<274>In Scotland, the years which had passed since the acceptance of the Articles of Perth had not been marked by any distinct prognostications of future trouble. Yet there were not wanting signs that the position of the bishops had been weakened. In the spring of 1620 their activity called out the first symptoms of resistance in a quarter from which the ministers had hitherto not had much to hope. 1620.April.Objections of Dunfermline.An order from James to the Privy Council directed that body to banish four citizens from Edinburgh. The Earl of Dunfermline, the Chancellor of Scotland, with a lawyer’s jealousy of the domination of bishops and presbyters alike, objected that October.it was illegal to punish without form of trial. A few months later the Council was directed to send for one of the incriminated ministers. “It is not our part,” said the Chancellor, “to judge in kirk matters. The bishops have a High Commission of their own to try these things.” “Will ye reason with the King?” cried Binning, who had been raised to the earldom of Melrose for his services at Perth. “We may reason,” replied Dunfermline, “whether we shall be the bishops’ hangmen or not.” The old lawyer carried the council with him, and the case was referred to the High Commission.[383]
In the following year Parliament was summoned to give the force of law to the Articles. In a House of 120, a majority of <275>twenty-seven pronounced in their favour. The minority 1621.August.The Articles confirmed by Parliament.amongst the laity was far more imposing than it had been at Perth. An analysis of the division list shows where the King’s strength lay. After the bishops and the Privy Councillors, his supporters were mainly taken from amongst the high nobility, that is to say, from the men who had the largest hold upon the Church lands.[384]
Long afterwards, zealous Presbyterians loved to tell how at the moment when the Bills of this session were being converted into law The thunderstorm.by the touch of the sceptre, a blinding flash of lightning burst forth from the lurid sky, giving the first warning of the terrific thunderstorm which followed. The air blackened as in the night, and the crashing hail was followed by torrents of rain. As the lords, instead of riding home in state, hurried away on foot or in their coaches, not a few of the citizens gazed upon the spectacle with ill-concealed satisfaction, and muttered that the storm was a visible sign of God’s anger. “Nay rather,” was the reply made by some one of the opposite party, “it is to be taken for an approbation of heaven, like that given at Sinai.”[385] It was long before the memory of ‘Black Saturday’ died out in Edinburgh.
The true portents of coming evil were to be sought, not in the sky, but in the bitterness of indignation awakened by the King’s action. James, The King’s letter.as soon as he heard the result of the Parliamentary campaign, hounded on the bishops to increased severity. “Hereafter,” he wrote, “that rebellious and disobedient crew must either obey, or resist both to God, their natural King, and the law of their country. … The sword is now put into your hands. Go on therefore to use it, and let it rest no longer till you have perfected the service trusted unto you. For otherwise we must use it both against you and them.”
During the remainder of James’s reign there was a perpetual <276>effort to enforce the articles. In 1623 Melrose reported that 1623.Difficulty of enforcing the Articles.at Edinburgh ‘the number of communicants was small,’ and of those ‘sundry of the base sort, and some women not of the best, did sit.’[386] James was for ever exhorting and threatening in vain. Unruly ministers were imprisoned without effect. It is no wonder that when such resistance was offered to the Articles, James would hear nothing of giving his sanction to further innovations, and that he turned a deaf ear to Laud’s ‘ill-fangled platform to make that stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English pattern.’[387]
Charles’s accession was the signal for the opening of that controversy with the nobility on which his father had not ventured to enter. 1625.The Church property of the nobles.In securing a permanent income for the clergy, James had done nothing to obviate the grave social and political evils attendant upon the vast absorption of Church revenues by the high nobility in the preceding and earlier generations. The possession of a right to tithes, where the tithes were levied in kind, placed the owner of the soil at the mercy of the owner of the tithes, when, as was then the case in Scotland, the latter was not under the control of a strong central authority. The landowner might be compelled to keep his harvest ungarnered till it pleased the tithe-owner to take possession of his share.[388] Even if such extreme rights were seldom put in force, they created a feeling of dependence in those who were subjected to them, which must <277>have gone far to strengthen the power of the nobles against the Government, and which would stand in the way of that distribution of equal justice which it was the business of the King’s Government to enforce.
If, however, Charles was in the right in desiring to change an arrangement so fraught with mischief, his mode of interference was Oct. 12.Charles’s Act of Revocation.at once harsh and impolitic. Acting, as he usually did, on the supposition that his legal rights were identical with his moral rights, he issued an Act of Revocation by which the mass of Church property in the hands of laymen was re-annexed to the Crown, on the ground of technical flaws in the original concession.[389] Not only was the extreme form in which the Act was couched certain to raise up enemies of no despicable kind, but it sinned against the principle that long possession is entitled to consideration for the sake of persons totally innocent of the original wrong, whose interests have grown up around it.
