to the censure of his own Synod ; he possessed no exclusive power of ordination ; he was ordained by ordinary ministers ; and he himself was not necessarily, or even invariably, a minister at all. ^ It has been mentioned incidentally, however, that Episcopacy of the political, not the canonical, kind was introduced in 1572 ; and the circumstances which gave rise to this change are worthy of more particular attention. In 1561 it had been decided that the Catholic prelates should retain two-thirds of their revenues for life ; and the nobles held so large a stake in the patri mony of the Church that this arrangement witnesses rather to their greed than to their moderation. Ten years after the Reformation, the old ecclesiastics were rapidly dying out ; and it became a question what was to be done with their vast estates. In August, 1591, an Act was passed that all lands held in feu or heritage of priors and superiors of convents should henceforth be held of the Crown* — such Crown lands being always open to become the property of those who could obtain the royal favour ; and it seemed at first as if the bishoprics were to pasi into the hands of the nobles by a much less circuitous method. In 1570 the Earl of Glencairn had been much offended because the Regent Lennox would not give him the archbishopric of Glas gow, the revenues of which he already enjoyed in the shape of an annual pension ; and on the execution of the Primate Hamilton, in April, 1571, Lennox had bestowed his archbishopric on the Earl of Morton. Even in the worst days of the old hierarchy, however, laymen, ' Bishop Maxwell admits that the Superintendents " resembled more Arch-Presbyters than Bishops."— The Burthen oflssachar, p. 34. ''Act Pari. iii. 59. STATE-MADE BISHOPS 287 though they might become abbots and priors, had never become bishops ; and the Parliament of 1571, with an eye to the validity of its own Acts, appointed certain of the clergy to fill up the gap in the spiritual estate. One of these was John Douglas, whom Morton had already presented to the see of St. Andrews, and to some small part of its revenues ; and the other — for there seem to have been only two — was John Porterfield, who voted as Archbishop of Glasgow.^ The Church was naturally indignant with the civil power for thus confiscating a large part of her patrimony and appointing nominees of its own to preside over the rest. The Superintendent of Fife forbade Douglas to vote till he had been admitted by the Church, under pain of excommunication, and Morton commanded him to vote under pain of treason. The Commissioners of the Assembly protested in Parlia ment that benefices should be given only to qualified persons, whose qualifications had been tried by the Church ; and Erskine of Dun, the Superintendent of Angus, in an indignant letter to the Regent Mar, re minded him of the fate of King Jeroboam, who had presumed to make priests in his realm.* Out of this dispute there could be only one issue. Neither party was at all anxious for the erection of bishops — ^the nobles because they wished to appropriate the revenues of the sees, and the clergy because, for the most part, they looked with suspicion on the episcopal office. But it was not the wish of the nobles, especially during the minority of the King, that one of the three Estates should become even partially extinct; and 1 Botfield's Original Letters ofthe Reign of James VI, i. xi. xii. James Paton had been made Bishop of Dunkeld, but seems not to have voted in the Stirling Parliament of 1571. ^ Bannatyne's Memorials, pp. 178, 183, 186, 199. 288 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 much as the bulk of the clergy disliked bishops, they disliked sacrilegious laymen still more. A settlement was arrived at between six members of the Government and six leading churchmen at Leith in January, 1572. The Church agreed to recognise, not only bishops, but abbots and priors — these last being eligible for seats both in Parliament and in the Court of Session ; and the State conceded that all persons presented to such prelacies should be admitted by the Church, and that " all feus, rentals, or tacks," to the prejudice of spiritual livings, should henceforth be null and void.^ The jurisdiction of the new episcopate was no greater and no more mysterious in origin than that of the super intendents ; * and by some at least of the clergy the innovation was cordially approved. Erskine of Dun, as Calderwood sorrowfully admits, " could not well distinguish betwixt a bishop and a superintendent " ; and in his letter to the Regent he even speaks of bishops as " the order which God hath appointed in his Kirk." * 1 Mr. Gardiner is thus mistaken in saying that " the Bishops were to be duly consecrated ... in order that they might have some legal title to hand over the greater part of their revenues to the nobles, to whom they owed their sees." — i. 46. Whatever legal title the bishops may have had to act thus before the Concordat of Leith, they had none thereafter. 2 " It was, as far as human power could make it, an Episcopacy, but it wanted the "life divine" which is communicated through the unbroken chain of the Apostolical Succession. It was like the chiselled marble as compared with the living man ; it bore a striking resemblance, but there was wanting the principle of vitality which fills the form with warmth, and lights up every feature with vivacity." — Bishop Sage's Presbytery Examined (Spottiswoode edition), p. 254, note. If the Spottiswoode Society had refrained from editing its reprints, we should have had a graver, but apparently not a poorer, world. ^ A good account of the Leith Concordat is given in Cook's History of the Church of Scotland. — i. 158-190 ; also iii Cunningham's History, i. 422-431. "TULCHAN bishops" 289 At the time of the Leith Concordat John Knox had less than a year to live ; and his attitude towards the scheme was no doubt that of the Church at large. Though he did not conceal his repugnance to the new polity, he was so far from repudiating it that he was anxious chiefly that the Church should make the most of its bargain ; and with this view he sent certain articles to the Assembly of August, 1572, in one of which he urged his brethren to petition the Regent that all vacant bishoprics should be filled up within a year by qualified persons, according to the terms of the late agreement.^ Knox's consent to Episcopacy was a sacrifice, not of principle indeed, but of inclination ; and it was a sacrifice the more galling that it seemed to have been made in vain. For the State never ful filled its obligations to the Church. Within a few months Lord Methven had obtained a grant of the bishopric of Ross ; Morton, to Knox's great indignation, held Archbishop Douglas to his nefarious compact ; and simony soon became so general and so notorious that the new bishops were popularly known as "tulchan bishops," in allusion to the practice of setting up stuffed calf-skins or tulchans before cows to make them yield their milk more freely. It has justly been observed, however, that this " milking " of the prelacies neither began nor ended with the new hierarchy — the Concordat of Leith being no more respon sible for such abuses than that it failed to prevent them.* The tulchan scandals were so discreditable to the episcopate that it might have been expected to succumb much more easily than it did to the assaults of Andrew Melville. Melville returned to Scotland in July, 1574 ; 1 Bannatyne, p. 261. * Grub, ii. 226. T 290 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 and though by his own account he began at once to make war on the bishops. Episcopacy was not finally condemned by the Assembly till July, 1580. The Church was doubtless reluctant to face a conflict with the statute law and the likelihood of losing what remained of its patrimony; for, soon after Melville's triumph, as might easily have been foreseen, the temporalities of the bishoprics were annexed to the Crown. The Church had now receded from its compact with the State ; and we have seen how the Duke of Lennox brought the two powers into conflict by presenting his pensioner, Robert Montgomery, to the archbishopric of Glasgow. In this, the first of its pitched battles. Epis copacy was singularly unfortunate in its champion. According to Spottiswoode, Montgomery had been so zealous against the bishops that on one occasion he would have had the Assembly censure those who had spoken in their favour ; ^ Scot describes him as " a stolid ass and arrogant ; * and his bargain with Lennox was the worst and the most notorious of all the tulchan scandals. The Assembly sought to evade the real ques tion at issue by accusing Montgomery of errors in doctrine ; but as he denied the charges and few of them were proved, the articles presented against him throw more light on the tenets of the Melville school than on his own. Of the sixteen articles, three were these : that he called " the matters of discipline and lawful calling in the kirk," " trifles of policy " ; that " he condemned the application of Scripture to the particular manners and corruptions of men, mockingly asking in what Scripture they may find a bishop for a thousand pounds, horse- corn and poultry " ; and that " he oppugned the doctrine ^ History,ii. 281. ^ Apolegetical Narration, p. 49. ARCHBISHOP ADAMSON 291 of Christ, who pronounceth that the most part are rebellious and perish." ^ The Montgomery affair proved to be little more than an episode in the Catholic conspiracy of Lennox ; and as such it ended, triumphantly enough for the Church, in the Raid of Ruthven. But the Presbyterians had now to deal with a more formidable opponent. Patrick Adamson was one of the most accomplished clergymen of the day — an eloquent preacher, a poet and a lawyer as well as a divine, and inferior in learning to Andrew Melville alone. In 1576 he succeeded Douglas as Archbishop of St. Andrews ; and when he was required to receive the office at the hands of the Assembly, he pointedly refused. It was he who was chiefly respon sible, after Arran, for the " Black Acts" of 1584 ; and these Acts he defended in an extremely able pamphlet — polished, temperate, vigorous, and terse, which attracted much attention in England, where it was reprinted and embodied in the second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles. To this tract there were two replies — one by Andrew Melville and another in the form of a dialogue by James. Of all the extremists James Melville had the reputation of being the gentlest and most moderate in practice ; but he had none of his uncle's massive force, and his wild and hysterical pamphlets are the best possible commentary on the reaction, which was already setting in against the ultra-Presbyterian party. In his dialogue he rails against Adamson as "a juggler, a HoUiglass, a drunkard, a vile Epicurean " ; and in 1586, when Adam son published an appeal to the King against his excommunication by the Synod of Fife, he replied in language, of which the following may serve as a speci men : "Thy wdcked doings, 0 malicious calumniator, 1 Calderwood, iii. 579-580. 292 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 and lewd life being laid open in thy own face, the filthiness of thy shame discovered, and thy festered galls and sores rubbed and pricked with the piercing and biting oil of the Word of God, thou kicked and flang with all thy force against the leech, and could not wile a better stroke than to allege that the rebuker and shower thee of thy vice had spoken against the King and his law." In the career of Adamson the Episcopacy of the future, both in its strength and in its weakness, is plainly foreshadowed. In a fanatical age he was a man of culture as opposed to undigested learning ; and James Melville urges as the most absurd of all his errors that he advocated liberty of conscience.^ On the other hand, he was wholly dependent on the support of the Crown ; and he it was who initiated that close correspondence between the English and the Scottish Church, which ultimately proved so disastrous to the latter. Adamson died in June, 1591, in great misery and want ; for the King, availing himself of the recent Act of Annexation, had bestowed his liferent on the young Duke of Lennox, and his opponents had ex torted from him a humiliating retractation. James sacrificed Adamson to his new understanding with the Church, the groundwork of which had been laid when the bulk of the clergy, headed by Craig, sub scribed the Acts of 1584; which had been fostered by the Armada in its twofold object of conversion and conquest; and which culminated, just a year after Adamson's death, in the famous statute, which, though it left intact the political status of the bishops, transferred to the presbyteries their episcopal jurisdic tion. But this accord, as we have seen, was of short duration. The anti-Spanish feeling, which the Crown 1 Calderwood, iv. 538. GROWTH OF MODERATISM 293 in its own interest had first fostered and then sought to restrain, soon passed beyond its control ; the Act of Abolition in favour of the Catholic Earls aroused the most vehement discontent ; and thus in 1596 James was opposed once more, and for the last time, by a united Church. Even at this crisis, however, the Moderates showed enough of their spirit to be em ployed as the chief agents of communication with the Court ; according to Spottiswoode, they were strongly in favour of accepting the King's offer to give up the process against Black, if the Church would give up its declinature ; 1 and after the tumult of the 17th December, which probably disgusted them as much as it alarmed the King, they acquiesced at once in the victory of the State. The difference between these men and their col leagues — between the " wiser sort " of Spottiswoode and the " sincerer sort" of Calderwood — was a difference rather of temperament than of principle ; for one might approve in general of Melville's aims, and yet cordially dislike his methods. On the Sunday after the riot Bruce complained bitterly from the pulpit of the faint-heartedness of so many of his brethren, who in their lack of zeal — their fine learning and unsancti- fied graces — were "the wrack of the Kirk."* To the Dundee Assembly of 1598 Patrick Galloway, one of the reclaimed zealots, preached a sermon, "exhorting to a confused peace, without due distinction between peace in God and peace in the devil " ; * and in certain most instructive articles penned, if not composed, ' History, iii. 19. The future Archbishop is said to have been particu larly active in obtaining subscriptions to the declinature ; but this state ment must be read in the light of the admission that " he was the only suspected or known Judas among the ministry at that time." — Scot, p. 72. 2 Calderwood, v. 518, 519. ' Ibid. p. 683. 294 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS," 1572-1625 by Davidson, the Assembly was petitioned to make an Act against a " curious kind of preaching, yea, rather a certain unprofitable and profane Kevocpcovia, without the right cutting of the Word, which of a long time has been unprofitably used by many, and by their example beginneth now to be more excessively used of more to the great hindrance of true edification, wherethrough the people . . . under a shadow of religion are enter tained in atheism without all true knowledge and feeling" — this novel style of preaching being quite opposed to the old, which stood " rather in the evidence of the Spirit," " not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." ^ As Maitland's controversy wdth Knox as to the law fulness of the Queen's Mass was the beginning of the quarrel between Church and State, so indirectly, in the spirit of the combatants, it foreshadowed the two types of character which were to compete for the mastery in the Church's life. We have seen, however, that between Knox and Maitland there was a conflict of aim, aggravated, indeed, by extreme personal antagonism, but necessarily as great as that between the Reforma tion and the Reformed Church. Maitland, in fact, subordinated his religion to his country ; and it was not till the Church had been rudely awakened from its theocratic illusions that a section of the clergy were pre pared, in the interest of religion, to assume the same attitude towards the Knoxians that Maitland, as a secular statesman, had assumed towards Knox. The names of three fathers of the Church are specially associated with the growth of this moderate movement. Knox's colleague, John Craig, died in 1600 at the great age of eighty-eight. Originally a Dominican friar, he 1 Calderwood, v. 704. CRAIG AND ERSKINE 295 had seen much of life in many lands, and, like Adamson, he was a lawyer as well as a divine. In the civil wars at the outset of the reign he had shown little sympathy with either side, comparing the state of the Church to that of the Jews, who were oppressed sometimes by the Assyrians and sometimes by the Egyptians ; ^ and nothing does him greater credit than his opposition to the Act of Assembly against praying for the Queen. The zealots of that day complained that he " swayed over much to the sword-hand " ; * but, though he lived to confute several of his own opinions, his inconsistency seems to have proceeded rather from weariness of strife than from want of courage. In 1564, in controversy with Maitland, he maintained that princes, who fail to keep faith with their subjects, may justly be deposed;* on several occasions he sternly rebuked the King ; and at the crisis of 1584 he defied Arran to his face. Yet in the end he not only took the lead in subscribing the " Black Acts," but declared from the pulpit that kings, even bad kings, are responsible to God alone. ' Erskine of Dun, who had seconded Craig in urging submission to the Acts, died eight years before him, in 1592. Both his father and his grandfather had fallen at piodden, where Craig's father had also fallen ; and he himself had fought gallantly against England, and subsequently against France. A party to the first Protestant ' Band ' or Covenant, he had adopted the new opinions long before the preaching of Wishart ; he was a generous patron of learning ; and it was under his auspices that Greek was first taught in Scotland at Montrose in 1534. Queen Mary referred to him as " a mild and sweet natured man with true honesty and ^ Calderwood, iii. 75-76. " Bannatyne, p. 253. ' Knox, Works, ii. 458. / 296 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 uprightness," and Knox as " a man of meek and gentle spirit." He contributed more than any other Church man to bring about the Concordat of Leith; and though himself merely a lay superintendent, we have seen that he held very exalted ideas of the episcopal office. Erskine did not live long enough, or rather was born too early, to exchange his formal Presbyterianism for diocesan Episcopacy ; and it was reserved for David Lindsay, whose public life coincides with the first half- century of the Reformed Church, to illustrate the transition in his own person. Lindsay's name appears as one of the original ministers at the first Assembly of 1560. ' It was he who carried Knox's dying message of doom to Kirkcaldy of Grange ; ^ and it is characteristic of the man that he "thought the message hard."* \ Associated with Craig and Erskine in negotiating the Concordat of Leith and in submission to the Acts of 1584, he was more of an Episcopalian than Craig and less so than Erskine. He was one of the three prelates nominated in 1600 ; he was consecrated with the other bishops in 1610 ; and he died, over eighty, in 1613. As "the minister whom the Court liked best,"* Lindsay was an object of some suspicion to the zealots ; and several amusing encounters are recorded between him and Davidson. Thus in 1593, at a meeting presided over by Lindsay during the excitement caused by the "Spanish Blanks," Davidson offered to preach next day, preparatory to a public fast, " which Mr. David Lindsay Go, I pray you, and tell him that I have sent you to him yet once, to warn him ; and bid him, in the name of God, leave that evil cause, and give over that castle. If not, he shall be brought down over the walls of it with shame, and hang against the sun. So God hath assured me." Knox's followers took care that this prophecy should not fall to the ground. * Melville's Diary, p. 34. ^ Calderwood, iv. 63. PRESBYTERY DISCREDITED 297 hearing, would not hear, but praised God"; and a few weeks later, just before the Act of Abolition, when Lindsay had hurried over an evasive message from the King, and " would have been at the prayer," Davidson said hotly, " If this Assembly did their duty ... ye should be put in the coal-house, for not urging our articles and returning such shifting and trifling toys to us." ^ Of the eight commissioners who had represented the Church at the Convention of Leith, one other survived the century in the person of Knox's son-in-law, Robert Pont, minister of St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh, and a Lord of Session. Pont had always attached more importance to the prerogative of the Church than to its form of government ; * and though now accounted one of " the chief plotters of Episcopacy," * he was more loyal than Lindsay to the principles of 1572. The King in 1600 ¦offered him the bishopric of Orkney, as he had offered him that of Caithness thirteen years before ; and in neither case, to his honour, would he accept the benefice without the Assembly's consent. To such men as Lindsay and Pont Presbytery may never have been more than a defensible innovation ; and even amongst those who had known no other system, there were many who had waxed cold in its support, chiefly, no doubt, because it had become the standard of revolt against the civil power, but also because it conflicted with their aspirations towards a 1 Calderwood, v. 277, 283. 2 "There is a judgment above yours," said Pont on one occasion to the King, " and that is God's, put in the hand of the ministry ; for we shall judge the angels, sayeth the Apostle." — Calderwood, v. 131. In 1586, •when James had made many good promises to the Assembly, Pont said, " Sir, we praise God that your Majesty, being a Christian prince, has decored our Assembly with your own presence ; we trust your Majesty «peaketh without hypocrisy." — Ibid. iv. 548-549. 3 Scot, p. 115. 298 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 new ideal both of faith and conduct. The "fine counterfoots " denounced by Bruce, who owed more to profane culture than to the Spirit of Grace, could hardly admit that prelacy was to be condemned merely because it was the invention of man ; ^ and they felt in stinctively that peace and freedom were to be enjoyed under a form of government advocated simply as the most expedient rather than under one which claimed to exist by divine right. Episcopacy, moreover, at this period, received a great impetus from the accession of King James to the English Crown ; and before we resume the narrative where we left it at the close of the last chapter, it may be well to review briefly the previous relations of the English and Scottish Churches. From the political point of view the Scottish Re formation could not have culminated more appropriately than in conformity with England. Except during the reign of Mary Tudor, when it was protected for dynastic reasons by the Queen Regent, Protestantism in Scot land had been dependent on English support ; it had flourished and decayed with the party of the English alliance ; and in the struggle with France it had been kept alive by English money, and established ultimately by English arms. It soon appeared, however, that the two movements thus politically conjoined were by no means the same. At the outset of the troubles the Reformers had used the Prayer-Book of Edward VI. ; but the conclusion of the war found the more zealous of them in no very complaisant mood. According to Bishop Leslie, there was no mention of religion in the Treaty of Edinburgh, because Elizabeth's commissioners 1 " That a lordly ministry is a lee (being a mere invention of man, who is a leer) I need not to prove." — Anonymous pamphlet of 1599 ; Calder wood, V. 764. This was always the great argument of the MelvUle party. THE TWO CHURCHES 299 had failed to prevail upon the Scots to accept the EngHsh model ; ^ and Randolph toiled in vain to the same purpose during the sitting of the Reformation Parliament. On the other hand, Maitland asked Cecil to let him know if he objected to anything in the Con fession, that, if possible, it might be qualified or changed ; * and Morton at a later time made it a chief .object of his dealings with the Church to conform it to English ideas. For the origin of the religious strife we must probably go back to the famous quarrel at Frankfort in 1556 between Knox and the future Bishop of Ely, Dr. Cox, as to the use of the English Prayer-Book ; for whilst Knox ruled supreme in the Scottish Church, the Cox party, to the prejudice of Knox's old associates, had their own way in England. We have seen how Knox in 1562 struck the first blow by wantonly attacking the Anglican "cross and candle." Three years later, when the order was issued for the use of the surplice, Moray and Maitland wrote to Leicester, urging him to labour for its recall ; * and in December, 1566, at the desire of the Assembly, Knox penned a letter to the bishops and pastors of England, entreating them not "to trouble the godly for such vanities" — " suirclothes, corner-cap, and tippet . . . the dregs of that Romish beast." * So far, however, the two Churches had much in common ; for the superintendent in Scotland was no bad apology for a bishop, and in England most of the sees were filled by the Marian exiles, whose Protes tantism had a strong Calvinistic bias. "The Scots," writes Bishop Parkhurst to BulHnger in August, 1560, "have made greater progress in true religion in a few months than we have done in many years." Bishop ^History, p. 292. ^ForeignCalendar,1560-1561,'^o.5'iZ. ^Foreign Ca?emda?-,1564-1565,No.l042. ? Calderwbod, ii. 333. 300 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 Jewel, writing to the same correspondent in 1562, speaks of religion as " daily making progress in that country" ;i and so late as 1581 we find Archbishop •Grindal licensing a Presbyterian divine, "called to the ministry by the imposition of hands, according to the .laudable form and rite of the Reformed Church of Scotland."* Knox's English colleagues, Goodman and Willock, both re-entered the English Church,. when their work in Scotland was done ; and Knox himself sent his two sons to be educated at Cam bridge, the younger of whom died Vicar of Clacton- Magna in 1591. It is somewhat remarkable that the divine right of Episcopacy was never asserted in England till Bancroft preached his famous sermon at Paul's Cross in 1589,* ¦eleven years after the Scottish Church had affirmed the divine right of Presbytery in the Second Book of Discipline ; and by that time enough had happened to embitter the antagonism thus sharply defined. The Melville party believed that the "Black Acts" had been hatched in England, from a visit to which country the Primate had returned only a week or two before the Parliament met. In London Adamson was well re ceived by the bishops, to whom he presented certain articles containing an abstract of the Scottish Discipline, with his own strictures thereon ; and his reception con trasts very favourably with that of the Presbyterian refugees next year. The Bishop of London, after some slight experience of their oratory, forbade Balcanquhal and Davidson to preach ; and when the exiles craved the favour of a separate place of worship, the request was refused. In his sermon at Paul's Cross Bancroft 1 Grub, ii. 253. ^ strype's Life of Grindal, b. vi., c. 13. ^ Neal's History ofthe Puritans {%diition 1754), i. 331. THE TWO CHURCHES 301 inveighed against Knox and the Scottish Church,. referring chiefly to Adamson's defence of the anti- Presbyterian Acts and to a work of Lord Burghley'& relative, Robert Brown, the father of the Independents, who had come to Edinburgh in 1584, and had been "committed to ward a night or two"^ till his opinions were tried. Bancroft was greatly blamed in Scotland for having had recourse to such " infamous witnesses" ; 'but the wrath of the clergy was not at all appeased when they discovered next year that he had applied for further information to John Norton, an English stationer in Edinburgh. A reply to the sermon was published by Davidson ; and from this period the Melville party hardly even affected to keep terms with the sister Church. The Assembly of March, 1590, required ministers to remember the persecuted Puritans in their prayers, both public and private ; in the Assembly of the following August James Melville, the retiring Moderator, declaimed against " these Amaziahs, the belly-god bishops in England," who " by all moyen and money were seeking conformity of our Kirk with theirs " ; and one of the causes of a fast appointed by the Synod of Fife in 1593 was " the hot persecution of discipline by the tyranny of Bishops in our neighbour land."