The council, thus urged by friend and foe, recognized the extreme necessity of the case, and did its best to cure the immedicable disease. Its first canon reaffirmed the observance of the Basilian regulations, and appointed a commission empowered to enforce them; and, that nothing should interfere with its efficiency, the Archbishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow made a special renunciation of their exemption from the jurisdiction of the council. The second canon, in forbidding the residence of illegitimate children with their clerical fathers, endeavored to procure obedience to the rule ordered by the council of 1549, by permitting it for four days in each quarter, and by a penalty for infractions of £200 in the case of an archbishop, £100 in that of a bishop, and leaving the mulct to be imposed on inferior ecclesiastics at the discretion of the officials. The third canon prohibited the promotion of children in their father’s benefices, and supplicated the queen-regent to obtain of the pope that no dispensations should be granted to evade the rule. The fourth canon inhibited ecclesiastics from marrying their daughters to barons and lairds, and endowing them with church lands, or making their sons barons or lairds with more than £100 annual income, under pain of fine to the amount of the dowry or lands abstracted from the church; and all grants of church lands or tithes to concubines or children were pronounced null and void.[1303]
When such legislation was necessary, the disorders which it was intended to repress are acknowledged in terms admitting neither of palliation nor excuse. The extent of the evil especially alluded to in the latter canons is further exemplified by the fact that during the thirty years immediately following the establishment of the Reformation in Scotland, more letters of legitimation were taken out than were issued in the subsequent two centuries. These were given to the sons of the clergy who were allowed to retain their benefices, and who then made over the property to their natural children.[1304]
Such being the state of morals among the ministers of the old religion, it is easy to appreciate the immense advantage enjoyed by the Reformers. They made good use of it. Knox loses no opportunity of stigmatizing the “pestilent Papists and Masse-mongers” as “adulterers and whoremasters,” who were thus perpetually held up to the people for execration, while the individual wrongs from which so many suffered were noised about and made the subject of constantly-increasing popular indignation.[1305] Yet the abrogation of celibacy occupies less space in the history of the Scottish Reformation than in that of any other people who threw off the allegiance to Rome.
The remote position of Scotland and its comparative barbarism rendered it in some degree inaccessible to the early doctrines of Luther and Zwingli. Before it began to show a trace of the new ideas, clerical marriage had long passed out of the region of disputation with the Reformers, and was firmly established as one of the inseparable results of the doctrine of justification professed by all the reformed churches.[1306] Not only was it thus accepted as a matter of course by all converts to the new faith, but that faith, when once introduced, spread in Scotland with a rapidity proportioned to the earnest character of the people. The permission to read the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, granted by Parliament in 1543, doubtless had much to do with this; the leaning of the Regent Arran to the same side gave it additional impetus, and the savage fierceness with which the Reformers were prepared to vindicate their belief is shown by the murder of Cardinal Beatoun, which was countenanced and justified by Knox himself. Powerful nobles soon saw in it the means of emancipating themselves from the vacillating control of the regent; nor was the central authority strengthened when, in 1554, the reins of power were wrested from the feeble Arran and confided to the queen-dowager, Mary of Guise, who found herself obliged to encourage each party by turns, and to balance one against the other, to prevent either Catholic or Calvinist from obtaining control over the state. Then, too, as in Germany and England, the temporal possessions of the church were a powerful temptation to its destruction. From the great Duke of Chatelleraut to the laird of some insignificant peel, all were needy and all eager for a share in the spoil. When, in 1560, an assembly of the nobles at Edinburgh listened to a disputation on the Mass, and the Catholic doctors were unable to defend it as a propitiatory sacrifice, the first exclamation of the lords revealed the secret tendencies of their thoughts—“We have been miserably deceived heretofore; for if the Mass may not obtain remission of sins to the quick and to the dead, Wherefore were all the Abbies so richly doted and endowed with our Temporall lands?”[1307]
Of course less selfish purposes were put forward to enlist the support of the people. On the 1st of January, 1559, when the storm was gathering, but before it had burst, the inmates of the religious houses found affixed to their gates a proclamation in the name of “The Blinde, Crooked, Lame, Widows, Orphans, and all other Poor, so visited by the hand of God as cannot work,” ordering the monks to leave the patrimony intended to relieve the suffering, but usurped by indolent shavelings, giving them until Whit-Sunday to make their exit, after which they would be ejected by force, and ending with the significant warning—“Let him, therefore, that hath before stolen, steal no more, but rather let him work with his hands that he may be helpfull to the poore.”[1308]
