the scottish episcopal church

A New History, by gavin white

Preface

1
Tullochgorum

2
Eighteenth Century

3
Seabury

4
Worship

5
Edinburgh

6
Oxford Movement

7
Glasgow

8
Publications

9
Church or Province

10
'English Episcopal'

11
Schools

12
Social Service

13
Synods and Councils

14
Clergy Training

15
A Small Dog Barking

16
As Others See Us

17
Women

18
Society

19
Second World War and After

Selected bibliography

Links

If there were few Episcopalians or those who would later be so described in much of the country after 1690, Edinburgh was full of them. Before 1745 there were no less than thirteen Episcopalian meeting-houses in the town, of which two were in Carubbers' Close. In 1708 seventeen clergymen were "condemned for officiating, and one was imprisoned in the common gaol." From 1712 it was possible for a congregation to "qualify" under a Toleration Act if their clergyman took the oaths of allegiance to the new regime, and if they prayed for Queen Anne, and used the Book of Common Prayer which was, of course, uncommon even amongst Episcopalians in Scotland. But it is not clear how many meeting-houses met these requirements, or did not, or tried to go half-way. After the 1745 rising the rules were tightened, and only English or Irish ordinations recognised by the state. Episcopalians wasted away. (1)

St. Paul's in Skinner's Close seems to have existed in 1712 under a minister named Barclay, and in 1754 it was fully organised under a Dr. James Grant, a clergyman also practising medicine. Formerly of Inveresk, he had "qualified" under the law and been supposedly licensed by the Bishop of London. He later went to England. The trustees were leading merchants and lawyers and other notables. They possessed "altar cloths, candlesticks, basses basoms, curtains, rods, and cleeks thereof, the Books of the Chapell...", and rented their premises. Grant owned the various items of tackle, which he sold to the managers who thus acquired shares, and a Charles Butter became junior minister, Grant resigning in 1764. There had been 133 seat-rents in 1755, so this was no small affair. Butter was followed by Rudd, there was a junior minister named Crawford, but in 1774 this chapel was joining with others to form the Cowgate Chapel, "But some, like Dr. Nath. Spens, preferred to join Old St. Paul's, Carruber's Close, for reasons that can only be surmised." But surmise we shall not. (2)

Then there was Baron Smith's Chapel, which began as far back as 1702, or in another account 1708, though in what form is uncertain. It was ministered to by a Mr. Blair, who later qualified, and it met in Half-Moon Close, under the castle battery of that name. In 1722 it re-opened as the New Chapel at the foot of Blackfriars Wynd, but still known as Baron Smith's - - he was a certain John Smith who came to Scotland as Lord Chief Baron of the new Court of Exchequer, wanted Prayer Book services, and cast upon the chapel a mantle of unimpeachable loyalty to Queen Anne, not to mention financial rectitude. When the Pretender took Edinburgh in 1745, the minister, a Mr. Fowlis from Essex, prayed for "the King" without naming him as George, for which he was dismissed when the Pretender withdrew, though apparently not before. If he was being cautious, so were the managers. By 1771 there were about a thousand Episcopalians worshipping in three "qualified" chapels, St. Paul's in Skinner's Close, St. Andrew's in Carubber's Close a mere step away, and Baron Smith's, so they joined to build the new chapel on the Cowgate between the New Town and the Old. The stone was laid in Doctor's Yards by the Commander of the Forces in North Britain, marked "Aedificii Sacr, Ecclesiae Episc. Angliae", and it opened in 1777. This was a major congregation with Myles Cooper from America as senior minister, and two others as juniors. But some of the Baron Smith element were not happy in their new home, and returned to Blackfriars Wynd where they lingered on until 1818. (3)

When the Scottish Episcopal Church had abandoned the Jacobite cause, the Cowgate could accept its bishop and did so in 1805. But the area was turning into a slum, and in 1815 they discussed union with the Charlotte Chapel. This came to nothing, so the Cowgate people bought a site on York Place at the eastern end of the New Town. Their old building was sold to a group who intended to make it a Church of Scotland chapel, but it became a Relief Church and, with a new and imposing front, St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church. The York Place chapel which opened in 1818 under the name of St. Paul, taken from altar plate brought from Skinner's Close, was a scaled-down copy of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, and was consecrated by Bishop Sandford, "solemnly disclaiming any authority but such as was exercised by the Bishops of the Primitive Church." The congregation took with them a bell which had gone to the Cowgate from Holyrood Abbey, a Snetzler organ, and the bones of a former incumbent named Carr. (4)