A proclamation issued to explain the King’s intentions did nothing to remove this fundamental objection.[390] The nobility, with 1626.Feb. 9.Explanatory proclamation.the greater part of the Privy Council, were up in arms. The Earl of Nithsdale, a Roman Catholic peer, who had married one of Buckingham’s many kinswomen, and was occasionally employed on delicate negotiations, had been sent to Scotland to carry the revocation into effect. He was met by a storm of opposition. If later report spoke truly, the leading tithe-owners resolved, if nothing else would serve, to ‘fall upon him and all his party in the old <278>Scottish fashion and knock him on the head.’[391] Another account charges the interested lords with exciting the people by spreading rumours that Nithsdale was coming to revoke, not the grants of tithes, but the laws establishing the Protestant religion, whilst they frightened Nithsdale by informing him, before he had completed his journey, that the people of Edinburgh had cut in pieces the coach which he had prepared for his entry into the city, had killed his horses, and were quite ready to do the same to himself.[392]
It was not often that worldly wisdom entered into the counsels of Charles; but the decision which he now took upon July 11.Charles offers compensation.hearing of the difficulties raised was admirably suited to meet the danger. On the one hand, whilst laying stress on his intention to relieve the burdens of the land-owners, he offered such of the tithe-owners as would make voluntary submission a reasonable compensation for their loss. July 12.The Articles of Perth partially suspended.On the other hand, he suspended the operation of the Articles of Perth, so far as those ministers were concerned who had been ordained before the new rules had been admitted, on the understanding that they would refrain from arguing against the existing system. At the same time there was to be a general amnesty for the ministers who had been arrested and imprisoned. In this way, whilst the Aug. 26.Legal action begun.attack upon the high nobility was softened, Charles might hope to rally round him the mass of the nation in support of a wise and justifiable policy.[393] On August 26 the King’s Advocate took the first steps to bring the legal <279>question to trial.[394] The blow was followed up by an order to Sir George Hay, September.who had succeeded Dunfermline as Chancellor — a testy and stubborn old man, who had made himself the centre of resistance — to come to London to justify his conduct.[395]
This decided step was at once successful. Envoys were sent from Scotland to 1627.Jan. 17.Commissioners to treat.treat with the King, and, after considerable discussion, commissioners were appointed to examine the whole subject.[396] After a long and 1629.Sept. 2.Compromise effected.minute investigation, a compromise was effected. The Church lands were to remain in the hands of those who held them, upon payment of certain rents to the King. Tithes, on the other hand, were dealt with in a more complicated fashion. The landowner was to be at liberty to extinguish the right of levying tithes on his property by payment of a sum calculated at nine years’ purchase. If he did not choose to exercise this option, the tithe in kind was to be commuted into a rentcharge, from which was to be deducted the stipend payable to the ministers, and an annuity reserved for the King.[397] Nature of the compromise.Special regard was paid to the circumstances of the minister, who in many instances received an augmentation of his stipend. In its final shape the arrangement thus made is worthy of memory as the one successful action of Charles’s reign. In money value it did not bring anything to the Scottish exchequer, as the King disposed of his annuity in perpetuity in payment of a debt of 10,000l.;[398] but it weakened the power of the nobility, and strengthened the prerogative in the only way in which the prerogative deserved to be strengthened — by the popularity it gained through carrying into effect a wise and beneficent reform. Every landowner who was freed from the perpetual annoyance of the tithe-gatherer, every minister <280>whose income had been increased and rendered more certain than by James’s arrangement, knew well to whom the change was owing.
To object to the change thus effected because it favoured the growth of the prerogative is mere constitutional pedantry. The Crown against the aristocracy.The stage of civilisation at which Scotland had arrived was one in which it was still desirable that the prerogative should be extended. The nobility were still, with some brilliant exceptions, self-seeking and unruly,[399] and the time for the development of a full Parliamentary system only arrives when all members of a State are equally submissive to the laws of the State.
In Scotland therefore Charles had but to persevere in the course upon which he had already entered. If he could satisfy the temporal requirements of the mass of the nation, and if he could avoid irritating their religious sentiments or their religious prejudices, he might still grasp firmly the nettle of aristocratic discontent.
Aristocratic discontent there was sure to be. It is hard to say that the nobility had any real ground for dissatisfaction. They had exchanged an income irregularly gained, and obtained by oppressive means, for one which was indeed less in amount, but which was to be secured not only by an indefeasible title, but by the cessation of the irritation caused by their former proceedings. Large bodies of men, however, are never very reasonable in their view of changes which cause them apparent damage, and the circumstances under which the original confiscatory Act of Revocation had been issued were such as to make them suspicious of Charles’s future action. The withdrawal of the means of indirectly influencing the conduct of the landowners, which was a pure gain to the community, naturally left the Scottish nobles sore, just as, in later times, English landowners were left sore by the destruction of the rotten boroughs.
Nor were the nobles without apprehension that Charles would take a further step in the same direction. The question <281>of the heritable jurisdictions had been again mooted in the Question of the heritable jurisdictions.course of the controversy, and though the King had restricted himself to the expression of a wish to buy them up whenever he was rich enough to do so,[400] it was always possible that a blow might be struck against them as sudden and unexpected as the Act of Revocation.
It was therefore certain that for some time to come Charles would have to confront the tacit hostility of the Scottish nobility. Charles invited to Scotland.For the present it was certain to be no more than a tacit hostility. Now that the legality of the Act of Revocation had been acknowledged, the nobles were anxious that the compromise to which they had consented should receive a Parliamentary sanction, which would save them from a more extreme danger in the future. Charles was therefore entreated to visit Scotland to be crowned, and to hold a Parliament in which the sanction of law might be given to the late arrangements.
Various circumstances delayed June 18.The King’s coronation at Edinburgh.the Royal visit, and it was not till 1633 that Charles crossed the border. On June 15 he entered Edinburgh amidst a storm of loyal welcome. On the 18th he was crowned at Holyrood.
As a political ceremony there can be little doubt that Charles’s coronation was greeted with genuine enthusiasm. It was, however, a religious ceremony as well, and the form which it took would therefore go far to indicate whether Charles meant to make the ideas of his letter for the suspension of the Perth Articles the leading principle of his ecclesiastical policy, or whether that suspension was only extorted from him by the immediate necessities of the situation, to be revoked as soon as the danger appeared to be at an end. It was a momentous question for Charles, for the decision of it in the wrong way would throw the whole force of popular religious enthusiasm on the side of the nobles, if they should at any time find it advisable to renew the struggle which they had for the moment renounced as hopeless.