* As early as 1587 we hear of Udall, one of the Marprelate pamphleteers, as being present in the Assembly; two years later, he preached before the King in St. Giles'; and it was from Scotland, where as an Anabaptist he resided in no great favour for three years, that his colleague Penry waged much of his paper war against the bishops. In April, 1604, about a year after his accession to the English Crown, James told the House of Commons 1 Calderwood, v. 6. '' Ibid. pp. 88, 100, 265. 302 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 that he hoped to leave at his death "one worship of God, one kingdom entirely governed, one unformity of law " ; ^ but neither of the two expedients he adopted towards this end had any immediate success. The Hampton Court Conference only widened the gulf between the Puritans and the Church. When Gal loway's report of the conference, corrected by James himself, had been read in the Presbytery of Edin burgh, James Melville warned his brethren to " watch and take heed that no peril or contagion come from our neighbour Kirk";* and the Scottish Parliament, in appointing a commission to treat for union, enacted that the commissioners should have no power to do anything to the prejudice of " the religion presently professed in Scotland." * The union project, after it had been put into shape by the commissioners of the two countries, was resisted and ultimately thrown aside by the English Parliament, when it found that James, contrary to its wishes, had obtained a decision at common law that persons born in Scotland after the union of the crowns — the postnati, as they were called — were ipso facto naturalised in England. But this decision realised part, and no unimportant part, of the proposed union. At the date of King James's accession to the English Crown the Church of Scotland was as thoroughly Presbyterian in form as in 1592, the only difference being that certain of the ministers, in addi tion to their pastoral duties, had been admitted to have voice in Parliament. The ruling power resided not in these so-called bishops, who had no episcopal jurisdiction, but in the Commissioners of the Assembly — "the Bischoprie Commissioners," as Forbes calls 1 Gardiner, i. 176. ^ Calderwood, vi. 247. ^ ^^j p^rl. iv. 264. THE CROWN AND THE ASSEMBLY 303 them^ — whose duty it was to advise the King in all things ecclesiastical, to maintain peace and concord between the Crown and the Church, and in particular, to take order with regard to "any enormity" of which the King might complain in the conduct of the clergy. Representative as it was, this Commission never failed to maintain its character as " the King's led horse," for, with the exception of the two Mel villes, Davidson, and Bruce, the moderate party now included all the leading men in the Church ; but, as every Assembly meant the appointment of a new Commission, it greatly concerned the King to main tain his influence in the Assembly, and with that view to fix at pleasure its time and place of meeting. Thus the Assembly, which was to have met at Aber deen in July, 1599, was appointed by royal proclama tion to meet at Montrose in March, 1600 ; in 1601, the Assembly fixed for July at St. Andrews was anticipated by the King at Burntisland in May ; and the Assembly of 1602 was postponed from July to November, and its place of meeting changed from St. Andrews to the King's own chapel at Holyrood. In thus asserting the royal authority at the expense of the Church James violated, or at all events suspended, the Act of 1592, which provided that an Assembly should be held every year, or oftener, at the time and place ap- poioted by the King or his Commissioner in the last Assembly, or in their absence by the Assembly itself; and in the meeting at Holyrood in 1602 he agreed that this Act should be observed in future. Nevertheless, the next i^ssembly, appointed to meet at Aberdeen in July, 1604, was prorogued to July, 1605, before which date it was prorogued again — this time indefinitely; 1 Records, p. 417. 304 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 and it appears from one of his letters that James had resolved to dispense with Assemblies altogether.^ The Melville party, or what remained of it, had now some reason to be alarmed ; for, if the Assembly did not meet on the day fixed, the right to summon such a court would pass wholly from the Church to the Crown. The Presbytery of St. Andrews had sent three ministers to Aberdeen in July, 1604 ; and nineteen ministers, followed by nine others who endorsed the proceedings in which they arrived too late to take part, convened there on July 22, 1605. John Forbes, one ofthe ministers, had an understanding with the Chancellor, Lord Dunfermline, that they would be allowed to meet, if they did no more in their Assembly than merely prorogue it to another day ; and the letter from the Council presented by Straiton of Lauriston, the King's Commissioner, being addressed, " To our Traist Friends, the Brethren of the Ministry convened at their Assembly in Aberdeen," they resolved to constitute themselves an Assembly before they opened it.* The letter, however, proved to be an order to dissolve at once without appointing any new meeting ; and when the ministers insisted on ad journing to the first Tuesday of September, Straiton, who had hitherto made no opposition and had even suggested Forbes as Moderator, protested that he had never acknowledged them to be a lawful Assembly, and charged them to disperse on pain of treason. He and his friends realised too late that the holding of this Assembly might extinguish the Commission appointed by the last ; and the Council 1 Gardiner, i. 303. ^The action of the Council, and especially of the Chancellor, is the more surprising, because in the previous October a proclamation had been issued forbidding the ministers to convene without the King's express warrant. — Balfour's Annals, ii. 2. THE ABERDEEN ASSEMBLY 305 were easily persuaded to accept his story, contrary as it was to their own instructions, that he had prohibited the Assembly by open proclamation on the previous day. For refusing to condemn their proceedings at Aber deen six of the ministers, including Forbes and Knox's son-in-law, John Welsh, were imprisoned in Blackness Castle. Of the whole number, one was released at the request of the Earl of Morton ; four were not summoned at all ; and about a third, through the exertions of David Lindsay, were brought to pronounce the Assembly illegal. The rest, fourteen in number, were cited before the Council on October 24 ; and as they would con sent to plead only after presenting a written protest that they did not recognise the jurisdiction of the court, it was determined in January, 1606, to bring the six Blackness prisoners to trial under the statute of 1584, which had been passed in consequence of Melville's declin ature, but which had not been enforced against Black, with the whole Church behind him, in 1596. That it should be enforced now against a handful of brave men, the last devoted champions of a ruined cause, was felt on all hands to be cruelly and scandalously unjust; and at the close of the proceedings at Linlithgow James was assured by the Crown lawyers that but for his own exertions the prosecution would certainly have failed.^ The Earl of Dunbar, formerly one of the Cubiculars, had been sent down from Court to overawe the judges, to pack the jury, and to fill the town with his friends and retainers. But the prisoners were ably defended by their counsel ; Forbes and Welsh both made eloquent speeches ; and after the jury had been coaxed and worried by Dunbar for more than six hours, nine only out of fifteen, and 1 Botfield's Original Letters, i. 31-33. X7 306 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 these his " private kinsmen and friends " could be brought to convict the accused ; and of the minority, one said boldly in open court that he took them for " honest ministers, faithful servants to Christ, and good subjects."^ All the ministers might easily have purchased their pardon by withdrawing their declinature ; but this they resolutely refused to do. In October, 1606, the Blackness prisoners were banished for life ; and the other eight, whom the Crown dared not bring to trial, were sent to the Hebrides, Caithness, and Ireland.* By such questionable means James got rid of fourteen formidable opponents ; and in August of this year he had disposed of eight more, including the two Melvilles, by calling them up to London to confer with him and their brethren on the state of the Church. Andrew Melville was never to see Scotland again. For an epigram on the Anglican service, written merely for his own amusement, he was summoned before the Council ; and conducting himself there with something more than his usual vehemence, he was committed to the Tower. After an imprisonment of four years he was permitted to retire to France; and he died at Sedan in 1622. His nephew had predeceased him at Berwick in 1614. Meanwhile, in accordance with the Act of the Assembly of 1602, James had filled up all the vacant bishoprics. 1 Scot, p. 155. ^ For the Aberdeen Assembly and its results, see the account given by John Forbes, the Moderator, in his Records touching the Estate of the Church, pp. 383-558, the documents printed in Calderwood, vol. vi., and Botfield's Original Letters. Burton's reference to this Assembly is an extraordinary example of his careless habit of writing. — v. 433. There are at least five errors in as many lines. On page 436 of the same volume he entirely misapplies a letter of the Presbytery of Edinburgh to the King. — Nov. 15, 1608, Botfield's Original Letters, i. 166. The Presbytery does not congratulate the King on his proceedings against the Melville party, as Burton supposes, but on his proceedings against the Papists. bishops' lands RESTORED 307 In July, 1603, Spottiswoode, David Lindsay's son-in-law, was made Archbishop of Glasgow ; soon afterwards Gladstanes was translated from Caithness to St. Andrews; and occupants were found for the sees of Caithness, Orkney, the Isles, Galloway, and Moray. The events of 1605, as well as his experience of the English hierarchy, must have quickened James's desire to establish a more permanent government in the Church than that of Commissioners whose authority lasted only from one Assembly to another ; but in order to restore the jurisdiction of the bishops it was necessary, or at least advisable to restore their estates, and to that there was likely to be considerable opposition. The nobles had already become jealous of the new prelates. It was supposed to have been from this motive that the Chancellor had encouraged Forbes to hold the Assembly at Aberdeen. — a fact which was speedily made known to the King by Archbishop Spottiswoode, and afterwards in self-defence by Forbes himself; and others of the Council, especially Lord Balmerino, President of the Session, were ^ suspected of being unfriendly to the bishops.^ At the opening of the Parliament held at Perth on July 9, 1606, ten bishops rode in pro cession between the earls and the barons ; but on the last day they went on foot, because their old place was denied them between the marquises and the earls ; and the legislation of the Parliament was quite in keeping with this rivalry between the temporal and the spiritual peers. The Act of Annexation, so far as it affected bishoprics, was repealed, and the estate of bishops was restored " as the same was in the reformed kirk" at any time before the Act of 1587.* On the 1 Forbes' Records, p. 426 ; Spottiswoode, iii. 204-205. ^ Act. Pari. iv. 281-284. 308 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 other hand, the nobles were expressly confirmed in all that they had obtained from the Crown under that Act to the prejudice of the Church ; and seventeen prelacies were erected in their favour into temporal lordships.^ The sacrifice may have been inevitable, but it was humiliating both for the Church and for the King. When James gained the assent of the Synodal Con vention to the appointment of the three bishops in 1600, he had promised, not only to recall the Act of Annexation, but, far from making new temporal lordships, to cancel those already made.* Although the bishops possessed no episcopal juris diction, something had already been done to bring them informally into working relations with the Church. In the Holyrood Assembly of 1602 two of them had been appointed Commissioners for Visitation within their respective bounds ; all of them exercised great influence through being employed to modify the stipends of the clergy ; and before the end of the year another cautious step had been taken in the same direction. At Linlithgow in December, 1606, there was a Convention, afterwards styled an Assembly, of s^me thirty lay magnates and 130 ministers nominated by the Crown to take order with Papists and the dissensions in the Church. On the proposal of the King's Com missioner, skilfully seconded by the Earl of Dunbar, it was agreed that every presbytery should have a " Constant Moderator," who should co-operate with the Council in the suppression of Popery, and in reward of ' There were twelve erections and five confirmations of royal grants. Amongst the abbacies and priories "erected" at this time were those of Arbroath, Scone, Holyrood, Dryburgh, and Cambuskenneth, St. Andrews, Jedburgh, and Coldingham.— .4ci. Pa/rl. iv. 321-361. ^ Original Letters, I. xvii.; Nicolson to Sir Robert Cecil, October 19, 1600. CONSTANT MODERATORS 309 his labours, unless he were a bishop, receive a pension from the Crown. The bishops were to preside in the synods as well as in the presbyteries within which they lived ; and the Convention took upon itself to nominate Constant Moderators, episcopal and ministerial, to all the presbyteries in Scotland. The presbyteries without much difficulty were induced to submit ; but in all the synods, except that of Angus, where Erskine's influence long survived him, the superiority of the bishops was strenuously opposed — the more so as it was believed that nothing had been concluded on this head at Linlithgow, and that the Act, in so far as it affected the synods, had been arbitrarily extended by the King.^ Many of the Commissioners of Assembly had now become bishops, and as all the bishops were also Commissioners, much of the authority denied them in the former capacity was permitted to them in the latter. As Commissioners their authority ought to have expired, with the meeting at Linlithgow, if that was an Assembly, as it was now declared to have been ; but since they had not been discharged, they claimed to hold office till the next Assembly, which after several prorogations was finally held at Linlith gow in July, 1608. Whatever means the Commis sioners may have used to influence the elections, such as modifying stipends and exercising the power of visitation granted to them in 1602, 'the Assembly from their point of view was a signal success. The general Commission was renewed in identical terms and to almost the same persons — eleven out of the 1 Calderwood, vi. 615, 622-624 ; Scot, pp. 179-194 ; Row, p. 244. James Melville's True Narration ofthe Declining Age ofthe Kirk of Scotland, which continues his record of ecclesiastical affairs from 1601 to 1610, is appended to the Wodrow edition of his Dia/ry. 310 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 thirty Commissioners being bishops, and these eleven sufficient of themselves to constitute a quorum. When James Melville heard of this, he wrote to a friend "that either God must change the King's heart or the government of the Kirk would be overturned " ; and the King was so much pleased that he told Spottiswoode that, if he had been present himself in the Assembly, he could not have done better. About a year later, in June, 1609, the bishops were restored by Act of Parliament to their ancient jurisdiction in testamentary, matrimonial, and all spiritual causes ; in February, 1610, two courts of High Commission on the English model were established by royal procla mation — one in each archbishopric ; and in an Assembly held at Glasgow in the following June the authority of the Commissioner was finally merged in that of the diocesan bishop. This meeting had no pretensions to be a free General Assembly, for the 138 ministers elected by the various presbyteries had all been nominated by the King through the Archbishop of St. Andrews, or in other words, by the Archbishop himself; and a large number of laymen were present without commission from either presbytery or synod. Sir James Balfour asserts that at the first Linlith gow Assembly of 1606 Dunbar, the Lord Treasurer, spent 40,000 merks in the purchase of votes ; ^ and corruption, under colour of money given for travel ling expenses, is said to have been practised on a large scale at Glasgow, where there were many ministers from the far north " who had never seen the face of a General Assembly." Calderwood has some reason to bewail what he calls " the conclusions of that corrupt crew." All presentations were hence- 1 Annals, ii. 18. EPISCOPACY ESTABLISHED 311 forth to be directed to the bishop of the diocese, who in concurrence with certain local ministers of his own choosing was authorised to ordain, suspend, and ' depose ; no sentence of excommunication or absolution was to be pronounced without his consent ; he was to preside as moderator in the diocesan synod, and every minister at his admission was to swear obedience to the King and his Ordinary. On the other hand, the bishop was to be subject to the censure of the Assembly, by which, with the King's consent, he might be deprived ; and this Act was violated in spirit, if not in letter, when in the October following three of the bishops received episcopal consecration in England, and on their return consecrated the rest.^ In October, 1612, the Acts of the Glasgow Assembly were ratified by Parliament in a manner extremely favourable to the bishops, and the Act of 1592 was repealed. On the face of it, this was a much less spontaneous revolution than that which had resulted in the triumph of Presbytery under Andrew Melville ; for the welcome accorded to the new system amongst the King's " own northern men," as Gladstanes called them, especially in Angus, was far outweighed by its un popularity in the more advanced and more populous districts south of the Tay. Yet both revolutions would seem to have been the work of a minority utilising, and ultimately outstripping, the tendencies of the time. Andrew Melville was recognised as Knox's 1 Calderwood, vii. 94-107. Before the ceremony in the chapel of London House, Dr. Andrews, Bishop of Ely, urged that the Scottish prelates must first be ordained presbyters, as they had never received episcopal ordina tion ; and though this objection was overruled by Archbishop Bancroft, it is admitted by most modern Episcopalians to have been perfectly valid, and was acted upon at the second consecration in 1661. 312 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 successor by a Church which had been committed by Knox to a struggle for supremacy with the State ; but it is doubtful whether the Second Book of Dis cipline did not as far exceed the Church's eagerness for war as the Episcopacy of 1610 exceeded what it was willing to sacrifice for peace. After the defeat of 1584, the great majority of the ministers submitted to the civil power; and from that date, as he himself recognised, many who co-operated formally with Melville were very far removed from him in spirit. It was these " profane ministers " who presided over the anti-Presbyterian reaction, some as Commis sioners of Assembly, and some as bishops ; and associated with them were several who had really been zealous for theocracy in former days. Nicolson, reputed "the chief contriver of the plots for the advancing of the Episcopal course,"^ and who died Bishop-designate of Dunkeld, had been James Melville's bosom friend ; Hall, who declared that the point at issue between the King and the Aberdeen Assembly was " not worth two straws," * had refused to subscribe the " Black Acts " ; Buchanan had protested against the action of the Assembly in annulling Archbishop Adamson's excommunication ; Galloway had exhorted the King to return thanks for the Raid of Ruthven ; Cranston, " now key-cold," * had read the story of Haman and Mordecai to the " choice professors " on the memorable 17th December ; and of the forty- two ministers who protested against the Act of 1606 in favour of the hierarchy three afterwards became bishops. Even amongst those who remained loyal to Presbyterianism there was a growing desire for peace. Balcanquhal urged the Presbytery of Edinburgh to 1 Scot, p. 177. '' Forbes' Records, p. 443. ^ Calderwood, v. 512. BISHOPS OVERRULED BY THE KING 313 accept the Constant Moderator, in whose favour he resigned ; ^ Patrick Simpson, the most prominent of the party and by far its finest spirit, reminded his brethren " that the marches of God's commandments were broken by some through words of fleshly con tention, rather rankling the wound nor healing the sore of our diseased Church " * and we have a good example of religion reverting under pressure to a milder and a purer type in the case of one Mac- birnie, who, being called to account for preaching against bishops and constant moderators, " promised to meddle no more with these controverted points in pulpit before the people, but only to preach Christ Jesus till he saw his time," whereat, we are told, "good brethren were offended."* The bishops were well aware that the bulk of the clergy, in their desire for peace, would consent only to such a fusion of Episcopacy and Presbytery as should restrain the excesses of the latter ;* and to this com promise, in the main, they faithfully adhered. But James himself was the soul and centre of the hierarchy ; and James acted in such a manner as to overrule the discretion of the bishops, and finally to discredit them as the mere instruments of his arbitrary power. It is said that, when the proceedings of the first Linlithgow Assembly were reported at Court, the King " sharply rebuked" the bishops for not asserting their right to moderate the synods, and insisted on the Act being 1 Calderwood, vi. 628. '' Ibid. vii. 24. ^ Ibid. vi. 682. * " The great multitude of the Ministry are desirous that Presbyteries shall stand, but directed and governed by the Bishops, and so would refer great matters to be done only by the consent and authority of the Bishops."— Gladstanes to King James, April 18, 1610; Botfield's Original Letters, i. 245. 314 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 extended before it was published. ^ Spottiswoode says that in 1610 the King was " daily urging the bishops to take upon them the administration of all Church affiairs," which they were unwilling to do without the approbation of the Assembly ;* and the Anglican consecration, for which the King was entirely responsible, is said to have been resented by some of the bishops, and was very little valued by all. It was indeed becoming only too apparent that King James was as little careful as Andrew Melville to distin guish in practice between the two jurisdictions, and that he was likely to intrude as far into the domain of the Church as Melville had intruded into that of the State. The Parliament of 1606 had acknowledged the King "to be sovereign monarch, absolute prince, judge and governor over all persons, estates, and causes, both spiri tual and temporal"; the two courts of High Commission, afterwards fused into one, had been established solely by the royal authority ; in 1614, professedly as a means of detecting Papists, all persons were required to commu nicate at their own parish kirks on April 24, that being Easter Day ; and next year a proclamation was published at the Cross that the communion should be celebrated on Easter Day in all time coming.* The Parliament of 1617, at which the King presided in person, restored the cathedral chapters, and obliged them to elect as bishop whatever person, being an actual minister, should be nominated by the Crown. At the same Parliament the Lords of the Articles agreed upon an Act " That whatsoever his majesty should determine in the external government of the Church with the advice of the archbishops, bishops, and a competent 1 Calderwood, vi. 629-630. ^ Spottiswoode, iii. 205. 5 Botfield's Original Letters, i. 449-450. THE FIVE ARTICLES 315 number of the ministry,^ should have the strength of a law"; and when he found that over fifty ministers, including such special friends of his own as Galloway and Hall, were prepared to protest against it, James withdrew the Act "as a thing no way necessary, the prerogative of his crown bearing him to more than was declared by it."* What was meant by the Act thus contemptuously withdrawn soon became apparent. In the previous year James had intimated his pleasure that certain practices hitherto unknown in the Reformed Church of Scotland should be revived — kneeling at communion, private com munion and private baptism, episcopal confirmation, and the observance of Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Trinity Sunday. Spottiswoode, who in 1615 had succeeded Gladstanes as Archbishop of St. Andrews, represented to the King that these five articles could not be inserted amongst the Canons till they had received the approbation of the Church; and towards the end of his sojourn in Scotland from May 13 to August 3, 1617, James consented that an Assembly for this purpose should be held at St. Andrews in the following November. The St. Andrews Assembly post poned consideration of three of the articles, and came as near as it safely could to the rejection of the other two, consenting merely that communion ' ' in presence of six elders and other famous witnesses," might be adminis tered to any sick person who had been bed-ridden for a year and who should declare on oath that he or she did not expect to recover, and also that a short table should be set in every church, at which the minister should deliver the bread and wine out of his own hands to the ' These words were inserted at the request of the bishops. 2 Spottiswoode, iii. 241-245 ; Calderwood, vii. 260-256. 316 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 people.^ James replied to these proceedings by com manding the two archbishops, as they would avoid his high displeasure, to " keep Christmas Day precisely," as well as to withhold the stipends of all ministers who should fail to advocate the Five Articles; and in his own hand he added this postscript : — " Since your Scottish Church hath so far contemned my clemency, they shall now find what it is to draw the anger of a King upon them." Soon afterwards, in a letter to Spottiswoode, he commented sarcastically on the conduct of the Assembly in insisting that the sick communicant should be "sworn to die," and in providing a table for "the minister's ease and commodious sitting on his tail," in virtue of which and other defects he required the two Acts to be entirely suppressed. * In January, 1618, all persons were com manded by proclamation to abstain from work on the five Holy Days that they might the better attend the services which His Majesty, with the advice of the Church, would appoint to be held on these days ; and at the request of the bishops James consented to convene another Assembly at Perth, on August 25. At the opening of this Assembly Archbishop Spottis woode preached a remarkable sermon. He protested "in the presence of Almighty God" that the Five Articles had been sent to him without his knowledge, against his desire, and when he least expected them, not to be proposed to the Church, but to be inserted by the King's sole authority amongst the Canons ; had it been in his power, he would most willingly have declined them, not because he thought them either unlawful or inconvenient, but because he " foresaw the contradiction which would be made and the business we should fall iScot, p. 252 ; Calderwood, vii. 286. 