But York Place already had an Episcopal chapel in St. George's, largely founded by the Steuart family who left Old St. Paul's in 1792 after the death of the Pretender. It began in a room over a pastry-cook's in West Register Street, with a minister named A.Cleeve who qualified just before the Penal Acts were repealed. Their chapel, designed by James Adam and completed in 1793, was always vaguely military, and from 1837 was used by the troops at the Castle. Its chief claim to fame was the presence of Sir Walter Scott in its pews from 1810 until 1825, perhaps because Cleeve had been his tutor, though he also managed to be a Church of Scotland elder at one stage of his life. From 1810 until 1841 the minister was R.Q.Shannon who "never went to church unless in full dress, with silk stockings, knee small-clothes, and dress shoes", and was the last minister in Edinburgh to wear, though only occasionally, "the clerical boots, reaching above the knees". The one thing clergy of his day did not wear was a clerical collar. But the military left and there was not much else, so when their rector died in 1932 they moved to St. Paul's, which became St. Paul's and St. George's. And they took Sir Walter Scott's pew with them. (5)

Then there was the Charlotte Chapel, later St. John's, Prince's Street. That began in 1792 when Daniel Sandford came to Edinburgh to minister on Church of England lines, in the same room over the pastry-cook just vacated by St. George's. In 1897 they moved to Charlotte Square and a Charlotte Chapel which was re-built on larger lines in 1811. After the failure to unite with the Cowgate they sold shares for a new church, the banker Sir William Forbes being the main figure, and in 1818 opened an opulent Gothic church at the west end of Princes' Street, while Charlotte Chapel was sold to the Baptists. St. John's was wealthy and cultured, though it had more rows over organs, choirs, and music than any other ten churches in Scotland. And it had Dean Ramsay, who bestrode Edinburgh and the Episcopal church as a clerical colossus. (6)

E.B.Ramsay was born to a family of lairds in Aberdeen, spent his boyhood in rural Yorkshire, studied at Cambridge, was seven years a curate in Somerset, was then curate at St. George's in Edinburgh, was briefly at what became Old St. Paul's, and finally went to St. John's as curate in 1827. He succeeded Bishop Sandford as minister in 1830, and stayed till his death in 1872, being dean from 1846. He was a middle-of-the-road man, which has not made him popular with the romantics, but he wished to keep the Episcopal Church from being used by English high churchmen as a flag of convenience, while holding off the Drummond faction who wanted to scare the moderate element into their arms. After Ramsay's death, D.T.K.Drummond, who had tried and failed to unseat him in 1858, presented himself as Ramsay's virtual successor. He had enjoyed with Ramsay a "personal friendship of more than forty years' standing", he had been a boy at St. George's when Ramsay preached evangelical doctrines which were "strange and new" to Edinburgh, and Ramsay's doctrines of the Eucharist agreed with those of the "great reformers of the Church of England"! In fact Ramsay had made it clear that "if there is a religious body upon earth that fully and absolutely deserves the character of schismatical, it is your Drummond secession." (7)

Ramsay's fame came mainly from his Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, derived from lectures published in batches and then cobbled together. These appeared in no less than thirty British editions, the last being in 1928, as well as American. They read oddly to-day. Scots appear as loyal, hard-working, and frequently amusing. They could be led by either an anglicised land-owner class, as Episcopalians generally expected, or a professional class, as Presbyterians did - - it was perhaps his broadness on this issue which made him so widely popular. And he was optimistic, as Victorians tended to be. He rejoiced that public drunkenness was on the wane, and noted that Scots had always used too much snuff, while the vice of the English was over-eating. The upper classes who were once so irreligious were no longer so, though the middle and lower classes had not much changed. And, though he sometimes used the word "English" to mean English, he could also, like many of his day, including Scots, use it to mean British. And he used the word "Anglican" to mean, not Episcopalian or Church of England, but English excluding Scottish, referring to an Anglican Methodist and Anglican land tenure. But above all else, Ramsay rejoiced in the decline of coarseness, and a new sensitivity. (8)

Ramsay, who did so much to set the government and finances of the Episcopal Church on a firm basis, and was the natural choice to preach before the Queen when she visited Edinburgh, might have been expected to have become a bishop. There was a reason why he did not. He was subject to bouts of depression and so declined the diocese of New Brunswick, offered to him by his friend Gladstone, and much later he declined election to Glasgow and to Edinburgh. Yet he provided stability in times of change. He could see the high churchmen making gains around him, and this he regretted, but he quietly adjusted himself and his congregation to moderate high church ways. He was an angliciser, and he tried to keep the Scottish Liturgy in the background lest ordinary Church of England people should panic, and he guarded the links with the Church of England. And yet he did all this as a Scot, using the English connection for the Scottish Episcopal Church and making a place for Scotland in an increasingly English world. (9)

