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Had not the Lord been on
our side,
May Israel now say;
Had not the Lord been on
our side,
When men rose us to slay;
They had us swallowed
quick, when as
Their wrath did 'gainst us
flame;
Waters had covered us, our
soul
Had sunk beneath the
stream,
- PSALM cxxiv. (Scottish version).
The Martyrs' Hills
forsaken--
The simmer's dusk sae
calm,
There's nae gathering now,
lassie,
To sing the evening psalm!
But the martyrs' grave
will rise, lassie,
Aboon the warrior's cairn;
And the martyrs soun' will
sleep, lassie,
Aneath the waving fern.
- ROBERT
ALLAN : The
Covenanter’s Lament.
The Scottish Church,
both on himself and those
With whom from childhood
he grew up, had held
The strong hand of her
purity; and still
Had watched him with an
unrelenting eye.
This he remembered in his
riper age,
With gratitude, and
reverential thoughts.
- WORDSWORTH
: The Excursion.
The cheerfu' supper
done, wi' serious face,
They round the ingle, form
a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er wi'
patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance
his father's pride:
His bonnet rev'rently is
laid aside,
His lyart haffets wearing
thin an' bare;
Those strains that once
did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a portion with
judicious care;
And 'Let us worship God!'
he says, with solemn air.
* * * * * * *
From scenes like these
auld Scotia's grandeur springs
That makes her lov'd at
home, rever'd abroad;
Princes and lords are but
the breath of kings,
‘An honest man's the
noblest work of God.'
- BURNS:
The
Cotter's Saturday Night.
It is a delicate task to
attempt any exposition of Scotland on its religious side; still it is
obviously impossible to form a just and adequate conception of the
Scottish character, as it has been developed, at home and abroad,
without taking one of the chief factors in the reckoning into account.
Religion, chiefly in the Presbyterian form, plays too important a part
in Scottish history, and in the moulding of national characteristics, to
be slighted or ignored. It is not necessary, however, for the present
purpose, to plunge through the white coating of those red ashes, which
still glow through the surface, or to burn one's fingers with questions
of dogma and Church government. Taking for granted the essential
sincerity and earnestness of the disputants, whether oppressors or
victims, victorious or vanquished, it seems possible to scan, with a
vision, more or less sympathetic, the struggles of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, as they radically and definitively affected
Scottish character. In order to take a dispassionate view of these
ecclesiastical troubles, it is necessary to bear in mind that there are
three religious communions to be taken into account - the ancient or
Roman Catholic Church, the Presbyterian or National Church of the
Reformation, with its numerous offshoots, and the Episcopal Church - the
representative in Scotland of the Established Church of England. The
last may be referred to hereafter; mean while let us glance briefly at
the old creed, and the process by which the faith of an overwhelming
majority of Scotsmen was evolved, or rather fought its way out from it.
It is extremely natural
that the Presbyterian Scotsman, even though he be an historian,
"should depreciate the real service performed in mediaeval times by
the Church of Rome in Scotland. Even now, centuries after the fiery
struggle has spent its strength, and the persecuted believers became
conquerors, the fire of the furnace still smoulders, and the attempt to
be impartial seems to the ardent religious patriot a sin scarcely less
heinous than overt apostasy. Still, it is well to be reminded that if
the ancient Church had finished its work in the sixteenth century, or
even earlier, it had a work to do which was accomplished with ardour and
sincerity. As Mr. Froude remarks, "the traditions of the struggle
survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to wound
without intending it; - yet that is no reason for refusing to gauge
fairly the good wrought by a system, even although it may have survived
its usefulness and been perverted to mischief. * There may be truth on
both sides, if only the great religious principles on which the
belligerents are agreed; and the spirit of conservatism in religion
-"the use and wont" - will often attach men sincerely not only
to the truth which means vitality, but to the error which evidences
decay. Not in Scotland alone, but all over Europe, modern society owes
more to the mediaeval Church than it has been willing to acknowledge
since the Reformation.
In the main it was the
civilizer, the instructor and the peacemaker in the midst of rude,
savage and merciless nations of illiterate and uncouth warriors,
governed by barbarous and tyrannical chiefs or kings. Between the
oppressor and the oppressed the Church was the only bulwark, and it
stood firm and unshaken when the tide of anarchy and violence lashed its
potent billows against that solid rampart. All these things ought not to
have been forgotten when the fabric rotted to decay, and the bats and
owls, and all unclean things found a refuge in its ruined
cloisters. In England, such names as those of Lanfranc and Langton,
Archbishops of Canterbury, and Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln
might well rescue any Church from obloquy; and in Scotland the aid
afforded by the Bishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow to Wallace and Bruce
entitle them to everlasting gratitude.
That the Church of St.
Ninian, St. Patrick, St. Mungo and St. Cuthbert was not hierarchical or
ultramontane is certain; indeed it can hardly be called episcopal; and
the Culdees, whatever they were, had extremely loose ideas about
apostolical succession. The Saxon Church in process of time became more
closely united to Rome; but neither at first, nor in the early Norman
time, was its submission to the Holy See perfect or voluntary. In
Scotland the bishops were almost invariably patriots and the friends of
education. They first established not only the great seats of learning,
but the Grammar Schools. The University of St. Andrews was founded in
1410; that of Glasgow, in 1450; that of Aberdeen, in 1495; and even the
University of Edinburgh, though not formally established till 1582, was
chiefly endowed by a sum bequeathed many years before, by Reid, the
Catholic Bishop of Orkney.**
In 1495, the Scottish
Parliament - in which the clergy were the leaders, not less on account
of their cultured intelligence than their sacerdotal claims - enacted a
law, compelling all barons and freeholders to send their eldest sons to
the Grammar Schools, under pain of a heavy fine. It is not an excess of
charity to believe that the Scottish bishops saw in religious education
the one great agent in civilizing the untutored race around them, and of
reducing to something like order the frightful chaos in which Scotland
was involved.
The wealthy endowments,
no less than the patronage, bestowed upon the Church by kings
from Malcolm and St. David onwards, no doubt caused it to gravitate to
the side of royalty; yet it is not unreasonable to suppose that the
clergy were also influenced by the patriotic conviction that, in the
strengthening and consolidation of the monarchy, lay the only prospect
of permanent relief from so wretched a condition of affairs. On the
other hand the nobles saw with dismay the gradual absorption of the
nation's slender resources by religious foundations, and they knew well
how hopeless it was by any ordinary effort, to unclinch the rigid
"dead hand" of the Church, when it, had once closed upon the
possessions within its reach. Religion "waxed fat, and
kicked;" became of the world, worldly; filled with avarice and
carnal ambitions, weak in faith and corrupt in morals.*** To the
degenerate hierarchy had gone forth the solemn warning heard by the
Apocalyptic seer and addressed to the Church at Sardis, - "I know
thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead."
During the minority of James V. the struggle between the nobles and the
Church assumed definite shape. Albany, the Regent, had retired in
disgust, and for a time the Douglases reigned supreme. They had turned
James Beaton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, out of the Chancellorship; but
their triumph was short-lived. In 1528, the clergy had again asserted
their supremacy and maintained it for the next thirty-two years, until
the first General Assembly met to garner in the fruits of the Protestant
victory. Meanwhile, the ecclesiastical influence was advancing, by sure
but rapid strides, to the supremacy. The clergy gradually got possession
of all offices of trust and emolument; the chiefs of the nobles were
exiled or imprisoned; the burning of heretics became a sacerdotal
business and a royal pastime. To make bad worse, James took as his
second wife - Mary, a daughter of the bigoted and ruthless family of
Guise, or as Kirkton terms her, "ane egge of the bloody nest of
Guise." In 1539, David Beaton, who had been raised to the
cardinalate, succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of St. Andrews, and from
that time till his assassination was the king's sole adviser. James had
received from the Pope the title Henry VIII. had forfeited, of
"Defender of the Faith," and the outlook for Scotland became
altogether dark, lowering and hopeless. But the doom of the ancient
Church was pronounced at the very moment, when flushed with their
triumph, the clergy were enacting new and more sanguinary penal laws
against heresy. They had even registered for death no less than six
hundred of the aristocracy in what Watson has called "the bluidy
scroll."
Step by step, as the
breach widened between the clergy and the nobles, the doctrines of the
Reformation were diffused all over the East and the Lowlands. Brutal
measures of repression only exasperated the aristocracy and ere long the
entire people. Violence begets violence; and, although there had been a
time when conciliation might have appeased the lords and delayed the
impending change in religion, that time was now past. Cardinal Beaton
and his fellow clerics had made the struggle one of life and death, and
the defiant challenge they had hurled at their foes was taken up eagerly
and savagely. The first consequence was a temporary eclipse of the
monarchy. Henry VIII. had been in correspondence with the recalcitrant
Scot Lords, and James V. called upon them to assist him in an invasion
of England. They refused, and the result was the shameful defeat at
Solway Moss, in 1542. The chivalrous monarch, in the utter
despair of shattered pride and wounded honour, would hear no words of
comfort but turned his face to the wall and died, leaving as his
successor the new-born babe, which had better have yielded up its little
life and been laid beside its father in the grave.
