the scottish episcopal church

The principal fact about the Episcopal Church in the eighteenth-century was its devotion to the Stuart cause, and this was not just conservatism. As Peter Nockles has noted, "The element in Orthodox political theology which perhaps most distinguished pre-Tractarian High Churchmen from other church parties was an almost mystical, sacred theory of monarchy." Monarchy was given, and was one aspect of "man's dependence on God", but, as noted in the preceding chapter, that dependence could be expressed in other ways. And the failure of successive Jacobite revolts and the sufferings which they brought upon the church made it necessary to seek other ways. (1)

But the 1745 revolt was a turning-point. From that date the Stuart cause was lost. The bishops had remained cool to the Pretender from the day of his landing, for they knew they would suffer whatever the outcome. Their Jacobite loyalty was already more theological than political. But with the cause lost, many Episcopalians, especially the townspeople who could organise and finance their own chapels, proceeded to set themselves up in chapels "Qualified" under the act of 1712, which allowed Episcopal worship where the clergy were of English or Irish ordination, prayed for the new regime, and used the Book of Common Prayer. Those Qualified chapels have had a bad press in recent generations, being blamed for rejecting Scottish bishops in order to suit the state. And yet it may be argued that they demanded the right to worship without being bound to a political allegiance which they no longer held.

Peterhead is a good example. A fishing port, and later a whaling port, north-east of Aberdeen, its parish minister was Alexander Barclay who managed to keep the parish church until removed in 1695, and who from about 1699 was ministering in a separate meeting-house on Port Henry Lane, being one of the early users of the English Prayer Book. When Queen Anne died in 1714, the Pretender James VIII landed and was proclaimed at Peterhead, whereupon Barclay took over the parish church, and it was claimed against him when the revolt failed that he "kept possession thereof several months last winter; that he read a proclamation in that pulpit for levying men for the Pretender's service, that he read another proclamation for keeping a Thanksgiving for his safe arrival in Scotland". He died a few years later and was followed by Mr. Cuming, by Bishop Dunbar, and by Mr. Hepburn, and then by Robert Kilgour who remained there for over fifty years. After the 1745 revolt the Episcopalians were subjected to harsh treatment, though the church as a church had not given support to the rising. The Presbytery of Deer declined to give evidence against the Episcopalians, but the dragoons made the chapel managers pay to demolish the meeting-house; to set it on fire in the normal way would have endangered the town. An Act of Parliament forbade Episcopal worship of more than five persons, but Kilgour officiated twelve or fourteen times on each Sunday in different houses. But when it became obvious that the 1745 revolt was the last, Episcopalians ceased to be feared and restrictions were slowly relaxed. Kilgour was able to gather his congregation in his own home, and in 1765 he was writing of a new chapel being built near to, but not provocatively on the same site as, the one demolished. Further, "there should be a closed gate, and the wall raised a considerable height above. so as that, I think, the congregation could go in and out without being seen from the Broadgate...". (2)

In 1768 Kilgour became Bishop of Aberdeen, remaining in Peterhead, and two years later appointed Dean Sangster to Lonmay. As Canon Wilkinson records, "Sangster was a Jacobite to his finger-tips; and the authorities showed their disapproval of the appointment by closing the Church at Lonmay, and the Bishop's own 'chapel' at Peterhead. This really was the beginning of the English schism in the northern fishing town; for the leading members of the Bishop's congregation wanted to live at peace with the Government, and made things so hot for Kilgour that he wrote to them a furious letter of farewell and stalked off and opened a kirk of his own in another part of the town." Those who remained wrote to an Aberdeen professor who recommended William Laing, originally an Episcopalian from Fraserburgh, with some medical knowledge and qualifications in divinity, and a "strong attachment to the Church of England." He was ordained in 1771 by Bishop Traill of Down and Connor, who had taken confirmations in a Qualified chapel at Arbroath, leading Kilgour to write, "the deserters of the Church have got their teacher and Sunday last Bishop Traill was here and put him in Presbyter's orders publicly in their Chapel. Strange things !" In fact Kilgour's wife was an Arbuthnot, and the Arbuthnots had already been having services in their "Grand House" with a Qualified minister, so this cut poor Kilgour hard. (3)

But what are we to make of Bishop Traill ? Was he promoting a religion because it was sanctioned by government ? And what was he doing in Scotland ? Traill was a Scot, the son of a Church of Scotland minister at Montrose; his father had given some assistance to nearby Episcopalians, so his son may be considered an Episcopalian by conviction, with an interest in those Episcopalians who wished to be rid of the Jacobite link. Had he been devoted to establishment views, he would have been promoting the Church of Scotland while visiting his homeland. Instead he was assisting a group who wished to be Episcopalians without a political link, and thus he should have been a hero to those historians who praised Episcopalians for being free of political bias. In fact he was called an intruder.

