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Title Pages
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Title Pages (p.i) Episcopalianism in Nineteenth‐Century Scotland (p.ii) (p.iii) Episcopalianism in Nineteenth‐Century Scotland
(p.iv) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States
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Title Pages by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Rowan Strong 2002 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Strong, Rowan Episcopalianism in nineteenth‐century Scotland: religious responses to a modernizing society / Rowan Strong. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Episcopal Church in Scotland—History—19th century. I. Title. BX5300.S77 2002 283′.411′09034—dc21 2001055483 ISBN 0‐19‐924922‐9
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Dedication
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Dedication (p.v) To my mother, Verna Strong, Who nurtured in me a love of history (p.vi)
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Preface
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface In the summer of 1999 I visited the new Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh for the first time. I found a building filled with spaces of light. It was a welcome relief from the grey Edinburgh climate that can cause tourist and citizen alike to lose sight of one of the splendid cities of Britain in their wish for a little more sun and a lot more warmth. Beginning on the ground floor, I dawdled up through the chronology of Scotland's history and people until I arrived in the section devoted to the Scots' religion. Encouraged by the exhibits devoted to Presbyterian, Catholic, and Episcopalian Scots I was surprised by a chart on the wall purporting to show the chronology and origins of the fissiparous creature that is the history of Scottish churches. It was a chart familiar to me from my own teaching, but what brought me up short was the absence of a line signifying the Scottish Episcopal Church. Here on one wall was a sign of Scottish historical amnesia about Episcopalianism that the exhibits on the other side of the room contradicted. In one place the Episcopalians were present, in the other they were not. It seemed to me to encapsulate the place of Scots Episcopalians in the national memory of Scotland. Episcopalians are amongst us but not entirely of us. They have an undeniable part in the history of Scotland, but they are, at the same time, the ‘English Kirk’; though this misnamed Kirk has been adhered to by a substantial proportion of Scots since at least the seventeenth century. So, in part, this study is an attempt to address the ambiguous place of Episcopalianism in one century of the history of Scotland. How did Episcopalians respond to the changes and challenges of an emerging modern society? Was their religion merely another force for the Anglicization of Scotland in the nineteenth century, or did it make some contribution to a sense of Scottish national identity? The chosen piece of the past in this work is the nineteenth century. This has been quite deliberate for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that it corresponds to the period (p.viii) when Scotland was undergoing its Page 1 of 4
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Preface lasting transformation from a small, agricultural, hierarchical society to the modern, urbanized, and industrialized country it is today. This was a fundamental social change that began in England and Scotland and, from there, spread throughout the globe. So I wanted to examine the effects on organized Christianity of these major societal changes, and the Scottish Episcopal Church was a small enough church to be a feasible case study for religion in a rising modern society. How did organized or institutional Christianity respond to the new society which was being brought into being by economic and social forces over which it had little or no control? Was it simply a reactive response, or did Episcopalians exercise some initiative and creativity towards the challenges and opportunities thrown up by the new urban areas? What about the changes this new society brought to the traditional rural areas where the Episcopal Church had been long established? But ecclesiastical structures and official churches are not the principal focus of this study. I was even more interested in the beliefs, outlooks, and religious practices of the people who comprised Scottish Episcopalianism. Too much of the ecclesiastical and religious history of Scotland has been about the institutions of Christianity. This is, of course, a legitimate concentration, for it was as members of organized churches that the vast majority of Scots went about their religious lives. However, that did not mean that the religious outlook of individuals and groups within Christianity necessarily reflected the official views of their churches. So I wanted to examine the religious lives of Episcopalians even more than of their church. This was a further reason for concentrating on the nineteenth century. In that century, with the massive rise of interest in religious and ecclesiastical matters by the British public, there was an unprecedented level of religious reporting. The increase in Episcopalian record‐ keeping, and the development of a church press as a consequence of its legalization in 1792, meant there was some access to the views of persons from the highest to the lowest social level. I wanted to understand how the various subcultures of Scottish Episcopalianism adapted to a drastically changing Scotland during the nineteenth century. It has always been a matter of personal regret that the landmark (p.ix) Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon did not include an Episcopal minister and his wife among his characters in the second novel of his classic trilogy of north‐eastern life, A Scots Quair, as was his original intention (Thomas Crawford, ‘Introduction’ to Cloude Howe in A Scots Quair (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1995), p. x). In that way, the penetrating insight of a great novelist would have brought alive to Scottish consciousness the culture of the traditional Episcopalianism of Angus and the Mearns that formed the background to Gibbon's famous novels. This study is a stumbling attempt to remedy the change of heart of that great writer and remind Scotland and Scots of a part of their religious inheritance.
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Preface The study of a country and a culture thousands of miles and two centuries away from Western Australia is never easy. I have been fortunate in the numbers of institutions and people who have made this research possible. At the forefront is Murdoch University, whose emphasis on the importance of research by its staff has primarily made this book possible through two Special Research Grants and the generous provision of research leave. The other major research funding was from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland who provided a shortfall grant to fund a sabbatical leave in Edinburgh. I hope it would have gladdened the heart of that boy from Dunfermline, Andrew Carnegie, that his New World wealth was used by a New Zealander studying Scottish history from Australia. A fellowship with the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh provided the opportunity of accomplishing the major part of the research for this study. The company of the Institute's international scholars, its director, Professor Peter Jones, and the staff there, particularly Mrs Anthea Taylor, made a six‐month's stay in Edinburgh both stimulating and pleasant. I am particularly grateful to that wise and generous Gaelic scholar, Professor Donald Meek, for reading a draft of the chapter on Gaelic Episcopalianism and encouraging me to continue by his combination of gentle criticism and enthusiasm. Other scholars have also given me their time to discuss my ideas, including David Bebbington and Stuart Brown. Naturally the judgements, as well as the inevitable errors and inadequacies, in the present work (p.x) remain very much my own. The Aberdeen and North‐East Scotland Family History Society provided photocopies of scarce Episcopal congregation's registers. Various Episcopal priests allowed access to the records in their care, including the Revd John Betteley, rector of Ballachulish; the Revd Alexander Emsley Nimmo of St Margaret's in Aberdeen; and Canon Dale Gray of Cumbrae cathedral. The warden of Glenalmond College, and the archivist, Felicity Given, made available all the pertinent records at their disposal and were equally friendly to a stranger who wanted to fossick around in their college's past. Dr Peter Nockles, though an Oxford man, provided an example of warm Mancunian hospitality at the library of the University of Manchester. Dr Sheridan Gilley and Mrs Gilley in Durham also provided a stranger a place to stay overnight. I am thankful to the ecumenical interest of Mr Murdo MacDonald, archivist of the Argyll and Bute Council, for helping me through the records of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, and for his Highland hospitality in giving me lunch at his home. The Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch have kindly permitted the publication of material from their family papers relating to the Marchioness of Lothian. As always the attention of the staff in Scottish libraries and archives exceeds the expectations of all researchers. To Dr Tristram Clark and the unfailing helpful and pleasant staff at the National Archives of Scotland, and to the staff of the National Library of Scotland who are always courteous, I am especially indebted in meeting the often persistent requests of a researcher with limited time at his disposal. Other Scottish libraries were also helpful in providing material, including the archives departments of the University of Page 3 of 4
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Preface Aberdeen, the University of Dundee, the A. K. Bell Library in Perth, and the Glasgow and the Edinburgh City Libraries. As always, Norma Henderson and the library staff of New College, Edinburgh, have been unstinting in their help and friendship. The Bishop of Aberdeen kindly permitted copies to be made of the congregational records of the diocese held in the National Archives of Scotland and in the library of the University of Aberdeen. My thanks also to the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, KT, for allowing the use of some of his papers deposited with the National Archives of Scotland. I also (p.xi) acknowledge the permission of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History published by Cambridge University Press for permission to use my article originally published in that significant journal which forms a part of Chapter 4 of this work. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my editor Hilary O'Shea and her staff, particularly Miss Enid Barker. Their meticulous attention has saved me from a number of errors and made this book easier for its readers. Their care for their authors' work continues to make Oxford University Press a boon to any academic author. Living with long dead Episcopalians has been a long business and I am most of all thankful to the close friends and family who have gone through these years of research with me, and never complained. To my wife, Toni, who shared her life with these Scots for the past decade I want to express my gratitude. Jill Soderstrom, a friend and research student, whose conversation has forced me to widen my historical boundaries and has made the study of history more enjoyable than ever. Finally, to my mother, whose love of history inspired her son to study it in the first place. Even though Scots Episcopalians in the nineteenth century are a long way from her beloved English Tudors, this book is dedicated to her with love and friendship. R.S.
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Map
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Map
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Map (p.xii)
(p.xiii) (p.xiv)
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List of Tables
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
(p.xvi) List of Tables 1.1. Adherents of the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of Scotland, 1851–1900 29 1.2 Episcopalian church attendance, 1851 30 2.1 Aberdeenshire Episcopalianism in the 1790s 39 2.2 Working‐Class adherence in North‐East congregations, 1837 47 2.3 Working‐Class adherence in North‐East Episcopalian congregations, 1849 48 3.1 Episcopalian population in Argyll‐Mainland, 1790s 76 3.2 Episcopalian population in the Western Isles [Inner Hebrides], 1790s 76 3.3 Episcopalian population in Inverness‐shire, Ross and Cromarty, 1790s 76 3.4 Episcopalian population in North and West Perthshire, 1790s 77 3.5 Highland congregations in 1837 95 3.6 Episcopalian population in the 1840s: Argyllshire 97 3.7 Episcopalian population in the 1840s: Inverness‐shire 97 3.8 Episcopalian population in the 1840s: Ross and Cromarty 97 3.9 Episcopalian population in the 1840s: Perthshire 98 3.10 Congregational returns of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, 1847 103
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List of Figures
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
List of Figures 2.1 Diocese of Aberdeen: membership of old congregations, 1821–1860 41 2.2 Diocese of Aberdeen: adherents, 1790–1860 45 2.3 Diocese of Aberdeen: adherents, 1821–1860 46 2.4 Diocese of Aberdeen: occasional offices, 1820–1860 47
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Abbreviations
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
(p.xvii) Abbreviations ABC Argyll and Bute District Council archives AUL University of Aberdeen archives BL British Library BrMS Brechin Diocesan archives, Dundee University library CC Cumbrae Cathedral archives DUL Dundee University Library EUML Edinburgh University Main Library archives GCA Glasgow City archives JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JRH Journal of Religious History LPL Lambeth Palace Library NLS National Library of Scotland NAS National Archives of Scotland NRA(S) National Register of Archives (Scotland) Page 1 of 2
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Abbreviations NSA New Statistical Account of Scotland OSA Old Statistical Account of Scotland PLA Perth Library archives PP Parliamentary Papers RSCHS Records of the Scottish Church History Society SAUL St Andrews University Library archives SCO Scottish Communion Office SEJ Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal SMCR Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review SG Scottish Guardian SSB Scottish Standard Bearer SSPCK Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (p.xviii)
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords Provides an overview of the history of Episcopalianism within Scottish society since its emergence as a religious alternative after the Reformation. It also traces the development of a separate Episcopal Church following the eviction of Episcopalians from the Church of Scotland subsequent to the ‘Glorious’ Revolution in 1689. Included in the chapter is the development of a distinctive Episcopalian theology and its connections with Jacobitism in the eighteenth century. Keywords: Church of Scotland, Episcopalian theology, Glorious Revolution, Jacobitism, Reformation, Scottish Episcopalianism, history
The new Protestant Church of Scotland inaugurated minimally by the Reformation Parliament of 1560 became an intermittent Scottish battleground for control by Presbyterians and Episcopalians until 1689 when the Presbyterians secured a lasting victory, due in no small measure to the theological and political inflexibility of the Episcopalians. Even after 1689 Presbyterian triumph and Episcopalian downfall was not finally secure until the military defeat of Jacobitism at the battle of Culloden in 1746. Prior to that, from 1560 to 1689, Episcopalianism enjoyed the comforts of the Established Church of Scotland either alongside or as dominant over their Presbyterian rivals. But the victory of Presbyterianism in 1689 meant that Scottish Episcopalians had to learn to build a church outwith the Established Church from which they had been evicted. They did not always make a good job of it, being unused to the privations of being a separate and illegal body; but ultimately they managed to build a distinctively Scottish form of ‘Anglicanism’. While it owed much to Page 1 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 English antecedents and intermittent influence, it was ultimately a Scottish form of episcopal Protestantism. Initially, little distinguishable from its Presbyterian rival in worship and organization, it gradually developed its own distinctive theological and ceremonial ethos that successfully claimed the tenacious allegiance of a number of Scots. But Scottish Episcopalianism underwent a drastic decline of adherence during the eighteenth century, especially following the inept rebellion of 1715, that was only finally arrested in the early nineteenth century when it stabilized at about 2.5 per cent of the national population. By that time it was, as Walter Scott claimed, a mere shadow of a shade of its former self at the beginning of the eighteenth century. To understand that process of loss and diminution it is necessary to outline how the fortunes of both Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism (p.2) were linked to the political forces that determined religion from the sixteenth‐century Reformation through eighteenth‐century Jacobitism to the granting of toleration to Episcopalians by the Hanoverian government at the end of the eighteenth century. This toleration enabled the now legal Episcopal Church to rebuild itself as a public institution in the nineteenth century. Inaugurated by the Reformation Parliament in 1560, the new Protestant Church of Scotland had a tenuous legal position that was not secured until 1567. The Protestants lacked the unqualified support of the crown or the magnates and were a faction, albeit a powerful one, among the landowning classes. Legally, the benefices of the church still remained in the possession of Catholics, many of whom had kin among the most powerful in the land whom the Kirk could neither overcome nor afford to alienate. This legal and political weakness of the reformed Kirk made the Reformation in Scotland a much less bloody and more tolerant religious change than elsewhere. In Scotland, religious zealots simply did not have enough power to enforce their will. Nor was the Catholic monarch, Mary of Scots, strong enough to override the magnates who dominated the Reformation Parliament. Therefore, although a new Confession of Faith was passed by the Parliament in 1560, it could not be imposed compulsorily but only by persuasion. The new Confession founded the new Kirk upon an agreed Calvinism of the community of all believers, two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), and a moderate predestinarianism.1 The new reformed Kirk having been minimally established the next concern of the reformers was to give some shape to its organization and government. This came, provisionally, with the First Book of Discipline in 1561. The Book was a patchwork document drawn up to meet the needs of the time. In fact it only managed to receive approval when it did because of the pressure created by the death of Francis II of France and the imminent return to Scotland of his wife, Mary of Scots, as a Catholic monarch. The Book gave the new Kirk a parochial focus, grounding the life of the reformed faithful in their parish kirk and school. (p.3) From 1560 the Kirk also began to establish itself in sympathetic parishes, with the support of Protestant‐minded landowners, particularly in the southern Page 2 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 areas of Ayrshire, Lothian, Fife, Angus, and the Mearns.2 The Kirk also began to form itself on a national level with the institution of the General Assembly in 1560. By 1570 the General Assembly was asserting its right to be supreme judge in Scotland of all ecclesiastical matters as the assembly of the Christian community of Scotland. This claim would be the point of tension between the Kirk and Mary's son, James VI. During this period the Kirk tried various forms of government as it pragmatically adjusted to the fluid social and political situation. Neither Knox nor his mentor John Calvin were particularly concerned about the exact form of the reformed church's government. Believing that what most mattered was its theology, worship, and discipline, they held polity to be a matter indifferent. The early Scottish reformers followed these priorities. At first even the former Catholic bishops who came over to reform continued to exercise an episcopate in their old dioceses, and these were later accompanied by five superintendents. These latter had been inaugurated by acts of the General Assembly in 1561 and they exercised the jurisdictional, administrative, and disciplinary functions of bishops in the districts given into their oversight. However, in establishing this ministry of oversight the reformers were not subscribing to the medieval understanding of the episcopate with its sacerdotal and lordly status. Nor were they concerned for any thought of a historic episcopal succession because the superintendents were not episcopally ordained. Consequently, the episcopal succession in the Kirk was allowed to die out. Many of the new parish ministers were not even ordained with prayer and the laying‐on of hands as it was thought the essential authority of the minister came not from this act but from induction into a particular parochial charge.3 The priority for the Kirk during these years was not the government of the church but the establishment of the reformed faith by teaching and worship in the parishes. It was in doing so that the Kirk proved its ability to win (p.4) the hearts and minds of the majority of the Lowland Scots after 1560. Like most Protestant reformers those in Scotland desired to make the Holy Communion the central act of worship but a weekly Eucharist proved impossible. Due to a lack of clergy and the need for instruction the Eucharist became a quarterly or even a biannual celebration. It was understood to be a feast not a sacrifice and endeavoured to be as literal a reproduction of the Last Supper as possible. Communicants were seated around a centrally placed table that was covered in a white cloth. The congregation sang psalms until the last sitting was served by the minister and the elders or deacons. Psalm‐singing became especially popular and was one of the indications of a renewal of congregational life after the apathy of the medieval church. Considerable effort went into ensuring that a worthy reception was made by a morally prepared people and so tokens were distributed beforehand to intending communicants who were first examined and prepared by the elders and deacons. But the typical morning service was one of the Word, containing essentially a sermon and a long intercession concluding with the Lord's Prayer and the recitation of Page 3 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 the Apostles' Creed. This service also usually contained an act of confession, the recitation of the psalms, and readings. The medieval cathedrals were largely inappropriate for this reformed worship where everyone needed to be close enough to hear the minister and so they were either left to decay, or were divided internally into a number of churches. Otherwise the Kirk devoted a considerable part of its limited resources to restoring the decaying churches or trying to convince their patrons to do so.4 The Kirk could not afford at this early period of its establishment to be anything other than pragmatic because of the changing political situation created by the vacillating policies of Mary of Scots. These ended with her enforced abdication in 1567 and the succession of her son, James, and the final defeat of her forces at the battle of Langside in 1568. The civil war finally came to an end when Edinburgh castle, Mary's last stronghold, fell to the Protestant forces in 1573. This enabled the Kirk to turn its attention to the unresolved matter of its own government. A major (p.5) attempt to solve the outstanding question of the polity of the reformed church came in January 1572 at a convention at Leith. The Leith settlement between the regent John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, and the Kirk retained the existing ecclesiastical structure with titular bishops nominated by the crown, but subjected them to the authority of the General Assembly. This moderate episcopacy remained the policy of the crown under the regency of Mar (regent: 1571–2), his successor James Douglas, fourth Earl of Morton (regent: 1572–8), and James VI who reigned in his own right from 1578. In 1573 the Leith agreement was given statutory force in a parliamentary Act of Conformity which imposed stricter Protestant standards in the parishes and hastened their takeover by a reformed ministry.5 This moderate episcopacy of the early reformers was soon brought into question by a succession of disreputable appointments which increased the General Assembly's dissatisfaction with it. The essentially pragmatic approach to ecclesiastical government which had prevailed since 1560 was also increasingly attacked by the growing influence of divine‐right Presbyterianism in Scotland. This was due to the emergence of a party under the leadership of Andrew Melville who subscribed to the theology of Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor in Geneva. Melville (1545–1622) had been educated at St Andrews where his intellectual brilliance marked him out. He left Scotland for further study in France in 1564. Desiring to study theology, he left France in 1569 for Geneva where he lectured in the city's college and became a disciple of Beza. Calvinism under Beza had begun to formalize into a school of theology centred on the doctrines of the sovereignty of God as superior to all earthly power, double predestination, and the government of the church by consistories of elders and clergy. Beza and Melville held to the view that in the New Testament church all ministers were equal and there was, consequently, no divine authorization for any superior jurisdiction of some clergy over others. This led to the advocacy of a new church structure, the presbytery or classis, which would take over the Page 4 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 traditional oversight of the bishops as a committee of equal clergy and elders.6 This polity was regarded by Beza and Melville (p.6) as being the divinely instituted New Testament form of government for the church. Therefore when Melville returned to Scotland in 1574 as an internationally renowned Protestant scholar he brought with him the Calvinism of Beza as the correct form for the reformed church. His academic reputation and influential position, first at Glasgow University and then as principal of St Mary's College, St Andrews, which he refounded as a seminary for the reformed ministry, made him the leading clergyman of the Kirk for the rest of his life. His reputation and positions of influence also gave Melville the ability to form a party among the younger men in the ministry who advanced the Presbyterian cause. Presbyterianism had the advantage of offering a number of practical solutions to seemingly intransigent problems of finance and the intrusion of the state into the affairs of the Kirk. If episcopal government was abolished then the bishop's revenues could accrue to the Kirk for parish ministry, schools, and poor relief; while examination of ministry candidates by the presbytery and their nomination by congregations made poor candidates imposed by patrons less likely.7 By the late 1570s the Kirk was divided into two parties of de jure Presbyterians and moderate pragmatists who were essentially divided over polity while concurring on Calvinist doctrine and worship. The first major victory of Melville's party was the passing of the Second Book of Discipline by the General Assembly in 1578. This set out some of the dogma important to the Presbyterians: the idea of two kingdoms rather than one in which the king was head of both church and state as in England (famously proclaimed to James VI by Melville in 1596);8 the parity of all ministers; and the sacrilege of secularizing ecclesiastical property. But the book did not mention the presbytery. In October 1580 the General Assembly declared episcopacy abolished and instituted a scheme whereby some fifty presbyteries were inaugurated to cover (p.7) approximately 600 parishes. But the real implementation of the presbyteries would not be achieved until they were written into statute law. The opportunity seemed to have arrived when James VI was seized by the zealously Protestant Ruthven Raiders in 1582 in an attempt to control his government. During this power vacuum the Kirk established functioning presbyteries in the major burghs. But this Presbyterian development was halted when James escaped in 1583. Parliament passed the so‐called ‘Black Acts’ during the short‐lived political supremacy of the anti‐Presbyterian James Stewart, Earl of Arran, who was chancellor from May 1584 to November 1585. These were black indeed from the Presbyterians' point of view. They reaffirmed episcopacy and subordinated the bishops to the crown rather than the General Assembly. But with Arran's downfall these Acts lapsed and James began to pursue consensus politics. Accordingly presbyteries were allowed, the authority of the General Assembly was reaffirmed, but the titular bishops were retained. A measure of statutory victory for Presbyterianism came in 1592 with the ‘Golden Act’ during the Page 5 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 administration of the moderate chancellor Sir John Maitland of Thirlestane. The Act meant the crown's acceptance of the new ecclesiastical organization of the Kirk and the dominance of the Presbyterian party. The Kirk was to be governed by the General Assembly (though that body was to be convened by the crown), synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions. But Parliament did not abolish the titular episcopal office, even if it was in apparent terminal decline.9 Therefore, the sixteenth‐century tussle between the crown and a largely Presbyterian Kirk over the insertion of bishops into this polity continued into the succeeding century. James, though a lifelong Calvinist, desired bishops as a means of securing and maintaining royal control over the church. His experience of abduction at the hands of the Ruthven Raiders of the ultra‐Protestant Earl of Gowrie had given him a stomachful of Presbyterian zealots. James skilfully used his power of summoning the General Assembly to isolate the most militant Presbyterian ministers. Using these (p.8) means James secured a diocesan episcopacy alongside the existing Presbyterian system of church courts. Scottish diocesan bishops were consecrated in 1610 by English bishops, though not including the two English archbishops so as to avoid any semblance of English superiority over the Scottish church. James also became king of England in 1603 and consequently desired greater conformity between the churches of his two realms. This policy climaxed in 1618 when he imposed the Five Articles of Perth on a reluctant General Assembly meeting in that town. These Articles required kneeling at the Eucharist, private Communion for the dying, the observance of Easter and Christmas, confirmation, and baptism to be administered no later than the Sunday following a child's birth. But despite his original intention for a Scottish prayer book, James eventually realized that the opposition to his Articles meant he could go no further in moulding the Scottish church into conformity with the English one.10 James's son, Charles I, was not astute like his father, and he revived the abandoned policy of imposing a Scottish prayer book. Although the book was the devising of the Scottish bishops, Presbyterian agitation easily defeated its introduction in 1637. Even if Jenny Geddes and her stool supposedly thrown at the head of the Bishop of Edinburgh in St Giles has no historical basis, the riot in the cathedral was real enough. The immediate outcome was the Bishops' Wars (1639–40) which were the opening skirmishes in the English and Scottish Civil Wars that brought the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland in 1638 and England in 1646 and finally ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649. Episcopacy in Scotland, as in England, was officially defunct during the 1650s when the Commonwealth ruled both nations. But the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 saw the restoration of bishops in the Church of Scotland the following year, in addition to the Presbyterian courts, with the English bishops again consecrating their Scottish counterparts. For the next forty years it was the turn of Presbyterianism to be on the receiving end of the enforcement of conformity; though only its most radical form of Covenanting Presbyterianism Page 6 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 intermittently (p.9) received the bloody end of the government's sword during the 1680s.11 The government's brutal repression was an indication that episcopacy also had the overwhelming support of the ruling aristocracy, in addition to the Stuart monarchs. Landed support, in the north, was instrumental in also engendering popular support for bishops. However, this division within the Established Church was not something which was evident to most Scots in their weekly worship. The weekly worship of the Established Church was much the same whether Presbyterianism or Episcopalianism was the official polity of the moment during the seventeenth century.12 So was the ecclesiastical government. Under an Episcopalian structure the various levels of church courts central to Presbyterianism remained intact. Kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods, and General Assembly remained, and episcopacy only added another dimension to this Presbyterian structure. Bishops presided over regional synods and, if they were present, also over presbyteries and kirk sessions. In many parts of the country the two systems married quite well, perhaps because no prayer book was imposed with its requisite liturgical uniformity. However, the association of episcopacy with official armed repression of radical Presbyterianism entrenched the hostility of many Lowland Scots towards Episcopalianism. This evolving and contentious polity of the Church of Scotland reached a definitive climax with the political victory of Presbyterianism in the Revolution Settlement in 1689. Following the successful outcome of the landing of William of Orange in England in 1688 and the flight of James II to France, a Convention of the Scottish Estates met in March 1689. In April they declared the throne vacant and offered it to William and Mary. By then the destiny of the Scottish church had been fixed by the determined response of the Scottish bishops to the new de facto monarchs. Hurrying south late in the previous year, Bishop Alexander Rose of Edinburgh had finally met with William who (p.10) was undecided which ecclesiastical polity to support. There were indications he would have favoured episcopacy for the same reasons of control that the Stuarts whom he supplanted preferred it. But Rose shut the door in his face by high‐ mindedly telling him that he would support him only as far ‘as the law and conscience allowed’. Rose's response was in keeping with the same High Church theology about the inviolability of oaths and the divine sanction for the anointed monarch which caused Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury and other leading English churchmen to become nonjuring objectors to the new regime. But theology does not always make for practical politics and in this case the Scottish bishops' conscientious stand handed victory in the Scottish church to the Presbyterians. Realizing the bishops would not in conscience support the new regime the new monarchy was left with no alternative but to support Presbyterianism in Scotland.13
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Consequently, Parliament placed control of admission to the next General Assembly in the hands of the embittered minority of Presbyterian clergy who had been evicted in 1661 for their beliefs. The Assembly, which met in the Presbyterian south of the country in May 1689, made the Westminster Confession the legal standard of the Church of Scotland's belief and order and, on 7 June, passed an Act abolishing episcopacy as ‘contrary to the inclinations of the generality of the people’. This restored Presbyterian government according to its form in 1592; that is, prior to James VI's institution of bishops.14 That episcopacy was not popular was certainly true of a number, perhaps most, of the southern parishes where Episcopalian ministers had been summarily evicted, or ‘rabbled’, out of their parishes even before the Assembly met, ostensibly for refusing to pray for William and Mary. This summary ‘rabbling of the curates’ was the latest in a series of evictions in which Presbyterians and Episcopalians had been alternately the nonconformist victims of changes in Scottish government. Between 1638 and 1660 it had been the turn of some 210 royalist and Episcopalian clergy to be turned out of their (p.11) parishes. With the royal restoration some 312 Presbyterian clergy were deprived. From 1689 to 1716 it was the turn of 664 Episcopalians in the Established Church's 926 parishes to suffer the consequences of upholding a theology at odds with the government.15 The determination of the uncompromising Presbyterians to evict even those Episcopalian clergy who were prepared to conform undoubtedly exacerbated the tensions between the two former parties in the Kirk. Many former Episcopalian ministers were prepared to accept that William and Mary were indeed de facto rulers and to take the oaths. However, this loophole was closed in 1693 when Parliament passed an Act which required all in positions of authority in church or state to take an oath that William and Mary were monarchs de jure. Consequently, no conscientious Episcopalian could comply and many lost their livings. By the end of the reign of William II (III) in 1702 Episcopalians fell into three classes. There were those who had taken the oaths and remained in their parishes and were tolerated by law. Other clergy had taken the oaths of allegiance to the reigning monarchy but had still been evicted from their livings. These tended to officiate in separate meeting houses but were liable to prosecution for doing so. Then there were all the bishops and the majority of the Episcopalian clergy who were sincere and explicit nonjurors and were consequently the objects of civil and ecclesiastical suspicion. They were also liable to legal sanctions and, if their worship was not in private houses, could also have their public worship shut down. While congregational worship persisted, the bishops made no attempt to perpetuate any diocesan structure or oversight of it.16 The General Assembly's claim in 1689 that episcopacy was intolerable to the Scottish people may have been true of the south of the country, but it was a very questionable statement of ecclesiastical principles for the north, the Highlands, and certainly the North‐East of Scotland. In his recent history of modern Page 8 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Scotland Tom Devine considers that more than half the clergy of (p.12) the Church of Scotland refused to accept the Presbyterian settlement, while fifteen of the twenty‐six Highland clans who rebelled in 1715 were Episcopalian and another five of mixed religious allegiance.17 In the North‐East local popularity and aristocratic support meant that by 1707 some 165 Episcopalian incumbents still remained in their parishes in defiance of the law and the Kirk.18 In the north, shortage of clergy and popular and landed support for Episcopalianism meant that it was not until the abject failure of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion that Presbyterianism made any effective inroads. The faculty of the University of Aberdeen only became fully conforming to the Established Church at this time.19 Until then the maintenance of Episcopalianism had been assisted by the accession of Queen Anne in 1702. As an adherent of the High Church theology of her grandfather, Charles I, she exercised a de facto toleration towards English nonjurors and Scottish Episcopalians. Notwithstanding the queen's personal goodwill towards them, the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 further entrenched the legal monopoly of the Presbyterian Established Church. In a specific statute—‘An Act for securing the Protestant religion and Presbyterian church government’—the belief and order of the Church of Scotland as it existed at that time was declared to continue without alteration in its Westminster Confession and Presbyterian government. Thereby Calvinism and Presbyterianism were constituted a fundamental and essential aspect of the Treaty of Union. However, in 1711, Presbyterian control did receive one legal setback that slightly advanced the cause of toleration. James Greenshields was an Episcopalian minister in Edinburgh who had taken the oaths and used the English Book of Common Prayer at the services in his meeting house. When summoned to appear before the Presbytery of Edinburgh he denied their authority over him and was consequently imprisoned. He appealed to the Court of Session and, when that court refused to hear his petition, Greenshields appealed to the House of Lords, an avenue made possible as a consequence of the Act of Union. The Lords reversed the (p.13) decision of the Scottish court, and this resulted in the Toleration Act of 1712. The Act—‘An act to prevent the disturbing those of the Episcopal Communion, in that part of Great Britain called Scotland, in the exercize of their religious worship; and in the use of the Liturgy of the Church of England; and for repealing the act passed in the parliament of Scotland, intituled An act against irregular Baptisms and Marriages’— established the legal basis for toleration towards Episcopalians for the rest of the eighteenth century. It permitted public worship by Episcopalians with clergy ordained by a Protestant bishop—provided such clergy took the oaths of obedience and abjuration and during public worship prayed for the reigning monarch, for Princess Sophia of Hanover, and for all the Hanoverian royal family. The new oath of abjuration, which was a part of this Act, required an abjuration of the right of succession of the sons of James Stuart the younger Page 9 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 who, by this time, had succeeded his father as the Stuart claimant to the throne. Such congregations, under clergy who legally qualified for toleration, became known as qualified chapels.20 While the bishops were reluctant to take organizational steps to establish an alternative church, they did perpetuate their episcopal succession from 1705 by consecrating priests to make up vacancies among the aged bench of bishops, but without diocesan jurisdiction. They even agreed, in 1711, to the joint consecration of a Scot, James Gadderar, by two Scottish bishops and the leading English nonjuror, Bishop George Hickes, which demonstrated the strong links between the two British nonjuring communities. The year before, another Scot, Archibald Campbell, had been consecrated in London by three Scottish bishops, at the request of Hickes to be his assistant.21 It would appear that nonjuring theology was able to cement a British approach to their mutual situations that overcame the traditional antagonism between Scot and English, at least among the clerical leadership.22 But the Scottish bishops set an unhelpful example of contention when they divided over the independence of the church from the royal authority of their Stuart monarch in regard to episcopal (p.14) nominations. During the 1720s and 1730s the bishops formed two distinct parties. The older, or ‘college’ party, sought to perpetuate the custom developed since 1689 and to govern the church by the bishops acting collectively as a college, and with the bishops appointed solely by royal nomination. The young Turks of the diocesan party wanted the re‐ establishment of a diocesan structure with the bishops elected by the diocesan clergy.23 As if that were not sufficient to fight about, the bishops also split over the Eucharist. First, they argued over some of the innovative ritual practices the diocesan party introduced into the Eucharist under the influence of the English nonjurors. These principally consisted of the mixing of water with the wine at the Eucharist, prayers for the dead, the use of an epiclesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit over the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer, and the prayer of oblation also incorporated into the same prayer. Under the liturgical scholarship of the leader of the diocesan party, Bishop Thomas Rattray of Dunkeld, these elements became part of the Scottish Communion Office, which became another bone of contention. This liturgy was Rattray's adaptation of the 1637 Eucharistic rite in the abortive Scottish Book of Common Prayer, using Eastern Orthodox and English nonjuring liturgies. This Eucharistic liturgy was also influenced by the 1718 liturgy of the English nonjurors so that it used an Eastern Orthodox form for the words of institution, the epiclesis, and the prayer of oblation as part of the Eucharistic prayer.24
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Each side solidified and perpetuated the quarrel by a series of unilateral consecrations designed to bolster their respective numbers. The debilitating struggle was not finally resolved until all the bishops agreed to a set of canons in 1743 on the basis of a concordat made in 1731 between the diocesans. This resolution cemented the final victory of the diocesan party which was achieved in the Episcopal Synod of 1743 which drew up the first official canons of the Episcopal Church.25 These canons sealed the de facto authority of the bishops over the church, though they (p.15) explicitly denied any claim to temporal control should it ‘please almighty God in the Course of his Providence, to restore this to a legal Establishment’. The six bishops then recommended to their clergy ‘in the strongest manner’ to use the Scottish Communion Office for Holy Communion.26 The use of the Scottish Office was greatly facilitated by a more definitive version produced by Bishop William Falconer and published with the authority of the bishops in 1764. It was in widespread use among nonjuring congregations in the characteristic form of ‘wee bookies’ which contained the liturgy and some additional devotional prayers. For other services the nonjurors mostly used the various services of the Book of Common Prayer, like their qualified contemporaries. Further penal legislation passed during the eighteenth century as a consequence of the failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715, 1719, and 1745 entrenched the division of Scottish Episcopalians into two parties, generally known as nonjuring and qualified because of their different stances towards the requirements of the Toleration Act. This legislation was further modified in 1718, 1746, and 1748, in reaction to successive Jacobite rebellions to place a number of penal conditions on nonjuring Episcopalian clergy. The requirement that qualified clergy were not to be ordained by the nonjuring Scottish bishops, but only by bishops of the Church of England or the Church of Ireland, effectively prevented such qualified clergy from coming under the jurisdiction of the Scottish bishops. The nonjuring clergy suffered the penal consequences of the law. This legislation made their ministry illegal, and all the sacraments that they celebrated, such as baptism and marriage. It also restricted the amount of people they could legally minister to at one time to less than nine or more persons after 1719 and less than five or more after 1746. The penalties for non‐compliance were fines and imprisonment. There may have been more justification for this legislation than is normally accepted by Episcopalian historians. These have tended to emphasize the political quietness of Episcopal congregations and to point to the destruction of Episcopal meeting houses by Cumberland's men as an unwarranted overreaction. But, in fact, in both the 1715 and 1745 (p.16) Jacobite rebellions Episcopalians formed a substantial part of the Jacobite armies, and most of the Jacobite leaders were Episcopalian aristocrats. While the bishops gave no public support to the 1745 uprising, one of the Episcopalian clergy, Robert Lyon, the clergyman at Perth did act as Episcopalian chaplain to the prince's army. For this offence he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Penrith on 28 October 1746. Page 11 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Before his execution he celebrated the Holy Communion and fifty of his prison companions also received the Eucharist.27 The most serious effect of these penal laws was felt after the 1748 legislation when they were made to apply not just to the clergy but also to the laity. Laypeople were already under pressure from the illegal nature of nonjuring Episcopalian baptisms and marriages, two religious ceremonies necessary for civil and social life. These civil disadvantages meant that a substantial number of laity, especially from the wealthier classes, went into the qualified chapels under clergy, some of them Scots, who acted as independent ministers of English and Irish ordination. There was one interruption after the 1740s into the otherwise isolated life of these insular nonjuring Scottish Episcopalians which happened in 1784 with the consecration of the American Samuel Seabury as the first bishop of the Episcopal Church of the newly independent United States by three of the four bishops left alive in the Scottish Episcopal Church.28 Seabury had been referred to the Scottish bishops when the English bishops dithered over the act because Seabury could not take the customary oaths of allegiance to the crown. This event was so unexpected that it impacted out of all proportion on the later consciousness of Scottish Episcopalians. Consequently, it has been commemorated in a number of nineteenth‐century memorials in Scottish churches. These include a stained glass window in Old St Paul's, Edinburgh, which has Bishop Robert Kilgour of Aberdeen, as the presiding bishop, dressed in an anachronistic cope and mitre instead of the (p.17) plain Geneva gown and wig he actually wore for the event in the rather ordinary chapel in Aberdeen. During the second half of the eighteenth century a new set of theological differences developed among the nonjurors, though they did not create the former bitter divisions of the college and the diocesan parties. Virtually all of the northern clergy were disciples of Hutchinsonianism, named after John Hutchinson (1674–1737), an English layman whose theology upheld Hebrew as the primal language of humanity which, if the secret could be decoded, offered the key to all knowledge. Divine revelation was accessible through an allegorical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Hutchinsonianism had a considerable following among British High Church clergy in the mid‐eighteenth century. Its greatest longevity, however, was among the northern Episcopalian clergy thanks to the influence of the Revd John Skinner of Longside in whose home many of them received their theological education. Aside from its linguistic complexities, Hutchinson's theology had a strong streak of sober sacramental mysticism about it, which is what probably appealed most to his Episcopalian followers. North‐ East Episcopalianism, for example, saw a flowering of a sacramental mysticism in the early eighteenth century under the influence of French Bourignonism among a group of lairds and clergy.29 But Hutchinsonianism contrasted with the High Church theology of the southern Episcopalian clergy, which was dominated Page 12 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 by the semi‐Pelagianism of Bishop Gleig where it was a reaction to Calvinism. However, Hutchinsonianism tended to exacerbate the conservatism of the northern clergy who were dominant in the church until the mid‐nineteenth century.30 This proved unfortunate, as the nineteenth century was a time of rapid change for the Episcopal Church, due to its new public profile and the effects of ecclesiastical reforming movements. These theological divergences were indicative of a wider ecclesiastical tension in the Episcopal Church between the northern and southern clergy which was strongest from the late (p.18) eighteenth century until it was subsumed in the new divisions created by Evangelicalism and Anglo‐Catholicism. The nineteenth‐ century Episcopalian biographer the Revd William Walker of Monymusk characterized these differences as deriving from the juring and nonjuring strands of Anglican High Churchmanship: ‘The Northern party in general held firmly by the principles of the English Non‐Jurors, and in matters of ritual, deviated considerably from the English Book of Common Prayer. The Southern party held generally, the views of the then English High Church party, and in worship, aimed at conformity with England, and uniformity at home.’31 In other words, the northerners had retained and developed their own strand of nonjuring theology and liturgy, initially derived from the English nonjurors, which was distinct from the English High Church party of the early nineteenth century which prevailed in the south. Northern Episcopalianism was more extreme in its theology of the divine independence of the church from the state, and in its sacramental theology, while it embraced the Scottish Communion Office as a better liturgy than that of the Eucharistic rite in the English Book of Common Prayer. Southern Episcopalianism was influenced by the High Churchmen who had remained in the Church of England at the 1688 Revolution, and was more inclined to things English and moderate. However, these differences, while recognizable, were not divisions, for both northerners and southerners were brands of High Churchmen. Both were kept together by a common regard for the Church of England and for its High Church theology. High Churchmen, both Scottish and English, tended to look to the crown as the ‘nursing father’ of the church, and were assertive of the apostolic succession of the Church of England as a defence against Dissent and of the Reformation as a necessary restoration of Christianity against Rome. They also affirmed the element of mystery of worship and sacraments against rationalism and Evangelical enthusiasm.32 Northern and Southern Episcopalians represented significant differences of emphasis within Scottish Episcopalianism. The northerners were (p.19) steeped in Scottish life and society; their southern counterparts tended to be either English, Irish, or Anglicized Scots. One valued the independent traditions and usages which had grown up in the separate life of Scottish Episcopalians since the late seventeenth century; the other was largely ignorant of such things and impatient with aspects not uniformly English.