<282>The Prayer-book, the preparation of which had been enjoined by the Assembly which had met at Aberdeen three years before, was 1619.The Prayer-book of the Scottish bishops.completed early in 1619. Hewat’s version had been thrust aside, and another, of which the chief part of the composition has been ascribed to Cowper, Bishop of Galloway, was revised by Spottiswoode and the Dean of Winchester, a Scotchman of the name of Young. But it was not brought into use. James was alarmed at the outburst of resistance to the Perth Articles, and in 1621 he allowed his Commissioners to promise the Scottish Parliament that if those Articles were confirmed there should be no further innovation in matters of religion.
The question of a liturgy was allowed to sleep for eight years. In 1629 the proceedings of the English Parliament riveted 1629.September.Charles revives the project.the ascendency of Laud upon Charles’s mind, and the success which he had obtained in the business of tithes in Scotland may have induced him to think that he had no reason to keep terms with Puritanism in that kingdom. Whatever the motive may have been, he sent for the draft of the Prayer-book. It was brought to England by Dr. James Maxwell, one of the Edinburgh ministers, a man unlikely to give offence from any undue sympathy with Puritanism, and was by him submitted to Laud, in obedience to Charles’s orders.
Laud’s judgment could hardly be doubtful. In itself uniformity was delightful to him, as the prop and stay of spiritual unity, and Laud prefers the English book.the mere fact that the proposed draft for Scotland differed from the existing English version would dispose him unfavourably towards it. In itself, too, the new Prayer-book must have seemed to him to differ for the worse from the forms to which he was accustomed. Though it followed to a great extent the Book of Common Prayer, it had large portions inserted from Knox’s Book of Common Order, and was, on the whole, such a recension of the Prayer-book as would commend itself to the feelings of an English low churchman of the present time.[401] Laud therefore <283>declined to give his approbation to the liturgy which was stamped with the recommendation of the Scottish bishops. “I told him,” he said long afterwards, in giving an account of his conversation with Maxwell, “I was clear of opinion that if his Majesty would have a liturgy settled there, it were best to take the English liturgy without any variation, that so the same Service Book might be established in all his Majesty’s dominions.” Maxwell’s reply was a warning of coming evil. That the Scotch were Puritans was only one side of the danger. They were also Scotchmen proud of their ancient nationality, and jealous, as only small communities are jealous, of any invasion of their special modes of action at the dictation of foreigners. “To this,” says Laud, “he replied that he was of a contrary opinion, and that not only he, but the bishops of that kingdom thought their countrymen would be much better satisfied if a liturgy were formed by their own clergy, than to have the English liturgy put upon them; yet, he added, that it might be according to the form of our English Service Book.” Even the hope held out of large modifications did not satisfy Laud. He reported the conversation to Charles, and Charles, as blind as Laud to the dangers in his path, approved Laud’s proposal for the introduction of the English Prayer-book.
The Scottish bishops were reaping, in their humiliation, the <284>harvest of the seed which they had sown in their apparent triumph at Perth. Position of the Scottish bishops.They had preached the acceptance of an order of things which they themselves held to be unadvisable, in order to please the King, and they now found that the King’s successor cast aside their advice and their warnings as unworthy of a moment’s notice. It is not required of those whose work it is to govern that they should be possessed of the highest spiritual insight, or that they should be constantly promulgating some new discovery in politics or theology; but if they are to retain the respect of contemporaries or of posterity, it is absolutely necessary that they should place some reasonable limits upon the extent to which they allow their own judgments to be overruled by considerations of expediency. It was not mere obsequiousness or ambition which had dictated the readiness of the bishops to accept, against their better judgment, the Articles of Perth. It was owing to the kingly authority that the Scottish clergy were able to carry out the work of their ministry in the face of the hungry and grasping owners of the soil, and it may well have seemed to the bishops that to oppose the King, except upon some question on which their own conscience was at stake, would throw back the Church into the clutches of the nobility. Since the Articles of Perth had been put in practice, however, some experience had been gained. The risk of placing the King’s rule in opposition to the religious consciousness of the nation was becoming plain to all who had eyes to see. To withstand the King at Perth in 1618 would have been, if they had only known it, the best service that the bishops could have rendered to James. To withstand the King at Edinburgh in 1633 would be the best service that they could render to Charles. It was because the Scottish bishops had no word to speak in the great contest which was arising, because, being neither strong partisans nor wise mediators, they drifted helplessly like logs on the current of affairs, that their very name stank in the nostrils of the Scottish nation, and that they were credited with all the mischief which they had done nothing to remedy. The great Italian poet would have condemned them without appeal to an endless comradeship with those who were alike displeasing to God and to His <285>enemies. The moral strength which is based on the conviction that a man ought to think and speak independently of the dictation of the King was passing over, if it had not already passed over, to their opponents.
What the bishops did not say was said by William Struthers, one of the Edinburgh ministers, himself a conformist, though 1631.Struthers’s letter.a most unwilling conformist, to the Articles of Perth. “There is some surmises,” he wrote in a letter intended for the King’s eyes, “of further novation of organs, liturgies, and such like, which greatly augments the grief of the people.” The Church, he said, lay groaning under two wounds, the erection of bishoprics and the order to kneel at the reception of the sacrament. If a third were added, and the congregations were ‘forced to suffer novelties’ in ‘the whole body of public worship,’ nothing short of general confusion would be the result.[402]
Charles, when at last he visited Scotland, came with the resolution to override such remonstrances. By his side was Laud, 1633.Laud in Charles’s company.prepared to renew at Edinburgh the recommendations which he had given in London.
