2. South wind blowing: the Anglicizing of the Kirk
South wind blowing: the Anglicizing of the Kirk 1. James gains the English crown The situation and prospects of the Scottish Kirk changed very dramatically in 1603 when Queen Elizabeth of England died, and James succeeded to the English throne.11 So came the union of the Scottish and English crowns, with fateful consequences for both countries.12 James left Scotland and took up residence in his new southern kingdom. In fact, he only ever visited
Scotland once thereafter! In England, James found a Church far more to his liking: an Episcopalian body whose bishops were appointed by the crown, and who were therefore dependent on the crown for their position—and tended to be very subservient. The adulation that the English Church hierarchy paid to the monarch was a vivid and welcome contrast for James to the constant criticism to which he had been subjected by the likes of Andrew Melville and the Scottish Presbyterian clergy. He now became absolutely determined to remodel the Kirk on the Anglican pattern.
Little can James have realized that he was sowing the seeds of a revolution that would see Scotland fight its king on the field of battle, and the entire Stuart dynasty toppled from the throne.
2. The bishops restored James' determination to Anglicize the Kirk was part of a wider shift in his attitude. The fact that he was now living in England, the larger, stronger, and richer of his two kingdoms, led to an Anglicizing of James' entire outlook. It was not merely that English bishops were more deferential that Scottish presbyters; the English aristocracy was also more deferential than its Scottish counterpart. Traditionally, the Scottish nobility had a less rigid, more relaxed ethos in relationships between people of differing social rank.
The English court was more strict and formal, more prone to a cult of monarchy. James enjoyed the English ways, and it helped persuade him of the superiority of all things English over all things Scottish.
Slowly but effectively, James carried out his campaign to remodel the Kirk. First he undermined the status of the general assembly. He cancelled its meeting for 1604, and then again for 1605. When a band of 19 ministers loyal to Melville's ideals met of their own accord in Aberdeen in July 1605, the Privy Council charged them with treason and they were banished. In 1606, James had Melville himself and six of his disciples brought to London, and forced them to sit through a series of lectures by Anglican divines on the superior merits of Episcopacy as a model of church government. Melville was not impressed; he was so outspokenly rude about the ceremonial form of worship observed in the English royal chapel that James lost all patience and threw him out of the country. Melville spent his final years in northern France, as a theological teacher in the French
Huguenot college at Sedan, dying there in 1622.
Next, James fully restored Episcopacy to the Kirk. It already had several bishops, but only in the shape of parliamentary commissioners, in accordance with the decision of the 1598 general assembly at Dundee (see section 1). James now had three men fully consecrated to the Episcopal office by the traditional method, the laying on of hands by existing bishops.
Anglican bishops performed the consecration in 1610; then the three Scottish bishops (of Glasgow, Brechin, and Galloway) consecrated several more. All the bishops were chosen personally by James, and he give them back their secular lands and income which had been seized by the crown in 1587. An interesting point was raised by Lancelot Andrewes, Anglican
Bishop of Ely. He argued that without Episcopal ordination, a minister could not validly hold a ministerial position. This would have meant that all
Scottish ministers would have to be reordained by bishops! However, Andrewes was opposed by Archbishop Bancroft of Canterbury. Bancroft took the more moderate view that in the absence of bishops, ordination of presbyters by other presbyters was valid—"otherwise it might be doubted if there were any lawful ordination in most of the Reformed Churches".
Bancroft's position triumphed over Andrewes', which was just as well for James; had Andrewes prevailed, an attempt to force all Scottish ministers to be Episcopally reordained would have provoked widespread and serious opposition in the Kirk.13
James' campaign was remarkably successful; there was very little in the way of resolute opposition to his reintroduction of full Episcopacy. Perhaps this was because he left intact the traditional Presbyterian structures of internal church government—local kirk session, presbytery, synod, and general assembly. However, though they were allowed to remain, they were made completely captive to the greater power of the king and his bishops.
Some have seen the Kirk in this period as a compromise between Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism, combining elements of each. Others have argued that it is of the essence of Presbyterianism that the Church must be independent of state control, and that all its ministers enjoy equal status; in that case, the Scottish Kirk had now lost the essentials of Presbyterianism, and become effectively royal and Episcopalian.
If we ask why the opposition to James was so ineffectual, it was partly because potential opponents lacked strong leadership, with Andrew
Melville in exile in France, and Melville's greatest disciple, Robert Bruce, in "internal exile" in Inverness. It was also partly because James initially confined himself to remodelling the Kirk's authority structures, which did not really impinge on the life and worship of ordinary Scottish churchgoers at grass-roots level.
3. The brink of conflict However, having enjoyed such success in reforming the government of the Kirk, James next turned his attention to bringing Scottish worship more into line with Anglican worship. In 1617, James visited Scotland with his chaplain, William Laud, the foremost figure in the High Church movement within Anglicanism.14 James wanted five controversial articles included in a new Scottish book of canon law. These required the following practices to be introduced into the Kirk:
1. Receiving holy communion in a kneeling posture.
2. Private celebrations of communion (e.g. in a nobleman's house).
3. Baptism administered privately whenever circumstances demanded.
4. Confirmation by a bishop of those preparing to receive communion for the first time.
5. The observance of the main holy days in the Christian year, e.g.
Christmas and Easter (these had been discontinued in Scotland, rather unusually—other Reformed Churches generally retained them in some form).
These proposals provoked immediate resistance. A group of 55 ministers met in Edinburgh and declared their opposition to the king's scheme; the Kirk, they affirmed, was independent of royal control, its own master in all matters of doctrine, worship, and government. Opponents of the Five
Articles argued against them on the following grounds:
1. Forms of worship not commanded in Scripture should not be imposed.
2. Kneeling at communion tended to idolatry—it was too much like the Roman Catholic adoration of the eucharistic bread as Christ's very body.
3. Baptism and communion must not be separated from the preaching of the Word in the gathered congregation.
4. Episcopal confirmation wrongly implied that baptism was defective without laying on of hands by a bishop.
5. Religious festivals like Christmas and Easter diminished respect for the Lord 's Day, the only divinely appointed "festival".
James treated this display of clerical defiance with contempt, and demanded that the general assembly accept his Five Articles; when it hesitated, he cut off the income of rebellious ministers. The following year, 1618, the Scottish bishops brought the king's Five Articles before the general assembly in Perth (hence their common name, "the Five Articles of Perth").
The assembly was presided over by John Spottiswoode, the new Archbishop of Saint Andrews. Many of the ministers were present at the king's special request—James' yes-men. The assembly voted to endorse the Five Articles by a majority of 86 to 42.
Despite this, there was serious popular opposition to the Articles. This grew more intense after James issued, later that year, his notorious Book of Sports, which promoted dancing and games on Sunday. Ministers who openly defied the Articles were punished. James' most famous victim was
David Dickson (c.1583–1663) of Irvine in Ayrshire, later celebrated in Covenanting times as an outstanding theologian and Bible commentator (an exposition of the Psalms and of all the apostle Paul's letters would long remain in print); Dickson was deposed from his church and sentenced to internal exile in Aberdeenshire in 1622–3. However, when it became evident that opposition to the Five Articles of Perth was widespread, James drew back from enforcing them with any vigour, and abandoned plans for further remodelling of Scottish worship. He had the sense to know when enough was enough.
But in a real sense, the damage was already done. The Five Articles had rekindled a Presbyterian flame, albeit not in such a way as to engulf the entire Kirk and country in a conflagration. Many Scots who had reluctantly gone along with James' ecclesiastical policies now became convinced that the diehard Presbyterian minority had been right all along: the king's policies were dragging the Kirk down a path which could end only in the ultimate destruction of its traditionally Reformed faith and worship.
Particularly ominous was the fact that a sizeable number of Scottish nobles joined with ministers in opposing the Five Articles. These nobles would, in the 1630s, step forth as leading Covenanters. It has been argued that James perceived this potentially deadly coalition between Presbyterian ministers and disaffected members of the aristocracy, and backed away, for fear of provoking the coalition into militant life. This would be precisely the fate of James' less politically astute son, Charles I.
The events surrounding the Five Articles revealed very painfully how King James was increasingly losing meaningful contact with the state of public opinion in his northern kingdom. The way that opposition to the Articles had come not just from ministers, but from members of the Scottish aristocracy and gentry, was probably a symptom of a growing alienation between Scotland and its absentee monarch. It was becoming all too possible for the Scottish ruling classes to feel that their land had been degraded to the condition of a mere province, governed in the interests of England, with Scottish concerns not being understood—or if they were understood, being ignored. James' own political skills managed to prevent this situation from developing into a national crisis; for example, throughout his reign the Scottish Privy Council continued to meet in Edinburgh, and James engaged in genuine policy discussion with the council through exchange of letters. Still, this was not the same as personto-person interaction, and some historians have argued that James merely delayed the inevitable Scottish reaction against an Anglicizing Stuart monarchy. His son was about to reap the bitter consequences.
4. The spiritual succession: Bruce and Henderson Meanwhile those consequences were being prepared, in part, by Robert
Bruce. We last saw him in internal exile in Inverness, creating a deep impression by his preaching. In 1613, James relented somewhat, and allowed Bruce to return to his native Kinnaird, near Stirling, although he was still basically under house arrest. However, he was allowed to preach for other ministers during communion services; and when it was known that Bruce was to preach, people would come flocking from far and wide to sit under his articulate, powerful, and moving ministry.
On one such occasion (either 1615 or 1616), one of his hearers was a young man named Alexander Henderson (1583–1646), and Henderson experienced a profound religious conversion through Bruce's preaching.
The story is remarkable. Henderson was no Presbyterian; he was an Episcopalian in his beliefs about church government, and had recently been appointed by Archbishop Gladstanes of Saint Andrews to the parish of Leuchars in Fife. His appointment, however, was against the wishes of the congregation, who nailed the kirk doors closed in protest on the day of Henderson's ordination: rather than enter by the door, he had to climb in through the windows. Learning that the famous prisoner of conscience,
Robert Bruce, was to preach in Forgan, Henderson went along, more out of curiosity than anything else. Bruce's sermon was on John 10:1—"He that entereth not in by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up another way, he is a thief and a robber."
Henderson was thunder-struck. Was this God Himself speaking through Bruce? Henderson fell under deep conviction of sin for the way he had forced himself on the people of Leuchars. From that moment, his life changed; he now became a disciple of Bruce, an earnest preacher, a godly and beloved pastor, a committed Presbyterian—and he would go on to become the architect of the Covenanting movement which would overthrow the Stuart monarchy. As the spiritual torch had passed from the hands of Knox to Melville, and from Melville to Bruce, so it passed from Bruce to Henderson.
Bruce's location varied with the fluctuating intensity of royal disfavour.
In 1622–4, he was back in internal exile in Inverness again. Then from 1624 until his death in 1631, he was back at Kinnaird. His spiritual legacy in the Kirk, through his preaching, was deep and enduring. His literary legacy was
also not to be despised. A volume of 17 of his sermons in the Scottish dialect has survived. His masterpiece, however, was a separate series of sermons on the Lord's Supper, delivered at Saint Giles Kirk, Edinburgh, in 1589. The sermons, bristling with quotations from the early Church fathers
(especially Augustine), expounded the classic Reformed doctrine with a warm evangelical spirituality, charting a middle way between the emptiness of a bare memorialism and the superstition of Catholic transubstantiation. If Bruce is still known today, it is for these rich sermons on the Supper.