Now began a terrible
period of confusion and distress. Cardinal Beaton had been appointed, by
the late king, guardian of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Governor of the
realm; and he immediately set to work with unrelenting severity to
extirpate heresy and to crush insubordination in Church and State. He
was utterly without principle, religious only in name; his master
passion was love of power, and, in its pursuit, he knew no scruples of
conscience, no touch of pity, no restraint from honour or remorse. For a
time dissensions among the nobles worked to his advantage. But, Angus
and Douglas had returned from exile; Beaton was imprisoned at Dalkeith;
and the Earl of Arran, who affected to be a Protestant when it suited
his purpose, became Regent. The struggle, so far as the nobles were
concerned, was not in any sense a religious one; they had a deadly
reckoning of revenge to make with Beaton and the Church; looked with
greedy eyes upon ecclesiastical wealth, and longed to lay their hands
upon it. But they soon fell out as such men will do, over a division of
the spoils; the clergy appealed to the people, and the Cardinal was
again master of the situation. But if the lords were not in earnest, the
people now rising into prominence soon proved that they were. In
England, there was a popular power of opinion and action; in Scotland it
was called into being by the religious contests of this age.+ This was
the first great boon conferred on Scotland by the Reformation, and it
has left indelible traces upon the Scottish character in all lands, and
through every succeeding age. The common people, as in the early days of
Christianity, heard gladly the preachers of the Gospel; and it was their
horror at the brutalities of the hierarchy which sealed the fate of the
ancient Church. Early in the fifteenth century, two "heretics"
had been burned to death under Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St. Andrew's,
who founded that University, in 1412; "which might have done him
honour, had he not imbrued his hands in innocent blood." ++ But the
first names enrolled in the new book opened by the Beatons in the
Scottish martyrology are those of Patrick Hamilton, burned in 1527, and
George Wishart in 1546.
Whether Cardinal Beaton
would have been suffered to continue his sanguinary course, in any case,
may be doubted; yet the popular indignation at Wishart's death was the
proximate cause of his assassination. On the 20th of May, 1546, within
three months after the martyr's execution at the stake, Norman and John
Leslie, William Kirkcaldy of Grange, James Melville, and others, gained
access to the castle and "stabbed him twice or thrice," ending
his cruel and arbitrary career upon the spot.+++ The restrained energy
and enthusiasm of the people at once burst forth. John Knox, although
not privy to the murder, shut himself up with the chief actors in the
castle of St. Andrew's, and made common cause with the Leslies and their
associates; Calderwood and other Church historians characterize the
murder as "a providential and stupendous act of Divine
judgment," and it has seldom been spoken of as a deed requiring
either defence or even extenuation.
The subsequent events of
the history are too generally known to require recapitulation in detail.
In 1554, Mary of Guise became regent in Arran's place - a step thus
commented upon by Knox in a characteristic sentence - " a croune
was patt upone hir head, als seimlye a sight (yff men had eis) as to
putt a sadill upone the back of ane unrewly kow." Mr. Buckle
suggests that Mary would not have ruled badly if her bigoted and
ambitious relations, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine had
left her alone. He quotes George Buchanan as saying that although she
had been called ambitious and intriguing, she was regretted even by her
opponents; that she possessed a distinguished mind and a disposition
inclined to equity. But the master-spirit of the time was about to
return, after a long absence to his native land. The character of John
Knox has been drawn by many hands. To some he is the incarnation of
stern probity, holy zeal and devout piety; to others a harsh, cruel and
unscrupulous zealot, fond of power and quite willing to abuse it when in
his hands. It is probable that he was brusque and uncompromising; needed
the mailed hand stretched forth by a dauntless soul. Philip Melancthon
in Scotland would never have perfected the work given to the Scottish
Reformer to do. When a mighty upheaval like the Reformation is in
progress, there is but one spirit fitted to cope with it, and direct its
unruly energy - the spirit of a Luther or a Knox. It is the fashion
now-a-days to look askance at the rugged heroes of the past, and to
forget the vast debt of gratitude due them from posterity. Of all the
Scottish heroes John Knox is the one who can best bear inspection. His
character may appear to be angular, and sharply cut at that, but the
angularities are those of the diamond, and, instead of detracting from
its value, they serve to display more clearly its purity and worth.
During the five years of struggle yet remaining his was the fiery and
indomitable spirit which conquered all opposition, renewed the youth of
Scotland, and placed her at once and forever on that higher plane up to
which she was toiling at Stirling and Bannockburn.*+ Even the brief
period referred to was broken by another visit to the Continent; but
after 1559, Knox put all his energies to the task of completing the work
of Reformation. In 1558, Mary of Guise married her daughter to Francis
the Dauphin, eldest son of Henry II. of France, and brother of Charles
IX., whose name has come down to us coupled with the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. During that year Mary Tudor of England died, Elizabeth
mounted the Throne, and the nobles made an offensive and defensive
alliance under the name of "The Lords of the Congregation." In
May, 1559, John Knox arrived once more. He was fifty-four years of age,
and the work might possibly have been completed without him; but his
presence seemed to send a sudden spasm of energy through the nation.
Like his master, Wishart, he had appealed to the commonalty from the
first; and, after his summons at Dundee, and especially at Perth, they
rose, plundered the churches, destroyed the monasteries, and overthrew
in a moment the old hierarchy. Mary, the Regent, moved troops; but the
Lords of the Congregation were on the alert. Glencairn, Argyle and
Murray came to their aid; Perth, Stirling and Linlithgow were seized;
Elizabeth's contingent drove the French force out of Leith; Edinburgh
was evacuated, and the Lords and their army entered the capital in
triumph, The Queen Regent was suspended, because she opposed "the
glory of God, the liberty of the realm, and the welfare of the
nobles." In 1560, the entire face of Scottish affairs was changed.
The English fleet was in the Firth of Forth; Norfolk was ready with an
English army at Berwick, and so the Reformation definitively triumphed.
It is impossible to say much for Elizabeth's part in the issue. She had,
as usual, played with matrimonial schemes for the union of the realms;
Protestantism, especially of the Scottish type, was not at all to her
mind, her aim being simply to crush the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots,
as a claimant to the English throne. For this purpose, in a feeble way,
she had assisted the Lords in driving out the French and the Regent; but
she had no heart in the cause, and Knox she detested, as was natural,
because of his ungallant treatise on "The Monstrous Regiment (rule)
of Women."
In addition to the triumph of the
Reformation, the year 1560 was remarkable for three notable incidents,
unconnected apparently, yet extending nevertheless to a common issue, so
far as Scotland was concerned. Francis II., the husband of Mary, Queen
of Scots, ascended the throne of France in the spring of 1559 – a
weakly youth of sixteen; he wore the crown during the shortest reign in
French history - about eighteen months - dying in December, 1560. Within
that brief period, the Guises and their enemies had been busy. There
were plots and counter-plots, whilst poor Mary finished her education,
with a Guise for mother, and Catherine de Medici for a mother-in-law. As
for France, it knew no health or vigour through the reigns of those
three wretched brothers, Francis, Charles and Henry, until Henry of
Navarre ascended the throne, a Bourbon when that house could boast of
nascent energy. In Scotland, the widowed Queen of France and of Scots,
became the focus of converging lines traced by fate - the cause of woe,
and yet herself the saddest and most pitiable figure in that long drawn
tragedy. On the 19th of August, 1561, she landed at Leith as the
historian pathetically phrases it, "a stranger to her subjects,
without experience, without allies, and almost without a friend."
During the same year the first General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland was held, and there Knox made an open breach with the nobles
who had espoused the Reformation solely to plunder and sequestrate the
property of the church. He boldly demanded that what had ever been
dedicated to sacred uses should be restored and devoted to the cause of
the Gospel. The nobles having obtained the plunder - refused to
surrender it, and thus the cause of the Reformation under Knox was
thrown into the hands of the people. The pulpit rang with vehement
declamation against the spoilation which had been committed. The money
had been squandered upon the unprincipled nobility, - "Satan had
prevailed, and the property had been given to profane men, court
flatterers, ruffians and hirelings." Knox declared that two-thirds
of the church endowments "had been given to the devil, and the
remaining third divided between God and the devil," alluding to the
arrangements proposed by the nobles. When the "First Book of
Discipline" was presented to the Privy Council, the nobles refused
their concurrence, not because they objected to its views on Church
government, but because it provided that "the haill rentis of the
Kirk, abusit in Papistrie sall be referrit again to the Kirk." Thus
then the people under Knox were arrayed against the Crown and the
nobility, whilst these were at variance, the one with the other. *++ In
the same year, Knox who had aroused the
commonalty or rather called them into active life, proposed the system
of popular education which afterwards made the Scottish people at large
what they have been at home and abroad in the field, the shop, the
counting-house, at the bar and in the senate - a fairly cultured and
eminently intelligent people. The scheme of Knox was not carried out in
it’s entirety until 1640 when the first attempt was made, to be fully
executed, "finally and permanently established" in 1696. *+++
Thus Scotland owes the initiation of its parochial system of education -
the first honest effort to raise the people by general education made in
Europe - and all the beneficent results which have flowed from it to the
same bold hand which rent asunder the ecclesiastical bonds enthralling
the people, taught them to be independent and free, and pointed out to
the humblest the path of knowledge and success. John Knox accomplished a
glorious work, not merely for Scotland but for the liberties of England
and of the world, when he stood face to face with the Crown, and a
time-serving aristocracy and defied them all in the name of God and in
the cause of the people.
