Knox, the founder of the Scots' reformation, and those who concurred with him, both adhered to the theological system of Calvin, and to the scheme of polity he had introduced at Geneva, with such modifications as became necessary from the greater scale on which it was to be practised. Each parish had its minister, lay-elder, and deacon, who held their kirk-session for spiritual jurisdiction and other purposes; each ecclesiastical province its synod of ministers and delegated elders presided over by a superintendent; but the supreme power resided in the general assembly of the Scots' church, constituted of all ministers of parishes, with an admixture of delegated laymen, to which appeals from inferior judicatories lay, and by whose determinations or canons the whole were bound. The superintendents had such a degree of episcopal authority as seems implied in their name, but concurrently with the parochial ministers, and in subordination to the general assembly; the number of these was designed to be ten, but only five were appointed.[440] This form of church polity was set up in 1560; but according to the irregular state of things at that time in Scotland, though fully admitted and acted upon, it had only the authority of the church, with no confirmation of parliament; which seems to have been the first step of the former towards the independency it came to usurp. Meanwhile it was agreed that the Roman catholic prelates, including the regulars, should enjoy two-thirds of their revenues, as well as their rank and seats in parliament; the remaining third being given to the Crown, out of which stipends should be allotted to the protestant clergy. Whatever violence may be imputed to the authors of the Scots' reformation, this arrangement seems to display a moderation which we should vainly seek in our own. The new church was, however, but inadequately provided for; and perhaps we may attribute some part of her subsequent contumacy and encroachment on the state to the exasperation occasioned by the latter's parsimony, or rather rapaciousness, in the distribution of ecclesiastical estates.[441]
It was doubtless intended by the planners of a presbyterian model, that the bishoprics should be extinguished by the death of the possessors, and their revenues be converted, partly to the maintenance of the clergy, partly to other public interests. But it suited better the men in power to keep up the old appellations for their own benefit. As the catholic prelates died away, they were replaced by protestant ministers, on private compacts to alienate the principal part of the revenues to those through whom they were appointed. After some hesitation, a convention of the church, in 1572, agreed to recognise these bishops, until the king's majority and a final settlement by the legislature, and to permit them a certain portion of jurisdiction, though not greater than that of the superintendent, and equally subordinate to the general assembly. They were not consecrated; nor would the slightest distinction of order have been endured by the church. Yet even this moderated episcopacy gave offence to ardent men, led by Andrew Melville, the second name to Knox in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland; and, notwithstanding their engagement to leave things as they were till the determination of parliament, the general assembly soon began to restrain the bishops by their own authority, and finally to enjoin them, under pain of excommunication, to lay down an office which they voted to be destitute of warrant from the word of God, and injurious to the church. Some of the bishops submitted to this decree; others, as might be expected, stood out in defence of their dignity, and were supported both by the king and by all who conceived that the supreme power of Scotland, in establishing and endowing the church, had not constituted a society independent of the commonwealth. A series of acts in 1584, at a time when the court had obtained a temporary ascendant, seemed to restore the episcopal government in almost its pristine lustre. But the popular voice was loud against episcopacy; the prelates were discredited by their simoniacal alienations of church-revenues, and by their connection with the court; the king was tempted to annex most of their lands to the Crown by an act of parliament in 1587; Adamson, Archbishop of St. Andrews, who had led the episcopal party, was driven to a humiliating retractation before the general assembly; and, in 1592, the sanction of the legislature was for the first time obtained to the whole scheme of presbyterian polity; and the laws of 1584 were for the most part abrogated.
The school of Knox, if so we may call the early presbyterian ministers of Scotland, was full of men breathing their master's spirit; acute in disputation, eloquent in discourse, learned beyond what their successors have been, and intensely zealous in the cause of reformation. They wielded the people at will; who, except in the Highlands, threw off almost with unanimity the old religion, and took alarm at the slightest indication of its revival. Their system of local and general assemblies infused, together with the forms of a republic, its energy and impatience of exterior control, combined with the concentration and unity of purpose that belongs to the most vigorous government. It must be confessed that the unsettled state of the kingdom, the faults and weakness of the regents Lennox and Morton, the inauspicious beginning of James's personal administration under the sway of unworthy favourites, the real perils of the reformed church, gave no slight pretext for the clergy's interference with civil policy. Not merely in their representative assemblies, but in the pulpits, they perpetually remonstrated, in no guarded language, against the misgovernment of the court, and even the personal indiscretions of the king. This they pretended to claim as a privilege beyond the restraint of law. Andrew Melville, second only to Knox among the heroes of the presbyterian church, having been summoned before the council in 1584, to give an account of some seditious language alleged to have been used by him in the pulpit, declined its jurisdiction, on the ground that he was only responsible, in the first instance, to his presbytery for words so spoken, of which the king and council could not judge without violating the immunities of the church. Precedents for such an immunity it would not have been difficult to find; but they must have been sought in the archives of the enemy. It was rather early for the new republic to emulate the despotism she had overthrown. Such, however, is the uniformity with which the same passions operate on bodies of men in similar circumstances; and so greedily do those, whose birth has placed them far beneath the possession of power, intoxicate themselves with its unaccustomed enjoyments. It has been urged in defence of Melville, that he only denied the competence of a secular tribunal in the first instance; and that, after the ecclesiastical forum had pronounced on the spiritual offence, it was not disputed that the civil magistrate might vindicate his own authority.[442] But not to mention that Melville's claim, as I understand it, was to be judged by his presbytery in the first instance, and ultimately by the general assembly, from which, according to the presbyterian theory, no appeal lay to a civil court; it is manifest that the government would have come to a very disadvantageous conflict with a man, to whose defence the ecclesiastical judicature had already pledged itself. For in the temper of those times it was easy to foresee the determination of a synod or presbytery.
