A Great Grievance. Laurence A.B. Whitley

A Great Grievance - Laurence A.B. Whitley


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whom he had disponed the patronage after 3 January 1642, then the presentation would only be given to a candidate selected from leets provided by the Church. On the occurrence of each vacancy, the presbytery would send the patron a blank presentation and a list of six persons who were both acceptable to the majority of the congregation, and willing to take the charge.61 To the parliamentary commissioners who had arranged the agreement, it may well have seemed a suitable compromise, but Baillie saw no future in it: “The overture . . . was of no use to us; for it was hard for us to find one person to a vacant kirk; bot to send up six . . . “62

      Given the weakness of the Crown at the time, it is possible that the Argyll proposal might well have thrashed out a system which preserved patronage in a form acceptable to most interests and opinions. Whether it would have survived and thereby spared the Kirk the anguish of the next two centuries, is hard to guess. In the event, however, Argyll’s initiative petered out as developments south of the border rose to occupy the main focus of national attention.

      Summary

      The 1587 Act of Annexation heightened landowners’ awareness of, and concern for, the heritable rights which applied to their property, of which patronage was one. Although the Kirk would have been alarmed by the powers vested in the episcopate to receive and expedite presentations, by the end of James’s reign, it looked as though the system he set in place for filling vacancies had a good chance of reaching a settled state. Charles’s misfortune was that although his intentions for teind reform had merit, the handling of so sensitive an issue required skills that he did not possess. This, along with mounting disquiet at his ecclesiastical policy, led to the revolution of 1637–8, the success of which would have been impossible without the support of the landed interest. Out of the ensuing turmoil came a renewal of the debate within the Church as to the acceptability of presentations. This in turn was intensified when attentions turned to the civil war that was brewing south of the border. As dialogue opened with the English Parliamentarians, the question arose, how far could both nations work together, or moreover, form a common ecclesiastical polity? If the latter were possible, what place would presentations have in the new regime?

      Such questions were to occupy much attention north and south of the border as both nations groped towards a possible consensus at what came to be known as the Westminster Assembly of Divines.


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