In 1565, Mary married her
cousin Henry Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox; then followed the
Rizzio episode. The birth of James, the miserable tragedy of Kirk o'
Field, the marriage with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the battle at
Carberry Hill, and the imprisonment of Mary at Lochlevin. Murray was
made Regent, and then came in fated order the escape from her island
prison, the battle of Langside (1568), the flight over Solway Firth,
imprisonment and ultimately death by the headsman at Fotheringay.
Meanwhile all was danger, and apprehension. The Queen had abdicated and
fled to England; her friends were in arms, and the Spaniards under Alva
threatened to land in England. In 1570, Murray, the only honest man
amongst the lay leaders - "the one supremely noble man," was
removed by the dagger of the assassin, and no trustworthy member of the
nobility was left. **+ Knox alone, weak, broken in body and scarcely
able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still thundered in the parish
church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten thousand trumpets,
pealing in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. During three years of
civil war, it was the genius of Knox, unaided by the vacillating and
parsimonious Elizabeth, or by the nobles, split up as they were into
factions, which saved Scotland. At last all was over, and the knell of
Mary's cause sounded in the tocsin, which awakened the perpetrators of
St. Bartholomew's massacre. In the same year, John Knox died quietly in
his bed, the deliverer of his country, the bold, devout, stern old
preacher of righteousness, "who, in his life, never feared the face
of man," as Morton said at his grave, "who hath been often
threatened with dag and dagger, but hath ended his days in peace and
honour." He died on the 24th of November, 1572, exactly three
months after the fatal Day of St. Bartholomew.**++
After the battle of
Langside, and from the field, Mary saw Scotland no more. Without waiting
to ascertain what reception she was likely to receive in England,
"she got into a fisher-boat, and with about twenty attendants (May
16, 1568), landed at Workington in Cumberland, and thence she was
conducted with many marks of respect to Carlisle" (Robertson; History,
B. V.). Before the escape from Lochleven, Murray had been appointed
Regent, and began the work of evolving order from confusion. Mary had
resigned the Crown to her son; but she entertained hopes of aid from
Elizabeth as a sister-queen, who had no sympathy with rebellious
subjects anywhere, still less at her own doors. Unhappily for Mary, the
English Queen was in one of her ever-recurring fits of perplexity. She
had no deliberate intention to be cruel; but her natural, overpowering
desire was to be safe. Therefore, she simulated and dissimulated, both
at once, or each in turn, as it suited her. The embarrassment of the
situation was, doubtless, trying; but the affectation of regard and
sympathy for Mary, the underplotting by which she kept the contending
parties embroiled in Scotland, from Carlisle and Bolton to the last
sickening scene at Fotheringay in 1587, all is intrigue, darkness,
conspiracy, faithlessness, and perfidy. Murray's purpose as Regent once
more, honest as it no doubt was, had hardly unfolded itself, when he was
cut off by the hand of an assassin. Amongst the prisoners taken at
Langside, were six men, distinguished by birth or position, who had been
condemned to death, but pardoned by Murray at the intercession of Knox.
One of these, Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, it was, who fired at Murray,
from a house at Linlithgow, and caused his death in 1570. Henceforward
there was a dreary time of plot, counterplot, dissension and civil war.
Lennox, the father of the wretched Darnley, fell in fighting the
malcontents, it is believed by the order of Lord Claud Hamilton. Mar,
who succeeded him by the voice of the nobles, an ardent lover of peace
and order, sank under the troubles of that chaotic period, and died of a
broken heart. It was during Mar's rule, in 1570, that Morton, at heart a
traitor and a hypocrite, throughout, made a simoniacal compact with the
bishops, by which the nobles obtained the bulk of the church
temporalities and episcopacy was re-established. Morton himself had
secured from the Crown the property of the archi-episcopal see of St.
Andrew's. According to Robertson, he obtained the appointment of Robert
Douglas, rector of the University, as archbishop, giving him a small
annuity, but retaining the bulk of the wealth for his own use. Other
nobles were anxious to have a share in the church lands, and the result
was an arrangement in 1570, for the re-establishment of episcopacy, ten
years after the first General Assembly by which the Reformation had been
accomplished. Knox, upon whom the hand of death was already laid,
protested vehemently against the compact; but he was unable to attend
the meeting, and died in 1572, in his sixty-seventh year, the bold,
courageous and vehement apostle to the Reformation he had been from
first to last. The resolution referred to ran in these terms: "That
the house and office of the archbishop and bishop shall be continued
during the King's minority, and these dignities should be conferred upon
the best qualified among the Protestant ministers; but that, with regard
to their spiritual jurisdictions, they should be subject to the General
Assembly of the Church."
At Mar's death, Morton
secured the prize of his ambition, the Regency, which he retained for
eleven troublous years, from 1570 until he mounted the scaffold in 1581.
During that period the history of Scotland is a mass of confused
negotiations with England, intrigues on behalf of Mar, and struggles for
supremacy amongst the nobles, upon which we need not enter. Morton was
not without administrative genius; but such efforts as he made to settle
public affairs were marred by his unscrupulous ambition, his lack of
principle, his avarice and extortion. His strong-handed rule became
intolerable, and he gradually arrayed against him the nobles and the
people under Argyle and Athole. James was young, but, during his whole
life, he was swayed by favourites. Lennox seemed, in 1580, the rising
star; and, in order to remove so dangerous a rival, Morton declaimed
against him as a foe to the reformed religion. Therefore, Lennox, with
an accommodating conscience, not at all singular amongst the nobles of
the time, listened to some divines sent to him by the King,
"renounced the errors of Popery, in the church of St. Giles, and
declared himself a member of the Church of Scotland by signing her
Confession of Faith." All was soon over with Morton; the King was
restive, and Lennox accused the Regent of intending to seize the royal
person and fly to England. He was taken prisoner, confined in Edinburgh
Castle, and, under the sinister management of Arran, tried, and found
guilty of complicity in Darnley's death at Kirk o' Field, fourteen years
before. He was beheaded, and his head affixed to the public jail at
Edinburgh.
During Morton's Regency,
the second great name on the roll of the Scottish Church became
prominent. If John Knox was the father of the Reformation in that
country, it was Andrew Melville who stamped upon it its Presbyterian
character with indelible distinctness. Knox had no peculiar views of his
own on Church government; and; although he declined the archbishopric of
St. Andrews, it does not appear that it was on any ground of Scripture
or conscience. He was anxious to draw as close as might be to the Church
of England, and almost his last signature, "with a dead hand, but a
glad heart," was subscribed after that of the Archbishop of St.
Andrews.**+++ But when Melville reached Scotland from Geneva in 1574, he
saw, with admirable sagacity and prescience, the drift of civil and
ecclesiastical affairs, and took his measures with characteristic
boldness and vigour. If Melville bearded James VI. as Knox had
confronted Mary, it was because he could detect, in the King, that
twin-headed form of absolutism in Church and State which the Stuarts
strove to impose upon both England and Scotland. James preached and
endeavoured to establish the divine right of bishops, because he saw in
it the main-stay of the corresponding dogma, so dear to his heart - the
divine right of kings. In 1572 Knox was " taken away from the evil
to come," without, perhaps, having detected the signs of the storm
in that heated atmosphere and lowering sky which were gathering their
forces in cloud and tempest. Andrew Melville arrived to be his
successor, an Elisha more trenchant and uncompromising than the Elijah
whose mantle descended upon him. And it was no common struggle which he
undertook. It meant the battle of freedom, civil and religious, against
absolutism; of moral and spiritual force, against tyrannical power,
which Melville and his colleagues fought with desperate and stubborn
perseverance. It may suit the canons of modern taste, philosophical or
other, to call that indomitable heroism in faith and fight, bigoted; but
men cannot afford to weigh the proprieties, or be mealy-mouthed in
defining their beliefs or ill expressing them, when the flames of
cruelty and persecution, having already singed their garments, threaten
to enwrap their bodies in a fiery embrace. There is much in the
religious literature of those days to repel, and perhaps offend; but it
was not intended to tickle fastidious palates, or to provoke digestion
in jaded and dyspeptic stomachs. The people of to-day enjoy the fruits
of what such men as Knox and Melville sowed for them amid storm and
mist; and, therefore, so far from quarrelling with the uncouth husk, we
ought to be eternally thankful to those who, as sturdy husbandmen,
committed the seed to the earth, and invoked upon it the blessing of
Heaven.
Mr. Buckle, although he
had but little appreciation for the honest and earnest conscientiousness
of Melville, is ready to bear testimony to his "great ability,
boldness of character, and fertility of resource." McCrie, in his
biography, pourtrays the great leader of the second Scottish Reformation
in nobler and more attractive colours: " Under God, save
Knox," he says, "I know of no individual from whom Scotland
has received such important services, or to whom she continues to owe so
deep a debt of gratitude as Andrew Melville." His work, which
extended over a quarter of a century, until his imprisonment in the
Tower of London and subsequent exile to Sedan, must be rapidly surveyed.
