The History Of Scotland - Volume 3: From James IV. To Knox And Mary Of Guise

Andrew Lang

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9783849604639
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is volume 3, covering the time from James IV. to Knox and Mary of Guise.In many volumes of several thousand combined pages the series "The History of Scotland" deals with something less than two millenniums of Scottish history. Every single volume covers a certain period in an attempt to examine the elements and forces which were imperative to the making of the Scottish people, and to record the more important events of that time.

BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION.

ON the conclusion of peace, the two chief questions before Scotland were the king's marriage and the dawn of Lutheran and other new ideas in religion. As to the former question, which must have seemed the more pressing, James was now twenty-three, and, in the matter of amours, was even as other kings and other Stuarts. It was desirable that he should marry, and everything turned on his choice of a bride. Was he to wed a daughter of France, or Mary (commonly called The Bloody) his cousin, the child of Henry VIII.? To this question we shall return after sketching the dawn of the Reformation in Scotland.

This is not a topic on which it is easy to be impartial. Protestant historians have seldom handled it with impartiality, and their suppressions, glosses, and want of historical balance naturally turn into opposition the judgment of a modern reader. In nothing has the character of the Lowland Scot, since 1560, differed from the character of his southern kinsmen of England so much as on the point of religion. The English Reformation began in the action of the Crown, and was carried through by the Crown, the new noblesse, the Bishops of Henry VIII., and the more wealthy and prosperous of the middle classes. What new doctrines were adopted came from Lutheranism, rather than from any other foreign source, but were chiefly the result of English compromise. A Church was developed which worshipped in the ancient fanes, under the ancient Order of Bishops, in the translated words of the ancient service-books, or in others not less beautiful. The assistance of the arts was not always rejected: common prayer was deemed more important than political and doctrinal harangues from the pulpit. Monasticism perished; purgatory, prayer to saints, pilgrimages, ceased to be recognised. There was a Revolution, but a Revolution which left many old things standing, and did not at once destroy all the pleasant popular holidays and practices which the ancient faith had consecrated to Christian use.

In Scotland the Reformation began, not in the Crown, and not immediately from personal and political causes, but from rational criticism, developed in the ranks of the gentry, the junior branches of the great families, the Augustinian and Dominican Orders, some of the secular clergy, and the wealthier burgesses. The king could not, as in England, direct and instigate the movement, for, had he done so, he must have broken with Rome and with France, on which he leaned for support against his loving uncle, Henry VIII. He saw Henry first quarrelling with Rome in the interests of his private love-affairs; then proclaiming the Royal supremacy over the Church; then executing the best and bravest of his subjects, More and Fisher (1535); then robbing the monasteries; then authorising (as a weapon against Rome) the translation of the Bible; destroying relics, and melting the golden reliquaries; burning men who read his translated Bible in their own sense; and, finally, roasting for one sort of heterodoxy, hanging for another, and keeping the executioner at work on his Ministers and his wives. The Protestant programme, as evolved and carried out by Henry VIII., was not a programme which James could have adopted. No Scottish king was ever allowed to bloat into such a monster of tyranny as Henry VIII. At the same time, and very naturally, Henry's conduct drove the governing clergy of Scotland into closer alliance with France. They had been the constant allies of France, they had helped to save, again and again, the national independence, now threatened by Henry and his tool, Angus.