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 In 1788 Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of James VIII for whose heirs and successors Episcopalians and others had rebelled three times against the Hanoverian monarchy, finally died. This left his younger brother Henry, a Roman Catholic cardinal, to inherit the dregs of the Stuart claim to the throne, a prospect most Protestant Episcopalians were not able to swallow. Led by the energetic Bishop John Skinner, the diocese of Aberdeen took the lead in relinquishing the Jacobite loyalties of the Episcopal Church. As a consequence, the Episcopal Synod of that year resolved to pray for George III at public prayers on Sunday 25 May 1788. As a further consequence of this proof of their new loyalty the bishops announced they would be seeking legal relief from the Penal Acts.33 It was not before time. The penal legislation and the attraction of qualified chapels for wealthier Episcopalians had drastically culled Episcopalian adherence from its high point of perhaps one‐third of Scots in 1689.34 However, as Bruce Lenman rightly cautions, estimates of Episcopalian and Presbyterian support are suspect as the religious differences between them were minimal and largely determined for most people by the choices of the aristocracy and lairds.35 But in 1800 Bishop Skinner reckoned there were just eleven thousand adults who regularly attended Episcopalian worship, and about four thousand in the qualified chapels. There were six bishops and fifty clergy, and twenty‐three qualified clergy.36 Those congregations in communion with the bishops were principally in Aberdeenshire, Angus, and the Mearns, with other scattered congregations in Moray and Ross, Perthshire, Argyll, and Fife. Other than (p. 20) qualified urban congregations there were few congregations in communion with the bishops in the south. There were only seven clergy in the southern central belt: four in Edinburgh, one at Leith, Stirling, and Glasgow. The Diocese of Dunblane and Fife had just four clergy and congregations: at Muthill, Alloa, St Andrews, and Pittenweem.37 In 1792 the Episcopal Church was finally granted legal toleration with the passing of a Relief Act from the previous penal legislation. But the Act had only passed Parliament against influential opposition.38 It still left the church penalized because Episcopal clergy were legally excluded from holding a benefice in the Church of England. But the legislation did enable the church to position itself to take a public role in Scottish life without hindrance or restriction for the first time in over a century. This strategic task was led by Bishop Skinner, the youngest and most energetic of the otherwise elderly bishops. His priority was to bring about a union between the formerly nonjuring congregations and their richer qualified counterparts. Clergy and laity from the qualified chapels sympathized with the southerners and regarded conformity with the Church of England as desirable. They therefore tended to look suspiciously at the northerners with their nonjuring history and Eucharistic liturgy divergent from the English Book of Common Prayer. Some qualified congregations, all from the North‐East, did join with the Episcopal Church Page 14 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 subsequent to the passing of the Relief Act, but most remained cautiously independent.39 However, there were leaders of goodwill on both sides, particularly in the leading qualified congregation of Edinburgh, and Skinner was able to effect the basis for a union at a convention of the church held at Laurencekirk in 1804. As a result the Episcopal Church formally accepted the Thirty‐Nine Articles of Religion and the joint use of the Book of Common Prayer alongside the Scottish Office. By 1850 all the formerly (p.21) qualified chapels except St Peter's, Montrose, had entered the Episcopal Church. But amongst these new developments the bishops had other concerns to occupy them. In the records of the annual episcopal synods much paper and ink was used up over internal defences of episcopal authority. In 1811 Bishop Alexander Jolly of Moray worried about whether the decision of the General Synod of that year to require approval for legislation from both houses—bishops and clergy— was an erosion of episcopal prerogative.40 In 1828 the General Synod passed a canon requiring annual diocesan synods and a General Synod every five years. But a year later this was reversed after Bishop David Low of Ross and Argyll and Jolly lobbied effectively to repeal it on the grounds that it was a direct threat to the apostolic commission of the bishops to govern the church.41 In opposing the involvement of the clergy in synods the northern bishops were true to their tradition of a monopolistic ecclesiastical government by the bishops and were not always supported by the southern bishops. But when it came to the unprecedented idea of including the laity in synods all the bishops spoke with one negative voice. In 1823 this was seriously proposed by the Revd John Skinner of Forfar. He had been inspired by the inclusive vision of laity and clergy involved in the government of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States following a visit by Bishop John Henry Hobart of New York in that year. The bishops howled his suggestion down. Bishop Patrick Torry called it ‘extravagant’ and ‘compromising that official authority which the LORD has given us for edification’.42 While laughed nervously out of court by the bishops in 1823 lay representation in the government of the church would not go away. The middle class would not consent to remaining submissive cash cows for too long. It was revived again by the scion of the archetypal middle‐class family made good, William Gladstone. Gladstone's father was a merchant who made his fortune in the West Indian trade. Having done so he acquired a landed (p.22) estate in Scotland and sent his son to Eton and Oxford where he could be assimilated into the traditional aristocratic and landed governing class of Britain.43 In 1852 William Gladstone raised the spectre of lay representation in synods in an open letter to Primus William Skinner.44 He had become involved with the Scottish Episcopal Church since his father had bought his estate of Fasque in Kincardineshire in 1830. By 1850 Gladstone had begun to look to the Scottish Episcopal Church as a better model than the Church of England to give a catholic lead to Anglicans, owing to its freedom from the constraints of a state connection.45 But he believed the Page 15 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Episcopal Church would be strengthened by the inclusion of communicant laymen as a third chamber of the General Synod, though leaving the initiation of legislation still in the control of the bishops. Such an address from the member for Oxford University, a leading High Churchman, and former Colonial Secretary could not be ignored by the bishops and they responded at a special meeting of the Episcopal Synod in April that year. Four of the seven bishops thought this unprecedented step acceptable ‘under certain conditions’; that is, leaving the episcopate in control of the agenda. However, the matter was stalled by referring it to diocesan synods and it went nowhere for the present.46 But a small chink in the wall of monopolistic episcopal power had already been achieved by the inclusion of clergy in synods from 1811. At the General Synod of 1862 a canon was passed allowing laymen to form part of the synods which elected bishops. The older brother of Bishop Alexander Forbes of Brechin reported smugly to Gladstone that the canon was passed by an alliance of the majority of the bishops with the lower house of the clergy, thereby defeating ‘the obstructives’, namely his Tractarian brother and Primus Robert Eden.47 William Forbes was the eldest son of Sir John Hay Forbes, Lord Medwyn of the Court of Session, and a leading Edinburgh advocate. He was thus a (p.23) representative of the increasing financial and managerial muscle of the urban middle class in the affairs of the church, and he was a supporter of the enfranchisement and empowerment in his church of his class of laymen. In agreement with Gladstone over the issue since at least 1852,48 he confidently asserted ‘we shall make no progress [as a church] without interesting laymen in its fortunes’. According to Forbes, ‘one of the advantages of the financial pinch we are suffering, is the turning of the public sentiment in the Church in the direction of a popular & democratic movement in the Church. We have too long been looking to the £10 of Dukes & Earls, & this plank has notably failed & we feel that the earnest middle class is the body to whom the temporal affairs of the Communion is to be entrusted.’49 A pattern for this emerging middle‐class power was established at the beginning of the nineteenth century when a trust fund was established in 1806 to augment the incomes of the bishops and poorer clergy. While the appeal was addressed to the ‘nobility and gentry’ of the Episcopal Church, the initiative and management of the fund was entirely middle class, led by Sir William Forbes, a leading Edinburgh banker and the grandfather of William Forbes.50 This pattern of middle‐class management behind aristocratic patronage repeated itself throughout the century. In 1838 the fund was re‐established through the efforts of Lord Medwyn as the Episcopal Church Society with a wider financial brief including church extension. Management was shared with clergy and bishops, but was predominantly in the hands of middle‐class laymen.51
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Such financial resources and a willingness to offer important organizational skills to the church could not be ignored by the clergy. They probably account for the increasing acceptance of lay involvement in the temporal management of the church by the bishops, as long as the spiritual or doctrinal area remained excluded. But even this limited concession was not going to be (p.24) acceded to without opposition from some of the more theologically conservative bishops and clergy. In 1867 there was a push for lay representation in synods from the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney but the Episcopal Synod stalled again by claiming it was ‘inexpedient to enter upon a question of such grave importance’.52 In 1869 all diocesan synods but that of Bishop Forbes's Diocese of Brechin resolved to include laymen provided they were excluded from issues of discipline, doctrine, or worship. Bishops Torry and Jolly had represented the older form of theological opposition to lay participation in ecclesiastical government, based on a High Church theology of the bishops as an apostolic order possessing the fullness of authority and order. Bishop Forbes's opposition was due to the new radical conservatism of Tractarianism, with its increasing sacerdotalism that exalted the independent power of all the ordained. The dioceses other than Brechin asked for a General Synod to resolve the issue. But the Episcopal Synod of that year also received a petition from aristocratic members against changing the status quo and accordingly passed a motion against it. It was decided to send the matter to special diocesan synods, including laymen from each congregation, to consider the matter. It was just another stall by the divided bishops, especially considering that the issue in 1869 had come up in the first place because of diocesan synods' initiatives.53 Clerical support for the change was probably encouraged by the views of such Episcopalian stalwarts from the landed classes as Sir Archibald Edmonstone who felt that a call for lay representation was not a claim for an equality of powers and privileges with the clergy. Laymen had distinct powers ‘though of an inferior kind’. He believed that the issue was a matter of the expediency of rousing laymen's ‘dormant interests’ by ‘widening their responsibilities’. ‘I want the laity to feel, more than they can do now, that they are members of a divinely appointed Church; and consequently, that their interests and responsibilities are not confined to their own locality’.54 The Tractarian Lord Horace Forbes opposed the move as a threat to the power of the ‘apostolic order’ of bishops.55 But (p.25) the Aberdeen lawyer George Grub claimed that lay supporters of the change were just as attached to episcopal government as was Lord Forbes.56 This push for lay representation, and with it the greater institutional influence of middle‐class males, reached an apogee in the formation of the Representative Church Council in 1876. This subsumed the work of the Church Society, but included in addition to the bishops and clergy all the lay officials of the church, lay synod representatives, plus a lay representative from every congregation. The first meeting in October 1876 was comprised of the bishops, 211 clergy, and 157 laymen elected by congregations.57
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 But a greater tension than that between bishops and laymen brewed during the nineteenth century, for the dual use of two liturgies for the Eucharist, necessitated by the union between the formerly nonjuring church and the qualified congregations, proved to be an increasing bone of contention. The Book of Common Prayer and conformity with England was not just a priority for southern and formerly qualified Episcopalians, it also drew support throughout the century from the influx of English and Irish immigrants into Scotland. In addition, as the lairds and aristocracy adopted an increasingly English lifestyle and education they also desired this mark of Anglicization in their worship. But the Scottish Communion Office was associated with the trials of the penal years in the allegiances of many northern Episcopalians and was an indispensable part of their received tradition. The supremacy of the Scottish Office was formally secured in the canons of 1811, the first revision of the canons after 1743. In these, canon 15 described the Office as ‘the authorized service of the Episcopal Church’, and ‘of primary authority in Scotland’ over the permitted use of the English Book of Common Prayer, and commanded its use on major occasions such as the consecrations of bishops and during General Synods.58 However, with the influx of non‐Scots Anglicans into Scotland, and the increasing Anglicization of the Scottish upper and middle classes it was inevitable that such divergences from the standards of the Church (p.26) of England would come under question in nineteenth‐century Episcopalianism. Eventually this non‐ Episcopalian Anglicanism became dominant, indicated by a canon passed at the General Synod in 1863 overturning the primary authority of the Scottish Office in favour of the Book of Common Prayer. Supporters of the Office counted themselves fortunate that the Office was not swept away altogether. However, by the end of the century there was another swing of the liturgical pendulum and the Scottish Office began to return to favour. This was partly due to the increasing numbers and influence of Anglo‐Catholics in the Episcopal Church. Anglo‐Catholics supported the Office because it seemed to them to have a more explicit doctrine of the real corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements. Ironically, traditional northern supporters of the Office believed it to be a hedge against the influence of Rome that became so prevalent with the Office's new Tractarian and Anglo‐Catholic protagonists. It was asserted both by contemporary Evangelicals in the nineteenth century and by Episcopalian historians since, that there was a love match between the Oxford Movement and the Episcopal Church with Anglo‐Catholics and Episcopalians warmly embracing one another in a fervour of Romanizing Catholicism. But how real was this marriage between two supposedly like‐ minded Catholic parties? In 1896 the Episcopalian William Stephen's history of the Episcopal Church had one of the earliest expressions of this interpretation when he claimed that the ‘listless and lethargic’ Episcopal Church was the chief beneficiary of the vitalizing influence of the Oxford Movement.59 In the same decade another clerical Episcopalian, John Archibald, also portrayed the impact Page 18 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 of the Oxford Movement as ‘revivifying’ the Scottish Church, though he admitted this was hindered by the ‘extreme language’ of the Romanizing party.60 The historian of Perthshire Episcopalianism and later dean of the Diocese of St Andrews, George Farquhar, also believed that traditional Episcopalian beliefs were identical with those of the Oxford Movement and therefore the two were natural partners.61 By this time (p.27) Episcopalian history was being almost exclusively written by clergy who were themselves products of Anglo‐Catholic theological colleges in England or Scotland. This historiographical process reached an apogee in the works of the Dean of Edinburgh, William Perry, written during the 1930s when Anglo‐Catholicism was at the height of its powers in British and international Anglicanism. In articles for journals and in two books Perry portrayed the Oxford Movement uncritically as the saviour of a largely moribund Episcopal Church, a position it was able to achieve because the movement's beliefs were identical with those of traditional Episcopalianism, although its ritualism was a necessary advance upon the woeful liturgical standards of the church.62 It is an interpretation that has found its way into the existing standard history of the Scottish churches in the modern period, the three‐volume work by James Bulloch and Andrew Drummond. For these writers Tractarianism was welcomed wherever the nonjuring tradition of Episcopalianism was alive, whereas it was only the southern Anglicizing tradition that was hostile.63 It has proved a durable perspective, having its latest manifestation in 1977 in an article by Gavin White.64 However, in recent research this standard Anglo‐Catholic historiography of nineteenth‐century Episcopalianism has been questioned as a greater difference and even antagonism between Scottish Episcopalianism and the Oxford Movement has been discerned. Tractarianism created as much division in the Episcopal Church as it did support. Pioneering research into the theology of contemporary High Churchmanship and early Tractarianism by Peter Nockles has not only delineated the affinities between the two, but also revealed their differences. The Tractarians admired the anti‐Erastianism of the Episcopal Church, but also its (p.28) emphasis on de jure episcopacy, the reverence for patristic theology, its Eucharistic theology, and its Scottish Office. In turn, leading Episcopalian churchmen looked favourably upon the movement in its initial years, particularly, but not exclusively, those of the northern school such as Bishop Patrick Torry, his son John Torry, and Bishop William Skinner. However, as a reaction developed against the Romanizing of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s Scottish Episcopalians also began to seek to distinguish their church from the movement.65 Recent work by me has also demonstrated that the Oxford Movement alienated many in the Episcopal Church including those steeped in the nonjuring tradition of the north, so that in its later developments Anglo‐Catholicism was also regarded as English and alien by many Episcopalians of both southern and northern traditions.66
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 The most divisive effect of the influence of Anglo‐Catholicism in the Episcopal Church came to public attention in the 1850s with the Eucharistic Controversy. This was initiated by Bishop Alexander Forbes when he expounded his Eucharistic doctrine in his primary charge to his diocese in 1857. Forbes was a disciple of Edward Pusey and was the first Tractarian to become a bishop in the Anglican Communion. After the usual pamphlet war characteristic of Victorian religious controversies, the bishop was delated by one of his priests and laity associated with him for trial by the Episcopal Synod for heretically upholding the real corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a theological quickstep, but a politically necessary judgement, the bishops found Forbes's teaching ‘to a certain extent inconsistent’ with Anglican formularies. Their judgement was a mere ‘Censure and Admonition’ and not the conviction for heresy feared by the bishop and his powerful supporters among the Tractarian and Anglo‐Catholic communities of interest in England and Scotland. In this way the bishops avoided a probable schism for the influence of these groups was growing.67 (p.29) Anglo‐Catholicism had powerful supporters among the landed classes, expressed in the building of St Ninian's cathedral as an Anglo‐Catholic edifice initiated by George Frederick Boyle, later sixth Earl of Glasgow, and Horace Courtney (later Lord) Forbes. William Gladstone and James Hope Scott, with the support of leading Scottish aristocracy, were responsible for the building of Trinity College in Perthshire as a combined Anglicizing public school for the middle classes and an Episcopal seminary, also during the 1840s. Yet the Episcopal Church was never a monochrome Anglo‐Catholic Church, even at the end of the nineteenth century. There were Evangelical congregations, and numbers of Evangelical Episcopalians worshipping in independent congregations outside the church and claiming allegiance to the Church of England. There were also clergy and laity who remained faithful to the old High Church tradition of the Church, worshipping with the Scottish Communion Office, upholding a non‐Erastian and catholic theology, but looking suspiciously at the ritualism of the Anglo‐Catholics as sailing too close to the winds from Rome. However, by the latter half of the nineteenth century the Episcopal Church undoubtedly sustained a new‐found confidence because it experienced an unprecedented growth, particularly among the Scottish middle classes. Bishop John Skinner's estimation of 11,000 Episcopalians had risen to nearly 44,000 by 1851, according to the new census figures (see Table 1.1). From the Table 1.1. Adherents of the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of Scotland, 1851–1900 Year
Episcopal Church
Church of Scotland
1851
43,904
566,409
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900
Year
Episcopal Church
Church of Scotland
1878
58,904
515,786
1881
68,553
528,475
1890
91,740
593,393
1900
116,296
661,629
Source: R. Currie et al., Churches and Church‐Goers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 128, 132–3, 219. greater religious detail of the 1851 religious census a closer analysis of the development of the Episcopal Church can be made. There was a high degree of return made by Episcopalian clergy to the (p.30) census, 109 chapels out of 131. The population of Episcopalians in that year equates with just 3 per cent of the Scottish population, compared with 85 per cent in all forms of Presbyterian Churches and 33 per cent in the Church of Scotland.68 This Episcopalian data was further elucidated by the Scottish Episcopal Journal in 1854 (see Table 1.2).
Table 1.2. Episcopalian Church Attendance, 1851 Morning
Afternoon
Evening
19,908a
8,147
4,110
28,744b
10,653
5,270
(a) Data on this row is from the 109 returns actually received. (b) Data on this row is from 109 returns, and 22 assumed averages for a total of 131 congregations. Source: Returns for the 1851 religious census, elucidated by SEJ (Aug. 1854), 117–19. The 1851 attendance figures meant that, in terms of congregations, the 134 congregations of Episcopalians (including three independent congregations) ranked after the Congregationalists (192) but ahead of the combined Methodists (82) and the Roman Catholics (117). But in terms of estimated attendances the 43,904 Episcopalians in church were considerably below that of the 68,531 Congregationalists and much less than the 79,723 estimated Roman Catholics. In 1856 there were 166 clergy and 157 churches and chapels; of these 58 were in the south and 107 in the north.69 Clearly, with the two dioceses south of the river Tay, Edinburgh and Glasgow and Galloway, comprising just under a third of the entire Episcopalian congregations by the mid‐nineteenth century this region was becoming increasingly important within the church, although the north still remained dominant. However, the Page 21 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 southern dioceses were growing at a faster rate as immigration was attracted to the central industrial belt of Scotland. In 1826 there were just eighteen congregations in the united Diocese of Edinburgh, Fife and Glasgow, compared with forty‐three in the other northern dioceses.70 In 1877 the Diocese of Edinburgh had (p.31) thirty‐five established and mission congregations and the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway fifty.71 In 1914 the Episcopal Church had 146,000 members. This marked increase was to some extent due to Anglican Irish and English migrating to Scotland and attending the Episcopal Church (though probably as many went to the Established Church of Scotland, or slipped from church attendance altogether). Increasing numbers of middle‐class Presbyterians also began to switch to the Episcopal Church. These were attracted by the more liturgical and aesthetically pleasing worship of that church compared to contemporary Presbyterianism, and also by the social cachet of belonging to a church akin to the Church of England in a culture where things English were held desirable. Such growth gave the Episcopal Church an unaccustomed assurance after the anxiety and marginality of the penal years of the eighteenth century and its slow recovery in the first part of the nineteenth century. This confidence was expressed, belatedly, in the usual Victorian way by embarking on an overseas mission. In 1871 the church accepted responsibility for the existing Anglican mission in the Chandra district of the Central Provinces of India. In 1873 the Scottish bishops consecrated the Revd Henry Callaway as bishop to a mission in Kaffaria in southern Africa, a move that identified them with the Anglo‐Catholic emphasis on missionary bishops as the instigators of new missionary churches.72 Callaway was already in Africa as a missionary to the Zulus from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and his consecration was a means of obtaining the sponsorship of the Episcopal Church for a new mission initiative.73 Throughout the nineteenth century the small and struggling Episcopal Church had its eye upon the Church of England, which it espoused as its ‘sister’, though such feelings were not often reciprocated by most of the English bishops until late in the century. English High Churchmen had been moral and financial supporters of their brethren north of the border since the end of (p.32) the eighteenth century.74 Recognition and affirmation from that predominant British church remained a major factor to the Scottish bishops and caused them to continually press for the rescinding of the remaining legal disabilities preventing Episcopal clergy holding a benefice in England. While this campaign, which went on intermittently after the repeal of the old Penal Acts of 1792, was finally successful in 1864, it caused the church to increasingly play down and modify its own distinctive traditions which were seen as a political hindrance to the achieving of this aim. Numbers of southern Episcopalians and even most of the Englishmen and Scots who comprised the Scottish episcopate favoured the removal of the Scottish Communion Office for this reason. Evangelical Episcopalians in Scotland opposed the Office because they saw it as marking the Page 22 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 Episcopal Church as a quasi‐Roman one. Leading lay Episcopalians among the landed classes who, like many of the middle‐class Episcopalians, were already highly Anglicized were intolerant or ignorant of the Office and the distinctive Episcopalianism it represented. The rearguard action in defence of the Office by Scots such as Bishop Forbes, the Revd Patrick Cheyne, and Lord Horace Forbes, and Englishmen such as Bishop Robert Eden and William Gladstone was, however, successful long enough for the church to recover a renewed pride in its own history and traditions late in the century. In the 1890s a revision of the Scottish Office was seriously considered by the church, under the patient and scholarly leadership of John Dowden, Bishop of Edinburgh, who was also recovering his church's history for his contemporaries. In the end nothing came of it, but the work laid the foundation for the eventual publication of a new Scottish Book of Common Prayer in 1929. The fact that the church was willing and able to revalue its own history and Scottishness by the end of a century in which an Anglicizing culture was so predominant in all facets of British life was in large part due to the ways in which the various subcultures of Episcopalians retained their traditional faith, or new Episcopalians from England appropriated it. Their story, and that of the other, opposing, Episcopalian cultures, in their response to the modernizing society of industrializing, capitalist Britain, is the subject of this book. Notes:
(1) Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 53–75. (2) Ian B. Cowan, The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth Century Scotland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 119–20. (3) Ibid. 102–29. (4) Cowan, Scottish Reformation, 139–58. (5) Donaldson, Scottish Reformation, 162–6. (6) Ibid. 183–91. (7) Donaldson, Scottish Reformation, 192–200. (8) This social doctrine was later famously expressed by Melville in a forceful way to James VI in 1596. Melville, no respecter of persons, or courtesies, on this occasion, proclaimed: ‘Thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Christ Jesus the King, and His Kingdom, the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and whase kingdome nocht a king, nor a lord, nor a heid, but a member’. Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), 228.
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 (9) David George Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of an Idea 1560– 1638 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 75. (10) Gordon Donaldson, ‘The Scottish Church 1567–1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), 40–56. (11) Rosalind Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage: Scotland 1603–1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 74–9. (12) Gordon Donaldson, ‘Covenant to Revolution’, in Duncan Forrester and Douglas Murray (eds.), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2nd edn. 1996), 63–70. (13) George Grub, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861), iii. 293–8. (14) Ibid. 299–300. Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage, 117–18. (15) Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Scottish Church 1688–1843: The Age of the Moderates (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1973), 5, 9; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 64. (16) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iii. 342–3 (17) Scottish Nation, 33, 34. (18) William Ferguson, Scotland 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968), 105. (19) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iii. 376. (20) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iii. 361–4. (21) H. Broxap, The Later Non‐Jurors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 11. (22) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iii. 357. (23) Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 5–9. (24) Broxap, Later Non‐Jurors, 70–1. (25) Strong, Alexander Forbes, 9–12. (26) Register of the College of Bishops, 1743–1819, NAS, CH. 12. 60. 1, fos. 1– 10.
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 (27) Note in the hand of Dean George Farquhar, Perth and Kinross Council Archives, A. K. Bell Library, MS 104, bundle 89. (28) These were Robert Kilgour of Aberdeen, Arthur Petrie of Moray, and John Skinner, coadjutor Bishop of Aberdeen. Charles Rose, Bishop of Dunblane, apparently refused to participate because Seabury was in English orders and was thus regarded by Rose as schismatic because the Church of England had rejected the Stuarts! Gavin White, ‘The Consecration of Samuel Seabury’, Scottish Historical Review, 63 (1984), 37–49 at 39. (29) Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80) was a Quietist Flemish mystical writer who repudiated orthodox Catholicism. G. D. Henderson, Mystics of the North‐East (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1934). (30) Gavin White, ‘Hutchinsonianism in Eighteenth‐Century Scotland, RSCHS 21 (1982), 157–69. (31) Life of the Right Reverend Alexander Jolly and the Right Reverend George Gleig (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 2nd edn. 1878), 205–6. (32) Peter B. Nockles. The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25– 6. (33) Thomas Lathbury, A History of the Non‐Jurors (London, 1845), 477–8. (34) Drummond and Bulloch claim that Episcopalianism was ‘the Church of the people’ north of the river Tay where half of Scots lived. Scottish Church, 15. (35) The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1995), 56. (36) Strong, Alexander Forbes, 12–13. (37) ‘The Scottish Clergy List in 1792 and in 1864’, SG (July 1865), 294. (38) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iv. 101–9. (39) These North‐East qualified congregations that united with the Episcopal Church between 1792 and prior to the Laurencekirk convention in 1804 included the chapels at Banff, Cruden, Elgin, Peterhead, and Stonehaven. Perry Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism. A Study of his Religious Ideas and Attitudes 1809–1858 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 164. (40) William Walker, The Life of the Right Reverend Alexander Jolly D.D. Bishop of Moray (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 2nd edn. 1878), 80. (41) Id., Life of Jolly and Gleig, 296–7. Page 25 of 27
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 (42) J. M. Neale, The Life and Times of Patrick Torry DD (London: Joseph Masters, 1856), 115. (43) H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–4, 8–9. (44) William Gladstone, On the Functions of Laymen in the Church (1852). (45) Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 69–9. (46) Register of the College of Bishops, 20 Apr. 1852, NAS, CH 12. 60. 3., fos. 254–5. (47) Forbes to William Gladstone, 21 Oct 1862, BL 44154, fo. 460. (48) Forbes to Gladstone, 8 Oct. 1852, ibid., fo. 401. (49) Forbes to Gladstone, 23 Feb. 1857, ibid., fo. 436. (50) The trustees for the first meeting on 29 Oct. 1806 were Lord Woodhouselee, James Clerk, Colin Mackenzie, Sir William Forbes, and William Forbes. Mackenzie was one of the principal clerks of the Court of Session. NAS, CH 12. 63. 1, fos. 19–27. (51) Brief sketch of the history, state, and prospects of the Scottish Episcopal Church by the committee of the Scottish Episcopal Society, NAS, CH 12. 64. 39, p. 4. (52) Register of the College of Bishops, 20 Nov. 1867, NAS, CH. 12. 60. 4., fos. 374–5. (53) Ibid., 16–17 Nov. 1869, fos. 394–406. (54) Archibald Edmonstone to the editor, SG (1 Oct. 1870), 53–5. (55) Lord Forbes to the editor, SG (15 Mar. 1872), 138. (56) George Grub to the editor, SG (1 Apr. 1872), 166. (57) SG (13 Oct. 1876), 80. (58) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iv. 131. (59) History of the Scottish Church (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1896), ii. 600. (60) John Archibald, The Historic Episcopate in the Columban Church and in the Diocese of Moray, (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1893), 340.
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Scottish Episcopalianism 1560–1900 (61) Farquhar was educated at Keble College, Oxford, and later commented: ‘It was therefore providential that I had entered a College where principles the same as those, in which I had been brought up, prevailed’. ‘Forty Three Years at the Cathedral Perth 1883–1926’ (n.d.), NLS, Dep. 271, fos. 2–3 (62) William Perry, The Oxford Movement in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933); id., Alexander Penrose Forbes, Bishop of Brechin: The Scottish Pusey (London: SPCK, 1939). (63) Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1975), 203–5. (64) ‘New Names for Old Things: Scottish Reaction to Early Tractarianism’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 329–37. (65) P. B. Nockles, ‘Continuity and Change in Anglican High Churchmanship in Britain 1792–1850’, D.Phil. Thesis (Oxford, 1982), ch. 7; id., ‘ “Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, JEH 47 (1996), 655–82. (66) Strong, Alexander Forbes, ch. 4; id., ‘High Churchmen and Anglo‐Catholics: William Gladstone and the Eucharistic Controversy in the Scottish Episcopal Church 1856–1860’, JRH 20 (1996), 175–84. (67) Strong, Alexander Forbes, ch. 4. (68) SEJ (Aug. 1854), 177. (69) SEJ (21 Feb. 1856), 25–6. (70) SEJ (Feb. 1854), 36–7, repr. of statistics for 1826 from the Edinburgh Almanac. (71) ‘The Episcopal Church in Scotland 1876–1877’, SG (Jan. 1877), 18–21. (72) C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self‐Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 13–19. (73) Records of the Episcopal Synod, NAS, CH 12. 60. 6, vol. 4, fos. 17–30. (74) Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’, 655–82
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐ East Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords Looks at the maintenance of a distinctive Episcopalian culture in rural Scotland by examining the religious cultures of Episcopalian crofters, farmers, and fisherfolk in Buchan and Aberdeenshire. It seeks to contradict the prevailing historical judgement that Episcopalianism was a religion of the landed classes and to restore a historical voice to these rural classes of Episcopalian Scots. It examines reasons for the longevity of Episcopalianism in this region from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Keywords: Aberdeenshire, Buchan, crofters, farmers, fisherfolk, landed classes, North‐east Scotland, rural Scotland
In the last years of the eighteenth century one of the chapelfolk, as Episcopalians were known in the North‐East, was having a theological discussion with a Presbyterian, or ‘Whig’ as eighteenth‐century Episcopalians called them. Exasperated by the intransigence of the Episcopalian the Presbyterian sought to bring the heated argument to a close by asking what he considered a rhetorical question. ‘ “An dae ye think we Presbyterians are a lost than?” To which the Episcopalian replied, “Weel. God's mercies are infinite— but . . . ” ’.1 Even in the late eighteenth century Episcopalianism remained strong enough in the North‐East (Buchan, Aberdeenshire, Angus, and Kincardineshire) for it to perpetuate a popular culture. This region was the Episcopal Church's traditional heartland. Here, despite its poverty and attrition
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East over the eighteenth century, it made surprisingly few concessions to dominant Presbyterianism in this region. This popular culture did manifest the common Episcopalian quietness, the fear of giving offence or of drawing attention that stemmed from the penal days when, especially after the '45, Hanoverian troops burned all the Episcopalian chapels they could find. After that experience Episcopalians were understandably less than anxious to remind the ruling authorities of their existence. Coupled with this enforced discretion there was an acceptance of the place of the Established Church by some. Episcopalians living at a distance from one of their own chapels would attend the parish kirk but would not usually communicate. Episcopalian lairds were not only heritors (landowners having legal maintenance obligations for the ecclesiastical infrastructure in a Church of Scotland parish), but they could also be ruling elders (p.34) and representatives on General Assembly, which could mean a loss to the Kirk in the next generation of a landed family. But among the North‐East Episcopalian peasantry there was a greater religious intransigence, not to say superiority, towards prevailing Presbyterianism. A dislike of proselytism was common among them, which could come from timidity. But it could also be a case of not wanting to cast the pearls of the true faith before swine. According to the reminiscences of the Dean of Brechin it was not uncommon to find among the bolder and sterner Episcopalians a belief that to court Presbyterians was to run the risk of the second commandment which proclaimed divine judgement upon idolators. For this reason ‘they would do nought, or next to nought, for the children of their Church's whilom enemies . . . they [Episcopalians] were the elect . . . and by words and actions they would do nought to widen that election’. The dean commented that this pride was a compensation for the loss of official political recognition.2 But that is to interpret popular North‐East Episcopalianism by the social and political agendas of higher classes for whom such recognition was essential for their involvement in ‘society’ as they defined it. In the day‐to‐day existence of Episcopalians of a lower social order this intransigence was a confidence in the truth and righteousness of their own brand of Christianity. It was also a manifestation of the polarized religious attitudes shared by Presbyterians as well as themselves. Presbyterians were just as dismissive towards their Chapel neighbours as when the shoe was on the other foot. This could be a result of ignorance. The Revd Andrew Cruickshank was the Episcopalian minister in Muthill from 1783 to 1834 and came one day to bury an old Episcopalian who had been lodging with an elderly Presbyterian relative for two years. Due to prevailing Presbyterian custom Episcopalian funerals had developed the custom of the burial service being read over the corpse in the house rather than publicly in the graveyard. The old Presbyterian woman heard the minister out with patience until he came to words of committal: ‘earth to earth and ashes to ashes’. As he took up a Page 2 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East handful of earth from a plate and began to cast it upon the corpse she seized his arm violently, exclaiming, ‘Hold, hold, I say, (p.35) ye're to play nane o' your cantrips here, sir.’ It was only when Cruickshank explained to her that he was not using an incantation to raise the dead that she let him go on.3 There was a part‐kindly, part‐contemptuous attitude of Presbyterians towards Episcopalians that was experienced one day by a local Aberdeenshire doctor in his meeting with the old parish minister. The minister hailed the doctor with ‘Eh, doctor! Have ye heard that the resurrectionists have been at work agen in oor kirkyard?’ ‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘and I am sorry indeed to hear it; are you sure it's the case?’ ‘Oh aye’, the minister said, ‘they've liftit twa men and a woman; it disna matter sae muckle for her, for, ye see, she was an Episcopal.’ Then pausing, he softened his remark by adding, ‘But, to be sure, she was a fellow creature for a' that.’4 One nineteenth‐century Presbyterian writer remembered this religious division of his boyhood as Episcopalian superiority. ‘While the Episcopalian had some advantage over his Presbyterian brother in the possession of a more picturesque and symbolic liturgy, his religious horizon was often obscured by sectarian intolerance. The persecution of the eighteenth century had left a half‐ hearted sore behind it, and broad hints were thrown out, when organs sounded, that heaven had been planned for a few.’5 So North‐East Presbyterians and Episcopalians at a popular social level knew they were erstwhile enemies and present antagonists still, and it was little use pretending otherwise, regardless of whatever cross‐border fraternization their social betters might engage in. The consequence of this was an Episcopalian clannishness. ‘Mair clannish than the heighlandmen themsel's.’6 Christmas, for example, was celebrated by Episcopalians but not by their Presbyterian neighbours because the Kirk had frowned upon all holy days but the Sunday sabbath. Consequently it was known as ‘the Chapel‐folks' Yule’ and, as at Easter, was a time of exclusively Episcopalian gatherings in homes.7 But this religious separation was also a consequence of the (p.36) demarcation of Episcopalians in eighteenth‐century Scottish society due to their political Jacobitism and their adherence to non‐Presbyterian episcopacy. It was a separation that, as regards their Jacobitism, was already being questioned within the Diocese of Aberdeen by 1786, two years before the death of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. In that year the diocese passed a series of resolutions which set out their church's claim to a religious life distinct from, and more basic to, their identity as Jacobites. In effect, the numerous North‐Eastern Episcopalians were claiming to be more fundamentally episcopal Christians than they were political Jacobites. The last four resolutions committed the diocese to working for the repeal of the penal laws as the necessary breakthrough for a reversal of their declining fortunes. But the first two of the six resolutions were a charter for the independent identity of their church preparatory to the ultimate demise of Episcopal allegiance to the Stuart claim to the throne. These
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East resolutions positioned Episcopalians for an unprecedented legal and public life in the next century. I. That the Church of Scotland8 is a spiritual Society founded by the authority of Jesus Christ the Supreme head of the Church, and derived thro' a lineal succession of Bishops from the Apostles, and is therefore independent of the authority or sanction of all civil powers for the continuation of that succession; the administration of the sacraments, and other holy affairs of religion necessary to the salvation of men; and for the government of her members by such discipline, as she shall see most conducive to their spiritual welfare. II. That the Church of Scotland, resting upon her spiritual powers alone, cannot admit of those political attachments that have been attributed to her, and which have been made the foundation of many severe laws and restrictions; And, that she has never made the profession of any (p.37) particular political principles, or the adherence to any particular party, a term of communion.9 It was a remarkable change in the official culture of Episcopalianism. The claim that political allegiance had not been a condition of membership was true in so far as any overt official or synodical declaration went. But it did fly in the face of the de facto realities of eighteenth‐century Episcopalianism. The royal family prayed for in the liturgy was not that in London but the Stuarts living in reduced circumstances in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. Nor was the disavowal of a requisite Jacobitism congruent with the ecclesiastical life of the church even in the later eighteenth century, decades after its political and military demise in the slaughter of Culloden. As late as 1770 a schism was caused in the Fraserburgh congregation over Bishop Robert Kilgour's appointment of a staunch nonjuring Jacobite as minister of Lonmay. The authorities retaliated by closing not just the Lonmay chapel, but those at Fraserburgh and Peterhead also. The managers of the Fraserburgh chapel asked the bishop to appoint a qualified clergyman at Lonmay, but he refused and his nonjuring intransigence led to a forty‐year‐long division of Fraserburgh into Hanoverian and Jacobite congregations.10
Under the increasingly dominant leadership of John Skinner, the ancient Kilgour's coadjutor bishop, the Aberdeen diocesan resolutions were forwarded to the Episcopalian clergy in the rest of the country who returned agreement to them by a great majority. But it was not until the following year that ‘circumstances had happened which seemed to put it in the power of the Clergy to go to greater lengths for the relief of the Church, than they had formerly thought themselves at liberty to do’.11 Those ‘circumstances’ were the death of Charles Edward Stuart on 30 January 1788 leaving as his successor to the Stuart claim his brother Cardinal Henry. Not even the nonjuring Episcopalian clergy could stomach a cardinal as their king and, consequently, for them there was not going to be a Henry I to succeed a Charles III. The (p.38) bishops meeting in Episcopal Synod agreed to pray for the Hanoverian monarch and royal family by
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East name during the Sunday services on 18 May 1789. To accompany this momentous change they sent an intimation to be read at every service that day. The Protestant Bishops in Scotland having met at Aberdeen on the 24th of April 1788, to take into their serious consideration the state of the Church under their Inspection, did, upon mature deliberation with their Clergy, unanimously agree to comply with and submit to the present Government of the Kingdom, as vested in the Person of his Majesty King George the Third. They also resolved to testify their compliance by uniformly praying for him by name in their public worship, in hopes of removing all suspicion of disaffection, and of obtaining relief from those Penal laws under which this Church has so long suffered. At the same time they think it their duty to declare, that this Resolution proceeds from principles purely ecclesiastical; and that they are moved to it by the justest and most satisfying reasons, in discharge of that high Trust devolved upon them in their Episcopal character, and to promote, as far as they can, the peace and Prosperity of that Portion of the Christian Church committed to their Charge.12 But how substantial in the North‐East was this ‘portion of the Christian Church’ which was expected to quietly acquiesce in this determination of ‘their spiritual Fathers’ the bishops? There was little in the way of record‐keeping in these congregations, with one or two exceptions. But the Old Statistical Account does enable some degree of approximate determination of the state of Aberdeenshire Episcopalianism in the 1790s. Detailing only those parishes where there were ten or more Episcopalians, the ministers of the Kirk had the data shown in Table 2.1 to offer. The comments of the Aberdeenshire ministers were sometimes unclear and also infrequent with regard to the Episcopalians in their parishes. The minister of Kenmay maintained that the local Episcopalians there ‘appear sometimes in the parish church’. In Huntly there was one Church of England chapel, while in Cruden there were two chapels, one Scots and one English. At Peterhead, Episcopalianism was described as ‘still professed by the wealthiest of the town’. Finally, the minister of Deer described a ‘Church of (p.39) Table 2.1. Aberdeenshire Episcopalianism in the 1790s Parish
Numbers
Newhills
15
Aberdeen
—
Kenmay
15
Kintore
2 families
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East
Parish
Numbers
Monymusk
28 families
Inverurie
10
Oyne
14
Chapel of Garioch
16
Rayne
60
Daviot
40
Bourtie
10
Keithhall & Kinkell
10
Udny
107
Slains
32
Logie Buchan
2 families
Ellon
c.130
Tarves
12
Meldrum
‘a few’
Fyvie
285
Auchterless
c. 22
Forgue
220
Drumblade
30
Huntly
—
Cairny
numerous
Cruden
c.360
Peterhead
c.1,100
Longside
723
Deer
721
New Deer
40
Montquhitter
60
Turriff
320
Crimond
244
Lonmay
311
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East
Parish
Numbers
Rathen
231
Pitsligo
50
King Edward
30
Source: OSA, xiv. 519, 530, 579, 625, 635; xv. 47, 50, 71, 84, 88, 100, 116, 122, 128, 147, 191, 202, 221, 257, 280, 292, 306, 310, 323, 364, 391, 462, 475, 481, 501, 512, 526, 551. England’ chapel and another ‘English Episcopalian chapel, where most of the gentry in the parish and neighbourhood attend’.
But the pattern of Episcopalian presence in Aberdeenshire is fairly clear from these figures. The church was stronger in the (p.40) north than in the southern parishes of the county. It was strongest of all in Buchan where it formed the second largest religious group after the Church of Scotland but ahead of other seceding Presbyterian groups, Roman Catholics, and the few imported religious bodies such as the Methodists and Independents. However, in no parish did it exceed the adherents of the Established Church, though it had probably came closest to doing so in Peterhead. According to the conscientious parish minister of the town, who had also taken his own surveys in 1764 and 1769, in the 1790s Episcopalians still accounted for 1,100 of a parish population of 4,100.13 A more accurate measurement of the Aberdeenshire Episcopalian population can be gauged from 1820 when the diocese began to compile an annual list of congregational returns in the synod minutes. In that year, as reported to the synod by Bishop William Skinner from his triennial visitation, there were 7,132 Episcopalians in the diocese, if the large centres of Peterhead and Fraserburgh were included. But as they were both under the charge of clergy who were bishops of other dioceses they were canonically excluded from the diocese. Without those congregations Episcopalians in the diocese totalled 5,920.14 These returns enable some determination to be made about the persistence of North‐ East Episcopalianism, using as a reference the older congregations established in the eighteenth century (see Fig. 2.1). The most remarkable aspect of this data is that the populations of the rural congregations were virtually static. There was a little decrease in most charges, but this was not steep except in the case of Longside. This sharper decline of the largest rural congregation was somewhat balanced by a large rise in the congregation at Cruden. In other words, while there were population shifts in the rural charges of the diocese the overall picture is of country Episcopalianism in Aberdeenshire maintaining its strength in the early to mid‐nineteenth century. Yet this was the period of agricultural improvement that resulted in the
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East depopulation of the Highlands and the reduction of rural labour in the southern Lowlands, where dispossessed or evicted tenants and cottars migrated (p.41) into the growing cities of the central belt.15 Why then was the stable persistence of an Episcopalian rural population possible in nineteenth‐century Aberdeenshire?