2 Botfield's Original Letters, ii. 524, 525 ; Spottiswoode, p. 249-250. THE ARTICLES ACCEPTED 317 into" ; the Articles were the King's " own motions," and not being unscriptural, they ought to be accepted as such ; for James was not only their King, to whom dis obedience in things indifferent was a sin, but so eminent a theologian that he knew " what is fit for a Church to have, and what not, better than we do all." ^ In a letter presented by the Dean of Winchester James gave the Assembly clearly to understand that, if they refused to accept the innovations, he would enforce them on his own authority. After three days' discussion, mostly in committee, the Articles were accepted by a majority, only two out of thirty laymen voting against them, and on fewer than thirty-nine out of eighty-five ministers.* Three years later, in the Parliament of 1621, the Articles were ratified by 78 votes to 50, half the shire members and more than half of the burgesses voting in the minority. There are few episodes in the history of the Scottish Church more exasperating than this. For the sake of these wretched Articles, the establishment of which he was said to desire more than all the gold of India,* James imperilled the results of more than twenty years' labour in ecclesiastical reform. The Articles were all of the " Anglopiscopapistical " kind, well calculated to make Puritans believe that " the sound of the feet of Popery is at the doors " ; they amounted to a gross violation by the State of the spiritual province ; and they were entirely opposed to the tendency of the Scottish Refor mation, which from a moribund Church had inherited none of the Catholic spirit. The bishops yielded most reluctantly to the caprice of their royal master Private 1 Lindsay's True Narrative ofthe Perth Assembly, pp. 39-40. ^Ibid. p. 72; Gardiner, iii. 237. 3 Calderwood, vii. 311 ; Spottiswoode's speech to Assembly. 318 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 communion and private baptism, as mere privileges, they were not called upon to enforce ; but they never practised confirmation ; ^ and of the ministers sum moned before the High Commission for neglect of the other two Articles many were dismissed with an admonition, whilst Bishop Bellenden of Dunkeld was content to " oversee " a minister, who had threatened him personally from the pulpit with endless shame and eternal torment. * James was so far from appreciating the forbearance of the bishops that in November, 1619, he writes to them thus : — " I do command you, as you will be answerable to me, that ye depose all these that refuse to conform without respect of persons, no ways regarding the multitude of the rebellious ; for, if there be not a sufficient number remaining to fill their places, I will send you ministers out of England."* After the Perth Articles had been confirmed by Parliament, he reminded the bishops that the sword was now put into their hands, " and let it rust no longer till ye have per fected the service trusted to you, or otherwise we must use it both against you and them."* It is easy to understand why the first Article and the last should have been so bitterly opposed ; for kneeling at communion was regarded not unreasonably as suggesting the Adoration of the Host, and the com memoration of the Christian Year had been condemned by the Church as unscriptural and superstitious ever since the Reformation. On Christmas Day, 1618, the Great Church of Edinburgh was not half filled, whilst " the dogs were playing in the midst of the flour of the Little Kirk for rarity of people"; and every year, as this festival came round, scores of citizens kept their > Grub, ii. 325, 361. 2 Row, p. 349-350. =* Calderwood, vii. 397. '^Ibid. 508. KNEELING AT COMMUNION 319 booths open, and by way of protest walked ostentatiously before them in time of sermon. At the Easter of 1619, the first after the Perth Assembly, it was in vain that the ministers promised to allow their parishioners to sit, stand, or kneel, and that one, more desperate than the rest, offered communion " to persons behaving themselves five sundry ways." The townspeople streamed out "in hundreds and thousands" to St. Cuthbert's, the Abbey Church, and a church at Leith, where communion was dispensed in the old style ; and when the ministers of these churches had been suspended, many, in order to avoid kneeling, went as far as Dunfermline. In some cases the minister found himself suddenly deserted by his entire flock ; in others there was unseemly wrangling between the minister and the people ; and even those who, like the clergy of Edinburgh, waived the obligation of kneeling, were often foiled in their efforts to distribute the elements out of their hands. The communicant on receiving a wafer would insist on sharing it with his neighbours ; and on one occasion the minister is said to have snatched away the bread thus circulating just as a woman was lifting it to her mouth. The scandal of such scenes soon became altogether intolerable. Arch bishop Spottiswoode, who could scarcely conceal his contempt for the whole paltry business, not only ceased to urge the obnoxious Article, but rebuked some of his clergy for pressing it. At his visitation of King- horn in 1622 he replaced the non-kneeling elders who had been expelled from the session; and in 1624 the ministers of Edinburgh bitterly reproached him for encouraging the insubordination of their flock. James, however, still continued to fulminate insane decrees, which his lieutenants, civil and ecclesiastical, had neither the power nor the inclination to enforce. In June, 320 BISHOPS AND PRESBYTERS, 1572-1625 1624, he sharply rebuked the Privy Council for forbearing to punish certain nonconformists ; soon afterwards he warned the magistrates of Edinburgh that, if they were not more careful in future both to obey and to enforce the Five Articles, he should remove the courts of justice from the town ; and one of his last public acts in Scotland was, on the strength of this threat, to proclaim a general Christmas communion, which was prevented only by the breaking out of the plague — not a bad visitation, Calderwood remarks, but just enough to scatter the people ; for " the Lord would have His hand in the business to let the world see that He can overrule Kings." ^ 1 Calderwood, vii. 341, 359, 360, 563, 600, 615, 621, 622, 629; Row, p. 321. CHAPTER X. THE EElGN OF THE MODERATES. The chief characteristic of the Moderates — the Episco- paux pacifiques, as Arnauld so happily calls them— was their love of peace; and the ecclesiastical settle ment was evidently the work of men anxious, so far as possible, to reconcile the old system and the new. Had the bishops been left to themselves, they would probably have been content to preside as Commis sioners of Assembly over a Presbyterian Church ; and even after all the pressure brought to bear upon them by the Crown, the old framework of kirk- sessions, presbyteries, and synods still remained intact.^ The ordinary life of the Church was very little affected by the change in its external form. Public worship ' Hume of Godscroft rather finely compares these " shadows and shows of our discipline" to the survival of the old Roman constitution under the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. — Letter to Bishop Law, Calderwood, vii. 68. This was just before the Glasgow Assembly of June, 1610 ; but even after that date Presbytery was far more of a reality than the Comitia in Rome after the battle of Pharsalia. On the other hand. Clarendon greatly underrates the power of the bishops in Scotland, when he says that " there was little more than the name of Episcopacy preserved in that church." — History, edition 1849, i. 123. It may be added that Hume's parallel is more specious than true, for the Comitia had been strangled by the Senate long before Caesar established his supremacy over both. X 322 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES was modified only by the first Article of Perth; and the attempt to enforce that Article had almost entirely failed. Calderwood asserts that not one person in forty received the communion kneeling, and Scot that the practice was unknown in two-thirds of the con gregations of Scotland.^ Summary excommunication had, indeed, been abolished as early as 1597, and after 1610 no person could be excommunicated without the consent of the bishop of the diocese ; but the kirk-sessions continued to be as active and as merci less as ever, and the Church, as a whole, sought to compound for its acceptance of prelacy by a rigorous prosecution of Papists. To the virtues of the Apostoli cal Succession — communicated, it is true, uncanonically and by a somewhat suspicious channel — ^the Scottish episcopate awoke only in its decline, and in all but a few cases never discovered them at all. It was not till July, 1631, that the jus divinum of Episcopacy was asserted from the pulpit ; and Maxwell, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, who preached on that occasion, got so little thanks from the bishops that they warmly repudiated his doctrine, and told him it could not be proved.* Row tells us that at the ordination of his nephew, William Row, the Bishop of Dunblane professed that he came there, not as a bishop, but as a member of the Presbytery, and that he would ask nothing that was not contained in the Psalm-Book;* and Bishop Andrew Knox, after his translation in 1611 from the see of the Isles to that of Raphoe in Ireland, is said to have behaved in a still more irregular manner. He not only allowed Livingstone, one of the Scottish nonconformists, to 1 Calderwood, vii. 611 ; Scot, p. 310. 2 Row, p. 354. 3 jiig[_ p_ 326. ARCHBISHOP SPOTTISWOODE 323 be ordained in his presence by presbyters, but gave him the Ordinal beforehand that he might mark any passages which he did not desire to be read. The book, however, proved to have been so thoroughly expurgated by former candidates of his own school that Livingstone found nothing to suppress.^ As an experiment in compromise, the new order was mainly the work of Spottiswoode, who presided over it with more or less of authority from its beginning to its close. At the end of 1604 he was admitted Archbishop of Glasgow, to which office he had been nominated in July ofthe previous year; in May, 1615, he succeeded Gladstanes as Archbishop of St. Andrews ; he was deposed with the other prelates in November, 1638 ; and he died in London in November, 1639. Horace Walpole once said that "the first quality of a prime minister in a free country is to have more common sense than any man " ; and if the Church of Scotland had been really free, she could hardly, in that explosive age, have had a better Primate. Spottiswoode was an able administrator of the true aristocratic type, cool and self-contained, unimaginative, little open to ideas, drawing largely on his privilege as a Moderate to be at ease in Sion, and penetrated with a well-bred conviction that enthusiasts of all kinds do more harm than good. His subservience to the King, from which the Church suffered so much, was due in part to the extreme weakness of his position, but also to his indifference to many things which his countrymen regarded as of supreme importance. When he was in France as chaplain to the Duke of Lennox in 1601, he did not scruple to be present as a spectator at Mass, and to approach so near that he had to kneel at the 1 " Life of Livingstone "—Select Biographies (Wodrow Society), i. 141. 324 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES elevation of the Host.^ In the days of the Melville ascendency he had been nearly suspended for profanation of the Sabbath ; * and after he became a bishop and one of the King's chief advisers, he was wont to economise time by travelling on Sundays.* In 1595, during some sharp fighting on the streets of Edinburgh, he showed conspicuous courage ; * his temper, though generous and easily appeased, was somewhat hasty ; and he had neither leisure nor patience to study the prejudices of men who were continually on the watch to see whether he ordered his coach or his barge in time of sermon, whether he played cards on Sunday afternoons, and whether he had morning and evening prayers. To such a man, as to others of a far more earnest spirit, the Five Articles were "matters of moonshine" — trivial novelties, he told the Perth Assembly, which would soon be quite familiar, according to the proverb, " A wonder lasts but nine nights in a town." * The nonconformists were "fools to leave their places for such trifles"; and doubtless in his private judgment the King, to insist on them, was little better. At the examination of one Scrimgeour, minister of Kinghorn, before the High Commission, he admitted that the Church was well before the Articles w^ere introduced, and would still be well, if they were withdrawn ; but when Scrimgeour interpreted this as an argument in his favour, he said cynically, " I tell you, Mr. John, the King is Pope now, and so shall be." ^ It did not occur to Spottiswoode that it could not be of no consequence whether people ^Calderwood, vi. 136. ^ ggQ^^ p 239 ' Spottiswoode is said to have made no less than fifty journeys to London. — Keith's Catalogue, p. 263. * Calderwood, v. 361. * Lindsay's Perth Assembly, p. 22. ° Calderwood, vii. 421. spottiswoode's HISTORY 325 knelt or sat at communion, so long as James in such matters asserted the authority of the Pope; for he had neither the prejudice nor the imaginative insight which would have shown him that even in trifles a great principle may often be at stake. Yet the alternative to obedience was indeed a serious one ; and we shall find that a bishop of even higher name was not disposed to resist the King at the cost of reviving the lamentable dissensions between Church and State. Spottiswoode's History of the Cliurch of Scotland, undertaken at the request of King James, was not published till 1651, twelve years after the Primate's death. It is by no means so unfair a work as M'Crie would have us believe ; for, though he does occasionally misrepresent facts, as in his account of the Assembly of 1610 where he gives the Acts in favour of the bishops, not as passed by the Assembly, but as ratified by Parliament in 1612, Spottiswoode has at least the desire to appear impartial, and he is far more alive to the relative value of testimony than such mere fanatics as Bannatyne, Calderwood, and Row. The book, however, is chiefly remarkable for its severe restraint of phrase and feeling, for its enlightened moderation and its essentially modern spirit, in which respects, despite its occasional cynicism, it is a worthy memorial both of the Primate and of his party in the Church. Spottis woode's estimate of Knox would probably have been much less favourable, if he had believed him to be the author of the History whose " scurrile discourses " he describes as " more fitting a comedian on a stage than a divine or minister " ; ^ and he is more sincere than charitable in his caustic references to Andrew Melville and Davidson, the latter of whom he once called " the 1 Spottiswoode, ii. 184. 326 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES maddest man that ever he knew."^ It may have been as false as it was ungenerous to say of Melville's last days at Sedan that he "lived in no great respect"; but his end was sufficiently unhappy to justify Spottis woode in rebuking those who had exulted with most unholy joy over the disgrace of Adamson. If, he says, one were to interpret Melville's fate as a judgment on his career, "it might be as probably spoken, and with some more likelihood, than that which they blasted forth against the dead bishop. But away with such rash and bold conceits ; the love of God either to causes or persons is not to be measured by these external and outward accidents."* The business of the Perth Articles had shown that ritualism from motives of prudence was hardly less distasteful to the bishops than on religious grounds to the Church at large ; and when Charles I. , after some hesitation, resolved to adhere to his father's policy, he took care to make bishops only of men who were in harmony with his design. According to Bishop Guthrie, it had been usual for the Crown during the reign of James to fill up each vacant bishop ric out of three or four names submitted, after con sultation with his brethren, by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. But Charles dispensed his patronage at Court ; and the character as well as the origin of the new appointments was calculated to create a sort of schism between the young prelates and the old.* Dr. Lesley, rector of St. Faith's within Laud's own diocese of London ; William Forbes, " anti -presbyterian to the 1 Calderwood, vii. 502. ^ Spottiswoode, iii. 183. ' Memoirs, pp. 13-15. Guthrie's statements are criticised as improbable, or at all events exaggerated, by Mr. Grub, ii. 380 ; but though it cannot be said that James's bishops and Charles's took opposite sides, we shall find that the former, as a body, were far more moderate than the latter. BISHOP WILLIAM FORBES 327 outmost," 1 who had drafted the first and most obnoxious of the Five Articles ; Maxwell, who had first asserted the divine right of Episcopacy ; Sydserf, " a bitter enemy to sincere professors" ;* Wedderburn, the special confidant of Laud and a prebendary in the cathedral of Wells ; Whitford, another divine of the same stamp — these were all made bishops, and the last four, the leaders of the " Canterburian faction," conducted them selves with a violence and lack of temper, of which Sydserff, who survived the Restoration, is said to have " made great acknowledgments in his old age." * To call these men moderate would obviously be an abuse of terms ; but it is necessary to say something of them here, partly because they belong historically to the moderate party, and as we shall see in the next chapter, were the chief instruments of its fall, but also because in one respect they were really more moderate and liberal than the Moderates themselves. Maxwell was the most vigorous of the High Church prelates, but the noblest, most learned, and most amiable, beyond all comparison, was William Forbes, the first Bishop of Edinburgh, who died in 1634, only three months after his admission to the see. Forbes had been one of the ministers of Edinburgh from 1621 to 1626, but was so little appreciated there that he was glad to return to his native town of Aberdeen. He was a man of the most fervent piety, of ascetical habits and extraordinary vehemence in preaching. Burnet w^as often told by his father " that he never saw him but he thought his heart was in heaven " ; * and Spalding de scribes him as " a matchless man of learning, languages, > Gordon's Scots Affairs, iii. 239. ^ Row, p. 375. ' Burnet's History of His Own Time, i. 45. * Preface to Life of Bishop Bedell. 328 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES utterance and delivery, ane peerless preacher, of ane grave and godly conversation." ^ With the best inten tions, however, Forbes probably did more to excite opposition to the hierarchy than any other prelate. The ideal of his life was to reconcile the Roman and the Reformed communions ; and to this end he made con cessions, which even the most moderate of his own party regarded as far too great. It was sufficiently startling to an Edinburgh audience in these days to be told from the pulpit that Christ died for all, that the Pope is not Antichrist, that a Papist, living and dying as such, may be saved, that Christ is really present in the sacrament, though in what manner cannot be known ; * but the Presbyterians believed their worst fears to be realised when a copy of Forbes's Considera- tiones Modestae came into their hands in 1640. In this treatise he maintains that transubstantiation is no heresy, but merely a trivial error ; that the Church of Rome is not to be condemned for denying the cup to the laity ; that prayers for the dead are most profitable ; and that there may well be an expiatory, though not a punitive purgatory.* The Catholic sympathies of Forbes received little support even in the University of Aberdeen, which was the stronghold of Episcopacy, and which in 1637 formally approved the labours of John Durie, son of one of the ministers banished on account of the Assembly of 1605, to promote a reconciliation between the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches. But, though Forbes in this respect stood somewhat alone, the whole ritualistic party was at one with him in his dislike of dogmatism, 1 Memorials of the Troubles, i. 45. 2Eow, p 372. 2 Baillie's Supplement of the Canterburian Self-Conviction. LIBERALITY OF CREED 329 and in his desire to liberate the Church from its thraldom to the schools. In a sermon, which he preached before Charles at Edinburgh in 1633, "he condemned the eagerness with which positive opinions were laid down regarding Predestination, and Divine Grace, and the manner in which the Body of Christ was present in the Eucharist " ; ^ and Baillie in his indictment of the Considerationes Modestae says that "his ordinary course " is always to make light of the chief points of controversy between the old faith and the new, holding " that all who make so much noise about these things, whether Papists or Protestants, are but rigid, passionate, uncharitable and weak-witted men." Unhappily, how ever, for those who took their inspiration from Laud, they only increased their unpopularity by this assertion of intellectual freedom ; for the Puritans in both kingdoms were, above all things, dogmatic ; and they were hardly more unwilling to comply with Laud's rigour in point of ritual than to avail themselves of the latitude which he permitted, and even inculcated, in matters of faith. Moreover, Laud's laxity of doctrine did not preclude him from favouring those whose opinions harmonised best with his view of the import ance of religious rites ; he openly adhered to the system of Arminius, with its corollary of salvation by works, in opposition to Calvin's theory of justification by faith ; and thus in the eyes of Puritans Laud's theology was no better than his ritual, except that they were free to disbelieve the former so long as they practised the latter. The Calvinistic doctrine of election and reprobation in its most revolting form had been re-affirmed by the Scottish Church in the Confession of Faith drawn up 1 Grub, ii. 348. 330 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES SO recently as 1616; but all the ritualistic prelates, especially Wedderburn, were avowed Arminians; and in 1630 Maxwell, afterwards Bishop of Ross, preached a sermon at Edinburgh, in which we see the new theology at its best. He declared that Christ descended to hell to rescue the souls of the virtuous and renowned pagans; and " for my own part," he said, " I so love these wights for their virtues' sake that I had rather admit twenty opinions, such as limbus patrum, than damn eternally the soul of one Cicero or one Socrates." ^ But perhaps the best example of " a professed Arminian and Popish champion" is Baillie's cousin, John Crighton, who was the first minister deposed as such by the Assembly of 1638. Crighton had dissented from a petition of the Presbytery of Paisley against the Service Book ; the Presbytery, on the complaint of some of his parishioners, proceeded against him for erroneous doctrine ; and the opinions attributed to him, most of which were proved to have been uttered out of the pulpit, are of considerable interest. As to his alleged popery, he was said to have advocated confession and prayers for the dead ; to have described the English Liturgy as " so excellent and perfect that neither man nor angel could make a better " ; to have taught that both Papists and Protestants went to heaven, though they entered by different gates, and that to sit at com- 1 Stevenson's History of Church and State, edition 1840, p. 124. Principal Lee (Lectures on Scottish Church History, ii. 234) is as much scandalised by such indecent liberality as was Luther, when he read those noble words of Zwingli, written just before his death, in which " he described that future ' assembly of all the saintly, the heroic, the faithful and the virtuous,' when Abel and Enoch, Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, will mingle with ' Socrates, Aristides, and Antigonus, with Numa and Camillus, Hercules and Theseus, the Scipios and the Catos,' and when every upright and holy man who has ever lived will be present with his God." — Lecky's Rationalism, i. 420. A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN 331 munion was "to sit with God cheek by joule." His Arminianism — or rather the liberal theology denounced as such^ — was quite as apparent, and was still more forcibly expressed. He taught "that Christ died alike for all — for Judas and Peter " ; that it was possible for us to fulfil the law ; * that, in spite of Christ's predic tion, " Peter might have contained his tongue within his teeth and not denied Christ " ; and " that the difference between Papists and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Arminians and Gonnarians, Conformists and Nonconformists, is but a mouthful of moonshine, and if churchmen were peaceably set, they might be easily reconciled." Predestination he denounced with noble vehemence as "a doctrine rashly devised, hatched in hell, and worthy to be delete out of God's Word." " ' Whoever mentions,' said he, ' election or reprobation before the foundation of the world, mentions a damnable doctrine. ' " * We cannot, however, regard such men as Crighton and William Forbes, liberal and enlightened and charitable as they were, as true representatives of the Church which had emerged, weaker but infinitely wiser, from its long conflict with the State. The disciple of Laud and the disciple of Melville agreed in this, that each regarded his •¦ " Arminianism was ... a great deal more than a mere system of doctrines. It raised, wherever it spread, a new spirit of religious inquiry. It opened up large questions as to the interpretation of Scripture, and the position and value of dogma altogether, and in short, diffused a latitudinarian atmosphere." — TuUoch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Centiiry, i. 73. 2 The extreme Calvinists held not only that the natural man could not fulfil the law, but that it was impious in him to try. " There is never a good action that we do, suppose it glance never so well before the world, if it be not done in faith, but it is abomination before God and will help forward to our damnation." — Bruce's Sermons, Woodrow edition, p. 121. 'Cameron Lees's Abbey of Paisley, pp. 289-293. 332 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES ecclesiastical system as of so high an origin that any departure from it was not inexpedient merely, but sinful. Crighton is said to have inculcated confession on the ground that he had as much power as the apostles to forgive sins ; and sacerdotalism was to be as fatal to the Laudians in the immediate future, as theocracy in the long run to the school of Knox and Melville. Not by such as these was the destiny of the Church to be fulfilled. Between the Episcopalians and the Presby terians — the one subordinating the doctrine of the Church to its external order, the other permitting no relaxation either of polity or of doctrine — stood the men who might have been either Episcopal or Presbyterian, because they believed that Christianity had no vital connexion with its outward forms. In these men was embodied the fundamental tendency of the Church of Scotland, the central mass from which the advocates of divine right, whether Episcopal or Presbyterian, have since seceded ; and their ruling principle was happdy expressed, many years later, by Archbishop Leighton — himself the noblest of all witnesses to its truth : "The mode of church government is immaterial, but peace and concord, kindness and goodwill are indispensable." Of this moderate party, Spottiswoode was long the patron, and always, perhaps the reputed head ; ^ but he was rather an able administrator than a leader of thought, and in his later years he suffered himself to iln his Life of Blair under date 1635, comparing the episcopal govern ment of Charles I.'s reign with that of the Restoration, Row says that "the bishops (especially Spottiswood) were more moderate, and dealt with the King for moderation, and did strive to keep off innovations, such as surplice, liturgy, etc., and did depose very few of the nonconformists ; for in the province of Fife there were only two deposed ; and then they never challenged deposed ministers for public preaching and assisting at the celebration of the communion." — p. 137. BISHOP COWPER 333 be practically superseded by the Laudian prelates. A man of finer, but of much less robust mould was William Cowper, brother of that John Cowper who in 1587 created a disturbance in St. Giles's by trying to keep Adamson out of the pulpit. Cowper, who in 1612 became Bishop of Galloway, was one of the so called "apostate ministers." At the Parliament of 1606 he had subscribed the protestation against the re-establishment of the spiritual estate ; and soon afterwards — as appears from his letter preserved by both Scot and Calderwood — he severely rebuked Bellenden, another of the sub scribers, for accepting the bishopric of Dunblane. The lapsing of so distinguished a divine, one of the most eloquent preachers at that time in Britain, exasperated the Presbyterians to the last degree ; and Cowper, by offering publicly to satisfy his accusers, involved himself in such a war of speech and paper with enthusiasts of both sexes, who attacked him anonymously and beset him both in the streets and in his own house, as is admitted even by his friends to have hastened his death. Of a gentle and kindly spirit, weak in nerve, and capable of expressing his thoughtful fervour in a fine music of words, he would probably have changed sides much sooner but for that extreme sensitiveness which is cen sured in Spottiswoode's remark that he "affected too much the applause of the popular."