“Sic pryd with prellatis, so few till preiche and pray,
Sic haunt of harlettis with thame, baythe nicht and day.”[634]
Queen Mary would seem to have regarded the health of the high Roman church dignitary who baptized her son James VI. with considerable suspicion, perhaps, however, only in as much as he was one of a class with a very bad character in that respect. King James, in “A Premonition to all most mightie Monarchs, Kings, Free Princes, and States of Christendome,”[635] thus refers to it:—“For first, I am no apostate, as the Cardinal (Bellarmine) would make me, not onely having ever been brought up in that religion which I presently professe, but even my father and grandfather on that side professing the same: and so cannot be properly an Heratike, by there own doctrine, since I never was of their church; and as for the Queene my mother of worthy memorie, although she continued in that religion wherein she was nourished, yet she was so farre from being superstitious or Jesuited therein, that at my Baptisme (although I was baptized by a Popish Archbishop) she sent him word to forbeare to use the spettle in my baptisme; which was obeyed, being indeed a filthy, and an apish trick, rather in scorne than in imitation of Christ; and her owne very words were, that ‘She would not have a pokie priest to spet in her child’s mouth.’”
Of the dissolute lives of the Scotch, like the other clergy of these times, we may find ample proof in some of the contemporaneous medical works. We know, for example, from an old medical author, something of the inner life of the identical “pockie priest” who baptized James VI. In 1552, Dr. Jerome Cardan, the famous Italian physician, came from Milan to Edinburgh to visit professionally the high ecclesiastic in question—namely, John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews—who was suffering under severe and recurrent attacks of asthma. He travelled with all possible expedition, and in these “good olden times” the part of his journey from London to Edinburgh only took twenty-three days. Cardan has left us in his works a copy of the lengthy and very minute medical and hygienic directions which he drew up for the behoof of the archbishop. Besides giving him innumerable medical prescriptions, he lays down for him excellent rules regarding his food, drink, exercise, sleep, etc., down to the materials of which his bed and his pillows should be composed. He adds for the Archbishop’s guidance the following rule—“De Venere. Certe non est bona, neque utilis: ubi tamen contingat necessitas, debet uti ea inter duos somnos, secilicet post mediam noctem, et melius est exercere eam ter in sex diebus pro exemplo, ita ut singulis duobus diebus semel, quam bis in una die, etiam quod staret per decem dies.”[636]
The quiet and matter-of-course style in which these rules are laid down and published proves only too strongly the dissolute life of some of the highest clergy in our land; and in order to appreciate the full force of this observation, it is necessary to remember that Cardan’s patient was the living head of the Scottish Roman Catholic church of that day—the Primate and Metropolitan of Scotland.[637] Perhaps still more unequivocal evidence of the scandalous profligacy of the Scottish clergy of these times is to be found in their own statutes, and in the legal documents of the country.
In a provincial council of the Scottish clergy, held at Edinburgh in 1549, the circumstance that there had come very grave scandals to the church from the incontinence of ecclesiastics (ex clericorum incontinentia, gravissima ecclesiæ scandala esse exorta) was taken into consideration, and the edict of the Council of Basle “De Concubinariis” put in force. Another edict was passed by this Edinburgh synod “exhorting” both the prelates and inferior clergy not to keep their own illegitimate children in their company, prohibiting their promotion of them in their churches, and forbidding the endowment of them with baronies out of the church’s goods.[638] But perhaps the dissolute and depraved state of the Romish church in Scotland is more clearly photographed in a subsequent edict, which they passed in a large synod held at Edinburgh in 1558-9. This edict does not “exhort” against incontinence on the part of the priests, but it simply and shamelessly restricts, and lays down a legal limit to, the amount of property which they might unsacrilegiously abstract and purloin from the pious endowments belonging to the Church (de patrimonio Christi) for the marriage portions of the bastard daughters of their concubines; the synod enacting that neither prelates nor any other ecclesiastics should directly or indirectly give with their illegitimate daughters, in marriage to barons or other landowners, any greater sum than one hundred pounds yearly of the Church’s patrimony.[639]
The legitimation of bastard children was necessary before they could inherit or dispose of property, and exercise other legal rights. The Privy Seal Records of Scotland for the earlier years of the sixteenth century have been preserved, and are full of entries of legitimation of the bastard children of Scottish prelates and priests. Lord Hailes gives us some sad information regarding the numbers of the illegitimate children of the Scottish bishops, abbots, and monks of these times.[640] Among others, he states that David Bethune, the immediate predecessor of Hamilton in the archbishopric of St. Andrews and primacy of Scotland, had three bastards legitimised in one day; and afterwards, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, had seven—five sons and two daughters—all acknowledged in one day. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, himself the illegitimate son of an official in the diocese of Moray—viz. of Gavin Leslie, parson of Kingusie, was the father of several illegitimate children; and it is, says the learned author of the Book of Bon Accord, sufficiently amusing to find his name among those of the other members of the chapter of Aberdeen who solemnly counselled their ordinary to “caus the lay kirkmen within their diocie to reforme thameselfes in all thair slanderous maner of lyving, and to remove thair oppin concubins.”[641]
Concubinage among the lower clergy, provided it was not slanderously open and avowed, would almost seem to have been overlooked and connived at by the church dignitaries of those degenerate times.[642]
The remains of the old chapel of St. Ninian, at Leith, still exist in the vicinity of Edinburgh. The spire of the church is, even at the present day, a conspicuous object above the second harbour bridge, though the chapel itself and its prebendary are degraded to common dwellings. This chapel was founded by Robert Bellenden, Abbot of Holyrood, and endowed for two chaplains. In the charter of foundation, which is dated 1493 (four years before syphilis broke out in Edinburgh), it is—in accordance with a common formula in these deeds—ordained that if “either of the aforesaid chaplains keep a lass or concubine, in an open and notorious manner, he shall be degraded; which seems,” as the historian Maitland pertly observes, “to imply this, that they or either of them might keep a miss or misses provided it were not publickly known.”[643]
Nor was poverty on the part of a portion of the priesthood apparently any great obstacle to such, as well as to less sinful indulgences. For, according to the testimony of honest George Marjoribanks (see his Annals of Scotland, p. 5), “In the yeir of God 1533 Sir Walter Cowpur, Chaiplaine in Edinburgh, gate a pynte of vyne, a laiffe of 36 unce vaight, a pock of aite-meill, a pynte of aill, a schiepe-hede, ane penny candell, and a faire woman for ane xviiid grote.”