IDOLATRY VERSUS TRUE RELIGION: FROM the moment John Knox gave up on Catholicism and joined the beleaguered Protestant community in his native Scotland, he framed his preaching around the difference between the truth as he understood it and the idolatry he imputed to Catholicism. In an early sermon (1547), he drew on the book of Daniel to explain what was wrong with Rome. No Catholic could be trusted, since all were allied with the Anti-christ. Nor was Catholicism capable of adhering to the commandment that declared, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Placing himself in the lineage of Old Testament prophets who warned their people to dispense with idols and worship the one true God, Knox evoked this ancestry to justify his outbursts against a Catholicism he deemed “Anti-christian.” I teach “all men to hate sin,” he wrote the Scottish nobility in 1558, adding that “vaine religion and idolatrie I call whatsoever is done in Goddes service . . . without the expresse commaundement of his own Worde.” These assertions stemmed from the goal he set himself after experiencing the powerful ministry of the martyred George Wishart and living as a Marian exile in the Geneva of John Calvin. The time had come for Scotland to emulate the Swiss city he esteemed as “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the Apostles.”1
Like his Old Testament predecessors, Knox knew that the process of reform was easily disrupted. England’s reformation was a case in point, an unfinished reformation compromised, in his words, by “Diabolicall inventions” such as “crossing in baptism, kneeling at the Lord’s table,” and “singing of the Litany.” He wanted Scotland to do better—much better, if it were to enjoy a “perfect reformation” that recovered “the grave and godly face of the primitive Church.” The missing element in England was discipline in the double sense of purging “superstition” from worship and reworking church structures (economic and ecclesiastical) to ensure the presence of an evangelical ministry. En route from Geneva to his homeland in 1559, he wrote an English friend that God was mustering an army to assault the great “adversary” Satan and release true religion from every “dreg of Papistry.”2
Such a reformation was within reach if the transformation of religious life in the towns of Dundee, Perth, and St. Andrews could be replicated elsewhere.3 In each place, spasms of iconoclasm eliminated the material presence of Catholicism. As the ecclesiastical capital of the country, St. Andrews had a cathedral, important monasteries, and the oldest of the Scottish universities. Militant Protestants arrived in mid-June 1559, as did Knox, who preached on Sunday, June 11, in Holy Trinity, the town church, on the theme of Christ’s cleansing of the temple. Taking this theme to heart, the vigilantes purged Holy Trinity and the cathedral of statues of the saints, rood screens, altars, and the gold and silver dishes used for communion. Overnight, this day of “Reformation” undid the Catholic presence in St. Andrews.4
Nothing this violent occurred in England during the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign or of Edward VI’s before her, and the gap between the two reformations began to widen because of Elizabeth I’s indifference to the “thorough reformation” Thomas Sampson and John Field were advocating. Fortunately for Knox and his allies, the weakness of the Scottish monarchy enabled a resolute Protestantism to emerge against the wishes of a Catholic queen regent, Mary of Guise. Much more tellingly, a coalition of Protestants and those with other grievances overthrew her successor, Mary Stuart. After 1559, no English Parliament had an effective voice in deciding religious practice, but the leaders of the Reformation in Scotland secured the approval of an irregular Scottish Parliament in 1560 and, more convincingly, of another in 1567 for a firmly Reformed model of worship and a Reformed statement of doctrine. Unlike the coming of reform to England, the Scottish reformation owed almost nothing to the church’s bishops. Despite many moments of contact, exchange, and cross-border politics dating from the late 1540s, the two reformations diverged in ways that had far-reaching consequences.
Before Mary Stuart took the throne in 1561, reformers and courtiers on both sides of the border had pondered the possibility of a fuller union between Scotland and England. This project went nowhere. Thereafter, the question the reformers in Scotland had to ask themselves was akin to the question answered in an unsatisfactory manner by the settlement of 1559 in England. Would the Protestantism Knox and other exiles had introduced in Frankfurt and enjoyed in Geneva—a Protestantism foregrounding the absolute authority of the Word of God and the imperative to liberate religious practice from idolatry—prevail or become diluted, as was happening in England? In the 1560s and more explicitly by the late sixteenth century, this question had been answered in a way that would have satisfied Thomas Sampson. Compromises of various kinds emerged, but in general the Church of Scotland had aligned itself with the high standards of the Reformed tradition.5
This circumstance explains why, in this chapter and elsewhere, the term “puritan” is attached to the Scottish reformers and the Protestant culture they created. Doing so is at odds with the practice of most historians of early modern Scotland, who regard this word as signifying an insurgency that mutated into nonconformity and de facto “congregationalism.” If this is what “puritan” means, it is ill-suited to a country where the state church came into the hands of Protestants who jettisoned every aspect of Catholic worship and, for this reason, a church without Thomas Sampson–like militants brooding over whether to wear the surplice. In Scotland, however (always ignoring those who remained Catholic), the makers of the Reformation shared the same understanding of worship and doctrine. Scottish historians may also want to avoid the negative connotations that accumulated around the term in the late sixteenth century and again in the nineteenth. In these pages, however, I use the word to designate the strong connections between the Protestant program in post-1560 Britain and the goals of the Reformed international. From this perspective, Scotland’s Reformation was fully “puritan” or Reformed: installing moral discipline in practice as well as in principle, aligning worship, doctrine, and ministry with Reformed models, and aspiring to implement the two-kingdoms understanding of church and state.6
These accomplishments were the envy of Thomas Cartwright’s generation in England. At various moments, each side reached out to the other, the leadership in Scotland doing so in response to the vestarian controversy and Knox honored during a visit to London in 1567 by people who remembered him from their days together in Geneva and Frankfurt. On this same trip, he met with members of the Plumbers’ Hall congregation (see chap. 2), who told him of their admiration for Geneva-style worship and suggested that he urge Christopher Goodman to write something against “Antichrists clothing.” A little later, some of these quasi-Separatists visited Scotland to see for themselves what a true church looked like. Much later (mid-1580s), a handful of radical ministers decamped to London, where they enjoyed the hospitality of that city’s “presbyterians.”7 Simultaneously, ministers on both sides of the border were fashioning the “practical divinity” (see chap. 4). On the other hand, the rhetoric of anti-puritanism that emerged in England in the mid-1560s was absent from Scotland until circa 1600, when James VI used it in Basilikon Doron (1599). By the 1630s, a presbyterian minister could complain that any “man that professed the power of religion” was “ridiculed and mocked as a Puritan.” In this chapter, therefore, a a story of differences is punctuated by intriguing moments of convergence.8
Catholic in faith and practice before the coming of the Reformation, Scotland in the early sixteenth century had a national church closely intertwined with the workings of the civil state, the privileges of the aristocracy, and the Catholic rulers of France. Connections with that country, or the “auld alliance,” dated from the late thirteenth century and were strengthened in the sixteenth by marriages that linked the French and Scottish royal dynasties: the second wife of James V (1513–42) was the Frenchwoman Mary of Guise, and in 1548 their only child, Mary Stuart, was betrothed to the dauphin of France, the future Francis II, whereupon she moved to France when she was five. Henry II of France, the father-in-law-to-be of Mary Stuart, knew she had a strong claim to the English throne. But he welcomed the marriage mainly because of his country’s rivalries with Spain and its then ally, England.
As news circulated within academic and elite circles of the stirrings of Protestantism in Europe, and as copies of the Bible in English became available, townspeople in the southwestern region of the country began to practice the new religion. They did so in the context of a Catholic church that acknowledged the importance of reform but lacked the will and resources to change.9 Its weaknesses enabled the movement to gain the support of some of the nobility and landed classes, although these people may have been more “evangelical” or humanist than emphatically Protestant. To these stirrings James V responded erratically, mingling severe repression in the late 1530s with gestures of support. When he died unexpectedly in December 1542, six days after the birth of Mary Stuart, the government came into the hands of the Earl of Arran, whose claims to the throne were second only to hers. He sided with England in the ongoing contest over Scotland’s international allies and, whether out of conviction or to please the English government, “briefly pursued a program of evangelical reform” that, for the first time, sanctioned the reading of the Bible in English, a practice the Catholic hierarchy had forbidden.10
The year 1543 promised great things for Protestantism. Evangelicals were preaching openly and, in the fall, the more intransigent staged anti-Catholic riots. Violence of this kind was not what Arran had expected or what he and the leaders of the state church could accept. English troops moved north, only to be checked by the arrival of French forces. Facing a hostile government, Protestantism subsided into household communities and kinship networks where people shared what they were learning from the Bible and sang psalms; some may have listened to sermons preached by former priests who became Protestants. The most impressive of these men was George Wishart. Fleeing to England once he converted and, while he was there, translating a Reformed confession into Scots, Wishart returned in 1543 or, more likely, in 1544 and began a preaching tour that ended with his arrest and execution in early 1546.11 Shortly thereafter, a group of high-ranking Scots murdered the senior Catholic clergyman, Cardinal Beaton, and seized the castle of St. Andrews, where they were joined by Knox, himself a former friar. Later that year the castle fell to a French force, and Knox was taken to France as a prisoner of the state. But the leaders of the state church refused to follow the example of Mary Tudor. A handful of Protestants were executed, though far fewer than in England. Nor did many of Scotland’s earliest Protestants become refugees.