The later history of Peterhead is of two chapels. But in 1803 when the Stuart cause was a thing of the past, Dr. Laing and his chapel joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, though they did not unite with the other chapel until 1812. By this time Kilgour's congregation had grown under Patrick Torry, minister from 1789, and Bishop of Dunkeld from 1808. But since it was customary for a bishop of a diocese in which he did not live to take his own congregation into his distant diocese, when Torry had a new chapel built on Merchant Street in 1798 that was not part of the Diocese of Aberdeen. So when the former Qualified chapel united with Torry's in 1812, that meant that Bishop Skinner lost a congregation, and as his son lamented to Bishop Torry, "things of this nature are particularly distressing to one whose nerves are by no means as strong as you wd have known them...". (4)

Next, the Highlands. There is a general impression that Highlanders were solidly Episcopalian at some time, but ceased to be so, and that lack of pastoral care was to blame. In fact, the picture appears to have been less simple. When people anywhere in Scotland wanted to be Episcopalian they managed to get themselves pastoral care, and when people did not so wish, there was nothing anyone could do about it. Of course there were some who might have been Episcopalian if pastoral care had come sooner, but their desire to be Episcopalian was a desire to be Episcopalian if it were immediately possible. And there were halfway positions; if it was not at all sure that Presbyterianism was here to stay, it was not at all sure that worshipping and even being communicant in a Presbyterian church, of which the minister had probably been ordained by a bishop before 1688, was inconsistent with being confirmed by a travelling bishop.

Such a bishop was Robert Forbes, who ministered at Leith where he wrote The Lyon in Mourning, on the sufferings of the Jacobites after 1745; he was the sort of man who asked his friends to drink from the shoes of the Young Pretender. He was also the man who re-baptised John Skinner, the young Tullochgorum, in view of Skinner's scruples about his earlier baptism, and was indignant that even Skinner who had sworn loyalty to the Hanoverians should have felt persecution. In 1762 Forbes was consecrated bishop for Ross and Caithness, though Bishop Alexander of Dunkeld wanted a man on the spot for Ross, instead of "barely keeping up an Order of Drones, who have nothing to do but continue themselves." We cannot say if bishops of Highland dioceses were non-resident because there was little enthusiasm for episcopacy in the Highlands, or whether it was the other way round. Or was the main problem lack of money ? Anyway, Forbes set off on an epic visitation, using the English Prayer Book for the first time in his life, and confirming 616 people in chapels and private houses. Finding himself in danger of arrest, he took flight to London, where he stayed with English Non-jurors, though on the road he attended choral worship in Durham Cathedral, which mightily impressed his wife who had never heard such a thing in her life. Safely back in Leith, he made another journey in 1770, and this time travelled through the Great Glen to Ballachulish, confirming 1,512 in all, and leaving a Mr. MacDonald in Argyllshire as catechist, though they wanted a clergyman. And the lack of Gaelic-speaking clergy was a constant complaint, but was this entirely the fault of the bishops ? One factor about the Highlands, and particularly the western Highlands, was that Episcopal clergy who were rabbled out in most others places were left in their parishes since there was no hope of replacing them. And this may have blurred the edges. Noone was going to send in new clergy while the old ones were still in the parish kirks. (5)

David Low was ordained priest in 1789 for Pittenweem in Fife, and consecrated bishop for Ross and Argyll in 1819, adding Moray in 1838, but giving up Argyll and the Isles, for which he provided an endowment, in 1847. He had only eleven or twelve Gaelic congregations in all his dioceses, and five Gaelic clergy, but he did his best to train others, founding the Gaelic Episcopal Society in 1831, mainly for schools, which led on to the Scottish Episcopal Church Society. Perhaps it was already too late; Low was a mover in the church and yet achieved comparatively little. (6)

