Lang The History Of Scotland - Volume 3: From James IV. To Knox And Mary Of Guise

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-8496-0463-9
Verlag: Jazzybee Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 151 Seiten

This is volume 3, covering the time from James IV. to Knox and Mary of Guise. In many volumes of several thousand combined pages the series 'The History of Scotland' deals with something less than two millenniums of Scottish history. Every single volume covers a certain period in an attempt to examine the elements and forces which were imperative to the making of the Scottish people, and to record the more important events of that time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lang, Andrew

Leseproben

BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION.

ON the conclusion of peace, the two chief questions before Scotland were the king's marriage and the dawn of Lutheran and other new ideas in religion. As to the former question, which must have seemed the more pressing, James was now twenty-three, and, in the matter of amours, was even as other kings and other Stuarts. It was desirable that he should marry, and everything turned on his choice of a bride. Was he to wed a daughter of France, or Mary (commonly called The Bloody) his cousin, the child of Henry VIII.? To this question we shall return after sketching the dawn of the Reformation in Scotland.

This is not a topic on which it is easy to be impartial. Protestant historians have seldom handled it with impartiality, and their suppressions, glosses, and want of historical balance naturally turn into opposition the judgment of a modern reader. In nothing has the character of the Lowland Scot, since 1560, differed from the character of his southern kinsmen of England so much as on the point of religion. The English Reformation began in the action of the Crown, and was carried through by the Crown, the new noblesse, the Bishops of Henry VIII., and the more wealthy and prosperous of the middle classes. What new doctrines were adopted came from Lutheranism, rather than from any other foreign source, but were chiefly the result of English compromise. A Church was developed which worshipped in the ancient fanes, under the ancient Order of Bishops, in the translated words of the ancient service-books, or in others not less beautiful. The assistance of the arts was not always rejected: common prayer was deemed more important than political and doctrinal harangues from the pulpit. Monasticism perished; purgatory, prayer to saints, pilgrimages, ceased to be recognised. There was a Revolution, but a Revolution which left many old things standing, and did not at once destroy all the pleasant popular holidays and practices which the ancient faith had consecrated to Christian use.

In Scotland the Reformation began, not in the Crown, and not immediately from personal and political causes, but from rational criticism, developed in the ranks of the gentry, the junior branches of the great families, the Augustinian and Dominican Orders, some of the secular clergy, and the wealthier burgesses. The king could not, as in England, direct and instigate the movement, for, had he done so, he must have broken with Rome and with France, on which he leaned for support against his loving uncle, Henry VIII. He saw Henry first quarrelling with Rome in the interests of his private love-affairs; then proclaiming the Royal supremacy over the Church; then executing the best and bravest of his subjects, More and Fisher (1535); then robbing the monasteries; then authorising (as a weapon against Rome) the translation of the Bible; destroying relics, and melting the golden reliquaries; burning men who read his translated Bible in their own sense; and, finally, roasting for one sort of heterodoxy, hanging for another, and keeping the executioner at work on his Ministers and his wives. The Protestant programme, as evolved and carried out by Henry VIII., was not a programme which James could have adopted. No Scottish king was ever allowed to bloat into such a monster of tyranny as Henry VIII. At the same time, and very naturally, Henry's conduct drove the governing clergy of Scotland into closer alliance with France. They had been the constant allies of France, they had helped to save, again and again, the national independence, now threatened by Henry and his tool, Angus.