^ In 1610, in the Synod of Fife, he thus rebuked his colleagues who scrupled to receive Gladstanes as Moderator : " Brethren, I beseech you in Christ, remember these things are not so essential points as to rend the bowels of the Kirk for them. . . . What joy can ye have for your suffering, when ye suffer for a matter indifferent, as who shall be moderator ; who shall have imposition of hands ? Wherefore serves it to 1 Spottiswoode, iii. 258. 334 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES fill the people's ears with contentious doctrine concerning the government of the Kirk ? Were it not far better to preach Christ sincerely, and to wait on and see what the Lord will work in these matters ? " — to which one of the opposite party made the characteristic answer: "A neu tral is not worthy to live in a commonwealth, let be in the kirk of God." ^ In his Christmas sermon on the Perth Articles Bishop Cowper is particularly happy in what he calls " the hardest point of all." He would be loath to condemn sitting, standing, or kneeling at com munion, for in so doing he must condemn his mother Church, or the French Church, or the English. " I like well," he said, "that modest judgment of Peter Martyr, who thinks any of these, sitting, standing, or kneeling, lawful." His tenure of power in Galloway is said to have been stained by not a single instance of cruelty or oppression ; but perhaps it was well for his good name that he died only six months after the Articles became the law of the Church. * Between Spottiswoode and Cowper there was a latent antagonism of character corresponding to the lack of sensibility in the one and the excess of it in the other ; and Bishop Patrick Forbes may be said to have com bined, though in very unequal proportions, the best qualities of both. In early youth, both at Glasgow and St. Andrews, Forbes had been the devoted pupil of 1 Calderwood, vii. 122, 123. 2 Cowper's Works, with Autobiography, published in 1629 ; Murray's Literary History of Galloway. Bishop Cowper is said to have been very fond of golf — " He loved that all his lifetime very much," says Row. But Row forgets that Ludos (amat) Gallua in the verses against the bishops, applies not to Cowper, but to his predecessor ; and he is probably no nearer the truth in his story of Cowper seeing a vision of two men with drawn swords on the Links of Leith, and then taking instantly to bed, and dying with the words, " a fallen star," on his lips. — p. 259. BISHOP PATRICK FORBES 335 Andrew Melville, whom he accompanied in his flight to England in 1584; his brother was the minister of Alford, who presided as Moderator at the abortive Assembly of 1605 ; and he was remotely connected with the first Bishop of Edinburgh. In 1598, after having lived for nine years in retirement near Montrose, he succeeded to his father's estate of Corse in Aberdeenshire. At that time the parish of Corse, and no less than twenty other parishes in the district, were entirely without pastors ; and King James may have been influenced by some suspicion of the laird's antecedents, when he required him to discontinue the Sunday lectures which he had been induced to transfer from his castle to the adjoining church. These lectures were a concession to those who had long been urging him to enter the ministry ; and he did enter it soon afterwards at the entreaty of a clergyman, dying by his own hand, who besought him to take his place. Forbes became minister of Keith in 1612; in 1615, on the death of Blackburn, one of the prelates nominated at the Convention of Synods in 1600, the people of Aberdeen wished to have him as their bishop ; but their wish was not gratified till another vacancy occurred in December, 1617. The bishopric of Aberdeen was offered to Forbes at a very critical time. The King had shown himself much displeased with the practical rejection of his Articles by the Assembly at St. Andrews ; he had just issued a proclamation requiring the observance of the five festivals ; and there was a very general apprehension that he would enforce the other Articles on his sole authority. Forbes had this state of things in view when- he wrote the well-known letter to Spottiswoode, in which he expressed his reluctance at such a time 336 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES to accept the episcopal office. He desired that the King should intrude nothing on the Church, which had not first been determined in a national council, exempt both from fear and favour; "but if things be so violently carried as no end may appear of bitter con tention, neither any place left to men placed in rooms, but instead of procuring peace and reuniting the hearts of the brethren, to stir the coals of detestable debate, for me I have no courage to be a partner in that work. I wish my heart blood might extinguish the ungracious rising fiame in our Kirk." How the new bishop contrived to reconcile the Assembly at Perth in the following August with his idea of a national council, in which the King " would neither make any man afraid with terror nor pervert the judgment of any with hope of favour," it is not easy to see — particularly as he himself in his opening sermon exhorted his brethren to beware of provoking the King's wrath. But, though Forbes in this respect had overstated his demand, he honestly believed that the King, with an Assembly of some sort at his back, had more right to enforce the Articles than a few individuals, by resisting them, to disturb the peace of the Church. He came forward, first of all, as the advocate of forbearance, if not of toleration ; but when all his efforts failed either to win over the nonconformists or to sweeten their temper, he turned upon them with unexpected vigour. He branded them as " contentious and troublers of the peace and unity of the Kirk " ; "he said they were like the salamander that delighted to live in the fire ; because there were matters brought into the Kirk which were disputable, they would break the peace of the Kirk, and set all on fire"; ^ and on one occasion when the bishops 1 Calderwood, vii. 491, 453. BISHOP PATRICK FORBES 337 had agreed to petition the King in favour of toleration, he indignantly protested against such a concession to those who had denounced kneeling as idolatry, declaring that, though he had once thought the matter indifferent, he would now insist on it till they had publicly recanted their error. " With such a zeal and courage," wrote Spottiswoode on the occasion of the Bishop's death to his son, " did he in that matter express himself as they that made the motion were stricken dumb. Surely I myself that never beheld him without reverence, did hear him that day with wonder." The conduct of Forbes as Bishop of Aberdeen was such as to justify Burnet in describing him as "in all things an apostolical man." He was an earnest and indefatigable preacher ; twice in each year he submitted himself unreservedly to the correction of his synod ; every summer, accompanied only by a single servant, he made a thorough visitation of his diocese, in the course of which he was wont to test the zeal .and ability of his clergy by appearing unex pectedly in their churches ; and he laboured inces santly to promote a better organisation of the parishes,' disjoining many which had been united in the interest of the tithe-owners, and subdividing others which were too large. Under his superintendence the colleges of Aberdeen were raised from the most wTctched con dition to the highest efficiency and vigour. Such was the respect entertained for him throughout the whole district that he was able to avert niuch litigation and even bloodshed amongst his neighbours by pre siding as arbiter in their disputes ; and even in old age, when his right side was entirely paralysed, he worked on unweariedly to the last. Patrick Forbes was undoubtedly the most thoroughly able man whom 338 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES the Moderates possessed during their forty years of power — more earnest than Spottiswoode, and far stronger than Cowper. So long as he was able to attend the Privy Council, he is said to have strenuously resisted the efforts of Charles to assimi late the Church to the English pattern ; and had he lived but three years longer, the Scottish episcopate would hardly have perished so ingloriously as it did.i If Patrick Forbes, Spottiswoode, and Cowper were the most distinguished of the Moderate prelates, there were others whose unobtrusive goodness was better known to their contemporaries than it can be to us. Of Neil Campbell, who resigned the bishopric of Argyll in 1608, we know almost nothing, except that his virtues — and his alone — w^ere cordially recognised even by the scurrilous verse-mongers of the day ; and Andrew Boyd, who succeeded Campbell's son in that see, lives only in the glowing eulogy bestowed upon him by Burnet, who says that he caused churches and schools to be everywhere founded and endowed in a country hitherto overrun with barbarity and ignorance ; that his name, fifty years after his death, was still held in particular veneration ; and that some of the strictest Presbyterians had owned to him "that if there were many such bishops, they would all be Episcopal." * It is remarkable that the Bishop of the Isles, another son of Bishop Campbell, was the only prelate whose personal character the Cove nanters of 1638 did not venture to assail. According to Gordon, he was supposed to have revived the ^ See the Biographical Memoir of Bishop Forbes by Charles Farquhar Shand prefixed to the Spottiswoode edition of his Funerals. " Preface to Life of Bedell. JOHN FORBES OP CORSE 339 primitive simplicity of St. Columba and St. Aidan, " so that in all probability the episcopal sanctity was fled to the confines of Christendom to hallow anew the barbarous appendices of the Scottish continent." ^ The University of Aberdeen was indebted mainly to Bishop Forbes for the group of learned divines who, in the paper war of 1638, achieved a blood less victory over the champions of the Covenant. The most distinguished of these, and a scholar of Euro pean reputation, was the Bishop's second son and heir, John Forbes, Professor of Divinity in King's College, extolled by Burnet as " perhaps inferior to no man of his age," and worthy to be mentioned here as one of the truest and best representatives of the Church of Scotland. John Forbes was ordained in the Presbyterian form at Middleburg in 1619 ; and though he afterwards strongly advocated Episcopacy, he never ceased to regard it as a form of govern ment, expedient and scriptural indeed, but in no way essential to the nature of the Church and the validity of its orders. After the fall of the hier archy, though he had been deprived of his Chair and forced even to leave the official residence which he himself had presented to the University, he con tinued to worship with his Presbyterian brethren and to participate in their communions. In 1644 he went abroad to escape the obligation of the Solemn League and Covenant; and during his two years of exile in Holland he preached frequently to the English and Scottish congregations, worshipped with the Dutch and French, and communicated in differently with all. He died at Corse in April, 1648 — the Covenanters having previously refused his 1 Scots Affairs, ii. 142-143. 340 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES last request, that he might be buried with his wife and father in St. Machar's Cathedral.^ About a year before John Forbes was ordained at Middleburg, the death occurred of one, whose name for Christian moderation and charity may well be coupled with his. Patrick Simson, for nearly thirty years minister of Stirling, was a Presbyterian of the strictest sect. Although Archbishop Adamson was his maternal uncle, he was one of the few ministers who refused to subscribe the Acts of 1584 ; after the murder of Moray he told King James from the pulpit that God would hold him responsible for the crime ; he was with the Blackness prisoners at their trial ; it was he who penned and presented the protestation against the bishops at the Parliament of 1606 ; and when he was appointed one of the permanent moderators, he refused to accept the office. But Simson, though as loyal to Presbytery as Andrew Melville himself, was animated by a very different spirit. We have seen how he rebuked some of his brethren for their " words of fieshly contention, rather rankling the wound nor healing the sore of our diseased church " ; and he himself set an example in this respect, which was much less agreeable to the zealots of his own party than to those who had vainly offered him, first a bishopric, and then a pension. He dispensed communion on Easter Sunday till he found that his action was misconstrued, when, in order to show that one day was as good as another, he dispensed it on the Sunday following. He corre sponded on friendly terms with Bishop Cowper ; he applied for instructions to Archbishop Gladstanes' diocesan synod ; and it was in discharge of a commis- 1 See Dr. Sprott's Article on John Forbes in the Dictionary of National Biography. INSTABILITY OP THE NEW ORDER 341 sion imposed upon him by Gladstanes' successor that he contracted the ailment which caused his death. Simson had greatly endeared himself to his parish ioners by appeasing their quarrels and working fear lessly among them in time of plague ; and during his last illness — "albeit many years before his death he was always dying" — people flocked from all quarters to receive his blessing. "It is enough," he had once said, " that I have liberty to teach Christ's gospel and to die in God's peace and the king's " ; and his brother tells us that he never repented of the" sweet purpose" through which " he was ever bent to quietness in the Kirk." 1 It must be apparent even from this slight analysis that the Church of Spottiswoode was a very different institution from the Church of Knox and Melville — different not so much in outward form as in spirit, aspiration, and habit of thought. Had the new religion, or rather the new interpretation of the old, been a genuine product of the popular mind, it might easily have expelled the poison instilled into it by James, and still more decisively by Charles and Laud. We have seen, however, that it was a forced and artificial development — a system imposed from above on a people neither ready nor willing to receive it, and elaborated under the shelter of the Crow^n by a few individuals who were far superior to the vulgar passions and pre judices of the day. Nothing shows this more clearly than the foul abuse to which the bishops were continu ally exposed ; and it may be well in conclusion to quote some of these " unrebukable men for outward offences," as Cowper calls them, who had " made their ' " Life of Patrick Simson " by his brother Archibald — Select Biographies (Wodrow Society), vol. i. ; Row, pp. 422-437. 342 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES mouth like the mouth of the serpent, spewing out words either of vanity or wickedness, like a deluge of waters to drown themselves and carry others away with them in the stream of their iniquity." For this purpose we need not go beyond the two contemporary annalists, Calderwood and Row, both of whom lived to play a part, more or less considerable, in the Puritan revolution. Archbishop Gladstanes, a singularly mediocre and harmless prelate, is called by Row " a vile, filthy, belly-god beast " — " Let that per jured apostate's filthy memory stink, rot, perish." Calderwood alludes to Gladstanes' successor as a " pro fane villain with an impudent face and a cauterised conscience, a traitor profane and licentious " — this out burst being occasioned by the fact that Spottiswoode had crossed over from Burntisland to Leith on Sunday in time of sermon and played cards — as was supposed — in the afternoon. He concludes that Bishop Cowper's death cannot have been " gracious and comfortable," because no " loud report " w^as made of it as such. Neither he nor Row admits a single virtue in Patrick Forbes. Calderwood calls him a hypocrite, and echoing Scot, an equally prejudiced but much more decorous writer, says that "it is known well enough that he undertook not the ministry till bishoprics were in bestowing, and that he could find no readier mean to repair his broken lairdship."^ /It need hardly be said that such statements as these are merely examples of that habit of swearing at large which had been trans mitted by Knox to all his spiritual children ; and whoever hesitates to reject them as such would do well to read the humanly impossible stories which Calderwood has collected with regard to the behaviour of Archbishop 1 Row, p. 304 ; Calderwood, vii. 296, 350, 395 ; Scot, p. 254. THEIR WORK 343 Adamson in London, or to compare Bishop Cowper's noble sermon on the Perth Articles with the same writer's account of it as so impertinent and frivolous "that the meanest in judgment made a mock at him."^ On the whole, it would seem that a great injustice is done to the Episcopal or Moderate party by those who judge it exclusively from a political standpoint.* The bishops may well have failed as statesmen, for they had no independent power, and the best of them sympathised neither with the Puritans nor with the King ; but it ought at least to be recognised that as religious teachers they accomplished what was little short of a revolution in the thought and character of the Church. It was a great thing to have discredited the crude religious ideal which had so long been paramount in the minds of the Scottish people — to have taught that the life of Christianity is not identified with any one of its external forms, that the most perfect rectitude of faith and conduct is no apology for an unchristian spirit, that God is never further than from those who see Him triumph in the confusion of their enemies, that the kingdom of Christ is not of this world, but a spiritual empire — the self-expansion which comes of full and intelligent self-conquest in the hearts and lives of men. We have seen that the Reformation favoured intellectual progress in so far as it divorced the text of Scripture from the fixed interpretation of the Church; and assuredly, if there ever was a Second Reformation ' Calderwood, vii. 342. 2 Mr. Gardiner is very hard on the bishops. He describes them as "neither strong partisans nor wise mediators," as "drifting helplessly like logs on the current of affairs," as such colourless souls as Dante would have condemned " without appeal to an endless comradeship with those who were alike displeasing to God and to His enemies."— History, vii. 342. 344 THE REIGN OF THE MODERATES in Scotland, it was not when fanaticism won a short lived triumph under the banner of the Covenant, but when men began, however faintly, to realise that even the Scriptures were designed rather to renew a right spirit than to enforce a mechanical rule. To Spottis woode and his colleagues the maintenance of peace and the things that make for peace was as much worth toiling and suffering for as any dogma of the schools. " For unity," writes one of them, " we should be ready to lay down our lives as well as for verity. . . . Yea, in my mind this is a greater martyrdom ; for in that every man suffereth for his own soul only, but here he suffers martyrdom for the whole Church." ^ It is to this idea of the duty of mutual forbearance and con cession, imperfectly and even quite erroneously as it was then understood, that we must attribute the finest qualities of the new order — its dignity, its charity, its courtesy, its largeness of mind and temper ; and these qualities, surviving the fall of the hierarchy and con centrated in one master spirit during its temporary restoration, were to pass from Episcopacy to Presbytery, and to become the permanent heritage of the Church of Scotland. ' Lindsay's Perth Assembly — Preface. CHAPTER XI. THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Church of Scotland was no better endowed than in 1567, and had come no nearer to the " full posses sion" of the teinds or tithes, which were then declared to be its proper patrimony. Before the Reformation the tithes of two-thirds of the parish churches had been annexed, with the churches them selves, to the bishoprics and abbeys ; and the great nobles, who had engrossed the abbeys, were now in possession of all their tithes, both original and acquired. Those of the clergy who had succeeded to parsonages surviving as such in 1560 drew the whole tithes of the parish ; but, with this exception — and many of the parsonages were held by laymen.^ — the only provision for the Church was the thirds of benefices, in so far as these were not claimed by the Crown, supplemented by Queen Mary's grant of all small livings under 300 merks a year. The thirds were distributed by a joint commission of nobles and clergy, which met annually in November ; the stipend 1 Thus John Lindsay, as his forensic title reminds us, was Parson of Menmuir. 346 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 allotted was usually very small, it was granted only from year to year, and owing to the wide ramifica tions of each great benefice, it was often payable at a great distance from the parish. Queen Mary granted a remission of the thirds to several of her friends ; and the fund was gradually extinguished in a manner very unfavourable to the Church. In 1592, but not till then, parsons actually serving as ministers were released from payment of the thirds ; bishops of the new order were exempted on condition that they provided for the ministers of their bounds ; and the Lords of Erection, where they did not escape the tax, usually received their grants on the same condition — a condition which they discharged so ill that in many cases they did not even exercise their rights as patrons. We have seen that in 1596 there were no fewer than 400 churches, exclusive of Argyll and the Isles, without either minister or reader. The thirds being thus remitted without adequate compensation, there was no alternative but to fall back on the tithes. In the " Constant Piatt " of 1596 it was proposed that every minister should have a permanent provision out of the tithes of his parish ; and though Lord Menmuir, the author of the scheme, laid it aside " as a thing not like to be done in his days,"^ a scheme substantially the same was adopted twenty-one years later. /The Act of 1617, which empowered certain commissioners to assign a per petual local stipend, not less than five chalders of victual or 500 merks nor more than eight chalders of victual or 800 merks, out of the tithes of every parish, brought all tithe-owners other than parsons 1 Melville's DioA-y, p. 229. TYRANNY OF TITHE-OWNERS 347 under contribution to the Church, and secured, or ought to have secured, to every minister then serving in Scotland^ a competency payable at his own door. It is probable that the average income of the clergy was more than doubled in consequence of this statute, which, however, fell short of Lord Menmuir's scheme, inasmuch as the surplus tithes of each parish were left undisturbed, instead of being applied to "the common affairs of the kirk and other godly uses." * "^ But the Act of 1617 hardly touched the real problem which had been raised through the vast change in the ownership of ecclesiastical property. In virtue of their possession of the abbey lands the Lords of Erection had acquired rights of superiority over a host of vassals, whilst as Titulars of the Teinds they had power over many landowners not otherwise subject to them. By the law of Scotland the heritor could not gather in his crop until the tithe-owner had taken up his share ; and though several Acts had been passed to enforce teinding within a reasonable time, he was bound, even by the latest of these, where the titular did not claim sooner, to leave his crop on the ground for twelve days after cutting, and to preserve the teind-corn from injury for eight days more.* In many cases tithes had been converted by agreement into a fixed amount of the produce ; but where this had not been done the heritor was always liable, through unfavourable weather, to lose the whole or great part of his crop. It was 1 The commission was appointed only for one year ; and though in 1621 it was renewed less definitely in favour of churches " not already planted," it probably did more to improve the position of the clergy than to increase their number. 2 Connell on Titlies, bk. ii. ; Forbes's Church Lands and Tithes, pp. 125, 126. 3 Connell, i. 126. 348 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 alleged against the nobles that they grossly abused their privilege as tithe-owners to coerce the landed gentry ; ^ and the privilege, whether abused or not, was a formidable addition to the direct authority they possessed over their own vassals. With the tithe question in this, its political and social aspect, Charles I. set himself at once to deaL In 1625, the first year of his reign, he issued an Act of Revocation, " the most ample that ever was made," * annulling all grants and acquisitions to the prejudice of the Crown during the two preceding years, particu larly the erection of Church lands, whether before or after the Act of Annexation of 1587 — the former grants on the ground that the Crown could not lawfully dispose of benefices which churchmen as life-renters had no power to resign, the latter on the ground that the Act of Annexation had never been repealed. Whatever may have been the sins of the nobility, this mode of rectifying them was in itself a great wrong : it made no allow^ance for titles purified through contract and prescription, and it dispensed not only with the erections, but with all Acts of Parliament confirming the same. In the course of the next year two pro clamations were issued, the object of which was to commend the King's project to the nation, and at the same time to limit its scope. In the first of these Charles avowed his intention to provide for the ministry and the schools, to redress " the great disorders and incommodities arising about teinds," and " to free the gentry of this kingdom from all those bands which may force them to depend upon any other than upon his Majesty." In the second, he restricted ' Large Declaration, p. 7 ; Heylyn's Laud, p. 237. "- Forbes, p. 258. COMMUTATION OF TITHES 349 his Revocation to the erections and other dispositions of lands and patronages justly belonging to the Church or Crown ; and to all who should surrender such he offered a reasonable compensation.^ In August, 1626, as many of the nobles still refused to give way, a process of reduction was raised with a view to reducing or setting aside the charters of erection as contrary to law ; and in 1628, in accordance with the decision of a committee of inquiry appointed in the previous year, the great majority of the nobles resigned their superiorities and their right to other men's teinds, that is, to teinds levied on other men's land, and submitted themselves for compensation to the pleasure of the King. The King's award on the question thus referred to his decision was issued on September 2, 1629 ; and after all deductions are made in favour of the Lord Advocate, Sir Thomas Hope, Charles must be allowed great credit for the four deereets-arbitral, extolled on one occasion by a Scottish judge as exhibiting " a degree of wisdom, fore sight, and sound policy which has never been exceeded in any age or nation."