This retention rate had more to do with the nature and social consequences of agricultural improvement in Aberdeenshire Fig. 2.1. Diocese of Aberdeen: than with anything the membership of old congregations, 1821– Episcopal Church itself did, 1860 though the latter dimension cannot be discounted completely. The marshy, treeless, and windswept landscape of the region had been customarily dominated by small joint‐tenant farms. The poverty of the soil, its poor roads, and difficult transportation made for low productivity. It was a land of rough stone cottages, roofed with turf and heather whose inhabitants lived by the light of open peat fires and wooden torches. Fishing was well established by 1800, but this was largely subsistence work for the inhabitants of the small coastal villages whose common lack of harbours limited the scope of their enterprise. In the early 1790s the only sign of any change to this traditional way of life were the few planned villages that had been constructed by improving landlords to provide services for the neighbouring countryside and which included some industry and manufacturing.16 (p.42) North‐East agricultural improvement received its major impetus from the French wars, which stimulated demand for all agricultural products and especially beef cattle. The sharp rise in agricultural prices encouraged proprietors to greater investment by way of drainage and enclosures that enabled larger farms, sufficient for plough horses to work the fields and increase production. Longer leases were provided on the new single‐tenant farms that gave tenants the security to build better stone and slate houses with genuine floors and chimneys. Villages were built or reconstructed for agricultural labourers and specialists such as ploughmen and cowmen. Turnpike roads were increasingly constructed after 1795 with local carriers becoming important businesses, complementing the railways when they began to spread north of Aberdeen from the 1850s. The improved communications strengthened local villages, though the railways did bring an end to the development of planned villages. Steamships began regular coastal services south from the 1820s, which allowed the transportation of live cattle and meat to southern markets. Such Page 8 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East developments tended to strengthen the role and dominance of the city of Aberdeen as the region's major service centre and local entrepôt.17 However, whereas in the Highlands agricultural improvement cleared the land of peasants in exchange for sheep, in Aberdeenshire it resulted in the retention of the local population. This was because in the North‐East the agricultural changes retained a necessary place for the agricultural labourer, but transformed him from a joint‐tenant cottar to a sole‐tenant crofter or small farmer. The major period of agricultural improvement, from 1800 to 1830, replaced the joint‐tenancy small farms with compact, reasonably large, regularly shaped farms run by a single tenant. There were more small farms between fifty and one hundred acres than was common in the southern Lowlands, and they all needed labour. It was this need to retain local labour, and the ability of local proprietors to use the displaced cottars to forward the work of improving the land, that resulted in a farming system that kept its population on the land. Proprietors would lease marginal land to tenants on longer leases. The tenant held his land directly from the (p.43) proprietor and owed him no other services, which used to divert attention away from his own land. Therefore, crofters and their families had sufficient security and incentive to undertake the back‐breaking work of bringing marsh and rocky ground into productive farmland. Using family labour they would drain, clear, fence, rehouse their property, and develop their own commercial skills to utilize new crops and methods. This intense effort was required if they were to meet the rising rentals based on the proprietor's expectation of improving land. By the mid‐nineteenth century the North‐East was transformed by this agricultural improvement into a region of small family farms, interspersed with fewer large‐scale farms and the estates of the traditional lairds and aristocracy.18 This largely crofter population developed a particular social pattern based on the stages of work that a farm labourer could expect to go through in his life. Most boys learned their basic farming skills as sons of small farmers or tenanted crofters. They usually became full‐time unmarried servants on a farm not more than a few miles from home, as indoor servants or as skilled ploughmen or cowmen. After marriage they were most likely to take a house in a village as farm cottages were few in the North‐East. Eventually they would take over their own croft, either from their father or a different one altogether. Some would leave the land for the city, or emigrate, but most were able to exercise an option to remain on the land. The consequence of this working pattern was that social standing was not a permanent fixture. A man in his lifetime was servant, day labourer, and crofter at various stages of life, having been born into a family with at least some land. Therefore, Aberdeenshire society was not one of landless labourers and landed proprietors but basically employing farmers and landed crofters. The social consequence of this economic change was the lack of a culture of deference among North‐East farm labourers. Although capitalist farming had taken hold by the mid‐nineteenth century, under the new economic Page 9 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East structure Aberdeenshire retained its peasant culture which did not (p.44) admit that the larger landowner was socially superior just because he owned more land.19 While land went with men, it was also a society with a definite place for women in the economy. They were common as agricultural labourers until the mid‐ century, and also as maids in the farmhouse where their work was supervised and managed by the farmer's wife. Even as indoor workers they would have to work outside when seasonal work such as harvest dictated. Female workers lived in the farmhouse where they were sexually accessible to the single male servants, which resulted in the characteristically high rates of illegitimacy in the North‐East.20 Even as late as 1860 women could still be employed as day labourers during intensive labour periods of the year, but by this time they were usually wives or widows of married farm servants.21 The retention of women as well as men in the improved agricultural economy of the North‐East also facilitated the continuation of family life and the consequent perpetuation of a distinctive peasant culture. So it was fortunate for the Diocese of Aberdeen that just at the time it was able to adopt a more public life, agricultural change was reaffirming the continued economic viability of its traditional peasant adherents. It was economics that accounted for the remarkable stability of adherence for those Episcopalians who still remained true to their church after the attrition of the previous century. In the Highlands economic change had resulted in depopulation which was a major cause of the erosion of allegiance to the Episcopal Church. But in the North‐East that church was a beneficiary rather than a casualty of the forces of agricultural change. This stable retention of Episcopalian numbers is further evinced when a comparison is made between the congregational returns from the nineteenth century with the figures given by the parish ministers of the Old Statistic Account in the 1790s (see Fig. 2.2). It should be acknowledged that the figures in Fig. 2.2 are not (p.45) exact comparisons as the Old Statistical Account figures are those of Episcopalians in local Church of Scotland parishes, while the nineteenth‐century figures are for those in Episcopal congregations. These are not necessarily the same as congregations were comprised of Episcopalians from across parish boundaries travelling to the nearest available chapel. But as congregational membership data before 1800 is virtually non‐existent the two sources Page 10 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East do give at least an approximate progression. It was unlikely that Episcopalians resident in parishes where there was an Episcopalian chapel, as was the case in all those above, would have travelled to another chapel, except for a few on the parish boundaries who were closer to a chapel in another parish. All the congregations with the exception of Cruden (to be explored below) show a decline. However, except for Longside, this decline over the seventy years of the data is minimal, and was mostly evident in the period 1825 to 1860. As the numbers of Episcopalians overall grew during this period (as the figures from all the congregational returns reveal in Fig. 2.3) this decline in the older congregations is probably best explained by a membership shift to other congregations. This could occur as economic developments attracted new migrants into towns and villages whose growth was encouraged by railways, new planned villages, new industries, or new marginal land available for tenancy. The Episcopal church at (p.46) Alford, for example, was built soon after the population increased with the arrival of the railway there.22 With regard to the farming congregations of the North‐East, therefore, the Episcopal Church was holding its own from the late eighteenth century until it began to experience real growth from around the 1820s. This growth can be seen in the numbers of members given in the annual synod returns.
There was a significant drop in the proportion of communicants to members between 1831 and 1860, but this was probably due to two factors. The increasing frequency of celebrations of the Eucharist by the mid‐nineteenth century would have spread the acts of Communion throughout the year more broadly than in previous generations when the
Fig. 2.3. Diocese of Aberdeen: adherents, 1821–1860
Fig. 2.2. Diocese of Aberdeen: adherents,
1790–1860 practice was for just three or four annual Communion days. Secondly, there was a real increase in the number of baptisms during this period, while deaths rose only slightly and marriages remained virtually static (see Fig. 2.4). In other words, in this period more Episcopalians were children and consequently ineligible to receive Holy Communion until after they were confirmed, usually around 12 or 14 years of age. That Episcopalianism did manage to retain its roots among the local peasantry in the North‐East is also supported by the returns made to the Commissioners of Religious Instruction in 1837 (see Table 2.2). The overwhelming majority of congregations gave evidence of a predominantly poor or working‐class membership (to use the Commission's categories). This is further supported in the congregational returns made to the Episcopal Church Society (p.47)
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East
Fig. 2.4. Diocese of Aberdeen: occasional offices, 1820–1860
Table 2.2. Working‐Class Adherence in North‐East Congregations, 1837 Congregation Number of poor
Comments
Huntly
mostly
‘working class & small farmers’
Ellon
121/183
‘increasing’
Longside
four‐fifths
‘agricultural labourers, operatives, handcraftsmen, and others’
Cuminestown five‐sixths
‘those from Turriff, King Edward and New Deer all poor and working class’
Keith
90
‘all poor and working class’
Forgue
150/200
Old Meldrum c.70/c.100 New Pitsligo
80–90
‘all apart from 2 families’
Peterhead
3/4 of 1,172
Fraserburgh
c.230/ c.300
Old Deer
all
except a few ‘chiefly landed proprietors’
Woodhead
c.200
‘chiefly small farmers’
Arradoul
all 300
‘except for a very few families’
Portsoy
2/5 of 260–70
Banff
c.144/260–70
Note: The ‘Number of poor’ column expresses (in differing ways) the portion of the whole congregation which comprises poor congregants. The
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East ‘Comments’ column expresses the socio‐economic composition of the congregation in relation to that population. Source: Appendix to the Fifth Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 122–5, 152–5, 162–5, 172–5, 190–3, 198– 205, 214–21, 226–33, 238–9, 246–9, 264–7, 280–3. (p.48)
Table 2.3. Working‐Class Adherence in North‐East Episcopalian Congregations, 1849 Congregation Number of poor
Comments
Turriff
‘all with very few exceptions’
Monymusk
‘upwards of two‐thirds/ c.80’
Lonmay
c.3/4
‘2 proprietors & rest agricultural labourers’
Cruden
all
‘with exception of Erroll family’
Note: The ‘Number of poor’ column expresses (in differing ways) the portion of the whole congregation which comprises poor congregants. The ‘Comments’ column expresses the socio‐economic composition of the congregation in relation to that population. Source: Scottish Episcopal Church, Congregational returns to the Episcopal Church Society for the 1840s, NAS, CH 12.65.1 ff. by incumbents requesting grant‐in‐aid money. In Table 2.3, Church Society data from 1849, the first year of returns, is used for those congregations which had also returned a positive answer to the Commission's inquiries about working‐class members.
Two incumbents provided greater details in these returns about the social composition of their congregations. John Pratt at Cruden explained to the Episcopal Church Society that his members were entirely fisherfolk or farmers, with the exception of the family of the Earl of Errol, the major landed proprietor of the area: ‘With the exception of the Errol family—here only occasionally—all the other members of the Congregation may be said to come under one or other of the classes—“poor” or “working”. Small farmers, who labour with their own Hands—Farm Servants—Cottagers and Fishermen compose the congregation. Five fishing villages are in the Parish, and nearly all the inhabitants of these are members of the Church.’23 James Christie at Turriff was even more detailed in his return to the Society. Two crofters with 2 horses each; one crofter with one horse; 2 Shopkeepers, 2 Merchant Tailors, 2 Shoemakers, 1 Innkeeper, 1 Gardener, 1 Watchmaker, five ladies, but whose circumstances cannot be called easy; Page 13 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East also two males but in easy circumstances, Mrs & Miss Rae of Ardmiddle, Lady Abercromby, Lady Duff when in the county which is (p.49) not more than one or two months in the year at most, Craigston family but they have not been in the country for more than one month in one year, 4 in last and for 1853 & present year absent altogether from Scotland. The remaining adult portion of the congregation is composed of day labourers, servants, & aged pauper females. Mr Adam of Scobbach is also a member of the Congregation, but is hardly ever at home—residing chiefly & almost altogether in England.24 There was a common social picture, therefore, in these congregations of a largely servant or crofter membership, interspersed with the families of large farmers, lairds, and local aristocracy. This did vary somewhat in the large towns where there was greater, or even predominant, middle‐class membership. But with the exception of one or two congregations, Episcopalianism in the North‐East was a religion of the peasantry as it had been in the eighteenth century.
This traditional North‐East Episcopalianism retained a cultural rivalry with Presbyterianism even into the later nineteenth century. In the 1860s the Episcopal Church was investing heavily in the establishment of congregational schools. From the educational returns made by incumbents it is apparent that a number of these priests felt that one of the major benefits of the schools was the way in which they reduced local Presbyterian hostility towards the Episcopal Church. The incumbent of Forgue, for example, considered his school was primarily useful in maintaining Episcopalian numbers ‘in a very hostile environment’. The openness of the school to Presbyterian children had brought an increasing number of Presbyterian parents to attend Episcopal services, an experience which, the clergyman believed, gave them ‘juster notions of what our services are’.25 The priest at New Pitsligo recorded there had been a ‘change of feeling toward the Church on the part of those without’, which was due to the school. It was a consequence of Presbyterian parents allowing their children to attend not just the school but also church services, and to do so themselves occasionally. As a result, the clergyman was sublimely confident of the evangelistic success of Presbyterian exposure to Episcopalianism: (p.50) for a long time past instead of contempt, abuse, misrepresentation, & even violent opposition in every possible way, the Church has commanded universal respect and the Services have received the commendation and even appreciation to a large extent of almost all. No sympathy is ever manifested now with any attempt to throw ridicule on Her services—on the contrary the acquaintance with them which the young acquire from attending them leads to inquiry into Church principles, on their own part when they are old enough & thro' their influence on the part of their parents & others & inquiry, I need not say, seldom fails to bring conviction of the Church's claims as the Divinely Instituted channel of salvation.26
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East At Deer it was the same story. Even whole families had been added to the congregation through the influence of the schools among Presbyterians.
Since the establishment of the School, two years ago, prejudices against the Church have been materially lessened. It has shown the Community that the Church in Scotland is not kept up merely for the use of the rich & great, as a luxury to them; & that we really care for the poor. One telling fact is that, whereas, formerly scarcely an individual belonging to the Established religion, or the Sects, wd. have ventured to cross the threshold of the Church, now, especially at the Evening Service, they may be seen by scores, some of them quite regular attenders, & taking their part heartily in the service. Their children, being taught the Collect & Hymns, wh. bring into their view the Church's doctrines & Holy Seasons, repeat them at home; & the parents are brought in many instances to see that the Church is not that terribly corrupt, superstitious Popish bugbear that they had been taught in their youth to believe it [sic].27 The minister at Woodhead was of a less certain mind about the social spin‐offs of the school there. The congregational increase he experienced was smaller than he had expected with the institution of the school. He could offer no certainty about the lessening of prejudice, but had not experienced any opposition from Presbyterian parents when their children were required to attend Episcopal services. But even this less confident response indicates (p.51) the continued existence of Presbyterian dislike of Episcopalianism. The priest affirmed that the school meant Episcopalian children were no longer exposed to the cultural antagonism towards their own church by attending the parish school. ‘They hear it spoken of slightingly by their school fellows, & it may be by their Teachers.’28 The clerical presumption that parish school teachers could be as inimical as Presbyterian children was also indicative of Episcopalian stereotypical animosity towards Presbyterians. The priest at Meiklefolla was more akin to his colleague at Woodhead than to the confident claims of other clergy for the influence of church schools. He could not say the school had increased his congregation, though there was ‘considerably over one third’ of Established and Free Church children at the school, despite the best efforts of the Free Church minister to prevent this.29 The attitude of the Free Church minister points to a clerical animus towards Episcopalianism, which was not always shared by numbers of his flock. Presbyterian parents probably appreciated the cheap education provided by the Episcopalians and were prepared to accept some contact with the church as a consequence. But the evidence of the priest at Deer suggests that some Presbyterians went further than this and were prepared to be regular and knowledgeable attenders at the non‐Eucharistic evening services. Some even converted, but perhaps not as many as the Episcopal clergy would have liked for their educational investment. That investment, however, seems to have been mostly valued by the clergy for the way in which it removed Episcopalian children from the influence of the parish school, and permitted the clergy to Page 15 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East have greater influence over children's religious development. The comment of the incumbent of Meiklefolla was characteristic. He supported the congregational school because it afforded ‘facility for having the young oftener under my own eye, and thereby forming a more intimate acquaintance with them’.30 While prejudice remained a constant, if declining, factor in the religious culture of the North‐East on both Episcopalian and Presbyterian sides, what about other aspects of Episcopalian (p.52) culture? Fortunately a glimpse of this at the popular level is accorded through a series of articles contributed to the Episcopalian journal, the Scottish Standard Bearer, at the end of the century by Canon William Low of Largs under the title of ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’. Low had been the incumbent of Cruden, one of the most populous charges in the diocese of Aberdeen, from 1870 to 1880. He succeeded the well‐ known J. B. Pratt when Pratt died in 1869 after an incumbency of forty‐three years.31 The parish of Cruden had a population of 2,349 in 1841, but the only villages in it were the small coastal fishing villages of Bullers, Ward, and Whinnyfold, which belonged to the Earl of Errol. However, the earl's property in the parish had considerably diminished, having been sold off to nine other proprietors to the grief of the parish minister as the earl was a conscientious principal heritor. The parish kirk was in the centre of the parish, and had recently been enlarged by the heritors. It had 840 communicants on the roll. There was a parochial school and four other unendowed schools, including an Episcopal, but also ten alehouses. By the 1840s earlier industry, in the form of a thread factory and a quarry, had both closed down, but a carding and spinning mill had recently opened on one of the estates and was doing ‘considerable business’. But the parish was still predominantly occupied in farming and fishing, having been improved in the 1830s with consolidation and drainage of the land.32 St James's Episcopal church was a substantial local landmark, having a spire of ninety feet. It was erected on the coast just west of Ward, so that it was a navigation mark for the fishing vessels out to sea. Built in 1843 with significant assistance from the seventeenth Earl and Countess of Errol, it was a sign of the newfound confidence of the North‐East Episcopalians by the mid‐ century.33 According to John Pratt, in 1841 the congregation consisted of small farmers and crofters, with their farm servants, male and female, and the inhabitants of the fishing villages. These fisherfolk were quite numerous with a ‘rapidly increasing’ population. They ‘with scarcely an exception, are faithful and attached (p.53) members of the Church, and with few exceptions, regular in their attendance’. With regard to Episcopalianism in the district, Pratt maintained that ‘a considerable portion of the inhabitants of the district of Country around the proposed Church have always been firmly and unalterably attached to Episcopacy . . . [and] the number of souls belonging to the congregation rather exceeds Seven Hundred’.34 In the parish of Cruden at least
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East Episcopalians were a match for the Church of Scotland, especially after it divided at the Disruption. In his reminiscences Low provided a number of character portraits of various members of his congregation during the mid‐nineteenth century. He would take the reserved sacrament to housebound elderly congregants as part of the usual Easter customs. These included two elderly women who lived alone in a small thatched cottage, with its peat stack outside at one end, and lit by only windows of eighteen inches square, and a door where the overhanging thatch required him to stoop to enter into the interior redolent with peat smoke. Waiting for his ministry were a 93‐year old women and her frail daughter of some 70 years. They were joined by Johnny Barclay, who was not too old to walk the quarter‐ mile to the cottage for his Easter Communion, but who was the eldest of the three communicants. He lived to be 100 in 1877. In his ninety‐seventh year Barclay did not expect to live much longer and wanted to arrange his affairs with his priest. He specified who was to inherit his bible, his prayer book, and an ancient rifle he had hanging over the fireplace. These were the only things he possessed after he became a pensioner on the Parochial Board. But he extracted from his bible a £5 note that he had hoarded away from the Board's prying eyes. He gave it to Low explaining that he had saved it for his burial, and if there was anything left it was to go the endowment fund of the church.35 Towards the end of his life his religion was obviously a fundamental aspect of Barclay's identity. It had sufficient priority for him to expend his limited energy and walk a quarter of a mile to fulfil his traditional duty of receiving Holy Communion on Easter (p.54) Day, or as close to that day as possible. Among the three things he determined to keep in his poverty, two of the three were to do with his church—the bible and the prayer book—while the rifle may have been a momento of his life as a soldier. What loomed large for him in these remaining years was the need to be accorded a decent burial, for which he had preserved the last of his money. The £5 represented a considerable investment, which could have significantly improved the comfort of his final years. But a proper church burial with the customary obsequies was a higher priority for the old man. Even if he had to go on poor relief, he would be buried a respectable man who paid for his own funeral and was buried according to the rites of his church. George Lendrum was an unmarried Episcopalian from the other end of the local social scale who had made his way up from small farmer to considerable wealth. He had begun on his farm with a capital of £100 and by dint of hard work, thrift (meanness said some neighbours), and shrewd investments in grain he accrued sufficient wealth to disperse significant sums to charities. Lendrum gave £1,000 to form a fund to help impoverished persons stay off the parish poor relief roll, but stipulated that indulgence in drink, tobacco, or snuff would disqualify a candidate. There was £400 for the Episcopal school and a similar amount to an Page 17 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East institution for the blind. The church endowment fund received £125, and the clergy widow's fund of the Episcopal Church £200. He also gave £800 to fund a bursary at the University of Aberdeen. Low commented that the benefactions were all associated with Lendrum's name.36 Like the poorer Barclay, Lendrum's Episcopalianism was sufficiently important for him to spend his energy and substance on it. Also like Barclay, he was determined to leave some mark of his life at his death, although Lendrum could afford to do this more lavishly than Barclay, who was content to ensure he had at least a decent funeral for his neighbours to remember him by. Sandy Davidson saved all his life for a farm and died days before he could consummate his ambition and his marriage. His father was a tough Episcopalian of the old school for whom little (p.55) could keep him from his Sunday duties. He appeared one Sunday in church suffering intensely from toothache, with his face wrapped in flannel (a traditional remedy, as flannel was supposed to provide relief). It gave little alleviation to the elder Davidson but his appearance did provide amusement for the younger members of the congregation. Not surprisingly, Low commented that the Davidson's home was one where duty, religious or otherwise, was regarded as sacred.37 But local life was not made up entirely of staunch and duty‐bound Episcopalians. Low recognized that among the young male farm servants especially the practice of religion left much to be desired from his clerical point of view. It was common for these males to spend Sunday recovering from Saturday night, lying in for most of the morning while one of them tended the horses on behalf of the others. Uppermost in the priest's mind was the need to safeguard the piety of new farm workers who had been raised in the church. Such young men, coming from the homes of small farmers like the other servants, were easily influenced because there was no class distinction to form a protective barrier against the mores of the irreligious. ‘The young farm‐servant, being often himself the son of such a farmer, would not think of them as belonging to a different class, and there would be no class antipathy.’ To overcome the contagion of religious indifference Low enlisted the help of the local small farmers. When he was notified of a newcomer into the district he paid a visit to one of these farmers and delegated to him responsibility for the young man's Christian practice. The farmer was asked to visit the new servant on the first available evening, tell him about the church, and arrange to pick him up on the next Sunday when the farmer was himself going to the service. Low, of course, visited the servant himself, but believed that without this lay assistance he would not have been as successful as he was in retaining Episcopalian allegiance among farm servants in Cruden.38 What Low did not comment on, or took for granted, was the commitment of these Episcopalian small farmers to their church. The nature of their existence, often hard and consuming, breaking in new land and (p.56) struggling to remain solvent, left them little time over for other pursuits. That Low could expect their cooperation in this way indicates a high level of Page 18 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East Episcopalian support among the Episcopalian crofters. Of course, it may also have had something to do with their interest in maintaining the faith and morals of their own sons when they, as was usual, became farm servants elsewhere. One of these servants left behind him an invaluable expression of his Episcopalian piety in an exercise book in which he noted his religious reflections on Sundays during 1830.39 It was a diary kept for his own personal contemplation and not intended as a more public document, which makes the comments more likely to be a reasonably accurate representation of his personal piety. This male servant worked on a farm some six miles from where he was born, earning about £8 per half‐year plus board. Born in 1799, he was then in his thirty‐first year and was a member of the Meiklefolla congregation, as was his birth family. He had therefore been raised in the church and was taught his catechism as was customary. Unfortunately, Low did not give the diary in full in his article but only extracts, but he asserted that what he had provided was characteristic of the rest. The servant went to church virtually every Sunday and remembered the text of the sermon, noting it in his diary along with a comment on what he had heard for his own edification. Some Sundays were spent in meditation and reading but not every one apparently for he commented that on New Year's Day 1830 he spent ‘the rest of the day very unbecomingly’. This was hardly surprising, as this was the day following Hogmanay. It was a tribute to his piety that he made it to church at all on that day after enjoying the traditional festivities of the night before. Anxieties about his use of time figured prominently in his meditations. He noted again, just two weeks later in the entry for 10 January, that he had spent the following days of the week ‘thoughtlessly employed’ and prayed ‘Lord help me to be more watchful for the future and prepared to die’. On 31 January he was reiterating this theme yet again. ‘When I look back on my conduct though the past month, I find I have trifled away time which I ought to have spent in gratitude for numberless mercies (p.57) which I have daily received.’ He attended the Eucharist on Easter Day where he received Communion. Easter Day, April 11.—Attended Divine Service and Communion. Text—Ps. Cxvi. 12, 13, 14. What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits to me? I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all His people. O my God, all the glory be unto Thee for Thy goodness in vouchsafing to feed me at Thy table. O continue Thy goodness and mercy towards me. Enable me to perform my resolutions to serve Thee in sincerity for the future. Defend me from all temptations, and give me the assistance of Thy Holy Spirit to guide me in the way that leadeth unto Thee, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.40 The experience of nearness to God prompted by his experience of Holy Communion, of being fed by God at God's table, prompted this prayer in which he asked to be enabled Page 19 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East to keep his religious resolutions by being defending against temptation (which he evidently experienced). Eventually, he hoped by the Holy Spirit's guidance to arrive in the presence of God.
The metaphor which concluded his prayer was the classic spiritual one of the journey, made famous among the Protestant British by the seventeenth‐century Nonconformist Englishman John Bunyan in his Pilgrim's Progress. The way to God was beset by temptations and required a serious effort on the part of the Christian to maintain the journey. But in this endeavour the Christian is helped by God's grace. For this Episcopalian that meant the sacraments, the Holy Spirit, personal meditation and spiritual reading, church services, and the sermons which meant a great deal to his weekly piety. The Bible was also important to him for his quotation of the sermon texts he wrote down was invariably correct according to the Authorized Version with only an occasional minor error. The prayer book seems also to have figured in his consciousness for the prayers he wrote were redolent with the form, cadences, and language of prayer book prayers. The one work of devotion he explicitly mentioned was reading ‘Skinner's Letters addressed to those intending to take Holy Orders, on the subject of predestination’. Evidently this Episcopalian was concerned about salvation, hence all the attention to (p.58) his own practice of piety. Perhaps he also experienced some anxiety about whether or not he was among the saved. This farm servant generally found his Episcopalianism offered him a helpful and reflective piety centred on the Sunday worship of the church, but maintained through his working week. It was, perhaps, a piety somewhat individualistic in its focus, although his attendance at church would have reminded him of the fellowship of which he was a member. It was a religion somewhat scrupulous in its use of time but, if his reflections after Hogmanay are any indication, his was not a piety which prevented him from joining in the traditional festivities of the wider culture. There are some indications of Episcopalian customs from other sources. When the congregation at Meiklefolla changed the location of their chapel local memory continued to retain a sense of sacredness attached to the former site. For a long time women on their way to the new chapel would curtsy as they passed the place where their old chapel used to be.41 The same behaviour was practised among the men of the Episcopalian fishing village of Cove, just south of Aberdeen. Fishermen attending a funeral all removed their hats when they came to a ruined bridge by the shore. In pre‐Reformation days the bridge had on it a statue of Mary, or a shrine, and their priest believed this was the reason for their customary behaviour. The men themselves could offer little, or no, explanation for their behaviour.42 If the priest's supposition was correct then North‐East Episcopalians had a remarkable religious conservatism and an attachment to the sacredness of place that was preserved not just for years, but for centuries. It was also a piety in which the holiness of a chapel or shrine was a significant indicator of the presence of God. The curtsy, or raising of hats, was a sign of deference to a God who was recognizably superior. But it was a Page 20 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East superiority made familiar and comforting by being focused on a local humble chapel, or a ruined bridge. Innovation was not a valued characteristic of North‐ East Episcopalianism and could give rise to some pithy responses. In Kincardine O'Neil a priest began to adopt the use of the white (p.59) surplice in place of the customary black Geneva gown for services. Officiating at a burial one day, he was observed by the old sexton leading a burial party in the new vestment. It caused the old man to comment, ‘Preserve's a! What's this noo? It canna be the corp on its ain feet!’43 The only thing the sexton had seen like this unknown vestment was the winding sheet of a corpse. There were other customs in which Episcopalians participated which may have also been part of the traditional life of the North‐East and were not just specific to themselves. On 2 May, the eve of Holy Cross Day, they placed small crosses made of rowan twigs over every opening into the house as protection against evil spirits. Other vestiges of the pre‐Reformation Christian year continued, such as the cessation of all manual labour during three days of Christmas. This was a time of mutual visiting, beer was brewed, and cakes baked for expected guests. Good Friday also was widely regarded as a day free of work. Shrove Tuesday, known locally as Fastern's Eve, was a time of festivity. Bonfires were lit on All Saints' Eve. In some parts it was still the custom for a new tenant to carry ‘kindling’ or new coals from his old house to the new. At funerals a lighted candle was placed near the deceased and left to burn out of its own accord. Clocks, if there were any in the house, were stopped at the time of death until the corpse left the house and the wake, or watching with the dead through the night, was still observed occasionally.44 Some of these customs, such as the Hallow's fire, were obviously more ancient than pre‐Reformation Catholicism and suggest an older world still inhabited by spirits and the souls of the dead which came alive for locals at certain times of the year. To return to the congregation of Cruden which was not just farmers and their servants, but predominantly fisherfolk from the small coastal villages: these Cruden fisherfolk retained a culture of Episcopalian religious confidence that was exemplified in one of the male leaders of Bullers village, Jake Alexander. His lay leadership and example was crucial in the Episcopalianism of the village surviving the attacks of Evangelical preachers that were common from the early 1860s. One Sunday a couple of lay preachers (p.60) arrived in the village and began to preach in the wide space that existed between the two rows of houses. So great was Jake's influence that they got no congregation, but were left severely to themselves . . . They [consequently] determined to make a house‐to‐house visitation and invite the people to their preaching. They began with Jake; and the neighbours seeing them go in promptly followed in anticipation of a lively skirmish. When they invited him, he responded with a flat refusal, and swiftly carried the war into the enemy's country. ‘What business hae ye to stan' up and tak' the Lord's name in your mou' Page 21 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East like that?’ ‘We're called to it.’ ‘Ay, I'll warrant ye think that. And sae did the seven sons o' Skavie [Sceva] the Jew.45 They thought they could tak' the Lord's name in their mou' like Paul did; but when yon lad cam' out upon them he let them see anither story.’ Jake's interlocutors had never met with this argument, and were considerably shattered. The only answer they could think of was to tell Jake where he was going (ultimately) . . . To which a neighbour ventured to respond, ‘Judge not, my bonny lad, or ye'll hae a fair chance to be there afore him’.46 Evidently, the visiting preachers had done their homework and knew of the reputation and influence of Jake Alexander in his community, for they chose to target him first in their house‐visiting strategy. If they could gain a measure of agreement from him then the rest of the community would likely follow his lead. That they correctly estimated Alexander's local leadership was demonstrated by the way the villagers followed them to the house of their local hero expecting to see him win this theological contest. There is a suggestion in this specifically religious leadership that at least some Episcopalian communities in the North‐East might have had their own equivalent of the Men, the Na Daoine, who figured so prominently in the Highlands in the spread of Gaelic Evangelicalism. Alexander, like the Men, was a spiritual leader by virtue of his moral life, knowledge of Scripture, and assertive religiosity. Canon Low characterized him as ‘a staunch Episcopalian [who was] never half‐hearted or backward as a defender of the faith’. Once Alexander had shown the way then other members of the village would follow his lead, as in the retort of one of the crowd in Alexander's defence. This assertive (p.61) Episcopalianism among the fisherfolk was also accompanied by a strong love of their local place and of their local church. One day, Alexander was rowing the priest of Ellon and some friends out to see a local landmark along the coast. He exclaimed as they passed the tall spire of the Cruden church, ‘did ye ever see a church like St James's?’ This was despite, or perhaps because of, the priest at Ellon having recently finished overseeing the construction of a fine new church.47
Strong religious leadership was not solely the prerogative of men in Episcopalian fishing communities. Lucky Cairney was a fisherman's granddaughter, daughter, wife, and mother. At her husband's deathbed Low observed how all the members of her family, male and female, looked to her. She was able to shoulder the burden of this domestic leadership because of her religious confidence in the providential ordering of God. ‘But nothing daunted her. She looked upon it as the burden laid upon her back by her heavenly father, who would remove it, or her, when his will was accomplished.’ But her leadership was more than familial and could extend into wider public life. In many a stiff encounter did Auld Lucky Cairney stand up for the Church of her Baptism . . . She knew her Bible and her Catechism. She knew moreover the weak points of the Confession of Faith, and how to take advantage of them . . . [In one such encounter] [t]he victim was a relation of her own, who was railing at all the organized religious bodies in the district, on account of their slackness of discipline. ‘Noo,’ said she, ‘would na't be a great sin a' me to sit doon at the Lord's Table wi ——and wi'——, Page 22 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East that I ken drinks, and swears, and mony anither sin forbye?’ She fastened on him a look like some masterful creature on its prey. ‘And ye would cast the stane, would ye?’ She said: ‘ye wouldna' sit doon wi' Jake, nae less! Man! Man! A better nor you sat doon wi' Judas Iscariot.’48 But such religious leadership did not always avail against the depredations into Episcopalianism by militant revivalist Evangelicalism in the mid‐nineteenth century. ‘It was a relief to her [Lucky Cairney] to speak of the change in her native village, whence in her day a large number of families,—I think she said (p.62) thirty went regularly, in spite of much petty persecution, to Bishop Jolly's Church,49 and now, she believed, hardly one. Revivalists, Plymouth Brethren, and such like, had scattered them to the winds. Even her own relations had gone, both there and at her married home, in spite of her powerful influence.’50 This conversation was during Low's ministry in the 1860s and points to the inroads into Episcopalianism made by the 1859 revival in the North‐ East which did so much to increase membership among the Brethren and Baptist churches.51 However, Episcopalian erosion may also have been a consequence of ritualism for Low went on to describe how Cairney pointed to the detrimental effect of the new east window in the Cruden church. It consisted of a cross surrounded by an equal‐sided triangle for the Trinity, the Agnus Dei, and various symbols of Christ's passion—the pillar and the scourge, a spear, hammer and nails, and the crown of thorns. Cairney believed that the window had cost the congregation the allegiance of some of its members.52
Yet, prior to the 1859 revival the Episcopal Church was largely successful in retaining the loyalties of those fishing communities which were Episcopalian. As with the farming community the church was fortunate that economic changes to the fishing industry did not result in depopulation. On the contrary, fishing employment rose as the industry underwent a transformation from a local subsistence activity to a major domestic and export industry. At the end of the eighteenth century there were some seventy fishing settlements on the east coast from the mouth of the Spey south to Montrose, but some were little more than hamlets whose few boats were drawn up on the beach for lack of natural harbours. Growth began with white fishing, especially for cod, ling, and haddock around 1800.53 This was followed around 1820 by the development of the herring fishing which brought in crews, and women for processing the fish, from north and south. Later, (p.63) the need to follow the herring shoals led North‐ East fishermen to spend part of the year in the Outer Hebrides, and even south as far as Berwick. The herring season occupied the short summer when it was intensive, with the rest of the year occupied in white fishing. The growth of the herring industry was due to the increasing quality of the processed fish from Scotland which enabled the Continental market to be exploited in addition to the traditional ones of the West Indies and Ireland. It was this Continental demand for the quality Scottish product that led to the rapid rise of Moray and Buchan fishing villages, such as Cruden, after 1815.54 As profits grew so did the need for larger catches which meant bigger boats and this, eventually, led to larger harbours being constructed and the congregating of the fishing population around them. But this was a late development so that it was only towards the Page 23 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East end of the nineteenth century that fishing villages began to depopulate in favour of towns like Peterhead and Aberdeen. Before then the fishing industry and its population grew steadily, through the expansion of existing communities rather than through the emergence of new ones.55 This meant that the culture of these fisherfolk communities persisted, and was subject to gradual change rather than rapid alteration or extinction. The fisherfolk's unique occupation led to the emergence of a distinctive society in the rural North‐East. Fishing was a full‐time occupation which required specific skills for its dangerous work. Consequently, fisherfolk society developed a separate cliquishness, and they were often looked askance at by others as almost an alien people. They intermarried, and recruited crews solely from fisher families until the expansion of the industry necessitated the use of some outsiders in order to make up crew numbers. This clannishness was accentuated by the fact that fisherwomen were a fundamental part of the village economy. Wives with gutting and processing skills were requisite for fishermen. One priest noted that fisherwomen ruled the roost on land. ‘On land the fisherwomen reigned supreme over every fisherman, whether husband, or son, or brother, or father. The fish found in the boats they (p.64) regarded as their own unquestioned and unquestionable property, and with their administration they would brook no interference . . . in their hands were held the purse strings.’ Fishermen knew better than to cross their women, especially sexually. Illicit sexual relations were carried on with inland women, and if one of these foreign women became pregnant to a fisherman he was honour‐bound to marry her. However, such a woman would be given little opportunity among fisherwomen to forget the reason for her marriage.56 At sea things were different and there was a great equality of status among fishermen. This was expressed in the way in which each member of the crew provided most of the cost of a boat, though not always in equal proportions. But they did have equal shares in the running costs, and profits were drawn in proportion to their investment.57 Each fisherman had his own standing as a member of the crew so that one historian of the Scottish fishing industry commented that the ‘fishing community was almost class‐less within itself’.58 This substantial internal equality held good for a great part of the century. By 1850, with the increasing size and capitalism of the industry new ways of fishing brought greater inequalities of wealth among crews and between skippers. ‘Yet, on the whole the fishermen continued to contribute in broadly equal amounts to the equipment of the fleet. The typical fisherman was a man of increasing wealth but none became outstandingly wealthier than his fellows.’59 By the second half of the century processing the catch had moved out of the control of the family, with the development of capitalist fish‐curing firms. They had become necessary to meet the expansion of the catch and the necessary quality control to ensure the precious brand that determined the saleability of the herring on the European market. But haddock curing remained a village and domestic activity for much longer. This meant that the fishing villages remained Page 24 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East viable for years more than they would have done if they had been solely given over to herring fishing whose catch was sold to the independent curing firms.60 One of the historians of the Scottish fisherfolk, Peter Anson, believed that the Episcopal Church had only a very small (p.65) membership among them. But this was an underestimation, for there were a number of villages even outwith Buchan where Episcopal clergy and others expressly mention their fisherfolk inhabitants as being wholly or solely Episcopalian. They include Cove, Cowie near Stonehaven, Muchalls, Skateraw, three villages in the parish of Fetteresso, and also villages in the parish of Dunottar and Kinneff.61 The introverted culture of the fisherfolk supported this traditional Episcopalian allegiance.62 Certainly, the Dean of Brechin remarked in 1900 that their conservatism was a primary reason for fisher villages remaining Episcopal. Even at the end of the century he could still claim there were ‘several villages along the coast where there are no other but Churchmen, nor has ever been’.63 Tales would still be told to fisherfolk children in the nineteenth century of Episcopalian persecution in the previous century. Stories of baptizing babies by imprisoned priests, or services interrupted by government authorities, were quite common. Smuggling stories also had a religious dimension, as smuggling was regarded by the fisherfolk as despoiling the Egyptians; that is, the Hanoverian government.64 Despite this clannishness Episcopalians apparently made an exception for the priest, who was usually an outsider. In the village of Cove it was the custom for a couple intending marriage to go and formally give notice of their nuptials to the laird. On one such occasion the laird had already known for a month because he had been told by the young priest, who came from a lawyer's family in Aberdeen. When the laird teased the couple with bringing him stale news he had heard from the priest they replied, ‘Eh, ay, but then ye ken he's ane o’ oorsells'. For the priest this was a compliment during his ministry there from 1864 to 1867 which was greater than being given admittance into the most exclusive of London clubs. ‘So exclusive were the fisherfolk in their own society and in their pride of race, that the fisher‐children would not even play with the country children.’65 Fervent Episcopalianism was also experienced (p.66) by the priest at Buckie from where he wrote to the Church Society about the poverty of his congregants and their love for their church. My fishermen have been away for the past 4 months prosecuting the white fishing in Caithness . . . You will perceive that unfortunately we have a falling‐off of £3—from the very great poverty of my poor Fishermen last year. And this year they have been obliged to leave me for four months and go and prosecute their calling on the other side of the Firth for want of a Harbour at home. This will also tell on the Revenue of our Congregation for this year. But this is a small matter compared with their want of the Holy Services of their Church when they move away from home. They will be obliged to go to Helmsdale again after they return from the Herring
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East Fishing and I do not know what will be the Consequence. Poor people, they feel their being away from their Church very deeply.66 The fisherfolk of Buckie were part of the congregation of Arradoul. But their involvement in the herring fishing prevented them from attending church during the frantic summer fishing. By the late 1830s it had become necessary to hire a former Methodist chapel in Buckie in order to provide them with an evening service in their own village. However, during the winter most of them continued to walk to Arradoul on Sunday mornings. Finally, in 1840, the diocesan synod resolved to petition for funds to build a church in the village.67 Once again, the poverty of the Episcopal Church meant it was able only belatedly to catch up with the needs of its people, even in the Episcopally populous North‐East. Financial constraints were allied with the perennial lack of clergy which often necessitated the withdrawal of ministry from smaller Episcopal populations. In the congregation of Keith, the minister, John Murdoch, ministered to three congregations—Fochabers and Ruthven, in addition to Keith—throughout his ministry from 1805 to 1834. Fochabers eventually became its own charge when the Duke and Duchess of Gordon built a chapel on their estate in 1834. But the following year the increasing age of (p.67) Murdoch meant he could no longer attend to the congregation at Ruthven, despite there being some forty Episcopalians in the place. When the history of the congregation at Keith was written in 1890 the ministry at Ruthven had never been resumed, except for the burial services of the few Episcopalians left.68 North‐East rural Episcopalianism, with its comparatively large Episcopalian populations, and its hold among the rural peasantry, demonstrates the retention of a traditional indigenous Episcopalian culture from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. There were a number of identifiable features to this Scottish culture still visible in the middle of the nineteenth century. It retained a hostility towards Presbyterianism as a second‐rate religion, despite Presbyterianism's overwhelmingly larger size. As a consequence, rural North‐ East Episcopalianism manifested an insularity and a preference for its own kind. It was self‐consciously aware and indefatigably proud of its own distinctiveness, retaining an oral history of its persecution under the Hanoverian and Presbyterian government of eighteenth‐century Scotland. North‐East Episcopalianism was conservative in its religious practice, though its usual deference towards the clergy could permit some religious innovations in the nineteenth century when new churches needed to be built, and younger clergy were less patient with the old, unobtrusive ways. That practice centred religion around the local chapel, and there was consequently a devotion to sacred spaces which determinedly kept memories alive of abandoned chapels, and even pre‐ Reformation shrines in some cases. While there are some indications of pre‐ Christian survivals among the common North‐East customs practised by Episcopalians, there seems little sign of any pagan meaning being attached to Page 26 of 31
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East them. Religion for these Episcopalians consisted of Sunday worship, where there was a common Scottish importance attached to the sermon and also to the less frequent celebrations of Holy Communion. On these observances of the Eucharistic sacrament Episcopalians, like their Presbyterian foes, prepared themselves with care and took considerable trouble to be present to (p.68) communicate. Indeed, it was generally only during the infrequent Eucharistic worship of Episcopalian chapels that there was much difference in the public worship between Episcopalian and Presbyterian antagonists. Among North‐East Episcopalians the Eucharist was mostly celebrated using the Scottish Communion Office, for which these Episcopalians brought with them to church their celebrated ‘wee bookies’, printed booklets of that rite which could vary somewhat with local usage. There was also a domestic Episcopalian religion which centred around the reading of the Bible and the use of the whole Book of Common Prayer for family and private devotions. It appears that one of the major reasons for the erosion of this traditional religious allegiance in North‐East Scotland was the inability of the Episcopal Church, both in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, to supply local clergy. As a sacramental religion, which emphasized bishops, and clergy ordained by bishops, as fundamental to its identity, clergy were requisite leaders for local churches. Lacking this leadership and support local Episcopalianism tended to suffer gradual decline, as Episcopalians were drawn in by the dependable parish presence of the Established Church and, later, by the enthusiasm of the Evangelical Revival movement of 1859. Where local people could be harnessed to ameliorate this clerical deficiency, or support an existing clerical ministry, as in Cruden and the fishing village of Bullers, such lay cooperation could assist Episcopalian retention. However, the example of Lucky Cairney, who failed to keep alive the Episcopalianism of her own family against the proselytism of revivalist evangelists, indicates that even lay religious leadership was not an invariable solution to Episcopalian decline. In part this was a result of the traditional insularity of North‐East farming and fishing communities being mitigated by the advent of the railways and the increasing conglomeration of fishing communities in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the more emotional religion of Revivalism was also attractive, or its emphasis on lay ministry. But, until the 1860s at least, despite never having as many clergy as it desired or needed, North‐East rural Episcopalianism managed to retain its adherents, and its own indigenous Scottish (p.69) culture among the North‐East peasantry, for far longer than the deficient resources of the Episcopal Church perhaps warranted. It was a testimonial to the attachment of the rural Episcopalian Scots, the Chapelfolk, of this part of the country to their ancestral religion.