The situation of the country’s Protestants began to change dramatically in 1557, the year in which several of the landed elite, a self-styled “Lords of the Congregation,” signed a “band” or covenant to promote the Protestant cause. Until Mary Stuart came of age and returned from France, Mary of Guise was head of state, or regent, a title she assumed in 1554. She was never going to abandon the Catholicism she shared with her powerful and intensely political family in France. In contrast to theirs, however, her authority was much weaker, hampered by the defects of the state church, a sharply divided nobility, and an uneasy relationship with England after Elizabeth I became head of state. Determined to secure Mary Stuart’s succession to the throne, Mary of Guise negotiated with the Lords of the Congregation, who pledged their loyalty to the government if she would allow Protestants to practice “lawfully” their own ways of worship. Mary assented to this compromise, as did the Scottish Parliament. For a moment, therefore, Protestants could worship as they pleased in the setting of “privy kirks” or “congregations of the faithful gathering in private,” doing so at the urging of preachers such as Knox, who had emphasized the “unlawfulness of communion with Papists” during a preaching tour of parts of his homeland in late 1555 and early 1556.12
Neither party was satisfied with these arrangements, and when Knox returned to the country for the third time in May 1559 he summoned Scottish Protestants to confront and overthrow “idolatry.” As Scots in greater numbers began to avoid the mass and outbursts of iconoclasm swept through a handful of communities, Knox and other leaders justified this fervency as a necessary means of repudiating “the servants of sin in their filthy corruptions.” Simultaneously (1559), he was telling the “communaltie” or “people” of Scotland that, because they were the spiritual “equall” of “Kinges, Rulers, Judges, Nobils,” God was calling on them to ignore their traditional deference to leaders of higher rank and, on their own, deliver Scotland from “bondage.”13
This gesture toward the people had few immediate consequences. For Protestantism to prevail, the reformers would have to secure the support of a significant group of the nobility and the head of state. The second was not going to happen. Instead, civil war broke out once Mary Tudor’s death in 1558 and the accession of Elizabeth I eliminated the threat of an alliance between Catholic England and Catholic Spain directed against Protestants in Scotland. Heartened by this turn of events and the possibility of English troops crossing the border to help Protestants defeat French forces, a group of nobles pledged at the end of May 1559 to “set forward the Reformation of Religion according to God’s Word,” although, for political reasons, they emphasized a civic program of recovering “ancient freedoms and liberties.” The most important member of this group was the fifth Earl of Argyll, who in 1558 succeeded his father, himself an early convert to Protestantism and head of Clan Campbell. At his dying father’s bedside, the young earl was charged to “set forward the public and true preaching of the Evangel of Jesus Christ, and to suppress all superstition and idolatry, to the utmost of his power.” Argyll recruited the troops that carried out the “Day of Reformation” in St. Andrews. Several months later (February 1560), he “personally secured” a treaty with England that Elizabeth reluctantly endorsed; wary of radicals such as Knox but not wanting France to gain control of Scotland, she finally agreed to send troops to aid the Lords of the Congregation.14 Mary died suddenly in June 1560, a treaty between France and England in July brought fighting to a close, French and English soldiers withdrew, and Scotland became a Protestant country, affirmed as such by an irregular Parliament in August 1560. This year too, the first “General Assembly” met in December; ten or twelve ministers turned up, as did a larger number of laymen.
Seen through the eyes of any European ruler, the accomplishments of 1560 did not mean much until the relationship between civil authority and the state church had been clarified. For the moment, the Reformation in Scotland was anomalous.15 Nowhere else had Protestants defied a legitimate ruler and taken over the state church, and nowhere else, except in France and the Netherlands, did Reformed-style Protestantism advance without the support of a local ruler. And anomalous the decisions of 1560 remained once Mary Stuart returned in 1561 after the death of her husband in 1560 (the two were married in 1558), for she was fervently Catholic. Within days of her arrival, John Knox was “inveighing against idolatry” and threatening “terrible plagues” if the nobility allowed her to observe the Catholic Mass—which some were willing to do.16
The confusion associated with her presence was echoed elsewhere. Catholicism was still being practiced in some regions of the country, and the newly reformed church included a few bishops who had changed sides, with Mary appointing more. At best, only a minority of the Scottish people were enthusiastic about any wholesale process of change; as was true in much of Europe and England, the process of turning ordinary people into full-fledged Protestants would extend well beyond the sixteenth century and never encompass everyone.17 Many within the landed and political class may have been glad to see French troops removed and Mary of Guise in the grave, but in the presence of a legitimate monarch they fell back on a traditional respect for that office. Doing so was consistent with their reasons for resisting Mary of Guise—not Knox’s evocation of a holy covenant between nation and God but a secular politics of “common weal.” As with the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, therefore, the pace and extent of change remained in doubt. Indeed, the Parliament of 1560 had decided nothing about ministry and discipline, topics addressed in a “Book of Discipline” (usually known as the First Book of Discipline, to differentiate it from the second of 1578) drawn up by a group of clergy and finalized in early 1561.18
To the dismay of Knox and Argyll, an elegant and willful Mary continued to attend the mass. Nor did she endorse the First Book of Discipline.19 Other-wise, she deferred to the Protestant nobility until, in early 1565, her engagement and marriage with Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley prompted some of them to become her allies after she promised to support the kirk. Out of favor, Argyll and his allies schemed to kidnap the queen, a plot that, instead of aiding Argyll, gained Mary Stuart more support among the Scottish magnates—even, for a moment, Argyll himself, who switched sides and joined the queen’s party. Fortunately for the Protestant cause, she conducted her private life in ways that undermined her public role. These missteps and ever-present political rivalries encouraged an uprising that pitted a “King’s Party” (supporting Mary’s infant son) against a “Queen’s Party.” When the two forces confronted each other at Carbury Hill in 1567, hers was defeated. Some months later she escaped, only to be defeated again at the battle of Langside. In its aftermath, she fled to England. Small-scale civil war finally ended once a group of Protestant and Catholic nobles accepted the “Pacification of Perth” (1573), which stipulated that Mary could not reclaim her throne and that her son James become monarch. In exile, encouraged by Catholics who aspired to place her on the English throne, she flirted with conspiracies against Elizabeth I (a politics greatly exaggerated by an English Parliament terrified that she would succeed a childless Elizabeth) to such an extent that she was executed in 1587.
Amid the confusion of civil war, the situation of the country’s Protestants was changing for the better. In December 1567, a new Parliament granted the General Assembly much of what it wanted: ratifying the votes of 1560, limiting the holding of public office to Protestants, assuring the kirk of its authority to supervise all appointments to benefices (endowed positions within the state church) and shifting certain revenues from the Crown to the church. That same month, James VI, although acknowledged as Scotland’s monarch, was not named supreme head of the church in deference to the General Assembly’s preference for a two-kingdoms model of church and state that barred the “spiritual” and “temporal” kingdoms from having authority over the other. Looking back on this sequence of events, the General Assembly of 1567 celebrated a “most miraculous victory”: “Our enemies, praised be God, are dashed; religion established; sufficient provision made for ministers; order taken, and penalty appointed for all sorts of transgression and transgressors; and, above all, a godly magistrate, whom God of His eternal and heavenly providence has reserved to this age; to put into execution whatsoever He by His law commands.”20
Exciting though it was to dispose of Mary Stuart, the practical workings of the state church, and especially the authority of general assemblies, remained in doubt for more than two decades. Year after year, those who disagreed with the particulars of a Knox-style perfect reformation clashed with others who wanted religious practice in Scotland to duplicate the model Calvin and Bucer had established in Geneva and elsewhere. In a much-divided country where church and state had been entangled for many generations, rearranging this relationship was never going to be easy. The most significant parties to this process were James VI and the regents who headed the government until he came of age; the political classes headed by the nobility; the clergy, who were not of one mind; and the European regimes, especially England, with a stake in the outcome. As for any hopes that the people could be evangelized, the geography of Scotland—economic, linguistic, and social—posed a host of difficulties.
James VI was Scotland’s first Protestant monarch. Unlike England’s queen, he enjoyed listening to sermons and practicing his skills as biblical exegete and theologian. His tutors, one of them the Scottish humanist George Buchanan, saw to his acquiring a command of Latin and other languages and an appetite for reading; later, and especially in the 1590s, James used his learnedness to translate some of the psalms, compose poetry, engage in anti-Catholic biblical commentary, write a treatise on the nature of monarchy, and in Basilikon Doron advise his eldest son Henry on how to govern an unruly Scotland. To these interests James added a passion for hunting and other amusements. As monarch, he inherited a position that none of his sixteenth-century predecessors had employed with skill or persistence. Authority was widely dispersed, so much so that James could not count on the obedience that Henry VIII and Elizabeth enjoyed as a function of their office. Initially, he ruled only in name, with regents doing the real work until he turned eighteen. Thereafter, he relied on a coterie of courtiers or favorites. Being close to the king was risky, for it threatened the ambitions of other magnates for access to power and the wealth it could provide. The governments of Spain, France, and England also meddled with James’s government, England in particular, for Elizabeth and her advisors wanted certain things of a Scottish king—agreement on how to bring order to the “Borders” between the two countries, an alliance with England rather than one with France or Spain, and, in the context of a formal treaty with England in 1586, James’s willingness to accept the execution of Mary Stuart. Of the benefits he gained from this concession, one seems to have been the reassurance that he was first in line to succeed Elizabeth.21
James was reared a Protestant, and a Protestant he remained despite having had a Catholic mother. Yet for him, the meaning of true religion differed from what Knox and his allies wanted. By the time he came of age in 1578, he had decided that their version contradicted his quest for greater authority as king, a decision that haunted the Scottish church for the rest of his reign. James may have been at his best in navigating the troubled waters of diplomacy. Perennially short of funds, he preferred peace to warfare and, at an opportune moment, secured a treaty with England that boded well for Protestants. Ever vulnerable to the talents and charm of certain courtiers, in the 1580s and 1590s the king included French-educated and possibly Catholic-tilting Scots among his closest friends and officers of state. One of these men, James Stuart, became regent in 1584 and received the title of Earl of Arran. Another, George Gordon, the sixth Earl of Huntly and leader of Clan Gordon, was repeatedly in trouble with the state church, which wanted him excommunicated for his closeness to Catholicism. Despite outbursts of militancy that included a battle between Catholic Gordons and Protestant Campbells in 1594 and a period of exile in France, Huntly managed to retain the king’s favor.
