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latter years, found himself driven by the force of political considerations into what might almost be called the direct discountenancing and discouragement of that mode of faith, and the patronage of its opposite. Abbot, the Calvinistic archbishop of Canterbury, ceased to have any influence at court, and was eventually disgraced and suspended; while Laud, Neile, Harsnet, Buckeridge, and others, his enemies or rivals, theological, political, and personal, were promoted to the richest bishoprics and other chief dignities in the church. În August, 1622, certain royal injunctions were issued to the clergy, having for their evident and all but avowed purpose the silencing of all such ministers as were most zealous in the inculcation of Calvinistic doctrines. Not only was preaching, the great weapon of the Puritanical and Calvinistic party, ; restrained and hampered by the order that no - preacher, under the rank of a bishop or a dean, should in his sermons fall into any commonplace of divinity not to be found in the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Homilies, but it was moreover expressly commanded that no mere parish minister should presume to discourse to any popular auditory on the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation, the universality, efficacy, resistibility, or irresistibility of God's grace-in other words, upon any one of the doctrines peculiar to Calvinism. All persons offending against this regulation, or against another, which prohibited any preacher of any degree whatsoever from henceforth presuming in any auditory to declare, limit, or set bounds to the prerogative, power, or jurisdiction of sovereign princes, or to meddle at all with affairs of state, were made punishable with suspension for a year and a day, till his majesty should prescribe some further penalty with advice of the convocaion. This was, if not an actual abjuration of

Calvinism on the part of the king and the court party in the church, at the very least a distinct abandonment of all the distinguishing articles of that creed as essential articles of belief, which, in the view of Calvinistic orthodoxy, was quite as damnable a heresy as the absolute rejection or denial of them. On the other hand, the Arminian bishops and clergy were accused of making open advances towards popery fully as fast as they receded from Calvinism. To quote the summary of a modern ecclesiastical historian of Puritan principles," the new bishops admitted the church of Rome to be a true church, and the pope the first bishop of Christendom. They declared for the lawfulness of images in churches; for the real presence; and that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a school nicety. They pleaded for confession to a priest, for sacerdotal absolution, and the proper merit of good works. They claimed an uninterrupted succession of the episcopal character from the apostles through the church of Rome, which obliged them to maintain the validity of her ordinations, when they denied the validity of those of the foreign Protestants. Further, they began to imitate the church of Rome in her gaudy ceremonies, in the rich furniture of their chapels, and the pomp of their worship. They complimented the Roman Catholic priests with their dignitary titles, and spent all their zeal in studying how to compromise matters with Rome, while they turned their backs upon the old Protestant doctrines of the Reformation, and were remarkably negligent in preaching or instructing the people in Christian knowledge."* Dissent of course throve under this neglect; and the more the heads of the church tended to Arminianism, to popery, and to the doctrine of absolutism in poli

Neal, Hist. Pur. i. 490.

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PROCESSION OF JAMES I. TO ST. PAUL'S, accompanied by the Prince of Wales and many of the Nobility, on Sunday, March 26, 1620.

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ST. PAUL'S CROSs, as it appeared during the services performed before James I. and his Court, Sunday, 26th March, 1620. The Cathedral

in the back-ground. From a Painting of the period.

This Cross was destroyed in 1643, by order of the Parliament.

tics, the farther and the faster did the people go on receding from all these things, and drifting over to Puritanism, Calvinism, and democracy.

Such was the state to which things had been brought when James died, and his son Charles came to reign in his stead. Notwithstanding, however, that the course of events from the beginning of the new reign continued to be in the highest degree favourable to the progress of the movement that had already advanced so far, it required still a space of some years to bring the gradually rising waters up to the bursting or overflowing point. The rush came at last from the north, and a dark-rolling inundation of presbytery soon filled the whole length and breadth of the land.

