A Great Grievance. Laurence A.B. Whitley
made to suppress these irregular services in the Act against conventicles and An act against separation and disobedience to ecclesiastical authority,14 attitudes hardened on both sides.
Through the following twenty-five years, the government attempted to resolve the fact that it had helped to create what was, in effect, a schismatic church, by alternating between repression and conciliation.15 Although some ministers took advantage of the indulgences of June 1669, September 1672 and June 1679, such defections simply reinforced the determination of the remnant who endured. For them, the true Church of Scotland had been driven into the wilderness by a corrupt establishment, which was now in the pocket of a sovereign whose rule they could no longer accept. Thus the root cause of their dismay was not so much the actual existence of bishops, but the Erastian implications which their appointment and presence brought to the nature of the Church.16 More will be said below about how elements of this understanding of the condition of the Church surfaced after the Revolution and in the patronage disputes of the following century. First, however, it is important to consider how prominent a part, if any, patronage played in the philosophical war of words that was also conducted in the period subsequent to the return of presentations.
The Patronage Issue After the Restoration
Whereas patronage had its place (albeit a small one) in the tide of polemical literature of the 1660s, it was to become marginalized as other issues, such as the permissibility of resistance to tyrants, moved to the centre of attention. The notable works that did pay attention to the question of lay presentations were that of John Brown#, who was minister of Wamphray (Lochmaben presbytery) until he was exiled to Holland in 1663, James (later Sir James) Stewart of Goodtrees#, James Stirling#, minister of Paisley second charge (deprived 1662) and Andrew Honyman#, bishop of Orkney.
In 1665, Brown published An apologetical relation of the particular sufferings of the faithful ministers and professors of the church of Scotland since August 1660. As its twenty-three sections were a comprehensive repudiation of the conduct of the Restoration regime since 1660, Sharp unsurprisingly labeled it “a damnable book,”17 and blamed it for turning mere grievance into defiance of the Crown. In section nine, Brown sets out the reasons why ministers refused to seek presentations under the 1662 Act, and these afford an insight into whether the basic arguments against patronage had altered greatly since their expression in the preamble to the 1649 Act. These had been that it was unscriptural, popish, contrary to the second Book, prejudicial to the liberty of the people and restricted freedom of choice.
Brown opens by rehearsing the familiar argument that presentations were supported neither by Scripture nor the best Reformed tradition. Similarly, he claims that the 1649 Parliament had simply completed the work of reformation, by restoring the Church’s original rights. To seek a presentation, therefore, would be to approve what the state had done in removing those rights. He next points out that receiving a presentation now meant taking the Oath of Allegiance as well, which right–thinking ministers could not do.
At this point, he attempts to answer two counter–arguments that had been leveled against the outed ministers. The first one challenged them to agree that since ministers admitted before 1649 were not elected, they must surely be classed as intruders. Brown’s curious reply is to say that although patronage was sinful, this was “not so fully seen and perceived before” and, in any case, “there was no other way of entry . . . practicable by law.” No doubt sensing that he has just weakened his own case,18 he thereupon goes on the offensive by claiming that any fault on the pre-1649 entrants’ part was small compared with that of those who have seen the evil reformed, yet “now again lick up that vomit.”19
Secondly, he deals with the point that since post-1649 entrants have already had a call from the people, then they cannot become intruders by now accepting a presentation. Brown this time has a more convincing answer. He suggests that for an incumbent now to accept a presentation would be to imply that he was not properly called on the first occasion. Moreover, the criticism itself is fatally flawed in that it suggests that election and presentations can be complementary to one another when in fact they are mutually exclusive: “the patron’s presentation is not cumulative unto, but privative and destructive of the people’s liberty of free election, because where patrons do present, the people’s suffrages are never asked, and, where people have power to elect, patrons have no place to present.”20
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