The weakness of the Scottish monarchy was intertwined with the character and circumstances of the Scottish nobility and landed classes that monopolized the government’s administrative offices. The nobility were one of three “estates” (the others being officers of the church and the lesser landholders, or lairds) in the Scottish Parliament. Accustomed to appropriating the property of the church for their own benefit, the higher nobility spurned every plea to disgorge the income they were receiving. The most spectacular prize in this scramble for personal gain was the revenue attached to bishoprics; whenever possible, the great families claimed this office and the benefits associated with it. Religious affiliation, much less religious commitment, took second place to the competition for wealth, political office (which could be economically beneficial), and access to regents or the king, and second place as well to an intricate game of alliance making among the major families in the context of interclan conflict. Allies came and went; betrayals, double-dealing, and coups d’état were everyday affairs; and vengeance, up to and including assassination, was an acceptable means of settling disputes. As James VI observed in Basilikon Doron, the nobility had a “feckless arrogant conceit of their greatness and power.” From almost any perspective, and certainly that of the Crown, the rule of law was tenuous. A nobleman called to account by a judicial court or the government was likely to arrive in Edinburgh or elsewhere accompanied by a retinue of armed men, a show of force the government was not always able to withstand. Tellingly, the nobility spurned the authority of the state church to call them to account for their moral behavior.22
People of this kind were not the best material on which to base a church bent on upholding a strict moral code and eliminating Catholicism, which a significant fraction of the nobility continued to prefer. According to the First Book of Discipline, everyone was accountable to the church and social rank was irrelevant; “to discipline must all the estates within this Realm be subject, as well the Rulers, as they that are ruled,” a rule the kirk struggled to enforce. Nor did rank offer any protection from the message that God expected great things of kings and the nobility. Knox made this point in his Appellation . . . from the Cruell and Most Unjust Sentence Pronounced against Him by the False Bishops and Cleargie of Scotland (Geneva, 1558). Addressing “the Nobilitie and Estats” of his homeland and quoting Romans 13:1–2, he summoned them to exercise their God-given authority to “promote true religion.” To this message he attached the prophet-like warning that, were they to neglect this role, they could not “escape God’s judgements.” Year after year, Knox and his successors reiterated this message, usually in the context of disputing the politics of religion pursued by various regents and, eventually, James VI. Knox also knew that, without the support of some of the nobility, neither his preaching tour of 1555 nor the overthrow of Mary of Guise would have been possible. Wavering or inconsistent in their alliances among each other and in their allegiance to the king, the nobility and lairds were, in the telling words of one Scottish historian, unable to “deliver the type of religious revolution which the ministers sought.” Nonetheless, an important group continued to prefer a Protestant-style state church.23
Where else did the Protestant program find substantial support? As was true in Germany and England, urban merchants, the lesser nobility, craftsmen, and tenant farmers were more likely to be Protestant. Support also came from townsmen and “burgesses” who met annually to debate affairs of state that impinged on the “royal burghs” in which some burgesses held office.24 John Knox owed his invitation (1559) to become minister of a key church in Edinburgh to men of this status. They turned up by the dozens in 1560 for the informal Parliament of that year and, as the century progressed, staffed the church courts or kirk sessions (see below). Quantifying the growth of the merchant class in sixteenth-century Scotland is difficult, but grow it did in wealth, numbers, and political influence. Despite their prominence, these Protestants of middling rank or status never created the versions of “voluntary religion” (see chap. 6) that became a significant feature of religious life in England; to cite one example, the Church of Scotland had no locally supported lecturers of the kind that emerged in England. Well into the seventeenth century, the sociology of Protestantism in Scotland was parish centered, with none of the flavor of the “congregationalism” that historians detect in the program of Cart-wright and Travers. And, although generalizing about the texture of everyday or popular Protestantism is a questionable enterprise, it seems certain that Knox’s vision of an embattled few who repudiated all aspects of Catholicism ignored the many in Scotland who preferred a more relaxed version of Protestantism.25
Other headwinds in the face of the Protestant reformers arose out of the economic and cultural geography of Scotland. Much more so than England, it was a rural society of landless peasants and tenant farmers, some of them quite prosperous, with Edinburgh the only town of any real size (possibly some 12,000 inhabitants in 1560, at a time when the overall population may have approached 700,000; by the 1620s, the city’s population had doubled). This social and economic geography overlapped with the division of the country into the Gaelic-speaking and, after 1560, substantially Catholic Highlands and the Scots-English–speaking and more fully Protestant Lowlands. The “Borders” (where England and Scotland met) was a region unto itself, an area dominated by the sixteenth-century equivalent of gangsters who defied all attempts at establishing law and order. Planting a Protestant ministry in the Highlands was virtually impossible, and as late as 1609, only a minority of parishes in that region employed a professional clergyman. A minister charged with introducing churches to the area complained in 1567 and again in 1572 that he was “not able to travel” in “the north” and collect church rents for the benefit of Protestant missionaries after he provoked a local magnate with little sympathy for Protestantism. Planting one in the Lowlands was hampered by a shortage of university-trained ministers and the low level of their stipends, so low in the early decades that some ministers gave up their vocation. Thanks to a multitude of such circumstances, turning Scotland into a Protestant country along Reformed lines would happen slowly and, in some regions, incompletely.26
Headwinds notwithstanding, a group of ministers in the 1560s held fast to the vision of a perfect reformation they had inherited from the example of Geneva and the Huguenot movement in France and passed this vision on to their successors. This vision rested on a concept of a covenant between God and a Protestant Scotland, a concept central to Knox’s preaching and the theological rationale for the fast days he wanted his fellow Scots to observe. At a perilous moment in 1565, Knox collaborated with another minister of the same thinking, John Craig, to write The Ordure and Doctrine of the General Fast, which they fashioned as an appeal to Scotland’s faithful Protestants to employ “prayer, fasting and repentance” as weapons against the queen and her allies.27 The self-confidence of these men may make us uneasy, and in sixteenth-century Scotland it irritated Mary Stuart, James VI, and some of the nobility; to a modern ear, although not to anyone who knew of Knox’s practice in the 1550s and 1560s, it seems unimaginable that a minister could admonish the noble house of Anstruther for collecting revenues that should have gone to the church, a message James Melville (1556–1614) reinforced by adding “a curse and malediction from God upon whosoever shall intervene and draw away the commodities thereof from the right use of sustaining of the ministry.”28
Always tense,29 the relationship between ministers and the country’s magnates was eased by the social status of some first- and second-generation ministers; men such as Robert Bruce, Robert Rollock, and John Craig were the sons of lairds or connected with the nobility, and John Erskine of Dun, a member of the Lords of the Congregation and akin to a minister in the role he would play as a superintendent (see below), was a laird with strong connections to those of “the nobility and gentry” to whom “he was related.” Thanks to their personal piety, some of these men acquired an authority as “especiall instrument[s] of God” in the work of evangelization. Questioned at the ceremony in 1561 admitting him to the office of superintendent, John Spottiswood cited his indifference to “worldly commodity, riches or glory,” pledging at the same moment to “profess, instruct, and mentain the purity of the doctrine, conteaned in the sacred word of God” against all attempts to introduce “men’s inventions.” Men such as Spottiswood, Bruce, James Lawson, and John Davidson had a high understanding of their office as the “especiall instrument of God” in the work of evangelization.30
In the 1560s, enough well-qualified ministers were on hand to staff the three major churches in Edinburgh and those in university towns such as St. Andrews and Glasgow. Elsewhere, such men were scarce; as the historian John McCallum has shown for the region of Fife, two or three parishes shared the same minister until near the end of the century or made do with “readers.” As in England, moreover, the state church continued to rely on men who had been priests or monks before the coming of the Reformation, a transition eased by the decision of the Scottish Parliament to allow these men to retain two-thirds of the income from their benefices. Keeping an eye on them, and especially on the credentials of readers, became a special concern of the General Assembly. Longer term, it was not these men but the dozens of students at one or another of the Scottish universities who implemented the new religion.31
Another challenge was arranging for a supply of service books and Bibles. A local printer issued an edition of Calvin’s Catechism in 1564, and John Craig’s A Shorte Summe of the Whole Catechisme (1581) had several local printings, but many other books were imported, especially Bibles and psalters; not until 1579 did a Glasgow printer publish a local edition of the Geneva Bible, which the Church of Scotland officially endorsed.32 Well beyond 1600, churches and people in Scotland depended on Dutch-printed Bibles and other books for most of their needs. The first book printed in Gaelic arose out of the ambition of the Earl of Argyll and the earliest superintendent in his part of the country, John Carswell. Hoping to evangelize the western Highlands, Carswell translated the worship guide known as the Book of Common Order (see below) into classic common Gaelic (an elite version of the vernacular) in 1567. He and Argyll talked of doing a Gaelic version of the Bible, a project thwarted by Carswell’s death in 1572 and the earl’s in 1573. Nonetheless, the way was open to introducing Protestantism to the Highlands.33