In 1575 the question of Church government was raised by John Dury, it is
said at Melville's instance; but, although the latter spoke unfavourably
of episcopacy, he acted cautiously as one feeling his way. In 1578, the
General Assembly resolved that no new bishop should be made, and that
those at present in possession should be called by their names and not
by their sees. In the same year, the second Book of Discipline marked
the important change which had come over Scotland since 1560 when the
First Book was compiled, under Knox. That these works are essentially
different admits of no question; yet, as Buckle urges, the charges of
inconsistency in the Presbyterian leaders is untenable and unjust.
"They were perfectly consistent, and they merely changed their
maxims that they might preserve their principles." In truth, the
positions of the parties had undergone a serious modification. In 1560,
the nobles, with more or less sincerity, fought the battles of the
Reformation against the Crown and clergy; in 1578 their intrigues and
personal ambitions had alienated the hearts of the ministers and of the
commonalty which preaching, devoutness, zeal and fervour, had summoned
into existence. The natural leaders of the people had, in fact, deserted
them, and were involved in plots of infinite variety - plots for their
own aggrandizement, for the destruction of rivals, for the possession of
the royal ear or person, for the restoration of Mary, and aid from
France or Spain, or for the intervention of Elizabeth. When Scotland was
not embroiled in civil war, it was a hot-bed of conspiracy. All this
time the people had been suffering from a rigorous oppression which was
only too real, and from fears which were hardly less so. The Duke of
Alva had been perpetrating his wholesale slaughter in the Netherlands,
and, in 1572, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew sent a thrill of horror
through Christendom, which aroused even the torpid heart of Elizabeth.
The Duke preparing for a descent on Scotland and the French for an
expedition to Leith to seize the capital. The commonalty, whose hearts
and consciences the ministers had quickened into a new and vigorous
life, recognised in them its only leaders against the cruelty and
oppression which beset them. This confidence, as the event proved, was
fully justified by the zeal and intrepidity of Melville and his
colleagues.
In 1580, at the General
Assembly, held at Dundee, with Melville as Moderator, the decisive blow
was struck. The office of bishop was unanimously denounced as unlawful,
unscriptural, of human invention, and at once to be abolished. All those
who held sees were called upon to resign them or suffer excommunication.
The language employed at Dundee was not finely phrased. The Church knew
that it must expect a conflict and, as the sword was to be drawn, the
people boldly flung away the scabbard. In the following year, so as to
test the question, the Crown nominated Robert Montgomery to the
Archbishopric of Glasgow. The Chapter refusing to elect, the Privy
Council fell back on the royal prerogative; the General Assembly forbade
the Archbishop to enter Glasgow, and he appealed for aid to the Duke of
Lennox, bribing him with the bulk of the archiepiscopal revenues. The
year 1582 was a very notable one in Scotland. The King ordered the
General Assembly not to discuss the Archbishopric; but its members were
men who knew not how to flinch, still less how to yield. They summoned
Montgomery, deposed him from the ministry, and threatened him with
instant excommunication. Fearing for his life, the Archbishop trembled
and yielded, promising not to make any attempt to take possession of the
see. The King and Arran were enraged; and, when some resolutions were
presented by Melville and the other commissioners, denouncing these
encroachments of the State upon the Church and seeking redress,
"the Earl of Arran," says Howie, "cried out, 'Is there
any here that dare subscribe these articles ?' Melville stepped forward
and said, 'we dare, and will render our lives in the cause,' and then
took up the pen and subscribed." But the Privy Council had material
force on their side, and at once prepared to use it. Dury was banished;
some of the other members were called to account; and more violent
measures were preparing "when," says Buckle, " they were
interrupted by one of those singular events, which not unfrequently
occurred in Scotland, and which strikingly evince the inherent weakness
of the Crown, notwithstanding the inordinate pretensions it commonly
assumed." This event was known as the Raid of Ruthven. According to
the historians, James was returning towards Edinburgh, after hunting,
when he was invited to Ruthven Castle. Thinking probably that some
further diversion might be on foot, he went thither; but he had some
great cause for apprehension, as the castle was crowded with strangers
and fresh groups were constantly arriving. The secret was soon
disclosed; James was a prisoner, and remained in durance at Stirling or
Holyrood for ten months. During this period the popular party had it all
their own way; Lennox and Arran were astounded, and, for the time,
paralysed. When James recovered his liberty in l583, he found himself
confronted, not merely by the Presbyterian ministers, but by a new
power, of which he had hitherto formed but a hazy conception - the
sturdy adolescence of the Scottish Commons.
The King's release was the signal for a
fiercer struggle which need not be followed in detail. It seems
sufficient to note the altered tone of the popular leaders now that they
had aroused their hearers by many a stirring and often violent appeal
from the pulpit. They openly defied the King. By one he was likened to
Cain; another denounced upon him the curse of Jeroboam, that he should
die childless and that his race should perish with him - a prophetic
denunciation unhappily falsified by the event. Simpson, Dury, Gibson,
Black, Welch (Knox's son-in-law) and others were furious in their
declarations, and Melville did not hesitate to upbraid James to his face
of having perverted the laws of God and man. He even, according to the
story "plucked him, as God's silly vassal, by the sleeve." In
1592 James, finding himself powerless to resist, re-established
Presbytery in its complete form, and promised to maintain it, with the
mental reservation, which gives its peculiar bias to Stuart perfidy,
that he would break his promise at the earliest opportunity. Melville's
struggles with the King extended over the rest of James' reign in
Scotland, and for three or four years after he ascended the English
throne. He was several times before the Council, yet never yielded one
jot of his principles, even when death seemed certain and imminent.
During four years he was imprisoned in the Tower, the years during which
the authorized version of the Scriptures was in process of making. The
"setting of that bright occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth," had
occurred eight years before; and then as the fulsome preface tells us,
came "the appearance of your majesty as of the Sun in his
strength," to dabble in dark and foul matters with Essex, Villiers,
and the rest of that diabolical crew, and when the Bible, as we have it,
emerged with these words of flattery prefixed, in 1611, Andrew Melville
was permitted, at the solicitation of the Duke de Bouillon, to retire to
France. At Sedan - a name of renown in more times than one - "the
Apostle of Presbyterianism in Scotland," as Archbishop Spottiswoode
terms him, breathed his last, in the year 1622, having attained the good
old age of seventy-seven years.
Let us pass over an
interval of some fifteen years to the year 1637, the twelfth of the
reign of Charles I. His predecessor had attempted to restore episcopacy
in the fitful way characteristic of his sinister genius; but he was too
wary, and had too much on his hands in England to venture his arm
farther than he could draw it safely back. Before Laud mounted the
episcopal bench, James had found it necessary to restrain him
"because he had a restless spirit," and again and again strove
to curb him in a career which ended on the scaffold.+* Charles, however,
was a monarch of a different turn of mind. He was stubborn without
firmness, crafty without tact, yielding without pliability, placable
without grace or ingenuous feeling. In the hands of William Laud, he was
plastic enough, and that narrow-minded prelate soon managed every thing
ecclesiastical in his own way. In 1626, the year after Charles'
accession, he was made Bishop of Bath and Wells; in 1628 transferred to
London; and in 1633 raised to the see of Canterbury. On the 23rd of
January, 1637, the first symptoms of the turbulent "stomach"
of the Scottish people showed themselves in the historical church of St.
Giles, Edinburgh. Whether Jenny Geddes really "discharged the
famous stool" at the devoted head of the Dean of Edinburgh,+** and
was imitated by ladies or their maids until a volley of "fauld
stools" were hurled at the reading-desk, has been disputed; yet it
is quite certain that a determined resistance to the Anglican liturgy
was excited on that memorable Sunday, by the words, gestures, or actions
of some woman or women. Episcopacy had been nominally restored in 1610,
and the free General Assemblies prevented from meeting; aggression after
aggression had been committed upon the established faith of Scotland,
and the people were determined to submit to these encroachments no
longer. "General causes," says Buckle, "had made the
people love the clergy, and made the clergy love liberty. As long as
these two facts co-existed, the destiny of the nation was safe. It might
be injured, insulted, trampled upon; but the greater the harm the surer
the remedy. All that was needed was a little more time, and a little
more provocation." The time had been spent in patient preparation;
the provocation came in the attempt to force the English liturgy -
"the black service book," the peculiar appanage of "foul
Prelacy" - upon the people. Riots began in Edinburgh, and the
contagion soon spread over the country until in the autumn the entire
nation had risen in sturdy resistance. In 1638, "in a paroxysm of
enthusiasm," says Robert Chambers, "unexampled in our
history," the National Covenant was signed by all classes
throughout the country.+*** It was a national defiance, a religious
Declaration of Independence, a solemn protest against absolutism in
Church and State, destined to make its potent influence felt, not only
there in Scotland, but in England, and, in later ages, over every
quarter of the globe. In November, 1638, Charles I. was prevailed upon
to allow a free General Assembly - the first for twenty years - to meet
at Glasgow. This concession, yielded in consequence of the universal
uprising of the nation, came too late. The Commissioner was arbitrary,
and, on the whole, matters were made worse by the characteristic
tardiness in yielding, the ungracious manner and want of sincerity
manifested throughout that unhappy king's career. The Marquis of
Hamilton, the Royal Commissioner, first threatened to withdraw, and then
ordered the Assembly to break up. They refused to separate until they
had finished the work, deposed the bishops, and put an end to the
"foul sin of Prelacy." Nothing remained but an appeal to arms.
