But we poor fouk maun live single,
And do the best we can:
I dinna care what I should want;
If I could get a man.
Woo’d and married and a’,” etc.
Scotland under Charles the First.
James died in March, 1625, and a few days thereafter his son Charles was proclaimed at the Edinburgh Cross, King of Scotland; but it was eight years later before he visited the land of his fathers, and was crowned as its King in Holyrood. The then finest poet in Scotland was William Drummond of Hawthornden, and to him was confided the address of welcome to Charles. The address was not in verse, but only in prose—run mad! “If nature,” it began, “could suffer rocks to move and abandon their natural places, this town—founded on the strength of rocks—had, with her castle, temples, and houses, moved towards you, and besought you to acknowledge her yours; her indwellers, your most humble and affectionate subjects; and to believe how many souls are within her circuits, so many lives are devoted to your sacred person and crown;” and so on. When the subjects’ flattery was so obsequious, we can hardly wonder at the amount of royal arrogance and assumption.
The people were a good deal disturbed about the ceremonial of Charles’s coronation; an altar was introduced, and some of the rites seemed to savour of popery. He had Laud and some other English bishops in his retinue, and the King soon gave evidence of his intention to carry out the later attempts of his father, to introduce prelacy, with its subordination to the crown, into Scotland. Now the old bishoprics of the Catholic Church had never been formally abolished, but the titles had been held by laymen of mean rank,—whilst the bulk of the emoluments had gone to certain of the nobles. The nominal bishops were nicknamed Tulchans; a tulchan being a calf-skin stuffed with straw, which was set up alongside of the mother-cow, to induce her to yield her milk more freely. The bishop had the title, but my lord had the milk. There was thus a framework of episcopacy in Scotland, and James had in the last year of his reign, ordered its re-establishment in full authority; archbishops and bishops to have under himself the headship of the Scottish Church.
Charles now confirmed the division of Scotland into dioceses, that of Edinburgh to include all the country south of the Forth; St. Giles to be the Cathedral church,—a wall which had been built to partition off the church into two separate places of worship, to be removed. Four years later, in 1637, the Kings projects had so far advanced, that a liturgy, moulded on that of the English church—but where it differed, with a stronger flavour of Rome—was ordered to be used in St. Giles’s. On the first Sunday of the innovation, the church was crowded; two archbishops, several bishops, lords of the privy council, the judges and city magistrates, being in the congregation. When the dean, in his surplice, began the service, an old woman—Jenny Geddes,—started up and exclaimed,—“You false loon, will you rout your black mass in my lugg?” and threw her stool at the dean’s head. This was a signal for a general uproar, in the midst of which the dean had his surplice torn off by excited women. Stones and other missiles were thrown at the bishops: the magistrates called in the Town Guard to drive the malcontents out of the church; but these by breaking the windows, battering at the doors, and wild clamour, drowned the dean’s voice, as he again ventured on his ungracious task. In the Greyfriars’ church the new liturgy was stopped by popular clamour.