Chapter XV: Section II

_History of the Reformation in Scotland
to the Death of Cardinal Beaton._

WHEN Europe was on the eve of the first stage of the Reformation struggle, Scotland as we have seen in the foregoing volume, had lost her king and many of her leading men upon the disastrous field of Flodden. The citizens of Edinburgh, however, were equal to the emergency, and they immediately took steps to preserve order and to defend the capital; and it was at this time that the authorities resolved to build a wall around Edinburgh.¹ But the fear of an invasion was soon dispelled as the Earl of Surrey disbanded his host. In October, 1513, the infant king was crowned at Scone, and his mother named as regent; but her frothy disposition speedily led her into actions which rendered this arrangement nugatory, as in the following year she married the young Earl of Angus, which at once deprived her of the regency.

¹ _Burgh Records of Edinburgh_, Volume I., pages 143‒144, 146.

Meanwhile a party of the nobles were looking to the Duke of Albany as a likely personage to take the reins of Government. He was a son of Alexander Stuart, Duke of Albany, a brother of James III., who after his forfeiture passed into France, and had attained to a position of wealth and honour. As a member of the Royal family, after the infant king, he was next heir to the throne. He was requested to assume the functions of Governor of the kingdom; but the state of society in Scotland offered comparatively few attractions to a man habituated to the gay and fashionable society of France, and he seems to have been very loath to leave the enjoyments of his adopted country, even in exchange for the highest office in the Council of Scotland.

As usual there was strife amongst the nobles; while a fierce contest was raging among the dignitaries of the Church about the See of St. Andrews. Gavin Douglas, the provost of St. Giles, John Hepburn, the prior of St. Andrews, and Andrew Forman, the bishop of Moray, were all eagerly struggling to obtain possession of the much coveted primacy. After some very unseemly demonstrations of force, a compromise was effected by a distribution of benefices amongst the aspirants, and Forman obtained St. Andrews with the power of _Legate a Latere_, and the promise of a cardinal’s hat.¹

¹ Buchanan’s _History of Scotland_, Book XIII., chapter 48;
_Statutes of the Scottish Church_, Volume I., pages 125‒127.

In May 1515 the Duke of Albany arrived in Scotland, and received a warm welcome from the people, as they hoped to enjoy greater tranquility under his rule. The task, however, of restoring order amongst the nobles was exceedingly difficult. Although the new governor’s talents were above the average of his class, he laboured under the disadvantage of being French in manner and habits, and of being quite unacquainted with the usages and feelings of the Scots. He began his government with bold measures. Offenders of high rank were seized, imprisoned, and executed. But these proceedings failed to produce the intended effect, and were too much out of the usual course. In a short time Albany discovered the hopelessness of his task. He repeatedly returned to France to be free of the turmoil; and after a fluctuating sway of eight years, his regency terminated in 1524.¹

¹ Buchanan’s _History of Scotland_, Book XIII. Among modern
historians Tytler has treated the regency of Albany at
greatest length. _History of Scotland_, Volume V. pages
101‒174; 1834.

The persistent interference of Henry VIII. with the internal affairs of Scotland added another element of anarchy, and he appears to have had a special animus at the Duke of Albany, continuing to tease and torment Scotland throughout his reign. Henry’s intrigues and projects were unceasing; he endeavoured to get the young King into his hands by encouraging his sister to flee with her children into England. He kept a number of paid spies and agents in Scotland for the express purpose of exciting popular tumults, private quarrels, and rekindling the jealousy of the nobles, in order to distract and discredit the government of Albany. Project after project arose in his passionate breast, which his ambitious and brutal nature pursued with unrelenting and murderous severity; sometimes his hobby was political, sometimes religious, at other times matrimonial, and in almost every instance he inflicted great suffering upon the people of Scotland. During the regency of Albany, the Earl of Angus, having previously been forced to leave the country, entered into a paction with the English Government in ♦1524, and returned to Scotland.¹

♦ “1224” replaced with “1524”

¹ _State Papers_, reign of Henry VIII., Volume IV., throughout.
Tytler’s _History of Scotland_, Volume V., pages 99, 117‒119,
182.

At this time the chief nobles were much divided; and the Earl of Angus quickly matured his plot. Having secured the concurrence of the Earl of Arran and others, he seized the young King, and, as had often been done before in similar circumstances, he shortly concentrated in his own hands all the power of the Crown. Angus kept the King in close restraint, and revelling in his usurped authority, he exercised a severe tyranny on all who dared to oppose him. The kingdom remained in this state for several years, though two attempts were made to rescue the King from the grasp of the bold noble, in one of which the Earl of Lennox lost his life, while the chains of the captive were more firmly rivetted than before. The Douglases were complete masters of the situation, Angus himself was chancellor, his uncle treasurer, and they compelled the King to sign all deeds which they presented to him, while the revenue and the law of the country were wholly under their control. At last, with the assistance of Archbishop Beaton, James escaped from Angus in May 1528, and from that time to the end of his reign, he pursued the Earl and his adherents with relentless severity.¹

¹ _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume II., pages
301, 307, 312, 330; ♦Lesly’s _History Of Scotland_, pages
134, 136, 140; Buchanan’s _History of Scotland_, Book XIV.,
chapter 33.