The King repudiated the existing treaty, and in 1640 the Scots invaded
England, with an army of 25,000 men, defeated a detachment sent against
them at Newburn, and took Newcastle. Charles again made an armistice and
proposed a treaty. In 1641, Strafford and Laud perished along with their
policy of "Thorough." During the autumn of that year the King
visited Scotland; was lavish in promise and concession as usual,
professed to conform to the Presbyterian worship, and appointed several
Covenanters to his Council. Then followed "The Grand
Remonstrance," the arrest of the five members and civil war in
England. It is not too much to assert that to the religious resistance
of Scotland, the first blood drawn by the Scots on the Tyne, and the
example as well as the invaluable aid they afforded England, the triumph
of its liberties was largely due. Without the stubborn opposition of
Scotland, it is highly probable that Charles might have continued to
trample upon his rebellious subjects in the south; and thus, as Buckle,
Froude, and most modern historians cheerfully acknowledge, England owes
a lasting debt of gratitude to Knox, to Melville, and to the champions
and martyrs of the Covenant. ++*
The events that followed
the outbreak of civil war in England, from August, 1642, when Charles
raised the royal standard at Nottingham, until his defeat at Naseby,
(June 14, 1645), hardly need particular reference here. Most readers are
well aware of the essential service rendered by the Scots' army. It was
they who turned the tide of victory against the King, and fought side by
side with Fairfax and Cromwell at Marston Moor; and without their aid
Naseby would not have left Charles hopeless and a fugitive to the land
from which he sprang and which, through Wentworth and Laud, as well as
by his own perfidy, he had so deeply outraged. The last battle of the
war was, in fact, fought on Scottish ground. The chivalrous James
Graham, Earl of Montrose, with his Highlanders, aided by a body of
Irish, had defeated Lord Elcho at Tippermuir near Park, in the previous
autumn. A victory at Kilsyth in 1645 had revived the drooping spirits of
the Royalists, and for the moment placed Scotland in the power of
Montrose. But on the 13th of September, four months after Naseby, Leslie
defeated him utterly and irretrievably in the battle of Philiphaugh; and
all was over. The only remaining episode was the landing of the second
Charles, his treacherous dealings with the Scottish Church, and the
signal defeat of the national forces by Cromwell at Dunbar. The
inherited faithlessness of the Stuarts had induced Charles to take a
false oath to the Covenant; the Scots fell into the trap and suffered
for it. During the progress of the civil war, several important events
had occurred, having a direct bearing upon the progress of Presbyterian
principles. When Pym, in Mr. Green's words, "had resolved at last
to fling the Scotch sword into the wavering balance, and in the darkest
hour of the Parliament's cause," the first condition required by
the Scots was "unity of religion." Accordingly, "in St.
Margaret Church," says Dean Stanley, "beneath the shadow of
Westminster Abbey, the Covenant was read from the pulpit article by
article, in the presence of both houses of Parliament and of the
Assembly of Divines. Every person in the congregation stood up with his
right hand raised to Heaven, and took a pledge to observe it." This
notable congregation vowed to "bring the Churches of God in the
kingdom to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion,
confession of faith, form of church government, direction for worship
and catechizing; that we and our posterity after us may live in faith
and love, and the Lord may delight to live in the midst of us; to
extirpate Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness,
&c." ++** This agreement was the renowned Solemn League and
Covenant. Of the effort to impose its terms by force it is only
necessary to remark that it was in consonance with the arbitrary spirit
of the age. Finally in 1648, the celebrated Westminster Assembly, which
had met in the Jerusalem Chamber since 1643, presented the Confession of
Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechism and the Directory of Public
Worship which still constitute "the standards" of the Kirk of
Scotland and the wide-spreading branches which have sprung from that
common root.
From the Restoration in
1660, almost without pause, to the Revolution, Scotland passed through
the fiery furnace of one of the most ruthless persecutions that ever
disgraced one nation and tried the heroic faith and endurance of
another. The Scottish Martyrs of the Covenant appear in no
ecclesiastical calendar with the prefixed "St." of
canonization; yet surely if there ever was a hagiology worthy of special
prominence, it is that in which are enrolled those devoted witnesses and
sufferers for conscience' sake in "auld Scotia." ++*** What
Beaton had begun in the old time, and Laud continued under the first two
Stuart monarchs of England, Lauderdale, Middleton, Sharp and Graham of
Claverhouse finished after the Restoration. In perusing the bloody
record of these terrible twenty-eight years, two powerful passions
struggle for the mastery in any human soul - the one made up of horror,
burning hatred and over-powering indignation at the brutal persecutions;
the other of tender, pitying sympathy and intense admiration at the
inspiring story of those who were so constant in faith, fervent in zeal,
and heroic in life and unto death. It is exceedingly difficult to put
forward any plea for Charles, and more especially for James, who was
personally responsible for much of the brutality perpetrated - that will
pass muster at the bar of posterity. Charles was not a zealot like
Philip II or Mary Tudor; he could not claim the decent covering of
religious conviction for his treatment of the Scots, since, from first
to last, he was a profligate though by no means a heedless one. There
was more method in his roystering madness than contemporaries gave him
credit for. What his brother James did with the sour face of a bigot,
and in a blundering style that proved his paternity, Charles, with easy
and gentlemanly grace, could surpass. The elder brother wore the mask of
comedy behind which the threatening grimace of evil passion was
perpetually at work upon his countenance. James was not more arbitrary,
more treacherous, or more cruel than his brother; but he wanted the
vizor or the paint, and always appeared the brutal, sensual and
unfeeling bigot that he was. Charles never had any religion at all,
unless it were Hobbism which commended itself to his theory of divine
right, or the other epicurean form of worship in which he was engaged on
that fatal Sunday in February, 1685, when he enjoyed his last orgy at
the palace with the Duchesses of Cleveland, Portsmouth and Mazarin. From
it he retired to a dying bed, and made an arrangement with Heaven
through the medium of
Father Huddlestone.
Whether in Scotland or in England, his successor was an unmitigated
ruffian; cruel for cruelty's sake, treacherous almost beyond the
treachery even of a Stuart; perfidious, immoral, in every way base, but
always on the surface a zealot, at heart either a conscious or
unconscious hypocrite.
These were the men who
hunted the simple-minded Covenanters of Scotland through the glens, over
the passes, into the caves, where these pious Christian men and women
had taken refuge, that they might worship the God of their fathers, in
spirit, in truth, and, above all, in peace. Lauderdale, who contributed
the final letter to the name of the infamous Cabal, was the chief agent
in the work, after James had done his part. On one occasion, 8,000
Highlanders, of the wildest and most unruly clans, were let loose upon
the entire south-western Lowlands, to murder, to rob, to torture and to
outrage, as their savage natures bade them. In May, 1876, the world was
excited over the atrocities of irregular troops in Bulgaria, not
authorized certainly, but connived at and subsequently condoned by a
semi-civilized power. But two centuries before, in Dumfries and Wigton
especially, deeds were wrought by the agents of chivalrous and
respectably veneered monarchs, in comparison with which the horrors of
Batak and Philippopolis, sink to the common-place level of ordinary
criminality. Nor was that all; for, behind the ruffianism of a brutal
soldiery there sat, with a solemn show of justice, a bench of
magistrates, whose names it would be grossly unfair to Jeffries and
Scroggs to link together with theirs on the scroll of infamy. All the
massacres and cruelties were not by any means the work of extra-legal
agents. Every crime committed in Galloway, or elsewhere in the devoted
district, was sanctioned by laws solemnly ordained by the Council, and
enforced under such men as Claverhouse, in whose behalf much has been
urged, and whose death at the moment of victory in the pass of
Killiecrankie has done much to throw a glamour about his name. Prof.
Aytoun has sung the praises of the Scottish cavaliers in the Jacobite
resistance; but it would require infinitely more to redeem the memories
of Dalyell, Lagg, Crighton, Bruce and Douglas from the posthumous hate
with which they are weighted down amongst Scotsmen.
The plot, in fact, was of
English manufacture, although its execution was entrusted to a
packed Council, and a degenerate nobility. Puritanism was silent, but
not inactive, in England; for amid the orgies of the Restoration period
there reposed, in fitful and uneasy slumber, the earnest and quenchless
spirit aroused during the Commonwealth. In Scotland and Ireland,
however, as Mr. Green observes {p. 618), it seemed possible to undo the
work, and once more to impose the yoke of absolutism, civil and
ecclesiastical. By one statute, "the Drunken Parliament"
repealed every Act passed during the previous eight-and-twenty years.
The Covenant was abolished; the ordinary machinery of Church government
shared the same fate as the General Assembly, which Cromwell had
abolished in a fit of anger after Dunbar. Episcopacy re-appeared, and
prelates sat again in Parliament. Under a monstrous perversion of the
law of high treason, Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyle, was beheaded
by that ingenious instrument "the maiden," an anticipation of
the guillotine, and a fresh proof of the execrable ingenuity which had
already made "the boots" and the "thumbikins" to be
the special delights of James. Argyle was the only noble opposed to
arbitrary government, who appeared likely to be a leader in popular
resistance, "the proto-martyr to religion since the
Reformation," says Howie, "in a word, he had piety for a
Christian, sense for a counsellor, courage for a martyr, and soul for a
king." "If ever any was, he might be said to be a true
Scotsman."+++* And now the crew who set themselves to the task of
crushing the religion and freedom of a nation went to work in earnest.