* All Church lands, except those [ of bishops, were henceforth to be held of the King — the Lords of Erection on this understanding to retain their estates, and also the feu-duties of their vassals until these should be redeemed at fixed prices by the Crown. The tithe question was settled on the sound principle that every man should have his own teinds, whether he bought them outright or leased them from the tithe- owner for an annual sum. Tithes were to be valued where they were paid in kind; where they had been 1 Proclamations, February and July, 1626 ; Connell, ii. 57-67. 2 Lord Justice-Clerk Hope in the Prestonkirk Case, 1808.— Connell, ii. 319. Mr. Gardiner refers to this " as the one successful action of Charles's reign." — History, vii. 279. 350 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 already commuted for money or victual, the whole rent of the land was to be valued, and the fifth part deducted in perpetuity as the tithe; and the heritor was at liberty to buy up his tithe at nine years' purchase. Charles did all in his power to push on the commutation of tithes, which was enforced by Parliament in 1633;^ but in spite of all the pressure brought to bear upon them by the King, the heritors showed little disposition to purchase their teinds, and not much even to have them valued,* partly, no doubt, because, having no immediate prospect of a rise in rent, they did not appreciate the benefit to their posterity of a fixed rent charge, but also, one may suspect, because Charles had somewhat exaggerated the oppression of this class by the Titulars of the Teinds. The clergy were great gainers by the King's scheme, though the bishops had at first opposed it under the impression that the sale of tithes would extinguish the patrimony of the Church.* The heritor could purchase no more of his teind than what remained after the mini ster's stipend had been paid; stipends were also to be granted or increased at each valuation; and the Teind Commission of 1627, ratified by Parliament in 1633, was empowered to provide for the clergy on a very liberal scale. 800 merks, the maximum of stipend allowed by the Act of 1617, now became the minimum; and the generosity of the Commissioners, which Charles took 1 Acts of Pari. v. 34. 2 It appears from a report of Commissioners in 1636 that at that time " the far greater sort are not yet valued." As to sales, few titulars can have sold their tithes without compulsion, though some apparently did so ; and it is remarkable that only two decrees of sale are recorded before the Restoration, and none thereafter till 1679. It may be added that the practice of levying tithes in kind, prohibited in 1633, had not been wholly discontinued at the beginning of the present century, or even later. See Connell, i. 169, 307, 308 ; ii: 113. 3 Forbes, pp. 265, 266. RESENTMENT OP THE NOBLES 351 pains to encourage, was not restricted to any maximum at all. The King professed in after years to have been pro fusely thanked by those whom through his dealing with tithes he had delivered " from intolerable bondage " ; ^ but on the page of history the gratitude of the clergy and lairds is much less conspicuous than the discontent of the nobles. The nobles were hurt in pride as well as seriously alarmed. Even in money value they had lost something, though Charles might justly claim to have satisfied them " to the uttermost farthing." * We have seen that, where tithes were sold, the minister's stipend was deducted from the price ; and as tithes are gene rally allowed to have been both sold and commuted at a lower rate than would have been the case, if they had not been liable to augmentations of stipend,* it is obvious that the nobles were fully paid only on the supposition — notoriously untrue — that they had hitherto discharged their obligations to the Church. It is very probable, as Charles supposed, that many of them were discontented because they had been "robbed, as they conceived, of the clientele and dependence of the clergy and laity " ; for, though in a vast number of cases tithes continued to be levied in kind, the heritor, who found himself aggrieved by this practice, could now terminate it at will. But even this, the avowed object of the commutation of tithes, could hardly have proved fatal to the King, if he had not prefaced the whole transac tion by so rash and so unwarranted a step. The ruling ^ Large Declaration, p. 9. * Ibid. 3 "In a process of augmentation . . . decided in 1669, it was argued on the part of the minister that the heritors ' having bought their teinds at nine years' purchase, are more than twice paid of the price since their buying.' These heritors bought their teinds about 1630."— Connell, i. 302, note. 352 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 families never forgot that Charles had threatened, and might threaten again, to deprive them at a stroke of all that their ancestors had acquired from the fall of the Ancient Church. Burnet assures us that, when Lord Nithsdale came down from Court to make good the Revocation, the nobles had resolved in the last resort to take his life ; ^ and the significance of such a rumour must be admitted, even if we question its truth. To men, who had long been jealous of the bishops as their rivals in rank and power, it seemed only too probable that the Crown, at their instigation, should seek to recover the patrimony of the Church ; and Sir James Balfour hardly exaggerates the effect of the Revocation, when he calls it " the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after, both to this King's government and family. " * The settlement of the Church lands and tithes was finally adjusted and confirmed by Parliament during the King's visit to Scotland in 1633. Charles had a magnificent reception on his public entry into Edin burgh on June 15 ; but the coronation ceremony, three days later, must have been even more offensive to " good Christians " than to the Episcopalian Spalding, who comments ruefully on the altar-like table with its " blind books " and unlighted candles, on the rich vest ments of the five officiating bishops, and on their becking and bowing as they passed the embroidered crucifix.* At St. Giles's on the following Sunday the ordinary reader was displaced in favour of two royal chaplains, who read, or as Row puts it, " acted " the English service ; the Bishop of Moray preached in his ' History of His Own Time, i. 36. See also Hey lyn, p. 237. 2 Annals, ii. 128. ^ Memorials of the Troubles, i. 36. BISHOPS SUPREME IN PARLIAMENT 353 rochet to a horrified congregation ; and Charles was then feasted by the magistrates on the other side of the street, with such noisy goodwill that the townspeople had to dispense with their afternoon sermon.^ The nobles on this occasion complained of the consti tution as well as of the proceedings of Parliament. In 1617 they had objected to the way in which the Lords of the Articles were chosen ; and that committee was now constituted according to the invidious form intro duced in the last Parliament of 1621. The nobles chose eight bishops, who in turn chose eight nobles, and the sixteen thus elected chose eight lairds and eight burgesses. Unless, therefore, they failed to find eight friendly peers amongst the whole nobility, the bishops could propose what measures they pleased ; and in Parliament the bishops were merely the instruments of the King. This increase of the royal power had arisen through the conversion of the abbacies into temporal lordships, for before that event the nobles with ecclesi astical titles were a large majority of the spiritual estate. As already mentioned, an Act was passed prohibiting the levying of tithes in kind. Most of the charters of erection were expressly confirmed, but so also, as a hint of what the King could do if he chose, was the Act of Revocation ; and many of the nobles vented what Clarendon calls their " thwarteous humour" by opposing the ecclesiastical measures which Charles had most at heart. The chief of these were two Acts ^ "As if," writes a Sabbatarian of the eighteenth century, "it had been resolved to bid defiance to the Almighty God, the great institutor of the Sabbath and author of divine ordinances, the noise of men speaking, trumpets sounding, music playing, and singing, etc., was so great that public worship could not be performed that afternoon in either of the churches of St. Giles. This to sober minds may, at first, seem incredible." —Stevenson's Church and State, edition 1840, p. 132. Z 354 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 ratifying the religious legislation of James VI., and empowering the King to regulate the apparel of church men ; and the latter, though engrossed by a " satanical trick of bishops" in an Act declaratory of the royal prerogative,^ was carried only by a small majority, which was afterwards rumoured— falsely indeed — to have been none at all. Charles gave deep offence to the opposition by noting down their names with his own hand ; and as he would not allow them to say anything in explanation of their votes, they embodied their reasons of dissent in the famous supplication, for which Lord Balmerino was afterwards brought to trial. It has been truly said that the sting of this petition lies rather in its general tone than in any specific statement.* It takes for granted that the whole ecclesiastical settle ment made by James VI. was unjust and illegal, and it carries this so far as to make incidentally the strange assertion that there were no " Parliamentary Bishops" from the Reformation to the year 1609. Charles refused to look at the petition, when it was brought to him by the Earl of Rothes, a leading tithe- owner, of whom he " had the worst opinion " ; but Balmerino, son of that President of the Court of Session, noted by Spottiswoode as a great enemy of the bishops,* retained a copy interlined with his own hand, from which another copy was made, which ultimately found its way to the King. Balmerino, having shown his copy to a Dundee lawyer, was indicted in June, 1634, ¦" Row, p. 366. Kirkton compares this device to that of the Roman Emperors, who " used in the market place to rear their own image close beside the image of their heathenish god, to oblige the poor Christians, in passing by, either to salute the idol in saluting the emperor, or to affront the prince in neglecting the idol." — Secret and True History of the Chwch ¦of Scotland, edited by Sharpe, p. 30. 2 Gardiner, vii. 294. 3 gee p. 307. TWO TYPES OP BISHOPS 355 for publishing a seditious libel; and in the following March, after a tedious process, during which the Puritans had warmly espoused his cause, a jury of his peers found him guilty, not of publishing the libel, but of approving and concealing it, by a majority of eight votes to seven. Balmerino was pardoned after an imprisonment of thirteen months ; but the malcontents attributed this rather to the weakness of the prosecution than to the clemency of the King. The year 1635 was one of fatal significance in Charles's reign. In January Archbishop Spottiswoode, to the great disgust of the nobles, was made Chancellor — no churchman having held that office since the Reformation. In March the condemnation of Bal merino was followed by the death of Bishop Patrick Forbes ; in May the Book of Canons, published in the following year, was authorised by royal warrant ; and it seems to have been at this time that the first draft of the Liturgy was prepared under Laud's direction. These events connect themselves only too naturally with certain new forces which were now at work both in Church and State. Charles I. believed as firmly as Laud himself in that divine origin of Episcopacy which his father, with all his love for bishops, had expressly denied; and corre sponding to this change in the character of the King, we find, not, indeed, two parties within the episcopate, but two trends of opinion, the one averse from the Court policy, and the other zealous in its support. The eight bishops of James's creation who survived the fall of the hierarchy were Spottiswoode of St. Andrews, Patrick Lindsay of Glasgow, Guthrie of Moray, David Lindsay of Edinburgh, Bellenden of Aberdeen, Graham of Orkney, Abernethy of Caith- 356 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 ness, and Alexander Lindsay of Dunkeld. With the exception of Spottiswoode in his official capacity as Primate and Chancellor, of David Lindsay and Bel lenden, it would seem that these prelates, without actually opposing Laud's designs, did as little to help him as they conveniently could. Graham, Abernethy, and Alexander Lindsay renounced Epis copacy in 1638, and in the Assembly of that year it was admitted that they had disapproved of the late innovations. 1 Spottiswoode sacrificed his private judgment to Charles, just as Lord North, during the last five years of the American war, sacrificed his to George III. Archbishop Lindsay had even less sympathy with Laud ; * and even as regards the Bishops of Edinburgh and Aberdeen the evidence is far from pointing only one way. The former is said to have insisted on making presbyters only of those who would first become deacons ; yet in 1636 he was supposed to have made a stand against " the Surplice, Cross, Apocrypha, Saints' days, and some other trash of the English Liturgy";* and in his book on the Perth Assembly he speaks contempt uously of those fanatics for external order who regarded any change of opinion in such matters as a sort of apostasy from the truth.* Bellenden, indeed, in a certain blundering fashion did try 1 The Sheriff' of Teviotdale pleaded for Abernethy that he would have resigned his bishopric had he not been deterred by the High Commission. — Peterkin's Records of the Kirk, p. 173. 2 In 1638, when Laud's policy had provoked a national revolt, the Earl of Traquair told Charles that Spottiswoode "from the beginning had withstood these designs, foreseeing how full of danger the executing of them might prove," and that Archbishop Lindsay " was worse pleased."— Burnet's Dukes of Hamilton, Oxford edition, p. 43. 3 Baillie, i. 4, 161. * Lindsay's Perth Assembly, p. 69 BISHOP MAXWELL 357 to follow in the footsteps of Laud. On the death of Patrick Forbes he was removed from Dunblane and the Deanery of the Chapel Royal to Aberdeen, partly on his own petition, and partly "as one who did not favour well enough Canterbury's new ways";^ and he seems to have given little satisfaction to his patron both before his removal and after. In 1634 he was sharply reprimanded by Laud for having omitted to read the English Liturgy in the Chapel ; * and in 1636 we find Laud writing to Spottiswoode that the King was "very much displeased with the Bishop of Aberdeen because he had allowed a fast to be kept on Sunday in his diocese at a time when His Majesty was trying to put down all usages unknown to the Ancient Church." * Of the six remaining prelates who owed their pro motion to Charles, Campbell of the Isles stood entirely aloof, and Fairley of Argyll -was consecrated only in August, 1637 ; but the other four — Maxwell, Wedder burn, Sydserf, and Whitford — were the leaders of what Baillie calls the " Canterburian faction." Amongst these Maxwell was by far the most prominent — a man of great energy, an avowed sacerdotalist, and the true father of that Episcopal Communion known within its own narrow limits as " the Church in Scotland." It was he, as we have seen, who in 1631 first asserted the divine right of Episcopacy ; some three years earlier, he had become the chief manager of Church business at Court ; and in 1633 he was made Bishop of Ross. His ecclesiastical opinions are fully disclosed in his Burthen of Issachar, one of the two pamphlets to which Baillie replied in his Historical Vindication ; and though much 1 Baillie, i. 162 ; Heylyn's Laud, p. 323. ^ Baillie, i. 432. ' Sprott's Scottish Liturgies ofthe Reign of James VI, p. Ivii. 358 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 must be excused to a deposed and fugitive bishop writing in 1646, the tract is remarkable for other reasons than the bitterness of its tone. Maxwell criticises Presbytery from the true Anglo-Catholic standpoint. The lay eldership, though he enlarges with good reason on the tyrannical abuse of its powers, is hateful to him chiefly as a " sacrilegious intrusion upon sacred Orders." He denounces the General Assemblies for violating the rule that jurisdiction is due to churchmen as such ex vi ordinis ; he is able to prove that " men who were never in Sacred Orders of Priest or Bishop have been Moderators " ; and he bewails the neglect of " that old barbarous, but Christian enough verse — Iteforas Laid, non est vobis locus yd." On the other hand, he speaks of Rome and its "cup of abominations" with much contempt; and whilst deploring "great losses the Church had by the Reformation," he thanks Heaven devoutly for its " good of truth." ^ Maxwell was warmly seconded by Sydserf and Whitford, the Bishops of Brechin and Galloway ; but his principal supporter was Wedderburn, Bellenden 's successor as Dean of the Chapel and Bishop of Dunblane. It was Wedderburn who persuaded Laud to have a new Ordinal printed in 1636 — the old one being defective in his opinion, because it treated deacons as mere laymen, and made priests so ill that " the very essential words of conferring orders were left out " ; and it was he also who was responsible for those portions of the Service-Book which enabled its opponents to denounce it as more popish than the Book of Common Prayer.* We have seen that these men reflected the intellectual tolerance as well as the fanatical churchmanship of Laud ; but their generous 1 Burtfien of Issachar, pp. 1, 4, 20, 21, 25, 31, 32. 2 Grub, ii. 368, 377. POPULAR RELIGION 359 breadth of doctrine was hardly less hateful to the Puritans than their enthusiasm for " Sacred Orders." Apart from the certainty that it would be denounced as a concession, or rather as a surrender, to Rome, the attempt to revive the mysteries of priestcraft had no chance of success. It was not merely that the Catholic spirit — the spirit of those for whom the strength and beauty of Christianity are eternally renewed in its hallowed rites and symbols — had been extinct in Scotland for 150 years, but that, since the Reformation, a new and antagonistic force had arisen in its place. To the popular religion of the day, Calvinistic and evangelical to the core, the whole priestly idea was abhorrent as a gross intrusion on that close personal intercourse which ought to subsist between the soul and God; and even if the bulk of the clergy had been disposed to relax the old creed — and Arminians, such as Crighton of Paisley, were the rare exception — there were some amongst them eager to assert its power. Under favour of such semi-Puritan bishops as Alexander Lindsay of Dunkeld, nonconformists, known to be such, were still occasionally ordained ; many more, admitted before the Perth Assembly, were permitted to retain their livings ; and even deposed ministers were at liberty to preach — which they frequently did at com munions — in any parish but their own.^ The extreme fervour of these divines was more in keeping with the old order of things than with the new, for the purpose of inciting their adherents against which they are said to have held a fast in private every quarter during the 1 Row's Blair, pp. 137-138. Samuel Rutherford, who had been banished from his parish of Anwoth to Aberdeen and prohibited from preaching, speaks of himself in June, 1637, as "the first in the kingdom put to utter silence."— ieWers, original edition of 1664, p. 95. 360 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 first eight years of Charles's reign. ^ The most remark able result of their preaching was the religious epidemic, associated with the names of David Dickson and John Livingstone, which broke out at Stewarton in Ayrshire in 1625, and culminated at Shotts in Clydesdale in 1630. Dickson's pulpit at Irvine was a source of attraction to the whole countryside ; and the parish ioners of Stewarton, who came thither on business, were wrought up to such a pitch by his market-day sermons that many of them fell down insensible, and had to be carried out of church, from which circumstance the epidemic was knowm as " the Stewarton sickness," and its victims as " the daft people of Stewarton." At Shotts in June, 1630, on the Monday after the com munion, Livingstone preached in the open air to an immense concourse of people, many of whom had been engaged in devotion the whole previous day and the whole previous night. These events are remarkable as one of the earliest indications that the centre of enthusiasm for Presbytery was shifting from the towns people of the east coast to the rude peasantry of the south-west, whose awakening was to shake to their foundations both Church and State. After the communion at Shotts, Livingstone was called to a parish in the north of Ireland ; and he and Robert Blair, the Scottish minister of Bangor,' laboured there with great success till they were deposed by the Bishop of Down for nonconformity, and for stirring up the people to " extasies and enthusianisms." * From Blair's autobiography it appears that persons without any sense of religion were frequently thrown during public worship into violent convulsions — such, apparently, as attended 1 Guthrie's Memoirs, p. 8. ''Select Biographies (Wodrow Society), i. 146. THE BOOK OP CANONS 361 the preaching of Wesley two centuries later ; and these he attributes to a stratagem of Satan, who thus " play ing the ape did . . . counterfeit the work of the Lord." 1 From such facts one may easily understand the connexion between Puritanism and witchcraft — "the reflection," as it has been called, "by a diseased imagina tion of the popular theology." * The Book of Canons, which had been ratified by the King in May, 1635, was published in January, 1636. The Canons are supposed to have been the work of Bishops Maxwell, Wedderburn, Bellenden, and Sydserf, revised by Laud and Juxon, Bishop of London;* and Juxon did not pun in excess of their probable effect, when in a letter to Maxwell he said that "perchance at first" they would "make more noise than all the cannons in Edinburgh Castle."* The most unpopular parts of the Book — if any part of it can be said to have been more unpopular than another — were the re-enactment in substance of the Perth Articles;^ the restriction of ordination to the first week of four months in the year ; the prohibition of public fasts, except on week days and with the King's consent, and of extemporary prayer ; the allow^ance of confession, with an obligation on the clergy not to divulge its secrets ; and the direction for placing a font near the church door, and the communion table at the upper end of the chancel. The last of the Canons required them to be subscribed by every presbyter at his ordination ; and the first denounced excommunication against all who should affirm that His 1 Life of Blair, p. 89. ^ Lecky's Rationalism, i. 139. 3 Grub, ii. 366. * Baillie, i. 439. ^The Articles had been suspended in 1626 as regards ministers who had been ordained before they became law, and who should abstain from agitating against them. 362 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 Majesty had not the same authority in causes ecclesi astical as the godly Jewish Kings and Christian emperors, and against all who should impugn the doctrine of the Church, its rites and ceremonies, its form of worship contained in the Book of Common Prayer, its episcopal government under the King, and its form of making bishops, presbyters, and deacons. The most extra ordinary item in this Canon was that which required the Church to receive without protest a liturgy which it had never seen ; for the Service-Book, though in course of preparation, had not yet been published, and did not appear till more than a year later. But none of the Canons, not even the first, was so objectionable as the sanction, or rather want of sanction, under which the whole were issued. The Book, "contrary to the usage of the Church in all times and ages," as Laud's own chaplain admits, ^ had no authority of any kind but that of the royal warrant ; and this was the more out rageous, because several of the Canons were matters of civil as well as ecclesiastical law — such, for example, as the one so justly denounced by Row, * which required both parties to a divorce- — the innocent as well as the guilty — to be bound over not to marry during each other's life. For the origin of the belated Liturgy we must go back to a time when the necessity, or at least the expediency, of such a form of prayer was admitted by all parties in the Church. Knox's Book of Com mon Order prefixed to the metrical translation of the Psalms, and hence commonly known as the Psalm-Book, had been in use ever since the Refor mation. It differed greatly from the Prayer-Book of 1 Heylyn's Laud, p. 301. See also Clarendon, i. 148. 2 Row, p. 393. KNOXS LITURGY REVISED 363 Edward VI. , which the Reformers had once used, at least in part, inasmuch as the prayers and con fessions were said by the minister alone, who was always permitted, and in some places expressly en joined, to use his own words. A new edition of this work was agreed to in 1601 — the psalms were to be revised, and such new prayers added at the sugges tion of individual members as the Assembly might approve. Nothing, however, appears to have been done in this direction until it was resolved, fifteen years later, to draw up a new form for the ordinary, as distinguished from the special, services in Knox's book. The Aberdeen Assembly of 1616, besides ratifying a new Confession of Faith, ordained that "a uniform order of Liturgy or Divine Service" should be compiled, and also a Book of Canons, for which purpose two committees were appointed, with a third and much larger one to revise the labours of both. A draft of the new Liturgy was finished within six months; but in 1617 Hewat, the convener of the liturgical committee, was banished from Edin burgh for penning a protestation against the Act, afterwards withdrawn, affirming the King's jurisdic tion in the external government of the Church ; Erskine, another of the four members, was soon after wards deprived for nonconformity ; and thus, by insisting on the Perth Articles, James not only alienated the more moderate of the Puritans from a Liturgy in which these articles would necessarily be embodied, but sowed the seeds of that general re pugnance to all liturgical forms which in the long run extended even to the Book of Common Order. Hewat's draft of the Liturgy was now thrown aside. The work in its new form, embracing both ordinary and special 364 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 services, is said to have been compiled chiefly under the direction of Bishop Cowper. It was revised by the King and by Young, the Scottish Dean of Winchester, and license to print it was granted in June, 1619. By that time, however, James had probably become alive to the danger of proceeding further in his ecclesiastical policy. At the Parliament of 1621 he authorised his Commissioner to say that, if the Perth Articles were confirmed, he should bring forward no more innova tions ; and if we can believe a somewhat doubtful story in Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, he con sented most reluctantly to make a bishop of Laud, who had twice "assaulted" him with an "ill-fangled plat form to make that stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English pattern." It is probable also that his sympathies were somewhat divided between Cowper's Liturgy and the English Book of Common Prayer, which in 1617 he caused to be read daily in the Chapel-Royal, and in 1623 in the New College of St. Andrews. In 1629, after he had practically disposed of the tithe question, Charles I. sent for the Liturgy, which his father, from whatever cause, had refrained from printing. Maxwell, who brought the book to London, urged its acceptance in an interview with Laud ; but Charles on Laud's recommendation decided to discard the Scottish for the English Liturgy, and according to Clarendon, it was with a view to introducing the latter that he took Laud with him to Scotland in 1633. At Edinburgh, however, he found it impossible to carry out his design. The bishops represented to him with great earnestness that to introduce the English Prayer Book, at a time when the Scots were morbidly sensitive to the effect on their nationality of the union of the A NEW LITURGY 365 crowns, would be a perfectly fatal step ; and in this they all concurred — both the Maxwell party, who wanted a new form of prayer, and those who, like Spottiswoode, were anxious, now that Cowper's Liturgy had been rejected, to retain the old. Either during this visit or immediately after his return, Charles decided in favour of a separate liturgy for Scotland fashioned as nearly as possible on the Anglican model ; and the bishops, who, with the excep tion of Maxwell, had demurred to the King's command that they should use the English Prayer Book mean while in their cathedrals and households, were ordered in May, 1634, to prepare both a Liturgy and Canons. In the following August Maxwell was despatched to Court with the Canons which had been begun, at least, in the preceding reign ; and these, as we have seen, after being revised by Laud and Juxon, were ratified by the King in May, 1635. In April of that year the Bishop of Ross was again in London. He brought with him a draft of the Liturgy, with regard to which he was instructed by his brother bishops to say " that they had done all that was possible " to meet the views of the King. Nevertheless Charles sent back the draft with various " corrections and instructions " signed by him at the instance of Juxon and Laud ; and in this form much of the Liturgy had been printed, when in the beginning of 1636 it was determined once more to make a fresh start. This appears to have been due to the vacancy in the see of Aberdeen caused by the death of Patrick Forbes, which resulted, after some delay, in Wedderburn succeeding Bellenden as Bishop of Dun blane and Dean of the Chapel-Royal. Wedderburn, though a native of Dundee and a great-grandson of the author of the "gude and godlie ballates," was to all 366 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 intents an Englishman, being at that time a prebendary of Ely.