♦ “Lesley” replaced with “Lesly” for consistency

In September a parliament met and passed an act of attainder against the Douglases, and Angus was forced to flee into England. The King appointed the Archbishop of Glasgow chancellor, the Abbot of Holyrood treasurer, and the Bishop of Dunkeld, keeper of the privy seal.¹ These appointments indicated that the tide was turned against the aristocracy, and that the policy of the young King would be strongly influenced by the circumstances in which he had been placed. James soon manifested an unmistakeable intention to curb the nobles, but it must be added that he entered upon his purpose without a full and proper appreciation of the difficulties of the task; he seems to have greatly under-estimated the power of the nobles, and accordingly he had to pay the penalty. Whenever the nobles were excluded from the government of the kingdom, they began to show a leaning towards the doctrines of the Reformation; they were extremely dissatisfied with the king, and hated the clergy on account of their influence over him, and their control of the government.

¹ _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume II., pages
322‒323, 324; _Diurnal of Occurrents_, page 11.

But the causes and circumstances which tended to promote the Reformation in Scotland demand a more minute examination. In the tenth chapter of this work it was noticed that the wealth of the Church gave the clergy much power in public affairs and the government of the country; it was also observed that the clergy generally ranked themselves on the side of the Crown in its struggles with the aristocracy. This deep-seated antagonism of interests between the clergy and the aristocracy was one of the chief external causes of the Reformation in Scotland; and in the development of Protestantism, the motives of this aristocratic connection finally issued in curious and instructive results. James V. was not insensible to the prevailing abuses of the Church, nor was he averse to moderate remedies, but he never entertained the idea of forsaking the religion of his fathers. He, however, incited Buchanan to lash the mendicant friars in the Satire of the Franciscans, and he encouraged by his presence the public performance of Sir David Lindsay’s Satire of the Three Estates, which was acted at Linlithgow in 1540. It was reported that he exhorted the bishops to reform their lives, and threatened if they neglected his warning that he would treat them after the manner of the King of England; still he was a faithful son of the Catholic Church, and pretty well under the influence of the clergy. Many of the nobles, from motives of self-interest, professed a willingness to embrace the reformed opinions, and gradually ranked themselves on the side of the Reformers; as time passed, and the prospects of the division of the church lands approached, they became more and more ardent in their adherence to the principles of the Reformation.

But strong as the influence of the nobles was in hastening on the Reformation, or rather the destruction of the Roman hierarchy, it is a misinterpretation of the historic phenomena to attribute this revolution to them alone. Besides the religious ideas and sentiments which the Reformers themselves honestly held and preached, there were also the domestic, the social, and the moral causes of the Reformation, and which comprised all the relations between the clergy and the people that had arisen and accumulated since the introduction of Christianity. The tenor of these relations and exactions have already been partly noticed in the Introduction and in the fourth and tenth chapters of this work, and again generally touched upon in the preceding pages of the present chapter, and I must now discuss the results which they more or less distinctly produced on the feeling and mind of the nation.

The exactions connected with the Roman Catholic rite of burial were the most teasing and heartless. They were known under the terms of “The Kirk Cow,” “The Uppermost Cloth,” and “Corse Presents,” that is, dues exacted by the parochial clergy on the deaths of their parishioners. These dues were sometimes taken from the surviving relations in cases of the most abject poverty, and however much concern the survivors of a father or a mother might have for the souls of the departed, surely it was a short-sighted piece of policy to lay on a heavy exaction at such a time, irrespective too of the circumstances of the parties. For these and many other obvious reasons the mortuary dues were the most hateful and galling to the people. On the eve of the Reformation (1559) a provincial council of the Catholic clergy enacted a canon relieving the poor from the mortuary dues, but they were to be exacted from those immediately above the poor in a modified form. The concession, however, came too late.¹ Then there were the paschal offerings, the Sunday penny, the penny offering, the christening pennies, and the lights at Candlemas for the feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary. At first these were free gift offerings, according to the benevolence of the giver; but in course of time they became obligatory, and the churchmen enforced the payment of them, when necessary, by fulminating the sentence of cursing and debarring the refractory from the sacraments of holy Church. The priest also claimed the right of common pasture for his cattle throughout the parish.²

¹ _Statutes of the Scottish Church_, Volume II., pages 44,
273‒274, 167‒168, 305‒306.

² _Ibid._, Volume II., pages 31, 45, 148‒149, 274‒275.