They stood by the Cause. It is hardly fair to blame them for this, and hardly historical to regard them as infamously cruel because they carried out the law of the land and the coronation oath by burning theological innovators, just as Henry VIII. was doing in England; just as Presbyterian ministers, on the strength of texts, were presently to burn old women, and (later) hang a premature Biblical critic. As James on the whole, though half-heartedly, having alienated his nobles, had to give his clergy their way, Reformation could not come from the Crown. Partly by dint of political circumstances and jealousy of France, partly by aid of reforming sympathies, the Scots leaned at last towards England, and so a band of nobles, gentry, educated burgesses, and " rascal multitude," as Knox says, were to overthrow a Church long weakened by wealth, ignorance, and vice. To anticipate by thirty years, the very greed of the nobles, by starving the new Establishment, made it democratic in tendency, while the adoption by Scotland of the republican theocracy of Geneva made the Kirk democratic in constitution. Ecclesiastical art, with its appeal to the emotions, was swept away. Preaching, doctrinal and political, tended to usurp in the Kirk the place of prayer and ceremony. The popular pleasures which the ancient faith had patronised were abolished. From a holiday and feast, Sunday was turned into a lugubrious penance. The priest's power to absolve, the mystical meaning of the Eucharist, vanished, and in their place the private miraculous gifts of ministers, in prophecy, in healing, and so forth, supplied the necessary element of the " supernatural." Man was left standing, without an official priesthood to aid him, in the awful presence of God, marvelling whether he were of the elect, and subject to the " wretchlesness of unclean living," which sometimes arises from the doubt. The details of private life, the conduct of the domestic and foreign affairs of the State, were subject to the censorship of preachers, some of whom believed themselves to be, and were believed to be, directly inspired. A tyranny unexampled was imposed on life and conscience, and enforced by the civil penalties of excommunication that is, " boycotting." Yet the tyranny was a democratic tyranny, often exercised by rude men of low birth. Thus, of Churches which have a common name to be Christian, there could not be two so unlike each other as those which in England and Scotland were to arise from the ruins of Rome. Meanwhile the essentially Christian virtues of meekness, sweetness, tolerance, long-suffering, could not be pre-eminent in the chill shadow of the early Kirk: " terrible as an army with banners." The character of the Scots was such as to lead them to the Kirk which they created and starved; but the nature and iron laws and creed of that Kirk, in turn, confirmed the national character.

But, under James V., these things still " lay on the knees of the gods." It is probable, as has been seen from an event in the reign of James IV., that Lollardy had never been quite stamped out in the remote region of Kyle. It was certain that the " new learning " associated with the name of Erasmus, and with his edition of the Greek Testament, would, in Scotland, produce the necessary fruit of universal questioning. Elphinstone had placed Boece, an acquaintance of Erasmus, in his new University of Aberdeen. Panter, the Latin Secretary of James IV., was a disciple of Erasmus as far as Ciceronian as against mediaeval Latin was concerned. Archbishop Stewart, who fell at Flodden, was educated in the school of the new learning; but Hepburn's New College of St. Leonard's, in St. Andrews, was erected on the old scholastic lines. Major, the most famous of the Scottish teachers of the age, was ridiculed as an old-fashioned pedant by Rabelais, Melanchthon, and George Buchanan, but he was opposed to the absolute supremacy of popes; he held quite modern doctrines as to the absence of right divine in kings; he censured the licence of the clergy, and the indolent wealth of the monastic orders, and he was a warm friend of union with England. Only at a change of doctrine, and at the new erudition, did he pause, not advancing to the learning which deserted the mediaeval criticism for classical and sacred writers in the original Greek and Hebrew. Knox and Buchanan had both studied under Major; they were to carry his Liberalism further, and into practice.

While the new learning had already, in the hands of Erasmus and others, sapped the frame of the mediaeval world, the abuses of the mediaeval Church had, in Scotland, risen to a perhaps unequalled height. Vernacular poetry and fabliau had for ages satirised the vices of a celibate clergy, the system of " pardoners," the idleness of able-bodied monks, the luxury and ambition of prelates. But these old abuses had been so long the butts of ridicule that it seemed as if, against them, ridicule was harmless. Flodden incidentally brought matters to a head. The death of the king and many earls at Flodden left more political power than ever in the hands of the clergy. The death of the Archbishop of St. Andrews on the same field, and later of the venerated Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, in his bed, left benefices vacant in many directions. These were at once fought for in feudal war, with clerics for captains, as we have already shown in part. These militant clerics were, as a rule, cadets of the great families, so that Stewarts, Douglases, Hamiltons, and the allied houses were warring with sword and gun for the benefices of the Church. "Every man takes up abbacies that may please, they tarry not till benefices be vacant, they take them ere they fall, for they lose virtue if they touch ground." This often-quoted passage is an extract from a letter which, as early as 1515, sketched the essential characteristics of the nascent Revolution, and of the Scottish character as it was, and, still more, as it was to be. James Ingles, or English, the...