ON 16 September 2010 two notable religious figures came to Edinburgh. One was the Reverend Ian Paisley, leader of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ireland. The other was the Pope, Benedict XVI. Paisley and his supporters went to the Magdalen Chapel in the Cowgate, the church where, Paisley erroneously claimed, the Scottish Reformation of 1560 began its life, presided over by John Knox. The Reverend’s doughty defence of that Reformation was somewhat weakened by the fact that Edinburgh exists on two levels, and geographically it was Paisley and his 60 followers who were at a disadvantage. They were tucked away out of sight in the depths of the Cowgate while some 125,000 people were out on the streets that soared above it to roar their welcome to the Pope after he had been formally and warmly received by the Queen at Holyrood. Thus Edinburgh on the 450th anniversary of the Reformation.
What has this to do with the sixteenth-century Reformation and its great reformer John Knox, who had identified the papacy with Antichrist? The differences between 1560 and 2010 are of course vast. But Paisley could undoubtedly regard himself as standing for reformation principles that only in the modern world were being rejected. He had, after all, interrupted John Paul II’s speech to the European Parliament in 1988, shouting out that ‘I denounce you as Antichrist’. Here, then, was one link between late sixteenth- and early twenty-first-century Scotland. Paisley, heir to Knox, was the representative of the long-held belief in the peculiarly godly nature of reformed Scotland; those who cheered the Pope were the destroyers of that Scottish godly Protestantism that from the sixteenth to the twentieth century had been the bedrock of the nation’s identity and justifiable pride in itself.
But where were the Scottish heirs of Knox? The Moderator of the Kirk of Scotland was welcoming Pope Benedict and thereafter going to London to read the Gospel at the ecumenical service at Westminster Abbey led by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It did rather look as though Scotland had gone soft; as recently as 1961 there had been the clarion call of the godliness of the Kirk when J. S. McEwen, Professor of Theology at the University of Aberdeen, had depicted Knox as rescuing Scotland from the Whore of Babylon.1
To see it in this way is, however, to buy into the belief of the unusual godliness of reformed Scotland, a belief which began its life in the late sixteenth century and flowered with renewed vigour after the union of the parliaments in 1707. But it is possible that what was happening in September 2010 was evidence not so much of Scotland going soft on faith, but of a very different kind of link with the Reformation past; and this forces a fundamental question about the insistent and sometimes strident claims for an unusually high level of godliness by the Kirk, by those offshoots which set themselves up when the Kirk was not godly enough, and by historians who bought into these claims. In asking this question, there is no intention of seeking to deny or to disparage what could be a deeply moving and inspiring sense of a simple and disciplined relationship between man and his God. But it can hardly be denied that Scotland was a distinctly grimmer place to live as it put down its reformed roots. The delightful mid-sixteenth-century poet Richard Maitland of Lethington tells us so in his haunting poem beginning ‘Quhair is the blyithnes that hes bene?’2 He was not alone. And perhaps we should listen more closely to such voices. It may be time to move away from concentration on godly success and think rather about whether H. L. Mencken’s famous definition of Puritanism, ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’, might have some relevance to the imposition of godliness in early-modern Scotland. Did sixteenth-century Scotsmen, unlike their early twenty-first-century descendants, really want to be grey, grim, and unhappy? Or does the difference lie more in the fact that they were unable to escape the shackles imposed on them by the ruling reforming elite with more or less backing from secular authority? Indeed, one might go further and ask whether, apart from the mid-seventeenth century, Scotland as a whole was really godly at all.
There is a problem here. Since McEwen wrote, reformation studies have, with a few lurid exceptions, been much more balanced, the product of the cooler eye of the historian than the passion of the godly. But the focus has been on the battle to establish and then maintain the Kirk fought out throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the leaders of religious and secular society; simply because there are far fewer of them, Scottish historians have lagged behind their English counterparts in trying to look beyond top-level religious controversy. We know well enough that the ungodly King James VI had a long and vitriolic battle with the godly leaders of the Kirk, that in the short term he triumphed, more or less, but in the longer term godliness prevailed, becoming rampant under the Covenanters. But there has been far less attention paid to the ordinary parishioners who after 1560 found old certainties gone and new and much more precise certainties imposed on them. They have not been wholly ignored; but they have tended to be viewed through the prism of the harsher discipline of the reformed Kirk. And it is certainly the case that, as the Kirk dug itself in, a whole new level of discipline was increasingly imposed on the population, successfully because it was imposed at parish level. The ungodly Stuart kings gave up summoning general assemblies, the national court of the Kirk, in 1618; none met again until Charles I was on the run in 1638, and that was a profoundly different assembly, which not only argued with secular authority but imposed its godly will on it. But presbyteries and kirk-sessions were still on the go. And that made it all too possible to view disciplined Scotland as godly Scotland, its sinners hounded and punished.
