A Great Grievance. Laurence A.B. Whitley
for help to Johnston, who was legal adviser to the Assembly. On hearing that a similar scenario was unfolding in another parish, Johnston considered the situation serious enough for him to leave his sick-bed to make, as he saw it, a definitive statement of the Kirk’s position on presentations, before things got out of hand.39
Johnston of Wariston’s Statement
Johnston’s paper is lengthy, but it provides a remarkable insight into what the leading figure in the Church at the time was thinking, and is worthy of attention. Its salient points can be summarized:
(i). only fanatics could think of raising, unnecessarily, questions of national significance at a time when the Church is trying to settle after the recent upheavals;
(ii). swearing to maintain the Kirk’s discipline is not the same as maintaining the Book of Discipline; there has been no specific instruction for the book to be subscribed by congregations, and in any case, there are also other guides to doctrine and discipline contained in past Acts of Assembly, which the Kirk could equally refer to—indeed, where an Act and the book conflict, the Act is to be preferred; whatever the Books of Discipline might say, the clear thread of parliamentary legislation since 1560 has been to uphold the rights of patrons, moreover, the Assembly itself has virtually done the same; even the Assembly of 1581, which entered the text of the second Book in its registers, contradicted it soon afterwards, by recording a requirement for all presentations to be directed to presbyteries; repeatedly, in subsequent Assemblies, the language of the minutes seem to suggest that presentations are an accepted fact of life; in summation, it is obvious from observation and from Acts of Parliament and Assembly, that the practice suggested by the Book “hes never come in practise, is obsolet, and the contrarie thairof continuallie tolerated.”40
(iii). the complainers are mistaken about the form of the book; only the first ten chapters contain directives, and none of these expressly condemns patronage; in chapter eleven, abuses are complained of, and in chapter twelve, supplication is made to have matters like patronage reformed; however, the abandonment of presentations was only sought, not enacted; this means the Covenant oath can hardly apply to something that ought to be done, but only to matters which are actually enjoined;
(iv). the complainers are also mistaken about the book’s use of the word presentation; in present usage, a presentation is separate from collation and institution; in earlier times however, it is clear, from Acts of Parliament and Assembly, that a settlement by presentation meant it took place without any collation, admission or examination by the Church at all; this habit of patrons planting benefices pleno jure [with full authority], was an issue of great annoyance to the Church, as may be seen from the resolutions of Assembly from 1563 onwards; yet patronage per se was not condemned, indeed, surely someone whose presentation is directed to the presbytery, who is then tried before the congregation and admitted by the presbytery, cannot be said to be intruded upon that people; be that as it may, Johnston personally thinks that a presbytery should resist implementing a presentation where the people are unanimously averse to the candidate, and that, on the face of it, the congregation has a right of negation (which should not nullify a patron’s right of patronage any more than the presbytery’s limited power of veto does, since, after all, he can continue to present other candidates); on the other hand, if a parish’s opposition is obviously “of will, and not of witt,”41 then presbytery should regulate its obstinacy; in summation, he does not think patronage is incompatible with election— it is like a parent or guardian initiating a marriage for his ward; in such a situation, it does not matter who is the proposer of the match, as long as it proceeds on the basis of consent;
(v). if the complainers wish to invoke the Covenant, let them remember that by it they swore to eschew the type of dangerous and divisive conduct they are now pursuing, “quhairof treulie I know none so great as this war to putt the Nobilitie, Gentrie, and Ministrie, be the eares togider [i.e., at variance];”42 further, the Covenant binds them to seek, by all means lawful, to recover the purity and liberty of the gospel as was practiced before the recent novations, however, they should remember, (a), settlements without presentations were not established as a part of that liberty before now, and indeed, the opposite custom has been tolerated; “All that can be said, that it [abolition] was wishit for and supplicated for; and so aucht we to doe, even as much as they did, to compleine of the abuse, and supplicat superior poweris,”43 (b), it is for the Assembly or parliament to declare whether or not something is a corruption, before it can be said that the Covenant implies it should be abjured, (c), on such a national issue as this, it is not for individuals to question what the Assembly expressly allows, and they should properly be censured for it, and (d), for all their fervor, they are in fact only binding themselves “to recover that quhilk was never had, and so was never lost.”44
In conclusion, he hopes his statement will be used, not to defend patronage—for he will labor, by all lawful means, to free the Church from it—but only for removing the objections that the complainers have to it.
Critique of Johnston’s Arguments
Taken as a whole, Johnston’s statement is coherent and persuasive, except for his fourth point, much of which is confused, if not questionable. It is important to consider this in detail, since some of the matters it covers reappear in later controversies.
The first part of his argument appears to be that the Church has never been opposed to presentations as such, only the particular way in which presentations were understood to operate in earlier times, that is, as a process by which a vacancy could be filled without deference to ecclesiastical examination and admission. He substantiates this claim by referring to the frequency with which the Assembly, from the beginning, called for its collation rights to be upheld, yet, by contrast, was silent on the subject of patronage’s abolition. To this it must be answered, however, that there is little indication that the early Reformers collectively entertained a different definition of the word presentation from that used by the next generation. It is certainly difficult to derive such an impression from the text of either Book of Discipline, and Gordon Donaldson makes no allowance for it: “Between 1560 and 1567 . . . while the crown showed a certain hesitation about making presentations and usually preferred to dispone benefices by simple gift, other patrons in general adhered to the traditional procedure of presentation followed by episcopal collation.”45
As for the existence of actual dialectic about the issue of lay patronage during the early Reformation period, Johnston is right when he alludes to its paucity. Nonetheless, it is still justifiable to conclude that the early Reformers’ ideal vision of “lawful election” did not include presentations (of any kind) by lay patrons.46 That there was not more attention paid to a campaign for actual abolition, was due to a pragmatism which obliged them to stifle such ambitions until a more favorable climate showed itself. In this respect, for example, a particular inducement to tread warily seems to have taken place in 1565, when the Queen took the opportunity of warning the Assembly that the Crown was not prepared to make compromises on the patronage issue. Since the Church was in need of the queen’s assistance in trying to resolve its increasingly desperate financial crisis (see chapter 1), the incentive would have been overwhelming for the Assembly to soften its position on presentations, and, instead, focus on the vital, but less confrontational issue of collation rights.
Johnston’s next argument is that patronage and the Kirk’s freedom of election need not be incompatible, since the crucial issue is always whether or not a forced intrusion takes place. In his view, such intrusions should not happen so long as presentations are channeled through presbyteries, where the candidate can again47 be examined and