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East Notes:
(1) Dean of Brechin, ‘Some traditional elements in the Scottish Church’, SSB (May 1897), 117–20. (2) SSB (May 1897), 117–20. (3) Anon., ‘The Burial of the Dead in Scotland’, SMCR (June 1848), 252. (4) SSB (Apr. 1890), 59. (5) Andrew Chalmers, ‘Buchan in my Boyhood’, in J. F. Toucher (ed.), The Book of Buchan (Peterhead: The Buchan Club, 1910), 429. (6) Dean of Brechin, ‘Some traditional elements’, 119. (7) Id., ‘Christmastide in the north and some of its association’, SSB (Dec. 1898), 277–80. (8) Even into the 19th cent. this quirky assertiveness of official or clerical Episcopalianism could be found in this repeated claim to be the true Church of Scotland. It was a nomenclature and an assertion that caused self‐made difficulties for the Episcopal Church in the 19th cent. as it sought to remove the remaining clerical disabilities from the eventual Relief Act from the penal laws. To do so they needed to demonstrate the support of the Established Church of Scotland so that parliamentarians at Westminster who upheld established religion could be assured that such favours to the Episcopal Church were not a threat to religious establishment in Scotland. However, the unnecessary and empty claim of the Episcopal Church expressed in its self‐description as the ‘Church of Scotland’ meant that Established Church uneasiness about the Episcopal Church continued. (9) Diocese of Aberdeen Synod minutes, AUL, MS 3320. 1. 12, 3 May 1786, fos. 11–17. (10) R. Neish, Old Peterhead: An Authentic Account of the Origin and Development of the Burgh of Barony of Old Peterhead (Peterhead, 1950), 107. (11) Diocese of Aberdeen Synod minutes, AUL, MS 3320. 1. 12, 9 May 1788, fo. 130. (12) Diocese of Aberdeen Synod minutes, AUL, MS 3320. 1. 12, 20 Aug. 1788, fos. 36–41. (13) OSA xv. 391–2. (14) Diocese of Aberdeen Synod minutes, AUL, MS 3320. 1. 12, 23 Aug. 1820, fos. 147–9.
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East (15) See Ch. 3 and T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy 1660–1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 126–34, 146–51. (16) Sydney Wood, The Shaping of 19th Century Aberdeenshire (Stevenage: SPA Books, 1985), 3–12. (17) Sydney Wood, The Shaping of 19th Century Aberdeenshire, 12–39. (18) Malcolm Gray, ‘The Processes of Agricultural Change in the North‐East 1790–1870’, in Leah Leneman (ed.), Perspectives in Scottish Social History (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 127–39. (19) Ian Carter, ‘Class and Culture among Farm Servants in the North‐East 1840–1914’, in A. Allan MacLaren (ed.), Social Class in Scotland: Past and Present (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d.), 105–27. (20) Ibid., 108. (21) Id., Farm Life in Northeast Scotland 1840–1914: The Poor Man's Country (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979), 102. (22) Alexander Smith, A New History of Aberdeenshire (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith, 1875), 223. (23) Statistical return for the Scottish Episcopal Church Society 1849, St James's, Cruden, NAS, CH 12. 64. 14., fo. 13. (24) Statistical return for the Scottish Episcopal Church Society 1856, Turriff, NAS, CH 12. 65. 9, fos. 119–20. (25) Educational return to the Episcopal Church Society 1865, Forgue, NAS, CH 12. 64. 16, fo. 145. (26) Educational return to the Episcopal Church Society 1865, New Pitsligo, NAS, CH 12. 64. 16, fo. 160A. (27) Education return to the Episcopal Church Society 1865, Deer, NAS, CH 12. 64. 16, fo. 141. (28) Educational return to the Episcopal Church Society 1865, Woodhead, NAS, CH 12. 64. 16, fo. 169. (29) Educational return to the Episcopal Church Society 1865, Meiklefolla, NAS, CH 12. 64. 16, fo. 157. (30) Ibid.
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East (31) G. Barron Walker, ‘St James's Church, Cruden’, SSB (Apr. 1891), 70; J. B. Pratt, rev. Robert Anderson, Buchan (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith & Son, 4th edn. 1901), p. xv. (32) NSA, xii. 978–80. (33) Pratt, Buchan, 35–6. (34) Note by John Pratt attached to his annual congregational return to the Episcopal Church Society in 1841 and endorsed by the Bishop of Aberdeen on 17 Apr. 1841, NAS, CH 12. 65. 3. (35) Low, ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’, SSB (Apr. 1891), 70–2. (36) Low, ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’, SSB (June 1891), 111–13. (37) Low, ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’, SSB (Oct. 1893), 184–5. (38) Ibid. (May 1902), 110–2. (39) Low, ‘Diary of a farm servant sixty‐five years ago’, SSB (Feb. 1895), 39–40. (40) Low, ‘Diary of a farm servant sixty‐five years ago’, SSB 40. (41) W.L.L., ‘The church of Folla‐Rule, parish of Fyvie, Aberdeenshire’, SSB (Sept. 1895), 204–6. (42) W. Humphrey, Recollections of Scottish Episcopalianism (London: Thomas Baker, 1896), 2. (43) SSB (Feb. 1891), 31–2. (44) Pratt, Buchan, 485–8. (45) Acts 19: 14–16. (46) Low, ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’, SSB (May 1899), 111–13. (47) Low, ‘Vignettes from a Country Parson's Album’, SSB (May 1899), 113. (48) Ibid. (Jan. 1891), 8–9. (49) Peterhead. (50) Low, ‘Vignettes’, SSB (Jan. 1891), 8–9. (51) Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, 1975), 55–7; Peter Anson, Scots Fisherfolk (Banff: Saltire Society, 1950), 46–7.
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Traditional Rural Episcopalianism: The North‐East (52) Ibid. (53) Malcolm Gray, The Fishing Industries of Scotland 1790–1914: A Study in Regional Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 9–21. (54) Malcolm Gray, The Fishing Industries of Scotland 1790–1914: A Study in Regional Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 39–51. (55) Ibid. 80–1. (56) Humphrey, Recollections, 19. (57) Gray, Fishing Industries of Scotland, 22–3. (58) Ibid. 24. (59) Ibid. 44. (60) Ibid. 48–9. (61) Humphrey, Recollections; Bishop David Moir of Brechin to the Revd Alexander Forbes, 10 June 1846, St Paul's Cathedral records, Dundee; William Paul, Past and Present of Aberdeenshire, or Reminiscences of Seventy Years (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith, 1881), 38–40. (62) Anson, Scots Fisherfolk, 48. (63) Dean of Brechin, ‘Church work among the fisher folk: old‐time customs among the east coast fisherfolk’, SSB (May 1900), 105–9, 108. (64) Ibid. (65) Humphrey, Recollections, 22. (66) The Revd Patrick Cheyne to the Episcopal Church Society, Buckie, 14 July 1852, NAS, CH 12. 65. 5. (67) Memorial of the Aberdeen Diocesan Synod to the Episcopal Church Society 1840, NAS, CH 12. 65. 1, fo. 30. (68) John Archibald, History of the Episcopal Church at Keith in the Diocese of Moray, in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, with other Reminiscences of the Dioceses of Moray and Ross (Edinburgh: R. Grant, 1890), 116.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Gaelic Episcopalianism Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0003
Abstract and Keywords Establishes the reality and patterns of a genuinely Scottish Gaelic Episcopalianism against the historiographical marginality that has been assigned to Scottish historians. It proves that Gaelic Episcopalianism was widespread in the Highlands at the end of the nineteenth century and managed to survive in defined areas into the nineteenth century. This was despite the depredations of Evangelical missionaries, the poverty and the increasing Anglicization of their own Church. Gaelic Episcopalian religion is identified as centred around the Gaelic language, bible, and prayerbook, with Gaels acting as agents in their own religious survival in many cases. Keywords: anglicization, bible, Evangelicalism, Gaelic Episcopalianism, Gaels, language, Highlands, historiography, prayerbook, religion
The history of Gaelic and Highland Episcopalians1 in the nineteenth century is one of barely holding the line in the face of a number of economic and other social forces which permitted Episcopalianism in the Highlands to be maintained while continuing to erode its Gaelic nature. While some of these corrosive influences were beyond the control of the Episcopal Church, Gaelic decline in that church also resulted from its own policies. As a consequence, nineteenth‐ century Episcopalianism was increasingly marginalized in Gaeldom compared with its position in the eighteenth century. Not just demographically, but also historiographically, Episcopalianism has been marginalized. Two recent works on Highland culture and Highland religion illustrate this by deliberately excluding Episcopalianism as more or less a Page 1 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism foreign, English, form of religion. John MacLeod's Highlanders: A History of the Gaels (1996) makes no bones about having a ‘disdain for rites Roman or Anglican’, and consequently perpetuates a popular distortion which reduces authentic Highland religion to Evangelical Presbyterianism.2 The generations of Scottish Highlanders who retained their traditional Episcopal faith in the glens of Appin and Lochaber would have been astonished at this historical myopia. In a recent academic work by Douglas Ansdell the same historical distortion operates. His book, The People of the Great Faith: The Highland Church 1690– 1900 (1998) is, in fact, about an entity that never existed. There never was a single ‘Highland Church’ as even when the (p.71) Church of Scotland was Presbyterian after 1690 there were substantial numbers of Episcopalian and Roman Catholic Gaels, not to mention the smaller Evangelical churches which had developed by the early nineteenth century. While Ansdell acknowledges this, his persistence in using the term to mean purely Evangelical Presbyterianism merely solidifies the historical inaccuracy and marginalizes whole populations of Highlanders for whom Catholicism or Episcopalianism was equally ‘the church’.3 Such monopolistic Evangelical historiography simply will not do any longer. The exclusion of Episcopalianism from any historical discussion of Highland Christianity is even perpetuated by historical societies that should know better. In 1998 the Scottish Church History Society organized a conference on ‘The Church in the Highlands’. If the published papers of the conference are any guide then the ‘The Church in the Highlands’ consisted solely of Gaels who were Presbyterian in one form or another, or Roman Catholic. The only mention in the entire work of the Episcopalian strand of Gaelic Christianity was a one‐line recognition by Donald MacLeod that while the predominant stream was Presbyterian ‘other Christian traditions are represented as well: Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist and Pentecostal’—not to mention non‐Christian faiths.4 Once again Episcopalianism has been written out of the religious history of Gaeldom. It would appear that historians are just as guilty as others are in perpetuating an inaccurate historical reduction of Episcopalianism as merely an ‘English’ kirk of no significance in Gaelic culture and history. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century Highland Episcopalianism was a major religious presence in the Highlands. Aside from a recognizable Presbyterian presence in southern Argyll, Easter Ross, and parts of Sutherland and Caithness, Episcopalianism and Catholicism prevailed throughout the Highlands at that time. John MacInnes, in his classic work on the spread of Highland Evangelicalism, estimates that at the Revolution in 1689 the country from the Seaforth lands in the north to the Atholl territory in the south was Episcopalian. There were (p.72) particular Episcopal concentrations in Lorn, the Perthshire Highlands, the Highlands of Badenoch, and along the eastern side of the Great Glen to Inverness.5
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Episcopalian allegiance remained a major factor in Highland life at least until the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. In the Highlands its alliance with Jacobitism brought upon the church an oppressive government reaction to that rebellion that one recent historian, Allan Macinnes, has labelled a ‘debilitating persecution verging on genocide by the Whig establishment in Church and state’. Despite subsequent programmatic destruction of the Episcopal Church's meeting houses, savage curtailment of its religious assemblies, and the proscription of its clergy, Allan Macinnes believes it retained a substantial following in northern Argyll, Lochaber, and the eastern Highlands into the early nineteenth century.6 On the basis of figures supplied by the clergy, the nineteenth‐century Episcopalian historian Thomas Stephens estimated there were some three thousand Gaelic Episcopalians left in the Diocese of Ross and Argyll in the early part of the century, a figure that omits entirely the Perthshire Highlands.7 This estimate, although suspiciously round, does at least indicate that severe attrition had taken its toll of Gaelic Episcopalians. This reduction is commonly attributed to government‐sponsored Presbyterianism allied with legal proscription due to Episcopacy's alliance with Jacobitism. It is also believed to be a consequence of the advance of Evangelicalism in the Highlands. But there were other forces eroding Gaelic culture and Highland society, within which traditional Highland Episcopalianism existed. Highland society had been undergoing radical economic and social change during the eighteenth century as clanship gave way to entrepreneurial capitalism. The fundamental reality in the Highlands remained the shortage of arable land and good pasture. The customary consequences of this were the multiple‐tenant communal farms clinging to the edges of the available arable in (p.73) small coastal strips or to the lower foothills in clustered cottages. These farms practised runrig arable farming, or strip agriculture with a fertilized infield and an unfertilized outfield on the poorer land. This was combined with transhumance farming of cattle for sale in Lowland markets. This cash crop enabled the import of necessary items such as sailcloth, ironware, and oatmeal for the peasantry, and the luxuries of Lowland life for the chiefs and lairds. This economic Highland landscape had sheltered a stratified society determined not by wealth but by descent and kinship. At the top were the patriarchal clan chiefs, great landowners who lived off their rents. Beneath these were the clan gentry and major tenants, who held extensive lands from the chiefs by tacks, or leases, and were consequently known as tacksmen. They, in turn, leased land to subtenants. The tacksmen and the subtenants were the actual farmers and they, with the chiefs, depended basically on the rents and labour of the working peasantry, or cottars, who constituted the majority of clan society. This traditional society had depended for its cohesion on the mutual recognition of customary rights belonging to both landlords, tenants, and cottars at the heart of which was the idea of duthchas, or heritable trusteeship by the chief for the
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Gaelic Episcopalianism lands of the entire clan. However, legally the land was recognized only as belonging solely to the chiefs.8 By the last decades of the eighteenth century this legal heritable title became, for this upper class of Highland society, the means by which they turned themselves into commercial proprietors as they increasingly savoured the delights of a Lowland lifestyle and became integrated into the new capitalist money economy of the Lowlands. This increased involvement with Lowland society and economy raised both the standard of living and consumption of the hereditary chiefs and lairds. Consequently, it also increased their need for revenue and also a growing indebtedness, resulting in escalating rent levels for the tenants and peasantry as the need for cash to spend in Lowland and English towns drove landowners to embrace in the Highlands a cash‐based economy. Gradually, (p.74) this requirement for a cash income for the landed classes to enable them to play a part in wider British society began to erode the binding force of custom, the mutual obligations of which were, finally, the only security of tenure the Highland peasantry had. By the late eighteenth century it was rents, and the landowner's need of labour, rather than the old prestige of maintaining a tail of armed men, which kept clanspeople on the land. However, neither the old society, nor the emerging capitalist one, insulated the Highland peasantry from the customary poverty and bare subsistence that was their usual lot. Consequently, by the end of the eighteenth century traditional Highland society was undergoing a fundamental economic and social restructuring led by the changing economic needs of its customary leaders, the great chiefs and lairds. In an initial bid to increase their cash profits the chiefs earlier in the century had begun to eliminate the middlemen, the tacksmen, and to take their rents directly from their lower tenants. But in the late eighteenth century the pull factor of a Lowland lifestyle as a stimulus for transforming hereditary ownership into capitalist proprietorship ran up against the push factor of a decreasing profitability of cattle in comparison to sheep farming. But sheep farming required large acres of empty pasture and that meant landowners began to seek to clear their estates of their small tenants and cottars. Sheep were simply more profitable than peasants, whose subsistence agriculture with one cash crop could not be relied upon to pay the rents needed by the burgeoning lifestyles of the chiefs, nor their need to maintain profitability if they were to retain their lands. Widespread clearances were limited for a while during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars when alternative cash crops requiring labour emerged in the Highlands. Kelp harvesting and fishing, as well as increased prices for cattle, brought great profits while the war lasted. But the bottom dropped out of these commodities in the post‐war depression and clearances for sheep resumed on an increased scale.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism This arrival in the Highlands during the eighteenth century of a British capitalist economy associated with the modern industrial society impacted on Highland Episcopalian populations. First, like all peasant Gaels of whatever religious persuasion they were (p.75) cleared off their traditional lands in a number of ways. Sometimes they relocated within the estate, often onto poor coastal lands in order to establish fishing crofts. Such relocations had been a traditional burden borne by the clanspeople, and it at least kept them on their customary lands. However, while on some occasions these relocations were part of a major infrastructure investment by the proprietor, in other cases the people were just dumped by the coast to fend for themselves. An increasing popular means of dealing with an estate's surplus population was through assisted emigration. By the nineteenth century, more clearances began to take on the character of compulsion with decreasing assistance for the surplus populations.9 The first detailed evidence existing for this eroding Highland Episcopalianism is that contained in the Statistical Account of Scotland compiled between 1791 and 1798. However, this source needs to be used with some care as the reports were compiled by the ministers of the Established Church who did not necessarily have an accurate or sympathetic knowledge of Episcopalians within their parishes, numbers of which were sometimes large and difficult to access. This potential inaccuracy would have been compounded by the fact that over the century Episcopalians had developed the necessary habit of maintaining a low profile. They were still legally penalized for their religious allegiance until the repeal of the Penal Acts in 1792, although active persecution had certainly ceased some decades before. Nevertheless the Highland parish accounts of local Episcopalianism present the picture for the 1790s shown in Table 3.1–3.4. The additional comments of the parish ministers indicate there were more Episcopalians than the mere numbers they sometimes gave in their parish accounts. At Duirinish the minister described the Episcopalians positively because they also went to the parish church. ‘These persons are endued with such liberality of sentiments, and so free from bigotry, that they frequent the Established Church, and communicate at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.’ The minister of Croy mentioned the same practice as common. At Daviot and Dunlichity there was ‘a meeting house, (p.76) Table 3.1. Episcopalian Population in Argyll‐Mainland, 1790Sa Parish
Numbers
Ardnamurchan: Kilchoan
16
Sunart
18
Moidartb
2
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Parish
Numbers
Arasaigb
1
Kilmore & Kilbride
2–3 families
Morvern
‘a few’
(a) Regional titles are those used in the OSA. (b) Moidart and Arasaig are in Invernessshire, but these statistics are given in the entry for the parish of Ardnamurchan. Source: OSA viii. 15, 279, 373.
Table 3.2. Episcopalian Population in the Western Isles [Inner Hebrides], 1790S Parish
Numbers
Bracadale
2
Duirinish
‘a very few Church of England [for all of Skye]’
Lismore & Appin
‘great numbers’
Source: OSA xx. 155, 161–2, 354.
Table 3.3. Episcopalian Population in Inverness‐Shire, Ross, and Cromarty, 1790S Parish
Numbers
Croy
3 or 4
Daviot & Dunlichty
430
Inverness
‘small’
Kilmale
407
Moy & Dalarosie
‘a few individuals’
Applecross
1
Avoch
4
Contin
50–60
Dingwall
10 families
Fodderty
2
Killearnan
‘above 300’
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Parish
Numbers
Kilmuir Wester & Suddy
not specified
Lochcarron
1
Rosemarkie
2–3 families
Urquhart
some
Urray
c.one fourth of the parish
Source: OSA xvii. 51, 59, 104, 142, 237, 293, 312, 331, 360, 397, 422, 431, 451, 570, 603, 666, 676. (p.77)
Table 3.4. Episcopalian Population in North and West Perthshire, 1790S Parish
Numbers
Aberfoyle
5–6 families
Bendothy
3
Blackford
‘a few’
Blair Atholl & Strowan
not specified
Blairgowrie
12
Callandar
20
Caputh
27
Clunie
2
Crieff
39
Dunkeld
not specified
Little Dunkeld
7–8
Fortingal
c.a dozen
Foulis Wester
2 resident heritors
Kilmadock or Doune
22
Kincardine
‘some’
Kincloch
1 family
Kippen
3
Lethendy
1 ‘English Episcopal church’
Logierait
390
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Parish
Numbers
Monivaird & Strowan
2–3
Monzie
5
Muthill
156
Source: OSA xii. 11, 74, 91, 118, 125, 157, 198, 242, 284, 329, 413, 429, 441, 451, 529, 553, 617, 635, 701, 709, 725, 737, 766, 786, 788. where one of their clergy preaches once in three or four weeks, but not regularly, and administers the Sacrament four times a year, after the manner described by the English ritual. They generally attend our public worship when they have none themselves, and are personally acquainted with the minister . . . and of our Episcopalians, it is but justice to say, that while they profess an opinion, that has been censured by some as illiberal, they are truly moderate’. An Episcopalian clergyman preached once a month at Kilmalie, and the Episcopalians at Moy also commonly attended the parish church. Those at Contin occasionally attended Coull's Chapel at Fortrose. In the parish of Kilmuir Wester and Suddy there were sufficient Episcopalian families for there to have been ten Episcopalian baptisms in one year. In Urquhart the Episcopalians were in the western district and attended Episcopalian worship in the neighbouring parish, while in Urray there was an (p.78) Episcopalian clergyman living in the parish who had two other places of worship in neighbouring parishes. When he was absent at any of these three chapels his people attended the parish church ‘as punctually as the other parishioners’. At Kilmaveonaig the old parish kirk had recently been converted into an Episcopalian chapel, while at Dunkeld there was a service every second Sunday with the clergyman alternating between there and Lethendy, eight miles east, where there was another chapel. The two resident Episcopalian heritors at Foulis Wester came in for criticism from their parish minister who complained, ‘were these heritors of the same religious profession as the vulgar, it would probably be the occasion of removing a grievance of which the people have long with too much reason complained—that no care is taken to render the parochial church decent and commodious’. At Doune there had formerly been an Episcopal meeting house but this had been given up on the death of its last incumbent. The same deteriorating Episcopalian situation was described by the minister of Moulin who mentioned that there had been a few Episcopalians there some years go, but that these had now joined the parish church. The long‐standing Episcopalian congregation at Muthill were misleadingly described as having ‘a Church of England meeting house’.10 There were no Episcopalians mentioned in any of the parish accounts for Caithness and Sutherland.
The statements of some ministers confirm the possibilities of inadequacy or inaccuracy. The minister of Blair Atholl, for example, mentions a new chapel at Kilmaveonaig, but gives no numbers for the Episcopalians associated with it. The minister of Lismore and Appin confines himself to the generalization of ‘great numbers’ of Episcopalians in his parish. The same rough estimates are given by other ministers—‘a few’, ‘some’, and ‘above 300’—which fail to provide any sort of accuracy. The minister of Kilmuir Wester mentions Episcopalian baptisms but no estimate of how many were performed, nor the total number of local Page 8 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Episcopalians. Therefore any assessment of the population of Gaelic and Highland Episcopalians based on the Old Statistical Account can offer no definitive accuracy, but will, in the absence of any other source, provide a basis for what can only be a crude under‐estimate. (p.79) To achieve this the numbers in the parish accounts have been accepted where they are stated in definite numbers. But some of these are given for individuals and some for families. In this case the numbers have been accepted as for individuals and are counted as families only when explicitly stated. Family numbers have been averaged at 5 per household. Generalizations of very small numbers have also been averaged at 5, and larger estimates, where given, have been accepted at the provided number. The most problematic parish is Lismore and Appin which, along with estates of Cameron of Lochiel in Lochaber, was probably the most populated area of Gaelic and Highland Episcopalians well into the nineteenth century. The Episcopalian historian James Brown Craven numbers this population at ‘upwards of 1000’ in about 1850.11 This very rough and ready basis points to the approximate population of Highland Episcopalians by the 1790s as around 3,000. But this does not include Lethendy and Blair Atholl where there was a chapel mentioned but no numbers. If these can be conservatively estimated at the same size as the 27 given for Caputh in the same area then this figure can be increased by 54. Urray, where Episcopalians constituted a fourth of the parish, had a population of 1,860 in 1791, giving a local Episcopal population of around 450. These broad approximations then provide a very conservative estimate that the Highland Episcopalians numbered at a minimum of 3,500 in the last decade of the century, but there were probably more. In other words, by the start of the nineteenth century Gaelic Episcopalians were reduced to scattered populations, with occasional local concentrations as exceptions to a prevailing picture of a few families living in large areas of territory where they had formerly predominated. Those parishes where there were definitely 150 or more Episcopalians mentioned by the parish clergy were Appin, Daviot and Dunlichity, Kilmalie, Killearnan, Urray, Blair Atholl, Logierait, and Muthill. If parishes with approximately 30 or more Episcopalians are added to these (Ardnamurchan, Contin, Dingwall, Aberfoyle, Caputh, Lethendy) then the areas of Episcopalian strength at the end of the eighteenth century emerge as North Argyll around the northern half of Loch Linnhe, central (p.80) Perthshire, south Ross‐shire, and north‐east Inverness‐shire. The substantial numbers in Daviot, Kilmalie, Killearnan, and Longerait—all above 300—indicate that Highland Episcopalians existed in significant numbers in more areas than the eastern shore of Loch Linnhe, as one historian has claimed was the situation by the 1790s.12 This illustrates the enormous cost Episcopalianism had paid for its Jacobitism and its episcopacy. The government feared its Jacobitism, with good reason given that most of the rebellious Jacobite army in the ‘45 was comprised of Episcopalians from the Lowlands of Buchan and Aberdeen and a large number of Page 9 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism the retainers of Episcopalian Highland chiefs.13 In addition, the Established Church hated its episcopacy, considering bishops unscriptural and as having given themselves to an oppressive alliance with the Restoration government against Presbyterianism between 1660 and 1689. Therefore, the politico‐ ecclesiastical establishment which ruled Scotland after 1689 combined to replace rebellious Episcopacy with conformist godly Presbyterianism. In this aim the main agent was the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) which conducted Highland missions in favour of Presbyterianism and English language from 1709. Establishment attitudes about the ‘barbaric’ culture of Gaeldom, anxiety about the tenuous hold of the Established Church there, and fears about the Gaels’ potential for rebellion, all combined to cause church and state to view the Highlands as a mission field for established Presbyterianism and British civilization.14 Through the agency of elementary schools and itinerant catechists the SSPCK sought to spread the Established Church's hold on the people and bring them the benefits of incorporation into the British state through the medium of a monolingual English education. The SSPCK was inaugurated in Edinburgh in 1709, a date which, by its proximity to the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, suggests (p.81) that the event was influential on its formation. Ironically, James Kirkwood, a nonjuring Episcopalian priest and Gaelic scholar, was instrumental in the formation of the SSPCK, and was responsible for the distribution of a Gaelic translation of the Bible produced by another Episcopalian, Robert Kirk, in 1688–90. He seems to have been motivated by a desire to increase the knowledge of the Scriptures among the Highlanders to deepen their Protestant faith, perhaps anxious about Roman Catholic missions, for in 1694 the first Catholic bishop to reside in Scotland since 1603 arrived.15 But the SSPCK's policy of promoting an exclusively English education in its schools was totally at variance with Kirkwood's designs of furthering Gaelic religious literature for the Highlands. Its ‘civilizing’ work began to pay real dividends only when the state provided more wholehearted support and resources as a consequence of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.16 From then on Presbyterian life and control became more effective in previously hostile areas.17 The religious agenda of a monocultural English education was further emphasized by the growing Enlightenment culture of Lowland Scotland. The Enlightenment literati of Scotland disparaged Gaeldom as barbaric, and Gaelic as ‘harsh, rugged, and uncouth’.18 The remote parish of Morvern in Argyll illustrates some of the factors involved in the replacement in the Highlands of Episcopalianism by Presbyterianism. In the first half of the eighteenth century the people of Morvern were nearly all Episcopalian as many of them were from one of the leading Episcopalian clans, the Camerons, whose clan chief was Lochiel. They followed Lochiel into the Jacobite army in 1745, not a single man serving with the loyalist Argyll Militia. As a consequence the people suffered the repression of the militia under Cumberland's orders to make a lesson of Morvern as a centre of disloyalty, Page 10 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism despite the (p.82) protests of the Duke of Argyll at the inhumanity and the depredation of his lands. The duke had become proprietor of virtually all of Morvern by the beginning of the eighteenth century, but it was only after the 1745 that many of the traditional tacksmen were replaced by Campbells. That loss of Episcopalian lairds was compounded by the duke's institution to the parish of an energetic loyalist Presbyterian minister, Norman MacLeod (1745– 1824). According to the historian of the parish, it was probably MacLeod's ministry that did most to turn the Episcopalians of Morvern into faithful members of the Established Church.19 The loss of Episcopalian tacksmen as middlemen between the people and the Presbyterian duke did not help Episcopalian retention either. By 1843 there were 391 families in the parish, of which 370 were members of the parish kirk, eight were Roman Catholic, and just two were Episcopalian.20 Other causes of the expansion of Presbyterianism in Morvern included the failure of the '45 which demoralized Episcopalians. The rebellion also galvanized Presbyterian proprietors like the Duke of Argyll to appoint energetic ministers in Church of Scotland parishes able to capitalize on that demoralization. In Morvern, the establishment of a genuine local Presbyterianism did not involve Evangelicalism, usually identified as a major cause in the erosion of Highland Episcopalism, as MacLeod does not appear to have been an Evangelical. The people of Morvern did not become Presbyterian until the second half of the eighteenth century when the rebellion galvanized the leading Presbyterian landowner into action. Before then it may have been that a further reason for Episcopalian longevity was the remoteness or the extensive size of a Highland parish which made it unattractive or inaccessible to Presbyterian ministers. It is significant that the minister of the parish of Lismore and Appin recorded in the 1790s that there were ‘great numbers’ of Episcopalians in his parish, but that they were mostly ‘in the higher parts of the parish’.21 The contrast of Episcopalian survival in upper Appin and its failure in Morvern suggests that when remoteness or inaccessibility was not subject to the local (p.83) Presbyterian determination of a great and wealthy landowner like the Duke of Argyll it could still serve as protection for the perpetuation of Episcopalianism in some Highland parishes. After the 1745 rebellion, according to John MacInnes, one of the major historians of Highland Evangelicalism, the threat of Episcopalianism to established Presbyterianism and the Hanoverian state had been seen off in the Highlands. After that date he finds that Episcopalians were a ‘steadily declining factor in the religion and politics of the Highlands’.22 This was due to the successful spread of the Established Church by the first half of the eighteenth century, spearheaded, according to MacInnes, by Highland Evangelicals. After 1745 Episcopalianism fought a determined but losing battle against state‐ sponsored Presbyterianism which was carried on in the Highlands by clergy supported by the resources of the national church. In some areas the change from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism occurred comparatively quickly, as in Page 11 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism mid‐ and southern Argyll, the Hebrides, and Sutherland. In other regions the transfer of religious power was more a matter of slow attrition, as it was in Lorn, the Highlands of Perthshire, along the Great Glen, Highland Moray, and even parts of Ross (long regarded as the heartland of Highland Evangelicalism) which were under the influences of the Mackenzies and Macraes, staunch Episcopalian Jacobites.23 However, the Evangelical MacInnes was rather too hasty in writing off the religious existence of Highland Episcopalianism. In some extensive areas of the Highlands Episcopalianism remained a significant, and sometimes predominant religion until the end of the century. MacInnes was dismissive of the power of Episcopalianism as a religious expression in its own right. He tended to reduce Episcopalian allegiance to anti‐Presbyterianism, as though it had nothing positive of itself to offer but maintained an identity purely by what it opposed.24 Yet, MacInnes himself quotes the Synod of Argyll reporting in 1750 that ‘the People of Ardnamurchan and the Stewarts of Appin are the most deeply poisoned with Disaffection to our Happy Constitution in Church and State of any people I ever knew. They idolize the Non‐juring clergy and can scarcely keep their temper when speaking of (p.84) Presbyterians.’25 In certain parishes in Inverness‐shire, such as Daviot and Dunlichity, MacInnes also points out that a substantial number, if not the majority, of the people were still Episcopalian in 1770.26 Even in 1813, the new parish minister of Killearnan in Ross could report that there were some 300 Episcopalians in the parish. But at his death in 1841 there were very few who attended the Episcopal chapel.27 The evidence of Killearnan in Ross, and Daviot and Dunlichity in Inverness‐shire of the persistence of regional Episcopalianism in substantial numbers into the nineteenth century, only to be ultimately replaced by Evangelical Presbyterianism, indicates that in the Highlands Evangelicalism had its final triumph over Episcopalianism not around 1745, as Macinnes claimed, but in a period from the late eighteenth century to the mid‐nineteenth. This period saw increased Evangelical activity, including itinerant Evangelical preachers only occasionally connected to the Established Church.28 Within the Church of Scotland, Evangelical influence spread during this period particularly through the work of local male spiritual elites known as ‘the Men’ (Na Daoine) who were active in spreading their version of the Evangelical gospel in Cromarty, Easter Ross, to Skye, the Outer Hebrides in the west, and north to Sutherland and Caithness. In this they were assisted by ministers of the Evangelical Party. This establishment Evangelicalism was also assisted by Evangelical teachers in the Gaelic Society schools.29 A major consequence of this Episcopalian erosion was the increasing difficulty of recruiting suitable Gaelic leadership, both clergy and laity. Arthur Petrie was Bishop of Ross, Caithness, and Moray from 1777 to 1787 when he was succeeded by Andrew MacFarlane as bishop of Moray, Ross, and Argyll until his Page 12 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism death in 1819. Their correspondence reveals a number of salient points about an Episcopalianism experiencing decline and other pressures at the turn of the century. Evidently the recruitment (p.85) of Gaelic personnel was a principal headache. In 1777 Alan Cameron, minister at Arpafeelie, was relieved to be able to report to Bishop Petrie that he had found a young man to become the catechist for the Appin people who was fluent in Gaelic and English, though ‘the getting of one was a more difficult Task than I imagined when you left this place’.30 Local lay leadership was becoming scarce, for Cameron went on, ‘there are few in the neighbourhood to keep them together, and these few at a considerable distance’. It appears that those men who were suitable were insufficient to local needs because of the increasing geographic isolation between scattered and dwindling Episcopalian families.31 A decade later things had not improved. Bishop Charles Rose of Dunblane reported to Petrie in 1783 that he had recently buried the Revd William Erskine of Muthill, but that a replacement for his ‘flourishing congregation’ would not easily be supplied.32 This shortage of suitable Gaelic leaders was directly responsible for a growing impatience among the Highlanders with their church. In 1782 one William Diack reported to Bishop Petrie on dissatisfaction among the Appin people. He asked the bishop to adopt measures for more regular Gaelic services. This provision would satisfy the minds of the discontented commons, who . . . are now fully resolved to desert us unless some speedy course is taken to prevent it, and I really think it very hard that such a numerous concourse of people, who have so long and strenuously adhered to the principles of the Catholic Church, should be obliged to deviate therefrom, so much contrary to their own inclinations . . . They say they are certain it will not be laid to their account, and it is much better for them to go where they can have regular worship each Lord's Day than where they can have it once a year, and sometimes not even that.33 Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, an Episcopalian proprietor, told the bishop about the same issue, commenting about ‘the Common People, who are now fully resolved to break off unless (p.86) they are more regularly supplied for the future than they have been for some time past’.34 According to one historian, this was a demand for a Gaelic‐ speaking ministry, but it may have involved more than that.35 The threat to attend the local parish church suggests a demand for regular Sunday worship. Yet this provision had rarely, if ever, been possible for the illegal Episcopal Church during much of the eighteenth century. The Appin people would have experienced this and known that such a demand was both impractical and unreasonable. What then were they seeking in making such a threat? The mention of services once a year or less does not square with the existence of itinerant catechists and local lay readers who provided non‐ sacramental worship. This lay‐led worship was supplemented in most Highland regions by the sacramental services of itinerant clergy.36 The existence of lay leaders such as that recruited by Alan Cameron suggests that the Appin people were not missing Page 13 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism worship, but rather the sacramental ministrations peculiar to the clergy, particularly Holy Communion, which only a priest could celebrate. Therefore, it may be that these Episcopalians were demanding more dependable celebrations of the sacramental life of their church, rather than simply more Gaelic services which laymen could and did supply. This Episcopalian discontent was therefore ultimately a consequence of Episcopalian loyalty rather than simply a hankering after more frequent Gaelic ministry. Evidently by the 1780s the shortage of clergy had become so acute that even in a stronghold of Highland Episcopacy like Appin the people could not always be supplied with even an annual Communion service.