The measures accepted by the parliaments of 1560 and 1567 were steps along the way to the reformation Knox aspired to accomplish. Of the objections that process was certain to include, four became contentious: the workings of discipline; the king’s authority in religious affairs or, if not the king’s, that of the regents serving in his stead; the administrative structure of the church; and the place clergy should have in the country’s Parliament. Reserving the politics and practice of church discipline for chapter 5, this chapter follows the up- and-down relationship between general assemblies and the country’s leaders to the end of the century and beyond.34
Theirs was not a simple relationship, and the details that follow may obscure the role of theological principles in the making of religious politics. One of these was the regulative principle, or the singular authority of the Word. Eventually, one wing of the Church of Scotland resorted to the argument of “things indifferent,” but for most of the sixteenth century the kirk insisted on a strong version of the Word as law. Another was the imperative to rid the church of idolatry, an imperative cloaked in a ferociously apocalyptic anti-Catholicism that some in civil society did not share, most notably James VI. But the brightest thread that wound its way through the tapestry of religious politics concerned the visible church and its place in the grand scheme of redemption. Ensuring the welfare of the church as a divine institution was the rock on which all other reforms were based—reform of ministry, an office or vocation of the highest importance and therefore open only to certain kinds of men; of worship, from which all idolatry should be removed; and of discipline, for the holiness of the church depended on its capacity to punish the immoral and the unworthy. Then and only then would the church become a veritable city upon a hill (Matt. 5:14); then and only then would it justify its identity as the “best” and purest church in all of Christendom. In the eyes of the more daring reformers, such a church was what the Reformation had brought into being, a church notably superior to its English counterpart and, as signaled by divine portents and providences, especially dear to God.35
In the 1560s, the kirk had achieved the impossible, a transition from Catholicism to Protestantism against the wishes of the country’s ruler. The price of doing so had been civil war and a severely divided nobility. Now, with the coming of peace, where did the civil magistrate figure in the country’s new-found Protestantism? Taking for granted that church and state “were two aspects of the one Christian commonwealth,” a Christendom headed by magistrates as well as ministers, each of them holding offices that God had ordained, the church’s new leaders also wanted to protect the distinctive freedom of the church. James VI welcomed the role of Christian prince because it seemed to confirm his authority in matters of religion. And, as was true in England, the clergy and their more immediate supporters needed a Christian prince to uphold their own authority and keep Catholicism at bay. On the other hand, the ministers valued the autonomy that the church was promised within the two-kingdoms framework. Tension was inevitable, one party wanting the officers of the church to defer to the magistrate and another insisting on the ministers’ independence alongside a strong role for a Christian prince.36
There was less reason to be anxious about worship or the lawfulness of the state church. On these there was broad agreement, so much so that English-style nonconformity was conspicuous by its absence, as were any flickerings of Separatism. In 1561 the General Assembly accepted a revised and expanded version of the First Book of Discipline. Affirming that “Gods written and revealed word” was normative, it created procedures for admitting persons to the ministry of local congregations (the longest section of the book); endorsed the practice of having congregations “elect” their pastors, elders, and deacons, for Knox a key aspect of a minister’s “call”;37 and reiterated the importance of supervising moral behavior, a task assigned to church officers known as elders, who wielded punishments of several kinds, most notably excommunication. Nothing was said of episcopacy, although Knox had previously inveighed against the “wicked, slanderous and detestable life of prelates,” contrasting their lust for “riches and possessions” with the simplicity of “able and true ministers.” During the back-and-forth with Mary of Guise, the Protestant leadership had insinuated that the Scottish bishops were tyrants in league with the Antichrist and therefore not “true ministers of Christ’s Church.”38 As of that moment, therefore, any English-style system of diocesan episcopacy was out of the question.
Unlike Calvin, the Scots made discipline a mark or “note” of the true church, a premise included in the Confession of 1560 on the grounds that discipline and “Christ’s Kingdome” rose and fell together. According to the First Book of Discipline, it was imperative that the church distinguish between “men of eveill conversation” and “God’s children” and just as imperative that some sort of barrier keep the godly from being “infected” with evil, a premise linked to Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians to expel evil doers (1 Cor. 5:6–7, 9–12). Both were means of sustaining the process of “edification” or mutual watch among church members and the ideal of the church as “more purely governed” than civil society. The ultimate remedy for corruption was to excommunicate anyone who remained unrepentant, a step elaborated on in an “Ordour of Excommunication” (1569).39
Simultaneously, the leaders of the church were redefining the substance of worship. An ideal version was readily at hand, the stringently anti-Catholic Forme of prayers and ministration of the Sacraments, the service book prepared by the Genevan community of Marian exiles (1556).40 Printed in Edinburgh in 1562, the year it was endorsed by the General Assembly, and reprinted many times thereafter, it was commonly referred to as the Book of Common Order. This text and its companion, the First Book of Discipline, contained a strongly Protestant understanding of baptism and Holy Communion that eliminated the sign of the cross in the first of these sacraments; specified that sitting at a table was the appropriate means of receiving the elements of bread and wine, for which ordinary bread was used; and eliminated all holy days “commanded by men” and “those that the Papists have invented,” a list that included Christmas.41 Holy days gave way to two services on Sunday, each centered on preaching, prayer, and the congregational singing of metrical psalms. Holy Communion would be celebrated four times a year (a schedule local churches rarely sustained), and procedures were put in place to prepare those who wanted to participate—in particular, “preparation” sermons preached a week or so before the sacrament was administered. Private baptism of newborn children was proscribed and rules spelled out for weddings and funerals, usually in a manner that disrupted Catholic or popular custom. Catholic vestments also vanished, for Knox agreed with those in England who denounced these garments as “badges of idolaters.” In their place, ministers in the kirk wore the scholars’ gown, a practice favored by Reformed communities on the continent.42
This pattern of worship validated the assertion that the Church of Scotland had purged itself of all “inventions.” Not in England, however, which was why the General Assembly sympathized with the ministers on the losing side of the vestarian controversy. Hearing of that dispute, the leaders of the assembly sent a letter of advice to Elizabeth and the English bishops. Its point was to underscore the imperative of eliminating idolatry, an imperative accomplished in Scotland but not in England now that vestments were being re-imposed. Opening with a rhetorical question, “What has darkness to do with light?” the assembly characterized “surplices, cornet cap and tippet” as “badges of idolaters,” adding that the wise course of action would be to jettison “the dregs of that Romish beast; yea, what is he that ought not to fear either to take in his hand or forehand, the print and mark of that odious beast?” To Elizabeth herself the assembly spoke in strong terms. She should not use her authority “against God,” but “oppose” herself “boldly . . . against all such as dare burden the consciences of the faithful further than God chargeth them in his own word.” For the kirk as for the protestors in London, conscience trumped “worldly wisdom,” a coded allusion to the queen’s willingness to ignore divine law.43
Meanwhile, the assembly was improvising an administrative structure for the kirk and casting about for ways to improve the financial situation of the clergy. Some parts of this process were easily accomplished—for example, curtailing Catholic-style church courts headed by bishops or their appointees and replacing a cathedral-centered system with an emphasis on the local parish. Measures of this kind ensured that episcopacy in any strong sense of the term had been eliminated. Actual bishops were not, however, for the state church inherited several men who converted to Protestantism. As would gradually become apparent, the Scottish bishops resembled a cat with nine lives—diminished or seemingly eliminated, yet somehow reappearing. Although the English and, even more so, the Catholic version of episcopacy contradicted the principle of ministerial equality, the reformers knew that Bucer and Calvin had entertained the possibility of a “reformed episcopate” justified by its administrative functions. With three Protestant bishops on hand, the authors of the First Book of Discipline settled on differentiating good from bad bishops, the former able to be “preachers themselves,” the latter, “idle Bishops” who had little or no role in the economy of salvation. An easy way to underscore the difference between the two was to order every minister to live in a single parish, a step that also had the benefit of curtailing nonresidency.44
With bishops sidelined, the General Assembly devised the office of superintendent, assigning the men who held this post the responsibility for overseeing regional clusters of local churches and giving them the task of staffing new parishes. A short-lived experiment with precedents in European practice, superintendency had nothing in common with bishops in the Church of England. Longer term, the leaders of the kirk wanted to control the process by which ministers were appointed to a parish, a goal frustrated by the privileges of magnates and others who owned church property.45 These steps taken, the leaders of the General Assembly turned to reforming the Scottish universities. A purge of Catholic faculty from the University of Aberdeen in 1569 was followed by the appointment of new leaders for Glasgow and St. Andrews, where Andrew Melville (1545–1622) moved in 1580 after spending several years as principal in Glasgow. Thanks to the expertise he gained in Europe, Melville became “the dominant figure in the education of Scottish divines,” although his influence as a theologian was less than that of Robert Rollock, who became the first head (1583) of a newly founded college in Edinburgh.46 As a practical step, the kirk endorsed the exercise of ministerial education known as prophesying, and the First Book of Discipline added a request that masters of families instruct their households in matters of religion.