On the day of the coronation the final decision had yet to be taken; but the ceremonies observed in Holyrood chapel June 18.Ceremonies at the coronation.were not such as gave hope that much regard would be paid to the feelings of Scotchmen. The Archbishop of St. Andrews and the other four bishops who took part in the service were attired in ‘white rochets and white sleeves, and copes of gold having blue silk to their foot.’ The Communion-table was prepared after a fashion which must have recalled to all educated Scotchmen the famous epigram of Andrew Melville. One who was by no means a stickler for extreme Puritanism remarked that a table was placed in the church ‘after the manner of an altar, having thereupon two books, with two wax chandeliers, and two wax candles which were unlighted, and a basin wherein there was nothing.’ At the back of this altar, “covered with tapestry,” he added, “there was a rich tapestry wherein the crucifix was <286>curiously wrought; and as these bishops who were in service passed by this crucifix they were seen to bow the knee and beck, which, with their habit, was noticed, and bred great fear of inbringing of Popery.”[403]
The work of exasperating the religious feelings of the greater part of those who had any religious feeling at all in Scotland was thus successfully begun. The pressure put upon congregations to kneel at the Communion was only felt once or twice a year. The offence given by the white garment and the reverence paid in passing before the crucifix would be an offence of weekly, if not of daily repetition, in the eyes of men who were sensitive above all other Protestants to the danger of relapsing into a system which they counted irreligious and antichristian.
That which had been done in the King’s chapel was not without its effect upon Parliament. On June 20, that body June 20.Meeting of Parliament.met for despatch of business. Unlike the English Parliament, it was not divided into two Houses. Out of 183 members, the non-official lords present in person or by proxy could number only sixty-six votes, and resistance to the King was therefore too hopeless to be attempted on a question in which, as in that of the compromise on tithes, he would have at his disposal the ninety-six votes of the representatives of the boroughs and of the untitled gentry. The ecclesiastical Bills offered a better rallying-ground for <287>opposition. It would be invidious to bring a charge of deliberate insincerity against those of the lords who perceived this. Some of them perhaps may have looked upon the opportunity offered them as merely an occasion for a clever piece of political tactics. Others were doubtless inspired with a conscientious dislike of the new ceremonies. But it is probable that there were many whose eyes were opened to the duty of opposing the ceremonies by the attack made on their own property and interests by the now withdrawn Act of Revocation.
Opposition to the Crown, however, was never very easy in a Scottish Parliament, excepting when the whole of those present were Difficulties of an opposition.substantially agreed. A committee named the Lords of the Articles was possessed of the exclusive right of examining and amending Bills, the whole House being compelled to accept or reject in their entirety the Bills which came down to them from that committee. By a series of changes, permitted or condoned by the Scottish Parliament, never so alive as the English Parliament to The Lords of the Articles.the value of forms, the Lords of the Articles were so constituted as to represent as far as possible the wishes of the King. The nobility had first of all to select eight of the twelve bishops, and it would have been hard to find a single bishop opposed to the Crown. The bishops had then to choose eight out of the sixty-six nobles, and it would have been strange if eight nobles could not be found to vote as the King wished. The bishops and nobles together then chose eight of the untitled gentry and eight of the commissioners for boroughs, and even if every one of these sixteen had joined in opposition, they would be helpless to turn the scale. For the King had the further right of adding eight officers of state to the committee thus constituted,[404] and of appointing his chancellor as its president. As if this were not enough, he might himself be present at the deliberations of the body thus formed.
When at last the Bills were laid before the whole House, there was found to be one which confirmed all Acts of the late reign relating to the Church, and another which mixed up <288>the confirmation of an Act made in 1606 in acknowledgment of June 28.The sitting of the whole House.the Royal prerogative with another Act giving power to the King to settle the apparel in which judges, magistrates, and the clergy were to appear in public. It would thus be impossible for anyone to vote against the latter clause without declaring himself the opponent of the King’s prerogative.[405] Nor was anyone left in doubt that the Bill, if carried, would be used by Charles in a way very different from that in which the former Act had been used by James. Hitherto the use of English forms had been confined to the Royal chapel at Holyrood. But on the Sunday before the day on which the vote was to be taken, Charles had attended St. Giles’s, ‘and after he was set down in his own place, the ordinary reader being reading the word and singing psalms,— as the ordinary custom was then,— before sermon, Mr. John Maxwell … came down from the king’s loft, caused the reader remove from his place, set down there two English chaplains clad with surplices, and they with the help of other chaplains and bishops there present, acted their English service. That being ended, in came Mr. John Guthrie, Bishop of Moray, clad also with a surplice,’ or rather a rochet, ‘went up so to pulpit, and taught a sermon.’[406] Another authority bears witness to the results. “The people of Edinburgh, seeing the bishop preach in his rochet, which was never seen in Giles’ kirk since the Reformation, and by him who was sometime one of their own town’s Puritan ministers, they were grieved and grudged hereat, thinking the same smelt of Popery.”[407]
The leaders of the opposition had already prepared a petition which showed that they knew how to meet the King with The rejected petition.his own tactics. In complaining of the Acts relating to the Church they took care to complain also of a proposed new taxation which weighed upon all landowners in Scotland.[408]
<289>Charles refused to receive the petition. In all the opposition which was surging up suddenly around him, he doubtless The Bills accepted.saw nothing else than a factious and unprincipled attempt to take vengeance upon him for the Act of Revocation. He threw himself into the struggle with all the heat of a party leader. When the Earl of Loudoun stood up to question the propriety of joining the confirmation of two Acts in one Bill, the King sharply told him that ‘the orders of the house’ were ‘not to dispute there but to vote.’[409] The whole assembly felt the importance of the contest which the King had challenged. When the division was taken there was scarcely a man present who did not anxiously note down the votes as they were given. Charles was too much interested in the result to maintain a dignified bearing; he too jotted down the names, not without expressions of dissatisfaction with those who voted in the negative. This time he was saved from defeat. A majority — probably only a slight majority — was on his side.[410]
The names of those who composed the minority are lost to us with scarcely an exception, and rumour has been so busy in swelling Rothes and Loudoun.the original grain of truth till it is no longer distinguishable from falsehood, that it is impossible to reproduce the scene with any distinctness. Yet it can hardly be doubted that the Earls of Rothes and Loudoun took a leading part in the opposition, and Rothes and Loudoun were two of three commissioners who had come to England in 1626 on behalf of the titheholding nobility.