^ He entered on his duties at the Chapel in October, 1635 ; and it was doubtless his influence, guided by instructions which Heylyn says he carried with him from Court, that was mainly responsible for the new edition. After all the laboui* bestowed upon it, the Liturgy in its final form was disposed of in a very summary fashion. In April, 1636, Laud sent down an English Prayer-Book, into which he and Juxon had written certain alterations suggested by themselves, or, with their approval, by the Scottish bishops ; and he concludes his long letter of the 20th to Wedderburn by saying that, although the royal warrant prefixed to the book granted a certain liberty of revision to the Arch bishop of St. Andrews and the other bishops, " yet you must know and inform them that his Majesty, having viewed all these additions, hopes there will be no need of change of anything, and will be best pleased with little or rather no alteration." In spite of this warning, the bishops availed themselves to some extent of the permission contained in the King's warrant ; and the book, thus slightly amended, was published a year later, in April, 1637. The Liturgy, which Charles had refused to sanction in 1629, was professedly a revision of the Book of Common Order, large extracts from which were in corporated therein. It omitted the sign of the cross in baptism and the use of the ring in marriage; but in these and other respects in which it invites comparison with the English Prayer-Book, Cowper's Liturgy does not diverge so widely from the latter in a Protestant, as 1 " A Scot by birth, but bred in Cambridge, beneficed in Hampshire, and made one of the Prebends of Ely by the learned Andrews."— Heylyn's Laud, p. 323. LAUDS SERVICE-BOOK 367 does Laud's in a Catholic direction. What Laud wanted above all things was to establish one manual of public worship throughout the two kingdoms ; but, if the Scots would not have the English Liturgy in form, he was determined that they should have that, and something more, in substance. He had no intention of altering the Prayer-Book without, as he believed, improving it ; and he was far more alive to the danger of encouraging the English nonconformists by admitting their objec tions than to that of exasperating the Scots by riding rough shod over theirs.^ Some slight concessions, indeed, were made to the popular feeling, such, for example, as the substitution of "Presbyter" for "Priest," and, in the daily lessons, of canonical for apocryphal books — portions of the latter being read only on certain festivals ; but these were far outweighed by the rubric, which required baptism to be administered only with consecrated water, and particularly by certain alterations in the communion service. According to the statement afterwards made by Laud in his own defence, it was Wedderburn who suggested the omission of the words in the present English Prayer-Book, which at the review of 1559 had been retained, for purposes of comprehension, in the Second Liturgy of Edward VI. , in order to balance certain other words suggestive of transubstantiation, which were then borrow^ed from the First. This omission, however, harmonised only too well with the direction in the rubrics that the holy table should be placed at the uppermost end of the chancel — "holy table" being a substitute for "table," and also in an opposite sense for Laud's own word " altar " ; that what remained ofthe consecrated elements should be covered " with a fair linen cloth or corporal" ; 1 See Maxwell's instructions to Balcanquhal. — Baillie, i. 444. 368 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 and that the Presbyter should " stand at such a part of the holy table where he may, with the more ease and decency, use both his hands " — this last being suggestive of the elevation of the Host. When it was reported to Laud that some bishops, who had never seen the book till it issued from the press, objected to these emendations on the Anglican ritual, he asked why they did not accept the English Liturgy intact when they had the chance ; and he probably did them no more than justice when he said that " by their refusal of that, and their dislike of this, 'tis more than manifest they would have neither, perhaps none at all, were they left to themselves." But to the Liturgy, as to the Canons, the most obvious and the most fatal objection was the utter want of all ecclesiastical sanction ; and in this respect it embodied in their last and extremest form the consequences of that reaction against theocracy, which had begun fifty years before, when the mass of the clergy under Craig and Erskine subscribed the " Black Acts." The Church, which had once claimed to over rule at almost every turn the policy of the State, was now reduced to praying only in the words prescribed to it by the King ; and Charles and Laud, in attempting at a time of grave political and religious discontent to introduce a Liturgy more Catholic in spirit than that for which Knox's had been adopted, and others had lately been proposed as substitutes, showed plainly that their enthusiasm for reforming the Church was quite as irrational as that of Knox and Melville for establishing its power. ^ 1 On the whole subject of Laud's Service-Book and its antecedents, see Dr. Sprott's Scottish Liturgies of ihe Reign of James VI., from the truly admirable introduction to which work the account given in the text has mainly been drawn. THE SERVICE-BOOK ENFORCED 369 The intensity of sanction for the change of ritual was in inverse proportion to its very limited scope. We have seen that infringers of the Liturgy were threatened with excommunication more than a year before it was issued, at a time when even its promoters had not finally decided what form it should take. When the hook appeared in April, 1637, it was prefaced by way of frontispiece with a proclamation w^hich had been published at the market crosses in the preceding December, requiring all the King's subjects on pain of rebellion to conform themselves to the new form of worship, and every parish to buy two copies before Easter; and this proclamation, not having had the desired effect, was driven home by another on June 13, requiring all ministers to purchase their copies within fifteen days. Maxwell at Fortrose and Wedderburn at the Chapel-Royal did not wait even for Easter to introduce the new service — -these prelates having no more to do than to substitute the Scottish Book of Common Prayer for the English; but the majority of the bishops, including Wedderburn himself as Bishop of Dunblane, granted a " breathing time " to their clergy from the April to the October Synods, which, however, was cut short at Edinburgh by a royal order appointing the Service-Book to be read on the third Sunday of July. Whether the malcontents availed themselves of the respite thus accorded to organise as well as to excite resistance is a point which cannot be precisely deter mined. There is nothing to discredit Bishop Guthrie's statement, corroborated in the main by Spalding, that the Puritan leaders, lay and clerical, had incited certain women to make a demonstration against the Service- Book, except that the Large Declaration is silent on 2a 370 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 this point, and that the women were not unlikely to undertake such a function of their own accord. Edinburgh, since the Reformation, had never been without a tribe of female enthusiasts "of the bangster Amazon kind," derided by King James on one occasion as "the holy sisters." It was women of this class who had hooted and stormed at Queen Mary after her surrender at Carberry HUl,^ who had mobbed Arch bishop Montgomery, who had caused a proclamation to be issued in defence of Archbishop Adamson,* and who in 1587 had raised a commotion in St. Giles's, when King James ordered the usurping Cowper to come out of the pulpit. Fifty years had elapsed since this last incident, when in the same church of St. Giles the reading of the "Popish-English-Scottish-Mass-Service Book," as Row calls it, provoked a similar, but much more serious tumult. As soon as Dean Hanna, in presence of the Bishop of Edinburgh, the Chancellor and other magnates, had begun to read, a tremendous outcry arose amongst the women, some cursing the Dean, and some the Bishop, as " beastly belly-god," " crafty fox," "ill-hanged thief," others tearing their hair, and shriek ing that the Mass was entered in and Baal set up anew. One at least of the " she- zealots" threw a stool at the Bishop's head ; another dashed her Bible in the face of a young man who was punctuating "that new composed comedy " with devout amens ; and a third is specially commended for having rebuked a woman with some sense of humour — "one of Ishmael's mocking daughters" 1 " The women be most furious and impudent against her, and yet the men be mad enough."— Throckmorton to Elizabeth ; Foreign Calendar, 1566-68, No. 1447. 2 M'Crie's Melville, i. 349. A 'NO-POPERY' riot 371 — by exclaiming in a loud voice, " Woe be to those that laugh when Zion mourns." The rioters were removed without much difficulty, many of them in horror of such idolatry being very anxious to get out ; but they did their best to obstruct the remainder of the service by smashing the windows and thundering at the doors. Bishop Lindsay, on issuing from the church, was set upon by a mob of these " zealous and holy women," ^ who pursued him with mud and curses ; a door at which he sought refuge was shut in his face ; and but for the Earl of Wemyss, who sent his servants to protect him, he would hardly have escaped with his life. The exclusion of the " devouter sex " resulted in the Liturgy being read without interruption in the afternoon ; but the unfortunate Bishop was freely pelted with stones as he drove home through the crowded streets in the Earl of Roxburgh's coach. In the Greyfriars' Church the reception of the Liturgy, though less violent, was quite as unfavourable; and similar ebullitions of rage soon occurred elsewhere. The women of Glasgow warned one minister that, if he defended the book in his sermon, they would drag him out of the pulpit ; and another, who had preached in its favour before the diocesan synod, was waylaid in the dark by several hundreds of them, and beaten most unmercifully both with fists and cudgels.* A proclamation was issued at Edinburgh on the day after the riot prohibiting all demonstrations against the bishops and the Service-Book on pain of death ; but, 1 Row's Blair, p. 150. 2 Contemporary accounts of the St. Giles's riot are to be found in Row, Spalding, Gordon, the Large Declaration, and the Appendix to Rothes's Relation (Bannatyne edition)— the last being a particularly brutal and obscene account. 372 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 beyond the apprehension of a few persons who were soon released, nothing was done to bring the offenders to trial. On July 29, on the motion of Archbishop Spottiswoode, it was decided that both the old Prayer- Book and the new should be suspended till the King's pleasure was known ; and a month later, on the petition of three Fifeshire ministers, one of whom was Alexander Henderson, the proclamation prefixed to the Liturgy was practically annulled by an Act of Council limiting it to the buying, as distinct from the reading, of the book. The weakness of the Council was due mainly to its want of union. The bishops distrusted the lay lords, particularly the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Traquair, who had shown his indifference, if not his enmity, to the Service-Book by going out of town the day before it was read ; ^ and they could not count even on several of their own order, who objected to a new form of worship introduced without their consent. The lay lords, on the other hand, were jealous of the bishops — especially of the nine, mostly High Churchmen, who had seats in the Council, and who, without waiting for their concurrence, had sent off an express to the King immediately after the riot. On August 25 the Council wrote to the King, suggesting that he should select some persons of note to confer with him in London ; and Traquair, in a letter to the Marquis of Hamilton, exhorted him to use his influence with Charlea that only bishops "of the wisest and most calm disposi tions " should be sent for ; " for certainly some of. the leading men amongst them are so violent and forward, 1 Heylyn, Guthrie, and Spalding assert that Traquair was in league with the opposition — a charge which is indignantly repudiated by Clarendon. OBSTINACY OP THE KING 373 and many times without ground or good judgment, that their want of right understanding how to compass busi ness of this nature and weight does often breed us many difficulties." ^ Charles, however, was as reckless of opposition in the matter of the Liturgy as his father had been in that of the Perth Articles, and the prelates he favoured most were just those whom the Lord Treasurer abhorred. He objected to the proposed deputation as likely to make "a needless noise"; he found fault with the suspension of the Liturgy, ordered the Council to establish it in Edinburgh, and every bishop, as Maxwell and Wedderburn had done, in his own diocese, and none but conformists to be chosen as magistrates in burghs.* When the Council met on September 20 to consider this reply to their letter, they found themselves besieged by a great concourse of nobles, lairds, and ministers, presenting no fewer than sixty-nine petitions against the Service-Book from all parts of the Lowlands. They sent up three of these petitions and a list of the rest with the Duke of Lennox, who happened to be returning to Court, entreating him to explain the true state of affairs ; and they promised to communicate the King's answer to the petitioners or "supplicants" on October 17. When that day came, and with it, owing to the com pletion of harvest, a greater crowd than before, the King's answer was announced in the shape of three pro clamations, one postponing an answer to the petitioners till they should be in a more peaceable mood, and ordering them all to leave Edinburgh within twenty-four hours, another removing the law courts from Edinburgh to Linlithgow, and a third suppressing a book recently published against "the English-Popish Ceremonies." 1 Burnet's Dukes of Hamilton, p. 40. ^ Balfour's Annals, ii. 232-233. 374 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 The leading petitioners were at no loss whom to hold responsible for these offensive edicts which were pub lished towards evening at the Cross ; and four of them — Lords Balmerino and Loudoun, Dickson and Henderson — were at work nearly all night on a supplication denouncing the bishops as the true authors and illegal enforcers of the Liturgy and Book of Canons, and craving that they should be removed from the Council as interested parties till these grievances had been tried. When this petition was presented next morning for signature, it was subscribed at once by some twenty- four nobles and between two and three hundred lairds ; and amongst the ministers its reception was hardly less favourable, although many of these disliked the Liturgy without at all disapproving of bishops. When Baillie came into the ministers' room late in the afternoon, he found a document "going fast" round, of which several of those who had signed it could give no account ; and he himself was induced to sign the petition, though he thought its framers " much more happy than wise," on an assurance that it militated against the bishops only in so far as they were the authors of the obnoxious Prayer-Book.^ Meanwhile the proclamations of the previous day had created a prodigious ferment in the town — the citizens being no more disposed to submit quietly to the second proclamation than the petitioners from the country to obey the first. Bishop Sydserf of Galloway, who was suspected of having a crucifix in his cabinet and another under his dress, was pursued by some 300 women to the Council House, which he gained only through the exertions of several friends, who "hurled him in at the door"; the Earls of 1 Baillie, i. 35, 36. ANOTHER 'no-popery' RIOT 375 Traquair and Wigtown, after having forced their way to his assistance, were unable to extricate either the Bishop or themselves ; and the magistrates, on receipt of an urgent message from the captives representing their plight, sent back word that they, too, were besieged by the rioters, who had threatened to kill them all, unless they signed a petition against the Service-Book. The two earls contrived at last to make their way in person to the Provost, who could only advise them to return whence they came, and . not to venture out till the tumult was quelled. On the way back — their first attempt to get through having entirely failed — Traquair was thrown down, raised with great difficulty by his friends, and his white staff broken ; and thus, " without hat or cloak, like a notorious malefactor," he was washed up by the mob against the Council House door, behind which the besieged Bishop was still listening in terror to the thunder of the streets. The Provost arrived soon afterwards, confessing his utter inability to con trol the people ; and the refugees had then no alternative but to have recourse to some of the leading petitioners, under whose protection they were piloted with no little difficulty to their homes, the women still railing at S;^dserf with unabated vigour. ^ This second riot, * which is said to have been headed by " the best sort of citizens," was far more serious than the first ; and it was followed by important, though less conspicuous results. At the meeting of Privy Council ' Large Declaration, pp. 35-38, copied almost verbatim by Gordon ; Rothes, pp. 15, 20 ; Guthrie, pp. 24-25. 2 Mr. Gardiner, contrary to the Large Declaration, calls this the third riot ; but the disturbance of September 25, which he counts as one, seems hardly worthy of the name. 376 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 in the afternoon, the petitioners obtained permission to postpone their departure for other twenty-four hours; and, though their complaint against the bishops was rejected as contrary to the late proclamation, they were shown how to obtain for themselves a far more important boon. Bishop Sydserf, and the Provost and Clerk-Regi ster, Sir John Hay,^ complained of the resort of nobles and gentry in such numbers to Edinburgh as the cause of the late tumult; and, in order to provide against such disturbances in future, they proposed that the supplicants should choose certain commissioners to treat with the Council in name of the rest. With the sanction of Sir Thomas Hope, a zealous Puritan, who had been appointed Lord Advocate in 1626 on account of his knowledge of tithes, vainly opposed by Traquair, the petitioners pro ceeded to act on this suggestion at their next meeting on November 15 ; and the Commissioners chosen on that occasion were the forerunners of the permanent body known as the Tables, or Green Tables, in allusion to the table covered with green cloth at which each of the committees sat, consisting respectively of four nobles, four lairds, four burgesses, and four ministers.* Charles had little reason to thank his Advocate for securing him against rioters at the expense of converting rioters into rebels — particularly as he could not hope to overpower the organisation of the Tables as his father had over powered that of the Commissioners of Assembly in 1597. The nobles, who as late as the Parliament of 1621 ' Burton appears not to know that the Clerk -Register and the Provost were one and the same person ; and he shows great ignorance of Sir John Hay's career, when he describes him as "a neutral figure in the confusions of the time." Balfour calls Hay " a slave to the bishops and court " ; and in the Lavge Declaration he and Sir Robert Spottiswoode, the Primate's son, are mentioned as " sworn enemies " to the Covenant. 2 Rothes, pp. 17, 27 ; Baillie, i. 38-40. WITHDRAWAL OF THE BISHOPS 377 had turned the scale in favour of the Perth Articles, were now on the popular side ; the craftsmen of Edinbugh had waxed cold in their loyalty to a non-resident king ; and the ecclesiastical system which Charles upheld had become more hateful to the nation than that which James VI. had successfully opposed. It would appear that the petitioners did not at first realise the full advantage they had gained ; for Baillie confesses that their resolution to elect Commissioners was merely an excuse for their returning in as great a number as possible to prosecute their suit against the bishops.^ The Council, however, was much less concerned about the bishops than about the new organisation which had received a certificate of legality from Sir Thomas Hope ; and in subsequent encounters they strove hard to split up the Commissioners by inducing them to petition separately, according to their several groups. Foiled in this, they sought privately to have the petition so amended that it should apply rather to some bishops alleged to be at fault than to the whole order ; and when this device also failed, they fairly ran away from their tormentors by going out at one door of the Council- House, whilst the Commissioners with a protestation were waiting for them at the other. Meanwhile, however, in order to avoid prejudicing their right by yielding to the declinature which they knew the petitioners were prepared to present against them, the bishops had deemed it prudent to retire ; * and the lay councillors are said to have adroitly hastened their departure by urging it as essential to their personal safety.* On December 19, their agents having this time beset both doors, the Commissioners were promised a full hearing before the Council; and on the 21st, 1 Baillie, i. 39. ^ Ibid. p. 45. ^ Gordon, i. 30. 378 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 after Lord Loudoun had presented the supplication and declinature, and he and two ministers had made speeches in their support, the Council by a formal Act resolved to lay the whole matter before the King. During all these five months Charles had made no serious effort to grapple with the growth of discontent in Scotland, which from the original grievance of the Prayer-Book had now extended to the Book of Canons, the High Commission, and the civil rights of bishops. After the riot of October 18 Traquair had com plained bitterly of " the delay in taking some certain and resolved course," and, as he was not permitted to offer his advice in person, had entreated Hamilton " for God's cause " to prevail upon the King to decide in time, and to state clearly what he wished to be done."^ At last, in the beginning of 1638, the Lord Treasurer obtained leave to come up to Court ; and after he had told Charles plainly that he must either withdraw the Liturgy or support it with an army of 40,000 men,* he was sent back, to his intense disgust, with another of those ridiculous proclamations which proclaimed nothing more loudly than the utter incapacity of the King. A few weeks before, the malcontents had been delighted to hear, as justifying their complaint against the bishops, that Charles had never intended to do anything in religion contrary to the laws of the realm. They were now assured that he was entirely responsible for the Liturgy which they had supposed to be the work of the bishops, and that this book, instead of being a preparative for popery, would prove a ready means to " beat out all superstition," and to maintain religion as at present professed. With this assurance and a pardon for their * Hai'dwicke, State Papers, ii. 96, 97. 2 Venetian Transcripts, quoted by Gardiner, viii. 327. FORMATION OP THE TABLES 379 past offences as done out of " preposterous zeal," they were required to disperse on pain of treason, and not to, re-assemble without the Council's consent.'- The petitioners, as soon as some of them had discovered the purport of this proclamation, resolved to protest against it ; and Traquair, after having tried in vain to dissuade them, was at his wit's end how to get it published without an affront to the King. On February 19 he and Lord Roxburgh rode out of Edinburgh at two in the morning, with a view to outwitting their opponents at Stirling ; but Lord Lindsay and the Earl of Home, hearing of their departure, two hours later, from one of Traquair's footmen, overtook them on the road, and were ready with their protest when the proclamation was read. At Linlithgow and Edinburgh the same formality was observed ; and at Edinburgh the royal mandate is said to have been received "with jeering and laughter" by the crowd.* The measures now adopted by the petitioners showed plainly that they were alive to the responsibility they had incurred by repudiating the King's commands as a mere Act of Council inspired by their enemies the bishops. On February 22, the day of the proclamation at Edinburgh, they despatched an urgent appeal to " all considerable persons" who still held aloof, as well as a letter of information to be circulated by their friends throughout the country ; and on the same day the temporary committees, through which the Commis sioners had been wont to deal with the Council, were superseded or supplemented — for the point is somewhat obscure — by the permanent executive known as the 1 Rothes, pp. 48, 87. 2 Large Declaration, p. 47. 380 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 Tables.^ As a pledge of union against the Council — for Traquair was still labouring to dissolve their organisa tion into its component groups, and some of the bishops had undertaken to satisfy those who would be content wdth the withdrawal of the Liturgy and Canons and a reform of the High Commission — the Tables at once resolved to renew the Covenant or Negative Confession drawn up in 1581 with a view to exposing the hypocrisy of the Jesuit Duke of Lennox,* and to add their owri grievances, by way of postscript, to the long list of papal abominations therein exhaustively enumerated and condemned. The leaders of the movement no doubt foresaw that this bond would not only deeply pledge all moderate Episcopalians who could be induced to subscribe, but would appeal with irre sistible force to the great multitude of uneducated fanatics, whose " whole religion," in the words unjustly applied by Clarendon to the Scottish nation, consisted " in an entire detestation of popery, in believing the Pope to be Antichrist, and hating per fectly the persons of all papists, and I doubt all others who did not hate them." * To retain the Episcopalians, or those of the party who still professed to be such, some slight concessions were made. Baillie obtained the softening of one passage which seemed to imply the lawfulness of armed resistance, and at his request another, contrary to its general tenor, was so amended 1 Gordon, who agrees with Row in ascribing the formation of the Tables to the preceding November, says that a fifth Table, consisting of delegates from the other four, was now formed. The Large Declaration first mentions the Tables under this date. Mr. Gardiner's is probably the true explanation— that commissioners were appointed in November, that these acted through committees, and that the committee appointed on February 22 was the first appointed for more than a special purpose. 