Establishing an effective regulation of morals, manners, and access to the Lord’s Supper would take another four or five decades. The rules may have been in place—the First Book of Discipline called on ministers to exert a “sharp examination” to ensure that no one was admitted to the Lord’s Supper who “can not formally say the Lord’s prayer, the Articles of the Beliefe and declare the summe of the Law”—but it was another matter to find the men who, as elders, would do the hard work of supervising everyday behavior.47 The good news was the presence of an institution with no direct counterpart in England, the kirk session or church court (see chap. 5). These were up and running in a handful of places as early as the 1560s and functioning throughout most of Lowland Scotland by the turn of the century. Thanks to their effectiveness, the disciplining aspects of the country’s Protestant culture were gradually incorporated into popular practice.48
The final part of the reformers’ program concerned the relationship between church and state. Aware of the two-kingdoms framework so important to the English “presbyterians” but also knowing that the Zurich theologians assigned a strong role to the magistrate or Christian prince, the leaders of the kirk could not do much by way of reform while Scotland was ruled by a Catholic queen. Nonetheless, in 1559 the Lords of the Congregation called on Mary of Guise to act in keeping with her duties as “Christian Prince” and “put away idolatry.” (She and her allies, and subsequently Mary Stuart in the 1560s, replied by accusing the Lords of the Congregation of fomenting “sedition.”) For the rest of the century and beyond, the leaders of the state church pushed and prodded regents, nobility, and James VI to live up to the role of Christian prince. Simultaneously, the assembly wanted to protect the freedom of the state church to regulate most aspects of religion—doctrine for one, discipline and the penalty of excommunication for another. It was easy to agree that ministers and superintendents should not hold civil office or serve in the Scottish Parliament, a rule contradicted by the few bishops who retained their place in that body.49 Far from withdrawing from civil life, however, the reformers insisted that the kirk play a major role in the life of the country. As God’s “watchmen of the people,” its leaders were entitled to summon the Scottish elite—kings, regents, and magnates—to remedy “all vices commanded by the law of God to be punished” and to threaten them in the name of God if they refused to do so. Simultaneously, assemblies evoked the concept of a “mutual bond” uniting king, people, and God, a contract that required the Christian prince to “maintain . . . the true religion of Jesus Christ.”50
With James VI too young to rule in person, the politics of religion revolved around the men who became regents. The first of these, James Stewart (first Earl of Moray), the deposed queen’s illegitimate brother, was sympathetic to the needs of the kirk. After he was assassinated in 1570 by allies of Mary Stuart, his successors, two of whom also died at the hands of assassins, began to appoint high-placed Protestants as bishops without seeking the consent of the General Assembly. Amid these difficulties, a compromise was struck in 1572 when a group of nobles and state officers commissioned by the current regent, James Douglas, the Earl of Morton, met in the town of Leith with a delegation of ministers. Erskine of Dun, an early supporter of reform among the nobility and gifted at crafting compromises, sketched a framework of rules aimed at reclaiming some of the property attached to bishoprics and requiring anyone of this rank to serve a parish. His scheme paved the way for an agreement to acknowledge an episcopate appointed by the Crown and empowered to ordain men to the ministry but in other respects “subject . . . to the general assembly.” For its part, the government agreed that, in theory, the role of these bishops was the same as that of superintendents, who would continue to be appointed. (In point of fact, this office gradually vanished.) The government also agreed that, each time the government named a new bishop, he would be vetted by the assembly, take up pastoral responsibilities, and accept the guidance of a “chapter of learned ministers.” The Convention of Leith was of the mix- and-match variety, each side getting something of what it wanted. The clauses about church revenues and adding more clergy epitomized this process; on the one hand they preserved lay patronage (ownership) of church property, but on the other they gave the church a greater role in managing its revenues and strengthened the funding of students at the several universities.51
As often happens with compromises of this kind, the convention disappointed the more emphatically Reformed, who sniped at the oddity of bishop-rics shorn of most of their revenue.52 In August 1572, the General Assembly insisted that the names of “archibishop archdeacon” and the like had the “sound of papistry” and urged the government to regard the agreement reached at Leith as provisional or interim, which in fact it was, since no assembly had approved its provisions. In October, disaffection made its way into a fast-day proclamation that singled out the “reformation of the nobility” as of special importance, noting their “wrongful use of the patrimony of the Kirk” and “their great negligence in times past” in punishing “vice.”53 The more significant reaction to Leith was the decision to begin work on a new book of discipline that would define the relationship between church and state; decide, once and for all, the status of episcopacy; and clarify other aspects of church structure.
Little is known about this process or who within the assembly and the nobility led the way. What seems certain is that such a step was envisioned as early as 1571 and others were being taken as of February 1574, when the assembly appointed a committee to prepare articles “which conerne the jurisdictioun of the kirk,” a process that gained fresh importance once the regent Morton, who wanted some version of episcopacy, began to tamper with the boundaries between church and state. Parliament having voted to endorse this project, the assembly returned to the question of bishops, past, present, and future. In 1576, Chancellor Glamis, a Protestant nobleman, sought the advice of Theodore Beza about church order at a moment when, in Glamis’s words, the “hindrances” of “internal strife” had been succeeded by “peace.” Hoping for consensus on “the form of government” for the state church, he told Beza that, as yet, “adequate agreement has not yet been reached among us on matters of government and constitution.” From Geneva, Beza responded by recommending that the state church avoid an institution he identified with tyranny, those “bastard bishops, the relicts of the Papacie.” Almost certainly aware of Travers’s Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae (1574) and the French Reformed discipline of 1571, which Beza had helped write, and armed with copies of his De Triplici Episcopatum, the assembly voted in 1575 to entrust a small group of ministers with the task of revising “all Books that are printed and published”; a year later, it authorized a committee to prepare what became known as the Second Book of Discipline. That year, too, the status of episcopacy as a divine office was debated, with Andrew Melville and John Craig, among others, arguing that the “name of Bishop is common to every one of them that hath a particular flock.” According to a later account, Melville was also saying “that the corruptions crept into the estate of Bishops were so great, as unlesse the same were removed, it could not go well with the Church, nor could Religion be long preserved in purity.”54
By late fall of 1578, the new book of discipline had advanced to the point where, at the king’s request, a draft was reviewed and amended by a committee of thirteen men, four of them important ministers in the kirk and another, Erskine of Dun. What is known of these deliberations suggests that the group was clarifying how magistrate and minister would work together in practice and how, going forward, episcopacy would be dealt with and the office of ruling elder introduced. Some details may have remained unclear, including, it seems, the situation of the existing bishops, and in 1578 Parliament was unwilling to ratify the document, but in 1580 the assembly resolved that the office of bishop “had no sure . . . ground out of the Scriptures, but was brought in by the folly and corruption of men’s invention to the great overthrow of the true Kirk.” Singling out the four bishops who remained, the assembly ordered them to “quit, and leave” the office.55
Now, at long last, the kirk acquired a presbyterian system of church government, although still burdened with an ambiguously situated office of bishop, which the government never agreed to abolish. According to the Second Book of Discipline, one great benefit of the new system was its capacity to prevent “all occasion of tyranny” given the principle (p. 74) that ministers must “rule with mutuall consent of brethren, and equalitie of power”—that is, parity among themselves, with laypeople empowered to assent to (not make) the selection of their parish minister. Curtailed in this regard, ministry was nonetheless an office that Christ brought into being and one to which he assigned a distinctive authority, doing so “immediately,” that is, without it passing from church to office (p. 71). Another branch of ministry, the office of elder, also came into its own as having near-clerical status (chap. 6). Taking up the vexed question of how to ensure adequate supervision of local churches and ministers, the assembly assigned most of this responsibility to provincial synods. Simultaneously, it affirmed a strong version of its own authority (chap. 7), which included the privilege of vetting and supervising any bishops. Another sign of the kirk’s newfound freedom was the decision to invite Thomas Cart-wright and Walter Travers to join the faculty of St. Andrews, although neither did so.
Other details were in keeping with Reformed practice. As in the plans of the English presbyterians, so in Scotland each local church was to be governed by a “consistory” of pastors, elders, and deacons complemented by intercongregational structures of presbyteries and synods, with the General Assembly acting as the final court of appeals for cases of discipline, the appointment of clergy to parish churches, and matters of larger policy. All ministers were barred from holding political office, a principle of two-kingdoms theory, and bishops were wished away by a rule that they must serve as pastors of a parish church (chap. 11). The post of reader, a leftover from the 1560s, disappeared although lingering in practice. As had been true since 1560, assemblies, synods, and presbyteries continued to include a substantial bloc of lay members, some of them holding office as elders in local churches, others elected or appointed, and still others participating by virtue of their social or political rank.56
In other sections, the Second Book of Discipline contained what may best be described as a wish list of hopes and expectations. This was notably the case with chapter 12, which insisted on “the libertie of the election of persons called to the Ecclesiasticall functions,” a liberty juxtaposed with a statement condemning any appointing of ministers “either by the prince or any inferiour person[s].” The same chapter included a critique of patronage in the hands of the nobility because it put the selection of parish ministers into the hands of the wrong people. Likening “patronages and presentation to benefices used in the Popes kirk,” the Second Book of Discipline “desire[d] all them, that truly fear God earnestly” to recognize that the popish “manner of proceeding has no ground in the word of God, but is contrary to the same, and to the said liberty of Election,” that is, the liberty of local churches to play a meaningful role in naming their ministers (pp. 89–90).
When it came to the relationship between church and state (chapters 10 and 11), the tone hardened. On the one hand, the Second Book of Discipline reiterated the customary wisdom about the Christian prince as “nourisher” of the church, an assertion embedded in the Confession of 1560. On the other, it combined this truism with a quite different principle drawn from two-kingdoms theory, the magistrate’s responsibility to “maintain the present liberty . . . God hath granted by the preaching of his Word.” To this assertion it added a ban on “usurping any thing that perteins not to the civil sword, but belongs to the offices that are merely Ecclesiasticall” (p. 85). Strong words about the jurisdiction of the church followed in chapter 12, which spelled out an autonomy vis-à-vis the Christian prince: “The Nationall Assemblies of this Countrey, called commonly the Generall Assemblies, ought alwayes to be retained in their own liberty, and have their own place. With power to the kirk to appoint times and places convenient for the same, & all men, as well Magistrates as inferiors, to be subject to the judgement of the same in Ecclesiasticall causes, without any reclamation or appellation to any Judge, civill or ecclesiasticall, within the Realm” (p. 89). Via language of this kind, the Second Book of Discipline aspired to curtail the authority of regents, kings, and parliaments to intervene beyond a certain point in the workings of the state church.