James however and his counsellors were not so feeble as to endure this open renewal of those extravagant pretensions which Rome had taught her priesthood to assert. Melville fled to England; and a parliament that met the same year sustained the supremacy of the civil power with that violence and dangerous latitude of expression so frequent in the Scots' statute-book. It was made treason to decline the jurisdiction of the king or council in any matter, to seek the diminution of the power of any of the three estates of parliament, which struck at all that had been done against episcopacy, to utter, or to conceal, when heard from others in sermons or familiar discourse, any false or slanderous speeches to the reproach of the king, his council, or their proceedings, or to the dishonour of his parents and progenitors, or to meddle in the affairs of state. It was forbidden to treat or consult on any matter of state, civil or ecclesiastical, without the king's express command; thus rendering the general assembly for its chief purposes, if not its existence, altogether dependent on the Crown. Such laws not only annihilated the pretended immunities of the church, but went very far to set up that tyranny, which the Stuarts afterwards exercised in Scotland till their expulsion. These were in part repealed, so far as affected the church, in 1592; but the Crown retained the exclusive right of convening its general assembly, to which the presbyterian hierarchy still gives but an evasive and reluctant obedience.[443]
These bold demagogues were not long in availing themselves of the advantage which they had obtained in the parliament of 1592, and through the troubled state of the realm. They began again to intermeddle with public affairs, the administration of which was sufficiently open to censure. This licence brought on a new crisis in 1596. Black, one of the ministers of St. Andrews, inveighing against the government from the pulpit, painted the king and queen, as well as their council, in the darkest colours, as dissembling enemies to religion. James, incensed at this attack, caused him to be summoned before the privy council. The clergy decided to make common cause with the accused. The council of the church, a standing committee lately appointed by the general assembly, enjoined Black to decline the jurisdiction. The king by proclamation directed the members of this council to retire to their several parishes. They resolved, instead of submitting, that since they were convened by the warrant of Christ, in a most needful and dangerous time, to see unto the good of the church, they should obey God rather than man. The king offered to stop the proceedings, if they would but declare that they did not decline the civil jurisdiction absolutely, but only in the particular case, as being one of slander, and consequently of ecclesiastical competence. For Black had asserted before the council, that speeches delivered in the pulpits, although alleged to be treasonable, could not be judged by the king, until the church had first taken cognisance thereof. But these ecclesiastics, in the full spirit of the thirteenth century, determined by a majority not to recede from their plea. Their contest with the court soon excited the populace of Edinburgh, and gave rise to a tumult, which, whether dangerous or not to the king, was what no government could pass over without utter loss of authority.
It was in church assemblies alone that James found opposition. His parliament, as had invariably been the case in Scotland, went readily into all that was proposed to them; nor can we doubt that the gentry must for the most part have revolted from these insolent usurpations of the ecclesiastical order. It was ordained in parliament, that every minister should declare his submission to the king's jurisdiction in all matters civil and criminal; that no ecclesiastical judicatory should meet without the king's consent, and that a magistrate might commit to prison any minister reflecting in his sermons on the king's conduct. He had next recourse to an instrument of power more successful frequently than intimidation, and generally successful in conjunction with it; gaining over the members of the general assembly, some by promises, some by exciting jealousies, till they surrendered no small portion of what had passed for the privileges of the church. The Crown obtained by their concession, which then seemed almost necessary to confirm what the legislature had enacted, the right of convoking assemblies, and of nominating ministers in the principal towns.