How was this opposition to be met by Charles? On June 30, Laud preached at Holyrood on the blessings of conformity, and a meeting of bishops and other ministers was held <290>to discuss with him and the King the proposed introduction of the English Prayer-book. Some of those present, Lindsay, June 30.The introduction of the Prayer-book postponed.Bishop of Brechin, the historian and defender of the Articles of Perth, Maxwell, who had just become Bishop of Ross, Sydserf, an Edinburgh minister, and Wedderburn, a Scotchman who had been a professor at St. Andrews, and was now a beneficed clergyman in the English Church, gave their voices in favour of Laud’s unwise proposal. The mass of the bishops were still of the same mind as in 1629. Yet so far as our information goes, they did not speak out plainly. They did not say that they could not go one step farther than the liturgy which they had prepared. They talked of the objection which would be taken in Scotland to a liturgy precisely similar to that used south of the Tweed. They complained of a few unimportant errors, mistakes in the translation of the Psalms, and the like. Every Scotchman knew that the real objection did not lie here. Charles did not care to see it. He gave way so far as to agree that some of the Scotch bishops should set to work ‘to draw up a liturgy as near that of England as might be.’[411] The Book of 1619 was tacitly allowed to drop out of sight. It had itself been more obnoxious than the book of 1617. Its successor might well be more obnoxious still.
The next day Charles set out for a progress in the country, which he enjoyed extremely. In spite of all that had passed, July 18.Charles leaves Scotland.he was received with every demonstration of affection. In the whole course of his wanderings he met with only one mishap, being nearly drowned in crossing from Burntisland, on his way back to Edinburgh. On July 18 he left his northern capital on his journey home.
Although the composition of a Prayer-book was for the present suspended, Charles had not been long in England before he discharged a Parthian shot at Scotland. In virtue of the <291>powers conferred on him by the recent Act, he directed that Oct. 15.The surplice ordered.at the time of service the clergy should appear in ‘whites.’[412] Such an order could not be enforced; but Charles had thrown up one more barrier between himself and the hearts of his loyal subjects in Scotland.
Another step taken in the same direction showed whither Charles was tending. During his visit he arranged for the establishment of Sept. 29.New Bishopric of Edinburgh.a new Bishopric of Edinburgh, the city and the country around having up to that time formed part of the diocese of St. Andrews. The first bishop 1634.January.W. Forbes the first bishop.appointed by Charles was William Forbes, a distant cousin of the Bishop of Aberdeen. A man more worthy of respect for wide theological learning, for gentleness of spirit, and for earnestness and simplicity of life, it would have been difficult to find. Yet a more indiscreet selection could hardly have been made. In his dislike of contention and strife, Forbes was inclined to overlook the realities which divided the Church into parties, and his theology, derived from a study of the Fathers, led him to admit possibilities of reconciliation by which the most radical diversities of opinion were to be merged in the white light of undefined and impalpable truth.
Least of all were the citizens of Edinburgh likely to give ear to a teacher who placed his ideal in a scheme of Christian thought which should enable the disciples of a Protestant Church to join hands with the disciples of the Pope. Even in Aberdeen, where a school adverse to the Puritan ideas of the South had arisen in the University, Forbes stood to a certain extent alone. In James’s reign he had been settled as one of the Edinburgh ministers. Finding the place uncongenial, he had shrunk back to Aberdeen from the atmosphere of strife into which he had been plunged. If Forbes did not satisfy the Scotch, he satisfied Charles. In a sermon preached 1633.before the King he had taken for his text, “My peace I leave with you.” As disturbers of peace he arraigned before his pulpit on the one hand the Pope, as the claimant of infallibility and the promulgator of new <292>doctrines, and on the other hand the Protestant theologians who contentiously proclaimed that which was not fundamental to be fundamental, and who took needless offence at ecclesiastical rites which were anciently in use with the universal consent of the Christian Church. Three things, he said, were needed to restore order; ‘one liturgy, one catechism, one confession of faith.’ The Church too needed external protection as well as inward unity. There were those who had stripped God of his portion, the Church of her patrimony, the pastors of their necessary food, the people of God of their spiritual bread, the poor of the maintenance of their bodies. When would the good Samaritan come to relieve the Scottish Church which had fallen among thieves?[413]
Forbes, who had thus encouraged Charles to come forward as the good Samaritan, was not long to be exposed to the contentions of the world. April 12.Death of Forbes.After an episcopate of three months he passed away, and gained that peace which was not to be found in the Scotland of his day. His successor was Lindsay of Brechin, who was in turn succeeded by Sydserf. Lindsay and Sydserf had been two of the four who had advised the introduction of the English liturgy. A third was already a bishop, and the fourth, Wedderburn, would not have long to wait.
A new element was thus introduced into the Scottish episcopate. The old bishops who had followed falteringly in James’s steps would soon die out, and others whose thoughts answered to those of Laud would take their places. The life, the vigour of Puritanism was to be repressed, and a scholarlike uniformity was to smother all rude and violent clamour. Religion and morality were expected to flourish when zeal, and the disorders which accompany zeal, had been put to silence.
The course which Charles was taking was terribly dangerous. The old bishops at least 1633.The old and new bishops.represented a movement in the Scottish mind, a weariness of ecclesiastical janglings and of clerical domination. The new bishops represented Laud and Charles and England, or what seemed <293>to be England to those who did not know where the heart of England was. Moral instincts which refused to be smothered by a catechism, a liturgy, and a confession prepared without reference to the beliefs of those for whom they were intended, would combine with the national indignation which was certain sooner or later to blaze up against the Scots who were ready to impose on their own country the bonds which were being forged in England.