The growing disenchantment of the common people of Appin with this situation was strong enough by the early 1780s to cause disquiet to their landed leaders. In 1782 a group of Appin proprietors petitioned Bishop Petrie for urgent redress. Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, James Stewart of Fasnacloich, and John McDonald of Glencoe asked the bishop for three visiting clergy to stay each for at least three Sundays in the area, and particularly that they be Gaelic speakers.37 In reply Petrie indicated that while (p.87) he was amenable to the suggestion, a permanent priest for the Appin people was not immediately obtainable.38 Some idea of the bishop's difficulty can be gauged from the fact that the Revd William Paterson, Cameron's predecessor as priest in Arpafeelie for forty years from 1784, was also incumbent at Ord, and also served Fairburn, Dingwall, Tain, Cromarty, Fortrose, Applecross, and Skye!39 Compounding the clerical shortage in Argyll was competition for the available clergymen. In the case of Appin in the 1780s this was a Mr James Taylor, incumbent at Kilmaveonaig in Perthshire, who was not a Gaelic speaker. In such cases clergy had to find a Gael who could interpret the sermon for them. But the Lochaber proprietors got in first and secured his services for their area. However, this involved Taylor crossing into another diocese, a breach of canonical discipline which upset the Revd Alan Macfarlane at Inverness.40 When challenged by Bishop Petrie a leading Lochaber proprietor, Cameron of Callart, defended himself vigorously. Taylor, he said, was a vigorous pastor and from that region originally, and with his Gaelic assistant he could also offer services at Ballachulish.41 Mindful as were Petrie, and Bishop Robert Kilgour of Aberdeen (who was primus), of the clergy shortage, they were just as careful of the niceties of episcopal jurisdiction. Therefore, they were prepared to discipline Taylor for agreeing to an arrangement with the Lochaber proprietors without the proper ecclesiastical authority.42 Episcopal authority was not always flexible when it came to the bishops' own power. But the exchange does indicate the concern of at least some of the traditional Highland proprietors for the religious life of their tenants and co‐adherents. This lairdly concern can also be found in a letter from Andrew Macfarlane to Petrie who said that Mr Stewart of Achnadarroch had written to him advising of the progress of the ‘Lad MacCole’ who was currently reading Virgil and Sallust, and was probably ready for Greek. Evidently Stewart was sponsoring the education Page 14 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism of a local youth towards (p.88) ordination.43 This was in keeping with the usual means of attending to the shortage of clergy which was for bishops to educate promising youths themselves in their own homes, often with financial support from some of the more zealous laity. Until the mid‐nineteenth century in the Highland region, as probably in most dioceses, these young men came from the lower orders, such as sons of poorer tenant farmers and shopkeepers.44 The poverty of the clergy was little incentive for wealthier families to send their sons into the clerical ranks. However, the social status of clergymen as gentlemen, despite the poverty of Episcopal clergy, was probably an incentive to lower‐class families already used to meagre wealth. For many years the people of Appin had been ministered to by the Gaelic‐ speaking Allan Cameron, itinerating from Arpafeelie in Ross. But they finally got their own resident Gaelic priest, a Mr Donald MacColl (the ‘Lad MacCole’?), in 1784. It was during MacColl's ministry that the Episcopal Church finally relinquished its Jacobite allegiance. As his ministry lasted until 1810 he was most probably the first priest in Appin to pray for the Hanoverian royal family. A loyalty of over a century, no matter how destitute the cause, did not pass without some protest from a few Appin Gaels. One elderly woman was sufficiently shocked by MacColl's prayers for the Hanoverian usurper to stand up and protest in the congregation on the appointed Sunday.45 In the same upper regions of the Church of Scotland parish where the Episcopalians were concentrated the Established Church also maintained a missionary. These itinerant preachers had been established in 1728 by the Royal Bounty Committee of the General Assembly to stamp out ‘Popery and ignorance’ in the Highlands, particularly targeting the people in remote areas.46 It would appear that even in the last decade of the eighteenth century the Kirk had not relinquished its aims of converting Episcopalians to a faith that was more godly and acceptable. There was a parish school in Appin and in Lismore, and an (p. 89) SSPCK school at the slate quarry at Glencoe. But Episcopalian relations with the Church of Scotland were evidently good. Parish poor were supported mainly by begging from house to house, but the £18 to £20 in poor relief that was available through the kirk session was supplemented by one to two guineas from the Episcopal congregation. Donald MacColl was succeeded by another local man, Paul MacColl, but the perennial shortage of Gaelic priests meant he also ministered to Episcopalians in Lochaber, Morvern, and Glengarry, from a base in Ballachulish.47 Paul MacColl's ministry from 1810 to 1838 also provides some indications of Gaelic Episcopalian piety at the start of the nineteenth century. Baptism was in demand for children, always at risk in the poverty and climate of the Highlands. Paul MacColl estimated (probably generously) he had baptized over 10,000 persons in his lifetime. This was obviously a rough estimate but it is indicative of the high demand for this particular sacrament, many baptisms being performed by Page 15 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism prearrangement in local burns of isolated glens during his travels. Some idea of the range of his ministry can be gathered from the places he baptized in during 1812. These included Portnacroish, Blairnanlaogh, Invergarry House, Inchree, Ishaag, the Ballachulish slatequarry, Carnoch, Inverco, the Mill of Glencoe, Strontian, Oinich, Coirechaorachan, Kiel, Caolisnacon, Kinlochleven, Lendgrianach, Coul, Mill of Fasnacloich, and Kintalen. The following year he performed seventy baptisms, which included the children of a piper, canaller, turner, shepherd, farmer, shoemaker, miller, labourer, quarrier, crofter, foxhunter, an Englishman, and a weaver.48 The premier festivals of the liturgical year were especially a focus for great Episcopalian assemblies to celebrate Holy Communion. People came walking to Ballachulish from as far as fifteen miles, and they came fasting as the discipline of the Episcopal Church had taught them when intending to partake of the sacrament. As the numbers were more than the small church could accommodate the priest stood at the top of the outside stair leading to the interior gallery. From that (p.90) vantage he read the service and preached extempore in Gaelic and English.49 When this scanty evidence is coupled with that from the congregation of Muthill a picture emerges of the centrality of these Eucharistic celebrations for Episcopalian piety. Muthill was a small town on the edge of the Perthshire Highlands which had had a continuous Episcopal congregation since the Revolution of 1689, with just two ministers serving it for virtually the entire eighteenth century. In 1907 the priest wrote a parish history in which elderly members were still able to recall the Episcopacy of the early nineteenth century, and oral traditions still gave access to the congregational life as it had been during the penal years. The Muthill congregation served as a focus for Episcopalians from Strathearn and from the surrounding country as far as Crieff and Auchterarder, and was consequently comprised of both Gaels and Lowlanders. After 1689 the congregation continued the worship pattern of pre‐ Revolutionary years with the infrequent Communion services lasting for at least three days, the service itself being preceded by preparatory sermons on the Saturday before and thanksgivings on the Monday. In 1708 this pattern became incorporated with the use of the Book of Common Prayer which was introduced for worship that year. The use of the prayer book meant that the Communions became attached to the great feasts of the liturgical year: Christmas Day, Easter, Pentecost, and Ascension. The 1710 Easter Communion had sermons on the preceding Friday and Saturday.50 On the Monday after the service a meeting was held to distribute the collection, part was used to defray costs of the Communion and part given as poor relief. The accounts for 1703 include £6. 12s. for bread, £16. 9s. 6d. for wine, 6s for nails to construct tables, and 1s. 2d. for soap to (p.91) wash the tablecloths. They demonstrate that Episcopalian communion maintained the practice of the seventeenth century and administered the sacrament to the congregation sitting at tables constructed for the purpose and covered with presumably white tablecloths. The sizeable Page 16 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism amount of money spent for bread and wine indicates that a considerable portion of the sacred elements of bread and wine was consumed by each communicant.51 Later, permanent communion tables or altars were erected in Episcopal chapels but the corporate meal aspect remained vestigially present in the administration of the sacrament. By the nineteenth century it was common practice for the communicants kneeling at the altar rails to remain there until all at the rail had communicated and then to leave the altar together after being dismissed by the priest with a blessing.52 An erosion of the older form of corporate communion as a symbolic communal meal was probably a result of the penal laws which prevented congregations of more than five assembling together. This eighteenth‐century Episcopalian practice of the Communion service with the congregation seated at tables, a service flanked by days of preaching, indicates that Leigh Schmidt's careful and ground‐breaking work on the reconstruction of the Presbyterian Communion seasons needs a little fine‐tuning when he restricts the development and persistence of the Communion season to ‘Evangelical’ Presbyterianism. Schmidt does cite Episcopalian critics of these Presbyterian ‘holy fairs’ as a foil for upholding the centrality and importance of these Communion seasons in Presbyterian piety.53 But the Muthill example is proof that the same practice continued in Episcopalian circles even though Episcopalian controversialists decried it. The Ballachulish outdoor Communion also indicates that some of this practice persisted into the next century. Even if the Communion was administered at a central altar, the administration of the sacrament in the context of extended preaching and large outdoor (p.92) assemblies was still an Episcopalian feature in the Highlands wherever there was a sufficiently large Episcopalian population to warrant it. In 1889 Bishop Chinnery‐Haldane noted it was still the custom in some Highland congregations to have these preparation services before the great Communion days of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and Lammas.54 Bishop Petrie, who died in 1787, was for years a recognizable figure coming up the glen on his Highland pony, in plaid rather than episcopal robes, and hospitality for him was as often provided by Presbyterian tacksmen as among his own people. Despite the obvious practical constraints upon his ability to exercise leadership among the widely scattered Gaelic Episcopalians, his ministry demonstrated that it was possible for even the socially and officially marginalized Episcopalian clergy to be widely acceptable to Highland people. This may have been one fortunate consequence of the poverty of the Episcopalian clergy as Gaels generally respected austerity in religious matters.55 Petrie's religion was not in an Evangelical mould, but rather emphasized religious reserve and carefulness before the mysteries of religion in the usual manner of High Church Episcopalian theology.56 One reminiscence of Petrie concerned two aged female disciples of the bishop in Inverness who kept their religious opinions to themselves except among their like‐minded friends. These Page 17 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism women found the emotionalism and doctrinal openness of Evangelicalism impious and distasteful, and consequently refused to attend Evangelical sermons. Theirs was a religion of rigorous reserve, with long hours of personal preparation for the infrequent reception of Holy Communion common to contemporary Episcopalian piety.57 However, Gaelic Episcopalians had no compunction about supplementing their own Communions with those of the parish kirk. They did so throughout the Highlands by the beginning of (p.93) the nineteenth century when there was no local Episcopalian minister available. That this occurred in the parish of Daviot despite there being substantial Episcopalian numbers again points to the Episcopal Church having severe difficulty finding sufficient clergy, but also suggests that the practice of less rigid confessional boundaries among the laity was not uncommon. The comment of the parish minister of Daviot in the Old Statistical Account that this practice of kirk attendance was associated with personal acquaintance with himself suggests that personal knowledge of non‐ Episcopal clergy was important in prompting Episcopalian acceptance. This practice of attending the parish kirk was more common in parishes where there were few Episcopalians, such as Moy where it usually resulted in the Episcopalians being absorbed into the Established Church; or where the ministry of clergy was unavailable, as in Urray where the laity went to the parish kirk on the week when their own minister was leading worship in a neighbouring parish. These practices support the contemporary contention that the shortage of clergy was a primary reason for loss of numbers by way of absorption into the Kirk whose ordained ministry was more available. However, by the early years of the nineteenth century virtually the only Gaelic priest in the Highland region aside from Appin was Duncan Mackenzie who was instituted to his lifelong charge of St Paul's, Strathnairn, in 1817, remaining there until 1858. Mackenzie came from Glencoe, the son of small tenant farmers. He acquired his theological education in the usual manner of being tutored at the homes of Bishop Macfarlane and of John Murdoch, the priest at Keith, before going on to King's College, Aberdeen, where he met the eminent Gaelic scholar and poet Ewen Maclauchlan who originated from Nether Lochaber. He assisted with Maclauchlan's Gaelic Dictionary (1828) and with his Gaelic translation of the Scriptures; and Mackenzie later translated the prayer book. While in Aberdeen Mackenzie learned a little medicine and law which became a useful adjunct in his later pastoral work when he was often the only help Highlanders had with ailments, wills, and contracts. In Strathnairn, an exposed upland district about fifteen miles south‐west of Inverness, the local population was virtually entirely Gaelic‐speaking, and (p.94) Mackenzie was the wealthiest inhabitant on his £40 a year. He soon acquired additional charges including the English‐speaking congregation at Fortrose, the Gaels of Arpafeelie, Dingwall, and often Highfield in Ross also. Even in 1840 Strathnairn numbered just 260 people with communicants averaging between forty and fifty persons. Yet Page 18 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Mackenzie had a significant leadership in Highland society beyond Strathnairn. Consulted as a physician by Highlanders who travelled from as far as John O'Groats and Iona, Mackenzie was also a ready source of funds for those intending to set themselves up in trade, farming, or to fund emigration by poor families. The priest was also a useful source of personal guarantee, as when a factor on a large landed estate would not hire Episcopalians unless they were accompanied by a reference from Mackenzie. But one priest, no matter how diligent and respected, could not adequately minister to the needs of Episcopalians in all of Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness‐shire.58 Other than the Old Statistical Account and the scanty Episcopalian records for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century published by J. B. Craven, the first detailed evidence existing for Highland Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century are the Reports of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland (1837–8). The Committee was established to investigate the adequacy of church accommodation and the churchgoing of the working class. It sent out 1,057 letters and visited 552 parishes and the Dissenting congregations within those boundaries.59 For this reason the evidence does not supply a truly national picture. There were just four Highland Episcopal congregations covered in the report: Lismore and Appin, Fort William, Inverness, and Kilmaveonaig in Blair Atholl (see Table 3.5). Some of the other data from the submissions of these Episcopal clergy are pertinent to the shape of Highland Episcopalianism in 1837. Appin had two chapels, at Ballachulish and Portnacroish, whereas all the others had one, all built between about 1795 and 1817, or after the Relief Act was passed in 1792. Inverness was (p.95)
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Table 3.5. Highland Congregations in 1837 Appin
Fort William
Inverness
Kilmavoenaig
total
1,439
c.200a
250–60b
66
no. of communicants
432
c.80
c.120
trend
stable
increasing
increasing
decreasing
comments
all poor
a few poor
30 poor
30 poor
summer
500
100
200–300
35
winter
370
c.60
c.150
20
No. of seats
520
250
280
c.200
from rents
£45
£8–£12
£100
£25
from collections
£4. 11s. 6d.
c.£5
c.£50
from Communions
c.£25
Stipend
£40
£45
£180
no house/glebe
house and small plot
no house/glebe small plot
Membership:
Attendance
Income
£78. 10s.
(a) 140 in Fort William mission district (b) Kirkwall 16; Daviot 10; Moy 7; Croy 14; Nairn ‘a few’
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Source: Appendix to the Fourth Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 22–5, 55–7, 237–9, 355–7.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism building a new 600‐seat chapel, which included 100 free seats for the poor. The others also made provision for the seating of the poor. Fort William had 50 free seats, but 100 were unlet. Kilmaveonaig had 45 seats given to people by right, though apparently none were let and therefore the rest of the chapel was free, which was rather superfluous with its small congregation. The same parlous financial situation was apparent at Fort William where rents were ‘very ill‐paid’. Ballachulish made no specific provision for free seating but always made room for those unable to pay. Evidently poor families made some effort to come considerable distances to these chapels. At Fort William there were six families at 2 miles from the chapel, four at 4 miles, two at 6 miles, while 12 miles was the greatest distance people actually travelled to attend. At Inverness people came from 20 miles away, though this must have been wealthy families with a horse or carriage. At Kilmaveonaig, there were just two houses further than 2 miles (p.96) from the chapel, while the greatest distance travelled to worship was 4 miles. The worship at all four chapels but Appin consisted of two services each Sunday. At Appin there was one service at each of the chapels every Sunday, plus an occasional service at Duror and Glencreran for the elderly. Fort William had a Gaelic service in the afternoon, plus occasional services at Morvern, Sunart, and Knoydart since 1828.
These four congregations indicate a membership of approximately 2,000, of which about 660 were communicants. Inverness was clearly the wealthiest of the four congregations, where sittings rented at a rate between 2s. and £1 were all let, bringing in an income of £100 in addition to a comparatively substantial annual collection of £45. Consequently, the stipend of £180 was about £100 in excess of any of the three rural charges. The level of seat rents indicates that Inverness was substantially a middle‐class and reasonably prosperous congregation with a minority of impoverished members, possibly Gaels as there was a Gaelic mission there in the 1850s. In contrast, the rural charges were all struggling to pay a priest adequately and had to be supported from central funds. This was clearly because they were all comprised almost entirely of poor or working‐class Gaels. The catchment area for all these rural chapels evidently depended on the ability of Highlanders to be able to walk to church. This varied from four miles at Kilmaveonaig to twelve miles at Fort William, where perhaps the terrain was easier to traverse. Beyond these distances the priest had to itinerate if he wished to pastor his people and thus to prop up their maintenance of an Episcopalian identity. In this way, the clergy in Appin and Fort William ministered periodically to scattered Episcopal families at Duror, Glencreran, Morvern, Sunart, and Knoydart although by this time, to minister to these and other Gaels throughout the Highlands there were just five clergy.60 But the four congregations visited by the commissioners did not comprise the whole of Highland Episcopalian populations, and therefore it is more useful to turn to the data from the 1840s in the New Statistical Account (see Tables 3.6–3.9). The occasional comments of the parish ministers again flesh out this statistical picture somewhat. At Appin the majority of the (p.97)
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Table 3.6. Episcopalian Population in the 1840S: Argyllshire Parish
Numbers
Ardnamurchan
1 family, plus the proprietor
Morvern
2
Lismore and Appin
not specified
Dunoon & Kilmun
4–5 families
Glassary
not specified
Kilmore & Kilbride
9–12
Source: NSA vii. 161, 191, 253, 531, 624, 697.
Table 3.7. Episcopalian Population in the 1840S: Inverness‐Shire Parish
Numbers
Inverness
c.150
Moy & Dalarossie
1–2
Kilmalie
c.400
North Uist
2 families
Skye–Diurnish
4 families
Kilmorack
c.50
Kilmavoenaig
2 families
Daviot & Dunlichty
not specified
Source: NSA xiv. 29, 112, 126, 179, 354, 370, 511, 512.
Table 3.8. Episcopalian Population in the 1840S: Ross and Cromarty Parish
Numbers
Kilmuir Wester & Suddy
130
Killearnan
not specified
Applecross
3–4
Dingwall
40–50
Rosemarkie
not specified
Urray
25 families
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Parish
Numbers
Urquhart & Logie Wester
not specified
Source: NSA xiv. 62, 71, 104, 230, 357, 379, 401–2. heritors remained Episcopalian, though that did not deter them from being conscientious upholders of the parish church. ‘I do not think’, affirmed the parish minister, ‘that there is a parish in Scotland in which the Episcopalian heritors deserve at the hands of the Establishment more honourable mention.’ ‘Respectable’ Episcopalians in the parish of Dunoon and Kilmun generally attended the Established church. But as those mentioned were noted as being either resident, or summer or autumn visitors, it (p.98) would appear that these were middle‐ or upper‐class local persons or tourists. The Episcopalians in Kilmore and Kilbride were also non‐Gaelic immigrants, being principally excise officers and their families from England.
Table 3.9. Episcopalian Population in the 1840S: Perthshire Parish
Numbers
Perth
not specified
Moneydie
2
Foulis Wester
2 resident heritors
Muthill (total)
c.44
District of Ardroch
12
Callandar
2
Longforgan
3
Crieff
43
Blair Atholl
c.20
Moulin
3 families
Longierait
50
Monivaird & Strowan
4 families = 10 individuals
Dull (total)
21
Dull
8
Foss
9
Grandtully
4
Blairgowrie
c.90
Dunkeld & Dowally
25
Lethendy & Kinloch
1 family
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Parish
Numbers
Comrie
c.6
Source: NSA x. 117, 208, 260, 330, 332, 358, 419, 520, 573, 574, 592, 663, 699, 745, 779, 780, 927, 992, 1004. In Inverness‐shire the one or two Episcopalians at Moy were regular at the Established church, while the great numbers at Kilmalie had their own chapel with the clergyman coming from Fort William. The Episcopalians in Skye attended the parish church at Bracadale, while in Daviot and Dunlichity the Episcopalians also had their own chapel, which was Duncan Mackenzie's chapel at Strathnairn. Itinerating constantly, Mackenzie held a service there every three or four weeks, and in between the people went to the local parish church as long as they ‘are personally acquainted with the minister’. The Episcopal chapel in the parish of Kilmuir Wester and Suddy, on the property of one of the local proprietors, was attended by (p.99) 130 persons belonging to that parish, and as many more from neighbouring parishes, including Killearnan. There was also an Episcopalian chapel at Fortrose in the parish of Rosemarkie. It was described as a handsome Gothic structure seating about three hundred. However, the congregation was rather limited as there were few Episcopalians in the local area. The same attrition was commented upon in the parish of Urquhart and Logie Wester (the charge of Ord or Highfield) where the parish minister said that a ‘considerable number of the inhabitants of the western districts of the parish were, thirty years ago, Episcopalians; but, of that persuasion, there are now very few indeed,—almost all the young people having become attached to the Established Church’. In Perthshire the three Episcopalian families in Moulin parish were of excisemen. The Episcopalian chapel at Tummel Bridge had a minister to officiate once a fortnight in summer, but had no service in winter. The congregation at Blairgowrie was described as a recent one, being formed in 1841. The average weekly attendance there was about thirty to forty from an overall Episcopalian population of about ninety. It had been founded by the pastor, the Revd John Marshall, who was currently building, at his own expense, a new Gothic church called St Catharine's. This would seat about 200, with a vestry and library attached to the building. The parish minister remarked that the library ‘is not intended exclusively for the use of the congregation, but for persons of all denominations, and contains many works of science and general literature’. A chapel was also being proposed to be built at Dunkeld.61 Clearly, in the 1840s Appin was the only area retaining a substantial population of Episcopalians in the Highlands. Indeed, over a decade later Bishop Alexander Ewing of Argyll and the Isles62 was still lamenting the lack of clergy for Appin, and commenting that there were still 1,500 Episcopalians without benefit of (p. 100) clergy.63 In the New Statistical Account the major landowners of Appin Page 25 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism included Sir Charles Stewart of Ballachulish, Stewart of Ardsheal, Stewart of Fasnacloich, Sir Duncan Cameron of Fass‐fern and Callart, Sir John Campbell of Ardchattan, Robert Downie of Appin, Colonel Fleming of Kinlochlaich, Colonel Stewart of Achnacone, McDonald of Dalness, and McCall of Minefield, all of which had an income of over £50 a year. Not all of these were Episcopalians. Downie, MP for Stirling, had been a merchant in Calcutta and had purchased the estate at Duror from the Stewarts of Appin. He was, one writer remembered, ‘a Lowlander, and did not understand Highland people or their habits, and was not at first very popular with the natives’.64 The Stewarts of Appin, the traditional proprietors of the upper part of the parish, had been fervent Jacobites and Episcopalians and had led their clan out in support of the 1745 rebellion, only to be massacred at Culloden. They had been local rivals to the power of the Argyll Campbells. In 1831 the Church of Scotland parish had a population of 4,365, with 1,497 in Lismore. In 1845 this was 3,526, with 1,121 of these living in Lismore. Lismore had been decreased by the emigration of 1,400 people, while the population of Appin was steadier.65 Gaelic was the common language, with monoglot speakers being common among the older people. The area remained one where traditional customs and vestigial clanship persisted, according to the parish minister. Lismore and Appin people tended to marry from among the local population, and to retain local clan and sept identities.66 In addition to social organization, there were also remains of older religious customs that continued to be practised, or had been observed until recently. Marriage banns, up to twenty or thirty years previous, had been published at a stone cross in the ancient burying‐ground on Lismore. Friends of both parties came together on a Sunday morning to hear the parish clerk read the banns. The rest of the day was spent drinking in the public house, capped off not (p.101) infrequently with a good fight. ‘Happily the last incumbent succeeded in abolishing this unseemly practice’, observed his successor with evident religious relief.67 In addition, baptisms in Lismore had no specified godparents; instead, all the guests, when the baptism was celebrated privately on a weekday, were held to be godparents to the child. This involved the father going around the entire company, giving the child briefly into their outstretched arms as he passed.68 Rearing of fine cattle had been a traditional occupation in the district, but the upper pastures of the hill farms had been converted into sheep walks, mostly in the 1790s. But the parish minister did not mention in the Old Statistical Account if this involved any clearances of tenants, apart from some enclosures by Sir John Campbell and Colonel Stewart of Achnaone. There had been at least two prior emigrations to North Carolina, in 1775, and in the early 1790s which involved 200 people. At that time there were further plans, presumably by one or more of the proprietors, for more emigration.69 Other than agriculture the primary employment was at the slate quarry of Sir Charles Stewart at Ballachulish, which had been opened in the 1750s by Stewart's grandfather. This industry employed about 800 people, including such supporting tradesmen as Page 26 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism blacksmiths and carpenters. The slates were used for roofing and were exported from Ballachulish throughout the country, and occasionally to North America and the West Indies. Access to the quarry was let annually to the workers, who quarried in ‘crews’ of four men and were paid according to the number of slates they produced in the period of the contract. The average wage was about 12s. a week, but sometimes as much as £1. An unskilled day labourer usually earned 1s. 6d. to 1s. 10d. per day. Almost entirely the skilled quarriers came from the local inhabitants, with boys following their fathers in the trade. The majority of this labour force lived on Stewart's Ballachulish estate in three‐roomed stone and slate houses, with an attached cowhouse. Each family had a cow pastured on the nearby hill and a piece of arable ground producing potatoes and some other vegetables. Annual rent for this house was £2. 5s., pasture £1. 6s., and the potato patch 15s., the potato having been (p.102) introduced into the Appin region some seventy years previous.70 The quarry was therefore a stable, long‐ term employment which gave its workers a higher standard of living than they would otherwise have enjoyed. It also meant that local people did not have to leave for Lowland cities or farms in search of permanent or seasonal work. Obviously, the existence of a stable, local industry was fundamental to this region retaining its Episcopalian population who, from their local predominance, and the active Episcopalianism of their employer, comprised the great majority of the workforce. The parish minister, for one, was sensible of the social deference and control this produced in the tenantry. ‘On the whole, the condition of the quarriers is, in most respects, superior to that of the people in the same station of life in the surrounding country. They are sensible of the advantages which they enjoy, and are an orderly and generally a well‐behaved body of men in every respect.’71 By 1845 the Episcopalians had built two chapels: at Portnacroish in the Strath of Appin, and at the Ballachulish quarry where there had developed a small village of about 500 persons. To this latter chapel the local quarrymen contributed ‘very largely’.72 The heritors of the Appin area were mostly still Episcopalian in the 1840s.73 The schools in the area now numbered eight, six of them parochial schools teaching both Gaelic and English reading, in addition to writing, arithmetic, bookkeeping, English grammar, and Latin. Most children attended school between the ages of 6 and 15 and few under 40 were illiterate.74 The other two schools belonging to the Episcopal Church, at North and South Ballachulish, whose schoolmasters were paid £15 per annum from the Church Society in addition to fees from the parents. The south‐side school averaged around fifty pupils and that on the north thirty. Being prepared to pay for the administration of their religion by building up its local infrastructure indicates that their faith was important to the local people. Bishop Ewing may have drawn the same conclusion from the greeting of one of the quarry‐men, (p.103) ‘We always feel so strong, your righteousness, when you are among us’.75 The greeting may suggest the traditional deference of the laity to the clergy, or it Page 27 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism may simply have been a polite greeting by a the local man who said what he thought the bishop would have liked to hear. An even clearer picture of Highland Episcopalianism emerges in the 1840s from the congregational returns for the new diocese of Argyll and the Isles which began to be collected in 1847. By then there were just seven congregations in the whole diocese: Ballachulish, Portnacroish, Fort William, Carroy in Skye, Dunoon, Rothesay, and Stornoway; to which Campbeltown and Lochgilphead were added in the following year. Obviously these do not constitute the whole of Episcopal Highland congregations—in other dioceses there were Inverness, Kilmaveonaig, the Black Isle,76 and scattered populations of Gaels in Highland Perthshire and also in Glasgow—but from the 1847 returns it is clear that the populations of Highland Episcopalians continued to decline (see Table 3.10).
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Gaelic Episcopalianism
Tables 3.10. Congregational Returns of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, 1847 Chapel
Numbers
Baptisms
Catechumens
Marriages
Communicantsa
Ballachulish
1,200
36
38
2
230/72
Fort William
250
13
18
1
70/40
Portnacroish
400
15
30
4
110/95
Dunoon
33
2
7
1
12/12
Rothesay
70–150
3
9
—
40/38
Carroy
16
—
—
—
10/10
Stornoway
50
3
—
—
15/8
(a) The first number is that of the total enrolled members; the second is the number of communicants. Source: Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1.2, fo. 158–9.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Migration, examined below, meant it was unlikely that these congregations were composed entirely of Gaels, though they were probably substantially so. Therefore the 1847 returns indicate a (p.104) Gaelic Episcopalian population in the western Highlands and islands of approximately 2,000 (given that young children are unlikely to be counted among the congregational numbers until they were confirmed). There are a number of reasons for this continuing decline. The one most favoured by contemporaries continued to be a lack of clergy, and more especially Gaelic‐speaking clergy. Although the Episcopal Church had suffered acutely from this shortage in the eighteenth century, it was not a problem limited to it alone in the nineteenth century. All churches had difficulty in recruiting Gaelic clergy who would remain in Highland parishes. This was less of a difficulty for the Established Church than it was for the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches. But even the Free Church, predominant throughout the Highlands after 1843, had this recruitment problem and was still short of Gaelic clergy in 1870.77 The customary solution to this continued to be to make the most of those Gaelic clergy that were available by itinerant ministry. A typical Highland itinerancy would see Bishop MacFarlane, the last Gaelic bishop of the nineteenth century, meet his dean, William Paterson (who lived in Ross), at Keppoch Ferry. On their first day they would perhaps journey twelve miles to Fortrose to celebrate Holy Communion, with some of the sacrament being reserved for the sick who were unable to be present, followed by catechizing the young. The next day they would go either eastwards to Cromarty or west to Highfield and Arcan, another twelve miles. Afterwards it was on to Lord Seaforth's seat at Castle Leod before proceeding to Dingwall where Presbyterian sympathizers also met them. It was often due to the contributions of Presbyterian husbands of Episcopalian wives that a number of the chapels in the region were able to be built, as Episcopalian members were largely too poor to afford the construction. Between them these two clerics took it in turns to cover the west of Ross, through Strath‐ Garve, Torridon, Gairloch, and on to Skye and the Long Island, mostly ministering to single families. In one instance Dean Paterson returned from a three‐month itinerancy having gone as far as Stornoway on foot, horseback, and boat.78 The support of Presbyterian husbands (p.105) points to the importance of females in Episcopalian survival, not just as mothers in teaching the faith, but as instigators of the provision of infrastructure in their capacity as wives to wealthy men. It is therefore not surprising that discussion about the need for Gaelic clergy became periodically intense in Episcopal circles in the nineteenth century. In 1835 Bishop David Low of Moray, Ross, and Argyll explicitly mentioned the lack of Gaelic clergy as a major stumbling block to Highland Episcopalianism. ‘We labour under many sad disadvantages. In my diocese there are eleven or twelve Gaelic episcopal congregations, and only five Gaelic clergymen; and our great object and struggle at present is to obtain four additional clergymen; but these Page 30 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism we have to educate, and pay for their education, all our present students being the children of very poor parents,—one only excepted.’79 In a letter in September 1856 to the editor of the Episcopalian periodical, the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal, a chaplain of Bishop Ewing's claimed that Gaelic clergy were not as necessary as many believed. Except for Appin, Skye, and Fort William, congregations at Campbeltown, Cumbrae, Rothesay, Dunoon, and Oban would not understand Gaelic, while the churches at Lochgilphead, Kilmartin, and Stornoway did not have any Gaels.80 This repudiation of the importance of Gaelic brought a response from ‘Veax’ in the next month's issue who denied that the congregation at Fort William was predominantly English‐speaking. Rather, apart from three or four English families, the congregation was Gaels, and the oldest members of these thirteen or fourteen families only understood Gaelic. It was here, rather than at Skye, that a Gaelic ministry was indispensable because in the latter place not a single Gaelic Episcopalian attended the chapel. There were also Gaels in Oban, Kilmartin, and Lochgilphead but, like those on Skye, they stayed away from churches with English monoglot clergy.81 Another correspondent also contradicted the chaplain. This writer pointed out that the monoglot clergy at Campbeltown contrasted with the Established, Free, and (p.106) United Churches where there were Gaelic‐speaking ministers, which merely underlined the non‐Gaelic nature of this new Episcopalian congregation composed of mostly of excisemen and their families. Lochgilphead and Ardrishaig, however, were almost entirely Gaelic villages and when one of the few Gaelic clergy in the diocese did officiate there ‘the natives crowded the Church. So much so, that the Bishop said he could not have believed that the language was so attractive to the people, and that he never saw the Church so crowded’. The church at Kilmartin had been built by the new local proprietor (Neil Malcolm) so near his house that it was remote from the main settlements, indicating it was built to serve the landed family and little else. ‘The poor Celt is practically shut out, and must, of course, keep his distance’. The new church at Craignish was also too convenient to Craignish castle (Colonel Gascoigne of Craignish) to be useful to local Episcopalians. In Oban, despite the church being built by public subscription for the needs of ‘poor Episcopalians’ all the clergy had been English and their lack of Gaelic alienated the attendance of several local Gaels. The two chapels in Appin were served by the only two Gaelic‐speaking clergy in the diocese. On Skye a chapel had been built by public subscription at Carroy because it was useful to the laird there. Consequently, it had been shut for years for want of a congregation, which would not have occurred if it had been built in the village of Portree.82 Despite what the chaplain claimed, there were native Episcopalians at Stornoway but they had been alienated by the English or Irish clergy there causing that chapel to be shut also. This correspondent was also scathing about the reasons for the supply of the new edition of Gaelic prayer books in the diocese. That edition, because it was in English as well as in Gaelic, the writer Page 31 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism saw as a sinister step towards the eradication of both Gaelic and the Scottish Communion Office beloved of the northern Episcopal tradition but intensely disliked by Bishop Ewing.83 Ewing would have preferred the elimination of the Office, due to its differences from the liturgy of the Church of (p.107) England, and hoped that the Episcopal Church would opt for ‘identification in all points with the Church of England’.84 A further response came from a ‘Layman resident in the Highlands’ who claimed that not only were Gaelic services necessary to existing Episcopalian Gaels but that the Episcopal Church could not expect any Highland evangelism to occur without them. The English clergy in the Highlands merely accentuated the tag that Episcopal churches were ‘English’ chapels. ‘We appear in their [the poorer classes] eyes as foreigners, with whom they have nothing in common; and the very accent of the purely English clergy sounds foreign to them.’ However, ‘Layman’ admitted that Episcopalian Scotsmen were not offering themselves for the ministry and believed that this was because too much stress was laid on inducing gentlemen into the clergy whereas impoverished fathers had no hesitation in sending sons into the army ‘where the pay is but little better’. Presumably this meant sons were going into the ranks rather than the officer corps. Probably both army officers and Episcopal clergy would have been offended at the suggestion that they were not gentlemen or that they should facilitate the incursion of impoverished lower‐class Gaels into their ranks.85 Further spleen was vented by ‘A Friend to the Gael’ who chipped in in support of the indispensability of Gaelic clergy, stating that English clergy should learn the language and questioning whether the Church Society should be giving grants to Highland churches where Gaelic was not used in at least one service a day.86 This barrage of criticism prompted a defensive retort from the chaplain in the following month by pointedly claiming that without Englishmen Highland charges would simply remain vacant for lack of Gaelic clergy. He indicated several reasons for the lack of Gaels in Highland ministry. The few that were ordained did not want to return to the Highlands. Suggesting the attractions of Lowland life and society in contrast to Highland poverty and isolation he asserted that ‘Gaelic does not rank highly enough in the estimation of the young men, and they are ambitious of larger (p.108) and more sociable charges than the severe solitudes and scanty remuneration of the Gael can afford. And whilst some look anxiously to the Lowlands, others decline the Ministry altogether’. Certainly these were pertinent reasons for the shortage of Gaelic ministry, but he gave away his Anglicizing agenda when he stated that Gaelic was fast fading in relevance for Highland ministry owing to emigration and ‘improved’ teaching in their church schools. These factors, and ‘the general national progress’, meant that English was increasing in use and therefore monoglot Gaelic clergy would no longer be necessary.87
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Gaelic Episcopalianism A decade later William Robertson of Kinlochmoidart, a local proprietor, contributed to a lengthy article on Gaelic Episcopalianism to the Episcopalian organ, the Scottish Guardian, in 1865. He affirmed the importance of Gaelic for reversing the decline of Highland Episcopalianism. It was, he claimed, a consequence of a long neglect of the Highlands by the church caused by Lowland ignorance about the real conditions of Highland life, and a prejudice against Gaelic which prevented Highlanders having clergy of their own culture and language. This lack of sympathy with Gaelic culture by Episcopalian leaders was a ‘suicidal’ policy for Episcopalianism in the Highlands.88 But the impact of English or Anglicized clergy in Gaelic charges was not as simplistically detrimental as the defenders of a Gaelic ministry claimed. The ministry of the Englishman John Ilkin at Ballachulish between 1857 and 1861 illustrates the mixed consequences of a diligent pastoral ministry by an Englishman in Highland culture. He succeeded the Gaelic‐speaking Duncan Mackenzie, a native of the area. Ilkin had previously been a missionary in the Bahamas, which seems to be the reason for his being thought suitable to minister to Gaels! If so, it underscores the way the Lowland Bishop Ewing regarded the foreignness of the Highlanders, despite his undoubted romantic fondness for them. But Ilkin's missionary service may also account for his initiatives in this new cultural context. It was through his efforts that a Sunday school was established for the Glencoe people and he also managed to recruit a local young man to run it. Ilkin also (p.109) initiated a night school for the young people who worked the quarries which was a success, with numbers of young men forming themselves into a Gaelic class so that they could read their bibles in Gaelic. They were also willing to meet again on Sunday nights for instruction in their church's teachings. It was only when there was no one left to run them that the night classes came to an end.89 However, despite these important projects to support the continuation of Episcopalianism in Appin, Ilkin's lack of Gaelic remained an offence to the people, while his unprecedented appointment to the prestigious but unknown office of Archdeacon of Appin offended the clergy. Ilkin made some changes in the worship at Ballachulish, decorating the sanctuary and introducing a choir and instrumental music. But it was the lack of Gaelic which remained the chief irritation, causing the people at Nether Lochaber to petition the bishop successfully to be separated from Ballachulish until such time as there was, once again, a Gaelic priest at Ballachulish.90 This desirable change occurred in 1861 when Ilkin was succeeded by Donald Mackenzie. He was a native of Nether Lochaber and had been incumbent of Duror, Portnacroish, and Glencreran. He remained at Ballachulish until 1879 when he went to be incumbent of Burntisland in Fife. During his time Lochaber and Glencoe were established as mission stations.91 At the new mission of Glencoe in 1868, the priest, Neil MacColl, reported that there were only about two hundred local Episcopalians who were ‘overwhelmingly nominal’. This Page 33 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism compared with the situation in the early nineteenth century when Paul MacColl was incumbent in Appin when large numbers attended church. As Glencoe was part of the Ballachulish incumbency this suggests an erosion of attendance under Ilkin, despite his pastoral initiatives, which even Mackenzie's Gaelic ministry could not easily rectify. The rare sight of even a dozen people going to church from the glen was chiefly owing to the lack of Gaelic clergy, the new missioner Neil MacColl asserted. Even the building of a meeting house to facilitate a monthly evening Gaelic service was insufficient to (p.110) rouse the people to an interest in their church. ‘Although their hereditary fondness for it [the Episcopal Church] is not yet extinguished, they begin to see themselves so much neglected by the Church that it will require but little persuasion on the part of dissenting bodies to win them away from it.’ MacColl considered that the recently arrived presence of young active Gaelic ministers in the Free and Established parishes meant there was every likelihood that Episcopalian decline would continue. The establishment of an Episcopalian school at Ballachulish was important, but it was still two miles away from Glencoe and the inclement weather and the scanty clothing of the children made it almost impossible for them to attend regularly. These conditions meant that parents preferred to send children to the nearest parish school, a quarter of a mile away. As a consequence, although it was antagonistic to the Episcopal Church, most of the children attending the parish school were in fact from Episcopal families. Perhaps MacColl's ministry did eventually begin to effect the desired renovation in Episcopalian attendance at church in Glencoe, for in 1872 some two hundred worshippers met outdoors in August on a Sunday, sheltered by fir trees. Thanks to the bazaar held by Lady Glasgow and Lady Alice Douglas, the Earl of Morton's second wife, there were funds finally to build a church at Glencoe, with Lady Douglas bargaining at the Ballachulish quarry for slates. Unfortunately, by this time the land for the chapel was not in the hands of Episcopalian proprietors, due to insolvencies, and there was still no permanent provision for a clergyman but, Ewing commented, ‘the old ark still floats on the waters’.92 Fears about the availability of local Gaelic ministry in the Presbyterian churches causing the erosion of Gaelic Episcopalian loyalty were as true for the nineteenth century as they had been in the previous one. At Fort William the congregation had an English priest who did not speak Gaelic. This resulted in some Episcopalians going to the Free Church, many more to the Church of Scotland, leaving few attending their traditional church.93 The incumbent of Fort William, William Simpson, felt called on to respond to this in a letter to the Scottish Guardian in (p.111) September 1865. He asserted that the present congregation was English‐speaking with a only a few Gaelic members, all of which, except for a couple of aged Gaels, understood English. The dispersion alluded to took place under one of his predecessors who was in fact a Gaelic priest.94 But Simpson's defence and his disparagement of the importance of Gaelic in his charge looks questionable, for when he left Fort William there was Page 34 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism a petition from forty members who stated their Gaelic monolingualism and consequently asked for a Gaelic priest. This number of monolingual Gaels suggests that Simpson did not know his congregation as well as he claimed, or that Gaels came out of the woodwork following his departure in the hopes of gaining a more appropriate pastor. But as the English‐speaking part of the congregation was the wealthier of the two it was likely that an English‐speaking priest would again be appointed and Gaelic ministry for Fort William and its neighbourhood would lapse.95 This was a serious concern in a charge which served the traditional Lochaber lands of the Episcopalian Cameron of Lochiel.96 Incompetent ministry could further deplete Episcopalian adherents. This, coupled with changes in the estate policy of the local laird, was the cause of serious erosion to the numbers of Episcopalians in Kilmaveonaig and the surrounding Strathtay area. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century there were nearly fifty communicants in Kilmaveonaig, and some seventy‐six in Strathtay and Tummel Bridge.97 At Blair Atholl in 1828 the kirk session estimated that of 1,100 people, there were 550 Episcopalians.98 But at Kilmaveonaig the village began to decay when the new laird began to relocate housing for the villagers at nearby Ballintoul, so that by 1834 the village was extinct. The final collapse of the congregation was also a consequence of the ministry of Thomas Walker who, between 1840 and 1856, for some unknown reason alienated the congregation. This incompetence, and the ultimate loss of the grant money required to (p.112) sustain a regular ministry, meant that the congregation drifted off to the parish church and many never returned when services were resumed in 1870.99 Another reason for Episcopalian decline in the Highlands prevalent among contemporaries was the poverty of Episcopalian clergy. Bishop Ewing was frequently beating this particular drum. In a letter to the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal in May 1855 he claimed that Episcopalian congregations were generally from the higher classes of society who required the same social background from their clergy. Ewing's claim is at odds with the evidence of rural Highland clergy to the parliamentary commission in the 1830s that their congregations were overwhelmingly poor and working class. More pertinently, it probably reflected the opinion of congregational elites, the wealthy middle class and county families who did indeed desire that a clergyman be of their own class and outlook. This was certainly the case when the incumbency of Crieff fell vacant in 1897. One of the local proprietors, on whose estate the church was located, wrote to one of the referees for one of the clerical candidates about expectations of the new man. We have not been fortunate in our Rectors as they have been rather too militant. To succeed the Rector must belong to a good old County Family if possible & have a good and handsome appearance and be of peaceable disposition and avoid any appearance of superciliousness to the Page 35 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Presbyterian Clergy, who are the Established Kirk. He must not look or dress like an R. C. Priest. He must understand school work as we have a school of 100. He must not quarrel with the Schoolmistress or anybody else, and must keep his accounts with exactness. His wife must be a lady of good family, she must be a very sensible woman, & avoid female quarrels and be prepared to show great deference & humbleness of mind to other ladies. The congregation are of the Broad Church School & no novelties in vestments, incense, turning his back on the Congregation or any imitation of a Popish Conventicle can be allowed. Sermons 15 minutes on ordinary every‐day morals, Service simple of 60 to 70 minutes. He should be a good musician & good at Church Music not Gregorian. Practically the Congregation who pay are old County Families, very conservative. The farmers are all Presbyterians. In summer we have many visitors but as a rule they do not give money to the Church Funds & we (p.113) really don't want them. There are some poor humbugs who come to get money.100 One wonders if the County Families got their like‐minded, omni‐competent, and deferential priest? However, this expectation of the Crieff proprietors that the priest be of their own class contrasts with the lobbying for a Gaelic priest by the traditional landowners of Appin at the end of the previous century.