"The Government," says Mr. Green (p. 619) "was entrusted
to a knot of profligate statesmen, who were directed by Lord Lauderdale,
one of the ablest and most unscrupulous of the King's ministers, and
their policy was steadily directed to the two purposes of humbling
Presbyterianism - as the force which could alone restore Scotland to
freedom, and enable her to lend aid, as before, to English liberty in
any struggle with the Crown - and of raising a Royal army which might be
ready, in case of trial, to march over the border to the King's
support." Charles, who had the soundest head at his Councilboard,
was no "idler and mere voluptuary;" on the contrary, he knew
how to plot and plan the means of attaining the crooked ends he had in
view.
At once the dogs of war
were let loose upon the western Lowlands. The record of that fearful
period has left a broad, black mark in history; but what is more to the
present purpose, it has left unmistakable traces indelibly stamped upon
the Scottish character. Englishmen look back with horror to the period
of "bloody Mary," as she has perhaps, considering her unhappy
life, been too harshly termed. But what were the handful of sufferers in
the southern kingdom, as compared with the wholesale butchery, torture
and outrage committed in the poor old realm of Scotland? The terrible
story is related at length, in almost sickening fullness of detail, in
Wodrow, upon whom Macaulay and most other authorities have drawn. In
turning over those gloomy pages, one almost instinctively hopes that the
chronicler may have grossly exaggerated the facts, and dipped his sombre
landscape in Rembrandt tints to some extent for artistic effect. But
alas! the truth is too dark in itself to be deepened by the resources of
art. Defoe has left a record of the doings of Claverhouse and Douglas,
with their "troopers, heritors, dragoons and Highlanders,"
when they swept Galloway from end to end in search of the hapless
Covenanters. Those poor, pious, unoffending sufferers, for conscience
sake, had been driven from their homes; they had been forced to worship
on moors, in caves, or "among the thickets of woodland dells;"
but even there the remorseless persecutors followed them. "This
outrage," says Simpson of Sanquhar, "on the lives of the
subjects was not committed by armed banditti on their own
responsibility. It was committed by the regular military, by the license
of the Government of the country." +++** He should rather have
said, by the express command of James, whether as vice-regent or King,
and of Sharp and Claverhouse. Many potentates have been permitted to
live and rule, as scourges of mankind, but James II. was one of the few
cruel and bloodthirsty men, high in place, to whom the spectacle of
torture was a delight for its own sake. Many other monsters have plied
the rack, the boots, the thumbscrew, and other diabolical contrivances
of the sort; but the last Stuart attained the frightful eminence of
positively gloating with delight over the feast of human suffering he
had prepared. Buckle, no friend to the Kirk, in an eloquent passage,
declaims with power and generous indignation against this royal
miscreant. Speaking of his odious pleasure in witnessing torture, he
says, "This is an abyss of wickedness into which even the most
corrupt natures rarely fall." Men have often been indifferent to
human suffering, and ready to inflict pain; "but to take delight in
the spectacle is a peculiar and hideous abomination." When one
contemplates James feasting his eyes, and revelling with fiendish joy,
"over the agonies, the tears and groans of his victims, it makes
one's flesh creep to think that such a man should have been the ruler of
millions." Burnet relates that, although almost all the members of
the Council offered to run away, when "the boots" were
produced, James "looked on all the while with an unmoved
indifference, and with an attention as if he had been to look on some
curious experiment. This gave a terrible idea of him to all who observed
it, as of a man who had no bowe1s nor humanity in him." Nor was the
head of the hierarchy, Sharp, Archbishop of St. Andrews, "a cruel,
rapacious man" and an apostate to boot, far behind the Duke of York
and Lauderdale in cruelty. Cardinal Beaton, alone of ecclesiastics in
Scotland, can be compared with him for the intense hatred he excited in
the breasts of an oppressed people; but, of the two, Sharp was
unquestionably the meaner and the worse. In 1668, James Mitchell
attempted to put him out of the way, and in 1679 he was murdered by John
Balfour of Burley, and others, at Magus Muir, in Fifeshire, with a
cruelty only to be palliated in consideration of the despairing rage and
madness of the times. In 1666, the poor Covenanters made a hopeless
effort at resistance, but were easily crushed at the Pentland Hills.
After Sharp's assassination, the chief actors collected a small force
which defeated the cavalry of Claverhouse, and made them temporarilly
masters of Glasgow. But this slight success at Drumclog was in vain;
they had mustered 8,000 men, but were finally routed by Monmouth at
Bothwell Brig, on the Clyde, at midsummer, 1679.
Reference has already
been made to John Graham, the "bluidy Claverhouse," as he is
still called in every peasant home in the South of Scotland. No historic
figure comes out with greater clearness of outline in the annals of
Scotland; he finds panegyrists in the poetry of Aytoun, and the prose of
Scott; yet neither the author of The Lays of the Cavaliers, nor
the matchless artist who drew Dundee's portrait at full length in Old
Mortality, can reverse the sober and deliberate verdict of history
or efface the dark and fearful image of the man which fills a skeleton
closet of its own in every Lowland heart. Those who choose may dwell
upon the chivalrous devotion and unquestioned courage of Claverhouse, or
the glorious death which became him better than almost anything else in
his life; yet the influence of his career from first to last was
undoubtedly pernicious and malign. After both uprisings in 1666 and 1679
his dragoons were set to their bloody work. Defoe relates that these
men, "forming themselves into a great army, spread themselves from
one side of the whole country to another, having their men placed
marching singly at a great distance, but always one in sight of the
other; so marching forward everyone straight before him, they by this
means searched the rocks, rivers, woods, wastes, mountains, mosses, and
even the most private and retired places of the country, where they
thought we were hidden; so that it was impossible anything could escape
them. And yet so true were the mountain men, as their persecutors called
them, to one another, that in that famous march they found not one man,
though many a good man, perhaps with trembling heart and hands lifted up
to Heaven for protection, saw them, and were passed by them
undisturbed." But in the inhabited country the slaughter was great.
The same author says that Claverhouse alone killed over a hundred
"in cold blood, making it his business to follow and pursue poor
people through the whole country, and having at his heels a crew of
savages, highlanders and dragoons whose sport was in blood, and whose
diversion was to haul innocent men from their houses or hiding-places
and murther them." Many were slain whose names and memories
perished with them and "multitudes of graves are discernible in the
wilds, of which no account can be given further than that they are the
graves of the martyrs." Many perished of fatigue, cold and hunger,
whose bones " were found bleaching on the moors after the
troublesome times had passed away." It is impossible now to
realize, in anything like their fearful truth, the horrors of that
terrible persecution. But even that does not exhaust the tale. In
addition to the work of military butchery, the civil power was
perpetrating deeds of kindred wickedness under the forms of law. In the
works before cited, the muster-roll of Scotland's martyrs and their
piteous story may be read at length. Macaulay cites a few cases in his
fourth chapter such as those of John Brown, "the Christian
carrier," +++*** Gillies and Bryce. But the most touching story of
all is the drowning of Margaret McLauchlan and Margaret Wilson, the
former an aged widow, the latter, a poor girl of eighteen, a farmer's
daughter of Wigtonshire. Their offence was that they had refused to take
the oath abjuring "The Apologetic Declaration" of the
Cameronians; their sentence, to be tied to stakes near the sea-shore and
so drowned by the rising tide in the water of Blednoch, an inlet of the
Solway. The widow died first being further from shore and then occurred
the pathetic death-scene of the simple maid which touched the chords of
many a heart after a lapse of nearly two centuries. The meek, untroubled
calmness of the martyr, the gibes of the troopers, the fruitless efforts
to induce her to recant; and the steadfast courage which made her
victorious in death are not to be read of unmoved. The maiden's
devotions at that trying hour, the Presbyterian simplicity that strikes
one so forcibly in its manner and order - the Psalm (xxv, 7) in the
Scottish version:
"Let not the errors
of my youth,
Nor sins remembered be;
In mercy for thy goodness’
sake,
O Lord remember me,
&c."
- the chapter and the prayer which was
ended by a benediction from no earthly priest, but came to that pure
devout heart from Heaven itself, all the circumstances seemed to shed a
halo of celestial light upon the maiden martyr’s brow as she sinks
beneath the wave to realize the beatific vision of which she fancied she
had caught a glimpse on earth.
