So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now consider to have been a mistake—a great many theories of earthly things which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented, was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork without which further progress in that science would have been probably impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say, as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue that the old fading tree could never have been green and young. Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.
So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough, and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems, however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that, measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the mediæval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could hardly have mended them if they had tried.
But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is expressed changes and has changed—changes as living languages change and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change, as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change—that is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas, instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs. The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates, priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry, cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed; and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of theirs, we all know tolerably well.
The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland, the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised. Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men, belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part, farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation of men detached from the lords and from the Church—brave, noble, resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of Scotland—that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and determined its after fortunes as a nation—had its first germ in these half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing—created already by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons, as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.
How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole nation—as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the explanation.
The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how that union was to be brought about—how they were to make sure that, when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals, and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church was rich—much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came about that the great families—even those who, like the Hamiltons, were most closely connected with France—were tempted over by the bait to the other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers, because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in favour of the revolution.
And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last, at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two? Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a new dynasty.
I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus, and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country. Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it—especially if Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the marriage—the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which would receive consideration from any of the high political personages concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had seen working under Calvin at Geneva—a constitution in which the clergy as ministers of God should rule all things—rule politically at the council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that. Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn, Ruthven, young Argyll—above all, the Earl of Moray—really did in some degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable, no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and what to do next they did not very well know.
It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the English Crown—as good as he, or better, for she would have the English Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it, but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country—and he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the rest—their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained unchanged from what it had been—had the direction of its fortunes remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.
The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles. They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles, was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery—if it threatened to bring them back—if it looked that way—they would have nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it, when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised into a political power, remained true.