Till difficulties actually stared Charles in the face, he did not know that they existed. Still less did he perceive how much Charles and the Opposition Lords.he was doing to increase them. He did not know that his Church policy was raising such men as Loudoun and Rothes from insignificance. He fancied that to overwhelm those selfish and unprincipled adventurers, as he regarded them, he had but to testify his displeasure. Before his arrival in Scotland he had created some new peers, and had raised many barons to a higher rank. He now gave orders that the grants which had not been formally made out should be suspended in the cases of those who had joined in the opposition in Parliament. When he returned to England, he heard to his annoyance that untrue rumours were floating about, and that Scotchmen were whispering to one another that the majority for the Ecclesiastical Acts had been a fictitious one, and that he had himself interfered to conceal the fraud.
Charles had thus gone back to England in no good temper with the Opposition. Treating it as altogether factious, he had refused, June.The supplication.whilst yet in Scotland, to look at a paper which had been drawn up by a certain William Haig, as embodying the sentiments of those who had voted against the Acts. This paper had been approved of by Lord Balmerino, the son of James’s secretary, and had been passed on by him to Rothes to be shown to the King as a ‘supplication of a great number of the nobility and other commissioners in the late Parliament.’ Rothes knew what the King’s temper was, and began by sounding him before he ventured to deliver the paper. “My lord,” was the reply, “ye know what is fit for you to represent, and I know what is fit to me to hear and consider; and therefore do or do not upon your peril.” <294>After another attempt Rothes put the document in his pocket and made no further effort to obtain a hearing.
Balmerino could not rest satisfied with this conclusion. He showed the paper in the strictest secrecy to his notary, and August.The paper gets into the King’s hands.the notary took a copy which he showed, also in the strictest secrecy, to a friend, who carried it to Spottiswoode. Spottiswoode forwarded it to the King.
The supplication, humble enough in outward form, must have been most irritating to Charles. The sting of the paper is to be found rather Its character.in its general tone than in any particular charge brought in it. On the one hand, it tacitly treated the whole existing Church system, and still more the changes which were known to be impending, as illegal. Nothing lawfully rejected at the Reformation could be reintroduced without consent of the ‘clergy lawfully assembled,’ that is to say, in plain words, without the consent of a Presbyterian Assembly. The recent ecclesiastical legislation was rejected as ‘importing a servitude upon this Church unpractised before.’
The framers of the supplication must have been aware that Charles might answer, as it had been again and again answered in England, that The King and the Estates of the Realm.it was for the King and the nation expressing their will in an Act of Parliament to impose their resolutions upon the clergy. They therefore proceeded to point out the obstacles which had been thrown in the way of that previous discussion without which Parliamentary proceedings are valueless. The Lords of the Articles had been chosen so as to make them merely the representatives of a party. The dissentient nobles had been hindered from representing their views to them in conference, and when the final vote was taken the King had forbidden that anyone should state the reasons of the vote which he was about to give, and finally, by marking down the votes given, had shown that those who persisted in opposition were regarded by him as out of favour.[414]
The supplication, in short, discursively, and under forms of <295>the highest respect, touched boldly on the sore point in Charles’s government. His own will was predominant. The general opinion of the clergy had long been neglected. The general opinion of the laity had not yet completely turned against him; but it required tender handling, and it might at any day become adverse in the process. Those who pointed out this to Charles were doing him a real service.
Charles did not perceive the service, but he did perceive that his whole system of government was threatened. Haig having prudently escaped to Holland, 1634.Proceedings against Balmerino.Balmerino was selected as the victim. By giving the paper to his notary he had published a seditious libel, and was liable to the penalty of death under the Scottish law of ‘leasing-making,’ for stirring up enmity between the King and his subjects by false and malicious statements. It was not till March 1635 that 1635.March 20.His trial.the trial actually came on.[415] The jury acquitted Balmerino of every charge brought against him but one. They found that he was not the author of the libel, and had not divulged or dispersed it; but they also found, by a bare majority of eight to seven, that he was guilty of concealing his knowledge of its existence.[416]
Already, before the day of trial, a remonstrance had been addressed to the King by a man of whom Scotland was deservedly proud. March 2.Drummond’s appeal.William Drummond of Hawthornden did not rise above the second rank of literary greatness. But he was a man of varied culture, and his writings in poetry and prose were widely read. He was the foremost of that band of men which broke the tradition that Scottish literature ought to be written in the Scottish national tongue, and which strove to express their thoughts in the language which had served the purposes of Shakspeare and Jonson, and was one day to serve the purposes of Scott and Campbell. He was withal an upright and honest man, craving for philosophic and literary culture rather than for Calvinistic <296>orthodoxy, and fearing the inquisitive meddling of the Presbyterian clergy who would be sure to bear hard upon one of his tastes and opinions. He was one who, like Patrick Forbes, had formed part of that wave of liberal reaction, which, through the blunders of James and Charles, had already spent its force. As Forbes had warned James against his ecclesiastical mistakes, Drummond now warned Charles against his political mistakes. In a letter, evidently intended to be shown to the King, he pointed out that it was impossible to secure popularity by muzzling men’s tongues and pens. In so doing the King was shutting his eyes to that which it most imported him to know. “Sometimes it is great wisdom in a prince not to reject and disdain those who freely tell him his duty, and open to him his misdemeanours to the commonwealth, and the surmises and umbrages of his people and council for the amending disorders and bettering the form of his government.” The best way to treat political libels was either to scorn them or to answer them. “Wise princes have never troubled themselves much about talkers; weak spirits cannot suffer the liberty of judgments nor the indiscretion of tongues.”[417]
Drummond’s letter was even a more impressive condemnation of Charles’s system of government than the supplication had been. July.Balmerino pardoned.The tone is different, but the fault complained of is the same. One man, however highly placed, cannot govern a nation from which he stands apart. It was because Charles could never learn this lesson that he fell at last. It was indeed morally impossible for him to send Balmerino to the scaffold. Even Laud told him that a man must be pardoned who had been acquitted by seven jurymen out of fifteen.[418] The impression of the trial and the events which had preceded it could not be so easily wiped <297>away. Charles had gone far to blot out the memory of the services which he had rendered to Scotland in enforcing the commutation of tithes.