Ewing went on to state that clergy generally received less than £200 a year, which was unattractive to men from higher classes. The demands on meagre clergy stipends also resulted in clergy becoming further impoverished and therefore often grasping in old age from a constant battle to find the means to support the lifestyle of gentlemen expected of their station by society. Ewing, who expended a great deal of his own capital on his new diocese, commented somewhat bitterly, ‘It is not too much to say that, on the whole, few Members of our voluntarily‐supported Church give as much to the maintenance of their Pastors as they do to their ordinary domestics’.101 But how real was this comparative clerical poverty? Substantially so, at least in the Highland charges of the diocese of Argyll and the Isles. In 1847 the incomes ranged from the stipend at Rothesay which was about £100, through the £90. 14s. at Ballachulish, to just £74. 14s. at Stornoway. Neither did all this derive from the congregations. Ballachulish had just £40 from that source, Carroy £20, Dunoon £20, Fort William £25, Portnacroish £10, and Stornoway £20. Only Rothesay received no external assistance. This was probably due to the town's popularity as a tourist resort for the middle class, which brought in English Anglicans to a town which served as a gateway for tours into the gentle foothills of the Highlands.102 For the other charges financial aid came from the major funds of the Episcopal Church: the Church Society, the Episcopal Fund, and the Friendly Society. The rest derived from individual donations from local landed
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Gaelic Episcopalianism proprietors, including an ‘English Lady’ who gave £20 to (p.114) Portnacroish. Only Ballachulish, Fort William, and Portnacroish had parsonages and glebes.103 But Ewing believed the disincentive of clerical poverty was not the only reason for the continuing reduction of traditional Highland congregations. In an address in 1867 he offered further reasons for it. The first of these was emigration. ‘If one [family member] goes, the other members, sooner or later, are sure to follow . . . The raw, unchristened air of Australia would be intolerable to Highlanders, if they had to breathe it by themselves, but though “Lochaber” no more, it is still Home wherever “kent folk” and familiar names are present’. Then there was the energetic evangelism of the Free Church which contrasted with the traditional ‘supineness’ of Episcopal clergy. Also, the internal controversies of the Episcopal Church and the divisions they created had a negative influence on local populations, by which Ewing seems to be referring to ongoing disputes about the Eucharist and the Scottish Communion Office during the 1850s.104 Ewing had a solution for reversing the decline. What was required was a new evangelistic enthusiasm. In particular he desired a band of experienced Evangelical clergy who would not only reclaim traditional Episcopalians (presumably from either lapsed members or those who had gone over into other churches) but would also actively evangelize non‐Episcopalians and even proselytize.105 How accurate was Ewing's analysis of decline? Emigration was undoubtedly reducing Episcopalian numbers because it had been a widespread phenomena decreasing Gaelic populations since the late eighteenth century.106 In 1852 some 300 Episcopalians of Appin emigrated to Australia, which severely reduced the congregation at Ballachulish.107 In 1865 Ewing drew attention to the fact that he had already had to withdraw the clergymen from Lewis (p.115) and from Skye because the former congregations on these islands had emigrated.108 Emigration had two aspects. There was internal migration from the rural Highlands to the urban centres of the Lowlands, or to Lowland farms, and to the fishing industry of the North‐East in search of work. Some of this was seasonal and was undertaken in order to keep families on the land in the Highlands by supplementing the inadequate livelihood from crofting. In other cases, younger men and women (who went into domestic service) undertook long‐term Lowland work, or migrated permanently to the Lowlands, often reluctantly driven there by the over‐population or lack of work in their traditional homes.109 There is a glimpse of such internal migrant Episcopalian Highlanders in Glasgow during the 1830s afforded by the correspondence of Bishop Michael Russell with Alexander D'Orsey, a priest establishing an urban congregation in Glasgow in the 1840s (see Chapter 4). D'Orsey, in his visitations around the Anderston area of the city, had discovered a number of such Highlanders and asked the bishop what to do about them. Russell replied, attempting to temper D'Orsey's enthusiasm by reminding him of a previous attempt ‘about a dozen years ago’ to Page 37 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism establish a congregation of Gaelic Episcopalians in the city. A house was bought, a clergyman financed, and Gaelic prayer books supplied free. ‘But all proved unavailing. The Celts preferred the eloquence of Dr MacLeod to the Prayer Book, and to Mr McColl, their pastor; & the attempt was relinquished in despair . . . The people seemed indifferent, and would not do anything for themselves.’ Russell advised that this time an attempt at a Gaelic congregation must come from the Gaels themselves. He concluded in a thoroughly exasperated Lowland way about Highlanders. ‘The Celt has never been accustomed to do much for himself. He is content to bring up the rear of social improvement everywhere—in Scotland, Ireland, & Wales. I have not forgotten that you have “Donald” in your name; but you are not a Celt any more than I am of the archangelical order’.110 (p.116) This was a major initiative towards urban Gaelic ministry by the cash‐ strapped and Gaelic‐poor Episcopal Church in the 1830s. It involved Donald MacColl, who had been incumbent at Ballachulish until 1810, as the priest in charge of the Glasgow Gaelic congregation from 1829 to 1833.111 This initiative failed not because of the lack of Gaelic clergy, but because of the greater pulpit eloquence of Dr Norman MacLeod at St Columba's, Church of Scotland. In Glasgow, the usually ministry‐poor Gaels had a number of alternative clergy to choose from. Yet here was the Episcopal Church agreeing to use one of its rare Gaelic priests to minister to urban Episcopalian Gaels, but only to find they preferred the preaching of the famous Dr MacLeod. No wonder that Primus James Walker was said to be annoyed and disgusted.112 One would like to know more about this lack of interest among Episcopalian Highlanders in their traditional religious allegiance. It was not simply a matter of attending where they could find Gaelic preaching, for obviously the supply of Gaelic prayer books and the ministry of the Donald MacColl meant this was on offer in the Episcopalian congregation. Was it the attraction of the eminence of MacLeod as a preacher in comparison to MacColl? Could it have been that the Episcopal congregation needed to be kept financially viable by seat rent, whereas MacLeod charged no rents at St Columba's to those who were known to him as poor.113 Highlanders were notoriously averse to paying seat rents, which contemporaries claimed was unknown to them in the Highlands.114 But this could only apply to Gaels attending the Established Church, for it was certainly a case that seat rents were charged in Episcopalian chapels, although the poor did not pay. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Gaelic urban migration could result in the loss of Episcopalian allegiance as the pluralism of the city opened up new churchgoing opportunities in comparison to the Highlands. However, this was not invariably the case as D'Orsey's enquiry to Bishop Russell was (p.117) obviously initiated because he was discovering Gaels who still nominated themselves as Episcopalians. Also, when the Revd David Aitchison began a working‐class congregation in Glasgow in the 1830s he had Highlanders among his members, though ‘only a very few’.115 Page 38 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism There was also emigration overseas to the white British colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand, and to the United States for the same economic reasons as internal migration.116 This had been a substantial cause of Gaelic depopulation since the mid‐eighteenth century and was facilitated by assisted emigration, often reluctantly accepted by an unwilling Highland peasantry as a consequence of land clearance to facilitate sheep farms on estates. Emigration was also, in the 1840s and 1850s especially, a product of famine in the Highlands. So, as a result of internal and external migration the Episcopal Church experienced a number of changes in its Highland adherence. One consequence was an accession of strength in the few Highland towns through rural immigration and also immigration from the south and England. This accounted for new congregations being established by non‐Gaels, for example, in Campbeltown and at Rothesay. At Campbeltown the excisemen wrote to the bishop requesting a service according to the ‘use of the Church of England’.117 Immigration was also the cause of the growth of the congregation in Inverness between 1792, when it was ‘small’, and 1835 when there were about 260 persons exclusive of children under 8. Permanent English and Lowland migration into Highland towns also prompted the initiation of an Episcopalian congregation in Stornoway on Lewis, where services began in 1844 in English, using the English Communion Service of the Book of Common Prayer. There were about fifty persons in this congregation. Possibly the strains of geographic or cultural isolation told on this congregation as their priest, Hugh Moore, was deposed by Bishop Ewing for arriving at the synod in 1848 so drunk that he suffered an attack of delirium tremens. The new proprietor of Lewis, Sir James Matheson, was told of the (p.118) termination of Moore's incumbency as a trustee for the chapel, having purchased it for £400 to relieve it of its debt.118 By 1857 the Stornoway congregation received a boost through the attendance of seasonal fishermen who did not understand Gaelic, which was the sole language of the services of the Free and Established Churches.119 Stornoway was one of a number of planned towns built in the later eighteenth century to provide for the expected expansion of the herring industry on the west coast and the islands.120 From the 1840s the larger boats from Aberdeenshire and the North‐East began to fish these north‐western areas.121 The North‐East of Scotland was still the largest region of Episcopalian population in the nineteenth century and undoubtedly numbers of these crews were of that persuasion. As seasonal migrants they would have temporarily increased congregational numbers in Lewis. In 1891 these migrants were still an important factor in the Stornoway congregation. In that year Bishop Chinnery‐ Haldane told his synod of the work of the pastor there among North‐East Episcopalian fishermen ‘and also among others’. He also pointed to the ministry of the deaconess, Sister Minna Fitzmaurice, among the ‘fishery girls’ by means of house‐to‐house and sick visiting, and the distribution of tracts and Page 39 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism biographical pictures of the life of Jesus.122 Evidently Fitzmaurice's work was also migratory, as she followed these girls on their seasonal migration to Orkney and the Shetlands as they in turn followed the North‐East herring fleets to work as herring gutters.123 However, Chinnery‐Haldane was careful to reassure the masculine membership of the diocesan synod that this female ministry in those northern islands was ‘of course’ under the sanction of the Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney. But not all immigration originated from outside the Highlands. Some Episcopalian growth in Highland towns resulted from rural Gaels seeking work, or being cleared off the land into new planned (p.119) villages. Growth through Gaelic migration is indicated in the increase of the Fort William congregation which in 1835 had about two hundred members and was expanding steadily. Of these, three‐quarters were poor and working class and there was a Gaelic afternoon service. The Easter communicants in 1848 numbered forty, of which Gaels predominated.124 The new village of Lochgilphead was planned by Campbell of Auchendarroch and some tenants of his Episcopalian neighbour, Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch, probably settled there when they were cleared off the northern part of the Shirvan estate by Malcolm.125 These, and other relocations of Gaels in the surrounding area, may account for the presence of Episcopalian Gaels in the burgeoning village.126 Another social and cultural change acting in favour of Episcopalianism was the development of Highland tourism. In Oban, a meeting to establish a congregation was held in July 1848, subsequent to a service the previous Sunday for about fifty persons attended almost exclusively by visitors.127 As there were few resident Episcopalians these were fluctuating congregations. At Rothesay the priest estimated the congregation at between 70 and 150 persons, although he also admitted that there were sometimes not more than twenty present.128 This incoming of English Anglicans, while technically increasing Episcopalian numbers in the Highlands, did little for the retention of traditional Gaelic Episcopalianism. Indeed, it probably decreased its influence in Episcopalian circles as the numbers of wealthier English grew in local congregations. The use of English and the services of the Church of England has been noted previously in Campbeltown and Stornoway. Certainly by the mid‐century the predominance of English culture was even felt in the few long‐standing Gaelic congregations left to the Episcopal Church. Portnacroish was one of the two charges in strongly Episcopalian Appin. In 1847 the congregation numbered above 400 persons, with around 110 communicants. Normal services (p.120) were entirely in Gaelic, but the priest owned that ‘whenever two or more are for English they are never refused it, but to 90 out of 100 of my hearers it is like Hebrew’.129 It is unlikely that locals would have requested an English service as they would all have understood Gaelic; therefore it is probable that this was a linguistic change foisted on them by Lowland or English visitors to the service, most probably Page 40 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism people staying with one of the local proprietors whom the priest was unwilling, or unable, to oppose. By mid‐century Gaels and Gaelic were definitely in a second‐class category in the Highlands in an increasingly Anglicized Episcopal Church. But Gaelic Episcopalians stubbornly clung to their traditional customs where they could. Even in the late nineteenth century, despite the influence of the Anglo‐Catholic Bishop Chinnery‐Haldane, local Gaels at St Brides, Nether Lochaber, persisted with receiving Holy Communion only three times a year. Despite much preaching and clerical teaching and the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, they could not be moved from this. The Gaels would always stay until the end of the service, but would not budge from their customary occasional reception.130 But by the 1880s Anglicization in the Highlands was coming under fire from some Episcopalians. One correspondent to the Scottish Guardian in March 1881 considered the Episcopal Church in the Highlands was becoming a foreign ghetto, catering decreasingly to native Episcopalians. Instead there were ritualistic English clergy catering for English tourists and Anglicized landowners. We have no business to talk of ‘want of men’ if we make no effort to get them; for I do not think that bringing cultivated gentlemen from England, to preach to English tourists and Anglicised Scottish lairds can be called getting men for the work of our Church, as the old National Church, seeing that the poor form everywhere the majority of the population. Such as these, so far from respecting and trying to understand our old Scottish Episcopacy, come North saturated with English prejudices, and talk loudly of ‘educating’ the people up to Church principles—introducing their choral services, and intoning, etc, which tend to dishearten and disgust the old‐ fashioned, but staunch and zealous, Episcopalians; while the effect of the influence of such men is further seen in their (p.121) attempts to disparage and stigmatise as ‘barbarous' the grand old Celtic language, by which alone we can ever hope to reach the hearts of the Highlanders, and draw them to the Church.’131 The solution of this correspondent was to jettison the emphasis on a university degree for the clergy, which exacerbated their social distance from Highlanders and increased the costliness of trained clergy. To facilitate a Gaelic ministry Highland men should be allowed to continue in their old occupation while serving a two‐ or three‐year probation as a lay reader or catechist in an area where they could gather a congregation around them. In this endeavour they should be supported by an itinerant diocesan priest who would periodically administer the Eucharist. This vision of a flexible ministry which was tailored to the lesser material means of Gaels and to their culture would make the Episcopal Church ‘felt in regions where now she is either unknown, or, if known at all, known only as a by‐word and a laughing‐stock, and as a mere convenience for tourists and well‐dressed folks’. These reforms would have made Episcopalian Gaelic ministry predominantly a leadership of laymen, with the clergy in a Page 41 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism supporting sacramental role and, as such, may have been a belated lesson learned from Gaelic Evangelicalism. Or it may have been a modern adaptation of the customary Episcopalian use of lay readers and catechists in the Highlands, only with a new deliberate evangelistic focus. The visionary plan brought a narrow‐minded response from one clergymen, E. S. Medley, a Canadian priest who was then the precentor of Inverness cathedral. Medley asserted that Gaelic ministry was increasingly unnecessary due to the overall decline of Gaelic in the Highlands.132 Yet the primary Episcopalian regions of the Highlands, Appin and Lochaber, and Highland Perthshire, were still overwhelmingly Gaelic‐speaking in 1881.133
Therefore, official clerical Episcopalianism exhibits what Charles Withers has called an Anglicizing cultural hegemony towards Gaeldom and the Gaelic language. It was an assumption of the superiority of Anglicized culture which only a few Highland laymen, and even fewer clergy or bishops, departed from. The (p.122) same attitude was even to be found in Bishop Ewing, according to one leading priest. For all Ewing's own dedication to the Highlands, George Forbes of Burntisland, brother of Bishop Alexander Forbes of Brechin, believed that Ewing's own Anglicizing policies were counter‐productive to the maintenance of a native and Gaelic Episcopalianism. Forbes did have an axe to grind against the bishop, and was inclined to be something of an antagonist in the causes he espoused. But he had founded the Gaelic Tract Society which printed for several years a monthly religious tract in Gaelic. However, the project faltered and Forbes asserted it was in part due to Ewing as a result of the opposition of Forbes and his friends to Ewing's election as bishop. He alleged that Ewing prohibited any of the Society's publications in his diocese so that Forbes had to request the mediation of the Episcopal Synod in the matter, although shortly afterwards the Society itself was dissolved. Indeed, Forbes believed that Ewing's sympathy for Gaelic Highlanders was a recent conversion, since he had adopted it only when it gave him the opportunity to cut a more prominent figure in appeals to leading members of the Church of England in London in connection with the establishment of the Diocesan Fund. Or, as Forbes caustically put it, Ewing had a long neglect of Gaelic Episcopalians ‘before he discovered that they could form the subject of picturesque speeches at London House’.134 Forbes also accused Ewing of replacing Gaelic clergy when they left with Englishmen. After the bishop's death, Ewing's brother defended him in 1881 by stating that English clergy were appointed only when no other personnel were on offer. But then he virtually conceded there was substance in the accusation by stating that it did not matter because of the decline of Gaels in the Highlands. ‘Every one who knows anything of the West Highlands, and more especially of Ballachulish and Appin, must be aware how greatly the population has been thinned during the last twenty‐five or thirty years by emigration to America, Glasgow, and the low country generally.’135 But this defence of the bishop's policy, if that was his policy, ignores the fact that there was still a sufficient Gaelic population in Argyll to necessitate Gaelic ministry in (p.123) the 1880s. In that decade a quarrying industry opened up in Ardchattan which
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Gaelic Episcopalianism employed a considerable number of Episcopalian Gaels and prompted the inauguration of a new Gaelic mission.136 In the brave new Episcopalian world of the legal and public nineteenth century, Highland congregations frequently owed much of their existence to the financial support of local proprietors such as Sir James Matheson. He had bought the island of Lewis in 1844 from the wealth he had accumulated from trade in the east, particularly the opium trade between India and China. He expended his capital in ultimately abortive plans to improve his estate, and was one of the more philanthropic landowners towards his crofters in his policy of land clearance.137 Matheson was indicative of the drastic changes to the upper levels of Highland society taking place since the eighteenth century, changes that were eroding the existence of many Highland chiefs and lairds, including the traditional Episcopalian leadership. Like other landlords, Episcopalian proprietors responded in various ways to new capitalistic pressures on their agricultural society, which increasingly pointed to population clearance in favour of sheepwalks as an economic solution to debt. At one end was Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, whose Tractarian sympathies did not prevent her and her husband's determination to clear her lands which comprised most of the county of Sutherland, and whose actions have become synonymous with the oppression of the Clearances.138 At the other end of the scale was Sir James Riddell of Ardnamurchan. He cleared his estates in Ardnamurchan and Sunart in the first half of the nineteenth century, but still left a relatively large number of people on the land. During the Highland famine of the 1840s and 1850s Riddell remained deaf to the urging of his factors to clear even more small tenants off the land, though these owed a debt of some £5,600 and Riddell's improvements had left the estate with a debt of £50,000. Eventually, refusal to forgo his traditional obligations (p.124) as he saw them left his estates in the hands of trustees, and in 1855 the Riddell estates were sold.139 Other traditional Episcopalian proprietors exhibited a shifting policy under similar economic duress. Cameron of Lochiel was possibly the last great traditional Episcopalian chief in possession of his customary lands by the mid‐ nineteenth century. Prior to the Highland famine he had encouraged the subdivision of crofts in order to retain people on his Lochaber lands. But by the late 1840s he had introduced estate regulations to prevent this, as one crofter witnessed: Two families are strictly prohibited from living upon one croft. If one of the family marries, he must leave the croft . . . Severe penalties are also threatened against the keeping of lodgers. The unlucky crofter who takes a friend under his roof without first obtaining the consent of Lochiel, must
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Gaelic Episcopalianism pay for the first offence a fine of £1; and, for the second, shall be removed from the estate.140 Despite the increasing adoption of entrepreneurial capitalism in place of clan society by Highland landowners the number of Gaels continued to be eroded in the nineteenth century. So did the number of traditional proprietors. Like all traditional landowners their indebtedness was not necessarily solved even by the greater profitability of sheep‐farming. All too often the level of indebtedness of the landowners became so severe through their new expensive ‘civilized’ lifestyles on already indebted estates that sheepwalks still left them exposed to bankruptcy. This frequently resulted in proprietors having to put their estates in the hands of trustees whose brief was profitability, which only increased the pressure towards clearances. When even this drastic measure could not solve the financial crisis (and it often did not), the estates were sold to foreign owners, Lowlanders or English. Unfortunately, even the Stewarts of Ballachulish eventually succumbed to this economic removal of customary Episcopalian Highland leadership. The last Stewart proprietor attempted to further develop the slate industry at Ballachulish. His improvements were (p.125) either not successful or he was not given sufficient time by his creditors to pay off his loan. The result was that the bond holders on his loan took over the management of the estate and, in 1862, sold it to an Englishman, a Mr Tennant.141 As one Highland writer commented, ‘the Stewarts, who possessed these properties for many generations, have now ceased to be known in the district’.142 Thus, the arrival of a capitalist economy in the Highlands meant depredation for Highland Episcopalianism at the top of society as well as the bottom. Sometimes these changes in landed proprietors could work to the advantage of Episcopalian expansion. In the new congregation at Lochgilphead in Argyll, the clergyman was confident in 1848 of the outcome of plans to build a substantial new stone church because the congregation consisted of ‘the most influential persons in the District—Orde, Mr Malcolm of Poltalloch, Mr Martin, Auchindarrock, members of the Stonefield family’.143 Eventually the completed building was consecrated in 1851 because of the support of both new and old landed proprietors. Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch and his brother had made their fortunes in the West Indian plantations and had bought Argyll estates from struggling Campbells. Initially unpopular in the area as a nouveau riche, the family became one of the largest proprietors in Argyll.144 Financial support of this size inevitably resulted in substantial influence in the affairs and direction of the congregation. In the charge at Dunoon, which began in 1848, the land for the church was given by a Mr Campbell, and another local proprietor, a Mr Manifold, was regarded by Ewing as a ‘great pillar in money matters’. Manifold was desirous of having the Scottish Office instead of the existing English one used for the Eucharist, despite the fact that the canons stated the alteration could not be made without the permission of the bishop and Ewing was not inclined to grant it because he disliked the Scottish Office. But the congregation Page 44 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism appealed Ewing's decision to the College of Bishops who advised Ewing to reconsider, which he (p.126) duly did.145 However, the Episcopal Church could not always expect to be the recipient of the generosity and allegiance of incoming English landowners. Not all of these were Anglicans and, even if they were, they did not always attend the Episcopal Church. The major new proprietor in Morvern parish in the nineteenth century was Octavius Smith, a wealthy distiller from London who bought Ardtornish estate in 1845 as a holiday home. Smith came from a Unitarian family. In the next generation of Smiths at Ardtornish the family attended the local kirk, probably because it was the only church in the area, but also perhaps because of the social cachet of attending the Established Church.146 Not all generous supporters of Highland Episcopalianism came from new English or Anglicized landowners such as James Matheson or Neil Malcolm. Some traditional lairds also showed signs of renewed support for their church during the nineteenth century. Captain John Stewart, heir to the Stewart of Fasnadoich, returned to his estate from service in a Highland regiment, as a major supporter of the Episcopal Church in Glencreran. In 1878 he built a church and parsonage there in lower Appin.147 Robertson Macdonald of Kinlochmoidart was, on his mother's side, the grandson of the Macdonald who was executed at Carlisle following the battle of Culloden. In 1857 he gave the site, several additional acres, the stone, and other resources for the building of a new church and parsonage. He also set his tenants to work to build it.148 Sir James Riddell advised Bishop Low in 1835 of his intention to build a chapel on his estate for his family and some thirty or forty poor Episcopalians in his neighbourhood. He also gave the site, and £200 for the building, plus a small endowment.149 The nobility were also getting into the act, the Earl of Morton in 1862 building a chapel on his Highland estate, Conaglen House, and wanting the Scottish Office used there.150 However, these supportive proprietors, both new and traditional, (p.127) seem to have been the exceptions to more general indifference. Some of this, it was claimed by Ewing, was due to the already substantial financial demands on Episcopalian proprietors as heritors legally responsible for the maintenance of churches of the Established Church. In addition, he believed that the increasing numbers of new owners purchasing insolvent estates from traditional lairds meant there was an unprecedented body of Highland proprietors who lacked the allegiance to the Episcopal Church of their traditional predecessors.151 The increasing dependence on the wealthy made Ewing anxious lest the Episcopal Church became a church for the well‐off and thereby contribute to the increasing social divisions in Scotland, alienating it from the general populace. In a letter to his brother he wrote, ‘I feel more and more that our little Church here in the north, if we do not allow it to enter into relations with the other Christian bodies of the land, will become a mere caste and appanage of the rich, and tend to divide social life in Scotland even more than it has hitherto been divided—a policy as dangerous as it is anti‐ Page 45 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Christian’.152 Yet this was a man who twice married daughters of the landed gentry, and was a great friend of Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch who loaned him the use of Duntroon castle as a home when he first came into the diocese.153 In 1860 Bishop Ewing called a meeting in London of Church of England bishops and aristocracy to establish a diocesan fund particularly to meet the needs of a ‘large body’ of Gaelic Episcopalians in scattered locations primarily in Appin, Morvern, and Lochaber which made pastoral care difficult. He commented that although most of the Scottish nobility were Episcopalians few took any interest in their church, and therefore he looked to the Episcopal Church's larger and wealthier sister church. He hoped the fund would focus on the main barrier to Episcopalian ministry amongst Gaels, which was the lack of Gaelic clergy. Accordingly, at its meeting in 1861 the members agreed to support six theological students, two of whom had been pupil teachers in the local (p.128) Ballachulish school. In addition, the members agreed to assist a reading room at the Ballachulish slate quarries. That local institution had forty‐five local members and took copies of the British Workman, the Band of Hope Review, the Guardian, and the Glasgow Herald. The ecclesiastical agenda of social change indicated by the presence of a temperance paper in that list was to be reinforced by the reading room having a roaring fire where the quarrymen might be induced by its warmth to play draughts instead of attending the local public house for their leisure. The distant social paternalism of these Englishmen in London was encouraged by a letter from the incumbent of Ballachulish, Donald Mackenzie, who emphasized the poor nature of his congregation, stating that while this was a common description of many congregations seeking support, the Ballachulish people were entirely labouring poor. The only exception to this was the quarry manager. Otherwise the men were stonecutters, shepherds, and fishermen, though this disguises somewhat the comparative affluence and skilled labour of the Ballachulish quarry workers compared to some other Highland parishes. Mackenzie, conscious no doubt of his audience, also wanted to emphasize the religiousness of the locals. He cited an incident in which a workman fell from the roof of his house, breaking his leg. When the priest came to him soon afterwards the workman took his cap off and began a prayer to God. The man told him later that he thought he was dying and needed to commend his soul to God.154 Such a display of devotion may not have been exceptional. In 1865 the anonymous author of an article on Gaelic Episcopalianism in the Scottish Guardian commented on a body of these Gaels that his party came across at Coillabol, near Easdale. They were entirely without a church or a pastor, or even a school or teacher. When questioned as to what they did on Sundays the curt answer was that they read their Gaelic prayer books and on Easter one of them read the service for that day, with the others joining in ‘as far as they were able’.155 It was another instance of local lay ministry, either as a substitute for, or in association with, that of (p.129) the ordained by which the scattered Page 46 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Gaelic and Highland Episcopalians had long coped with the lack of priests and attended to their own religious needs. One of the students supported by the Diocesan Fund, Dugald MacColl, was ordained and in 1867 had been sent by Bishop Ewing to serve a curacy in an east‐end London parish as a means of gaining practical experience. He attended the London meeting of the fund that year and mentioned that his brother, a layman and resident of Glencoe, acted as a voluntary catechist in that area.156 While new societal changes such as tourism and immigration were bringing opportunities for Episcopalian growth in the Highlands, and others such as emigration and clearances were destroying or restructuring traditional Gaelic congregations, the marginal nature of Highland agriculture remained a constant reality for the remaining peasantry on the land. Most Highlanders lived on subsistence agriculture which could degenerate into famine due to bad harvests. The continual race between mouths to feed and food to put in them had been largely mitigated since the late eighteenth century because of the adoption of the potato as the staple crop in the Highland diet. The potato could be grown in marginal land and produced up to three crops a year due to lazy‐bed farming using layers of seaweed as fertilizer. Increasing numbers of Highlanders existed on a potato diet supplemented by the more traditional oatmeal. This dangerous reliance on mono‐culture became a crisis when the potato crop failed repeatedly in the 1840s and early 1850s due to the potato blight, a fungus which destroyed the crop in the ground. It looked like being a repeat of the great Irish Famine when over a million people died. But in the case of the Highlands both government and private assistance was rapid enough to avoid mortality on that scale. The Free Church responded early and magnificently to news of the looming famine which broke in 1847. That church's overwhelming predominance in the Highlands since its split from the Established Church in 1843 meant it had sufficient organization to be almost immediately effective in its response. By the end of 1848 its Lowland congregations had raised over £10,400 and it was (p. 130) distributing relief in its own ship, the Breadalbane, which ferried food aid to Highland ministers.157 Compared to this effort the Episcopal Church's response was far less organized and very much smaller in keeping with its tiny size. A number of individuals preferred to channel their donations through Bishop Low, especially those from England, including the High Church friend to Scottish Episcopalianism Joshua Watson. In addition, according to George Forbes, ‘considerable’ funds were sent from private individuals directly to the clergy for charitable relief of Episcopalian Gaels. One of the reasons Forbes gave for this was a suspicion that these Gaels would not receive equitable attention from the official relief committees as they consisted mainly of Presbyterians.158 Episcopalian relief also benefited from an initiative of American Episcopalians as an indirect consequence of Low's personal contact with American churchmen. Alerted by
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Low, the ship Harmonia was despatched from Connecticut laden with relief supplies.159 Low's successor, Ewing, still had the consequences of starving Highlanders to deal with when he became bishop of Argyll and the Isles in 1847. His attitude to the misery was revealed in a sermon he preached for the Highland Emigration Fund in London in June 1851.160 Reflecting a Malthusian outlook, Ewing believed the famine was basically due to overpopulation and that the potato blight had only precipitated an inevitable demographic crisis brought on by the decline of traditional employments such as kelp, herring, and illicit whisky distilling. But, as a remedy for starvation charitable aid would, he maintained, simply result in more evil than good because it undermined an individual's work ethic. Indeed, the last five years of such aid had merely taught an unhealthy dependency on charity to the Highlanders. Almsgiving, the bishop blithely maintained, led to ‘habits of recklessness and immorality . . . ’, teaching people ‘to depend on others for their support, and temporarily, at least, so far paralysed their industry that the very land itself was allowed to remain without cultivation’. Ewing's concern to shape the social life of (p.131) Episcopalian Highlanders according to the morally respectable tenets of a severe political economy continued throughout his life. In 1870 he became anxious about the drunkenness of Loch Fyne fishermen in the village of Ardrishaig. This was a consequence of their receiving part of their wages in whisky. In a village population of about a thousand inhabitants the expenditure in one year on whisky amounted to £4,542, a sum which excluded other forms of alcoholic liquor. Ewing's solution was the building of reading rooms for the fishermen, and to this end he had appealed through an open letter and to various civil authorities but to no effect.161 Perhaps the officials realized that reading would have little appeal to the fishermen compared with the conviviality of the pub after the hardships of a day's work at sea. Some of these undesirable social and economic consequences of Highland life could be solved, the bishop believed, if there was more assisted emigration, particularly to Australia where the Highlanders could be resettled on pastoral land left idle by the gold rushes there. He was sure that once in Australia Highlanders would be able, in contrast to other colonists, to resist the lure of gold and settle to the respectable occupation of farmers. The empire would solve the Highlanders' lack of land. Our path is plain. We have to make the wants of the one country bear upon the wants of the other. Bring Scotland into connection with food, and Australia into connection with labour. Happily, the Highlanders desire to emigrate to pastoral tracts, and to emigrate in families—under no other conditions will they consent to emigrate. This fact gives us as great a security for a satisfactory result . . . Settled apart, with his family and his clan around him, engaged in old and congenial pursuits—severed by his Page 48 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism language and by race from previous settlers—there is every reason for believing that the Highlander would continue to furnish the labour which Australia requires, and in this way and at the same time minister to his own needs.162 Finally, just to ensure the Episcopalians among this future Antipodean population of contented bucolic Gaels stayed that way, Ewing obtained grants for them of Gaelic bibles and prayer books from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in England.