We have seen to what insignificance the general assemblies of the Scottish church had been reduced before the death of James; from the accession of Charles they were no longer suffered to be held at all. And even in the synods and presbyteries the bishops, who were in their own persons or by their nominees perpetual moderators of these subordinate courts, controlled everything: so that the great body of the clergy, so potent in the former popular constitution of the church, were now

brought down to be mere parish priests, with little more to say in a legislative or regulating character than the common soldiery have in an army. The chief administration of ecclesiastical affairs was left in the hands of the primate, Archbishop Spotswood; but, although his power in this department was nearly absolute, it is admitted even by Presbyterian writers that Spotswood's government was not only able, but, upon the whole, as temperate and conciliatory as it well could have been in the circumstances, and that probably the convulsions which eventually broke out might have been prevented if his authority had been permitted to continue unimpaired and uninterfered with. From the very first, however, the archbishop was pressed upon with importunities to advance at a quicker step than he was inclined to take, both by some of his right reverend brethren, and morees pecially by the king himself, acting under the instigation of the restless and impatient Laud. Where no violent opposition was offered, conformity on the part of the clergy to the late restrictive laws which had been carried in the assembly and the parliament had not at first been very strictly enforced by Spotswood and the Scottish privy council; but within a few weeks after his accession Charles

wrote to the archbishop, informing him that he was determined that there should be an end of this laxity; and in July, 1626, he sent down a set of regulations, in which, although it was directed that such ministers as had been admitted before the assembly of 1618, and had previously preached against conformity, should be excused from obeying the five articles or canons of Perth for a little time till they should be better instructed, and that all those who had been banished, confined, or suspended should be replaced in their charges on giving security for their future good behaviourindulgences and concessions probably obtained by Spotswood's representations-it was at the same time ordered that conformity to the said five canons should be strictly enforced on all who had been admitted to the ministry since the Perth assembly, and that a bond to that effect should be subscribed by every new entrant into the ministry at his admission.

To this

About the same time, the further to exalt the hierarchy, his majesty hastened to confer upon Spotswood, its head, certain marks of dignity and pre-eminence which were as distasteful to the aristocracy as to the popular sentiment of the Scottish nation. First he was admitted by the royal command to a new office, that of President of the Court of Exchequer; and soon after, letters came down directing that, as primate and metropolitan, he should take place, as was the custom in England, before the lord chancellor, and of course before all others of the temporal nobility. transposition, however, Hay (afterwards Earl of Kinnoul), who then held the office of chancellor, "a gallant stout man," as Sir James Balfour, the annalist, calls him, never would submit. Balfour, who was lord-lyon-king-at-arms, and consequently conversant with such matters, relates an incident which vividly pourtrays the irritation and scorn excited in the breasts of the fierce and haughty Scottish nobles of that day, by the intrusion of these novel pretensions of the clergy. "I remember," says he, "that King Charles sent me to the lord chancellor (being then Earl of Kinnoul) the day of his coronation, in the morning, in anno 1633, to show him that it was his will and pleasure, but only for that day, that he would cede and give place to the archbishop: but he returned by me to his majesty a very brisk answer, which was, that since his majesty had been pleased to continue him in that office of chancellor, which, by his means, his worthy father of famous memory had bestowed upon him, he was ready in all humility to lay it down at his majesty's feet; but, since it was his royal will he should enjoy it with the known privileges of the same, never a stoned priest in Scotland should set a foot before him so long as his blood was hot. When I had related his answer to the king, he said, Weel, Lyon, let's go to business; I will not meddle further with that old cankered goutish man, at whose hands there is nothing to be gained but sour

VOL. III.

words."* Hay, accordingly, was troubled no more on the subject, till he died, about a year and a half after this (16th December, 1634), when Spotswood was immediately raised to the office of chancellor himself.