They stood by the Cause. It is hardly fair to blame them for this, and hardly historical to regard them as infamously cruel because they carried out the law of the land and the coronation oath by burning theological innovators, just as Henry VIII. was doing in England; just as Presbyterian ministers, on the strength of texts, were presently to burn old women, and (later) hang a premature Biblical critic. As James on the whole, though half-heartedly, having alienated his nobles, had to give his clergy their way, Reformation could not come from the Crown. Partly by dint of political circumstances and jealousy of France, partly by aid of reforming sympathies, the Scots leaned at last towards England, and so a band of nobles, gentry, educated burgesses, and " rascal multitude," as Knox says, were to overthrow a Church long weakened by wealth, ignorance, and vice. To anticipate by thirty years, the very greed of the nobles, by starving the new Establishment, made it democratic in tendency, while the adoption by Scotland of the republican theocracy of Geneva made the Kirk democratic in constitution. Ecclesiastical art, with its appeal to the emotions, was swept away. Preaching, doctrinal and political, tended to usurp in the Kirk the place of prayer and ceremony. The popular pleasures which the ancient faith had patronised were abolished. From a holiday and feast, Sunday was turned into a lugubrious penance. The priest's power to absolve, the mystical meaning of the Eucharist, vanished, and in their place the private miraculous gifts of ministers, in prophecy, in healing, and so forth, supplied the necessary element of the " supernatural." Man was left standing, without an official priesthood to aid him, in the awful presence of God, marvelling whether he were of the elect, and subject to the " wretchlesness of unclean living," which sometimes arises from the doubt. The details of private life, the conduct of the domestic and foreign affairs of the State, were subject to the censorship of preachers, some of whom believed themselves to be, and were believed to be, directly inspired. A tyranny unexampled was imposed on life and conscience, and enforced by the civil penalties of excommunication that is, " boycotting." Yet the tyranny was a democratic tyranny, often exercised by rude men of low birth. Thus, of Churches which have a common name to be Christian, there could not be two so unlike each other as those which in England and Scotland were to arise from the ruins of Rome. Meanwhile the essentially Christian virtues of meekness, sweetness, tolerance, long-suffering, could not be pre-eminent in the chill shadow of the early Kirk: " terrible as an army with banners." The character of the Scots was such as to lead them to the Kirk which they created and starved; but the nature and iron laws and creed of that Kirk, in turn, confirmed the national character.

But, under James V., these things still " lay on the knees of the gods." It is probable, as has been seen from an event in the reign of James IV., that Lollardy had never been quite stamped out in the remote region of Kyle. It was certain that the " new learning " associated with the name of Erasmus, and with his edition of the Greek Testament, would, in Scotland, produce the necessary fruit of universal questioning. Elphinstone had placed Boece, an acquaintance of Erasmus, in his new University of Aberdeen. Panter, the Latin Secretary of James IV., was a disciple of Erasmus as far as Ciceronian as against mediaeval Latin was concerned. Archbishop Stewart, who fell at Flodden, was educated in the school of the new learning; but Hepburn's New College of St. Leonard's, in St. Andrews, was erected on the old scholastic lines. Major, the most famous of the Scottish teachers of the age, was ridiculed as an old-fashioned pedant by Rabelais, Melanchthon, and George Buchanan, but he was opposed to the absolute supremacy of popes; he held quite modern doctrines as to the absence of right divine in kings; he censured the licence of the clergy, and the indolent wealth of the monastic orders, and he was a warm friend of union with England. Only at a change of doctrine, and at the new erudition, did he pause, not advancing to the learning which deserted the mediaeval criticism for classical and sacred writers in the original Greek and Hebrew. Knox and Buchanan had both studied under Major; they were to carry his Liberalism further, and into practice.