The deeper point—too easily overlooked—was the implication that the General Assembly derived its legitimacy not from the monarchy or civil state but from God. At the General Assembly of 1581, the delegates insisted anew that the national church’s “power ecclesiastical flows immediately from God and the mediator Jesus Christ, and is spiritual, not having a temporal head on earth, but only Christ.” With aggressive regents in mind as well as James VI, the assembly also resolved that “it is a title falsely usurped by the anti-Christ, to call himself head of the Kirk,” a title deserved by neither “angel or . . . man, of what estate soever he be.”57 To be sure, everyone knew that assemblies had repeatedly negotiated the details of certain policies with regents and the Scottish Parliament or depended on their being endorsed by the government—witness the Parliament of 1560 and, in 1578, a willingness born of political necessity to negotiate with the regent Morton about certain aspects of the Second Book of Discipline. More negotiations lay ahead over presbyteries, which did not fully emerge until the mid-1580s after being formally introduced in 1581, and more as well about the handling of excommunication and the presence of bishops (or any clergy) in the Scottish Parliament. Another task was to clarify the relationship between clergy and lay elders—in the case of lay elders, ensuring they were outnumbered by ordained ministers in presbyteries and synods. Nonetheless, the Second Book of Discipline asserted a strong version of autonomy against the wishes of Esme Stewart, a former Catholic, cousin of the king, and regent as of 1581.58
Many years later, it was said by supporters of episcopacy in Scotland that the presbyterianism of the Second Book of Discipline was the doing of Andrew Melville. Perhaps they knew of his nickname (as reported much later by his nephew James) as “the flinger out of bishops.” Melville was in Geneva when the impulse to rewrite the first Book of Discipline emerged within the kirk.59 Leaving Scotland for France in the 1560s, he studied in Paris and Poitiers before moving to Geneva, where he met Cartwright and Travers, acquired a copy of Travers’s Ecclesiasticae disciplinae, and worked alongside Beza at a moment when he was helping the Huguenot complete their structure of governance. These experiences and his academic training were immediately acknowledged in Scotland as helpful to the country’s colleges and the General Assembly, which he served as moderator in 1578 and a few of its successors. It may also have been at his initiative that Cartwright and Travers were invited to Scotland.60
A convincing victory by the presbyterians would be theirs only when the government endorsed the decisions of the assembly. After Morton’s regency ended in March 1578, the political situation became remarkably unstable even by Scottish standards, with coups d’état unfolding in rapid succession—six of them by September 1585, when the current regent James Stewart was overthrown, a series of events that also included the Ruthven raid (1582), a plot by several Protestant members of the nobility to seize the king and exclude the regent and counselors he was favoring. That James VI was trespassing on the liberties of the kirk had already been noted by the General Assembly in 1582, at a moment when the young king was hearing from anti-presbyterians that a “free” monarchy was incompatible with that system. Heartened by this coup, some of the clergy urged James to approve several measures to improve the economic situation of the church and sustain its independence. As so often happened in Scottish politics, extreme views—in this instance, those of the “Protestant zealots” who endorsed the Ruthven raid—provoked a counterreaction led by courtiers and Catholic nobility, one of them the ever-troubling George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly. With the king’s support and seconded by Patrick Adamson as archbishop, James Stewart encouraged the Parliament of 1584 to enact the so-called “Black Acts.” Unflinchingly royalist, the new rules assigned an unlimited or “absolute” power to the king in matters of religion. The most telling was the second act (“confirming the king’s majesty’s royal power”), which nullified what was said in chapter 8 of the Second Book of Discipline. In an accompanying “Declaration,” Adamson emphasized Romans 13:2 on the God-given authority of kings. Perhaps with the hope of deflecting criticism, the first of the Black Acts endorsed the liberty of the clergy to preach and administer the sacraments, although dropping any reference to discipline. Otherwise, the provisions of the Second Book of Discipline went by the boards: no general assembly or “conventions” could meet without the king’s approval and “the new pretended presbyteries” were suppressed, a step justified by the possibility that presbyterianism would mutate into an “Ecclesiasticall tyrannie.” The government also demanded that all clergy agree to the acts or lose their stipends, an “unprecedented” step in Scottish history.61
These measures, together with rumors of a conspiracy to restore Mary Stuart to the throne and the possibility of being convicted of sedition for refusing to subscribe to the Black Acts, prompted the nobility who led the Ruthven raid or participated in an assault on the royal castle at Stirling in 1584 to flee to England, as did some twenty ministers, including James Lawson, Melville, and Melville’s nephew James; when Lawson died in London, local presbyterians honored him at a funeral they arranged. Others in Scotland rejected the acts as ungodly, but acquiesced once the king allowed them to add the phrase “so far as they agree with the Word of God” when they pledged to obey “all . . . laws and acts of Parliament.”62 Before many months passed, a fresh wave of conspiracies against the rapacious Stewart drove him and his clique from office, a change of regimes encouraged by the English government. In came a new chancellor, John Maitland, who seems to have advised the king to pursue a policy of compromise with the kirk. When members of the assembly of 1586 met with James VI, he denied that he had “made defection from the true religion,” words he backed with a promise to “establish” the “discipline” which, “by conference amongst them, should be found most agreeable to the word of God.” Nonetheless, he insisted on the privilege of deciding when and where the General Assembly would meet. Presbyteries reappeared, and in negotiations between the king’s representatives and leaders of the kirk, it was decided to allow a diminished version of bishops. That crosscurrents persisted within the assembly itself was implied by a decision to discuss, behind closed doors, whether “there was any man of other judgement but that the discipline . . . , was according to the word of God.”63
The twists and turns of these years are singularly visible in the career of the first Protestant to become Archbishop of the (Protestant) Church of Scotland. Patrick Adamson (1527–1592) graduated from St. Andrews in 1558. Studies in France and a phase as a lawyer intervened before he gained access to the highest political circles in the country as chaplain to the regent Morton. With his backing, Adamson became Archbishop of St. Andrews in 1576, although previously (1572) he had questioned the legitimacy of that office. Called to account by various synods and assemblies and professing to accept the authority of one of them (1578), he may have conceded that bishops were not superior to other pastors. Two years later, he accepted a post as parish minister in St. Andrews and worked alongside Andrew Melville on various committees charged with implementing the Second Book of Discipline. With the arrival of James Stewart as regent in 1583, Adamson switched sides and began to advocate for episcopacy. During a visit to London (1583–84), where he met John Whitgift, he let it be known that he admired the English liturgy and English-style bishops. What he said in London and to the young king after he returned to Edinburgh matched the currents of royal and parliamentary policy, so much so that one of the Black Acts ratified his authority to summon synods and appoint ministers. Unbending when it came to the guilt of the clergy involved in the “late attempted rebellion” (the Ruthven raid) and freshly enthused about James VI, Adamson extolled him as the most important member of the church and a worthy successor to Old Testament kings and Christian emperors such as Constantine.64
With the fall of Stewart and the return from exile of the Ruthven raiders, the wheel turned anew. Urged on by James Melville, the synod of Fife excommunicated Adamson a second time. The General Assembly of 1586 noted his “submission” in which he “denied” having ever “professed” a supremacy” over “other pastors.” For the time being, he avoided the penalty of excommunication, thanks to the intervention of the king. But in 1589 a string of penalties imposed by another assembly culminated in a decision to confirm his excommunication. Two years later, at a moment when he was suffering from the illness that concluded with his death in February 1592, he appealed to the presbytery of St. Andrews to release him from this censure, which it agreed to do after he acknowledged his mistakes. Shortly thereafter, he reversed himself on the question of bishops, declaring that the office “hath no warrant of the word of God, but is grounded upon the policie of the invention of man,” language akin to what he had said about presbyteries. He apologized as well for defending the authority of the king over the church when, in his words, “the power of the word is to be extolled above the power of princes.”65
Adamson’s about-face may have affected James VI, who became more forbearing of the presbyterians. Even so, he refused to allow the kirk to punish any officer of state or to excommunicate Huntly at a moment when leaders of the church were sounding the alarm about the Counter-Reformation militancy of Jesuit missionaries, the converts they were making, the threat of a Spanish invasion, and a Huntly-led insurrection in 1589, the same year in which James promised the leaders of the assembly he would “uphold discipline.”66 When the coronation of James’s new wife, Anne of Denmark, was celebrated in Edinburgh in 1590, Andrew Melville and another ardent presbyterian, Robert Bruce, participated in the ceremony. Learning that Richard Bancroft had lam-basted Scottish presbyterianism as “an introduction to . . . popularitie” and “tended to the overthrow” of the Crown,” the king professed dismay and, in August 1590, criticized the Book of Common Prayer (“their service is an ill-mumbled Mess”), spoke of his delight at being “King, in such a Kirk, the sincerest Kirk in the world”—better even than the church in Geneva—and “charge[d]” the General Assembly “to stand to your purity.” Beforehand (1589), the leaders of the church denounced Bancroft’s portrait of presbyterianism as incompatible with the authority of the monarch, a response notable for its firm evocation of two-kingdoms principles, affirming, on the one hand, that magistrates whether “heathen” or “Christian” must be obeyed, and on the other, that “church officers . . . are appointed of God, to execute all ecclesiastical matters.”67