Such a view has been exceedingly prevalent; and the idea of the power of local discipline through the local courts of the Kirk does seem to make sense. And historians such as Michael Graham and Margo Todd, who have begun investigations that go far beyond the power struggle, have undoubtedly added very considerably to our understanding of the early-modern Kirk; Michael Lynch first argued for a longer timescale for the Kirk to establish itself than used to be thought, an argument recently reinforced by John McCallum’s detailed study of Fife.3 Yet Todd, whose book is a wonderful new approach to the subject, is far too nuanced and wide-ranging simply to reiterate the old view, but even she surely retreats into too much caution; her final chapter is entitled ‘A Puritan Nation’. Certainly there were Puritans in Scotland, ‘very pestes in the Churche & commonweale’,4 who, as far as King James was concerned, were a good deal noisier and nastier and more demanding than his sister monarch’s in England. The difference before 1603 was that James was less paranoid about his Scottish Puritans than Elizabeth; when he met the English ones at Hampton Court after his accession in 1603 as James I of England, they seemed, by comparison, remarkably well mannered. But were these ‘pestes’ quite so dominant in James’s mind as in the minds of later historians?
And is it possible to move further from the idea of Puritan-inspired and discipline-imposed godliness? Christopher Haigh has recently attacked ‘kirk-session discipline’ as an explanation for the Scottish Reformation because England had its discipline also.5 This overstates the case, simply because English discipline was more patchy, less coherent, and less structured. But it raises a valid question. Moreover, there is a problem about the kirk-session records themselves, which are regarded as evidence for godly Scotland. But are they? Or is it that modern historians have still tended to play into what was actually a powerful and prehensile myth, the myth of godliness created in the early-modern period, and sustained in differing forms ever since, and that it is time that more effort was made to unpick that myth?
There is good reason to do so. Going back to H. L. Mencken, it is surely troubling that the essence of godliness seems to be about excessive austerity and making people miserable. This is not, of course, simply a Scottish problem; one need only look at the great predestinarian theologians, going back to St Augustine, or consider Simon Stylites on his pillar. But Scotland does rank among the intensely miserable godly societies. While in the Scriptures Christ enjoins his followers to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, nowhere in the Bible, that fundamental handbook of reformed religion, does Christ enjoin his followers to ‘shop thy neighbour to the local kirk session’; that was a man-made injunction. Individuals with an unusually high level of spirituality, with an ability to lead an unusually austere and godly life, can indeed provide immense inspiration to lesser mortals, and in the Catholic Church they have their rightful place; they are the saints, to whom people could look for intercession and help. It was a very different matter when austere and godly ministers insisted that all lesser mortals had to become saints and live austere and godly lives. But that is what Scotland has long prided itself on: its exceptional level of godliness since the days of John Knox.
Yet the local records of the Kirk, so consistently used to illustrate godly Scotland, actually tell us about the failure to make Scotland godly. They insistently tell the story of resistance to godliness. Of course, the Kirk recognized that all men were sinners—even if its leaders had an unpleasant tendency to exempt themselves—and that some were reprobates. What seems to have puzzled the Kirk is that it could not, try it ever so hard, eradicate sin, or at least drive it respectably underground and out of sight. The general assembly in 1596 set out in extensive detail the terrible backsliding of Scottish sinners, and what the ministers must do. Yet for all their efforts, and at the height of their apparent success, in 1649 they found ‘the wholl Land [still] polluted with sin’. And this almost a century after the godly Reformation.6 It was a very genuine perplexity, because the Scottish godly, unlike English divines, had seen the Reformation as an event, not an ongoing process. What we call The First Book of Discipline was actually entitled in 1560 The Buik of Reformatioun and Discipline of the Kirk; and in 1563 the Catholic apologist Ninian Winzet attacked ‘the new impietie callit … the Reformatioun of the Protestantis’.7
But the answer is surely obvious: many people in post-Reformation Scotland hated the godly. They refused to be driven into welcome or unwelcome godliness by the discipline of the Kirk. Eradication of sin, the determination of the Kirk to stamp out the celebration of Christmas, its unsatisfactory and inconsistent change to the sacrament of baptism, its strict sabbatarianism, its attack on drinking, dancing, and play-acting, bonfires at Beltane and midsummer: all these were strenuously resisted, and continued to be resisted throughout the seventeenth century, by those who were not persuaded of the advantages of the godly life, and were determined on their right to continue to enjoy themselves as they had done in the easier world of pre-Reformation Scotland.
