Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  The Scottish Kirk held the current doctrine in its extremest form, and for a manual of practice had recourse to the Bible. She interpreted it arbitrarily and literally, forgetting Donne’s pregnant saying that “sentences in Scripture, like hairs in horses’ tails, concur in one root of beauty and strength, but, being plucked out one by one, serve only for springes and snares.” Finding little warrant for force in the New Testament, her divines had recourse to the Old Testament, where they discovered encouraging precedents in the doings of Elijah and Hezekiah and Josiah. This constant resort to the Mosaic dispensation encouraged a stiff and autocratic temper. Cromwell’s famous appeal—”We should be pitiful . . . and tender towards all though of different judgments. . . . Love all, tender all, cherish and countenance all, in all things that are good. . . . And if the poorest Christian, the most mistaken Christian, shall desire to live peaceably and quietly under you — I say, if any shall desire but to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him be protected” — would have sounded in their ears like a fearful blasphemy. Their church was a theocracy, and that involves both a claim to infallibility and a meticulous physical discipline applied in the spiritual sphere. They held the keys of heaven and hell, and had power to deliver the erring over to Satan and to anticipate by exemplary punishment in this world the torments of the next.

  With such a creed there could be no real delimitation between the spiritual and the secular, between Church and State. The right of the Kirk to dominate personal and family life was soon extended to the duty of interference with civil government. Indeed, the rejection of toleration and the belief in uniformity led inevitably to a usurpation of civil power. The Kirk believed, as Catholicism believed, in a single church, a complete and exclusive system to which a single separatist was anathema. In her zeal for uniformity she in no way differed from Laud, though she preferred another pattern. The secularization of politics did not fully come about till the toleration of religious variety had first been established. When the Kirk usurped powers which seem to us in no way to belong to her province, she was following the prevailing tendency of the age. She was true to the mediæval idea of one church, one rule. Against the universal claim of Rome it was necessary to establish a counter-universalism. Presbytery professed, as Rome professed, to be based upon jus divinum, and therefore there could be no limits to its sovereignty. With Catholic and Anglican it waged truceless war, but it drew, like them, from the Middle Ages, and accepted the same kind of dogmatic sanction. High Cavalier and high Covenanter talked the same language, though with different applications, and divine right was the watchword of both. To each the man who looked upon the world with a cool secular eye and talked sober reason was worse than their avowed opponents; he was a heretic in the fundamentals, the ultimate blasphemer.

  The Scottish ministers have fared ill with later historians, except in the copious literature of their own communion. The wisest and greatest, Robert Leighton, belongs to a later date, and soon deserted the manse of Newbattle. They have been represented as violent and illiterate peasants, mob-orators rather than divines. As a matter of fact, they sprang either from the landed gentry and the clergy, or from well-to-do burgher families. Robert Traill had for his father a gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Prince Henry; Robert Blair was the son of an Ayrshire laird, and his mother was a Mure of Rowallan; James Durham was an Angus proprietor; Robert Baillie was of the Baillies of Lamington; Robert Douglas was a son of that George Douglas who helped Queen Mary to escape from Lochleven; James Guthrie was a son of Guthrie of that ilk. Almost all had received a sound education in the humanities as well as in theology, and some, like Robert Boyd and Alexander Henderson, Hugh Binning and Samuel Rutherford, were notable scholars. Among them, too, were many types of mind and temperament, from the political shrewdness of Robert Baillie and the quaint humanity of William Guthrie of Fenwick to the fanatic hardness of Nevoy and the oriental lusciousness of Samuel Rutherford.

  They preached a creed which, in most of its details, is now forgotten, and the language of which is fantastic or ridiculous to our ears. They laid down as the necessary and universal progress towards salvation a rigid curriculum of experiences—”exercise,” “law-work,” “discovery of interest,” “damps,” “challenge,” “outgate,” “assurance.” Well might a later seventeenth-century Scotsman exclaim: “I doubt it hath occasioned much unnecessary disquiet to some holy persons that they have not found such a regular and orderly transaction in their souls as they have seen described in the books. . . . God hath several ways of dealing with the souls of men, and it sufficeth if the work be accomplished whatever the methods have been.” But behind their narrowness and their legal jargon we can see in many the true exaltation of the saint. Among the crudities and absurdities of their sermons and biographies there are passages of apostolic power, visions such as George Fox records in his journal, which led them to an ecstasy of praise, moments of deep tenderness towards the souls of their flocks. They must be judged by their work, and beyond doubt they gave to the Scottish people a moral seriousness, a conception of the deeper issues of life, and an intellectual ascesis, gifts which may well atone for their many infirmities.