It is believed, however, that certain of his brethren had already been for some years at work in undermining the influence of the primate at court. Spotswood himself is said to have made no fewer than fifty journeys to London in the course of his primacy of about twenty-four years; but the opposition of temper between him and Laud made all this diligence of little effect. Excepting at the times of these short periodical visits, he had necessarily his hands fully occupied with the affairs of his two high offices, and little leisure either for cultivating court favour, or for watching and counteracting the intrigues of his opponents and rivals. A custom, too, had grown up of having one of the bishops generally resident in London, in order, as it was expressed, to deal with his majesty for the weal of the church, contributions being collected throughout the country for the maintenance of the persons who were successively sent up on this commission, which afforded the best opportunity for the more ambitious members of the bench to insinuate themselves into the good graces of Laud, and to seek to advance their fortunes by siding with him against their own metropolitan. In the pursuit of this object they adopted and made ostentatious profession of Laud's Arminian theology, as well as of his church and state politics; and while the openly avowed design of the measures which they urged forward was to bring the Scottish church, in discipline, in doctrine, and in ceremonies, into perfect conformity with the English, it was universally felt that they also desired to bring both churches nearer than either of them yet was to the original popish model in all these respects.

According to Burnet, Charles had, from the first, set his heart upon carrying through two designs in regard to the church of Scotland, "that his father had set on foot, but had let the prosecution of them fall in the last year of his reign." The first of these was the recovery of the tithes and church-lands; for which end we are told he determined to go on with and complete the project only begun, or rather only announced, by James, of annulling all the grants of property of this description made in the minority of the latter, and also to augment the spiritual lords in parliament to their old number by the restoration of the titular abbots. In this scheme, however, but little progress was made beyond the secret purchase from the two great families of Hamilton and Lennox of the abbey of Arbroath for the see of St. Andrew's, and the lordship of Glasgow for the other archbishopric. "These lords," says Burnet, “made a show of zeal after a good bargain, and surrendered them to the king. He also purchased several estates of less value to the several sees; and all men

• Annals. of Scot. ii. 142.

:

who pretended to favour at court offered their church lands to sale at a low rate." But no grants were, as had at first been threatened or intended, actually resumed without compensation. It may be also mentioned, in connexion with this matter, that when Charles came down to Scotland to be crowned, in 1633, he erected a new bishopric at Edinburgh; "and," says Burnet, in his gossiping way, "made one Forbes bishop, who was a very learned and pious man he had a strange faculty of preaching five or six hours at a time: his way of life and devotion was thought monastic, and his learning lay in antiquity; he studied to be a reconciler between Papists and Protestants, leaning rather to the first, as appears by his Considerationes Modesta: he was a very simple man, and knew little of the world; so he fell into several errors in conduct, but died soon after, suspected of popery, which suspicion was increased by his son's turning papist."*

The other grand project to which Charles was instigated by Laud and his partisans among the Scotch bishops, was the imposition of a Liturgy upon the church of Scotland-a measure which was carried farther, and which ere long set the whole kingdom in flames. To adopt the homely but expressive language of Balfour, writing in the time of the civil wars, this " was that business, the so much advancing whereof since has not only rooted out the bishops root and branch, but also ruined the king and his haill family. Thir [these] unhappy bishops, they were evil counsellors, but worse musicians; for they tempered their strings to such a clef of ambition and superstitious foolery, that, before ever they yielded any sound, they burst all in pieces."+

It appears that the first proposal made in the present reign for the introduction of a Liturgy into the Scottish church was brought forward in 1630, at a convention of the clergy called by the primate, at the king's command, for the express purpose of considering how the whole order of the church of England might be adopted in Scotland. Laud's representative, or emissary, upon this occasion, was a Mr. John Maxwell, then one of the ministers of Edinburgh, who a few years afterwards was