The right of the Church to enforce the payment of tithes under penalties had been long established in Scotland as elsewhere, but this often led to disputes between the clergy and the people. An uncounted tithe was a tax on the fruits of industry, increasing in amount with the increase of production and wealth; and however much the hard toil of a man or a family might produce, the tenth part thereof had always to go to swell the riches of the Church. This exaction pressed extremely hard upon the class of tenant farmers and the toilers of the soil, who amid all their difficulties and struggles could not fail to see that the services of the clergy scarcely repaid them for the worry and loss of so large a deduction from the products of their industry. Such thoughts naturally would have arisen in the minds of the people, for strong as their religious feeling was, yet it had a limit, beyond which it could not be drawn upon with any chance of safety. Then the tithes were extended not only to include all kinds of farm produce, live stock, and poultry, but also the produce of gardens, descending to flax, leeks, and cabbages; tithes of pasture and hay, tithes of mills and fishings, tithes of wool and everything else.¹ That the collection of all these dues must have been a constant source of annoyance to the people cannot be doubted, or that it occasioned many disputes and quarrels was not surprising.

¹ _Ibid._, Volume II., pages 21‒23; _Acts of the Parliaments of
Scotland_, Volume I., page 47.

But from another point of view the practice of the Roman Catholic Church had issued in a social corruption of the clergy and the religious orders which was too palpably inconsistent to endure. Touching the principle of celibacy, it was briefly noticed in the fourth chapter that the clergy of Scotland had not strictly practised the rule of the Church; and in the sixteenth century this blot on the clergy was not a matter of doubt or dispute, it was a notorious fact and patent to the eyes of all. The result in Scotland was this, the rule of celibacy was enjoined by law but abrogated in practice among those of the clergy who were rich enough to support a household; council after council protested against it, canon after canon called upon the bishops and the clergy to put away their concubines, but all was in vain, on the failing of incontinence they seemed to be utterly irredeemable. Cardinal Beaton had five children; his successor, Archbishop Hamilton, had three; William Gordon, Bishop of Aberdeen, had several children, and one of his daughters married the Laird of Udny; Bishop Chisholm of Dunblane had children, in 1542 one of his daughters married Sir James Stirling of Keir, and her father gave her a dowry of £1000, and also bound himself to keep her and her husband for five years. The Bishop of Moray, when Prior of St. Andrews had three sons, legitimated in 1533; when Bishop of Moray he had five sons legitimated in 1545, and two daughters in 1550――making ten of a family. In fact most of the bishops and many of the abbots and monks had children at the period immediately preceding the Reformation. The statutes passed in the Provincial Council of the clergy held at Edinburgh in 1549, were prefaced with a confession that the cause of the troubles and heresies which afflicted the Church were the corruption, the lewdness, and the gross ignorance of churchmen of almost all ranks. “The clergy, therefore, were enjoined to put away their concubines under pain of deprivation of their benefices; to dismiss from their houses the children born to them in concubinage; not to promote such children to benefices, nor to enrich them, the daughters with doweries, the sons with baronies, from the patrimony of the Church. Prelates were admonished not to keep in their households manifest drunkards, gamblers, whoremongers, brawlers, night-walkers, buffoons, blasphemers, and profane swearers. The clergy in general were exhorted to amend their lives and manners; to dress modestly and gravely; to keep their faces shaven and their heads tonsured; to live soberly and frugally, so as to have more to spare to the poor; to abstain from secular pursuits, and especially trading.

“Provision was made for preaching to the people; for teaching grammar, divinity, and canon law in cathedrals and abbeys; for visiting and reforming monasteries, nunneries, and hospitals; for recalling fugitives and apostates, whether monks or nuns, to their cloisters; for sending from every monastery one or more monks to a university; for preventing unqualified persons from receiving orders and from holding cure of souls; for enforcing residence and for restraining pluralities; for preventing the evasion of spiritual censures by bribes or fines; for silencing pardoners or itinerant hawkers of indulgences and relics; for compelling parish clerks to do their duty in person, or to find sufficient substitutes; for registering testaments and inventories of persons deceased, and for securing faithful administration of their estates by bringing their executors to yearly account and reckoning; for suspending unfit notaries, and for preserving the protocols of notaries deceased; for reforming the abuses of the Consistorial courts.”¹ This is a very formidable array of abuses to reform brought forward by the Roman Catholic clergy themselves; but the proceedings and canons of subsequent councils show that they were not carried into effect――indeed it would have been marvellous if the churchmen had complied with the canons of 1549. Sir David Lindsay in the Satire of the Three Estates makes Spiritually say――

“Howbeit I dar not plainlie spouse a wife,
Yet concubeins I haif had four or five,
And to my sons I have given rich rewards,
And all my daughters maryit upon lairds.”

¹ _Statutes of the Scottish Church_, Volume I., pages 149‒150,
173; Volume II., pages 15, 17, 28, 35, 42, 48, 51, 55, 65,
81‒88, 89‒118, 128, 153‒156, 301‒303. _Register of the Great
Seal_, Book 26; _Acts of the Lords of Council and Session_,