LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

whom he had disponed the patronage after 3 January 1642, then the presentation would only be given to a candidate selected from leets provided by the Church. On the occurrence of each vacancy, the presbytery would send the patron a blank presentation and a list of six persons who were both acceptable to the majority of the congregation, and willing to take the charge.61 To the parliamentary commissioners who had arranged the agreement, it may well have seemed a suitable compromise, but Baillie saw no future in it: “The overture . . . was of no use to us; for it was hard for us to find one person to a vacant kirk; bot to send up six . . . “62

Baillie felt the same lack of enthusiasm for another compromise, this time put before the Assembly by the Marquis of Argyll.63 Hoping to persuade his fellow patrons to join him, Argyll offered a bargain whereby, “they would give free libertie to presbyteries and people to name whom they would to vacant places, on condition the Assemblie would obleidge intrants to rest content with modified stipends.”64 Baillie’s view was that it was foolish to tie the Church’s hands, but further debate on the matter was aborted when it became obvious that some landed patrons were outraged that any such arrangement was being discussed at all. Accordingly, it was thought wise to drop the subject of patronage for the remainder of the court’s sitting.

When the 1643 Assembly came around, it was obvious the patronage debate was still very much alive. The fact was, Johnston’s optimism that patrons and parishes should not find it difficult to work in harmony, was starting to be contradicted by a succession of tiresome altercations. Since 1641, lengthy disputes had arisen between the preferences of patron and people, as at Dundee and at Inverness second charge; between patron and presbytery, as at Kilrenny [St. Andrews]; and between patron against presbytery and people, as at Campsie [Glasgow] and Largo [St. Andrews].65 It was perhaps not unexpected, therefore, that some should have considered the time had come for a full airing of the subject, as Baillie was to report: “We are like to be troubled with the question of Patronage. William Rigg [Sir William Rigg of Ethernie, who sat in Parliament for Fife] had procured a sharpe petition to us from the whole Commissioners of shyres and burghes against the intrusion of ministers on parishes against their minde; diverse noblemen, patrons, took this evill. We knew not how to guide it; at last, because of the time, as [with] all other things of great difficultie, we got it suppressed.”66

Clearly, however, stifling the debate could only act as a temporary expedient. When the Assembly returned to the issue a few days later in a resolution to reduce, through scarcity of candidates, the leets submitted to the king from six to three, the Marquis of Argyll used the opportunity to make a suggestion that “pleased all.” This was that a start should be made in drawing up a code of practice for other patrons beside the king. To this end, he moved that presbyteries be asked to consider the best way of admitting ministers to charges, and send their opinions to the following meeting. The Assembly, thinking it “very necessary that some general course were set down . . . whereby all occasions of contests and differences among patrons, presbyteries and paroches may be removed,”67 gratefully accepted the suggestion.

      Given the weakness of the Crown at the time, it is possible that the Argyll proposal might well have thrashed out a system which preserved patronage in a form acceptable to most interests and opinions. Whether it would have survived and thereby spared the Kirk the anguish of the next two centuries, is hard to guess. In the event, however, Argyll’s initiative petered out as developments south of the border rose to occupy the main focus of national attention.

      Summary

      The 1587 Act of Annexation heightened landowners’ awareness of, and concern for, the heritable rights which applied to their property, of which patronage was one. Although the Kirk would have been alarmed by the powers vested in the episcopate to receive and expedite presentations, by the end of James’s reign, it looked as though the system he set in place for filling vacancies had a good chance of reaching a settled state. Charles’s misfortune was that although his intentions for teind reform had merit, the handling of so sensitive an issue required skills that he did not possess. This, along with mounting disquiet at his ecclesiastical policy, led to the revolution of 1637–8, the success of which would have been impossible without the support of the landed interest. Out of the ensuing turmoil came a renewal of the debate within the Church as to the acceptability of presentations. This in turn was intensified when attentions turned to the civil war that was brewing south of the border. As dialogue opened with the English Parliamentarians, the question arose, how far could both nations work together, or moreover, form a common ecclesiastical polity? If the latter were possible, what place would presentations have in the new regime?

      Such questions were to occupy much attention north and south of the border as both nations groped towards a possible consensus at what came to be known as the Westminster Assembly of Divines.

1. 1588, 1592, and 1598.

2. Since the teinds had been specifically excluded from the 1587 Annexation Act, the presumption, in ecclesiastical circles, had been that they were being earmarked for the Church’s use. However, it became increasingly obvious that nothing specific was going to materialize: “Sometimes the teinds of the annexed churches were expressly conveyed to the grantee, and erected into benefices with grants of the patronage; at other times there was no mention of the patronage and no erection of the teinds into benefices, but in both cases the Lords of Erection generally assumed to themselves the right of presenting” [Patronage Report, #32].

3. Sess. 4, 9 March 1598; BUK, 467.

4. APS., iv, 294. The Act does not define simony, but simply lists it, along with the dilapidation of the rents of benefices, as an offence worthy of deprivation.

5. The privilege was affirmed in the Deposition of Ministers Act of 1592 [APS, iii, 542, c.9]. On the 23 July 1644, however, Parliament decided that the fruits of a vacant benefice could only be expended on pious uses [APS. vi, 128, c.47]. After the Restoration 0f 1660, the 1644 Act was rescinded. Yet, although presentations (abolished in 1649) were then re-established, patrons did not get back their right to the teinds of a vacancy. These were to be applied for pious uses for seven years, then during royal pleasure [APS., 1661, vii, 303, c.330].

6. APS, iv, 469.

7. Dunlop, Parochial law, 193–94.

8. For a discussion of this, see David G. Mullen, Episcopacy in Scotland: the history of an idea (Edinburgh: 1986).

9. Basilikon Doron, in Source Book iii, 51.

10. APS, iv, 130.

11. Although an English–style royal supremacy in the Kirk was not constitutionally possible, since unlike England, the Kirk did not issue from the conscious will and pleasure of a monarch.

12.

Скачать книгу