Own Time, i. 23. Bishop William Forbes, who before his elevation to the bench had been one of the ministers of Edinburgh, must not be confounded with either of his learned relations, Patrick Forbes, bishop of Aberdeen (1615-1635), and his son John Forbes, the author of several theological works written in Latin, which long enjoyed a high reputation. The friends of Bishop William Forbes indignantly deny the truth of the imputation of popery thrown upon him by Burnet. Burnet himself, in the preface to his Life of Bishop Bedel, 1685, has drawn a more favourable character of the Bishop of Edinburgh than that quoted in the text. He there says," He was a grave and eminent divine; my father, that knew him long, and, being of counsel for him in his law matters, had occasion to know him well, has often told me that he never saw him but he thought his heart in heaven, and he was never alone with him but he felt within himself a commentary on these words of the apostles-Did not our hearts burn within us, while he yet talked with us, and opened to us the scriptures. He preached with a zeal and vehemence that made him often forget all the measures of time; two or three hours was no extraordinary thing for him." Bishop Forbes died within a year after he was raised to the bench. His only printed work, Considerationes Modestæ et Pacificæ Controversiarum de Justificatione, Purgatorio, Invocatione Sauctorum, Christo Mediatore, et Eucharisti, did not appear till many years after his death, having been brought out at London in 1658, under the care, as it is thought, of Dr. Thomas Gale.

† Annals, ii, 140.;

made bishop of Ross, and after having been driven out of the country at the general overthrow of episcopacy in Scotland, obtained the bishopric of Killala in Ireland, and died Archbishop of Tuam, in 1646. Although several consultations upon the subject took place in the two following years, nothing was determined upon till Charles came down to Edinburgh to be crowned in 1633, when, as Clarendon tells us, "he carried with him the resolution to finish that important business in the church at the same time." “And many wise men," adds this historian, "were then, and stiil are, of opinion, that if the king had then proposed the Liturgy of the church of England to have been received and practised by that nation, it would have been submitted to without opposition." This, however, it is said, was opposed by the Scottish bishops, as they professed, in part on the ground that there were some things in the English Liturgy which could not be altogether defended, but principaliy from the apprehension that the popular feeling in Scotland, always jealous of England, might be inflamed by what would be construed as indicating an intention of making everything in the former country be overridden by the institutions and customs of the latter. The expedient of having a new Liturgy prepared for the special use of the Scots, "was so passionately and vehemently urged," says Clarendon, "even by the bishops, that, however they deferred to the minds and humours of other men, it was manifest enough that the exception and device proceeded from the pride of their own hearts." The fact, however, appears to have been, that the opposition to the adoption of the English Liturgy came from those of the bishops, namely, Spotswood and his friends, who would have been best pleased to go on as they had been doing without any appointed form of public worship at all, and that their chief motive for insisting upon the necessity of a new form was probably the hope that the thing might in that way be got rid of altogether. In the end it was determined that a Liturgy and a Book of Canons should be drawn up in Scotland, and then submitted for revisal to Laud, assisted by his brother prelates, Juxon and Wren. Burnet says expressly that the books "were' never examined in any public assembly of the (Scottish) clergy; all was managed by three or four aspiring bishopsMaxwell, Sydserf, Whitford, and Ballantine, the bishops of Ross, Galloway, Dunblane, and Aberdeen."* The Book of Canons, the shorter and easier work, was the first begun, or at least the first finished it was confirmed by letters patent under the great seal, dated 23rd May, 1635; and a procla mation was at the same time issued by the king for the due observance of the canons within his kingdom

* Own Time, i. 26. Burnet's enumeration, however, is somewhat hasty and loose. Maxwell became bishop of Ross in 1633; Sydserf was translated from Brechin to Galloway in 1634; Whitford was promoted to the see, not of Dunblane, but of Brechin in 1634. Ba nantine, or rather Ballenden, was translated from Dunblane to Aberdeen in 1634. Wedderburn, who became bishop of Dunblane in 1636, and Lindsay, translated from Brechin to Edilburgh in 160l, are mentioned as two of the bishops of Laud's party who had a chief hand in this business, by other authorities,