Of course a rich parish with seat-rents (only abolished in 1958) needed a place for the poor. All Saints at Tollcross was founded in 1854, while St. Michael's grew up around St. Andrew's Girls' Home from 1865 along, says A.W.Campbell, "distinctly baroque lines", with a later building on Hill Square. In 1965 St.Michael's united with All Saints at Tollcross. St. Michael's so annoyed Bishop Walpole that in 1927 he refused to institute a new rector unless he abandoned Benediction (a blessing of the people with the reserved sacrament held high); they compromised on a more modest version of the same. But this brouhaha had earlier produced the silliest sentence in Scottish Episcopal history, in a little book bluntly called Benediction in Scotland ; "... one has always remembered that the desire for such devotions, often springs from an intense personal love of our Lord in devout Catholics, often the expression of that love, just as that love finds expression in an Evangelical in the work of missions to the heathen." (10)

Which leads on to Old St. Paul's. It is said that Dean Rose led the Jacobite remnant out of St. Giles's and down to Carruber's Close, but it cannot be certain that the congregation he formed, out of so many, was the one which later became Old St. Paul's, called "old" to prevent confusion with York Place. What is undoubted is that Old St. Paul's later represented the Jacobite strain in Edinburgh, though this was probably forgotten in the nineteenth century. That century brought the chapel new life. John Alexander introduced the Scottish Liturgy, though only at an early hour, in 1846 when the new high church movement was just getting under way. But it was not getting underway with all; the vestry were opposed, and Alexander and most of the congregation stalked out to form St. Columba's, their attempt to take the communion plate with them being frustrated by a flurry of lawsuits. The vestry, described as a vestry without a congregation, though some of the poor remained, were constantly bringing litigation against the Bishop, the Primus, the Episcopal Fund Trustees, and, as a last resort, each other. (11)

As minister they took a certain G.M.West ordained in Ohio, and bombarded Bishop Terrot with demands that he should be licensed. Terrot was seeking legal advice about West when William Edwards, the dominant vestryman, met him dead drunk in the street, he having severely beaten his wife. In fact West was a legendary character in America, having been ordained to raise money for Kenyon College, of which he was the first graduate, though before studies commenced, and having asserted that since the Bishop of Ohio had given him a blessing when he made him deacon, and another when he made him priest, and yet another in a farmhouse before sending him to Britain to raise money, the last blessing must have made him a bishop ! There was a subsidiary scandal in all this, about Edwards' uncle's late butler, but that need not detain us. Then the Episcopal Fund Trustees locked the vestry out of the chapel. In 1869 there was no quorum for the vestry, and their minister resigned through not having been paid, and by 1874 they were wandering from one rented hall to another, as the old chapel was unsafe. Next year David Smart became their minister and things went better; by 1880 a hundred members petitioned that Smart be made permanent. But the Walker sisters had left money for a poor chapel as well as a cathedral, and St. Paul's was selected to be that chapel. This opened up all kinds of new possibilities, requiring a new clergyman. In 1883 R.J.B.Mitchell-Innes, of an old Edinburgh Episcopal family, was appointed incumbent, while Smart went off to pastures, if not greener, at least poorer. (12)

Mitchell-Innes changed everything. He had returned to Scotland from high church circles in London, he knew what he wanted, and he saw that he got it. This was hard on the existing worshippers, but he did keep some of them, and made up for those who left by attracting those of high church tendencies from other churches. In 1884 came candles on the altar and a surpliced choir, in 1885 coloured stoles, in 1886 non-communicants were asked not to leave after the Prayer for the Church, though some kept doing so until at least 1898. The main service became Holy Communion after Morning Prayer, with the music and sermon being gradually moved to Holy Communion and Morning Prayer left to wither on the vine. There were restrictions on communicating at late celebrations, white linen vestments came in 1880, wafer-bread followed in 1892, "prepared by religious persons" and not vulgar bakers, while coloured chasubles finally arrived in 1897. But in that year Mitchell-Innes moved on to Christ Church, Glasgow, and was replaced by A.E.Laurie, who left things very much as he found them until his death in 1937. Old St. Paul's did not become "advanced" or Anglo-Catholic until after the Second World War. And the congregation grew. In 1897 there were 1313 adherents, of whom slightly more than half were communicants, though only a quarter of the congregation were there on the average Sunday. The new church, built in stages, seated 350 before extensions in 1905, but it was seldom crowded. (13)

A.E.Laurie was interested in everything and everyone, and he had a thoughtful mind which he opened to his congregation, even when his thoughts were only half-formed. Mitchell-Innes had expected family life to depend totally on church and clergy, but Laurie had a vision of the incarnate Christ influencing society. Before Old St. Paul's he had attended Christ Church on Trinity Road, and it is said that that was probably his natural home, with Catholic teaching but not much ritual. He had been lay-reader at Old St. Paul's, then curate, then rector, and to spend his entire ministry there may have been unwise.