An attempt has thus been
made to indicate, rather than trace in detail, the rise and progress of
the Presbyterian faith in Scotland. It has not been possible, even were
it relevant, to refer particularly to the many noble confessors,
preachers or sufferers of that faith. Many names will occur to the
reader of Scottish history, which ought to find a place in a systematic
account of its religion, such as those of Richard Cameron, Samuel
Rutherford, Alexander Henderson, Alexander Peden, Patrick Simpson, James
Guthrie and James Reinwick. But the present purpose being to examine the
influences which have made the Scot at home or abroad what he is, it
seems sufficient to indicate these influences as they have moulded
national character. Upon the merits of the creed or form of church
government no opinion must be advanced, still as the question has often
been raised, notably by Mr. Buckle, it seems well, in concluding this
chapter, to inquire whether, on the whole, the church has been a benefit
to the Scottish people and through them to the world. With purely
aesthetical pleas, it is not necessary to deal; but charges of violence
and intolerance have been made against the Reformers and of narrowness,
bigotry, acerbity and over-bearing interference with freedom of opinion
and with social life in its amenities and amusements. Dean Stanley in
his Lectures has made some reference to the rather savage onslaught of
Buckle; and the Church has been well defended from most of those charges
by its authorized exponents. The writer of the unfinished History of
Civilization laboured under the capital defect of not being able,
from want of knowledge and want of sympathy, to understand and
appreciate the religious character of the Scottish people. He can defend
Knox and even Melville, execrate the Stuarts, Sharp, Lauderdale and the
other agents of oppression; but, strangely enough, appears to suppose
that after the Revolution, the sternness of the discipline, the
contracted views of human life and destiny which he attributes to the
clergy, and the robust piety of Covenanting times should have been
mellowed all of a sudden and that the fiery rays which illumined the
centuries of struggle and suffering should have been toned down as
though it had entered " the studious cloisters pale" through
"Storied windows
sickly dight,
Casting a dim religious
light."
National character is not modified by
legislative unions; it may pass through vicissitudes which rub off its
angles and divert the forces which together constitute its energy; but
at bottom the race, and especially the religion of the race, where it
has been forced into prominence, as in Scotland, is seldom altered
radically. The characteristics of the people may take eccentric turns to
all appearance; but they are obedient to law, and that most certain and
unerring of all laws, heredity. The first instinct of the Scottish
nature, wherever found, is the love of freedom, of action, of thrift,
linked closely with a strong and earnest moral sense, and a deep
reverence for the Maker and Giver of all that is good. Sydney Smith’s
celebrated mot about the obtusity of the Scot’s head to
pleasantry, is plainly absurd, if, by a joke he meant anything but that
sort of sharp, verbal sleight-of-hand that passes for what is called
wit. The Scot is a born humorist, full of quiet, paukie, good-natured
fun, not often found so universally diffused amongst all classes of any
people. Dean Ramsay’s entertaining Reminiscences show, and it was
necessary, to all appearance, that it should be shown, that so far from
the Scot being the slave of his minister, as Buckle seems to think, the
minister was his slave, his butt occasionally, and always merely his
representative in sacred things.
Democracy in Scotland was
the fruit of long centuries of painful effort. It involved ages of
struggle, endurance, sorrow and suffering; and to suggest that Scotland
is "priest-ridden," in even a greater degree than Spain, is a
paradox which disconcerted Mr. Buckle, but never suggested to him the
possibility that his selected data and the conclusions he had determined
to infer in advance, were altogether fallacious. Mr. Froude has well
remarked that the Scottish people are not so gloomy as the philosophical
historian would have us believe; indeed their literature, no less than
their daily life, proves that they are not oppressed by the alleged
gloom of Calvinistic doctrine or pulpit denunciation. That the clergy
"thought more of duty than of pleasure," one might expect; but
that simply shows that their over-exuberance of animal spirits appeared
to religious minds to require rebuke.*+* Calvinism, whatever doctrinal
or philosophical value it may have as a dogmatic principle, cannot exert
an injurious effect upon a strong-headed, energetic, earnest and
enterprising people. The Turk may be a fatalist, and the Scot may be a
predestinarian; but in the one case there is the despondency and
sluggishness which dispose to inaction, in the other, the virtue and
energy of a race are nerved to action by a strong moral and religious
impetus gathered by honest and free action, through many generations, as
well as an inexorable sense of duty which forms a feature in the
national type, and is inseparable from it. The Turk leaves all to
destiny; the Scot, according to the injunction of the great Apostle,
" makes his calling and election sure."
The illiberality of
"the Kirk" is often insisted upon; but what would have become
of the liberties of Scotland and England also, and measurably of the
world, if Knox had spoken soft words to poor Mary Stuart, or Melville
had picked phrases when he bearded her son? **+* How, when the Stuarts
harried the Lowlands, could the people, physically helpless and under
the heel of oppression, have endured like true disciples of their Master
until the end, if a strong faith, stern and sharply defined, had not
inspired and made heroes of them? It is a subject of complaint that
Scottish religion is Judaic, and reverts unduly to the Old Testament;
what could you expect of those who have experienced, under a new
dispensation, the trials, reverses, and triumphs of Moses, David,
Elijah, Josiah and all the sacred seers or leaders of the olden time?
What it concerns us here to note is that their ancestral faith has made
honest and God-fearing men of the Scots. There are bad men of Scottish
birth, and a bad Scot, like an unworthy woman, is sure to appear in an
aggravated form of wickedness - a result partly flowing from the exalted
pattern set before him, and partly from a comparison we are apt to make
between the pure and good and those who, through despair or reckless
indifference, have drifted from their moorings, out upon the dark sea of
vice and impiety.
Where a high standard of
morals is kept before a people, and especially where it is reinforced by
the solemn sanctions of a rigid and commanding creed, it is inevitable
that those who leave the strict and narrow path shall wander far astray.
But that is not the normal action of the Scottish religion. Inherited
through centuries, its beneficient and healthy influences remain in the
form of strong earnestness, a deep sense of duty, high aims and an
unfaltering confidence in God and morality, whether in principle or in
life. Dean Stanley quotes two testimonies to the high worth of the
Scottish character from an outside point of view. The first relates to
the Covenanters. "The soldiers of the Cameronian regiment,"
who, says one being among them, but not of them, "are strictly
religious, and make the war a part of their religion, and convert State
policy into points of conscience. They fight as they pray, and they pray
as they fight. They may be slain; never conquered. Many have lost their
lives; few or none ever yielded. Whenever their duty or their religion
calls them to it, they are always unanimous and ready with undaunted
spirit and great enterprises, despise dangers, and bravely rush to death
or victory. ***+* In 1736, when John Wesley visited the Darien
settlement of Scots, and was greatly shocked at the absence of a liturgy
and of daily church services, "yet," he says, "it must be
owned that in all instance of personal or social duty, this people
utterly shames our countrymen. In sobriety, industry, frugality,
patience, in sincerity and openness of behaviour, in justice and mercy
of all kinds, being not content with exemplary kindness and friendliness
to one another, but extending it to the utmost of their ability to every
stranger that comes within their gates. ++**+ These testimonies to the
essential worth of the Scottish character might be multiplied to any
extent. The industry, enterprise and thrift of the Scot informed and
sustained by sterling probity, sensitive pride, independence,
self-respect, and an abiding regard to duty for its own sake, have made
him an inestimable power for good all the world over. Individual
Scotsmen may have renounced the faith of their ancestors; but they can
no more divest themselves of the inherited traits of character they owe
to their country’s religious history, than they can change their form
and features, or the colour of their skin. The inestimable qualities,
social and industrial, which have made the people of Scotland so
prominent in almost every land in which they have settled, are the
accumulated results of many ages of poverty, hardship, toil and
suffering, and cannot be effaced by volition or effort. But the greatest
factor of all in any right estimate of that character, and its value in
colonists to British North America or elsewhere, is the moral bent it
has acquired through centuries of severe discipline, and that is in the
main due to the religious element which has formed the backbone of
Scottish history during the last three hundred years. On that account,
it has appeared necessary to enter at some length into the great
struggles out of which the national genius of the Scot emerged, and
became what it now is everywhere found to be.
* "My own conviction
with respect to all great social and religious convulsions is the
extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on both sides. I
believe that nowhere, and at no time, can any such struggle take place
on a large scale, unless each party is contending for something that has
a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is plain, honest, wise and
noble-minded men are all on one side; and only rogues and fools are on
the other. Where the wise and good are divided, the truth is generally
found to be divided between them." Froude: The Influence of the
Reformation on the Scottish Character a lecture in "Short
Studies on Great Subjects." First series. Amer. Edit.,
p. 103.
** Lecky: England in
the Eighteenth Century. Amer. Ed. Vol. II. p. 47. It "must
be acknowledged that a large part of the credit of the movement in
favour of education belongs to the Church which preceded the
Reformation; nor is any fact in Scotch history more remarkable than the
noble enthusiasm for knowledge which animated that Church during the
fifteenth century." Ibid.
*** "From the see of
St Peter to the far monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran,
the laity were shocked and scandalized at the outrageous doings of high
cardinals, prelates, priests and monk. It was clear enough that these
great personages themselves did not believe what they taught; so why
should the people believe it?" Froude (as above), p. 106.
+ "In this it was
that the Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any
other part of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing -
created already by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated
them, but it did not materially affect their political condition. In
Scotland, the commons, as an organized body, were simply created by
religion. Before the Reformation they had no political existence; and
therefore it has been that the fruit of their origin has gone so deeply
into their social constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of
the work of Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed
at last, it was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon
the other." Froude (as before), p. 108. To this peculiar feature in
the Scottish Reformation, may no doubt be traced the democratic
constitution of the Scottish Church.
++ The Scots
Worthies: By John Howie. Edinburgh, 1870, p. 9.
+++ According to Howie,
Wishart is reported to have said, just before his death:
"This flame hath scorched my body, yet it hath not daunted my
spirit; but he who, from yonder place, beholdeth us with such pride,
shall, within a few days, lie in the same as ignominiously as he is now
seen proudly to rest himself." (p. 30.) The fact of this reported
saying has been seriously questioned; it has been represented as
prophecy, but it is certain that the plot to take off the Cardinal was
entered into a year before Wishart’s death.
*+ "This
independence of the Scottish Church belongs in fact to the independence
of the Scottish race. It was nurtured, if not produced, by the long
struggle first of Wallace, then of Bruce, which gave to the whole
character of the people a defiant self-reliance, such as, perhaps, is
equally impressed on no other kingdom in Europe." Dean Stanley; Lectures
on the History of the Church of Scotland. (Am. Ed.) p. 70.
*++ "I know of
nothing finer in Scottish history than the way in which the commons of
the Lowlands took their places by the side of Knox in the great
convulsions which followed. If all other forsook him, they at least
would never forsake him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained
to strike. Broken they might have been, trampled out, as the Huguenots
at last were trampled out in France, had Mary been less than the most.
improvident or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or those
with whom they had to deal, fought for them." Froude, p. 112. Even
Mr. Buckle, no friend to the Scottish Church, speaks in glowing terms of
this turn in affairs, because it eventually produced the happiest
results, by keeping alive, at a critical moment, the spirit of
liberty." History of Civilization, Vol. III. 681.
*+++ Lecky: History of
England, &c., Vol. II, p.48.
**+ "The only
powerful noblemen who remained on the Protestant side were Lennox,
Morton and Mar. Lord Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon despatched;
Mar was old and weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel who used
the Reformation only as a stalking horse, to win the spoils which he had
clutched in the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any
moment, if the balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the
Kirk were fooled and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart, that he
had gained them all except one. John Knox alone defied both his threats
and his persuasion.. Good reason has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He
only, in this wild crisis, saved the Kirk which he had founded, and
saved with it Scottish and English freedom. But for Knox and what he was
still able to do, it is almost certain that the Duke of Alva's army
would have landed on the eastern coast," Froude, p.114.
**++Carlyle, in The
Portrait of John Knox (p. 180), speaks of the great Reformer as one
who "kindled all Scotland within a few years, almost within a few
months, into perhaps the noblest frame of sacred human zeal, and brave
determination to believe only what it found completely believable, and
to defy the whole world and the devil at its back, in unsubduable
defiance of the same." This is the master's view of his character;
"Knox, you can well perceive, in all his writings, and in all his
ways of life, was emphatically of Scottish build; eminently a national
specimen; in fact what we might denominate the most Scottish of Scots,
and to this day typical of all the qualities which belong
nationally to the very choicest Scotsmen we have known, or had clear
record of - utmost sharpness of discernment and discrimination, courage
enough and what is still better, no particular consciousness of courage,
but in all simplicity to do and dare whatsoever is commanded by the
inward voice of native manhood; on the whole a beautiful and simple, but
complete incompatibility with whatever is false in word or conduct;
inexorable contempt and detestation of what in modern speech is called humbug.
Nothing hypocritical, foolish or untrue can find harbour in this
man; a pure, and mainly silent tenderness of affection is in him,
touches of genial humour are not wanting under his severe austerity; an
occasional growl of sarcastic indignation against malfeasance, falsity
and stupidity; indeed secretly an extensive fund of that disposition,
kept mainly silent, though inwardly in daily exercise; a most clear-cut,
hardy, distinct and effective man; fearing God, and without any other
fear." Carlyle; Portrait of Knox, p. 181.
**+++ Dean Stanley, Lectures,
p.49.
+* After referring to the
furious effort made by Laud, James remarks: "For all this be feared
not mine anger, but assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform
to make that stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English pattern. But I
durst not play fast and loose with my soul. He knows not the
stomach of that people. But I ken the story of my grandmother,
the Queen Margaret, that after she was inveigled to break her promise
made to some mutineers at a Perth meeting, she never saw ‘good day,’
but from thence, being much beloved, was despised by all the
people." Hackett’s Life of Williams, p. 14, quoted by Dean
Stanley: Lectures, p. 80. Perhaps James had received this story
from the preacher. In 1583, when they "bade him take heed what he
was about, and reminded him that no occupant of the throne had ever
prospered, when the ministers began to threaten him." Buckle, vol.
III., p. 104.
+** " The person
whose fervent zeal was most conspicuous on that occasion was a humble
female who kept a cabbage stall at the Town Kirk, and who was sitting
near the reading desk. Greatly excited at the Dean's presumption, this
female, whose name was Janet Geddes - a name familiar in Scotland as a
household word, exclaimed, at the top of her voice, ‘Villain, dost
thou say mass at my lug,' and suiting the action to the word, launched
the cutty-stool on which she had been sitting at his hood, ‘intending,'
as a contemporary remarks, ‘to have given him a ticket of
remembrance,' but jouking became his safe-guard at that time." Rev.
James Anderson: The Ladies of the Covenant, Introd. p. xix. It is
added in a note that Janet long survived this incident and kept her
cabbage stall so late as 1661. Reference is made to Wilson's Memorials
of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, Vol. I. p. 92, and Vol. II. p. 30.
+*** "It was in the
Greyfriars’ Church at Edinburgh, that it was first received, on
February 28, 1638. The aged Earl of Sutherland was the first to sign his
name. Then the whole congregation followed. Then it was laid on the
first gravestone still preserved in the church-yard. Men and women
crowded to add their names. Some wept aloud others wrote their names in
their own blood; others added after their names ‘till death.’ For
hours they signed, till every corner of the parchment was filled, and
only room left for their initials, and the shades of night alone checked
the continual flow. From Greyfriar’s church-yard it spread to the
whole of Scotland. Gentlemen and noblemen carried copies of it in their
portmanteaus and pockets, requiring and collecting subscriptions
publicly and privately. Women sat in church all day and all night, from
Friday till Sunday, in order to receive the Communion with it. None
dared to refuse their names. The general panic, or the general contagion
caught those whom one should least expect. The chivalrous Montrose, the
gay Charles II., the holy and enlightened Leighton, were constrained to
follow in the universal rush. Dean Stanley: Lectures, p. 84.
++* See an eloquent
passage in Buckle, Vol.iii. pp., 112-114, from which there is only space
for a sentence or two: - "It is also well known that, in the
struggle, the English were greatly indebted to the Scotch, who had,
moreover, the merit of being the first to lift their hand against the
tyrant. What, however, is less known, but is inadvertently true is, that
both nations owe a debt they can never repay to those bold men who,
during the latter part of the sixteenth century, disseminated, from
their pulpits and assemblies, sentiments which the people cherished in
their hearts, and which, at a fitting moment, they reproduced to the
dismay and eventually to the destruction of those who threatened their
liberties," See also Froud,'s Lecture (Short Studies, pp.118-121),
and McCrie; Life of Melville, i, p. 302.
++** Dean Stanley: Lectures,
pp. 84, 85. Green’s Short History, P. 534.
++*** See Macaulay: History
of England, Vol. I. chaps. ii. and iv. Howle: Scot's Worthies. Simpson:
The Banner of the Covenant. Anderson: The Ladies of
the Covenant. Also The Cloud of Witnesses, and the
individual biographies and Church histories treating of the time.
+++* See Howie's biograph
of Argyle in Scots Worthies, pp. 242-257, and the account of
Margaret, his Marchioness, in Ladies of the Covenant, p. 83.
+++** The Banner of the
Covenant, p. 17.
+++*** Macaulay, quoting
Wodrow, states that Brown's widow cried out to Claverhouse in her agony,
- for the latter, in a rage at not finding an executioner had shot him
dead like a dog - "Well, sir, well; the day of reckoning will
come." His reply was, "To man I can answer for what I have
done; and as for God I will take Him into my own hands."
*+* "Among other
good qualities, the Scots have been distinguished for humour - not for
venomous wit, but for kindly, genial humour which half loves what it
laughs at - and this alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it
belongs have not looked too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world.
I should rather say that the Scots had been an unusually happy people.
Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that
it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life
moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of
life in which men are born - this through the week, and at the end of it
the "Cotter's Saturday Night" - the homely family, gathered
reverently and peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred
presence. Happiness! such happiness as we are likely to know upon this
world, will be found there, if any where." Froude: Short
Studies, p. 120.
**+* Suppose the Kirk had
been the broad, liberal, philosophical, intellectual thing which some
people think it ought to have been, how would it have fared in that
crusade; how altogether would it have encountered those surplices of
Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of Claverhouse: It is hard to lose one’s
life for a ‘perhaps,’ and philosophical belief at the bottom means a
‘perhaps,’ and nothing more. For more than half of the seventeenth
century, the battle had to be fought out in Scotland, which, in reality,
was the battle between liberty and despotism; and where, except in an
intense, burning conviction that they were maintaining God’s cause
against the Devil, could the poor Scottish people have found strength
for the unequal struggle which was forced upon them?" Froude: (as
before) p. 118.
***+* Burton, vii. 460.
++**+ Wesley’s MS.
Journal, "communicated by the kindness of Dr. Rigg." Stanley; Lectures,
p. 157.
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