James’s warm words were followed by a parliamentary session in late May 1592 that met at a moment of intense conflict among the nobility and dismay within the state church with Huntly for his role in the murder of James Stewart, the Earl of Moray. Beforehand, the General Assembly agreed to ask the king and the new Parliament to annul the Black Acts of 1584 and restore certain properties to the church, adding, as well, a request that bishops be excluded from sitting in Parliament. James endorsed most of these requests, as did Parliament, which granted official recognition to a system of presbyteries and synods and repealed some of the Black Acts. In principle, the king also agreed that assemblies should meet every year “at the least.” The most crucial of the Black Acts, the second, which awarded James supreme power in matters spiritual and temporal, was not repealed but softened by glossing it in a way that upheld the “privilege” of the kirk to decide the “heads of religion” and excommunicate and otherwise punish ministers and laypeople who misbehaved. As historians have pointed out, the wording of the “golden acts” was deceptively satisfying. Much remained unclear, for their wording did not specify who should judge which censures were “essential” or define the scope of the “privilege . . . god has given” the kirk. Nor did the new rules seriously curtail the role of the king in religious affairs or say anything about episcopacy, a silence that could be interpreted in different ways. Nonetheless, some of the men who had been alienated from the king in the mid-1580s were telling each other that “the Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection.” On paper, perhaps, but not consistently in practice, for assemblies continued to remind the government that it was not always adhering to the new rules.68
When James intervened in late 1596 and 1597 against the presbyterians, the situation of Andrew and James Melville and their allies took a sharp turn for the worse. Alarmed by the resurgence of Catholicism and the king’s willingness to pardon high-ranking Catholics who had been exiled, a party of ministers persuaded the General Assembly that met in March 1596 to accuse the king of “swearing” and other moral faults, and the people around him, including the queen, of bad behavior and indifference to true religion. Implicitly if not to his face, the kirk was threatening the king with excommunication. As had happened under similar circumstances in 1580–81 and the year of the Spanish Armada (1588), the assembly appealed to the Scottish people to “join [themselves] to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.” On his own, Andrew Melville confronted the king directly. Included in a deputation that met with James to complain about his handling of Huntly’s excommunication, Melville was “unable to restrain himself” (in the words of an admiring nineteenth-century biographer) after hearing the king denounce a special meeting of the ministers as “illegal and seditious.” Taking James by the sleeve, Melville told him to his face that he was “but God’s silly vassal,” adding that “there is two kings and two Kingdoms, in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.”69
Thus was set in motion the parting of the ways between James and those who insisted on the autonomy of the state church, a process linked to the deaths of the great Protestant “magnates” of the 1580s and earlier. The king had already reprimanded the clergy for their comments about him and in 1596 confronted David Black, a minister in St. Andrews, for using “undecent” language in a sermon that touched on the behavior of the king and Queen Anne. A hard-liner, Black refused to acknowledge the king’s jurisdiction in “spiritual” matters. In the aftermath of an attempted coup (or more likely, a riot) in Edinburgh in December 1596 fed by rumors of “plots” against the kirk,70 the king exploited his powers under the “Black Acts” to bypass Edinburgh and fix on Perth as the site of the General Assembly of 1597. This time around, the king not only convened the assembly but decided its agenda. Doing so made it more likely that the ministers and laypeople who attended were out from under the influence of the Melvilles—Andrew was banned from attending—and their fellow presbyterians. The Perth Assembly was not as complacent as he may have expected. Nonetheless, it endorsed most of what he wanted, agreeing, for example, to allow bishops to vote in parliaments and the king a role in the appointment of ministers. In exchange, James promised better revenues for the kirk and a military campaign against extremist Catholics in the Highlands. As well, the Perth Assembly accepted the king’s suggestion that, between sessions of the assembly, fourteen “commissioners” manage its business. Knowing he could influence the naming of these men, James may have thought of them as de facto bishops.71
Here, for the moment, we must conclude the story of the Reformation in Scotland. Buffeted though it was by the twists and turns of regional, national, dynastic, and international politics, the reforming party had turned Scotland into a Protestant country despite the presence of Catholic-leaning clans. By 1600, James was imposing the rule of law on some of the Scottish nobility and clarifying his authority over a church that aspired to be independent. Knowing he was likely to succeed Elizabeth as monarch of England, he may have taken to heart the warning he received from her in 1590: “There is risen, both in your realm and mine, a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery.”72 James tucked this counsel into Basilikon Doron. There, he defended a theory of kingship as hereditary and criticized any and every attempt by Catholics and “puritans” alike to differentiate a king’s authority in “spiritual” affairs from his authority in the realm of the civil or secular. Retracing the history of the Scottish Reformation, he likened it to a “popular tumult and rebellion” that, unlike the reformation in England, had not been initiated by a “Princes order” but by “some fierie spirited men in the ministerie” who “fantasie[d] to themselves a Democraticke forme of gouernment.” With Andrew Melville and others of his temperament in mind, James was especially contemptuous of ministers who “breath . . . nothing but sedition and calumnies” against the country’s rulers. What made their preaching seditious? The message that “all Kings and Princes were naturally enemies to the libertie of the Church, and could never patiently beare the yoke of Christ: with such sound doctrine fed they their flockes.” In a companion treatise, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), he repudiated the “resistance” theorizing of John Knox and others on the grounds that kings were “Gods Lieutenant in earth” who could be “judged onely by God.” By the early seventeenth century, he wanted nothing to do with such a system and its principle of ministerial parity. As he put it, parity was “the mother of confusion and enemy to Unity, which is the mother of order.”73
In the new century as well as previously, James benefitted from the presence of ministers or statesmen who wavered in their commitments, as Erskine of Dun and John Craig (d. 1600) had done during their many years of service to the state church. George Gledstanes (d. 1622) was already known as a moderate when, probably at the king’s behest, he replaced David Black in St. Andrews in 1597. At the Perth Assembly, he supported the proposal to reinstate bishops as voting members of Parliament, a step approved by the assembly of 1600, the year he became a bishop and, four years later, Archbishop of St. Andrews—possibly a reluctant archbishop, for he told his local presbytery that he claimed “no superiority” over other ministers and promised “to behave himself in . . . great humility.”74 Gledstanes, Andrew Boyd (who also became a bishop), and Robert Rollock, who served as moderator of the Perth Assembly of 1597, were among those who had wearied of conflict between kirk and king. Attracted to James because he seemed to promise unity and peace, they admired him for pushing back against the lawlessness of the nobility. It mattered, too, that he was promising to strengthen the financial situation of the clergy. Moreover, James was committed to Protestant doctrine. Late in life, Rollock extolled him for having “walled round religion with sound discipline” and “protected it by his person,” adding that he himself had “laboured heart and soul” that church and state “should mutually assist each other,” an alliance grounded on James’s self-proclaimed identity as a Christian prince. Another moderate and future bishop, David Lindsay, counseled his fellow ministers that they did more harm than good when they confronted the king. Not that moderates approved of the king’s fondness for some of the Catholic nobility or welcomed his aggressive handling of the General Assembly. Nonetheless, he did not deserve the harsh words spoken by a David Black or John Davidson, harsh words they may possibly have owed to the theorizing of George Buchanan about the origins of monarchy.75
To a group that included Davidson, Bruce, and the Melvilles, anything short of outspokenness would allow James to become another Jeroboam (1 Kings 12), who endorsed idolatry and persecuted the faithful.76 A story the king’s critics learned from the Old Testament, it overlapped with a theme inherited from the Book of Martyrs, the ever-present menace of the Antichrist in the form of Catholicism. Melville and his allies liked to recall the moment when church leaders, nobility, and the young king had endorsed the “King’s” or “Negative Confession” of 1581, a forcefully anti-Catholic “band” that came into being in response to a resurgence of Catholicism in the country. Then and there, James had acted in keeping with a model of godly kingship.77 Now, some two or three decades later, the church under his leadership was becoming corrupt. James Melville, who waited until 1604 to go into opposition, poured his frustration into “A True Narratioune of The Declyning Aige of the Kirk of Scotland; From M.D.XCVI to M.CD.X.” Beginning with the General Assembly of March 1596, which vowed to eliminate all “corruption” by renewing the covenant between God and Scotland, and concluding in 1610 with the reestablishing of episcopacy, the “True Narration” was premised on the “incomparable” or “full perfection” of the Scottish church in its infancy, a church “without any mixture from Babylon” thanks to a reformation that surpassed what had happened “in all the kingdoms of Europe,” a reformation “faire as the morning, clear as the moon.” Thereafter, the “True Narration” became a story of betrayal by “Judases” who toppled the kirk from its heights of purity to a situation of being “oppressed by authority, circumvented with craft, and kept in thralldom, against God’s word, [and] her own constitutions and custom.”78
Events in 1606 (see below, chap. 6) reinforced the worldview of men such as Melville and like-minded ministers. Forty-two such men signed a protest delivered to the Scottish Parliament in 1606, and a single theme dominated their version of recent history: the “decline” of the kirk. Once upon a time, the kirk had truly been the “House of God,” a house built according to the specifications prescribed in the Word. There was no choice in this matter, for the true king of the church was Christ. “All other authority” was secondary or subordinate to his. Neither Parliament or James VI could therefore command the kirk to adopt a “form of divine service which God in his word hath not before allowed.” Yet this is exactly what the king was doing when he reintroduced the English-style office of bishop. Drawing on the same vocabulary of apocalypticism that English Separatists had used, the protestors of 1606 referred to bishops as the fruit of the “man of sin,” the Antichrist or “monster” that was Rome. A turning point had been reached, they warned, a moment when the kirk would either reclaim the truth or follow the path of decline to its endpoint, the plight of being cursed by God. How could this be happening when “the Noble-men and Estates of this realm” and the king himself had sworn in 1581 to preserve the kirk from Catholicism?79