Such a cry could hardly fail to be popular, but when the threat was carried into execution, the blind and the crooked, the widow and orphan received so small a share of the spoil that they were worse off than before. As we have already seen in England, the destruction of the Scottish monasteries was the commencement of the necessity of making some public provision for paupers.[1309] The nobles seized the lion’s share; the rest fell to the crown, subject to the payment of the very moderate stipends assigned to the comparatively few ministers required by the new establishment, and these stipends were so irregularly paid that the unfortunate ministers were frequently in danger of starvation, and were constantly besieging the court with their dolorous complaints. Where the lands and revenues went is indicated with grim humor by Knox, in describing the resistance offered in 1560 to the adoption of his Book of Discipline by those who had professed great zeal for the Lord Jesus. Lord Erskine had been one of the first and most consistent of the “Lords of the Congregation,” yet he also refused to sign the book—“And no wonder, for besides that he had a very evill woman to his wife, if the Poore, the Schooles, and the Ministerie of the Church had their owne, his Kitchin would lack two parts and more of that which he unjustly now possesseth.”[1310]
Yet, when compared with the rich abbatial manors of England or the princely foundations of Germany, the spoil of the church was mean indeed. Knox had resided much abroad, and had seen the vast wealth which the piety of ages had showered upon the church in the most opulent lands of Europe, yet his simplicity or fanaticism finds source of wondering comment in the homespun luxury of the unfortunate monks whom he assisted in dispossessing. When the destruction of the monasteries in 1559 commenced by a brawl in Perth, caused by a sermon preached by Knox, and three prominent convents were broken up, he expatiates on the extravagance revealed to sight—“And in very deed the Grey-Friers was a place so well provided that unlesse honest men had seen the same, we would have feared to have reported what provision they had, their sheets, blankets, beds and coverlets were such that no Earle in Scotland had better: Their naperie was fine; they were but 8 persons in the Convent, and yet they had 8 puncheons of salt beef (consider the time of the yeere, the eleventh of May), wine, beere, and ale, beside store of victuals belonging thereto.”[1311] Imagine an abbot of St. Albans or an abbess of Poissy reduced to the coverlets and salt beef which the stern Calvinist deemed an indulgence so great as to be incredible!
Still, in so impoverished a country as the Scotland of that period, even these poor spoils were a motive sufficient to prove a powerful aid to the conquering party in the struggle. And yet, amid all the miserable ambitions of the Erskines and Murrays, the Huntleys and Bothwells, who occupied the prominent places in the court and camp, we should do grievous wrong to the spirit which triumphed at last over the force and fraud of the Guises, if we attributed to temporal motives alone the movement which expelled licentious prelates and drove Queen Mary to the fateful refuge of Fotheringay. The selfish aims of the nobles would have been fruitless but for the zealous earnestness of the people, led by men of iron nature, who doubted themselves as little as they doubted their God, and who, in the death-struggle with Antichrist, were as ready to suffer as they were ruthless to inflict. Nor can the disorders of the Catholic clergy be rightly imputed to the temperament of the race, for the Reformers, who carried with them so large a portion of the middle and lower classes, preached a system of rigid morality to which the world had been a stranger since the virtues of the Germanic tribes had been lost in the overthrow of the Empire; and they not merely preached it, but obtained its embodiment in a code of repressive laws, which their vigilant authority strictly enforced.
I have said above that the question of celibacy appears but rarely in the course of the contest, yet, notwithstanding the causes which rendered it a less prominent subject of debate than elsewhere, it occasionally rises to view. The first instance of clerical marriage that I find recorded occurred in 1538, when Thomas Coklaw, parish priest of Tillibodie, married a widow of the same village named Margaret Jameson. This, however, was not done openly and defiantly, as in Germany, but in secret, and the married couple continued to dwell apart. That the infraction of the canons was not without danger was shown by the result, for, when it became known, Coklaw was tried by the Bishop of Dumblane and condemned to perpetual imprisonment; but his relatives broke open his dungeon and he escaped to England. When, early in the following year, a group of reformers, including Dean Thomas Forret, Friar John Killore, Friar John Beverege, and others, were put on trial, their presence at this wedding was one of the crimes for which they were executed upon Castle Hill at Edinburgh.[1312] In fact, the abrogation of the rule of celibacy, in Scotland as elsewhere, was necessarily one of the leading points at issue between the Reformers and the Catholics. Thus, when George Wishart, one of the early heretics who ventured openly to preach the Lord Jesus, was seized, in spite of powerful protectors, and after a prolonged captivity was brought for trial before Cardinal Beatoun in 1545, in the accusation against him article 14th asserted, “Thou false Hereticke hast taught plainly against the Vows of Monks, Friers, Nuns, and Priests, saying, That whosoever was bound to such like Vows, they vowed themselves to the state of damnation. Moreover, That it was lawfull for Priests to marry wives and not to live sole.” Wishart tacitly confessed the truth of this impeachment by rejoining—“But as many as have not the gift of chastity, nor yet for the Gospel have overcome the concupiscence of the flesh, and have vowed chastity; ye have experience, although I should hold my tongue, to what inconveniences they have exposed themselves.”[1313] He was accordingly condemned as an incorrigible heretic, and promptly burnt. Yet when, in 1547, John Knox held his disputation with Dean Wynrame and Friar Arbuckle, though the nine articles drawn up for discussion ranged from the supremacy of the pope and the existence of purgatory to the payment of tithes, the subject of vows of chastity was not even mentioned.[1314]