Duncan McKenzie came from North Ballachulish, studied at King's College, Aberdeen, was learned in both Gaelic and Hebrew, the latter probably as part of the Hutchinsonian legacy, and took a school at Strathnairn. He was made deacon by Bishop MacFarlane in 1817, priested two years later, became famed as "Parson Duncan", and ministered in English and Gaelic at Fortrose, and also at Strathnairn, with an eight-month interlude in a mission attached to St. Mary's, Glasgow, in 1854. He then returned north and died in 1858. He compiled a catechism in Gaelic, "I fear that true Blues will not relish the work...", and wrote in 1819, "the neglect of Catechising the Children, is the ruination of Episcopacy in this country, and in others likewise." He held that Presbyterianism and Methodism were both "false and absurd", "these Sectaries are divided, sub-divided, demi-subs, etc." he had about 300 or 400 at Strathnairn, 100 at Fortrose, only 30 at Dingwall and they "Ladies and Gentlemen", and these were "members of the true and pure church". (7)

But, with the exception of the Argyll pockets, this faded away. The Highlands became Calvinist as no other part of Scotland became Calvinist, and it may be that in some subterranean way Calvinism played the same part in the Highlands as Hutchinsonianism in Aberdeenshire Episcopalianism. Both systems of thought could be held to derive from the "givenness" of monarchy as held by the Jacobites, and both systems of thought were based on set forms with no contracts. One influence was Thomas Boston, whose Marrow theology combined with an interest in Hebrew vowel-points to produce something not unlike Hutchinsonianism, and who laid the basis for a Scottish Evangelicalism. Of course there were other aspects to Highland religion, but here we find questions which cannot be answered or, if they can, not in this connection. (8)

Yet more than this must be said of Calvinism. One of the features of that doctrine was the close relationship of church and state; God was Lord not only of Saints, but of Nations, and it is for this reason that the last Calvinists who inhabit the Western Isles are so sensitive to members of the royal family attending Roman Catholic functions. In theory, if not in practice, the monarchy must be Christian, and Protestant, even if Anglicanism scarcely qualifies in their view. And this is not just a quirk; it is vital to the doctrine of the full sovereignty of God, the doctrine on which Calvinism stands, and which requires, or is thought to require, that human free will should give way to God's free will. Yet this does have something in common with the English high church view of the monarchy, even if in theory the strict Calvinist puts the monarchy under the church in a Covenant, while the strict Episcopalian puts things the other way round. And this means that Calvinist and Episcopalian are of the same stock, and this is not the stock of the Presbyterian, who holds that the church is free of the state, or should be, and preaches the "crown rights of the Redeemer", instead of linking Lord of Saints with Lord of Nations. It is all very much a dance in which every participant comes to rest at quite the opposite corner of the room from his or her starting-point.

But in practical terms the Episcopalians spent much of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries noted for their indifference to Calvinism, and this was probably their most attractive feature. Episcopacy was not much of a selling point; being weak on Calvinism meant being strong in a world which was seeing a decline in the negative view of humanity which must necessarily accompany a stress on God's full sovereignty. And that decline would soon be a rout; in the 1830s ministers of the Church of Scotland would be put out of their pulpits and manses for teaching otherwise than as Calvin did, or was believed to have done. And yet by the 1870s the Presbyterian churches in Scotland would have to admit to themselves that they no longer believed in pre-destination, and they would do this without the sky falling upon them. Of course they would lose parts of their Highland constituency, but that may have been unavoidable. (9)