Even though men of this worldview complained of betrayal from within, the presbyterians could point with pride to two projects of great significance in the longer history of Scottish Protestantism. One of these was structural and social, the development of a system of disciplinary courts responsible for overseeing social and moral behavior. The other was religious and cultural, an identity for the Scottish church based on Bale and Foxe’s narrative of the few who remained faithful to their covenant with God, a faithfulness tested by the siren song of idolatry but never giving way to corruption. Instead of tying that identity to the apostolic age, which was where Foxe had begun his narrative in the Book of Martyrs, the presbyterians evoked a more immediate past, the events of circa 1560–1567 that had transformed the Church of Scotland into its glorious identity as the most perfectly reformed church in all of Protestant Europe. So Knox had insisted in the opening pages of his History: “We are bold to affirm that there is no realm this day upon the face of the earth” with “greater purity” in how the sacraments were administered and doctrine taught; “yea (we must speak the truth whomsoever we offend), there is none that hath them in the like purity.” Assertions of this kind were commonplace, voiced by James VI himself in the early 1590s, incorporated into the Scottish Confession of 1616, where the state church was characterized in somewhat tempered language as “one of the purest kirks under heaven to this day,” and evoked in 1621 by a radical of the next generation, David Calderwood. “Was there ever any realme since Christ’s incarnation that professed Christian religion so universally . . . in such puritie, discipline, and publike worship, with such liberties,” was how Calder-wood understood the significance of the Church of Scotland, a significance borne out by the testimony of divine providence. Writing in the wake of what Knox had said about the providential blessings God poured out on a covenanted people, Calderwood and James Melville filled their narratives with example after example of providential interventions against the kirk’s many enemies.80
This was the good news. The bad was Melville’s tale of woe. Paradoxically, this was good news, for God was certain to befriend the Scottish church when and if prophet-like leaders aroused Scottish Protestants and, especially, the nobility, to reaffirm their covenant with God. A ritual process was available for doing so, the fast day, as were ministers eager to resume the role played by Jeremiah and Hosea in ancient Israel and relished by Knox in the 1550s and 1560s. Covenant making on behalf of Protestantism dated to the 1550s. What may be regarded as the archetypal fast happened in December 1565 when, at the urging of Knox and John Craig, the General Assembly summoned Scottish Protestants to repent their sins in the context of anxieties about the nobility and its support for Mary Stuart. A political as well as a spiritual event, the fast of 1565 promised a double deliverance: from the “angry wrath” of the God who had “come upon us for our sins” and from a Catholic queen. Covenant making and covenant renewal took on a fresh importance in 1581 in the context of the Negative Confession, which committed the country’s leaders to defend “the Doctrine and Discipline of this Kirk . . . according to our vocation and power” against the errors of Rome. For those who fashioned this “touchstone to try and discern Papists from Protestants” and oversaw its renewal in 1588, 1590, and 1595, it promised to protect kirk and country from Catholic missionaries aspiring to “corrupt and subvert secretly God’s true religion.” Be it in 1581 or 1595, covenants and the repentance that preceded them were understood by the more ardent Presbyterians as ensuring that idolatry never reemerged, or could be overcome if it did. Covenants were also making it possible to incorporate the apocalyptic scenario of true religion contending against the anti-Christ into opposition to the king’s politics of religion.81
Where did Scotland’s monarchs fit into this story of a true church warding off its enemies? On the one hand, an unequivocal affirmation of their authority was impossible thanks to the origins of the Reformation as an insurgency against two rulers deemed “idolaters” by Knox. Out of that process emerged the premise, articulated in the 1550s and 1560s by Knox, Craig, and others, that a Christian prince who flouted divine law must be resisted, to the point of “execut[ing] God’s law against” such a person. The context for this argument included the assertion at the General Assembly of 1567 that “all kings, rulers, magistrats, at their installing in their office, shall sweare to defend the true religion, and set forward the work of reformation” and, some thirty years later, the story of Gideon, who refused to become king after liberating ancient Israel, which a group of insurgents cited in December 1596 to justify their objections to the policies of James VI.82
Such statements were not as daring as they may seem, for they never dislodged the Reformed assumption that God had empowered the Christian prince to protect the church. As Knox liked to point out, Moses the civil leader, not Aaron the priest, had brought true religion to the people of ancient Israel. Nonetheless, he also knew from reading the Old Testament that kings could mutate into tyrants who turned against God. In a sermon he preached on Isaiah 26:13–21 (1565) in the presence of the queen’s husband, Knox tied the authority of any earthly ruler (specifying judges and kings) to their service as “lieutenants” of God, who charged them with “put[ting] in execution suche things as [are . . .] commanded in divine law, without declying eyther to the right or left hande.” Faithful kings could expect to be obeyed. A monarch who betrayed Scotland’s covenant was another matter, a possibility that may account for the wording of a sentence in the Negative, or King’s, Confession: “we perceive that the quietness and stability of our religion and church depends upon the safety and good behavior [emphasis added] of the king’s majesty . . . for the maintaining of his church.” Via assertions of this kind, obedience became contingent on the meaning of lawfulness. Hence the conclusion of a modern historian that “the legitimacy of the Scottish Reformation impugned the legitimacy of the Scottish crown,” to the point of seriously “circumscrib[ing] James VI’s authority as monarch.” That James felt the sting of this possibility is apparent from his hostility to the makers of the Scottish Reformation,83 for he sensed that anti-monarchical themes were in the air. When and where they were being voiced remains unclear, although a good starting point would surely be the Confession of 1581, which asserted that “the cause of God’s true religion and His Highness’ authority are so joined as the hurt of the one is common to both” and conflated loyalty to “true religion” with loyalty to James VI.84
Going forward, the mythic vision of a purified and God-centered church made any lasting alliance with James and the Scottish nobility less likely. Not only did the “purity via covenant” paradigm seem to exclude compromise of any kind, it also incorporated a ferocious anti-Catholicism at odds with James’s willingness to include Catholics in his government. Moreover, the concept of a covenanted society included a role for latter-day prophets that Knox and his successors played to the hilt. The struggle for true religion in Scotland thus assumed the same shape as the struggle for true religion in ancient Israel—encompassing the same covenant, the same obligation to obey divine law, and the same role for truth-speaking prophets. In the 1560s, Knox had confronted Mary Stuart in this manner. By the early seventeenth century, another confrontation of this kind was becoming inevitable. In the presence of a king visibly irritated by the theme of kings experiencing divine judgment, Melville had insisted that ministers were entitled to describe the judgments God inflicted on bad rulers. He softened this message by insisting on his loyalty to James. Yet he made it clear that God came first and kings and the nobility, second. James may have been a godly king, but in Scotland, the church belonged to God (or Christ). As was said at the assembly of 1583, God had entrusted its purity to those who served in Christ’s stead as His ministers and “watchmen” and empowered them to pronounce “fearful” warnings in His name against anyone one “who neglects to execute faithfully every part of their charge.”85
Did the true church include everyone in Scotland, or only the faithful few? In principle, the Church of Scotland was all-encompassing, an assertion embedded in the description of the visible church in the Scottish Confession of 1560. In practice, it was as well; kirk sessions took for granted a near-universal system of parishes equipped with the machinery of discipline. Yet there was also the possibility of imagining the true church as a “little flock,” the few who, when called upon to repent, did so from the “heart,” an image or idea Knox had embraced in the 1550s and reaffirmed in the fast-day order of 1565. Or was every covenant inclusive or corporate in one dimension but limited to the faithful in another? The series of covenants or “bonds” out of which the reformation of the late 1550s had emerged were mainly the doing of the few, but the Negative Confession of 1581 was ostensibly a national document, as were fast days that began to be practiced in that decade. For the time being, the sectarian alternative of “the few” was pushed aside in favor of a more encompassing program. In England, stalemate or defeat and the ever-pressing question of “lawfulness” had fostered the alternatives of Separatism and nonconformity. Neither of these tendencies existed in Scotland, where Protestants had no basis for questioning the lawfulness of ministers ordained by their peers. No diocesan bishops, no Catholic-style liturgy, and no issues of doctrine alongside an emphasis on discipline, this triad precluded anything akin to the restlessness of the Puritan movement in England. Not until this triad was replaced by practices akin to those of the Church of England did nonconformity emerge and, eventually, a popular insurgency. For the moment, events of this kind remained implicit in the rhetoric of the presbyterian party.
To recognize that certain possibilities were implicit is not to say that they were without consequences. Andrew Melville was eventually banished, and John Knox had died in 1572, but others resumed the role of prophet: the ministers who secured the Negative Confession; John Davidson, who fled his homeland in 1574 but returned in 1579 and participated in an attempt in 1589–1590 to renew that Confession; James Melville, who in 1584 told the nobles who had fled with him to England that God expected them to repent of their sinfulness; and a long line of others in the next century. These men were willing to use biblically grounded prophecy against the powers that be because doing so would preserve the accomplishments of 1560–61 and 1592: a pattern of worship that, unlike the Book of Common Prayer, discarded all aspects of Catholic practice and installed a structure of church government that protected the kirk from bishops as ambitious “for power as ever the Papisticall Prelates” alongside a two-kingdoms framework that curtailed the scope of royal or state authority. They also looked to “bands” or covenants as the means of restoring the greatness of the Church of Scotland. By 1600 and even more so by 1610, it seemed unlikely that covenanting, fast days, and prophecy could thwart James VI. Yet a Protestant imaginary that fused kirk, covenant, and anti-Catholicism with a critique of imperial kingship, a synthesis grounded in “Calvinist anti-monarchical constitutionalism” and its appropriation of Old Testament examples of evil kings being overturned, was not going to disappear, for its core elements were preserved in sermons and histories of the church. Only time would tell if this version of the past would provoke a second reformation marked, in the words of James Melville, by a “spirit of action, zeal, and courage” among “a few from every presbytery and province” with the courage to “censure” all “corrupters of the kirk to the uttermost.”86