When great national errors have been committed, smaller personal mistakes are certain to follow in their wake, and to obtain 1633.Difficulty of finding a Government.an importance which they would not otherwise have had. There can be no doubt that the absence of the King was an enormous difficulty in the way of governing Scotland. Not only was the King himself liable to be filled with ideas which were not Scottish ideas, but the Privy Council which ruled in his name was sure to deteriorate into the worst possible form of government. It was a committee in which there was no master mind. Personal objects swayed its members, and those men who should have stood as the leaders of the nation became known as men jostling against one another for power or pelf. One great blow had been wisely struck at their supremacy by Charles at the beginning of his reign. He had ordained that, with the exception of the Chancellor, men who sat in the Privy Council as administrators of the Government, should not also sit in the Court of Session as judges.[419] From time to time he had done his best to moderate the quarrels of his representatives at Edinburgh. But he had not sufficient knowledge of men to choose counsellors who were really worthy to govern, and his gradual alienation from the national feeling on the subject of religion made those who were really worthy shrink from his side.
Gradually Charles saw fit to take for his counsellor in England the Marquis of Hamilton. He chose him as he had chosen Hamilton in favour.Buckingham and Weston, and resolved to support him against all complaints. It was not a wise choice. Hamilton was a weak and inefficient man, with just enough remembrance of his relationship to the Royal dynasty to keep him perpetually on the watch for occasions which might increase his credit in Scotland, whilst his double-dealing, springing from an anxiety to stand well with every party, deprived him of all value as an adviser.
Charles’s choice of representatives at Edinburgh was even <298>worse than his choice of a confidant in England. When nobles were grasping and The bishops promoted in Scotland.lawyers intriguing, there was one body of men who had never crossed his path, and who had given him every reason to assure himself of their devotion. If the bishops had given him full satisfaction when employed in Church affairs, why should they not give him full satisfaction when employed in political affairs? Man for man, there was in all probability more chance that a bishop would be honest and self-denying than an earl or a baron would be. Charles at least thought so. Step by step he had pushed forward the bishops into temporal rank and office. At his coronation he had been vexed by the refusal of Lord Chancellor Hay, whom he had just created Earl of Kinnoul, to allow Spottiswoode to take precedence of him. Kinnoul declared his readiness to lay the Chancellorship at his Majesty’s feet; but whilst he kept it, ‘never a priest in Scotland should set a foot before him, as long as his blood was hot.’[420] In December 1634 the ‘old cankered goutish man,’ 1635.January.Spottiswoode Chancellor.as Charles called him, died. In January 1635, the Archbishop of St. Andrews was appointed Chancellor in his place. Seven other bishops had been gradually admitted to the Privy Council.
The step which Charles had taken was a distinct challenge to all orders and classes of men. Those who were thus promoted were obnoxious to the Presbyterians because they were bishops, and to the mass of religious Scotchmen who were not distinctly Presbyterians, because they supported the ceremonies, and were incorrectly believed to have been the authors of all the innovations which had had their real origin in England. The nobles hated them as intruders upon the dignities which they claimed by birth. The lawyers were jealous of them as intruders upon the dignities which they claimed by virtue of professional knowledge. They stood alone in Scotland as Charles stood almost alone in England.
In the summer of 1635 every element of Dangers in the future.a great conflagration was present in Scotland. Only the spark was wanting to set the country ablaze.
[383] Calderwood, vii. 383.
[384] Melrose to the King, Aug. 3. Ratification of the Articles, Aug. 4. Botfield’s Original Letters, ii. 656, 658. Calderwood, vii. 488–501.
[385] Calderwood, vii. 505. Spottiswoode, iii. 262.
[386] Melrose Papers, ii. 637.
[387] Mr. Sprott, in his Introduction to the Scottish Liturgies of the reign of James VI. xxxvii, points out that the story of James’s conversation with Williams about Laud cannot possibly have taken place at the date assigned to it by Hacket; but it is probably true in the main.
[388] This is distinctly stated in Charles’s Large Declaration issued in 1639, and may be taken as a true representation of the law of the case, even if the practice was more moderate. Compare, too, Lithgow’s Scotland’s Welcome. Poetical Remains, ed. Maidment, sig. C, 2:—
“For Sir, take heed, what grief is this and cross?To my poor Commons, and a yearly loss;That when their corns are shorn, stouked, dead, and dry,They cannot get them teinded; nay, and why?Some grudge or malice moves despight to woundThe hopeful harvest, and rot their corns on ground.<277>This is no rare thing on their stowks that’s seen,Snow-covered tops, below their grass grown green.”
Scotland entreats Charles not to farm the tithes to the Lords:—
Then let my tithes be brought to money rent,For thee, from landlord and the poor tenant;So may they shear, and lead and stack their corn,At midnight, midday, afternoon or morn,Which shall be their advantage and my gain,When barns and yards are filled with timely grain.”
[389] Acta Parl. Scot. v. 23.
[390] Proclamation, Feb. 9, 1626. Connell’s Treatise on Tithes, iii. 58.