This would have astonished Episcopalians, or the few who noticed it. For it was one of the assumptions of Episcopalians that Presbyterianism was so utterly Calvinist that if that doctrine ever went out of fashion, the churches which held it must wither away. And here we must mention Thomas Erskine, who was perhaps the most influential Episcopalian of the period under review. In fact Erskine was not an Episcopalian in his early years, and as a laird near Broughty Ferry on Tayside he might never have influenced anyone, but in 1828 he published The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, which was just what its name implied, and a few years later, The Brazen Serpent, which was more of the same. He became friendly with John McLeod Campell of the Church of Scotland, and with Alexander Ewing, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, with whom he talked and thought in Pollok House, near the modern Burrell Collection. But if Ewing had any idea that their labours would benefit the Episcopal Church, he was wrong. Their labours removed from the Episcopal Church its monopoly on a non-Calvinist theology, and raised up competition with it. And here statistics come into play; it is sometimes said that the Episcopal Church only increased after the repeal of the Penal Laws in 1792, and after receiving full freedom to worship. In fact real persecution had petered out much earlier, though annoying restrictions remained, and if the Episcopal Church continued to decline slowly, this was probably because it had little to recommend it. It is also said that liturgical worship was the factor that caused real growth in the nineteenth century. Undoubtedly it did, but it only began after mid-century, and the greatest rate of growth for the Episcopal Church was before 1840, when the distinguishing feature of that body was its indifference to Calvinism. (10)

Finally, there is the Church of England. It has become something of a matter of faith that the poor Scottish Episcopalians were neglected and scorned by the proud and worldly bishops of the Church of England throughout the eighteenth century. To some extent they were, but there seem always to have been bishops, usually High Churchmen, who woke in the middle of the night to worry about Episcopalians in Scotland. The Scottish bishops waxed furious that bishops should intrude into Scotland, as did Dr. Traill, and perform episcopal acts as if there were no bishops to do that. And yet there may have been more of a pattern to this than first meets the eye. Traill was a bishop of the Church of Ireland, and not of the Church of England, which made his activities less official than would otherwise have been the case. Another bishop who undertook confirmations in Scotland, Dr. Pococke, Bishop of Ossary and later of Meath, was likewise a bishop in Ireland, though himself English. And towards the end of the century, when the Scottish bishops needed a nudge, it was the Bishop of Sodor and Man who took confirmations in the Cowgate Chapel in Edinburgh. That diocese was technically not of the Church of England, and that bishop did not sit in the House of Lords, and the "Sodor" part of his title could be held to make him Scottish, so this was yet another man who could not be accused of extending the Church of England into Scotland. Of course it may be that all these men should be seen as Evangelicals rescuing good Church of England Evangelicals happening to reside in Scotland from the clutches of superstitious Scottish bishops, but the lines were not so drawn in those days. And the last bit of evidence concerns Banff. After the Scottish Episcopalians had accepted the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England at Laurencekirk in 1804, and most Qualified chapels joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, there arose a dispute at Banff. That chapel had joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, only to face litigation from a minority. Legal costs for the majority were high, and as a sign of support all the English bishops, of whatever churchmanship, though organised by the high church Samuel Horsley, made token contributions to those costs. The impression from all these events is that the English bishops were more friendly than has sometimes been asserted. (11)

Notes
(1) Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context p 50
(2) John Wilkinson, Some Chapters of Church History in Buchan p 80(Peterhead 1914); Scottish Chronicle 1920 p 419; Scottish Chronicle 1922 p 407
(3) Alex B. McGillivray, Meiklefolla : The Saga of an Episcopalian Odyssey (Inverurie 1980)
(4) J.T.Hornsby, "The Case of Mr John Glas", Records of the Scottish Church History Society, Vol 6 1938 p 117; Patrick Torry Papers, Scottish Episcopal Church Archives, 2336
(5) J.B.Craven, Journals of the Episcopal Visitations of the Right Rev. Robert Forbes, M.A. (London 1886); William Ferguson, "The Problems of the Established Church in the West Highlands and Islands in the Eighteenth Century", Records of the Scottish Church History SocietyVol 17 1972
(6) William Blatch, A Memoir of the Rt. Rev. David Low (London and Edinburgh 1855); Scottish Guardian 1932 p 198
(7) Scottish Guardian 1930 pp 580-581, 602; Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal 1853 p 260, 1855 p 77
(8) Donald Beaton, "The Marrow of Modern Divinity", Records of the Scottish Church History Society Vol 1 1926
(9) A.L.Drummond and James Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843-1874 p 250 (Edinburgh 1975)
(10) Henry H. Henderson, Erskine of Linlathen (Edinburgh and London 1899)
(11) Craven, Robert Forbes p 162; Bishops' Papers, Scottish Episcopal Church Archives 2224; Mather, High Church Prophet p 137

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