Some—like Richard Maitland of Lethington—did not do so. But not all sank into depressed acceptance; far from it. They made life intolerable for that hard-working body, the presbytery of Stirling, whose records, especially if read without an undue concentration on sexual sin, significantly redress the balance between the efforts of the godly to contain and punish sin and the more light-hearted determination of the sinners to withstand these efforts. A few examples of this remarkably entertaining source will suffice to illustrate the point:
On 7 May 1583, ‘The brethrein wndirstandand that on sonday last thair was ane drum strukin in the brugh of Stirling be ane certane of servand men & boyis & May playis usit quhairby the sabbothe day was prophainit and the kirke sclanderit.’ So the town baillies were told to ensure that it did not happen again ‘wndir the paine of the censures of the kirk to be excute againis thame’, which is a pretty pathetic response.
On 21 May 1583, ‘Johnne Wod & Johne broun schulmaisteris at the kirkis of Mwthill & Strogayth (Strageath)’ were summoned ‘for playing of clark playis on the sabboth day’ and also using the same for unlawful administration of baptism and marriage. Wod turned up and was ordered to make public repentance and confess his fault immediately after the sermon. Broun, though often called, did not appear until 28 May, when he denied it all. On 11 June he was told to write a thesis in Latin on whether it was lawful to play clark plays8 on the Sabbath or not, and whether it was lawful to make clark plays on any part of Scripture or not, and produce it before the brethren on 2 July. He did arrive on that day, and presented his thesis not only in the required prose but also in verse. It is anyone’s guess how far the brethren understood the thesis, and the verse sounds like deliberate provocation. But it worked to Broun’s advantage, for by that time the brethren were getting worked up over the amount of swearing and filthy bawdrie which was going on in his school. Broun was ordered to reappear for judgement on 6 August; and the story ends with another pathetic climbdown, when the brethren ‘admittis him to teiche latein grammar at the kirk of Strogayth quhair he is presentlie or in any ythir place qwhair he may profit the kirk of god in teaching of the youthe’. Apparently, a schoolmaster who had proved that he could write Latin—prose and verse too—was the answer to swearing and bawdrie, especially if they could not understand the Latin themselves. Certainly it was a total victory for John Broun.
Then in January–February 1584 there was the mysterious case of the marriage of the laird of Tulliallan, which was performed by a disguised man. Was he the minister? The brethren decided yes, on the grounds that he was ‘ane honest lyk man cled lyk ane minister with ane taffety hatt quhais name thai knew not. … ’ Perhaps it was necessary to be circumspect about godliness in the case of a laird.
Finally, on 14 November 1592 the brethren were exercised by ‘John qwhyt Pyper in Sawchie’, who ‘plait with his pyp in the grein of Allway on the Sonday befoir none immediatelie aftir he was forbidden to do the samin be the said Minister in the kirk forsaid and also minasit the said minister be outragiuss words’. John ignored several summons, but eventually turned up on 15 May 1593—which was hardly quick and rigorous discipline—when he admitted that he had indeed played his pipe before a bridegroom, but denied that he had threatened the minister; then on reflection he said that perhaps he had, because he was drunk at the time and could not remember. For this, the threat of excommunication was lifted and he was ordered to make one public repentance.9
This last case happened in the year when the godly were apparently jubilant and exultant because of the Golden Act of 1592 (the colour reflecting Presbyterian triumph), which effectively suspended episcopacy and legally underwrote presbyteries.10 This is a very different side of the story. And it is worth noting that only one public repentance was demanded for profaning the Sabbath and, indeed, being drunk on the Sabbath. This contrasts with the hefty repeated public repentances imposed on fornicators and adulterers. The godly did appear to be obsessed with sexual sins. But perhaps there has been too much concentration on that obsession, as if the local courts thought of nothing else. It may be that the point which has been missed here is that far from being able to impose godly discipline generally, the authorities found adultery and fornication to be the easy bits to punish, often involving, as they did, jealousy and anger among the parties themselves or their slighted spouses. So presbyteries and sessions could look for a measure of local support. It seems to have been different on matters to which local society did not object, play-acting, pipe playing, swearing, and drunkenness, and different again on the matter of the sacraments of baptism and marriage, and the courts had therefore to tread much more carefully.
The difficulty for the Stirling presbytery in eradicating music and play-acting is very much reinforced by John McGavin’s work on drama in sixteenth-century Haddington, East Lothian, which has shown that the presbytery could by no means count on other sources of authority, notably the council, which maintained its role as the provider of plays after the Reformation, or a local schoolmaster, John Brounsyde, who set up a successful school just outside the town to rival the unpopular burgh one. And the Kirk found it difficult in the extreme to eradicate Robin Hood, the Abbot of Unreason, and craft plays from the burghs of Scotland.11 Possibly not every official of the Kirk wanted to. We have some way to go in searching out the reality of ‘godly Scotland’; the next step is to find out whether those who imposed discipline can all be herded together in the ranks of the godly.