2 See p. 222. 3 Clarendon, i. 149. THE COVENANT SIGNED 381 that the subscriber was bound only to abstain from practising " novations " of worship, and from approving " the corruptions of the public government of the kirk " until these had been tried and allowed in Assembly and Parliament.^ To those who objected that the Perth Articles had been established both by Assembly and Parliament, it was answered that " the reason of the law was the force of the law," and that the reason alleged for the Act of Perth was that there was no longer any fear of superstition and idolatry, which now, to all appearance, were more rampant than ever.* Some three or four ministers of Angus, that ancient stronghold of Episcopacy, loyally refused to act contrary to their ordination vows ; * but the great majority of the ministers then in Edinburgh — nearly three hundred in number — subscribed the Covenant on the first of March, 1638. " Many thousands " of nobles and lairds had subscribed on the previous day ; the burgesses sub scribed wdth the ministers ; and during the next two months adherents were being enrolled in almost every Lowland parish. According to the original intention of its promoters, the Covenant was to be offered only to communicants, who might get a notary to sign for them, if they were unable to write ; but in practice it was offered to all who had any wish to subscribe, and to almost all, except Catholics, who had none. Rothes euphemistically says that " this was an oath whereto none were to be compelled, but it was expected all would wdllingly condescend." Four pages further on, he records a ^Baillie, i. 53. The retention of the word "allowed" shows that " corruptions of the public government of the kirk " had been substituted for " Episcopacy." 2 Rothes, p. 73. * Baillie, i. 53. 382 THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1625-1638 resolution of the nobles that those ministers who dis appointed this expectation should " be discountenanced and dishaunted by them all, and all they could per suade";^ and the practice of making Covenanters only of communicants was soon exchanged for that of denying communion to those who would not take the Covenant. Such compulsion, however, amounting in some cases to actual violence, was not often needed ; for Episcopalians more scrupulous than Baillie were allowed to subscribe with a reservation of Episcopacy and the Perth Articles ; the loyalists in general were utterly disheartened by what one of them calls the " long boggling and irreso lution of the King ; * and the frenzy of the populace was an argument even with the boldest not to thwart its humour. Never had there been before, never has there been since, such an astounding exhibition of the perfer- vidum ingenium Scotorum. Nobles and lairds carried the Covenant with them for signature wherever they went ; whole congregations swore to maintain it with uplifted hands ; and all alike, men, women, and mere children, were admitted to the oath. Many subscribed with tears, cursing themselves to all eternity if they should prove unfaithful to their vow ; and some even insisted on signing with their blood. The churches of Covenanting ministers were crowded to overflowing ; and some female enthusiasts, in order to attest their Protestantism by sitting at communion, are said to have kept their seats from Friday to Sunday.* \ 1 Rothes, pp. 75, 79, 80. ^ Lord Hailes's Memorials of the Reign of Charles I, p. 25 — one of three letters written in a singularly polished and incisive style by a person calling himself John de Maria to a person unknown. Napier has disproved Lord Hailes's conjecture that this person was the Duke of Lennox. — Memorials of Montrose and His Times, i. 248, note. 3 Gordon, i. 45, 46 ; Large Declaration, p. 69. CHAPTER XII. PEESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638. The Puritan movement, which had adopted the Covenant as its symbol, was in several respects the counterpart of that which had resulted, nearly eighty years earlier, in the overthrow of the papal power. Professing their fidelity to an absentee sovereign, the Covenanters^ appealed from the King's Council to the King, just as the Reformers had appealed from the Queen Regent to the Queen ; and the great majority of the nobles resisted Charles as repre sented by his Council from the same motives which had led their ancestors to bear arms against Mary of Lorraine. Amongst the Covenanting peers, as amongst the Lords of the Congregation, there were some whose zeal for religion was not w^hoUy assumed. The Earls of Rothes and Eglinton, Lords Balmerino, Tester, Burleigh, and Cowper, influenced perhaps to some extent by jealousy of the bishops, had opposed the ratification of the Perth Articles in the Parliament of 1621 ; and others may very well have resented the King's pretensions to dispose at pleasure of the ritual ^ " A name, which they are not ashamed of, although their adversaries have put it upon them."— Anonymous letter iu Hailes's Memorials, p. 70. 384 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 and discipline of the Church. It was mainly, how ever, throughi the votes of the nobility that the Perth Articles had passed into law; Rothes and Loudoun had been despatched to Court to represent the grievances of the tithe-owners in 1626 ; and Charles could point very plausibly to the fact that the leaders of the Covenanters were the same men who had resisted the commutation of tithes and had dis played their "thwarteous humour" during his visit to Scotland in 1633. We have seen that the race of lay commendators had looked with disfavour on the efforts of the last Catholic primate to anticipate revolution by reform ; and Charles I.'s Act of Revo cation was a still more direct challenge to those who, as Lords of Erection, had engrossed the abbey lands. The nobles suspected Charles, even after their grants had been confirmed to them anew, of an intention to complete the hierarchy by adding abbots to bishops, probably with a view to reviving what had once been the ecclesiastical wing of the Court of Session ; and considerable alarm was excited amongst them in 1636 by the presentation, which, however, never took effect, of a minister named Lear- month to the abbacy of Lindores.^ ' But, if in these respects the Protestant and the- Puritan revolutions may be said to correspond, there are others in which they entirely disagree. The revolt of Charles's reign was a popular movement headed by the nobles, that of Mary's an aristocratic movement identified for purposes of its own with a small religious sect. The mob, indeed, played a considerable part in both revolutions ; but the " rascal multitude " of Knox's day, neither Papist nor Protestant, was as 1 Baillie, i. 6 ; Row, p. 389 ; Burnet's Dukes of Hamilton, p. 38. NOT A PATRIOTIC MOVEMENT 385 ready to set up a Lord of Misrule or to resist the carting of an adulterer as to practise iconoclasm at the expense of the monks. In the reign of Charles the populace had absorbed the worst elements of that Protestantism which had once been confined to "the nobility and others of borough and town";^ and Scotland in its Covenanting frenzy of 1638 presents a strange contrast to the apathetic Scotland of 1559, when "men had no will to hazard," when "the most part apparently took no great care of God's word," and when Randolph almost despaired of his mission amongst a people with " so little love to God or zeal to their country." * "^ We have seen how the politics of the Reformation encroached on its religion, and how the men, who had taken up arms on behalf of the new faith, were content to wield them in defence of the national honour. No such change of policy occurred in 1638;* but this in itself is no argument against the common view that the success of the Covenant was due to a great outburst of patriotic feeling. Even if Luther or Calvin had been a name to conjure with in Scotland, the Reformers would still have been disposed to magnify the French ' It is thus that the English Government sums up the forces of Pro testantism in Scotland in March, 1561. — Foreign Calendar, 1561-1562, No. 57. ^ See pp. 67, 70. ^In the letter of appeal to Louis XIII. which Charles discovered in 1639, the Covenanters did attempt for once to shift the Covenant from a religious to a political basis. It is curious to find them in this letter complaining of English aggression to France, just as the Reformers had complained of French aggression to England ; and it seems that about the same time Richelieu, like a second Cecil, was successfully impressing on Sir Robert Murray, one of the Scotsmen at the French Court, that the independence as well as the religion of his country was at stake.— Gordon's Britan^s Distemper, p. 6. 2b 386 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 design of conquest as the only thing that was at all likely to bring Elizabeth to their side, whereas the Covenanters, looking mainly to the English Puritans, had every inducement to keep religion in the front. It would seem, however, that the difference in this respect between the Protestant and th,e Puritan revolutions is due simply to the fact that the integrity of the kingdom was in grave danger in 1559 and was in no danger at all in 1638. From nothing that Charles ever did could it be supposed that he harboured a design against the liberties of his native country, for which, according to Lord Clarendon, he had the most jealous regard. The understanding with the English Puritans, which is said to have been a great inducement with many to sign the Covenant,^ would have sufficed of itself to prevent any strong anti- English feeling ; and if such a feeling existed, it is strange that we find no trace of it in the temper of the mob. The truth is that in 1638 the "non-popery" agitation was sufficient to sw^allow up every Other issue ; and it was not till that agitation had burned itself out, fifty years later, that the nation awoke to the wider destiny, which had revealed itself at the Reforma tion to the greatest Scotsman of the age. So long as no concessions were made by the King, the discontent in Scotland needed only to be organ ised ; and the leaders, especially Rothes and Henderson, were quite equal to the task. John Leslie, sixth Earl of Rothes, was a man of the most genial disposition, sprightly, affable, and facetious in manner, a prodigious talker, popular alike with zealots, politicians, and lovers of pleasure, and so little of a Puritan at heart that Clarendon describes him as " very free and amorous, and unrestrained in his discourse by any scruples of 1 Gordon, i. 48. HENDERSON AND JOHNSTON 387 religion, which he only put on when the part he had to act required it, and then no man could appear more conscientiously transported." Alexander Henderson, minister of Leuchars in Fife, had distinguished himself by his opposition to the Perth Articles in the Assembly of 1618 ; and he was one of many ministers, such as Scot and Row, the Presbyterian annalists. Cant, Dickson, Porteous, and Sommerville, who, though they never con formed and never ceased to agitate against the hierarchy, were suffered, in most cases unmolested, to retain their livings. About 1630 he is said to have superseded Scot as the leader of the Puritan party ; ^ and after the outbreak of the troubles he was the foremost of a trium virate completed by Dickson and Cant, and characterised by a loyalist divine as the Apostles of the Covenant. Henderson, however, unlike Knox and Melville, was less of an apostle than a man of affairs — temperate in speech, sagacious and practical ; and his biographer truly says that he was the only one of the three who combined the suaviter in modo with the fortiter in re. The most extreme man among the Covenanters was, the young advocate, Johnston of Warriston, the writer of all their manifestoes and protestations, and joint author with Henderson of the Covenant itself Johnston, though a shrewd lawyer, was a fanatic of the purest type. His nephew Burnet describes him as a man of intense application, who could seldom sleep for more than three hours in the twenty-four, a fluent and powerful speaker, so copiously devout that he would often pray in his family for two hours at a stretch, and " out of measure zealous " for the Covenant, which he regarded " as the setting of Christ on his throne." * 1 Alton's Life of Henderson, pp. 104-106. 2 History of His Own Time, i. 49, 50. 388 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 If the protest at Stirling had been the declaration, the Covenant was virtually the first act, of war ; for the oath, which the petitioners were exacting from the King's subjects, was a clear violation of his sovereign rights, and to the bond in the original Covenant in defence of the King they had added another in de fence of themselves against all persons whatsoever. On the first of March, when the ministers and burgesses were signing the Covenant at Edinburgh, the Privy Council met at Stirling ; and after three days' discussion they sent the Justice- Clerk, Sir John Hamilton, to Court with instructions, endorsed by Spottiswoode and four other bishops, to represent to the King their unanimous opinion that "the general combustions in the country" were due to the Liturgy, Book of Canons, and High Commission, and to "the introduction thereof contrary to or without warrant of the laws of the kingdom." ^ Charles, however, was not prepared even yet to admit, or at all' events to act upon, this half-truth, which had once been the whole ; and whilst he added two more months to the seven already wasted, the Covenanters of both sexes lost no opportunity of asserting their power. Recusant ministers were deprived of their stipends, threatened with violence, and in some cases cruelly ill-used. One minister was assaulted by the women of Edin burgh for referring to the Virgin Mary in terms which Baillie believed to have been perfectly correct ; another at Torphichen, on the Sunday after his people had subscribed the Covenant, was set upon in church, soundly beaten, and his gown torn into rags; similar outrages occurred at Lanark, Markinch, and Kirkmichael ; and Bishop Sydserf, after having ^ Burnet, pp. 44-46. PERSECUTION OF LOYALISTS 389 narrowly escaped violence at Stirling, was stoned on his way to Edinburgh by the "wives of Falkirk." Loyalists of good family were debarred from the communion, those of humble rank imprisoned or set in the stocks. In the west the inns are said to have been closed against all who were not Covenanters, and the list of those who had subscribed in each shire was soon supplemented by another list of those who had not. The presbyteries were incited or com pelled to get rid of non-juring moderators, to grant collation to livings without consulting the bishop, to depose ministers who refused to read the Covenant, or where they were not deposed, to supersede them by giving them Puritan colleagues. Most of the ministers thus intruded on the Church were Presby terians of the straitest sect — men who had been banished to Ireland for nonconformity and driven out of it for the same cause ; and Traquair com plained to Hamilton that these fanatics were infiam- ing the people to madness with their "foolish, seditious doctrine."^ Charles had a difficult part to play; for whatever con cessions he granted to the Scottish Puritans might be demanded by the English, and in view of the discontent at home, it might be as hard for him to wage war in such a cause as it now was to avert it. The charge against Charles is not that he succumbed to these difficulties, which might easily have overpowered a far stronger king, but that he shut his eyes to them, and never really tried to grapple with them at all. For the last nine months he had steadily refused to make any concessions to men who were continually, demanding 1 Hardwicke State Papers, ii. 107 ; Baillie, i. 51, 76 ; 'BaHqs's Memorials, pp. 25-27 ; Burnet, pp. 53-54. 390 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 more; and this policy would at least have been intelligible, if, as soon as the troubles in Scotland became serious, he had prepared for the worst. The wiser course would doubtless have been to have withdrawn the Liturgy, or at all events to have promised not to re-introduce it without the consent of the Church. /When the trouble began, in addition to the few who were really in sympathy with Laud, there was a large party amongst the ministers, described by Baillie as " the most and most considerable of all the clergy of Scotland,"^ who had no objection to Episcopacy and the Perth Articles, and who would not have objected even to the Liturgy in the modified form in which alone it could have been legally introduced. The misfortune was that Charles did not attempt to win, or rather to retain, this class, until through his own obstinacy and the terrorism exercised by the Covenanters it had almost ceased to exist. At length, wearied of passive resistance, Charles realised the necessity of doing something, which, if it did not secure peace, would at least give him time to prepare for war. He resolved to negotiate ; and the bishops having contrived to impair Traquair's credit without adding anything to their own, the Marquis of Hamilton, much against his will, was entrusted with the task. Hamilton as Commissioner left London, towards the end of May, with two proclamations and a royal warrant, authorising him to use either, and in certain circumstances to issue a third. The Canons, the Liturgy, and the High Commission were not to be withdrawn ; but the Commissioner was to announce that the first two would not be pressed, except in " a fair and legal way," and that the last would be so reformed that it should 1 Letters, i. 36. HAMILTON'S MISSION 391 not infringe the laws or be just cause of complaint. After these assurances, he might either require the Covenanters to abjure their bond and to surrender all copies of it to the Council, according to the first pro clamation, or he might exhort them in general terms to obedience, according to the second ; but, if he took the latter course, and the Covenant was not voluntarily given up within six weeks, then he was to issue the third proclamation, declaring the Covenanters traitors, unless they made full submission within eight days.^ By his own confession Hamilton had " no hope in the world of doing good without coming to blows " ; * and he had travelled no further than Berwick when he assured the King that, from all he could learn, his subjects would yield to no argument but force. At Edinburgh, which he entered on June 7 between two rows of supplicants a mile and a half long, the outlook was still more discouraging. The Covenanters, whilst freely importing weapons from abroad, had set a watch round the castle to prevent its receiving a ship-load of arms ; they demanded the abolition of the Perth Articles and of Episcopacy in all but name ; and if Charles would not summon a Parliament for this purpose, they talked of summoning one themselves.* So little disposed were they to renounce the Covenant that they were pressing it on the Lords of Session, and had even solicited the King's Commissioner to subscribe. When Hamilton, half in jest, ventured to suggest that they should dissolve the league, Rothes told him that there was not one of them who would not rather quit his life— he himself "would not wish to be King over so many man-sworn dogs," and it would be much to His Majesty's 1 Burnet, pp. 56-58 ; Hamilton Papers, p. 2. 2 Gardiner, viii. 341. ' Hamilton Papers, p. 6. 392 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 advantage, if his subjects in England and Ireland were to subscribe the same bond.^ In these circumstances, even before he arrived at Edinburgh, Hamilton had resolved to " divide " the pro clamation, that is, apparently, to publish the second and least offensive form without following it up with the third ; but, in the vain hope of dissuading the Coven anters from their purpose of protesting, he delayed its publication from day to day. Charles's chief anxiety now was to stave off the inevitable conflict, which, his Commissioner assured him, would be "a difficult work and bloody " ; and with this view he told Hamilton not to issue the third proclamation, even though the six weeks had elapsed, until he should hear from himself that the fleet had sailed for Scotland. Hamilton, how ever, was so "pressed beyond expression " with demands for an Assembly and Parliament that matters threatened to come to a crisis much sooner than his master desired. He was anxious on any pretext to get the swarm of petitioners out of Edinburgh ; and towards the end of June, driven to his "last shifts," he promised to lay their demands in person before the King, on condition that they dispersed to their homes and did not re-assemble before his return in the beginning of August. Hamilton had already started for Court, when he received a despatch from Charles, requiring him to publish the second proclamation, extended in such a way as to suggest some vague hope of an Assembly and Parlia ment ; and this he did at Edinburgh on July 4. The Covenanters replied with a protestation, in which they claimed the right, in the last resort, to hold an Assembly on their own authority ; and next day the majority of those who had signed the Act of Council approving the 1 Rothes, pp. 117, 122, 15l' 159. MONTROSE AS A COVENANTER 393 proclamation, professed such remorse for what they had done that Hamilton, in order to prevent them subscrib ing the Covenant, was feign to tear up the Act before their eyes.^ Whilst the Commissioner was absent in England, the Covenanters sent some of their number to proselytise in Aberdeen, where the King's cause was upheld by the group of learned divines formed by Bishop Patrick Forbes, and now presided over by his son. Dr. John Forbes of Corse. The deputation was headed by one who stands forth in the full stature of greatness amongst the small shadowy figures of that bustling time. In this his twenty-third year James Graham, Earl and future Marquis of Montrose, was in his first enthusiasm for the Covenant. Baillie refers to him as having been won over by " the canniness of Rothes " ; * and his conduct may have been influenced by the cold reception which Hamilton, on his return from France, is said to have procured for him at Court, and by the fear, also, it is said, instilled into him by Hamilton, that Charles meant to reduce Scotland to an English province.* But a young man of high spirit, who "lived as in a romance";* and whose love of heroism had been stirred to emulatiop by the reading of Plutarch's Lives, could hardly have failed to seek distinction where it could most readily be found. Montrose had imbibed from his kinsman and guardian. Lord Napier, an antipathy to bishops as well as a deep distrust of Hamilton ; and he himself had a political theory — or at all events he had such a theory two years later — which must have drawn him to the ^ Charles's letters to Hamilton are printed in Burnet, and Hamilton's to Charles in the Hamilton Papers, edited by Mr. Gardiner for the Camden Society. 2 Baillie, ii. 261 . ^ Heylyn, p. 373. * Burnet's Own Time, i. 53. 394 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 popular side. He believed that the two worst abuses of government were an "extended power," which is despotism, and a " restrained power" which means the tyranny of the strong over the weak ; and Scotland was now suffering from the first of these evils as in after days it suffered from the second.^ Even Montrose's ardour could obtain no more than twenty subscriptions in Aberdeen. His clerical asso^ ciates were excluded from the pulpit ; and after preach ing for two days with little result from a balcony in the town, they were involved in a little war of pamphlets, in which the arguments against the Covenant appear to have been much stronger than those used in its defence. Hamilton returned to Edinburgh on August 10. Charles was now prepared to summon an Assembly on the understanding that the bishops should be members, that all ministers and moderators of presbyteries deprived for refusing the Covenant should be restored, that moderators of presbyteries should have seats in the Assembly ex officio, and that no lay person should take part in the choice of commissioners. Hamilton, how ever, soon found that the bishops would be suffered to appear only for the purpose of being deposed, and that the laity meant both to control the elections to the Assembly and to be present in large numbers themselves. This last point had almost caused a rupture between the ministers and their lay associates, for the right of elders ' Napier's Memoirs of Montrose, pp. 281-289. It is remarkable that even at this period Hamilton questioned the depth of Montrose's attachment to the Covenant. In November of this year, having enumerated the principal lay leaders — Rothes, Balmerino, Lindsay, Lothian, Loudoun, Yester, Cranston— he says, " There are many others as forward in show ; amongst whom none more vainly foolish than Montrose." — Letter to Charles, Hardwicke State Papers, ii. 117. THE king's CONCESSIONS 395 to sit in presbyteries had been in abeyance for nearly forty years. ^ The ministers, however, were soon coerced into submission to the other three Tables; and Hamilton, though Charles had instructed him " to yield anything, though unreasonable, rather than now to break," deemed it advisable on this point to appeal in person to the King.* After an absence of three weeks, the Commissioner arrived at Edinburgh for the third time on Septem ber 17. Charles's policy now was to grant all the formal demands of the Covenanters, and by satisfying the less violent to prevent the extremists from de manding more. The Canons, the Liturgy, and the High Commission were to be absolutely given up ; the Perth Articles were to be discharged, and, at the pleasure of Parliament, repealed ; and Episcopacy was to^ be limited with such restrictions as should accord with the laws of the Church and kingdom. On the other hand, Hamilton was to labour by all possible means to stir up the ministers against the laity, and the laity against the ministers ; and the Negative Confession of 1581 as adopted by the Covenanters was to be superseded by the same Confession supple mented by a bond in defence of the true religion, the Crown and kingdom, which James VI. had authorised in the year after the defeat of the Armada. This last device Charles had reluctantly adopted at the instance of Traquair, who hoped to confound the malcontents by making the King himself a party to their "no-popery" zeal. On the 22nd, after a long ^ " That custom hath been these 35 years by-past universally (and above forty years in most Presbyteries) interrupted."— Petition against lay elders presented to the Assembly : Large Declaration, p. 266. ^Burnet, p. 83 ; Large Declaration, pp. iii. 123 ; Baillie, i. 99, 100. 396 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 debate, the Privy Councillors were prevailed upon to sign the Confession and bond, to pass an Act offering their lives and fortunes in defence of the royal authority, and to draw up a letter to the King, thanking him in the most extravagant terms for his " transcendent grace." Immediately thereafter, a pro clamation was published at the Cross announcing the King's concessions, enjoining the new Covenant, and appointing an Assembly to be held at Glasgow on November 21, and a Parliament at Edinburgh on May 15. The Covenanters, who had other friends at Holyrood besides Sir Thomas Hope, had laboured for four hours to avert, or at least to post pone, the decision of the Council ; and in a docu ment of even more than the usual length, which they caused to be printed, they protested against the pro clamation, chiefly on the ground that it limited the freedom of the Assembly, and that the signing of the King's Covenant would invalidate their own.^ Charles had good reason to resent " this last damnable protestation," which had no other object than to intimidate the non-Presbyterians, and to deter them from that full submission to which most of them were much inclined. Rollock, who signed the pro testation on behalf of the ministers, is said to have had no authority from the Table, w^hich had shown great repugnance to any such measure ; and the protesters had some difficulty in re-establishing their authority in Glasgow, where the people, though aware of what had been done at Edinburgh, had not only received the proclamation with the utmost joy, but had sent two letters of thanks to the Commissioner — one from the Town Council, and another from the clergy. 