His ideas were not those of ordinary Catholic Anglicans. In 1904 he wrote that the spirit of the time was "breaking down all the old more or less unreal conventions", and in 1908 he wrote of a "divorce of the people from an ecclesiasticism which has ceased to be religious. For my part, I consider it gain. Now, at last, we are beginning to see the real truth." Perhaps the key to his thought is a sentence of 1913, about "the Manhood of the Risen and Ascended Christ" around which social reformers should unite. And when he went to war in 1914, he wrote that he was "at long last beginning to discover man...this must first be reached before one can discover God." Like others, he expected war to lead to better things, and wrote of "such courage and self-forgetfulness as dignifies the Race and must surely purify the nation." But when only a fifth of his division was left standing after the Somme, he sounded a different note. Nonetheless, he still believed that those forged in the trenches would build a new nation and, "It is to the organised Church at Home that the men will turn for guidance...". After the war, Laurie warned his congregation that their worship and life must change to accommodate the returned soldiers who would change society, but those soldiers who sought to change society had little use for the church. Old St. Paul's stayed as it was. And Laurie stayed there, always battling for the weak and a light to his generation. (14)

But one last thing must be said of Old St. Paul's. In 1907 a history of the church stressed the Jacobite connection, long since forgotten or swept under the carpet, and it began to be thought that Samuel Seabury had worshipped there as a medical student in 1753. This was based on an anecdote in an American book published a century later, though even that did not mention any particular chapel. The story had Seabury following someone through the streets so as not to attract notice, as if the location of a chapel could be secret. And that anecdote may have been derived from an even less credible anecdote about the Scottish boyhood of the second Bishop of Maryland; he was supposed to have been led blindfold through Keith lest he should divulge the location of the chapel ! In fact, Seabury was in Edinburgh as a student for the Church of England ministry, supported by S.P.G., and would hardly have joined a congregation associated with a recent rebellion. Had he done so, he could never have been ordained. (15)

St. Columba's-by-the-Castle, meanwhile, developed with John Alexander and a core of people from Old St. Paul's, though we are told they were outnumbered by a high church exodus form the other St. Paul's. The work on Johnston Terrace by the Castle had begun in 1844 as a school in the Lawnmarket; this outgrew the premises and a new school was constructed from 1845 with stones largely drawn from the old chapel of Mary of Guise - - such things meant much to Victorians. The chapel was over the school, and that became St. Columba's-by-the-Castle. The school was a pioneer "Ragged School" with nine hundred children not only taught, on the Madras monitor system of Dr. Bell of St. Andrews, but also clothed and fed. It was closed in 1880 when board schools made it unnecessary. The chapel became known not only for using the Scottish Liturgy, against great objections, and for full choral services, but for its social outreach. There were Sisters of Charity, and there was a Guild of St. Giles, which led to St. Giles' Printing Works, and a mission in Penicuik led to what is now St. James'. (16)

Of course each move of a church to a better location meant that the poorer worshippers were left behind, and provision had to be made for them. So the move from the Cowgate to York Place led to the opening of St. Andrew's, Holyrood Road, which had the dubious distinction of being vandalised by the Ku Klux Klan in 1924, and once in St. Paul's, York Place, that congregation set up St. Barnabas' for the poorer members who joined them in their new home. In the same way St. John's had set up All Saints', and Old St. Paul's was revived as the poorer relation of the new cathedral by the Walker Trust. (17)

This leaves St.Mary's Cathedral, the legacy of the Misses Barbara and Mary Walker, of the Cowgate Chapel, whose grandfather had been minister at Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, and whose father was a legal man who bought up the Drumsheugh and Coates estates from 1788 as a speculation. It paid off, and all of his children died childless and rich. The two sisters moved from the Royal Mile to the Manor House of Coates, next to the present Cathedral, and sold land and collected feu rents. It had been intended to replace various chapels with a great church just below the Mound, a cathedral for the New Town as St. Giles' was for the old, but St. John's and St.Paul's were built instead, and by 1850 the sisters were planning a really large church in memory of Mary Drummond their mother, whose name it was given. From 1858 the projected building was called "the Cathedral", and it was seen as a cathedral for the entire Episcopal Church, the adjective "Metropolitan", meaning of an archbishop, being used well into this century. The architect was Gilbert Scott, and the central tower has been described as "a structural masterpiece". Opened for worship in 1879, it lacked west towers until 1915 and 1917, and Bishop Walpole rejoiced that he could have built twelve mission churches with the money spent on these towers, but believed that the missionary influence of a completed cathedral would be greater. Perhaps he was right; so many mission churches have since closed that history may have justified him in ways that he could not have foreseen. (18)