While the new learning had already, in the hands of Erasmus and others, sapped the frame of the mediaeval world, the abuses of the mediaeval Church had, in Scotland, risen to a perhaps unequalled height. Vernacular poetry and fabliau had for ages satirised the vices of a celibate clergy, the system of " pardoners," the idleness of able-bodied monks, the luxury and ambition of prelates. But these old abuses had been so long the butts of ridicule that it seemed as if, against them, ridicule was harmless. Flodden incidentally brought matters to a head. The death of the king and many earls at Flodden left more political power than ever in the hands of the clergy. The death of the Archbishop of St. Andrews on the same field, and later of the venerated Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, in his bed, left benefices vacant in many directions. These were at once fought for in feudal war, with clerics for captains, as we have already shown in part. These militant clerics were, as a rule, cadets of the great families, so that Stewarts, Douglases, Hamiltons, and the allied houses were warring with sword and gun for the benefices of the Church. "Every man takes up abbacies that may please, they tarry not till benefices be vacant, they take them ere they fall, for they lose virtue if they touch ground." This often-quoted passage is an extract from a letter which, as early as 1515, sketched the essential characteristics of the nascent Revolution, and of the Scottish character as it was, and, still more, as it was to be. James Ingles, or English, the chaplain of Margaret Tudor, was the author, writing to Adam Williamson. He had been on a mission to England, and was fabled " to have stolen away the king." " You know," he says, " the use of this country. Every man speaks what he will without blame. There is no slander punished. The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content except he know the master's counsel. There is no order among us." So long the country of feudal loyalty to a chief, if to no one else, now Scotland had become a realm where " the man hath more words than the master." The celebrated "independence" of which Burns boasts so much was being developed; and Knox, with his survival of feudal fidelity to the House of Hepburn, his extremely free speaking, and his fearlessness of the face of man, was the type of Scot which was being evolved out of anarchy and revolution. The brawling of ecclesiastics in 1513-16 would not escape the free tongues of the populace. The private lives of some of the clergy were as secular as the corslet of Archbishop Beaton. Had we only the statement of Knox (who had a taste for scandal) and of other Protestants, we might doubt this, but the records of the legitimations of " priests' geats" (bastards) are testimony invincible. Alan, or Alesius, a canon of the Priory of St. Andrews at the time, mentions the Archbishop's request that Patrick Hepburn, of the wild Bothwell blood, the new prior, would put away a mistress who lived within the precinct. Hepburn answered by arming his retainers. David Beaton (later cardinal) and Rothes prevented a battle between the Castle of St. Andrews and the fortified Priory which lie so near each other.

One of the most extraordinary and, in its way, diverting indications of clerical morals is contained in a deed of obligation (1455) between Patrick Brown, Chaplain of the Altar of Corpus Christi, in the Church of St. Michael at Linlithgow, on one hand, and the bailies of the town on the other. The chaplain binds himself, with six sureties, not to pawn the sacred plate, books, and vestments, "to use no unreasonable excess," and "to have no continual concubine," though one unceasing mistress seems less dangerous to public peace than a system of constant mutation in amours. While some of the clergy were thus fierce and dissolute they were also, with many notable exceptions, ignorant. Their learning, except for a few devotees of the studies of the Renaissance, was the old learning. Greek they had none, nor Hebrew. Their forte lay in knowledge of the law (notaries, like Knox, were clerics) and of affairs. They could not meet students of the texts of the Old and New Testaments in dispute indeed they had no common ground. Catholics stood on the traditions developed by the Church, under the constant guidance, as was alleged, of the Holy Spirit. The new men stood on the letter of the Bible, as the sole and sufficient inspired authority. The eternal complaint is that the clergy do not preach, that the bishops are " dumb dogs." Preaching, in fact, was left almost wholly to the friars. Modern people will see no great harm in this, for the ordinary run of sermons are great deterrents of church-going. Every man ordained is not necessarily eloquent, nor even capable of the humblest literary composition. But a hunger and thirst for sermons was arising in Scotland. As the Reformation advanced they became the chief substitutes of the age for newspapers and magazines. The harangues were political, antipapal, controversial, stirring, and exciting. The friars, on the other hand, are said to have preached mainly on legends of saints and saintly miracles.

A poem of David Lyndsay, " Kitty's Confession," written probably about 1540, shows what the friends of the new ideas expected, and what the priests gave, or were said to give. The humour of Lyndsay was, of course, among the influences which diffused the modern doctrines.

" He showed me nought of God His word

Which sharper is than any sword,

Of Christ His blood nothing he knew,

Nor of His promises full true,

He bade me not to Christ be kind,

To keep His law with heart and mind,

And love and thank His great mercy,

From sin and hell that saved me.

And love my neighbour as mysel,

Of this nothing he could me tell,

But gave me penance every day,

And Ave Marie for to say,

And with a plack to buy a Mess,

From drunken Sir John Latinless."