Meanwhile, it is possible to offer one speculation. A particular appeal of the reformed Kirk was, apparently, that it allowed the laity a much more participatory role in its services. One may certainly question how far the laity embraced with enthusiasm the new length of these services, and in particular the length of the sermons. And, subjective though it must ultimately be, one may also question the other form of participation,, music. The account of the two thousand who turned out on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh to sing ‘Now Israel may say’, when in 1582 the minister John Durie returned from exile, is a gripping invocation of the power of music. Significantly, the two hundred who began the psalm were singing in four parts.12 But congregational singing in unison does not immediately and automatically inspire people. It is an art which has to be learned, as the immediate post-Vatican II dismal congregational caterwauling in Catholic churches demonstrated all too clearly. To be fair, Scottish psalm and hymn singing did come to create a very distinguished musical tradition; and thanks to the enchanting and delightfully illustrated Partbooks of the former Catholic musician Thomas Wode, who became a Reader in the reformed Kirk, we get a remarkable view of the beginnings of that tradition. Yet banning organs, where they existed, can hardly have helped it in its early days. That the Kirk was aware of the problem is reflected in the efforts made to revivify the pre-Reformation song-schools in the burghs to provide choristers to lead part-singing. But in the main the new musical experience was unison singing.13 It is still possible to get a sense of its profound limitations from the CD accompanying Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England. The four-part psalm ‘Blessed are they that perfect art’ is lovely (no. 44); the unaccompanied psalm 29 with precentor and congregation (no. 45) is frankly grim, slow, and dragging (though sung by experienced singers).14 In modern times, psalm singing in the Wee Free Church, which only in November 2010 removed the ban on organs and on the singing of hymns, still reflects something of the difficulty, though it is also moving testimony to the effect of long experience. It indicates, therefore, what the experience of those who first encountered reformed music must have been.15
If the appeal of the new music of the Kirk may be seriously doubted, an old appeal held firm. Just outside Stirling was a holy well—Christ’s well—long believed to have healing powers. In the later sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, the Stirling presbytery records are stuffed with agonized complaints about people insisting on visiting the well; nothing would stop them ‘passing in pilgrimage to chrystis woll and using of superstitioun and idolatrie’. And why, from their point of view, should they stop? Hauled year in, year out, before the presbytery, they explained that they had gone to the well for healing, of headaches, pains in their sides, difficulty in walking, and so on. The most dramatic example was on 14 May 1595, when Helen Jameson, brought before the brethren, explained that she had gone the previous year to the well ‘to gait her bairnis ein heallit quhilk was blind ane moneth befoir. She wash his ein thrys with the watir thairof and alledgis that the bairn saw er he come hame’; and so she had returned this year to give thanks. For this she and her husband were sentenced ‘to mak public repentance in lining clathis the nixt thrie Sabboth dayes bairfuted’. It is rather pleasing that the husband was sentenced along with his wife, because he was sufficiently cowardly to try to distance himself, claiming that he had not been there. In any event, the presbytery’s efforts, in this case and others, were futile. Even posting guards around the well failed to keep the faithful away; they said that they needed the water for healing, and seem to have been able to go and get it.16 This has its parallels throughout Scotland, even in the very godly northern burgh of Elgin in Moray; as late as 1659, well into Scotland’s excessively godly period, parishioners were brought before the Dunblane kirk-session for this offence, while the capital itself was beset with the problem in that very holy year of 1649, when the godly ministers appeared to reach their high point of control.17 In an article on ‘Sacred spas … in Britain’, Alexandra Walsham does point out the difficulty of preventing visits to wells. But when she says that ‘In Scotland a Calvinist church made more systematic efforts to stamp out such practices’, we hear again the echo of the Scottish godly myth.18 There were the local courts of the Kirk, and there was an Act of Parliament in 1581.19 But the point is that the practices were not systematically stamped out. What was so marvellous about Scottish godly discipline if a century after the Reformation people were still going to holy wells? No wonder the godly in 1649 lamented about ‘the wholl Land polluted by sin’.
One of the Stirling cases cited above brings up the wrongful administration of baptism and marriage, which brings us to the issue of the sacraments. It was one thing for reforming theologians to turn their intellectual minds to the question of the sacraments, and reduce them to two. It may have been quite another for ordinary parishioners, when their long-accustomed rites of passage were suddenly altered. Marriage, despite the confusion over whether it was a sacrament, was probably the least problematic. But baptism and care for the dying and the dead were a very different matter. And these take us firmly into the interplay between central and local, the conflict between King James and the really hardline Presbyterians, the Melvillians, and its impact on the parishes.