(p.132) Highland Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century was subject to fundamental economic and social changes which had a deleterious effect on its traditional Gaelic adherents, though they did reinforce the arrival of a new English or Anglicized form of that religious persuasion. Despite the best efforts of leaders like Bishop Ewing, Gaelic Episcopalianism continued to decline in the nineteenth century in the face of modernizing forces. In the first place Gaelic remained central to the religious identity of Gaels, a fact which the Episcopal Church only fitfully recognized. The frequent requests of the Appin and Lochaber people for Gaelic ministry, the fall‐off in attendance from the Glencoe people during Ilkin's English ministry, and the emergence of some forty Gaels at Fort William unknown to the English priest, William Simpson, underline the importance of Gaelic worship for the retention of Highland Episcopalianism. It was the presence of Gaelic ministers in the Free and Established churches at Glencoe that made the Episcopal priest there fear for the survival of traditional religion in the glen. Given the continued centrality of Gaelic in Highland religion during the nineteenth century Gaelic ministry was crucial to the survival of Episcopalianism among Gaels, but the church too often adopted pragmatic, short‐term solutions provided by non‐Gaelic clergy rather than developing longer‐term strategies and resources for the encouragement of local Gaelic ministry, both lay and ordained. This all underlines in an Episcopalian setting what Charles Withers pointed out throughout Gaeldom, that Gaels regarded their native tongue as fundamental in their religious lives. As he notes, SSPCK reports through the 1810s to the 1830s affirmed that Gaelic was the religious language of preference among Gaels. This was so even in areas where the people could also understand English.163 The long‐lived bond between Gaelic and spiritual concerns in various Highland churches was also evident in the perpetuation of Gaelic in church services long after the local population had become bilingual. There was constant petitioning against non‐Gaelic ministers in Highland charges, and Gaels generally exhibited greater reverence towards religious texts in Gaelic than in English, especially bibles but also, among (p.133) Episcopalians, towards Gaelic prayer books.164 Withers believed devotion to Gaelic in religion was an outlet for reacting against Highland social and economic change which was Anglicizing and eroding Gaelic clan society. This also accounts, he maintained, for the popularity of Highland Evangelical revivals and, especially, for the near‐total Highland allegiance to the Page 49 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Free Church in the Disruption of 1843. Both of these were manifestations of a popular‐level Evangelicalism that involved a rejection of middle‐class Establishment clergy whose class interests most often allied them to the landed proprietors.165 If this social alienation was responsible for the rejection of the Established Church by Gaels, then it probably played a part in the gradual desertion of Gaels from Episcopalianism also. It is true that Gaelic Episcopalian clergy did not come from middle‐class backgrounds, at least until the increase of English clergymen in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet there is no record of Episcopalian clergy protesting at the clearance policy of landlords. In their case it may have been more a matter of deference towards local proprietors who were central to the economic survival of clergy. Lower‐class clergy would have found it difficult to challenge the economic strategies of their social superiors. Also, their ecclesiastical superiors, the bishops, always came from a propertied and wealthy background that gave them a great deal in common with the landowners. It could hardly be expected that, in the face of the silence of their ecclesiastical superiors and conscious of the social class and the local and financial clout of the proprietors, struggling Episcopalian priests in the few Highland charges would have shoved their heads above the parapets. Survival, rather than protest, appeared to have been the policy of the clerical leadership to the arrival of a capitalist society and economy in the Highlands and its erosion of their Gaelic adherents. If the Episcopalian leadership largely failed to identify themselves with Gaelic culture, what about the Episcopalian Gaels themselves? They continued to disappear throughout the nineteenth century, pushed out of their religion or their lands by forces beyond their control, and beyond the control of many of their (p.134) traditional landed leaders also. Economic necessity, or deliberate choices by landowners, forced Episcopalians and other Gaels across the seas to a new colonial context; or across the hills and straths to swell the numbers in the industrial cities of Scotland and England. The poverty of the Episcopal Church's infrastructure, the attraction of Highland Evangelicalism, or just the mere local presence of the Established Church, often meant Episcopalian Gaels became the Gaels of another church. Those that did survive as Episcopalians in the nineteenth century were more numerous and more regionally extant than historians have often credited. These Gaelic Episcopalians managed to overcome considerable odds to persist in their traditional religion, adopting various strategies for survival. They were not merely passive in the face of change. Their attempts to improve their religious provision in terms of frequency or culture could include lobbying their clergy or proprietors for more Gaelic ministry, passive resistance by absenteeism from non‐Gaelic ministry, or initiating their own lay leadership when the ordained version was not obtainable. When Gaelic clergy were available Episcopalian Gaels demonstrated a loyalty to their church that was both persistent and considerable, as in Ballachulish where the cost of building the local church was met mostly by the local quarrymen. Page 50 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism But the odds were stacked against the survival of a Gaelic Episcopalianism. Economic change was robbing them of their traditional landed Episcopalian leaders, or of their numbers due to emigration and clearance. Like other Gaels, the fact that most Highland Episcopalians were from the poor cottar and unskilled classes gave them little independence to withstand the economic and social restructuring of their society. Highland Episcopalian decline was also caused by the religious attractions of Gaelic Presbyterian or Evangelicalism which could draw on the financial and Gaelic resources of larger churches like the Church of Scotland or the Free Church. However, the most destructive blow to the retention of those Episcopalian Gaels who had stuck with their allegiance into the nineteenth century was the Anglicization of their own church. To some extent this cultural subservience was foisted upon the constrained circumstances of a church that was impoverished by its struggle for survival as an illegal (p.135) and periodically persecuted entity for all but eight years of the previous century. Consequently, the Episcopal Church inherited a situation at the beginning of the next century that could not be reversed. It had scattered, isolated, and tiny populations of adherents dotted across the Highlands with little infrastructure to support them in terms of finance to pay for churches and priests. In a church which restricted the most important religious rites to an ordained ministry, Gaelic‐speaking clergy were a necessary resource to facilitate and strengthen Episcopalians' communal and religious identity in a region increasingly subject to Evangelical missions and economic restructuring. But at the very time when increased finance was needed, because legally the Episcopal Church could develop its public life as never before, it was losing in the Highlands the traditional lairds that were its only wealthy class of adherents. Only when these were replaced by Anglican landlords could the Episcopal Church expect any financial support, but not all of these newcomers were Anglican and, when they were, not all were prepared to offer the sort of support that the old Episcopalian landowners were at least susceptible to, even if they often fell short of ecclesiastical expectations. But even when new proprietors were prepared to support Episcopalianism they became a sort of cultural fifth column because their Englishness was at odds with the retention of a Gaelic Episcopacy in the Highlands. Generally speaking, the new landed proprietors of the nineteenth century were a disaster for Gaelic Episcopalianism because the small numbers and comparative poverty of Episcopalian Gaels gave excessive economic clout to the Anglicized newcomers in Highland congregations. This influence was only reinforced by the Gaelic culture of deference towards the landowning classes. This was a playing out on the stage of Highland Episcopalianism of the English cultural and economic dominance of the British state which had proceeded apace since the Act of Union in 1707. English landlords prepared to support the Episcopal Church wanted an Episcopalianism that was Anglican and familiar and they were prepared to pay for it, by building churches and hiring clergy who would provide English services according to the English Book of Common Prayer. Therefore, to a large extent the Episcopal Page 51 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism Church was subject to (p.136) an Anglicization it was powerless to control, or about which it had little choice. But little is not the same as none. To the degree that it controlled its own life the Episcopal Church also embraced an Anglicizing culture that could afford little protection to the survival of its Gaelic life in the Highlands. The willingness of monoglot English priests to accept charges in Gaelic areas, and the confidence which they expressed about English driving out Gaelic in the Highlands may have been part of a growing Britishness which Linda Colley has identified. According to Colley, the period from the Act of Union in 1707 to 1837 witnessed the emergence of a new British identity over and above the older nationalities that comprised Great Britain. It was a fresh nationality founded to a large extent on the common Protestantism of Scotland and England which, in Scotland's case, meant Scots comfortably contained their Scottish identity within a larger British one.166 In the context of Highland Episcopalianism this Britishness may have been the reason for Englishmen accepting Highland Scottish congregations and unquestioningly asserting the dominance of English as necessary to the future of that region. It may have been because they did not see these areas as foreign any more, as their eighteenth‐century predecessors had. Highland Scotland was, perhaps, for them, just another part of the British state to which they belonged, albeit a remoter part with a diminishing ‘foreign’ tongue, but that would soon be changed. Certainly Ewing's dislike of the Scottish Communion Office, and (perhaps, if George Forbes is to be believed) his preference for English over Gaelic clergy, was due to his desire to make the Episcopal Church more like the Church of England. That aim may also be seen as a belief that in the one British state differences between ‘Anglicans’ were unfortunate to say the least. It does suggest that Ewing saw Scottish Episcopalianism as a small part of a greater ‘Anglicanism’ existing throughout Britain, in which the major partner, the Church of England, set the agendas. If, then, the presence of English priests in Scottish charges and the concern of church leaders such as Ewing for uniformity with the Church of England were due to (p.137) their perception of a single British state into which older national identities were now subsumed, it must be said that their Britishness was very English. Such an Anglicized Britishness was detrimental and unsympathetic to Gaelic Episcopalianism for most of the nineteenth century. By embracing this Anglicized Britishness the Scottish Episcopal Church acted to the detriment of its own loyal followers in the Highlands who had stayed with that church in the eighteenth century, only to be undermined by it in the nineteenth. For the whole of the nineteenth century there was not one Gael or Gaelic‐speaker chosen as bishop of a Highland diocese. The last one had been Andrew Macfarlane who died in 1819 having been elected Bishop of Moray and Ross in 1787. The impoverishment of the church meant that in the nineteenth century bishops were chosen from clergy of independent means. Consequently, the bishops of Argyll and the Isles included a Presbyterian convert who had Page 52 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism previously served in Aberdeenshire (Ewing) and an Englishman whose undoubted affection for the Gaels could not make up for his lack of their language (Chinnery‐Haldane). Both men expended themselves and their resources in the service of the diocese, but both brought to their task assumptions about the superiority of an English culture. Ewing detested the Scottish Communion Office as a badge of divisiveness from the Church of England, and Chinnery‐Haldane embraced an Anglo‐Catholicism which was part of the Anglican cultural hegemony at odds with the practices of traditional Gaelic Episcopacy. It was no wonder that in the nineteenth century the Scottish Episcopal Church was known as the ‘English Kirk’ despite its ancient undoubted and continuous Gaelic credentials. It was an identification ascribed to the Episcopal Church by dominant Presbyterianism and which allowed Presbyterians to dismiss that church as unScottish. It has largely been accepted by Scottish historians ever since. But it must have been galling to the Episcopalian Gaels who had kept their traditional faith for centuries. For them, their church's Anglicization was merely a new dress on an old antagonism towards their language and culture which had been the dominant paradigm of Lowlanders and English for centuries. Notes:
(1) This chapter primarily looks at congregations of traditional Episcopalian Gaels, most, though not all, of whom spoke Gaelic and often English. But it also examines new congregations of non‐Gaels—Lowland or English Episcopalians— which were also established in the Highlands during the 19th cent. Hence the distinction between ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Highland’ Episcopalians. As the primary emphasis of the chapter is on the religious culture of Gaelic Episcopalians, some congregations on the fringe of the Highlands have been included, such as those in the Black Isle, and in Muthill. (2) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 27. (3) The People of the Great Faith: The Highland Church 1690–1900 (Stornoway: Acair, 1998), 1–5. (4) ‘The Highland Churches Today’, in James Kirk (ed.), The Church in the Highlands (Edinburgh: The Scottish Church History Society, 1998), 146–76 at 146. (5) The Evangelical Movement in the Highlands of Scotland 1688–1800 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1951), 13, 18, 21, 22, 24, 28. (6) ‘Evangelical Protestantism in the Nineteenth‐Century Highlands’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 43.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (7) The History of the Church of Scotland from the Reformation to the Present Time, 4 vols (London, John Lendrum, 1845), iv. 533–4. (8) Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Landownership, Land Use and Elite Enterprise in Scottish Gaeldom: From Clanship to Clearance in Argyll 1688–1858’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994), 70. John MacInnes, Evanglical Movement, 70. (9) Robert A. Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands c. 1493–1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 102–22, 233–48. (10) See sources given for Tables 3.1 to 3.4. (11) Records of the Dioceses of Argyll and the Isles 1560–1860 (Kirkwall: William Pease, 1907), 283. (12) James Hunter, ‘The Emergence of the Crofting Community: The Religious Contribution 1798–1843’, Scottish Studies, 18 (1974), 98. (13) Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1995), ch. 10. (14) Donald Meek, ‘Scottish Highlanders: North American Indians and the SSPCK: Some Cultural Perspectives’, RSCHS 23 (1989), 380–3. (15) John MacInnes, Evangelical Movement, 60–3. J. R. Wolffe, ‘Roman Catholicism’, in Nigel M. de A. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 727. (16) Charles Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region (London: Routledge, 1988), 122–36. (17) William Ferguson, ‘The Problems of the Established Church in the West Highlands and Islands in the Eighteenth Century’, RSCHS 17 (1969), 29–30. (18) David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 83–4. (19) Philip Gaskell, Morvern Transformed: A Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 1–5, 11. (20) Ibid. 50. (21) OSA xx. 354. (22) MacInnes, Evangelical Movement, 41. (23) Ibid. 18–33. Page 54 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (24) Ibid. 13. (25) MacInnes, Evangelical Movement, 19. (26) Ibid. 26. (27) Ibid. 34. (28) Donald Meek, ‘Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth‐Century Highlands’, Scottish Studies, 28 (1987), 1–34. (29) Macinnes, ‘Evangelical Protestantism’, 52–4. (30) Allan Cameron to Bishop Petrie, Arpafeelie, 27 Dec. 1777, in Craven, Records of Argyll, 256–7. (31) Bishop Rose to Bishop Petrie, Down, 17 Feb. 1783, ibid. 257–8. (32) Ibid. 257. (33) William Diack to Bishop Petrie, Cuchenna, 41 Oct. 1782, ibid. 258–9. (34) Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, James Stewart of Fasnacloich, and John McDonald of Glencoe to Bishop Petrie, Portnacroish, 20 Oct. 1782, ibid. 259–60. (35) Ferguson, ‘Problems of the Established Church’, 30. (36) Craven, Records of Argyll, 279. (37) Ibid. 279. (38) Bishop Petrie to James of Fasnaclough [sic], Dec. 1782, ibid. 261–2. (39) Craven, Records of Argyll, 268. (40) Revd A. Macfarlane to Bishop Petrie, Inverness, 31 Oct. 1782, ibid. 263. (41) J. Cameron of Callart to Bishop Petrie, Callart, 14 Nov. 1782, ibid. 263–4. (42) Bishop Kilgour to Bishop Petrie, 19 Feb. 1783, ibid. 264. (43) Andrew Macfarlane to Bishop Petrie, Inverness, 12 Dec. 1783, ibid. 264–5. (44) Craven, Records of Argyll, 269–70. (45) Ibid., 280. (46) George Robb, ‘Popular Religion and the Christianisation of the Scottish Highlands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, JRH 16 (1990), 18–34 at 27. Page 55 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (47) George Robb, ‘Popular Religion and the Christianisation of the Scottish Highlands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, JRH 16 (1990), 18–34 at 27. (48) Baptismal register, St John's, Ballachulish, Ballachulish Episcopal Congregation, rectory, Glencoe, 1812–13. (49) Craven, Records of Argyll, 281. A part of this small church still stands adjacent to the 19th‐cent. church at Ballachulish. Currently used as a garden shed it was originally a stone storehouse belonging to Stewart of Ballachulish and used by Bishop Robert Forbes during his episcopal visitation of the Highlands in 1770. The storehouse was converted into a church around the turn of the century and it is the vestry of this church which remains. It was used frequently by newly‐wed Episcopalians as a two‐room cottage after the new church was built. It is one of the few physical vestiges of 18th‐cent. Jacobite Episcopalianism left in Scotland. (50) J. H. Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn: A History of the Church at Muthill from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dumfries: R. G. Mann, 1907), 19–20. (51) J. H. Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn: A History of the Church at Muthill from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 22–3. (52) F. C. Eeles, Ceremonial Connected with the Scottish Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), 73–7. (53) Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and the American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 44, 170. (54) A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles (Edinburgh: Master & Co, 1889), 7. (55) John MacInnes, ‘Religion in Gaelic Society’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 52 (1983), 233. (56) Peter Nockles, ‘ “Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, JEH 47 (1996), 655–82. (57) Craven, Records of Argyll, 268–9. (58) J. B. Craven, History of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Moray (London: Skeffington, 1889), 279–81; (59) J. A. Haythornthwaite, Scotland in the Nineteenth Century: An Analytical Bibliography of Material Relating to Scotland in Parliamentary Papers 1800– 1900 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 66. (60) Thomas Stephen, History of the Church of Scotland, iv. 533–4. Page 56 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (61) See sources of Tables 3.6–3.9. (62) Alexander Ewing (1814–73) was consecrated bishop of Argyll and the Isles in 1847, with the sponsorship of Bishop David Low whose endowment of the see had made the creation of the new diocese possible. He was born in Edinburgh and had converted to the Episcopal Church as a reaction against Presbyterian Calvinism. Prior to becoming a bishop Ewing served as priest in the new congregation of Forres, in the diocese of Moray. However, he remained all his life unsympathetic to the nonjuring tradition still prevalent at that time in the northern dioceses of the Episcopal Church. (63) Alexander J. Ross, Memoir of Alexander Ewing DCL Bishop of Argyll and the Isles (London: Kegan Paul, 2nd edn. 1879), 271. (64) Joseph Mitchell, Reminiscences of my Life in the Highlands, 2 vols. (Chilwork: privately printed, 1883–4; Newton Abbot: David & Charles Reprints, 1971), i. 179. (65) NSA vii. 244–5. (66) Ibid., 245. (67) Ibid., 242–3. (68) Ibid., 245. (69) OSA xx. 352. (70) NSA vii. 247–51. (71) Ibid., 251. (72) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fo. 93. (73) NSA, vii. 253. (74) Ibid., 254. (75) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 144. (76) Bishop Chinnery‐Haldane, in a charge to the diocese of Argyll and the Isles in 1887 mentioned a diocesan priest leaving to take charge of ‘an important Gaelic‐speaking Congregation in the Black Isle’. It is unlikely that such a congregation of Gaels would have been a recent foundation. Chinnery‐Haldane, A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1887), 7. (77) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 153–4. (78) ‘The Gaelic movement’, SG (Sept. 1865), 383. Page 57 of 62
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (79) Bishop Low to the Revd A. B. Clough, Oct. 1835, in William Blatch, A Memoir of the Right Rev. David Low (London: Rivingtons, 1855), 200–1. (80) Letter to the editor from a chaplain to the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, SEJ (Sept. 1856), 142–3. (81) ‘Veax’ to the editor, SEJ (Oct. 1856), 157. (82) This was later rectified when a chapel in Portree was opened in 1885 as a memorial to Bishop George Mackarness of Argyll and the Isles (bishop 1874– 1883). Alexander Chinnery‐Haldane, A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1885), 3. (83) ‘Abrach’ to the editor, SEJ (Oct. 1856), 157–8. (84) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 280. (85) ‘A Layman resident in the Highlands’ to the editor, SEJ (Oct. 1856), 158–9. (86) ‘A Friend of the Gael’ to the editor, SEJ (Oct. 1856), 159. (87) ‘A chaplain to the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles’, SEJ (Nov. 1856), 175. (88) ‘The Gaelic Movement’, SG (Oct. 1865), 429–30. (89) Letter: Revd Neil MacColl to Bishop Ewing, 7 Mar. 1868, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3. (90) Craven, Records of Argyll, 284. (91) Ibid. 284–5. (92) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 587. (93) ‘Gaelic Movement’, SG (July 1865), 291–3. (94) Revd W. Simpson to the editor, SG (Sept. 1865), 399–400. (95) Bishop Ewing to the Diocesan Fund, AGM, 8 June 1869, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3. (96) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 154. (97) Christopher I. K. Bowstead, Facts and Fancies Linked with Folk‐Lore about Kilmaveonaig (Edinburgh: R. Grant & Son, n.d.), 82. (98) Ibid. 87. (99) Christopher I. K. Bowstead, Facts and Fancies Linked with Folk‐Lore about Kilmaveonaig, 100, 103, 105, 110–11.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (100) A. J. Murray of Dollerie to unknown, 13 Aug. 1897, NAS, CH 12. 36. 2. (101) Bishop Ewing to the editor, SEJ (May 1855), 76–7. (102) Nicholas Morgan and Richard Trainor, ‘The Dominant Classes’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 1830– 1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 120–1. (103) ‘Incomes of Clergy in 1847’, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fo. 158. (104) Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), chs. 4 and 5. (105) Bishop Ewing to the Diocesan Fund, AGM, 26 July 1867, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3, fos. 8–9. (106) Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Emigration, Protest, Reasons (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 179–283. (107) Anon., ‘A Highland stronghold of the church’, SSB (Oct. 1896), 227–9; (Nov. 1896), 248–52, 250. (108) Bishop Ewing to the editor, SG (Oct. 1865), 439–40. (109) T. M. Devine ‘Temporary Migration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 32 (1978), 344–59. (110) Bishop Michael Russell to Alexander D'Orsey, Leith, 26 Feb. 1847, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 40. Russell was born in Edinburgh. (111) David M. Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy 1689–2000 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 343. (112) Bishop Michael Russell to Alexander D'Orsey, Leith, 26 Feb. 1847, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 40. (113) Charles Withers, Urban Highlanders: Highland–Lowland Migration and Urban Gaelic Culture 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 178. (114) Ibid. 176–7. (115) Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP, (1837–8), 104. (116) Richards, Highland Clearances: Migration, Protest, Reasons, chs. 7 and 9. (117) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC1/2, fo. 106.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (118) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC1/2, fos. 130–1. (119) SEJ (June 1857), 96. (120) T. M. Devine, The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 21. (121) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 306–7. (122) Alexander Chinnery‐Haldane, A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1891), 6. (123) Id., A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1892), 10. (124) SEJ (June 1857), 115–16. (125) Richards, Highland Clearances: Migration, Protest, Reasons, 474 n. 12. (126) See ‘Veax’ to the editor, SEJ (Oct. 1856), 157. (127) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fo. 136–7. (128) Ibid., fo. 125. (129) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fo. 120–1. (130) Anon., ‘St Bride's, Nether Lochaber’, SSB (Aug. 1909), 87–8. (131) ‘Ard‐Albannack’ to the editor, SG (18 Mar. 1881), 127. (132) E. S. Medley to the editor, SG (1 Apr. 1881,) 151. (133) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 39. (134) G. H. Forbes to the editor, SG (1 Nov. 1872), 237. (135) J. A. Ewing to editor, SG (25 Feb. 1881), 93–4. (136) Alexander Chinnery‐Haldane, A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1885), 4–5. (137) Richards, Highland Clearances: Migration, Protest, Reasons, 96–7. (138) K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 73, 75. (139) Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 475– 6.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (140) T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofter's War: The Social Transformation of the Highlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 199. (141) Barbara Fairweather, The 300‐Year Story of Ballachulish Slate (Glencoe: Glencoe & North Lorn Folk Museum, n.d.), 4. (142) Mitchell, Reminiscences, i. 179. (143) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fos. 140–1. (144) Mitchell, Reminiscences, i. 175–6. (145) Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Ledger 1, ABC, EC 1/2, fos. 102–3. (146) Gaskell, Morvern Transformed, 57–60, 86. (147) John H. J. Stewart and Duncan Stewart, The Stewarts of Appin (Edinburgh: privately published, 1880), 158. (148) SEJ (June 1857), 96. (149) Blatch, Memoir of David Low, 200. (150) Earl of Morton to Bishop Alexander Forbes, 11 Aug. 1862, BrMS 1. 3. 634. (151) Diocesan Fund AGM, London, 22 June 1863, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3, p. 5. (152) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 611. (153) In 1835 he married Katherine Stewart, daughter of Major Ludovic Stewart of Pittyvaich, Banffshire. She died in 1856. In 1862 he married Lady Alice Douglas, daughter of the Earl of Morton. (154) Diocesan Fund, First Annual Meeting, 24 June 1861, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3. (155) ‘The Gaelic Movement’, SG (July 1865), 291–3. (156) Diocesan Fund AGM, London, 26 June 1867, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3. (157) Devine, Great Highland Famine, 116–17. (158) G. H. Forbes to the editor, SG (1 Nov. 1872), 237. (159) Blatch, Memoir of David Low, 334–8. (160) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 207–8.
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Gaelic Episcopalianism (161) Ross, Memoir of Ewing, 524–5. (162) Ibid. 208. (163) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 146–7. (164) Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 338. (165) Hunter, ‘Emergence of the Crofting Community’, 99; Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 339. (166) Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 373.
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Urban Episcopalianism
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Urban Episcopalianism Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0004
Abstract and Keywords Uses the example of Glasgow to examine the impact on Scottish Episcopalianism of the new urban and industrial society of nineteenth‐century Scotland. It clearly identifies distinct religious sub‐cultures with this urban setting, including working‐class Episcopalianism, middle‐class Episcopalianism, and clerical Episcopalianism whose requirements were, at times, in conflict with one another. The Episcopal Church is seen to be more responsive earlier in the nineteenth century to the new urban masses than has been generally thought by historians. Working‐class Episcopalianism is also more genuine, if informal in its religious need, than proponents of a secularizing nineteenth century have posited.clergy Keywords: Episcopalianism industrial, middle class, nineteenth century, Scotlandsecularization, urbanworking class, working‐class religion
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Revd Archibald Alison, Episcopal minister of the Cowgate chapel in Edinburgh, preached to his respectable middle‐class congregation a sermon he called ‘On the moral dangers of the society of great cities’.1 Alison was convinced of the influence of the environment on human life and conduct. Accordingly, he contrasted the blissfulness of Abraham dwelling in rural Canaan ‘amid the simplicity of nature, and the innocence of rural life’ with his brother Lot living in the cities of the plain ‘amid the refinements of art, and the luxury of society’. The modern city, Alison proclaimed, offered both splendid examples of human achievement and awful examples of vice and depravity. Among its dangers to his flock he listed the gradual loss of piety. Unlike the countryside which was filled with examples Page 1 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism of the Creator's sublime work, in the city inhabitants were surrounded by the works of humanity which turned attention to this world. Cities also provided the ‘means of temptation’ compared with the ‘tranquillity of the country’. Urban life was the setting for an ‘unhallowed struggle for wealth and for distinction which prevails,—everything which can seduce the innocence of youth, or confirm the errors of maturity, is to be found, and to be purchased’. Alison was clearly concerned lest the members of his respectable congregation, especially the younger and more susceptible, too easily associated with the sordid and the profligate to the detriment of their religious life. Cities placed moral life at risk due to a social intermingling, especially the middle class with the disreputable among the lower orders. Urban anonymity encouraged this, in contrast with rural life ‘where every man is an object of observation’. As a remedy for this morally dangerous (p.139) urban environment Alison proposed devotional remedies of self‐examination together with regular prayer and worship. This Episcopal preacher looked on the city as a far less desirable place, morally and religiously, than the countryside. But it is also evident that he and his congregation had no intention of departing for that purportedly superior rural life in preference to their comfortable middle‐class existence in expanding Edinburgh. The urban life of city and town was an increasingly prevalent factor of nineteenth‐century Scotland and, as a church newly launched into public life at that century's start, the Episcopal Church was having to come to terms with it. Like Alison, Episcopalians might hanker after an idealized rural society, but their church would have to develop in the urban landscape of Scotland where the great majority of Scots increasingly settled after 1800. This chapter examines the responses and developments within the Scottish Episcopal Church to the industrialization and urbanization of Scotland. Scotland is a particularly appropriate country in which to study an ecclesiastical response to the new society of the nineteenth century as it was the most rapidly urbanizing society in the world between 1750 and 1850, apart from Poland.2 Scotland's population is estimated to have been just over 1,600,000 in 1801 and rose to 2,800,000 in 1851 and 3,360,000 in 1871.3 Those Scots living in towns and cities of more than 5,000 population were 31.2 per cent in 1831 and 53.5 per cent in 1891.4 It is therefore not without justification that Ian Adams complained in 1978 of the undue emphasis in Scottish history on the Highlands where most Scots did not live. According to Adams, ‘Scots are an urban people, whose rural links have been severed for almost two hundred years’.5 In the century to 1850 Scotland went from a small agricultural country to an urban society whose rate of urbanization outstripped that of England. However, Scottish cities developed differently to those of England due to a number of factors. Westminster legislation was not as workable in Scotland because of its unique legal system. (p.140) Scottish local authorities had greater powers than their English counterparts due to the history of burgh government. The characteristic stone tenements of Scottish cities made massive overcrowding Page 2 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism possible with consequent appalling living conditions, especially in the first half of the century.6 It is generally accepted in the literature that this unprecedented rate of urbanization was a consequence of industrialization. The historical process conveniently known by the shorthand ‘Industrial Revolution’ of course began in England, and in its early decades in Scotland depended on English technological breakthroughs in textile manufacturing, though allied to Scottish entrepreneurs. The consequent growth of the textile industry in Scotland can be measured in the shipments of processed cotton from Scottish ports—from 0.15 million per annum in 1774, 2.0 million in 1789, 3.2 million in 1799, to 7.5 million in 1801.7 This expansion of the textile industry continued to 1825 when increasing use of the power loom brought further expansion until the middle of the century. By then textiles were being overtaken by the expansion of the heavy industries of coal, iron, and steel. Among the causes of this industrial takeoff in England were political stability, social mobility between influential classes, centuries of industrial manufacturing, the existence of a substantial middle class, a rising population which meant an increased market and an increased expenditure, and the fact that Britain was rich in natural resources. These advantages were utilized by the technological breakthroughs well known to generations of schoolchildren such as Compton's mule, Arkwright's improved steam engine, and Hargreave's spinning jenny. But this English industrial breakthrough took some decades to transform Scottish society. By 1830 Scottish working life was still not predominantly in the large‐scale factory‐based, steam‐driven, heavy industry that is stereotypical of the idea of industrialization. Scots in industry still mostly earned their living from traditional crafts or outwork rather than from work in factories. In 1830 most factories were still sited in rural areas near rivers and streams because they (p.141) were run by water‐power, with machinery that was wooden not iron. It was partly the advent of effective steam power from the 1820s that freed industries from the need for running water and enabled factories to be built in urban areas close to the requisite pools of labour. This urban industrial expansion was facilitated through developments in transport, as the steamship and the railway allowed British goods to reach markets domestic and overseas speedily and in bulk. Railways especially had a direct impact on urbanization, giving Victorian cities their compact shape and assisting the emergence of commuting suburbs for the better‐off. Inevitably, the Industrial Revolution had social as well as economic results for Scotland. The most obvious consequence was the emergence of urbanism as the dominant way of life. Since Adam's plea about the neglect of the study of urban life in the 1970s historians have increasingly examined this central facet of Scottish life. Towns did not only grow as a result of industrialization, though manufacturing was the primary stimulus.8 They were also a consequence of improved agriculture needing local commercial centres, and of greater agricultural incomes stimulating increased demand for urban products. Trade Page 3 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism was also a factor, with Scotland being well positioned geographically to take advantage of the important transatlantic trade. Migration was a major stimulus as urban industries attracted migrants both from rural hinterlands to the major cities, and from England, Wales, and Ireland. This led to a pattern of Scottish urbanization dominated by the central Lowland urban ‘belt’ from Greenock in the west to Edinburgh in the east, and the two northern east‐coast cities of Dundee and Aberdeen. Among these large‐scale urban areas Edinburgh and Glasgow were dominant: as early as 1800 60 per cent of all urban dwellers lived there. This growth also indicated a shift in Scottish population from north to south. Population in the central Lowlands rose from 37 per cent to 47 per cent between c.1750 and 1821, and fell in northern Scotland from 51 per cent to 41 per cent during the same period.9 There was also a host of smaller towns, which continued a Scottish pattern of settlement from before the nineteenth century. But the size and scale of urbanization were unprecedented compared with earlier (p.142) centuries. This rapid transformation continued throughout the century when southern metalworking towns such as Coatbridge and Motherwell began to expand during the mid‐Victorian decades. The rapid growth of Scottish urban settlements had consequences for all the social classes that inhabited them.10 Towns and cities became dominated by the middle class, partly as a consequence of the urban absence of the gentry and the aristocracy. These landed families often had town houses in Edinburgh, but were more attracted to the greater metropolitan life of London as the British capital, and to their estates, which still remained the central focus for the lives of the aristocracy. This Scottish urban absence of the major landowners left a vacuum for the middle classes to fill. The middle classes have been identified by Stana Nenadic as non‐manual workers who derived their livelihood from the use of their intellect or their managerial skills and who, if they were married, had non‐ working wives and children. As such they were to be found in four broad categories: businessmen, professionals, employees, and a small independent leisured group. In other words, occupation was an important designator of class. As a component of society the middle class expanded greatly throughout the nineteenth century, assisted by the widening range of intellectual or managerial occupations initiated by the new commercial opportunities of industrial society. Their numbers increased due to the expansion of domestic and imperial trade, and administration, consumption, and entertainment industries, and the rise of the professions. They drew recruits among the landed classes from those sons excluded from landed inheritance by primogeniture, and from below into occupations such as shopkeeping. According to Nenadic, as well as a discernible occupational group (non‐landed and non‐manual) the middle class also began (p.143) to develop a class‐ consciousness by 1830. This growing awareness was facilitated by the city as a space which geographically concentrated the middle classes and consequently assisted the communication of common ideas and outlook. There were also the Page 4 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism clubs and societies of the Enlightenment culture and the voluntary organizations of the following century. Middle‐class identity was also facilitated by the adoption of several common behaviours regarded as important, especially church attendance and the cult of respectability. Another significant facilitator of middle‐class identity was education. The middle class poured in money to develop schools suited to their needs. There were burgh schools with their new commercial curriculum. In addition, for the professional and administrative classes particularly, private schools were built for classical Anglicized studies such as the Edinburgh Academy which opened in 1825.11 A particularly obvious sign of middle‐class identity was separate middle‐class housing in the various ‘new towns’ around Edinburgh and other cities. Improved transport such as trams, railways, and also, in Glasgow, Clyde steamers, permitted the exodus of the middle classes from the city centre into distinct garden suburbs with their two‐storey villas, such as Broughty Ferry in Dundee, Kelvinside in Glasgow, and Trinity in Edinburgh. It was this separate and identifiable housing which resulted in the emerging suburban separation of the middle classes from the lower orders and therefore helped to forge their social and cultural distinctness as well.12 It was the home, in addition to occupation, which was especially the carrier of middle‐class cultural identity.13 It became a place of the family and of leisure quite apart from the workplace, so that in middle‐class life there were two separate spheres, private and public. Women and children were confined to the former and the ability to maintain a non‐working wife was one of the indicators of middle‐class identity. This left middle‐class women restricted in what they could do outside the home, a cultural (p.144) imperative which did not begin to break down in terms of employment until towards the end of the century when a number of occupations began to be possible for women. But these were those usually understood as extensions of the domestic sphere, such as nursing and teaching. Until then it was philanthropy which gave middle‐class women their major opportunity to venture outside the private sphere of the gentlewoman. Charitable works also offered females some degree of autonomy as many of the voluntary organizations that developed in the later nineteenth century were managed by women.14 But philanthropy aside, the Victorian view of women was patriarchally idealistic and therefore restrictive in the varieties of social opportunities it gave to middle‐class women. Women were ‘angels in the home’ which reduced their role largely to homemakers in the large and distinct middle‐ class areas of British cities.15 The reason for this middle‐class urban flight into cultural separation and suburbia was the search for a better lifestyle away from the increasingly noxious and unpleasant realities that were the lot of the working class and labouring poor in Scottish cities. The working class had no such options available to them. Manual workers, skilled and unskilled, flooded into the industrial cities of Scotland from c.1780, a migration that grew as industries were increasingly Page 5 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism sited in urban areas. For employers, this meant that one of the major advantages of Scotland over England throughout the nineteenth century was the lower wages which this pool, indeed oversupply, of labour made possible. But in order to fit into the requirements of the new capitalist industry working life had to undergo a number of changes from its pre‐industrial form that workers were not keen on. Most of the lower orders in the eighteenth century had relied on subsistence agriculture with a little cash crop plus the sale of their labour in agriculture. Full‐time employment in industry was known, but only by a minority in an agricultural economy. This gave the lower orders a degree of (p.145) flexibility in their working lives with regard to time. It was one of the reasons why, for example, the Scottish Communion seasons could be so well attended by people from often considerable distances away.16 But the new industrial employment required workers to have a greater attention to clock time and to labour consistently during the working day. Distractions from these goals were challenged by employers with fines for drunkenness at work, the enclosure of the workplace to prevent absenteeism and theft, and the threat of dismissal through legally enforceable contracts. This new industrial work culture generally resulted in a twelve‐hour working day, six days a week, with two short meal breaks and Sundays off. Needless to say this new employment did not go without challenge from workers and protests were numerous before 1830.17 However, by the 1830s the growing dominance of industrial employment, agricultural clearances of rural populations, and the increasing migration of labour into Scotland brought about a change in which industrial employment began to be more accepted by the working classes. Within the industrial working class there was a broad and fundamental division between respectable and unrespectable occupations. This distinction was not exactly conterminous with the division between skilled and unskilled (for clerks tended to be regarded as disreputable), although the skilled–unskilled division was also important. Respectability meant regular employment, sobriety, thrift, and some connection with organized religion. The emphasis on regular employment and savings of course made it difficult for unskilled workers to be respectable as they were subject to greater fluctuations of employment and incomes. William Knox has drawn attention to the way in which the cult of respectability was controlled and fostered by the middle class to attack what it saw as the threatening and unruly aspects of working‐class life in favour of a ‘culture of order’. This middle‐class desire for order had three prongs to it: temperance, religion, and education. The voluntary organizations of religion, from Sunday schools to savings banks, were part of this middle‐class (p.146) ‘cultural assault’ because they were organizations initiated and run by the middle class to impose the agenda of respectability on the working class. But the main strategy in this cultural battle was education, the financing of schools by the middle class to inculcate not just literacy and numeracy, but also discipline and order. The reason for this was a growing anxiety and concern about the Page 6 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism urban masses by the propertied classes. As the middle class gained more material and social advantages from the new industrial society so they had more to lose. They looked nervously about them at the increasing numbers of the great unwashed who made up the urban labouring masses and their sense of threat grew.18 While this cultural agenda was bred and fostered in the middle class, from the mid‐Victorian decades it began to be taken up by the skilled working class who felt it had benefits for them also.19 It could mean savings to help insulate the family from periodic unemployment, and especially greater employability. This growing cultural assimilation by the respectable working class to the middle‐class lifestyle assisted a greater sense of understanding between the two and was another sign of the cultural dominance of the middle class in Victorian Britain.20 But one of several differences between the two cultures was that the lower‐class workplace was not entirely masculine. Women and children made up 63 per cent of the workforce in Scotland by 1826, and in Glasgow there were sixty females for every one hundred male workers.21 The low wages paid in Scotland (about 2s. 6d. per week at this time) were a major stimulus in prompting women to work, and employers also encouraged their labour (along with young persons) as a cheaper alternative to that of males. There was a sexual division of labour with women paid a lower wage than men, or they were allocated the less skilled portions of a job. But the culture of respectability also permeated women's lives because it was seen as desirable for respectable women not to work at all, and if they did it should be in occupations (p.147) related to their household labour. Consequently, much of the middle‐class educational effort with regard to girls was ploughed into teaching them the skills of a respectable home and turning them into useful domestic staff for middle‐class homes.22 Male and female workers shared the industrial workplace with children. In the first decades of the century child‐pauper and so‐called ‘apprentice’ labour was increasingly common. These near‐indentured wage‐slaves worked longer hours than adults in conditions of frequent high humidity, dust, and pittance pay, and were subject to ill‐health, injury, physical punishment, and sexual abuse. Although by 1830 most of these child labourers had been replaced by those sent into the factory by their parents, who usually had little choice because they were drawn from the lowest ranks of the impoverished unskilled;23 it was not until the compulsory attendance clauses for children between 5 and 13 of the 1872 Education Act that child labour in factory and field began to decline. It was these new industrial workers—men, women, and children; skilled and unskilled; respectable and disreputable—who crowded into the Scottish industrial cities. Not for them the airy tenements of new towns, or the garden villas of the suburbs. Their lot was slum housing. In 1801 there were 546 persons per 100 homes; in 1851 this had risen to 780 persons per 100 homes. This was far worse than in England when it is realized that in 1861 226,700 Page 7 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism families, or a third of the Scottish population, lived in houses of one room only, and 8,000 lived in houses of one room with no windows.24 Landlords had little incentive to do anything about this; more families in a building simply meant more rent. It was not until various Parliamentary Acts from the mid‐century onwards that there was any legal way of compelling change, and housing improvement schemes by town council initiatives did not begin until the 1860s.25 Until then urban life for the working classes in Scottish cities was simply horrible. For this section of Scottish society urban life was lethal, especially after the great population increases due to (p.148) demobilization after the Napoleonic Wars and the increased immigration from Ireland and the Highlands. In 1847 a woman renting a flat in Dundee was told she could have use of a wall cupboard in the flat if she cleaned it out: it was full of two cartloads of faeces.26 In 1840 Edwin Chadwick described what he found in Glasgow: We entered a dirty low passage like a house door, which led from the street through the first house to a square court immediately behind, which court, with the exception of a narrow path around it leading to another long passage through a second house, was occupied entirely as a dung receptacle of the most disgusting kind. Beyond this court the second passage led to a second square court, occupied in the same way by its dung hill; and from this court there was a yet a third passage to a third court and third dungheap. There were no privies or drains there, and the dungheaps received all filth which the swarm of wretched inhabitants could give; and we learnt that a considerable part of the rent of the houses was paid by the produce of the dungheaps.27 These conditions were a direct result of overcrowding and a lack of public health facilities which inevitably caused disease. There were cholera outbreaks in 1832, 1848, and 1855, and typhus was also endemic. But there were also deaths from other diseases such as measles, as well as from general malnourishment and the poor Scottish diet. The remedy was of course sanitation and preventative medicine, but the latter was virtually non‐existent and the former had to overcome general lethargy or strenuous opposition to interfering with the rights of property, sacred to the governing classes. Consequently, death rates rose sharply throughout the first half of the century. Deaths were obviously highest among young children. In Glasgow, among those children under 5 it was 112.8 : 1,000 in 1841; in 1861 it was still 96.4 : 1,000.28
The major form of relief for those caught in this urban death trap was the Scottish Poor Law which placed responsibility for assistance on the parishes of the Church of Scotland under legislation dating from the sixteenth century. In rural areas the parish church provided the funds for poor relief out of voluntary (p.149) collections made in each parish and from assessments placed on the heritors, with these funds administered by each kirk session. In burghs and cities such as Glasgow poor relief was legally the responsibility of the magistrates who apportioned and levied the poor rate, though the daily Page 8 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism administration was usually devolved to a committee of managers. By the nineteenth century this was becoming massively inadequate. The funds raised were woefully incapable of relieving the large numbers needing relief, especially in the towns. The Scottish Poor Law was made even more inadequate in the face of the large‐scale unemployment prevalent in times of depression in an already oversupplied labour market because it recognized no provision for able‐bodied paupers. Therefore, it was legally incapable of providing relief for the greater numbers of unemployed in industrial society. The depression from 1836 onwards brought this weakness of the Poor Law into sharp focus. This inadequacy was highlighted by the agitation of public health advocates, such as the well‐known Edinburgh physician W. P. Alison, son of the Revd Archibald Alison. These crusaders lobbied for legal over voluntary relief, contrary to the influential views of Thomas Chalmers. The 1843 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws led to its legal revision in 1845 into a system modelled on that of England. While it provided for a greater system of supervision, it still left the greatest weakness of the old Poor Law in place: the non‐provision of relief for the able‐bodied unemployed. Boyd Hilton has drawn attention to the way in which middle‐class hostility towards able‐bodied relief was an outcome of the alliance between Evangelicalism and the new economic theories of political economy. Moderate Evangelicalism with its emphasis on God's general providence believed that the economic laws were inviolable because they were divine. These laws governed society in a moral way, rewarding the virtuous—that is, the thrifty, the sexually monogamous, and the respectably restrained—while punishing the undeserving with unemployment and poverty. Consequently, these conditions became immoral and even sinful because they were associated with God's punishment of the wicked. To aid the unemployed and the able‐bodied poor was not only to flout God's law, it was also to encourage the (p.150) disreputable and could lead to the undermining of the moral basis of society.29 This was just one of the Christian responses to the new industrial society that have been highlighted in recent historical research. Generally the new research has shown that Christianity and the churches remained central to Victorian society throughout the nineteenth century, which has been a turnaround from earlier views which were encapsulated by Alan Gilbert's influential book of the 1970s.30 Gilbert maintained that religion for the urban working class became increasingly marginalized in the nineteenth century due to pervasive secularization throughout that level of society. By the 1840s working‐class religious practice had begun to wither because industrialization was basically inimical to religion. Gilbert argued that industry depended on human, not divine, control over the environment, and thereby fostered an attitude which increasingly left God out of human affairs. Urban life also contributed to a secularized outlook through its anonymity which facilitated the loosening of ties with the churches which could decreasingly rely on social sanction to support Page 9 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism their membership. This view, that religion was detrimentally affected by urban society, was influential in Christopher Smout's view of religion in nineteenth‐ century Scotland. He pointed to a falling‐off of faith in the second half of the century due to the erosion of old certainties about heaven and hell and the growth of working‐class indifference.31 The same secularization thesis was also prevalent in the work of significant twentieth‐century ecclesiastical historians.32 However, Callum Brown, Hugh McLeod, and others have challenged the secularization thesis. Over the past ten years these historians have shown that working‐class attendance at church and involvement in religion generally (p. 151) continued for the majority of Britons throughout the century.33 For Brown, it was in the twentieth century and with suburbanization rather than urbanization that religious decline set in as a long‐term trend. McLeod is more ready to see some signs of secularization towards the end of the nineteenth century resulting in growing alienation of the working class after 1870, though most of society, including the skilled working class, remained churchgoing. If nineteenth‐century Scots remained more connected to organized religion than was previously believed, then how was Christianity shaped by the new industrial and urban society of the period? Undoubtedly, there was a religious change to Christianity during the century. Jeffrey Cox's innovative insight into late nineteenth‐century London has coined the phrase ‘diffusive Christianity’ to describe genuine, but less institutionalized, connections with the churches or Christianity in the later nineteenth century by the working class.34 Included in this form of religion are attendances at rites of passage ceremonies such as baptisms and funerals, at services held by the working class to be significant like New Year's Eve, and the practice of individual piety like prayer and bible reading. Callum Brown has also focused attention not just on the continuation of Christian belief and practice among the working class in urban society, but more particularly on the ways in which middle‐class Evangelicalism permeated British culture during the nineteenth century. This was a consequence of the growing dominance of the middle class in society for whom Evangelicalism was a distinguishing feature. The vehicle for this religious predominance was the invention of the voluntary society, myriads of which sprang up as middle‐class Evangelicalism attempted to deal with virtually every conceivable issue. Through their organized good works, the middle classes tackled the new (p.152) society with agendas of individual piety and moral reform which were their remedy for social problems, because these were understood to be a consequence of an individual's spiritual failures.35 But voluntary organizations were not limited to Evangelicals. High Church Anglicans had already adopted this method as early as 1811 when they founded the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church to see off the threat in England from Nonconformist elementary education.
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Urban Episcopalianism The nineteenth century prompted other developments within the Christian churches. Prominent among them were the growing professionalization of the clergy with more specific theological and pastoral training and other indicators of their separate professional status, and the centralization and bureaucratization of ecclesiastical machinery. There was also the increasing partisan internal life of the churches divided between liberal and conservative forms such as Moderates and Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, Anglo‐ Catholics and Evangelicals in the Church of England, and Ultramontanists and Liberals in the Roman Catholic Church. In Hugh McLeod's most recent work he has managed in a comparative study of three metropolitan cities to identify certain characteristics of nineteenth‐century urban Christianity. Compared with its rural counterpart it was pluralistic, which facilitated it being the scene for religious conflict, and it was dominated by the middle class who were the controlling social element in nineteenth‐century cities.36 For Archibald Alison much of these social developments were still in the future for his congregation and his church. But by the first years of the new century he had obviously seen enough of urban Edinburgh to regard the new cities dubiously from his religious and clerical perspective. How representative of Episcopalian opinion was Alison? What was the social outlook of the Episcopal Church in the context of industrializing and urbanizing Scotland? How did it react to the changes in Scottish society? The remainder of this chapter will look first at broad attitudes to nineteenth‐century society within the Episcopal Church and then (p.153) examine its urban life in greater detail, particularly in the city of Glasgow in the first half of the century. While some supporting reference is made to Episcopalians in other Scottish cities, Glasgow remains the primary focus of this urban study. It underwent the largest scale of urban expansion of any Scottish city and, consequently, the characteristic urban problems for Christianity of unchurched masses, immigration, and social destitution and deprivation were found in Glasgow in greater proportions than elsewhere. The issues confronting urban Episcopalianism in Glasgow were, therefore, much the same as it faced in all Scottish cities. Glasgow was also a city in which the Episcopal Church began with little infrastructure prior to the rapid urbanization which began in the late eighteenth century, having just two congregations in the city at that time. More significantly for the purposes of this research, there has been the rare preservation of correspondence from two mission priests in Glasgow, one in private letters to his bishop, the other in public letters on urban mission in an Episcopalian journal. These sources give an unusual glimpse of the religion of the urban clergy and of their working‐class congregants. Such a primary source has not been discovered for other urban Episcopalian congregations, aside from the example of St Columba's in Edinburgh used in Chapter 5. It is hoped that other researchers may unearth similar sources for the Episcopal and other Scottish churches and consequently
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Urban Episcopalianism be able to test the findings about urban Christianity in the nineteenth century which are offered here. Episcopalian social attitudes, as represented by the clergy and the bishops, at the beginning of the century were marked by conservatism and caution. This was only to be expected in a church which had newly raised its head from its trench of illegality into the exposure of public life. In a sermon at a major event in the church's early nineteenth‐century life, the consecration of Daniel Sandford as bishop of Edinburgh in 1806, the Revd James Walker was at pains to stress the political innocuousness of Episcopalianism and its patriotism. Walker was a significant clergyman in his church: he later became dean of Edinburgh, the first professor of theology in his church, and ultimately bishop of Edinburgh and primus. Nor was the event an ordinary one. The (p.154) consecration of Sandford, an Englishman, was an attempt to unite the formerly nonjuring Episcopalians dominant in the north of the country with the qualified congregations mostly in the south. Walker was most anxious to dispel hostility towards his church by claiming that Episcopalian beliefs were no threat to the existing civil and church establishment and that, despite their recent Jacobite history, they were now exemplary British subjects. Episcopalians were ‘a body of Christians, however humble and obscure, whose faith and practice are neither inconsistent with the Gospel, nor injurious to the state’. He expressly eschewed any desire to make proselytes or provoke controversy, and maintained the necessity of religion for the good order of society. ‘We have been told, on high authority, that to be of no Church is dangerous; and what we have thus been told, is indeed true: it is dangerous to the individual, and hurtful to the community’. He elaborated on his thinking a little later, alluding to the difficult times Britain was then going through. In these disastrous times, in which dangerous novelties assail us on every hand, in which errors in politics, in science and religion, are propagated with assiduity, and produce endless doubts, animosities, jealousies, and divisions, we may be permitted earnestly to exhort and to entreat all those who acknowledge our humble authority, to stand firm in their profession . . . fixed and approved principles are of inestimable value in every age; but in the unhappy times in which the providence of God has been pleased to cast our lot, their value becomes palpably evident even to the careless and inattentive. It is too obvious that the want of such principles, and of the practice resulting from them, has been the main cause of all the desolation of which we have been the unhappy witnesses . . . by zealously performing the duties of our holy profession, and by sincerely reforming our conduct, each individual for himself, we may contribute to what is interesting to the best feelings of the human heart, to the safety of our country, and to the restoration of order to the distracted world.37 Page 12 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism Walker was claiming that religion, which revealed otherwise unknown divine moral truths, was necessary for the moral behaviour of the individual, and hence for the community or the state. Without the undergirding given to morality by religion (p. 155) people would have little inducement to think of others before themselves. Therefore, as Episcopalians were God‐fearing and religious people, their religion was a support not a threat to the British state. This agenda of social conformism and loyalism was sufficiently acceptable to his congregation of leading Episcopalians for the sermon to have been accorded the usual courtesy of publication.