Material formulae, penance that could undeniably be done, and done with, words that could be uttered, money that actually changed hands, were imposed upon the penitent. The Kirk was to sweep away almost all formulae except that rigidity about the Sabbath, which took the place of the rest, and was often all the religion that a Scot possessed. Whether Kitty (in the poem) was not as chaste as her Presbyterian daughters proved, and as lucky in the old teacher as her daughters were in teachers who might tell her that the salvation of all her children "would be an uncouth mercy," may be questioned. However, the tide in Scotland was turning under James V. against formulae and traditions. The new learning could not find Purgatory in the Bible (though found it may be, with research), and if there were no Purgatory, then all the money laid out on Masses for souls had been robbed. So, later, Arran came to think (1543), and changed what few but he called his mind.

There were also practical grievances. First, Rome took a great deal of money out of the country. We have heard of Patrick Graham, the unhappy first Archbishop of St. Andrews. As soon as he was translated from Brechin to St. Andrews, in 1465, he paid 3300 golden florins, and was to pay , more, to Rome, ratione translationis. Six hundred more golden florins were paid, and yet more were promised by Graham, as Commendator of Paisley, in January 1466. In 1473 the papal records show Graham still paying, as Commendator of Arbroath. This was in December: the Bardi were his bankers, and we find him threatened with excommunication by Paul II. for lack of punctuality in transmitting money. These are examples of one practical grievance. Rome was of the daughters of the horse-leech.

Once more, canonical prohibition of marriage grew till it reached the seventh degree of consanguinity; while spiritual kindred, through godfathers and godmothers, multiplied the intolerable number of taboos. In a small country like Scotland, few people of good birth could marry without breaking ecclesiastical taboos. Therefore dispensations had to be paid for; while divorce, on the ground of too near kinship, could always be procured for a consideration, if money had not already been paid to the dispensing power. The divorces of Margaret Tudor, mother of James V., are only flagrant examples of the common condition of morality. The poor were especially the victims of ecclesiastical plunderers. The customary extortion by the clergy of " the best cloth," or " upper cloth," and a cow from the family of the dead peasant, was a detestable abuse devised on feudal lines. James suppressed, or tried to suppress, this iniquity, as we shall see, in 1536. People soon declined to pay for " the penny curse " on the unknown thieves of stolen property, when "nobody seemed one penny the worse." The populace, after all, was to find that it had made a bad change of masters, for, by Knox's admission, the clergy were more kind and lenient than lay landlords. But every class, from Kitty to the noblesse, had now its own grudge against the clergy as lewd, greedy, ignorant, indolent, or too active, and these old quarrels were inflamed by the infiltration of the new learning the books of Luther, and English translations of the Scriptures. We have seen that, in 1525, the Scots Parliament condemned the introduction, by seafaring men, of Luther's and others' heretical writings. Gavin Dunbar, Bishop of Aberdeen, at once obtained a warrant against persons who brought such books from the Low Countries into his university town. These works, like English translations of the Bible, being contraband, were probably expensive, and, being prohibited, were in demand. An agent of Wolsey's informed him that such volumes were freely smuggled into Leith, Edinburgh, and most of all into St. Andrews. To us it seems the extreme of absurdity that Christian men should be prohibited from reading the sacred books of the Christian religion. A few years earlier than 1525-28 similar opinions had prevailed in England to a certain extent. More tells Erasmus that the Bishop of Winchester (Gardiner) " in a large concourse of people affirmed that your version of the New Testament was worth more to him than ten commentaries." The bishops were loud in its praises, said Warham. Yet Erasmus, by applying the principles of philological criticism to the Greek Testament, as to any other Greek book, was upsetting the tradition of the Latin Vulgate. " Who sees not that the authority of the Church was displaced, and the sufficiency of all men individually to read and interpret for themselves was thus asserted by the New Testament of Erasmus? " People did not see it till Luther opened their eyes.

But, by 1528, we find Wolsey accusing a...

Table of contents

• JAMES IV.
• BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION.