The Episcopal Church in Scotland

'Within a year of the fierce battle in the streets of Dunkeld [1688], a new parliament abolished prelacy and established Presbyterianism.  [King] William's support for the True Kirk was not the result of pious sympathy.  The refusal of Scots bishops to accept the Revolution had left him no choice.  When the first General Assembly met in 1690 he told its members that moderation would become them as much as it would please him, but bitter memories of the killing-times were not to be set aside by the sensible advice of an invited king.  One intolerance was replaced by another, and the victims were now the episcopalians, "all insufficient, negligent, scandalous and erroneous ministers" whom the Assembly was determined to remove.  The holy work begun by the western mob in December, 1688, was continued in the purging of parish and university by Kirk commissions, until the King's indignation and Parliament's intervention regularized the witch-hunting, protecting those episcopalian office-holders and ministers who took an oath of allegiance to the Crown, and outlawing those who would not.  After one hundred and thirty years the Kirk was finally victorious, but preoccupation with the long struggle had stunted the artistic and intellectual growth of the country south of the Highland line, hampered its industry and economy, wasted the blood of its young men, and given it a tradition of hard, self-sacrificial intolerance that would dominate its spirit for another century more.  The triumph of Presbyterianism came toward the end of Scotland's political independence, and in the few years left the nation's pride would reach its zenith in a splendid and suicidal gesture, falling to a shameful nadir of spiteful revenge.

Prebble pp272-273

'The gentry of the Lowlands were divided not unevenly into Presbyterian and Episcopalian, a division scarcely distinguishable from the political division of Whig and Jacobite.  Tories there were none, in the English sense of the word, for the Tory was an Episcopalian who had accepted the Revolution Settlement because it left his Church established and privileged, whereas in Scotland the Revolution left the Episcopal Church disestablished, and not even tolerated according to law;  Scottish Episcopalians , therefore, were necessarily Jacobites, looking to a counter-revolution for their relief.  This was the essential difference between English and Scottish politics, and it deeply affected social life and relations in the northern kingdom.

'Family and religious discipline tended to be more strict in Presbyterian than in Episcopalian families.  There was usually more pleasure and freedom in a Jacobite household.  But deep Presbyterian piety and a strict sense of public duty did not prevent Forbes of Culloden from indulgence in hard drinking, convivial hospitality, profound learning and liberal culture.  And when Anne came to the throne, the services of psalmody, preaching and extempore prayer were very much the same in the Episcopal meeting house as in the Presbyterian parish church.  The prayer book only began to find its way into some of the meeting houses in the last half of her reign.  The doctrines professed by the rival denominations differed little except on Church government, and not much even on that, seeing that the Episcopalians too had their Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions with inquisition and discipline over morals.

'. . . Nearly all Scottish families, especially those of the gentry, regularly attended either the parish church or the Episcopal meeting house, where they received much the same spiritual medecine, diluted with different quantities of water.  Poverty and religious controversy combined to form a national character, over-riding the acute political divisions, and uniting all Scots in a mental and moral antagonism to the wealthier, more libertine civilisation [to] the south of the Cheviots.'

Trevelyan pp375-376

The universities of Scotland were in a dull condition at sunrise of that [18th] century which was to set in the golden glow of Principal Robertson, Adam Smith and the Edinburgh philosophers.  An age of violent civic commotion is seldom favourable to academic institutions controlled by the state.  The Episcopal regime of Charles II had excluded half the Scottish men of learning from academic life, and the Revolution extruded most of the other half, replacing them by men who had learnt more fanaticism than scholarship in moorside conventicles subject to attack by dragoons.'

Trevelyan p377

'The Kirk Session of self-important lay elders, acting conjointly with the minister, interfered in ordinary life to an excessive degree.  Week in, week out, the Kirk Session and the superior court of the Presbytery were trying cases of alleged swearing, slander, quarrelling, Breach of Sabbath, witchcraft and sexual offences.  Some of these enquiries and judgments were properly conducted and useful, being such as were dealt with by ordinary magistrates in England.  Others were intolerably vexatious, as when a woman was arraigned for carrying a pail on a fast day, and a crowder for fiddling at a christening feast.  The adulterer or fornicator of either sex was exposed on the stool of repentance in church, to the merriment of the junior half of the congregation, to the grave reprobation of the more respectable, and to the unblushing denunciations of the minister, renewed sometimes for six, ten or twenty Sabbaths on end.  There was often a long row of penitents, and the 'gowns' in which they were clad were in such constant use that they had frequently to be renewed.  To avoid this intolerable humiliation, poor girls often resorted to concealment of pregnancy and sometimes to child murder.  The Privy Council was constantly dealing with the question of remitting or enforcing the extreme penalty in such cases.

'These activities of the Kirk Session and Presbytery had much support in public opinion or they could not have so long survived the disuse of similar Church jurisdiction in England.  But they aroused deep resentment in many, not least among the upper classes.  It is true that commutation of penance for fines was often allowed in the case of the gentry.  But even with these mitigations, the jurisdiction over conduct claimed by lowborn elders and clergymen was an offence to the proud families of lairds and nobles;  it was an underlying cause of Episcopal religion and Jacobite politics in many who had otherwise no quarrel with the services and doctrines of the Presbyterian Church.  Anticlericalism strengthened the Jacobites in Scotland, as it strengthened the Whigs in England.  Yet it must be remembered that the stool of repentance and the jurisdiction of Kirk Sessions had gone on even in the Episcopal days of Charles II, and had not yet ceased in those numerous parishes still ruled by Episcopalian ministers.

'On the whole, the Episcopalian or Jacobite party depended on upper-class support more than the Presbyterian or Whig.  The more rigorous the discipleship of Knox, the more democratic were doctrine and practice likely to be.  The clash came in the appointment of ministers, which the true-blue Presbyterian claimed for the people of the parish, both on grounds of religious doctrine as to the call of pastors, and because the private patrons who claimed to appoint were often very doubtful of their Presbyterianism.

'Episcopalian pamphleteers twitted the Presbyterians with their want of policy in:  "constant taking part with the mob in all the disputes that happen betwixt them and the Nobility and Gentry in the choice of ministers, as if you relied upon them for the security of your establishment….The Nobility and Gentry in Scotland have the commons so much under, that it argues no small stupidity in you to have blundered in so plain a case"

'Even English Nonconformist visitors to Scotland were astonished and alarmed at the boldness of the Church in its dealings with 'the Great'. Whatever its other faults, the Church of John Knox raised the down-trodden people of Scotland to look its feudal masters in the face.

'The position of the Episcopalians at the beginning of the eighteenth century was most anomalous.  Their services, doctrines, organisation and discipline - except for the presence of the Bishops who in fact exercised small authority - differed little save in emphasis from those of the Presbyterian Establishment.  Yet the greatest bitterness prevailed between the two communions, because the difference of the Churches answered to the political difference of Whig and Jacobite, behind which lay two generations of feuds and wrongs inflicted and remembered on both sides.

'The Episcopalians of Scotland were at once better and worse off than the Nonconformists of England.  On the one hand there was not, until 1712, any Act of Toleration to legalize their services.  On the other hand, more than a sixth of the parish churches were still occupied by their ministers.  In Aberdeenshire, in the Highlands and along their eastern border, Presbyterian clergymen who showed themselves were liable to be attacked by mobs as savage as those who had 'rabbled' the Episcopal 'curates' of the south-west.  When in 1704 the Presbyterian minister was to be inducted at Dingwall, he was stoned, beaten and driven away by a mob of men and women crying "King Willie is dead and our King is alive".

'The popular feeling that thus found expression in the north-east arose less from religious differences than from political feuds, regional hatred of the Whiggamores of the south-west, and personal loyalty to old and tried pastors.

'In 1707 there were still 165 parishes in Scotland where the minister adhered to the Episcopalian Church.  But the great majority of the Episcopalian clergy had been deprived at the Revolution.  In Anne's reign they were living miserably enough, the more fortunate as chaplains in some great house, too many on alms collected from their co-religionists in Scotland, or from English churchmen who regarded them as martyrs in a common cause.'

Trevelyan pp388-390

'The eighteenth century also saw changes in the fortunes and in the spirit of the Episcopalian minority.  At the time of the Union of 1707 the Episcopalians were a formidable body, practically identical with the Jacobites, and prepared to fight for a restoration of their Church and of their King; they did not, however, use the prayer book, and their religion was only a milder form of that of the Presbyterian Establishment.  But as the century went on they drew nearer to the rest of the nation in politics and further from it in religion.  After the death of Jacobitism they became loyal subjects of George III, while their adoption of a prayer book closely resembling the English divided them off from their fellow Scots as a religious community with an ethos of its own.  Their numbers dwindled.  In Anne's reign they had been the Church of the people in many parts of eastern Scotland, and had as such been permitted at the Revolution to continue in occupation of parish churches and manses in spite of the law.  But as that generation of incumbents died off, they were replaced by Presbyterian ministers

. 'On the other hand, the position of the Episcopalians was improved in one important respect.  They had not, at the Revolution, been granted an Act of Toleration like the English Dissenters.  Their position was in every respect anomalous, depending not on law but on local opinion and force.  At length in 1712 the Tories of the Westminster parliament passed a Toleration Act for Scotland - a first-fruit of the Union eminently right and proper, but regarded with deep suspicion by the Presbyterians as the herald of further attacks on the established order.

'Indeed, there followed in a few weeks another and more questionable interference of the British Parliament in the affairs of the Scottish Church.  In 1712 patronage was restored - that is, the right of individual proprietors to appoint to livings.  To an Englishman accustomed to the system in the Anglican Church this may seem a small matter, but Scottish religious and social history was profoundly affected for 150 years to come by the restoration of patronage.

'The democratic element in the appointment of ministers to parishes was regarded by orthodox Presbyterians as an essential point of religion;  and apart from all theory, there was a practical danger in presentation by patrons many of whom were latitudinarians, Episcopalians or Jacobites.  For these reasons Patronage had been abolished by a law of the Scottish Parliament at the Revolution:  by the Act of 1690 the Protestant heritors and elders should 'name and propose' a minister to the whole congregation, which if dissatisfied might appeal to the Presbytery, whose decision should be final.  But now, in 1712, the 'prelatic' Parliament of Westminster altered this law, in defiance of the spirit of the Union Treaty.  The right of presentation was restored to the old patrons, unless they were Roman Catholics.

'Although the new law was deeply resented, its consequences were not remarkable for the first generation after its passage.  But the ultimate outcome was momentous indeed.  Patronage was the root cause of a long series of secession of Presbyterian bodies from an Established Church bound by this state-made law.  For good or evil, Scotland, hitherto inimical to sects such as flourished in England, saw the rise of a number of Nonconformist Churches, competing with the Establishment, though differing from it in doctrine and ritual hardly at all.

'The restoration of patronage had also the effect of helping the rise of the moderate party in the Church.  In the eighteenth century the rights of the patrons were often exerted to place moderate-minded ministers in parishes of zealots, who objected to their intrusion, yet benefited by their mild ministrations.  Readers of Galt's Annals of the Parish will not forget that in the first year of George III's reign the excellent Mr. Balwhidder was thus intruded, 'for I was put in by a patron, and people knew nothing whatsoever of me, and their hearts were stirred into strife on the occasion'.  Some critics of the bigotry of the older Calvinism have said in their haste that the Scots were 'a priest-ridden people'.  It would be truer to say that theirs was 'a people-ridden clergy'. The zealots in the congregation kept a close eye on their minister's orthodoxy.  In the eighteenth century many of the placed clergy did all they could to liberalize Scottish religion, often at the price of unpopularity with their lay parishioners.

'In the nineteenth century the long-drawn-out consequences of the Patronage Act of 1712 culminated in the secession of the Free Church under Chalmers, a protest on behalf of evangelical liberty which is one of the great facts of the modern history of Scotland (1843).  At length, in 1875, the measure so lightly passed in Anne's reign was reversed, with the consequence that a path was opened for the ultimate reunion of the divided parts of the Church of Scotland, which took place in our own day, after the state had still further declared the unfettered freedom of the Church over the entire field of matters spiritual by the Act of 1921'

Trevelyan pp403-406

'On 31 January 1788, Prince Charles Edward Stuart died.  His brother, Prince Henry, was a Cardinal, so on 25 May 'the king, queen and prince of Wales, were prayed for by name and the rest of the royal family in the usual manner in all the Nonjuring chapels in [Edinburgh and Leith].  The same manner of testifying the loyalty of the Scotch Episcopalians will also be observed in every part of the country, in consequence of the resolution come to by the bishops and clergy of that persuasion'.  'Prince Charles had lived long enough for Samuel Seabury to be consecrated in 1784 as the first bishop of the United States of America by the Scottish bishops who had never sworn allegiance to George III.'

IC p76