The struggle itself is a subject with plenty of enjoyment in its own right, because the king, unlike the Presbyterians, had a sense of humour, and a robust way with words, which gave him the power to tweak the tails of the godly and get his own way; hence the occasion when the Kirk maliciously called a fast in Edinburgh on the day when the king proposed to hold a banquet for the departing French ambassador—the banquet, of course, going ahead.20 But it was a long and grim struggle, even if James won in the end. And its high point came with the king’s notorious Five Articles of Perth, long a subject of debate among historians, and recently revived when Alan MacDonald and Laura Stewart argued that so offensive were these articles—private baptism and Communion, Confirmation, the celebration of Christmas and Easter, and above all kneeling at Communion—that it was they, and not the accession of Charles I in 1625, which opened a ‘high road’ that would lead to the breakdown of the 1630s and 1640s.21 I have engaged with their arguments elsewhere, and will not pursue the general theme here.22 But there is a strong case for arguing that their unpopularity was less than is usually suggested, and certainly not uniform throughout the country. Thus, for example, the king’s article only demanded preaching on Christmas Day, when in fact people in Perth and Aberdeen had long been going further, defying the Kirk’s prohibition of Christmas by enjoying themselves as their predecessors had done; and in 1609 the Lords of Session went on strike for the right to have a Christmas holiday. Moreover, even where the Kirk did manage to impose its will, there was an all too effective ungodly answer: the celebration of the wholly pagan feast of Hogmanay. Hogmanay is a striking example of the difference between myth and reality. And when in 1958 the Kirk did finally recognize Christmas, it made no difference whatsoever to social practice, except that those who wanted could now go to church, and Christmas was officially recognized as a holiday. King James had his godly opponents; the first General Assembly which discussed the articles in 1617 rejected them, and it was only in 1618 that a rather differently constituted assembly at Perth accepted them—hence the name. But the king also had his supporters, not only among those who now felt freer to enjoy Christmas, but among those for whom, for example, the disciplinary load was now lightened on a matter that deeply touched the family: private baptism and private communion.
The Kirk’s view of baptism was strikingly inconsistent. Although it had retained baptism as one of the two sacraments, and despite its insistence on reliance on the Scriptures, it departed from the text ‘unless a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’ by saying that baptism was not strictly necessary because it was valid only if done in the face of the congregation; here is a good case of those godly who thought, in their desperation to uphold their godly principles, that they could actually do better than the Bible.23 Ordinary parishioners were not well versed in the higher flights of theology. They knew, as their ancestors had known, the dangers to the soul of the unbaptized child. James’s furious reply to a minister who asked him whether he thought that a child who died unbaptized was damned shows where his sympathies lay: ‘No’, he said, ‘but if you, being called to baptize the child, though privately, should refuse to come, I thinke you shall be damned.’24 This article, along with private communion for the sick and dying, offered spiritual consolation denied by the godly in the Kirk. Stubborn to the end, they gave way on the principle, but insisted that a certificate asserting terminal illness was needed for private communion, and that private baptism could be performed only during the day. No wonder the inhabitants of godly Scotland did not unite behind what looks like pernickety godly mean-mindedness. And some of these inhabitants continued to invoke the age-old consolation of praying for their dead, anathema as it might be to the protestant Kirk.
It is of course unarguable that Scotland became a Calvinist country, though at no time did those arch enemies (the Catholics) disappear. What is arguable is the emphasis on the success of godliness, at the expense of those, recognized by King James, who as time passed became increasingly accustomed to being members of a Protestant rather than a Catholic Kirk, yet strenuously objected to being godly. They are the people left out of the myth, or included only to enhance the role of the godly rather than being recognized in their own right. So who or what created the myth? The initial effort was made by the usual suspects: John Knox, Andrew Melville, James Melville, and the Presbyterian historians David Calderwood and John Row; then there was the inevitable scapegoat for anything that went wrong in the mid-seventeenth century, namely, Charles I, ably assisted by the fanatical Covenanter Archibald Johnston of Wariston and Archibald, Marquis of Argyll; there was the grisly and exaggerated period of the Killing Times; and then, giving the myth a new twist, came the union of parliaments in 1707, which sparked off a long-lasting debate about the sovereignty of Christ—or rather, the Kirk—in Scotland, complicated by the persistent lingering on of commitment to the Covenanting principle. And underpinning it all was fear: the fear of subordination to England. In the late thirteenth century, the Scots had thought up a distinguished origin myth in a hurry to meet the imperialist claims of Edward I. In 1603 there was the deep irony that the last act in the story was that a Scottish king united the kingdoms. But the very fact of coming closer to England in the later sixteenth century because of supposedly common ground in religion, and being dynastically tied to it from the beginning of the seventeenth, brought its own new fear, the fear of marginalization and neglect. What better way to reinforce Scottish identity, Scottish pride, than by asserting the special godliness of its Kirk, ‘one of the purest kirks under heaven this day’, as the 1616 confession said.25 The other was Geneva; it was certainly not England.