  Yet there is much to be atoned for, and the immediate result of their predominance was not less disastrous than beneficent. “Deliver me, O Lord,” was the cry of Archbishop Leighton, “from the errors of wise men, yea, and of good men.” They perverted the Gospel into a thing of subtle legal conundrums; they made morality difficult by destroying its rational basis; they took the colour out of life for their people by condemning the innocencies of the world with a more than monastic austerity; they inflamed the superstitions of the country by peopling it with a fanciful pandemonium. If any one has the patience to labour through a dozen volumes of their sermons, he will be aghast at the childishness and irreverence of much of their teaching. Like an African witch-doctor, they “smelled out” offenders, and they were the principal upstay of witch-burning. Miracles and portents adorned their path, and natural laws were suspended to point their lessons. They magnified their office till they hedged themselves round with a bastard divinity. The clouds of their dogmatic terrors darkened the world for their hearers, and condemned weak spirits to religious mania. Their neurotic supernaturalism, which saw judgments and signs in the common incidents of life, weakened in the people the power of rational thought. If they gave manhood and liberty to Scotland, they did much to sap the first and shackle the second. Condemning natural pleasures and affections, they drew a dark pall over the old merry Scottish world, the world of the ballads and the songs, of frolics and mummings and “blithesome bridals,” and, since human nature will not be denied, drove men and women to sinister and perverted outlets. In a word, they established over the whole of human life, alike in its public duties and in its most intimate private affairs, a harsh and senseless tyranny, and against them, as the delegates of heaven, there was no appeal. Tougher spirits might emerge unscathed and even fortified, but the frail were warped and demented. Yet it was the strongest thing in Scotland, and presently in all the Lowlands it had made good its sway over every class of the people; ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.

  III

  To balance the claims of the Kirk there was no strong apparatus of secular government. The so-called Parliament, with its three estates of clergy, tenants-in-chief, and burgesses, delegated its power in the Lords of the Articles, who had the sole right to initiate business, and the selection of whom was controlled by the king. It was neither representative nor free. “The Crown manipulated elections, determined the composition of the committee through which all business must pass before it reached the throne, sternly limited the time allowed for the discussion of the committee’s report, forced a long series of measures through the House at a single sitting, and cajoled or threatened opponents.” The Privy Council, the equivalent of the Cabinet, was almost identical with the Lords of the Articles. The Convention of Royal Burghs was a kind of minor parliament charged with burgh concerns,
and its existence did much to distract the interest of burgess members from national affairs. In all this mechanism there was no authority which could act as a makeweight to the growing popular authority of the Kirk, guard the liberties of Scotland against royal encroachment, or, on behalf of the nation at large, control the traditional high-handedness of the nobility.

  The Scottish nobles from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century were probably the most turbulent, rapacious, and ignorant in Europe. Resolute champions of indefensible privileges, they resisted all the reforming efforts of their kings, and were the death of more than one sovereign. They had not even the merit of patriotism, for often they were in arms against their own land, and Scottish history is stored with ugly tales of treason. Their prime foes had been the king and the church, and they had always cast longing eyes at the fat abbeys and the rich glebes of their clerical rivals. The Reformation gave them their chance. Two-thirds of the church plunder fell into their hands, and their Protestantism was mainly determined by self-interest. Knox complained, not without reason, that in all the Lords of the Congregation there was not one righteous man. A few became dogmatic enthusiasts, but the majority cared as little for the difference between priest and minister as for the Ten Commandments. Nor were they, like many of the great families of England — like Pembroke in Wiltshire, or Stanley in Lancashire, or Beaufort on the West Marches — magnates who performed useful duties of local administration. Their mediæval satrapies were antagonistic to the first principles of a modern state. Knox had struggled to win from the old church property reasonable endowments for his new Kirk, but the tithes and the lands went to the nobles and barons, who were determined not to disgorge. Their opposition to the Anglicanism of Charles was largely due to the fact that it involved sooner or later a redivision of ecclesiastical plunder; they would vehemently oppose any church except one which they could starve.

  At first sight it would seem that there could be little in common between a proud Kirk, with a great popular following, laying down the austerest rule of life, and a nobility which was irreligious and oppressive, which clung to wealth which Knox had destined for the Kirk, and of which the Kirk was sorely in need. Indeed it was only the blundering of the king that prevented a breach between the two, with the clergy for once on the royal side. The tithe had become a crying scandal, for the feudal lords, to whom it had passed, could levy it in kind much as they pleased and when they pleased, so that the tenant could not get in his harvest till the lord had taken his toll. In 1625 Charles undertook the work of reform. He removed the judges from the Privy Council, that they might have time for their proper business of the Court of Session, and by the Act of Revocation of 1625 he attempted to recover as much as he could of the old church property for national uses. In the most modern way he appointed a royal commission to work out the details; the teinds were to afford a living wage to the ministers, and the holders of church lands were in future to pay rent to the Crown. Mr. Gardiner calls the measure the “one successful act of Charles’s reign,” and considers that it “weakened the power of the nobility, and strengthened the prerogative in the only way in which the prerogative deserved to be strengthened . . . by the popularity it gained through carrying into effect a wise and beneficent reform.” But no popularity followed. Perhaps the money-getting motive was too clear in the reform, for it was instituted after the English Parliament had refused to grant adequate supplies; perhaps the royal interference with property suggested further revolutionary designs. At any rate the king got no gratitude from the Kirk, and he incurred the deadly displeasure of the aristocracy. The way was prepared for an alliance between the two contraries, who were agreed only in their stubborn conservatism — nobles desperately intent on holding what their fathers had won, and churchmen desperately in earnest about their spiritual prerogatives. It was a very pretty powder-magazine for the inevitable spark.