[391] Mr. Burton (Hist. of Scotland, vi. 358) expressed doubts, in which I fully share, of the ‘savage story’ told by Burnet of the blind Lord Belhaven intending to murder the Earl of Dumfries. It may be added that the date of the third year of the King, given by Burnet, becomes 1628 in Mr. Burton’s history, which is too late, and that the names Belhaven and Dumfries point to the late origin of the story. There were no such titles till 1633. Burnet’s statement that the King purchased lands for the archbishoprics from Hamilton and Lennox ought to have been referred to a later date, as is shown by the English Exchequer Books, though there is a Privy Seal for 2,000l. for the purpose in 1625.
[392] Heylyn, 237.
[393] The King to the Council, July 11, Connell, iii. 64. Balfour’s Hist. Works, ii. 142.
[394] Connell, iii. 68.
[395] Contarini to the Doge, Oct. 6⁄16, Ven. Transcripts, R. O.
[396] Commission, Jan. 7, 1627, Connell, iii. 71.
[397] Connell, Book iii.–iv. Forbes, A Treatise on Church Lands and Tithes, 258. See also the observations of Mr. Burton (vi. 353–368).
[398] Forbes, 264.
[399] The beginning of Spalding’s History of the Troubles, and the latter part of Mr. Burton’s sixty-fourth chapter, headed ‘Sufferings of the Bishops’ (vi. 246) should be studied by all who doubt this.
[400] Contarini to the Doge, Jan. 12⁄22, 1627, Ven. Transcripts, R. O.; Heylyn, 238.
[401] Thus, in the Baptismal Service, the use of the sign of the cross and the declaration after baptism ‘that this child is regenerate,’ were omitted, <283>and it was ordered that, at the Communion Service, the table was to stand ‘in that part of the church which the minister findeth most convenient.’ The double form derived from the two Prayer-books of Edward VI. was preserved in the administration of the Communion to the people on their knees; but it was prefaced by a short address adopted from Knox:— “Let us lift up our hearts unto the Lord, and by faith lay hold upon Jesus, whom God the Father, by his Spirit, offereth to us in this holy sacrament, that we may draw virtue from the Lord to quicken and conceive our souls and bodies unto eternal life.” The whole subject is treated of at length in Mr. Sprott’s Appendix to the Scottish Liturgies of the reign of James VI. One point which confirms his argument that the Prayer for the Queen was introduced in the autumn of 1629 has escaped his notice. The petition to ‘make her a happy mother of successful children’ must, almost certainly, have been written, not only before the birth of Prince Charles, but after the Queen’s miscarriage of her first child. I have not quoted the original authorities for this part of my narrative, as the reader will find them all referred to in Mr. Sprott’s excellent Introduction.
[402] Balfour, ii. 181. The Earl of Airth, to whom the letter is said to have been addressed, was known at that time as the Earl of Menteith.
[403] Spalding, i. 36. Mr. Grub, in his Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, ii. 345, throws doubt on the usually accepted story told by Rushworth, that the Archbishop of St. Andrews, being placed on the King’s right hand, and the Archbishop of Glasgow on the left, Laud ‘took Glasgow and thrust him from the King in these words:— “Are you a churchman, and wants the coat of your order.”’ He argues that ‘in Sir J. Balfour’s minute narrative of the coronation it does not appear that any special place was assigned to Archbishop Lindsay,’ and that Spalding says that ‘the Archbishop of Glasgow and the remanent of the Bishops there present who were not in the service, changed not their habit, but wore their black gowns without rochets or white sleeves.’ It may be added that the details of the ceremony must have been arranged beforehand, and if the Archbishop objected to appear in a cope, the question would not have been left to be settled in the church. It should be remembered that during this period Rushworth is no safe authority.
[404] Burton, vi. 369. Acts of Parl. of Scotland, v. 10.
[405] The powers conferred on James had been to the effect that ‘every preacher of God’s word shall hereafter wear black grave and comely apparel,’ and that as the King was ‘godly, wise, and religious, hating all erroneous and vain superstition,’ he might settle what the apparel of the clergy was to be.
[406] Row, Hist. of the Kirk of Scotland, 363.
[407] Spalding, i. 20.
[408] Row, 364.
[409] Sanderson’s History, 194. That discussion was stopped is stated in the Humble Supplication, for connection with which Balmerino was afterwards tried.
[410] Mr. Napier (Montrose and the Covenanters, i. 521) seems to me to have completely disposed of the story that there was a real majority the other way, concealed by Charles. Yet, though its antecedent improbability is glaring, it was believed soon after the time.
[411] Laud’s Works, iii. 278. Crawford, Lives of the Officers of the Crown, 177. He founds his narrative on MSS. of Spottiswoode which have been lost, and upon Clarendon, who had doubtless a good opportunity of hearing what passed. Crawford anticipates by calling Sydserf and Wedderburn bishops.
[412] Acts of Parl of Scotl. v. 21.
[413] Sermon preached June 25, 1633, in Garden’s Life of J. Forbes, 290, prefixed to J. Forbesii Opera.
[414] These ideas are expressed in different parts of the supplication, but they are all there.
[415] Mr. Burton, Hist. of Scotl. vi. 384, suggests that this delay was caused by the hesitation of those entrusted with the conduct of the prosecution.
[416] State Trials, iii. 591; Row, 386.
[417] Drummond’s Apologetical Letter [to the Earl of Ancram], Works, 132. I need not refer the reader to Professor Masson’s Drummond of Hawthornden, which should be in everyone’s hands who wishes to understand these times in Scotland. Unluckily he has passed over the affair of the tithes, without which no completely fair judgment can be formed. Mr. Napier, on the other hand, in his various works on the life of Montrose, was totally unable to see anything except the commutation of tithes and Presbyterian intolerance.
[418] Row, 389.
[419] Balfour, ii. 129.
[420] Balfour, ii. 141.