Despite the efforts of Knox, Melville, Calderwood, and Row, however, it was not in the first century of the Kirk’s existence that the myth of godly Scotland really put down roots. Godliness was undoubtedy claimed, and with some success. The French Protestant theologian Theodore Beza preferred Scotland’s Genevan model of Church courts to England’s Episcopal Church. The English Bishop Bancroft was clearly terrified of the Scottish godly; Catholics, it seems, were in his eyes actually preferable to Knox and Buchanan.26 On the other hand, English Puritans and Presbyterians were impressed by the godly. How they knew about them actually owes in some measure to Elizabeth I, who was terrified of her home-grown Puritans but quite happy to make life difficult for her fellow monarch James VI of Scotland by giving pulpit space in London to those godly preachers Andrew Melville, David Black, and others, when he booted them out of Scotland; and she gave a haven in the north of England to a Scottish Puritan cell plotting revolution, namely, the exiled Ruthven Raiders of 1583 with their attendant minister James Melville. That kind of royal game-playing was not, incidentally, all one way; when Robert Waldegrave was driven out of England for his part in printing the Marprelate Tracts in 1589, James openly welcomed him to Scotland and gave him the prestigious job of king’s printer.
But claiming superior godliness did not make it real. Powerful though the prose may be of Knox’s History of the Reformation,27 thunder as he might from the pulpit of St Giles in Edinburgh, Knox was in fact marginalized in the first years of reformation, not just because of his disastrously timed First Blast of the Trumpet, for which Elizabeth never forgave him, but because his attacks on Mary, Queen of Scots, from whom the Protestants were getting support, were equally ill-timed. Calderwood, taking up the baton from Knox, also sought to portray Scotland as particularly godly; what he provides is in fact a description of failure. As Michael Lynch has pointed out, Calderwood’s account of the year 1596 claims it to be the pinnacle of godly success; yet, as he has to admit, by the end of that glorious year, God’s favour had given way to King James’s ungodly success when his reaction to a particularly godly attack on him—threatening to move his capital away from Edinburgh—changed the minds of the godly citizens, merchants, and craftsmen, and turned them into slavish king’s men.28 Perhaps the unwittingly funniest part of Calderwood’s History of the Church of Scotland is his own account of chasing after a hostile King James from Scotland as far as Carlisle in Cumbria in 1617, and writing him letters begging him for forgiveness and favour on the grounds that he had misunderstood His Majesty’s command to keep silent, and would, of course, not preach now that it had been explained to him.29
Indeed, the failure to establish successful godliness led to a new problem, that sorting out myth from reality in this early period of reform created not one myth but two; and the two were mutually conflicting. For especially after 1596 a different note was more emphatically sounded: the note of persecution. Although it was in 1596 that Andrew Melville made his most outspoken claim for the separation of Crown and Kirk, when he famously told the king that ‘thair is twa kings and twa kingdoms … thair is Chryst Jesus the King and his Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James the Saxt is, and of whose kingdome nocht a king, nor a lord, nor a heid but a member’, the slide was on. In April 1597, when the General Assembly at St Andrews, the heartland of Presbyterian strength, proved ineffective, James Melville wrote that ‘the court began to govern all’ and the freedom of the kirk was subordinated to the ‘polytic esteat of a frie monarchie’.30 Worse was to follow, as James moved towards the restoration of episcopacy in Scotland, which was achieved, if as yet in a limited way, when three bishops were appointed in 1600. Leading and outspoken Presbyterian ministers such as David Black of St Andrews and Robert Bruce of Edinburgh were muzzled. And the Presbyterian attempt to hold a General Assembly in Aberdeen led to imprisonment for some of its members and accusations of high treason—a capital crime—and ultimately to their summons in 1606 to what could be called the second Hampton Court Conference, incarceration in the Tower of London, and exile. The new theme of the sufferings of the persecuted godly rather than the achievements of the successful godly was now heard. Here is Lady Culross, writing her Ane Godlie Dreame (1603):
O Lord, how lang it is thy will,
That thy puir Sanctis sall be afflictit still? …
Thy sillie Sancts are tostit to and fro
Awalk, O Lord, quhy sleipest thou sa lang
…
The warld prevails, our enemies ar strang
The wickit rage, bot wee ar puir and waik …
Moreover, this passage was rewritten as a sonnet of spiritual comfort for Andrew Melville in the Tower in 1607.31 Persecution of the godly, so encapsulated here, is of course an eternal theme; Christ had told his followers what they would suffer and the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of St Paul bear ample witness to what they did suffer. But the use of persecution by the early-modern Scottish godly simply underlines the fact that they were forced to turn to it, to seek spiritual consolation from it, when they were no longer able to trumpet the godliness they were imposing on their country. This universal theme was not simply a myth. But in Scotland it can be regarded as myth, not just because Scottish persecution was in fact neither severe nor long-lived, but because it had its own place in the developing belief in the particular godliness of Scotland.