1 Burnet, pp. 89-103 ; Lan-ge Declaration, pp. 134-173. "the she PROPHETESS" 397 Wherever the proclamation arrived before the protes tation, it was cordially received ; and in many places the protestation was disowned by the Covenanters themselves.^ It is probable, however, that the King evoked as much ill-feeling by his adoption of the Covenant as the Covenanters by their protestation. The zealots attacked the new bond as a trick of Satan to make them perjure themselves by abandon ing the old ; and the cool-headed denounced it quite as strongly as a piece of mundane strategy designed to break up the league. 28,000 signatures are said to have been obtained, 12,000 of these in and around Aberdeen ; * but the " small party," which Hamilton claimed to have detached from the original Covenant, was a mere apology for the great host of subscribers which, in Traquair's expectation, was to have over whelmed the King's enemies without assistance from England. Meanwhile the "bangster Amazons" had not forgotten their part. At Kinghorn in July, by such forcible arguments as " wounds and blood," they had made a zealous Covenanter of one Dr. Monro ; at Edinburgh in October they visited Dr. Eliot "with many sad strokes," because he had occupied the pulpit when they expected another preacher ; * and about the same time a great impression was produced by a less formidable enthusiast of the same sex. This was a mad woman named Michelson — "the she Prophetess," as Gordon redundantly calls her — ^who, lying face downwards in bed, uttered much "holy tautological nonsense," which was inter preted to mean that the original Covenant was ratified in Heaven, and that the King's had emanated from Hell. 1 Large Declaration, pp. 185-188 ; Baillie, i. 106. 2 Burnet, p. 110. * Baillie, i. 94, 98, 109. 398 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 Great numbers of people listened devoutly to this poor maniac in her fits ; and by some of these the Earl of Airth, who had altered a copy of her ravings so as to express his contempt, was in some danger of being stoned.^ Charles had now a pretext for withdrawing, or at all events for postponing, the concessions which had been received in so unbecoming a spirit. The bishops, who from the first had opposed the holding of an Assembly, urged many reasons for its prorogation in a letter to Laud. Hamilton argued against this on the ground that the Covenanters would still proceed with the Assembly, whether Charles prorogued it or not, and that a prorogation would only confirm the assertions of those who had persuaded many that none of the concessions would ever be made good.* Looking to the possibility of drawing off a party for the King, he proposed, and Charles agreed, that the Assembly should be allowed to meet, and that he should then, or soon after, dissolve it on the ground of certain "nullities" in its constitution, of the accumulation of which he had for some time been taking a diligent account. Before the end of September jnost of the presbyteries had chosen their commissioners ; and the commissioners were chosen in a manner which says little for the sincerity of those who at that very time were protesting against the King's proclamation as prejudicial to the freedom of the Assembly. A blank commission, con demnatory of the late innovations, and blank only to those who had not been entrusted with the names,* was '^ Large Declaration, pp. 226-228 ; Gordon, i. 131, 132. 2 Hamilton Papers, pp. 47-48. 2 " Thirty-nine presbyteries already had chosen their commissioners, as they were desired." — Baillie, i. 107. PACKING THE ASSEMBLY 399 sent down from the Tables ; and, apart from certain private instructions which forbad the election of chapter-men, members of the High Commission, and ministers who had conformed to the Liturgy and Canons, the presbytery was to be constituted in such a way that the commissioner could hardly fail to be of the right stamp. Every kirk-session was to be represented by the minister and one elder ; and as the laymen would thus be equal in number to the clergy, and as the three clerical commissioners were chosen out of a leet of either four or six, all of whom withdrew before the election, the laity, if united, could carry whatever candidates they pleased. It is said that in some presbyteries the ministers chosen had only one clerical vote, and that in all cases they were elected by a majority of lay elders. By this means the nobles and gentry hoped to root out the bishops, and at the same time, as they told Hamilton, to re-establish Presby terianism under such conditions as should secure them, against its tyrannical power. ^ That such measures should have been needed to secure the co-operation of the clergy is sufficient evidence how widely Episcopacy had struck its roots amongst them in little more than thirty years. The ministers, as a body, had no quarrel with a system of government under which they had doubled their stipends and attained to a con siderable degree of culture, as well as of social importance and well-being. It was not Episcopacy that had caused a revolution in the Church, but the ritualistic movement initiated by James VI. , and developed by Charles in conjunction with Maxwell and Laud; and but for Charles's long refusal to withdraw a Liturgy illegally 1 Large Declaration, pp. 129, 189-192, 266 ; Hamilton's speech to the Assembly in Burnet, p, 129. 400 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 introduced, the nobles could never have carried the clergy with them so far. The majority of the ministers had become reconciled, if not positively attached, even to the Perth Articles ; and the minority, which was willing to go the whole way with Laud, is described by a contemporary as not "inconsiderable either for number or learning." ^ Episcopacy, in fact, was as dear to this generation of clergy as Presbytery had been to the one before ; and the Covenanters were as slow to disclose their design of abolishing, as James had been to disclose his of introducing, bishops.* The Covenanters, having now ensured the con demnation of Episcopacy, had nothing more to do than to bring its representatives to trial ; and on October 24 those of them who were not commissioners presented an indictment to the Presbytery of Edinburgh against Bishop David Lindsay and the other thirteen prelates. The constitutional charge against the bishops was reasonable enough in so far as it accused them of having brought in the Canons, the Liturgy, and the High Commission contrary to law, and of having obtained consecration in England without the consent of the Church. With these exceptions, the charge was more irrelevant than true. It was absurd to represent the Anglican consecration as an infringement of the Act of Assembly of 1580 abolishing the episcopal office, which had long since been implicitly repealed ; and there was no ground at all for the first and most important charge, that the bishops had violated the "caveats" enacted by the Assembly of 1600 at 1 Gordon, i. 16. 2 Baillie says that " at the first forming " of the Covenant, " any design or hope to have gotten down Bishops altogether did appear in no man, to my knowledge." — i. 182. THE ASSEMBLY MEETS 401 Montrose. We have seen that the svstem of election, to which these restrictions referred, had never been put into practice, that James VI. had set it aside only six months later, and that the Assembly in 1602 had expressly adopted the King's mode of making bishops at the expense of its own.^ The rest of the indictment was a strange mixture of honest Puritanism, blank ignorance, and intemperate zeal. The bishops were accused of inculcating auricular confession, of changing the sacrament into a sacrifice, the table into an altar, and ministers into priests, of denying the Pope to be Antichrist, of opposing the Calvinistic theology, and of restraining discipline " against Papists, Sorcerers, Adulterers, and other gross offenders " ; and the indict ment concluded with an intimation that they were ' slandered constantly " as being guilty of all manner of sins, from profanation of the Sabbath to drunkenness, perjury, adultery, and incest. The Presbytery having referred the accusation to the Assembly, as its authors desired, ordered it to be read in every church by the minister or reader ; and thus on the following Sunday the bishops were held up to public infamy on charges of the grossest kind, not one of which their enemies were ever able to prove. On Wednesday, November 21, 1638, the Assembly opened at Glasgow in the noble minster, under whose spacious roof Scotsmen for so many generations had met for worship, and, after the lapse of seven-and-a-half centuries, are meeting still. Hamilton professed to Charles that never since Christianity began had " such a crew assembled together, and that in such equipage 1 " As for that Act at Montrose, let them answer to it that have their calling by that commission." — Bishops' Declinature ; Large Declaration, p. 261. 2c 402 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 ... to treat in ecclesiastic affairs."^ Hardly any of the clergy wore gowns, and most of the laymen had daggers or swords. In addition to a crowd of witnesses and petitioners, and " huge numbers of people ... in the vaults above," each of the 240«members of Assembly was attended by two, if not three or four, assessors ; and the confusion and uproar at the opening of each sitting were so great that Baillie complains that his country-' men " might learn from Canterbury, yea from the Pope, from the Turks or Pagans, modesty and manners." * A declinature had been drawn up at great length in the name of six bishops and carefully revised by the King, protesting against the Assembly as a packed convention of laymen, and of ministers elected by laymen, who had avowed themselves enemies to episcopal rule. On the second day, after the formal business of the first, Hamilton desired that this docu ment should be read ; but the Assembly insisted on electing a Moderator, to which office Henderson was unanimously called, and on the third day, after choosing Johnston of Warriston as Clerk, they still refused to hear the declinature, although Hamilton and Traquair argued warmly that, as a protest against the constitution of the Assembly, it ought to be read before the com missions were approved. During the reading of the commissions it transpired that Erskine of Dun had been elected lay elder by a few of the Presbytery of Brechin, that the Presbytery at a fuller meeting had elected Lord Carnegie, and that the Tables had rejected the second return as contrary to their direction. On Tuesday, the 27th, the long-deferred declinature was admitted and read ; and Hamilton in its support pro duced three protestations against the intrusion of lay 1 Hamilton Papers, p. 59. 2 Baillie, i. 123. ILLEGALITIES EXPOSED 403 elders — one signed by twenty ministers in name of the Church, another from certain ministers and laymen of Dundee, and a third from eight ministers, including several Covenanters, of the Presbytery of Glasgow. This last was withdrawn at the request of the Principal of the University, Dr. Strang ; and Hamilton learned, to his great indignation, that the Moderator and others had sent for Strang on the previous night, and when other arguments failed, had told him plainly that, unless he withdrew the protestation, they would " deal with him as an open enemy." ^ On Wednesday, after a long debate in which he maintained against Balcanquhal* that the bishops were as amenable to the Assembly as the Remonstrants to the Synod of Dort, the Moderator said curtly that, since the competence as well as the legality of the Assembly was called in question, it behoved them to decide both points by putting them to the vote. Hamilton now saw that the crisis had come. In an able speech, suggestive of what Baillie calls his " brave and masterlike expression," he showed that the Covenanters had so "handled and marred the matter" that that Assembly could not be called free "by any man who hath not given a bill of divorce both to his understanding and conscience." He pointed out that Tihe voting of lay elders could not be revived without authority after being in abeyance for forty years ; that in every presbytery the lay elders had | outvoted the ministers, which was contrary even to the Second Book of Discipline ; that most of the elders, if 1 These are the words of Baillie (i. 134), who himself assisted to coerce the Principal. 2 Balcanquhal was Hamilton's chaplain, and the author of the Large Declaration. 404 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 not all, had been admitted after the proclamation of the Assembly, and some the very day before the election ; that some were minors ; that some were not resident within their respective presbyteries ; that some had no authority from the kirk-sessions ; and that the commissioners had no right to bring assessors, without whose consent some of them had sworn not to vote. As to the clerical members, he asserted that some had never been ordained, that many had been illegally admitted or restored; and in conclusion, he asked how the Assembly could be, lawful, when its members were pledged to overturn the whole ecclesiastical system existing under King and Parliament by the statute law.^ Henderson in reply to this speech won the Commis sioner's approval "as a good Christian and dutiful subject" by pleading in very moderate terms for the prerogative of the Church ; but when Rothes and Loudoun ventured to challenge his assertions as to the pre-limiting of the Assembly, Hamilton produced two documents well fitted to establish their truth. One of these, without date, contained nothing more remarkable than the first article, in which allusion was made to the misery " inexpressibly great " which would befall the Covenanters, if their adversaries " shall prevail over us in a free General Assembly." The other, of the same date as the public instructions already mentioned, and to "be discovered to none but to brethren well affected to the cause," was much more ' Burnet, pp. 128-133. It is probable that this speech was only partially delivered ; for the greater part of it is engrossed without acknowledgment in the Large Declaration as the King's reasons for holding the Assembly to be null. It appears from Baillie (i. 124) that Hamilton did not deliver at all the speech he had prepared for the opening day. THE ORDER TO DISPERSE 405 explicit. It provided, amongst other things, that none hut Covenanters, "and those well-affected," should be chosen as ruling elders; that the ruling elders should come to the presbytery in equal numbers with the ministers, and "put themselves in ' possession notwith standing any opposition"; that the Commissioners of the Shire should convene the elders of the presbytery, " and enjoin them upon their oath that they give vote to none but to those who are named already in the meeting at Edinburgh." Hamilton admitted that these instructions had been sent without the knowledge of the " public Tables " ; but he easily disposed of the plea "that they might be some private advices from one friend to another " by showing that he had received identical copies from different parts of the country, and all, as he afterwards assured Charles, from indignant Covenanters.^ After some further^ debate, Hamilton dissolved the Assembly, and commanded the members to disperse on pain of treason. The Covenanters replied with a protestation "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the only Head and Monarch of his own Church," during the reading of which, at four o'clock on Novem ber 28, the King's Commissioner withdrew.* On the previous day, in very bitter terms, Hamil ton had announced the impending rupture to the ' In their protestation at Edinburgh on December 18, the Covenanters asserted that this second paper was a forgery " craftily intermixed " with two articles borrowed from the true copy of their private instructions, which is printed in the appendix to Baillie, i. 469. But the paper could not have been forged by Covenanters ; and Gordon tells us that, twenty years later, persons known to him had " preserved the principal copies of these private instructions which were then denied ; and they are to be seen, subscribed by the Clerk of the Tables' hand." — Scots Affairs, i. 190. The Clerk of the Tables, as of the Assembly, was Johnston. 2 For the Glasgow Assembly, see the Large Declaration, pp. 234-302 ; Baillie, i. 118-143 ; Peterkin's Records, pp. 128-147. 406 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 King, protesting with suspicious vehemence that he had done his best, even to the straining of his con science, and laying the blame on every available shoulder but his own. He complained of Traquair for quarrelling with the bishops, and of the bishops for needlessly provoking Traquair ; he said he hated Scotland "next to Hell," and prayed that his sons should be bred in England, and that his daughters should never marry Scotsmen. The third Marquis of Hamilton was a true representative of that diffident, irresolute, and mysterious house ; and his character, the subject of more discussion than it would seem to deserve, suggests the type of profundity satirised in Dean Swift's simile of the well which " will pass for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark." His position in Scotland might have compromised a much franker man. He had succeeded Buckingham as the King's closest and most intimate friend, yet he had pretensions to the Scottish crown which had given rise to serious inquiry at Court. His mother, the daughter of the Earl of Glencairn, was a fanatical Covenanter. His two sisters were both married to Covenanting peers — one to the Earl "of Cassillis, the other to Lord Lindsay ; and, as he often reminded Rothes in their private interviews, he had too great a stake in the country not to be anxious for its peace. Circum stances had thus conspired with his natural disposi tion to make Hamilton — ^what Lord Shelburne was a century and a half later — the most thoroughly dis trusted statesman of his time. Sir Philip Warwick, in explanation of his "serpentine winding," remarks that eVW in youth " the air of his countenance had such a cloud on it that nature seems to have im- HAMILTONS DOUBLE-DEALING 407' pressed aliquid insigne " ; Clarendon refers to " his natural darkness and reservation in discourse " ; Baillie, who really admired him, complains on one occasion that his " ways were so ambiguous that nO' man understood him"; and Heylyn calls him "a notable dissembler, true only to his own ends, and a most excellent master in the art of insinuation.'" In spite of all his protestations, it is tolerably certain that Hamilton had striven rather to preserve peace and to secure immunity to himself in the event of war than to discharge his duty to the King.. ' Baillie mentions incidentally that, before his appoint ment as Commissioner, he had privately encouraged the malcontents to proceed with their supplications ; ^ and Bishop Guthrie tells against him a remarkable story which he professes to have received from Montrose, and also at second-hand from a minister, both of whom were present when the incident took place. It seems that on July 5, the day on which he was. forced to tear up the Act of Council, Hamilton went out of the room with a deputation of Covenan ters, and addressed them thus : " My Lords and Gentle men, I spoke to you before those . Lords of Council as the King's Commissioner. Now, there being none- present but yourselves, I speak to you as a kindly Scotchman. If you go on with courage and resolu tion, you will carry what you please ; but if you faint and give ground in the least, you are undone.. A word is enough to wise men."* 1 Baillie, i. 99. 2 Guthrie's Memoirs, pp. 34-35. Sir James Turner, however, remarks. that, if Guthrie got this story from Montrose, it is strang^that the latter did not include it amongst the charges which he brought against Hamilton at Oxford in 1643.— Turner's Memoirs, p. 235. 408 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 The charge of trying to serve two masters was pre ferred with much less reason against the Lord Treasurer, Traquair, whose loyalty had indeed been severely tried. We have seen that for nine months Charles made no •effort to stem the tide of discontent in Scotland, except by occasionally rebuking it at the Market Cross ; and Traquair, who had to play the chief part in this solemn trifling, might w^ell take God to witness that he was "never so perplexed what to do." Without express authority, he could not venture to resist ; and if he gave way, he was " calumniated as an underhand conniver." ^ In such circumstances it would not have been surprising if the Lord Treasurer had privately •encouraged the supplicants with a view to putting pressure on the King. Of this, however, apart from the idle gossip of Guthrie and Spalding, there is no good evidence, beyond the statement of Rothes that soon after Hamilton's arrival as Commissioner, and pro bably under his influence, he counselled the Covenanters to " deal for " an Assembly and Parliament ; and Traquair's loyalty is reluctantly admitted by Lord Lindsay, who writes of him as " having shown himself so small a friend to our business and so earnest in that was commanded him by His Majesty."* In personal ¦character Traquair was as great a contrast to Hamilton as can well be conceived. He was a violent, impetuous, much-swearing man, prone to carry everything before him in what Baillie calls "a spate of passion," the best ^ Traquair to Hamilton, October 19, 1637. — Hardwicke State Papers, ii. 96. ^ Rothes, p. 147 ; Hamilton Papers, p. 101. Burnet's statement {History ¦of His Own Time, i. 46) on the authority of Primrose, Clerk of Council, that Traquair himself drew up the first protestation is utterly incredible, unless by "first protestation" he means the declinature against the "bishops, and not the document the reading of which the Treasurer took .such pains to elude. THE BISHOPS DEPOSED 409* orator of his time in Scotland, highly educated, and hailed by Drummond of Hawthornden on his appoint ment to the Treasurership as a true friend to the Muses.^ The Assembly sat for three weeks and a day after- Hamilton had dissolved it in the King's name — only some half-dozen members having then withdrawn. It annulled all the six Assemblies which had been held since 1606, partly on technical grounds, but chiefly on the ground of that lack of freedom, which was the great argument against itself. It condemned the Canons, the Liturgy, the Book of Ordination, and the High Commission. It excommunicated eight of the bishops, and deposed them all. It found that Episco pacy and the Five Articles had been abjured in the Covenant ; and all who had not already subscribed were required to sign the Covenant with a declaration to that effect. With a view to proceeding against the bishops on personal as well as on public grounds, the Tables. had sent out a circular on August 27, requiring the presbyteries to substantiate a long list of charges. " common to all or proper to any," which were assumed to be true. This preliminary investigation, however, would seem to have had little result ; for the committee- of Assembly, which conducted the prosecution, is said to have been retarded by having to collect as well as to> 1 Masson's Drummond, p. 268. Traquair and Rothes were accustomed'. to express themselves with somewhat unnecessary warmth. Johnston of Warriston in 1 641 reports the former as having said " that before he- perished, he should mix Heaven and Earth and Hell together." Rothes, not long before, in a conversation with Sir Thomas Hope, had denounced " that swinger, the Treasurer," threatening to " raze him out of the earth,"" and "to sweep his memory forth of the land." — ^Napier's Memoirs of Montrose, i. 231, 323. 410 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 receive evidence.^ The minor charges against the bishops are quite in accordance with what we know of their repugnance to the superstition and moral severity of Puritanism, as well as to its cruel creed. One can believe more or less readily that some of them had ¦" slighted charming," had dispensed on occasion with the hair-gown and penitential stool, had prohibited fasting on Sunday, had travelled on that day, transacted business, played cards, or curled on the ice. The graver charges, on the other hand, are inherently improbable ; and against these and all the charges there is a strong presumption in the fact that the records contain no allusion, except in the very vaguest terms, to any personal fault. Baillie's narrative enables us to realise the sort of atmosphere in which the whole proceedings took place. He tells us that the bishops and their adherents were " ordinary swearers," inasmuch as they used such strong expressions as " Before God," " By my conscience," "On my soul." The Bishop of Moray, we are told, " had all the ordinary faults of a bishop " ; "it was undertaken to prove" that Spottiswoode had been guilty of adultery and incest ; the Bishop of Brechin was incriminated by the appearance of a woman and child "that made his adultery very probable";* and " such was his impudence " that, if Hamilton had not deterred him, he would have appeared before the Assembly to make his defence.* The Bishop 1 Baillie, i. 148. 2 Gordon tells us that when this woman was asked to point out the bishop in a group of " black coats," she pointed out the wrong man ; and she is said to have confessed that she was suborned to make the accusation by Lord Johnstone, afterwards Earl of Hartfell.— (Scoits Affairs, ii. 101. ^ It appears from an anonymous letter to Johnston of Warriston that the Covenanters, or some of them, were prepared to intimidate the CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTION 411 of Dunblane was excommunicated as a professed Arminian — "what drunkenness, swearing, or other crimes was libelled," adds Baillie, " I do not remember." As the Acts of deposition show, the bishops were not deposed forJmmorality,.butfor repudiating the Assembly and~abuse of what was supposed to be an illegal power ; and though the Bishops of Caithness and Dunkeld are said to have been guilty of " the common faults," they as well as the Bishop of Argyll were re-admitted, on their submission, to the pastoral charge.^ With the bishops, their few remaining adherents amongst the clergy were deposed or referred to com mittees for trial. Most of them, though not all, were accused merely of false doctrine and popery ; and Baillie commends the Assembly for dealing leniently with the minister of Crail, who in contrast with these " monstrous fellows " was charged with nothing more heinous than "meddling with the church-box."* It need hardly be said that this was a revolution in the life and character as well as in the government of the Church ; and little as we have found to admire in its progress, we shall find still less in its results. By the confession of one at least of its opponents in after days, the ecclesiastical system now overthrown had not been one of excessive rigour. Not many nonconformists had been deposed — only two, Blair's biographer remarks, in the province of Fife ; some such had even been ordained; and it has been truly said that more ministers were deprived and banished by the Covenanters in nine months than by Arch bishop Spottiswoode in upwards of twenty years.* bishops from coming to Glasgow, as their public appearance would be prejudicial to the cause.— Hailes' Memorials, p. 46. 1 Baillie, i. 152-168. ^ Ibid. p. 154. ^ (jrub, iii. 67. 412 PRESBYTERY RESTORED, 1638 Events were soon to prove that what at first sight might seem to have been the heat of revolution was no more than the normal vehemence of the Knoxian or zealous party in the Church, aggravated, as it now was, by the fanaticism of a class lower and more ignorant than that from which the bulk of its forces had hitherto been drawn. We have traced the causes external to itself through which in 1638 as in 1560 this party had attained to a temporary importance out of all proportion to its real strength. It remains to show how in the development of its own qualities Puritanism of this violent type subsided once more to its natural level. GLASGOW : PBINTKD AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AKD 00.