of Scotland. "It was a fatal inadvertency," observes Clarendon, "that these canons, neither before nor after they were sent to the king, had been ever seen by the assembly, or any convocation of the clergy, which was so strictly obliged to the observation of them; nor so much as communicated to the lords of the council of that kingdom; it being almost impossible that any new discipline could be introduced into the church which would not much concern the government of the state, and even trench upon or refer to the municipal laws of the kingdom." It was also strange and much to be regretted, he thinks, that the canons should have been published before the Liturgy, seeing that several of them, to which the whole body of the clergy were to swear to submit and pay all obedience, expressly enjoined a punctual compliance with the ritual and form of worship which yet remained unsettled, or at least unannounced. It may, indeed, be questioned if any more prudent or dexterous management of the business would have prevented the flame which actually broke out; but, certainly, whether we look to the character and substance of the proposed innovations, or to the manner and circumstances of their introduction, nothing could have been better fitted to provoke the simultaneous aversion and revolt against them of all classes of the Scottish nation-of the aristocracy, as well as the clergy and the general mass of the people. The canons, as Clarendon remarks, in the mere mode in which they were prepared and published, "appeared to be so many new laws imposed upon the whole kingdom by the king's sole authority, and contrived by a few private men, of whom they had no good opinion, and who were strangers to the nation; so that it was thought no other than a subjection to England by receiving laws from thence." Then, he also acknowledges, "they were so far from being confined to the church, and the matters of religion, that they believed there was no part of their civil government uninvaded by them, and no persons, of what quality soever, unconcerned, and, as they thought, unhurt in them." Among other novel extravagancies contained in these canons, which filled all men with alarm, were the unlimited extent assigned to the royal power and prerogative, which was expressly declared to be according to the pattern of the kings of Israel; the severe restrictions laid upon ecclesiastical persons, as, for example, that none of them should become surety for any man, and that all of them, from bishops inclusive, who died without children, should be obliged to bequeath a considerable part of their property to the church, and even if they should have children, still to leave something to the church, or for the advancement of learning; that no person should officiate as a teacher, either publicly or privately, without having first obtained a license from the archbishop of the province, or the bishop of the diocese. These and other things of the same kind the great royalist historian oddly thinks might have been " fit to be commended to

a regular and orderly people piously disposed;" but he admits that the whole mess was "too strong meat for infants in discipline, and too much nourishment to be administered at once to weak and queasy stomachs, and too much inclined to nauseate what was most wholesome." In doctrine also, of course, the new canons were all that was most abhorrent to presbyterian consciences; in some points, indeed, they were thought to go to the very verge of popery, particularly in their assignment of the power of absolution to the bishops, and in the injunction "that no presbyter should reveal anything he should receive in confession, except in such cases where by the law of the land his own life should be forfeited"-the practice of confession, under whatsoever restrictions, being looked upon by most Protestants, to adopt the expression of Clarendon," as the strongest and most inseparable limb of antichrist." The proper positions of the font, and of the altar or communion-table, in every church, were moreover set down with all the punctiliousness which Laud held to be requisite in such matters, but which many other Christians, and especially those of Scotland, were accustomed to look upon as the height of puerility and superstition. In all things, in short, these canons were designed and fitted to bring the Scottish church into as exact conformity as possible with the Arminian, half-popish model which Laud had established in England.

It was more than a year after the publication of the Book of Canons before the Liturgy was ready. It is said that the first edition of the latter work, after it was printed off, proved so unsatisfactory to Laud, that it was sold for waste paper. Ultimately, by his alterations, it was brought, as his opponents alleged, to be little better than an English translation of the Roman Missal; and in this form it was at last published, and the use of it enjoined by royal proclamation, in December, 1636. It was at first directed that the new service should begin to be read in all the churches at the following Easter; and the more impatient zeal of Maxwell, Wedderburn, and Whitford, the Bishops of Ross, Dunblane, and Brechin, did, in fact, introduce it then in those three dioceses. Spotswood and his party, however, had in the mean time strongly advised that more time should be allowed to prepare the public mind for the change; and, in compliance with their representations, it had been resolved that the great innovation should be put off till the autumn. Finally, it was arranged that the reading should be begun, by way of experiment or example, only in the churches of Edinburgh and the immediate neighbourhood, on Sunday, the 23rd of July, "to the end that the lords of the session, and others who had any law business, might see the success of it before the rising of the session," on the first of August, and so might report what had been done to all parts of the country on their return home.* This determination seems to have been taken with the same precipitancy and want * Rushworth, ii. 387.

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