One may question, therefore, how much the pictures painted by the Melvilles, Calderwood, and Row had to do with the state of the Kirk of their day; for those who painted these pictures knew very well that they were imposing black and white on the ambivalent and grey. King James’s greatest opponent, Andrew Melville, after all, wrote adulatory verse on the birth of Prince Henry in 1594. Moreover, they knew that unlike their English counterparts they were dealing with a Calvinist king, some of whose ecclesiastical policies they thoroughly agreed with: an educated clergy, decent stipends for the ministry. So their abiding influence does not relate to contemporary reality. It comes from the desire of later generations to believe in their picture.
We can take that hugely contentious issue, episcopacy, as an example. In 1957, in the course of discussions with the Church of England, the Kirk made the historically outrageous claim that it had never had bishops. In fact, had it not been for what happened after Charles I’s accession in 1625, it is perfectly possible to contend that James’s Church, that Episcopal-Presbyterian hybrid, might have survived. James’s bishops were moderate men, dressed at the king’s behest in plain black ministerial gowns, working in harmony with the Church courts.32 Patrick Forbes of Aberdeen was rightly respected and popular. William Cowper, Bishop of Galloway and formerly second minister of Perth, was actually more godly than the first minister, John Malcolm, who pointed out that Cowper objected to Malcolm’s refusal to prevent feasting at Yule, ‘yet he accepted of a bishopric, and I continued minister at Perth’.33 Amazingly, as late as 1637, the future ardent Covenanting minister Robert Baillie claimed that ‘bishops I love’, while his contemporary, the godly Earl of Rothes, objected to them only on the grounds of their lack of zeal in preaching.34 But Baillie hit the nail squarely on the head. It was the Jacobean-style bishop that he loved; he went on to inveigh against the proud papistical type of bishop, the type that Charles I was intruding on the Kirk, and which would return with the restoration of Charles II. That was the death knell of episcopacy in the Kirk. Thus it was that Calderwood and Row were believed, while the royally commissioned account of John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St Andrews, a man highly sensitive to the tensions in the Jacobean Kirk, an account written without the fire and vitriol of Calderwood and Row, was consigned to the dustheap.35 But it should be remembered that, even when the Kirk was established in 1690 as Presbyterian and non-Episcopal, these hated bishops were not consigned to the dustheap; there has been an Episcopal Church in Scotland from that day to this.
What gave the myth its real foundation was that brief period of the appalling mistakes of Charles I, and the appalling zeal of the Covenanters. For less than a decade, between 1637 and the mid-1640s, the godly Scots could believe that they were determining events in the fight with Charles I. Charles, unlike James, had sought to Anglicanize the Kirk, and suffered grievously for it. With the National Covenant of 1638, the godly triumphed in Scotland against their king. With the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, they sought to Scotticize the English Church: the Covenant was made for the preservation of the Kirk, and the reformation of the Churches of England and Ireland.36 How, despite the presence of the Presbyterians in England, the Scots actually managed to convince themselves that this was a realistic prospect—though they tried it again when negotiating with Charles I after the first Civil War—suggests godliness spiralling into a dream world.
Reality was a long inevitable decline. Charles II, the Covenanted king of 1651, understandably never went near Scotland again after the Restoration in 1660. The Covenanters dwindled into a small, extremist sect in south-west Scotland, the Cameronians. That created its own myth, of the heroic godly martyrs of the ‘Killing Times’, but in fact they were less popular then than they were to become, though they are still remembered in their mythical form in some of the parishes of Ayrshire. The Kirk itself was losing confidence in the Edinburgh of the 1690s; and a glance at the list of books on the shelves of Edinburgh University library suggests why: Hobbes, burned in Oxford in 1683; Spinoza; Descartes; the deist works of John Toland and Charles Blount; Richard Simon’s Critical Enquiries into the Various Editions of the Bible, John Edwards’s work on atheism. There the students sat, reading such works under the watchful eyes of portraits of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin, with the skull of George Buchanan to cheer them up. One of them, Thomas Aitkenhead, became the target of the Kirk’s frantic need to regain control. He was brutally and probably illegally executed for blasphemy in 1697, the same year that over in the west, at Paisley, saw the last of Scotland’s determined witch-hunts (if not the last actual execution).37 Few outside Scotland recognized a Kirk sensing itself under threat and more than ever needing its myth; they saw the horrendous godliness of the Scottish Kirk, which in itself helped to reinforce the myth.