  The time was one of deep poverty for the common people. The bonnet-lairds and the tacksmen, the labourers and shepherds, the petty craftsmen in the villages, even the burghers in the little towns, lived very near the edge of destitution. The rudimentary and wasteful system of agriculture, with its sodden in-fields and its rank out-fields, its wretched grain, its shallow ploughing, placed the farmers at the mercy of an indifferent climate and a poor soil — for the richer valley bottoms were uncultivable from lack of drainage. Stock was in no better case, for the cattle were stunted and perpetually lean, and the sheep were moving masses of tar and vermin. At the close of each winter the spectre of starvation came very near to man and beast. Idyllic pictures have been drawn of the Covenanting peasant as a stalwart fellow in good homespun clothes and blue bonnet, and of his house as a snug dwelling like an illustration to The Cotter’s Saturday Night. The truth seems to be that the physique of most was early ruined by poor feeding and incessant toil, that they had small regard for bodily cleanliness, that their clothes were coarse at the best and generally ragged, and that their dwellings resembled a Connemara cabin. Recurrent plagues carried off their thousands, and foul habits and a diet of thin brose and bannocks weakened the survivors. Nasty, brutish, and short was the life of the seventeenth-century Lowlander. Education did something to counterbalance the economic defects, but it is easy to exaggerate the extent of Scottish education at this era. Kirkton, indeed, records that before 1660 “every village had a school, every family almost had a Bible, yea, in most of the country all the children of age could read the Scriptures”; but Kirkton was laudator temporis acti, and his testimony is not borne out by parish and burgh records. Knox’s great scheme remained largely an unrealized ideal; the report of the commission of 1627 reveals very many parishes in the Lowlands and the Borders without school or schoolmaster; and the remedial Acts of 1633 and 1643 were for the most part a dead letter. The fact that the new religion was based on private Bible-reading was indeed an inducement to literacy, but in the very places where theological interest was keenest we find a surprising proportion unable to write, while Wodrow was told by his father that in his day “the generality by far in the country . . . could not read.”

  There was no middle-class to act as a force of social persistence and a sober nursery of new civic ideas, like the great bourgeoisie which was the strength of English Puritanism. Scottish commerce was a petty thing; her noblesse de robe were reactionary manipulators of a reactionary law; her burghers and bonnet-lairds were too near the peasant; she had no parallel class to the yeomanry and merchantry of England. If strife came it would be conducted between king, nobles, and Kirk, with the bulk of the people obedient under the spiritual narcotics of the last. There was little hope for that fruitful political dispute which is the basis of a free polity, but for wild and barren explosions there was an uncomfortable amount of powder.

  IV

  1633-35

  The spark came from a blundering king. Charles had been born and educated in Scotland, and, according to Clarendon, was “always an immoderate lover of the Scottish nation”; but he had not his father’s knowledge of the national temperament, and he had for his advisers on Scottish affairs men altogether out of touch with the people. When he came to Scotland in the summer of 1633 to be crowned, he had already estranged the nobility by his perfectly just and reasonable treatment of the tithes question. The visit revealed the existence of an opposition even in the packed Scots Parliament, and, since Laud was in his company, the coronation ceremonies roused suspicion in Presbyterian breasts. In August of that year Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, and entered upon the policy of reclaiming Scottish barbarism to his ideal of ecclesiastical decency. A year later the Court of High Commission was established by royal warrant, and the number of bishops in the Privy Council was increased to seven. In January 1635 Archbishop Spottiswoode was made Chancellor in succession to Kinnoull, the first time since the Reformation that the office had been given to a churchman.

  The Scottish hierarchy of the time has been portrayed, perhaps, in darker colours than it deserves. Spottiswoode himself, and m
en like Forbes and Maxwell, Sydserf and Wedderburn, were liberal in doctrine and exemplary in private life, and saintliness was the prerogative of neither party. But the bishops for good and ill were out of tune with their countrymen; they represented a theological creed which was in advance of their age, and an ecclesiastical creed which lagged behind it, for they did not appreciate the passion for spiritual autonomy which had become part of the national mood. They were impossible as mediators, since the best of them talked a language unintelligible to that age, and the worst of them shared in Laud’s perilous hieratic dreams. They might be intellectually tolerant like their leader, but they were ecclesiastically dogmatic. Their sudden rise to political power roused the extreme suspicion of the Kirk, it offended the pride of the nobles, and it stirred the opposition of even the staunchest moderates. “That Churchmen have competency,” wrote Montrose’s guardian and brother-in-law, Lord Napier, “is agreeable to the law of God and man; but to invest them into great estates and principal offices of the State, is neither convenient for the Church, for the King, nor for the State. . . . Histories witness what troubles have been raised to kings, what tragedies amongst subjects, in all places where Churchmen were great. Our reformed Churches, having reduced religion to the ancient primitive truth and simplicity, ought to beware that corruption enter not into their Church in the same gate.”