Series 5 > Religious Controversy in Scotland 1625-1639

2
RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY IN SCOTLAND
the period covered by this book) can in great part be found in abundance in
England. One must be more cautious about reversing the equation because
England’s rehgious landscape had a much broader extent on the ‘left’—Scodand
did not produce exile communities in the Netherlands led by people like Francis
Johnson, John Smyth, Thomas Helwys, or John Robinson, and when quakers
and baptists and independents appeared in Scotland in the 1650s, their progeni¬
tors and many of their followers spoke with English accents.When Robert Brown
turned up in Edinburgh in 1584 the kirk received him coldly,1 and even the
more radical Scottish presbyterians despised the name of Brownist. But this radical
extreme is not central to the story told in the documents included here. What is
important is the divide between episcopalians/Anglicans and presbyterians. Lori
Anne Ferrell has shown how the English court under James VI and I attacked
puritan nonconformity by identifying it with the subversive nature of popery.2
That dissenting puritan ‘movement’ found plenty of popery in the life and work
of LauncelotAndrewes, William Laud, John Cosin, and numerous others. Scot¬
tish opponents of episcopacy and of the use of ceremonial in worship were no
less forthcoming in their opposition than were people like Alexander Leighton
(himself an expatriate Scot) John Bastwick, Henry Burton, and William Prynne,3
all of whom suffered mutilation and imprisonment for their stridency.
Christopher Hill noted years ago that ‘popery’‘was a convenient phrase un¬
der which opposition stemming from the most divergent causes could be united’.4
Another important term was ‘Arminian’, and this meant the same thing, as
Arminians were simply the advanced guard of all things popish. In Scodand
these tensions came to a head a few years earlier than in England, and indeed
helped significandy to bring about the collapse of the Stewart monarchy in the
British Isles and ultimately the execution of Charles I.Thus while Scodand had
absorbed Protestant influences from England even before 1560, it repaid the
debt completely and fatefully.5 Scodand’s relationship with England was com¬
plex and ineluctable. It was impossible to ignore the more powerful southern
neighbour. England harboured both fell enemies and fast friends, and
1 DCH, iv, 1-3.
L.A. Ferrell, Government by Polemic.James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-
1625 (Stanford, Calif., 1998).
3 S. Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the
Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Hamden, Conn., 1978).
C. Hill, Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Ox¬
ford, 1956), 5.
G. Donaldson, Scotland: Church and Nation through Sixteen Centuries (London, 1972) provides a
helpful perspective on the insular rehgious problem.