Establishment of episcopacy.—James followed up this victory by a still more important blow. It was enacted that fifty-one ministers, on being nominated by the king to titular bishoprics and other prelacies, might sit in parliament as representatives of the church. This seemed justly alarming to the zealots of party; nor could the general assembly be brought to acquiesce without such very considerable restrictions upon these suspicious commissioners, by which name they prevailed to have them called, as might in some measure afford security against the revival of that episcopal domination, towards which the endeavours of the Crown were plainly directed. But the king paid little regard to these regulations; and thus the name and parliamentary station of bishops were restored in Scotland after only six years from their abolition.[444]
A king like James, not less conceited of his wisdom than full of the dignity of his station, could not avoid contracting that insuperable aversion to the Scottish presbytery, which he expressed in his Basilicon Doron, before his accession to the English throne, and more vehemently on all occasions afterwards. He found a very different race of churchmen, well trained in the supple school of courtly conformity, and emulous flatterers both of his power and his wisdom. The ministers of Edinburgh had been used to pray that God would turn his heart: Whitgift, at the conference of Hampton Court, falling on his knees, exclaimed, that he doubted not his majesty spoke by the special grace of God. It was impossible that he should not redouble his endeavours to introduce so convenient a system of ecclesiastical government into his native kingdom. He began, accordingly, to prevent the meetings of the general assembly by continued prorogations. Some hardy presbyterians ventured to assemble of their own authority; which the lawyers construed into treason. The bishops were restored by parliament, in 1606, to a part of their revenues; the act annexing these to the Crown being repealed. They were appointed by an ecclesiastical convention, more subservient to the Crown than formerly, to be perpetual moderators of provincial synods. The clergy still gave way with reluctance; but the Crown had an irresistible ascendancy in parliament; and in 1610 the episcopal system was thoroughly established. The powers of ordination, as well as jurisdiction, were solely vested in the prelates; a court of high commission was created on the English model; and, though the general assembly of the church still continued, it was merely as a shadow, and almost mockery, of its original importance. The bishops now repaired to England for consecration; a ceremony deemed essential in the new school that now predominated in the Anglican church; and this gave a final blow to the polity in which the Scottish reformation had been founded.[445] With far more questionable prudence, James, some years afterwards, forced upon the people of Scotland what were called the five articles of Perth, reluctantly adopted by a general assembly held there in 1617. These were matters of ceremony, such as the posture of kneeling in the eucharist, the rite of confirmation, and the observance of certain holidays; but enough to alarm a nation fanatically abhorrent of every approximation to the Roman worship, and already incensed by what they deemed the corruption and degradation of their church.[446]
That church, if indeed it preserved its identity, was wholly changed in character; and became as much distinguished in its episcopal form by servility and corruption as during its presbyterian democracy by faction and turbulence. The bishops at its head, many of them abhorred by their own countrymen as apostates and despised for their vices, looked for protection to the sister church of England in its pride and triumph. It had long been the favourite project of the court, as it naturally was of the Anglican prelates, to assimilate in all respects the two establishments. That of Scotland still wanted one essential characteristic, a regular liturgy. But in preparing what was called the service book, the English model was not closely followed; the variations having all a tendency towards the Romish worship. It is far more probable that Laud intended these to prepare the way for a similar change in England, than that, as some have surmised, the Scottish bishops, from a notion of independence, chose thus to distinguish their own ritual. What were the consequences of this unhappy innovation, attempted with that ignorance of mankind which kings and priests, when left to their own guidance, usually display, it is here needless to mention. In its ultimate results, it preserved the liberties and overthrew the monarchy of England. In its more immediate effects, it gave rise to the national covenant of Scotland; a solemn pledge of unity and perseverance in a great public cause, long since devised when the Spanish armada threatened the liberties and religion of all Britain, but now directed against the domestic enemies of both. The episcopal government had no friends, even among those who served the king. To him it was dear by the sincerest conviction, and by its connection with absolute power, still more close and direct than in England. But he had reduced himself to a condition where it was necessary to sacrifice his authority in the smaller kingdom, if he would hope to preserve it in the greater; and in this view he consented, in the parliament of 1641, to restore the presbyterian discipline of the Scottish church; an offence against his conscience (for such his prejudices led him to consider it) which he deeply afterwards repented, when he discovered how absolutely it had failed of serving his interests.
Innovations of Charles I.—In the great struggle with Charles against episcopacy, the encroachments of arbitrary rule, for the sake of which, in a great measure, he valued that form of church polity, were not overlooked; and the parliament of 1641 procured some essential improvements in the civil constitution of Scotland. Triennial sessions of the legislature, and other salutary reformations, were borrowed from their friends and coadjutors in England. But what was still more important, was the abolition of that destructive control over the legislature, which the Crown had obtained through the lords of articles. These had doubtless been originally nominated by the several estates in parliament, solely to expedite the management of business, and relieve the entire body from attention to it. But, as early as 1561, we find a practice established, that the spiritual lords should choose the temporal, generally eight in number, who were to sit on this committee, and conversely; the burgesses still electing their own. To these it became usual to add some of the officers of state; and in 1617 it was established that eight of them should be on the list. Charles procured, without authority of parliament, a further innovation in 1633. The bishops chose eight peers, the peers eight bishops; and these appointed sixteen commissioners of shires and boroughs. Thus the whole power devolved upon the bishops, the slaves and sycophants of the Crown. The parliament itself met only on two days, the first and last of their pretended session, the one time in order to choose the lords of articles, the other, to ratify what they proposed.[447] So monstrous an anomaly could not long subsist in a high-spirited nation. This improvident assumption of power by low-born and odious men precipitated their downfall, and made the destruction of the hierarchy appear the necessary guarantee for parliamentary independence, and the ascendant of the aristocracy. But, lest the court might, in some other form, regain this preliminary or initiative voice in legislation, which the experience of many governments has shown to be the surest method of keeping supreme authority in their hands, it was enacted in 1641, that each estate might choose lords of articles or not, at its discretion; but that all propositions should in the first instance be submitted to the whole parliament, by whom such only as should be thought fitting might be referred to the committee of articles for consideration.