A new lease of life came with the Union of 1707, when Covenanting principles roared back into life: the union of parliaments would mean breaking the covenants, as Scots MPs were forced to sit in a Parliament that contained bishops. And in the longer term, among the many highly complex debates on the legal basis for the Union, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Kirk became highly assertive about its own position. The General Assembly, which represented the sovereignty of Christ, had an authority in ecclesiastical matters that no secular power could challenge.38 And as the Kirk claimed a godly status unrivalled by any institution in England, so the myth revived and was now dramatically extended. The idea of Presbyterian democracy was born. Knox, Calderwood, and Row now came into their own—though in a form that they would not have recognized.
‘Democracy’ was in fact virtually unused, from the classical world—when Aristotle himself had consigned it to his three bad forms of government—until the American and French Revolutions, when it took off into all sorts of weird and wonderful forms, as we see today.39 On the rare occasions it was used, ‘democracy’ was a dirty word; for both the ungodly King James and the godly Robert Baillie it was a term of condemnation. James, in his vitriolic attack on the Puritans in Basilikon Doron (1599), wrote of the tumultuous beginnings of the Reformation when there was no order from the Prince, and the Puritans ‘begouth to fantasie to themselves a Democratick forme of government … [an] imagined Democracie’. Baillie, in 1643, asserted the need to ‘eschew that democratic anarchy and independence of particular congregations which they knew to be opposite to the word of God and destructive wholly of that discipline’.40
But once democracy was in vogue, as the highest form of government, why should the Kirk not annex it? Hence the lurid claims of two godly luminaries of the Kirk, Professor Alexander Martin, Moderator of the United Free Church and influential in the union of the United Free Church and Church of Scotland, in 1929, and Archibald Main, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Glasgow, 1922–42. In ringing tones, Martin claimed that ‘It had been on the floor of the General Assemblies rather than in the corrupt estates (parliament) or Privy Council that the battle of the Scottish people for freedom had been fought and won. The burden of the poor was borne for centuries by the Church unaided and in her system of education she laid during the past ages the system of democracy in which all barriers were laid down, and the way was open and free for all.’ Main asserted that ‘Our country was not a nation, in any strict sense of the word, before the Reformation. … The refashioning of the medieval Church accomplished more for the unity of the Scottish race than the victory at Bannockburn or the defeat at Flodden. After the year 1560 the ordinary man gained what the extraordinary cleric had lost. No more was the layman a humble puppet of Mother Church. He could voice his views in Kirk sessions or General Assembly, he could take part in the election of his minister, he had the opportunity of influencing public opinion.’41 It is a little difficult to believe that the sinners of the early-modern period would have recognized this luxury. But it was a wonderful theme to be pressed into the service of national pride.
So the myth is solid and enduring. It remains a source of pride, even in an increasingly secular and multicultural society, with the Kirk’s membership steadily declining. It has its amusing side. It also has its terrifying one, in the sectarianism that in the modern period continues to cast its hideous shadow over the fundamental message of Christianity. Nevertheless, there are signs that this is beginning to diminish; in December 2010 the city fathers of Glasgow decided to restrict the Orange marches, to the fury of the Orangemen. That is not the only sign. The response to the papal visit, the fact that it was godly Irishmen who had to carry the godly flag, suggests that alongside the apparent triumph of the Scottish godly there has been a flourishing ability to serve the Lord in ungodly fashion. That ability, which can be traced back to those who asserted their right to do so in the early decades of the Reformation, merits attention.
Graham, Michael, The Uses of Reform: ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond (Leiden, 1996).
—— The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2008).
Kidd, Colin, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008).
Kirk, James, Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989).
McCallum, John, Reforming the Scottish Parish: The Reformation in Fife, 1560–1640 (Farnham, 2010).
MacDonald, Alan R., The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy (Aldershot, 1998).
Mullan, David G., Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of an Idea, 1560–1638 (Edinburgh, 1986).
—— Scottish Puritanism 1590–1638 (Oxford, 2000).
Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, 2002).
Woods Preece, Isabel, Our awin Scottish use: Music in the Scottish Church up to 1603 (Glasgow and Aberdeen, 2000).