The reward of heaven and, particularly, the deterrence of hell, were indispensable ingredients in individual and social morality, as Walker made more clear in another sermon just four years later. The recompense of a future reward is the great law of the gospel, by which the moral world was regulated from the fall to the giving of the law; by which good men were guided before the law, and under the law; and which is now fully revealed, ratified, and confirmed, to all mankind in the mission of the Son of God. The doctrine is not new. Though to us, under the gospel, more fully regulated, it is as old as the race of man. It has supplied motives of moral government, restraint, and consolation, to good men in every age.38 This was solid Anglican social thinking with a long history behind it. It was also what the Tory government wanted to hear for, at that time, it was repressively anxious for the maintenance of the political and social status quo. In 1806 Britain was in the middle of the long war against Revolutionary France and its Napoleonic successor which lasted from 1793 to 1815. During those two decades the British state clamped down on any signs of political or social dissent that possibly could be indicative of the importation of revolutionary threats to the ancien régime of Hanoverian Britain. In Scotland almost the entire ruling classes swung in behind this defence of their privilege and power. Political radicalism, encouraged by the French Revolution and the writings of Tom Paine which were widely read in Scotland, was harshly dealt with in a series of political show trials.39 Thomas Muir, the radical Edinburgh advocate and a leader in the first General Convention (p.156) of the Friends of the People in Scotland, was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation to Botany Bay in 1793. But Muir was exceptional and most of the middle class who had previously flirted with radicalism now shook the dust of such error from their feet as the Revolution became bloodier. Their place was taken by artisans, and particularly weavers, most of whom in the more radical Society of United Scotsmen followed their predecessors in transportation to New South Wales.40
The state was supported in this political reaction by the social views of clergy in the Church of England whose theology in this area was remarkably similar whatever their politics.41 This English clerical conservatism formed a piece with that of Walker and his fellow Episcopalian clergy. Like Walker, the English Anglican clergy also saw religion as necessary to society, lest it otherwise be plunged into immoral anarchy, a threat which they saw as coming true in Revolutionary France. The remedy for such sinful overturning of the God‐given social hierarchies was a more zealous and assiduous practice of religion.42 Page 13 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism According to Robert Hole there was an increasing emphasis on the importance of restraint in religious social theories in these decades, propounded particularly, but not exclusively, by clergy of the Church of England. This was especially evident in clerical social theory after 1793 when the French Revolution became more violent. Bishops such as George Pretyman‐Tomline of Lincoln in 1794 urged their clergy to emphasize subordination and restraint as Christian virtues.43 In 1789 the Dean of Canterbury, the High Church George Horne, asserted that ‘the law of God enjoins obedience to every government settled according to the constitution of the country in which it subsists’.44 Obedience became a much‐visited theme in religious perorations of every kind.45 There was a growing Anglican belief, led by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), that the French Revolution threatened all religion and that (p.157) this would undermine the very basis of society which rested for moral order upon the principles of revealed Christianity.46 For Burke, as for his Anglican followers, God placed persons in their station in society and, consequently, accepting that place and fulfilling its obligations was the only sure way to civic peace.47 It was believed, therefore, that those who practised Christianity would be more restrained, moral persons and therefore good obedient subjects, whereas the infidel's loyalty could not be relied upon. So Episcopalian clerical assertion that their religion made Episcopalians good deferential citizens is not surprising upon the basis of this Anglican social thinking. It did, however, require from the government a change of attitude from older suspicions about the seditious nature of Jacobite Episcopalianism. There were sound political reasons for the loyalist and submissive emphasis in Episcopalian social teaching. The recent granting of religious toleration in 1792 had only passed against influential opposition, particularly from Chancellor Edward Thurlow whose arguments about the necessity of royal authority for making bishops suggest suspicions about the new‐found Episcopalian loyalty to the House of Hanover.48 The qualified congregations were also not going to join the Episcopal Church unless they could be convinced of its loyalty to the existing British state. In 1793 the declaration of war by the Revolutionary government in France gave the church an opportunity to show its new loyalist sentiments. Various dioceses issued declarations of loyalty, and the one from the Diocese of Aberdeen was characteristic: The bishop and Scottish Episcopal Clergy of the Diocese of Aberdeen, duly sensible of the blessings which they enjoy under the mild and equitable Government of this country, think it their duty, at the present juncture, to testify in the most public manner their grateful and inviolable attachment to the King and Constitution of Great Britain; a king, whose care and happiness it has ever been to govern agreeably to the laws, and a constitution which has stood the test of ages, and is admirably calculated
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Urban Episcopalianism for securing to his Majesty's subjects all that is desirable of civil and religious liberty. (p.158)
Impressed with these sentiments, and considering it as an obligation arising from their professional character, as well as from the regard which they owe to the welfare of their country, the Bishop and Clergy above mentioned will make it their constant study to counteract the insidious operation of all seditious and inflammatory publications, tending to alienate the affections of the people from the Government by which they are so equally protected, and to make them unhappy and discontented with their situation. Justly alarmed at the dissemination of principles which have such a dangerous tendency, they will never cease to inculcate on those who attend their ministrations, the genuine doctrines of that pure and undefiled religion which teacheth men to . . . ‘honour & obey the King, and all that are in authority under him’.49 A theology of political submission and acceptance of the established order was still being taught by the Episcopal Church in the 1820s. In 1822 a catechism was republished which taught children ‘to honour and obey the king, and all that are put in authority under him, and to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters, and to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters’. It pronounced against any thoughts of challenging the social order. The commandment to love your neighbour was interpreted as forbidding ‘all actual disobedience, or unnatural disrespect to our parents, all sorts of rebellion against those who have a temporal authority over us, as well as all contempt or neglect of those who have a spiritual relation to us, and in general, every kind of haughty and seditious behaviour, that may disturb the peace, either of the church or state in which we live’.50 This was hardly compatible with the Episcopal Church's former rebellious Jacobitism. But now the acceptance of all established authorities, including the authority of the clergy who were to be accorded their rightful obedience, was on the basis that the way things were was due to the providential ordering of God which was not to be questioned. Children were taught ‘to be content with our lot in the world, whether it be rich or poor . . . and with humble trust in God's providence, to be always doing our duty in that state of life to which he shall be pleased to call us’.51 It was (p.159) a view of church and society that also placed a great deal of emphasis on the authority and God‐given prerogatives of the clergy as paternal teachers and leaders of their children, the laity. Bishop Patrick Torry of Dunkeld spelled this out in a charge to his clergy at the end of the 1820s. As he put it, the clergy were ‘instruments for putting in execution the counsels of eternal Wisdom—for preserving the knowledge of those truths which God hath revealed,—for administering, each in his own proper rank and place, those ordinances appointed for the benefit and comfort of man; and thus, like faithful and
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Urban Episcopalianism affectionate Fathers, watching over the interests, and providing for the wants of that portion of the family of Christ, to which we respectively belong’.52 The bishops were preoccupied with their own authority during the century and frequently demonstrated that they were unable to understand the new urban populations of their dioceses. Until 1837 they had been quite content to accept the incorporation of both Edinburgh and Glasgow into one massive southern diocese, under the Bishop of Edinburgh. While there were few established congregations in the southern half of Scotland at that time, large migrations from England, Wales, and Ireland had been occurring in that region for some decades. These populations included significant numbers of members of the United Church of England and Ireland who were thus nominally members of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. However, anxious about moves to involve the laity in church government, their own authority remained the most pressing concern for the episcopate during the first half of the nineteenth century. The bishops were doing their best to develop congregations within their own dioceses, but there was little sign from them as a group that they were prepared to offer some collective leadership on the new social issues of urban Scotland. Theirs was a defensive and inward viewpoint little calculated to encourage within the church an outward focus on the new urbanizing society around them. In the first decades they were predominantly an elderly group of men and change made them nervous. The repressive climate from the 1790s to the 1820s may also have discouraged any innovative religious response to the new urban masses. But this social conservatism also accorded with (p.160) the bishops' views. George Gleig, Bishop of Brechin between 1810 and 1837, was a contributor to the ultra‐ conservative Anti‐Jacobin Review. As the nineteenth century advanced economic and social conservatism was further encouraged by the prevalence of Malthusian political economy among the British clergy of most churches. Exceptions to this lack of vigour among the bishops such as John Skinner of Aberdeen and Daniel Sanderson of Edinburgh were too busy re‐establishing the public life of the existing church to give much thought to the needs of the wider urban society in Scotland. Later, when existing congregations had been secured, and union with the qualified congregations achieved, the bishops continued to be men of private means—a necessity given the scanty resources of their church —which was not a social background attuned to the urban masses of the burgeoning cities. Theirs remained a socially conservative, even timid, voice, throughout most of the century, and certainly during the first half of it. However, by the 1840s and 1850s some Episcopalians were beginning to believe that something more proactive was needed from their church; that mere social acquiescence and charity were insufficient in the changing society. In his history of the Episcopal Church published in 1845 Thomas Stephen complained about a lack of evangelism. He criticized the church for a ‘timidity which seems to have clung to the church like her evil genius; and men are now so liberal, that they will not proselytize the semi‐heathen, by whom they are surrounded, lest they Page 16 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism should give offence to the establishment’.53 By 1850 at least one cleric was echoing the same sentiments as Stephen about the ostrich‐like caution of the episcopal leadership. Alexander Lendrum was a young, active priest in Crieff, in the Diocese of St Andrew's, where he had a gingering influence on the aged Patrick Torry. In a sermon preached in 1850 in St John's, Greenock, he called for a missionary spirit in the church. He castigated his church for being ‘non‐ aggressive’ and for having done ‘nothing’, apart from the efforts of individual clergymen who only brought unpopularity on themselves from lukewarm members. Lendrum advocated giving up the present (p.161) congregational organization in large towns, asking ‘of what value are the labours of two or three Clergymen?’ In a huge city like Glasgow this meant that the few clergymen ‘pass to and fro, but, like men travelling in a wilderness, the traces of their footsteps are obliterated’. What Lendrum wanted was what he called ‘the Collegiate system’; that is, a residential college of priests, with equal numbers of deacons and schoolmasters, supported from a common fund and working the town in districts of equal size. Unless there was a radical reorganization, oriented towards evangelism, he feared the Episcopal Church would not make any impact upon the urbanized masses. From Lendrum's point of view, the root cause was Episcopalian caution about upsetting the authorities, or wealthy aristocratic adherents. ‘So long only as the Bishops are afraid to move hand or foot, for fear of offending a secular establishment, or clashing with the prejudices of some man of title or fortune, will things remain as they are, and the Church continue to be the scorn and reproach of her enemies.’54 Another sign of changing social attitudes came in 1851 from an anonymous reviewer of an article entitled ‘Christian Socialism, or the Question of Associated Labour’ in the Episcopalian organ the Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review. Here the Christian Socialists of F. D. Maurice's group of the late 1840s are commended for at least attempting to do something about the misery of the labouring poor compared with the inaction of the Church of England. However, the reviewer was also aware that the same criticism could be levelled at the Episcopal Church, which was too accepting of capitalist competition to the detriment of local labour. He pointed to Trinity College as an example, accusing it of ordering its books more cheaply from London rather than supporting Scottish firms and their artisans.55 So by the 1850s the Episcopal Church was coming under increased public criticism from some of its members for its lack of evangelism and its shrinking from the likely charge of proselytism. A ‘Lay Inquirer’ wrote to the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal in 1857 criticizing the bishops for their lack of vigour in this area. ‘But (p.162) many of us are under the impression . . . that some of our Bishops do not consider they are sent to minister to any except those already of our own communion, or to Brethren who visit us from England.’ It seemed to this writer that the mission of the Episcopal Church was to the rich because its churches in the large towns were filled with people who could afford to rent Page 17 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism pews, which system of finance excluded the poor. ‘The want of the poor in our churches is the strongest argument against our being Catholic’.56 The non‐ missionary character of the church was a criticism which offended another Episcopalian writer in the ultra‐Romanist organ the Union Review in 1866. The writer added, ‘So far from even attempting (like other Churches) to fulfil the commandment, “Make disciples of all nations”, our Church scarcely makes a disciple in our own nation. Immigration and fashion help a little to swell our numbers, and create a false appearance of work and success, but what has our Church done, what is it doing, for the masses? Except in Dundee, literally nothing!’57 That there was some substance to these criticisms about the bishops is evidenced in the retort of Bishop Eden of Moray and Ross in 1861 at the first annual general meeting of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles Fund in London. Addressing the meeting, Eden repudiated the idea that the Fund's object was proselytism. ‘We have quite enough to do for our own people . . . We are misunderstood if it is supposed . . . that because we maintain those distinctive principles, it is that we are desirous of disparaging others, and endeavouring to draw those who belong to the Established Church of Scotland into our own. I repudiate on my own part and that of my brethren any such notion.’58 Bishop Walter Trower of Glasgow was of the same cautious mind about missions some years earlier. Addressing the annual meeting of the Church Society in 1855 in favour of a resolution for financial aid for domestic missions he expressly discounted proselytism. For these bishops mission was only to their own and to any who might come to them rather than vica versa. Anything else was simply in bad taste or politically too risky. (p.163) It is not a resolution to proselytize; not but what we should rejoice whenever persons join our communion, and we would say to all ‘come and see’, and would hold up the light of truth to all persons who are strangers to the blessings we possess ourselves through the mercy of God; but it is not that this Society is a proselytizing Society; we would not intrude our opinions and ministrations on those who are satisfied with the systems under which they have been trained—but whenever persons come asking us for the bread of life, we will not turn away our ear from their cry for help.59 The more critical voices represented the growing force of the middle class in the Episcopal Church, an emerging influence that can be seen more visibly in the push for lay representation in the church's councils. This was ultimately secured in 1876 with the inauguration of the Representative Church Council comprising bishops, clergy, and laity of each diocese. Some rural congregations sent their local aristocrat, including Fochabers who nominated the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, and Alloa the Earl of Mar and Kellie. But the aristocracy and lairds were massively outnumbered by the middle‐class men from the more numerous urban Page 18 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism congregations: the lawyers, engineers, valuators, and merchants.60 It was these earnest middle‐class males who were making their views felt from the mid‐ Victorian years, and some were prepared to criticize their church for not being energetic enough about the urban masses. Yet while having some truth about it, the criticism of the Episcopal Church and its leadership as non‐evangelistic and self‐absorbed was too simplistic. First, urban social engagement also took other Scottish churches a considerable time to get around to. Professor Alex Cheyne points to a number of reasons for this. There was the religious fragmentation of the Scots due to the divisions within the Established Church leading to its split in the Disruption of 1843. This diverted the energies of the Free Church and the Church of Scotland for the rest of the 1840s. Then there was the capitulation of clergy to the theories of political economy and laissez‐faire capitalism which caused a failure to expound a distinctively Christian social critique. In addition, there was a trust (p.164) in voluntary effort and a dislike of state intervention in social reform, which owed so much to the views of Thomas Chalmers and a prevailing Tory viewpoint among the clergy. There were of course exceptional individuals such as the Chartist Patrick Brewster in the Church of Scotland; William Blaikie of the Free Church who advocated improved working‐class housing, temperance, and old‐ age pensions; and the fiery and conservative James Begg whose robust Calvinism nevertheless led him to push for such things as better housing, sanitation, and education.61 But these social reformers were often isolated within their own churches.62 Even these unusual clergy only began to raise their voices in the 1840s, and mostly in the second half of the century. There was the significant exception of Chalmers's earlier work to alleviate the urban poverty of Glasgow between 1815 and 1823. But this was stimulated by an older rural vision of Scotland as a godly commonwealth centred around the parish church.63 Chalmers was not responding innovatively to the new urban society by offering new social initiatives by the church, but was rather revivifying a pre‐industrial social vision for the new cities. More recently, Stewart Brown has directed attention to the revival of Chalmers's ideal of Scotland as a godly commonwealth through the inauguration of territorial missions in deprived urban areas. These sorts of urban missions were major institutional responses by the two largest Scottish churches, but only in the 1850s and 1860s by the Free Church, and in the 1870s and 1880s by the Church of Scotland.64 Secondly, the Episcopal Church was very new to public life in Scotland. Unlike these other churches the Episcopal Church only began to develop a secure public infrastructure at the start of the nineteenth century due to its previously proscribed legal status. It was virtually having to start from scratch as a social force. Admittedly, the Free Church also began completely afresh when (p.165) its members separated themselves from the Established Church in 1843.
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Urban Episcopalianism However, the much larger membership and consequently the financial resources of the Free Church dwarfed those of the Episcopal Church.65 Thirdly, within the constraints imposed on its meagre resources by its reduced circumstances, there were Episcopalian attempts to engage and evangelize the urban masses before the 1860s. It suited both Alexander Lendrum and the writer of the Union Review as polemicists to disparage these attempts. Lendrum, as a preacher, wanted to make a point about new forms of mission and therefore to detract from the success of older ones. The Union Review writer was a contributor to an ultra‐Roman Anglo‐Catholic organ, and therefore clearly felt that it was only the arrival of Anglo‐Catholics that brought new life to a moribund church. This was the reason the writer identified the work of the Tractarian Bishop Forbes in Dundee as the only example of urban mission in Scotland. But there was an involvement in urban mission by Episcopalians in the first half of the century and it was separate from the arrival of Tractarianism in Scotland. The rest of the chapter will largely be concerned with exploring this urban experience in Glasgow, the largest Scottish city. In December 1845 Bishop Michael Russell of Glasgow and Galloway wrote to a keen young Episcopalian layman, Alexander James Donald D'Orsey, a teacher at the high school in Glasgow, suggesting ordination.66 Conscious of the growing numbers of immigrant Episcopalians in the western suburbs of Glasgow, the bishop's intention was to stimulate a new congregation for ‘the wants of the poorer class there’. Evidently D'Orsey was already known to the bishop for he mentioned him as pleading ‘with your usual eloquence’ the cause of the Episcopalian Church Society, which would raise part of the £80 stipend. Russell envisaged that D'Orsey would work in this new congregation for a year or two until something more worthy of the young man's talents came up. (p.166) D'Orsey wrote stating that the proposal was attractive, not least because it was a congregation which would primarily be comprised of the ‘humbler classes’.67 He would continue in his present position at the city's high school and undertake the congregational duties part‐time. His present income made it preferable to refuse the stipend, suggesting that it should go to augment the livings of poorer clergy. As a new priest D'Orsey went on to create the congregation that eventually became St John's, Anderston, and to become embroiled with Russell's successor, Bishop Walter Trower, over ritualism. D'Orsey's work among the labouring poor of Anderston during the 1840s further undermines the traditional historiography of Scottish Episcopalianism which interprets it as largely a church of the upper social orders lacking in evangelistic zeal. This interpretation has proved remarkably persistent, even among some of the leading historians of nineteenth‐century Scottish religion. Alan MacLaren, writing of Episcopalianism in its heartland of Aberdeenshire, believed that by the 1850s it had retreated from any mission beyond its traditional adherents.68 Andrew Drummond and James Bulloch portrayed Scottish Episcopalianism as Page 20 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism having little allegiance among the working classes of nineteenth‐century Scotland, except for the traditional North‐East and regarded initiatives by clergy such as David Aitchison and Bishop Alexander Forbes as exceptionally rare.69 The problem with the prevailing interpretation of an inward‐looking upper‐class Episcopalianism is that the exceptions to it are growing more numerous. Callum Brown has acknowledged that there was a reversal of declining church membership in Scotland during the 1840s, largely connected with increasing church extension by competing denominations, particularly the Free and Established Churches.70 He also points to the Episcopal Church as having the greatest growth of all, in relation to its size. However, he believes this was (p. 167) greatest among the middle classes who were attracted to that church for aspects not available in Presbyterianism, presumably liturgical and aesthetic ones. He also dates the major Episcopalian expansion as occurring after 1877.71 When D'Orsey in Anderston is coupled with Aitchison at Bridgeton during the 1830s, Forbes in Dundee in the late 1840s,72 and John Alexander at St Columba's,73 Edinburgh, in the same period, not to mention the possibility of working‐class evangelism by some already‐established congregations, then it would appear that Episcopalian expansion among the lower social orders began to be a significant aspect of that church's revival as early as the 1830s. The establishment of the Anderston mission points to an early connection with liturgical ritualism distinct, however, from the more famous Anglo‐Catholic variety. The connection of slum ministries with Anglo‐Catholicism is well known in England.74 But, in D'Orsey's case, he had no personal connection with Tractarianism prior to his ordination and to the emergence of his moderate ritualism. His surname indicates a possible Huguenot extraction, but he himself was apparently of Scottish birth. He attended Glasgow University where, he informed Russell, he did not intend to be ordained and therefore felt he had inadequate theology.75 The bishop directed his reading to Gilbert Burnet on the Thirty‐Nine Articles,76 and Pearson on the Creed.77 He also provided him with one of his own sermons On The Historical Evidences for the Apostolical Institution of Episcopacy,78 and advised him to procure a copy of the canons of the Scottish Episcopal Church.79 A month later, responding to D'Orsey's continuing anxieties about his theological competence, Russell further (p.168) suggested he read Paley on evidences for Christianity;80 Hooker,81 Potter,82 Lloyd on the constitution of the Church; Brett,83 Bingham,84 and Wheatley85 on liturgy.86 Russell's recommendations meant that D'Orsey's reading moulded him into the same sort of High Churchman, as distinct from a Tractarian, as Russell himself was. D'Orsey's theological formation occurred in the context of reading the classics of High Church and nonjuring divinity. There is nothing in this list that would have drawn D'Orsey's attention away from the High Church tradition that had predominated in the Scottish Episcopal Church and, intermittently, the Church of England, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to that point.87 Consciously or otherwise, Russell excluded D'Orsey from any Page 21 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism contact with the English Tractarians such as John Keble or John Henry Newman whose Tracts for the Times had been making such an increasingly controversial splash in the Church of England since 1833. D'Orsey's theological formation was not from the Tractarian stable which initiated Anglo‐Catholic slum ministries which began in the late 1840s and 1850s. D'Orsey's was a slum ministry in Glasgow which grew entirely out of the classic High Church theology prevalent in Scottish Episcopalianism since its forced separation from the Church of Scotland in 1689. The consciousness of the need for such a mission was brought about by the changing nature of Glasgow itself, a change that particularly impacted on Anderston. Glasgow had undergone a transition from a merchant city whose economy depended largely on the import of tobacco, to the leading industrialized city in Britain by the mid‐nineteenth century. This had dramatically changed the urban landscape from the genteel streets of the eighteenth century to one that was regarded by experts such as (p.169) Edwin Chadwick as the most degraded, unhealthy, urban environment in Britain.88 Industrialized Glasgow was largely the consequence of the deepening of the river Clyde which allowed navigation to reach the city itself. The river had also attracted the building of factories, especially textile mills, whose steam power required large quantities of water. New industries needed a greatly expanded labour force and proved a magnet for the labouring classes. As a consequence Glasgow experienced a population growth unprecedented in Scotland. In 1801 the city had some 77,000 people; by 1841 this had risen to 274,000.89 In the 1820s this was a growth of some 40 per cent, and in the next decade just a little less at 35 per cent.90 No early Victorian city could have coped adequately with such a population explosion. In 1802 Anderston had been a large village on the periphery of Glasgow, having a population of about 4,000, mainly handloom weavers.91 By 1831 it had become an industrialized suburb, a burgh of the city, with a population of 11,600 and a growth rate faster than that of the city itself. A quarter of this population was Irish.92 There were many handloom weavers threatened with obsolescence, factory workers, and large numbers of casual labourers.93 Leading employers in the district soaking up this unskilled and semi‐skilled labour included Houldsworth's cotton mill, potteries, bottle, glass, and chemical works, foundry and engineering firms.94 Into Anderston came large numbers of Anglican Irish and English immigrants, and it was these whom Bishop Russell had become anxious about by 1845. ‘Nothing was more desirable’, according to the bishop, ‘than that we should bring within the fold of the Church, the thousands of Episcopalians in Glasgow who ought to belong to us.’95 At the appeal for a new church launched in London in 1849 it was made more explicit who these thousands of unchurched Episcopalians were. D'Orsey told the meeting that (p.170) in Anderston, Finniston, and the western suburbs there were some 12,000 living ‘irreligious lives, some not even nominal Christians . . . most of whom are either natives of Page 22 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism England and Ireland, or the children of English and Irish parents, and members of the Established Church in those countries’.96 Apparently some of these former Anglicans had petitioned the diocesan synod in May 1845 for a regular service.97 The answer the bishop came up with was to look to D'Orsey as the right person to initiate a new congregation, and he was subsequently ordained deacon in 1846,98 presumably by September when Russell talks of sending him a ‘Licence’ to read after the liturgy.99 Almost immediately, if he had not already acquired it, D'Orsey showed signs of a liturgical interest. In July 1846 he had seemingly asked the bishop about the lawfulness of wearing the surplice for Russell replied that it was ‘allowed among us in all ranks & orders of the clergy’.100 Russell did not seem at all perturbed by the request. He acknowledged its canonicity at a time when surplices were causing unrest in London parishes,101 and when the black Geneva gown was still customary usage in the Episcopal Church apart from advanced churches which had adopted the surplice for Matins and Evensong by the late 1820s.102 It was an early sign of D'Orsey's liturgical innovations which would cause increasing episcopal concern. Russell was already anxious about his new priest in December the next year when D'Orsey consulted the bishop about an invitation to ‘celebrate Vespers’ with the Revd James Gordon at St Andrews.103 The use of the non‐Anglican term for the service made Russell wary not just about exactly what ‘Vespers’ might involve, but also about the ‘Teachings’ advertised to precede it. ‘Evensong’, he believed, would have been sufficient to cause derision among the local Presbyterian or unchurched (p.171) population, but ‘Vespers’ had no sanction in ‘Protestant usage’. Russell commented caustically that though Gordon was a former pupil of himself and Bishop Terrot of Edinburgh ‘assuredly he got none of his nonsense from us, as we rather labour to keep down the spirit of High Churchism than to raise it, in the minds of our youth’. It would appear that Gordon had caught ‘High Churchism’, that is, the Tractarian bug, and was endeavouring to educate D'Orsey in the delights of such avant‐ garde religion. Gordon's Anglo‐Catholicism would later become more well known in Glasgow, as would his work for slum clearance in the neighbourhood of St Andrews in that city.104 Endeavouring to nip such dangerous views in the bud, the bishop was cautioning D'Orsey to stay within the orthodox bounds of restrained High Church religion. However, the following year D'Orsey's liturgical infection surfaced yet again, this time over a more thoroughly Episcopalian matter than any concocted Vespers service. Much to Russell's displeasure D'Orsey was showing an interest in using the Scottish Communion Office for the Eucharistic service at Anderston. Russell deplored the idea of its introduction into his diocese where it could become a source of division.
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Urban Episcopalianism As to the Scottish Communion Office I wish there were no such thing in existence. But it is recognized; and many of the northern clergy prefer it to the other. It ought to be a sufficient argument for peace that nobody is asked to use it in these parts. There is only one small chapel in Edinh. diocese; and only one small chapel in the Glasgow diocese where it is used —that is, in all Scotland southwards of the Forth. The Bishops are divided, according to their local stations; and we do not agree respecting the question of using or not using, further than to allow the northerns to do as they chuse [sic], & the Southerns to do as they chuse [sic], without any interference. Nobody in Glasgow is offended by the presence of the Scot. Com. Office and therefore every body in Glasgow ought to be quiet, & cultivate the charity which thinketh no evil.105 The issue may have surfaced in connection to baptisms, for it is in a letter replying to D'Orsey's uneasiness about requests for home (p.172) baptisms that Russell first mentions it.106 It may therefore have been requested by some parents, perhaps northern Episcopalians who immigrated into the area and were accustomed to the Scottish Office.
Meanwhile D'Orsey set about the task of establishing a viable congregation in Anderston, working in his spare time after teaching at the high school. Wherever he looked he saw opportunities, and when he broached the subject of the colliers at the Clyde iron‐works for possible evangelism the bishop had to remind him not to overtax himself.107 By November 1846 D'Orsey had a regular Sunday congregation and was planning a further Wednesday meeting. Regarding this additional meeting, the bishop, perhaps mindful of its mixed gender or the temptations of the local public house, insisted it meet somewhere which permitted the congregation to be ‘assembled decently & in order’.108 In 1849 supporters of D'Orsey launched in London an appeal for a church which gave the priest an opportunity to report his progress since 1846. At the London meeting he claimed that his congregation consisted ‘almost entirely of the humbler classes’.109 However, in a presentation designed to tap the pockets of the wealthy English, D'Orsey's information needs to be treated a little cautiously. One of Russell's early letters mentions that the potential adherents included some ‘very respectable persons’, and there were sufficient middle‐class members to take up pew rents and to make up the parish leadership. Both churchwardens in 1851, for example, were bankers.110 Yet despite such undoubted middle‐class leavening in these initial years the congregation did largely reflect the working‐class nature of Anderston. In connection with the appeal a circular was printed to attract potential donors which gives further opportunity for assessing the social make‐up of the congregation.111 According to this there were some ten or twelve families with an income over £200 a year (p.173) but ‘far more than one‐half of the congregation are strictly working people, many are almost paupers, and some actually so’. It was proposed that Anderston would have a church with accommodation for 600, plus a school.112 In Page 24 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism the year of the appeal D'Orsey claimed to have a congregation of 400 which he believed could be trebled but for the lack of church accommodation.113 Communicants for the previous three years were respectively 64, 120, and 154, with a monthly average of 42 and at the last Easter 108 attended, though how many of these were communicants is not stated which suggests it may have been a significantly smaller number. The respectable poor attended at all services through the provision of free seating. But there was a burgeoning demand of unsatisfied applications for rented seats which indicates that pressure from those able to afford the rental, presumably the middle classes, was increasing. Unfortunately for D'Orsey's hopes the predominantly working‐class congregation which met before the church was built did not long survive after it was erected. One visitor to St John's during the last years of D'Orsey's ministry found a large but middle‐class congregation. ‘On reaching the place we were directed by the door‐keeper to take our place in a crimson‐covered pew . . . among the respectable citizens of Glasgow. As a matter of course, we looked around us to gratify our eyes with the sight of “ragged people”, but before and behind us were silks or comfortable stuffs, or glossy coats.’ In 1849 D'Orsey was already feeling his failure to maintain a working‐class and poor congregation and was devising a new strategy. He now wanted to establish a service solely for the poor. The regular services had originally been attended mainly by the poor, but had been taken over by the middle class until ‘not one‐tenth could be fairly considered as the really poor’. Therefore he instituted an 8.00 a.m. service ‘for the poor exclusively’. On the first Sunday just three persons came; at the next, seven, and twenty‐two the following Sunday, followed by thirty‐one. These were ‘all in their common clothes, the men in fustian and mole‐skin, the women in coarse gowns and white caps, some without even these, and some bare‐foot’. After a handbill drop in the area, (p.174) using children of the Sunday school as deliverers, there were sixty people present the following Sunday and nearly one hundred the following week.114 There is no doubting D'Orsey's commitment and energy for a genuine working‐class church. But by 1871 an account of St John's reported that it was ‘largely and fashionably attended by West Enders’. But by that time D'Orsey had left Anderston due to his health having deteriorated and he eventually became professor of elocution at the University of London.115 Until 1848 D'Orsey had experienced the close personal support of Bishop Russell who had been a sort of ecclesiastical paterfamilias to a new priest ordained later in life and still feeling his way into clerical culture. He had been fortunate that in dealing with the new problems of Anderston he had had the advice of the moderate theological liberalism of Russell. Clearly, Russell was not phased by some of the slightly intemperate enthusiasms of his young protégé. This cordial eirenicism ceased when Russell died in April 1848116 and an Englishman, Walter Trower, was elected in his place. In December 1850 D'Orsey found himself the subject of complaints to his new bishop and he wrote vigorously to defend Page 25 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism himself against his local detractors. It is not clear what the petitioners were complaining of but it stung D'Orsey to retort that most of them were unsatisfactory members of the congregation. ‘I have sacrificed time, labour, domestic comfort, money, health, & almost life for these people—I say for these people, for all my efforts were directed to the poor—the few of the other classes that attend our Church having required but little of my ease . . . What have the petitioners done & suffered for the Church . . . Yet we had 153 Communicants last Easter, many of them receiving from 10/‐ to 30/‐ a week. Most of them, I am sure, have not contributed the price of a single nail to the building.’117 From the weekly income figures cited by D'Orsey, these were people earning annually between £48 and £65, so it would appear that his opponents were those in the skilled working‐class or lower middle‐class income bracket. This is made more likely by the fact of their having petitioned the (p.175) bishop, not a likely move for the labouring poor of the congregation many of whom may have been illiterate. In this defensive letter to Trower D'Orsey points to his unwearied exertions on behalf of the neighbourhood poor. But how true was his personal picture? Fortunately in the correspondence there exists a letter written in D'Orsey's support by a physician who had been surgeon to the Anderston Dispensary since 1847 and then parochial surgeon to the same part of the city.118 The letter had been sought by D'Orsey in his defence to the bishop and therefore comes from a supporter, who was also an Episcopalian. But it is unlikely that a professional man asked to give a testimonial to an authority in his own church would have seriously distorted the picture of D'Orsey's pastoral work when it could have been easily verified by the bishop from other local sources. The physician states that he had particularly made enquiries regarding the religious beliefs of those he visited and his conclusion was that pastoral visiting ‘was much neglected in Glasgow’. He had not been long in practice in the neighbourhood when he heard of the reputation of D'Orsey visiting not just his own congregation and lapsed Episcopalians, but also encountered him when visiting the sick. ‘During the Epidemics of Fever in 47 & 8 & of Cholera in 48–9—when ministers of other sects shrank from their duty I know that your attendance on the sick was instant & unreserved.’ Apparently D'Orsey's habit was to visit each night in the evenings until as late as 10 p.m., going from house to house to enquire for Episcopalians. Having made special enquiries the physician was confident enough to claim that he knew of ‘no clergyman in Glasgow who has so amply fulfilled his duties in this respect’. Alongside his commitment to widespread pastoral visiting D'Orsey was also prepared to challenge both his congregation's customs and the predilections of his bishop. As he had learned from Bishop Russell, it had long been Episcopalian custom to baptize privately in homes. However, D'Orsey conscientiously objected to this, and here he had Trower's support.119 Both were convinced that in so doing they were demanding people live up to (p.176) the rule of the church for Page 26 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism public baptism as expressed in the prayer book. However, in other liturgical matters the two were not so united. The first hint of trouble came in November 1849 when Trower objected to some of D'Orsey's acquisitions for the church, explicitly drawing attention to surplices for the boys, presumably in the choir.120 The introduction of a (surpliced) choir nevertheless went ahead but not without some congregational objections, which were addressed in a printed circular in May 1850.121 Evidently some saw a choir as a threat to congregational participation in the service for the circular justified the choir as a group to lead the rest and not to ‘perform the Service instead of the people’. Its role would be to lead the congregational chanting of antiphonal psalmody. This was obviously an attempt by D'Orsey to raise the standards of public worship for the circular expressed the hope that ‘the practice of whispering or muttering the responses, and remaining silent during the singing of God's praise, is really as objectionable as if the Minister were to omit large portions, or to read them in an inaudible voice’. But to Trower the choir was a presage of dreaded ritualism. ‘I have much doubt’, he told D'Orsey, ‘whether any great degree of choral service is suitable to the circumstances of this Church; and I think that our ritual and ceremonial should be as simple as is consistent with a decent reverence.’122 He wished to discourage any ritualistic goings‐on in his diocese and found D'Orsey further at fault for not having consulted him beforehand. Trower claimed that had he known what D'Orsey intended he would not have subscribed ‘for a Church for the poor in Anderston’.123 This was a bishop even more restricted in his liturgical tolerance than Russell had been. What lay behind Trower's anti‐ritualism was his personal contact with Tractarianism at Oxford University. A tutor at Oriel College between 1828 and 1830, he became friendly with Newman.124 Trower had even been one of those whose views Newman sought as to what was to be done as a consequence of (p. 177) John Keble's assize sermon, traditionally the initiating event for the Oxford Movement.125 In September 1834 Newman visited Trower at his home at Milland, where he was enchanted by the house, had lunch with him, and gave him a packet of Tracts.126 An intimation of their future disagreement came when Newman told Hurrell Froude on 2 September 1833 that he had received from Trower a ‘wretched letter—he calls me an ultra and you an enthusiast’.127 Trower had written the previous month that the established nature of the Church of England made it difficult to ‘fix the limit of the state's interference in Church Government . . . I will not for a moment conceal that I look upon you as very extreme in your opinions’.128 The assertion of such High and Dry Erastianism would not have pleased Newman at all and was precisely what he would controvert in Tract 1 published around the same time in September 1833. Though the correspondence and contact continued between the two, even up to 1837 when Newman breakfasted with the Trowers in Oxford, their previous association gradually developed into theological antagonism. Trower was a High Churchman, famously referred to by Newman as the inadequately zealous ‘Z's’. Page 27 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism By the time he became bishop of Glasgow and Galloway Trower was a doubly convinced High Churchman, in his opposition to detested Tractarianism and to moderate ritualism. Trower was sure that ritualism of any kind was a sign of the dangerously Rome‐ward extremism of the Tractarians and a source of division the church could ill afford. Trower's fears proved realistic when he was sent a petition by some members of St John's in 1850.129 They called the bishop's attention to ‘these alarming times of the encroachments of popery in the land’ and particularly to recent ‘sweeping innovations or rather “novelties” introduced into our Church Service’. These innovations caused division and led to some members leaving St John's, so the petitioners wanted a return to the status quo ante as they asserted the changes were both obsolete and popish. The (p.178) petitioners also desired a resident full‐time clergyman who would be paid by the congregation. In this way these objecting laity would have greater control over their priest than they currently exercised over D'Orsey, whose income from the high school did not depend on them. The petition was signed by sixty‐four signatures. There exists an analysis of these signatories, presumably by D'Orsey, which records that 145 had previously withdrawn their names. These had signed, believing the petition to be against popery, but when D'Orsey made them aware it was against himself they withdrew their support.130 How many of these were the lower‐class victims of the pressure of their priestly social superior, and how many genuine supporters of D'Orsey, it is now impossible to say. Of the sixty‐four remaining twenty‐one were not seat holders and six were not communicants. By thus redefining membership to marginalize those who were not at least seat holders and preferably communicants D'Orsey was able to represent, at least to himself, that the opposition was confined to a satisfactorily small number of dissidents. In a later letter he claimed that the majority of the petitioners were occasional attenders, coming regularly only when D'Orsey confronted them in his regular visiting or when he had sufficient funds to help them out. ‘It is notorious’, he told Trower, ‘that some of the poor are ready to attend any Church where money & clothes can be had in return, no matter what the Creed may be.’ Apparently, the congregation at this time still retained some lower‐class participation. Defending himself to the bishop D'Orsey also questioned the quality and knowledgeability of the petitioners' religious adherence. The truth is nine‐tenths of these people dont know what is in their Prayer‐ book, & the less they know, the more ready they are to find fault. A very few of them are passably educated for their station, but even they brand as ‘Popish’ that [which] does not perfectly coincide with their opinion & with the lax & irregular practices they have seen elsewhere. But most are totally incompetent to judge in such questions, in proof [of] which I may mention that at last Confirmation I had 88 candidates many of whom, grown up men & women, could not say the Lord's prayer & the Creed; & Page 28 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism after months of teaching only three fourths of them passed. (p.179) (I see some their names in the memorial). I have been repeatedly asked to perform the public services of the Church (marrying, Baptising, Burying, Churching) in private houses; & people have been offended & left the Church because I refused; & not for the reasons now dishonestly put forth. To one man I lent money which he has never repaid; but he soon afterwards left the Congregation, assigning his dislike to ‘Puseyism’ as his reason!131 D'Orsey's complaints about the poor state of his confirmees' religious knowledge may in fact have had more to do with the gap between his professional and clericalized standards and the more diffused religion of his confirmation candidates. While objecting to their lack of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, and passing only three‐ quarters of his class as ready for confirmation, he seems to have overlooked the fact that he had eighty‐eight adults who, apparently, persisted in trying to meet his expectations. When this persistence is coupled with lay demands for sacramental rites at home mentioned above, it would appear that D'Orsey was not encountering irreligion as he supposed from his professional viewpoint, but rather a different form of Christianity. This lower‐order religion may have placed more store on getting things done and less on doing them in the approved manner. At this popular level of religion it may have been genuinely important to make connections with the church at significant moments of life—birth, adolescence, marriage, death—but to make them as family concerns in which the home was the proper context for the rite, rather than the more impersonal church building. D'Orsey, regarding the fellowship of the church as the principal social bond, reversed this domestic priority and placed the church building at the centre of his ministrations. It was a gap in Victorian religion between the more amorphous but genuine religion of the masses and the more defined ecclesiastical culture of the clerics and the more advanced laity.
A similar breach of understanding and practice was beginning to open up between the priest and his bishop, focused now on intoning the liturgy rather than the earlier issue of the surplice. As well as believing this more elaborate ceremonial was inappropriate to the place of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, Trower (p.180) also held that it was an attempt ‘to give the character of cathedral services to simple, parochial or congregational worship’.132 By this Trower may have meant that such ceremonial produced an inappropriately exhibitionist worship for a church representing only a tiny fraction of the Scottish population. However, he recognized that D'Orsey had not done anything which deserved an official reprimand. D'Orsey attempted a general defence to this episcopal disapproval which revealed that his inspiration was High Church rather than Tractarian. He had done nothing which was ‘unauthorised by the best writers on ritual recommended to me, when preparing for ordination, by your Lordship's predecessor. I am as much opposed to those who would add to our Services by poor imitations of Romish rites, as I am to such who would strip our ritual of all those ceremonies which “do serve to a decent order & godly discipline” ’.133 In a cunning thrust at the bishop's constant theme of authority D'Orsey drew attention to his ordination promise in the twenty‐fifth canon Page 29 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism ‘strictly’ to observe the rubrics. He thereby foreshadowed the defence later characteristic of recalcitrant ritualist priests in the Church of England when faced with their bishop's disapproval.134 In any case, he maintained, prayers were intoned only at the evening service ‘to meet the views of many who desire it’. Those who did not so desire could find an intonation‐free zone at the morning services. Yet the intoned choral evening service was the best attended, both by rich and poor, and even from the other Episcopal churches, Trower's included.135 But Trower continued adamant in his opposition to intoning the prayers, particularly insisting that it ran contrary to the ecclesiastical culture of the poor, especially the Irish poor, for whom the church was built.136 Here Trower had a point, for anti‐popery was a prominent part of the ecclesiastical culture of both the Church of Ireland and the Church of England. It had been one of the major ways in which the Protestantism of these two official churches had influenced (p.181) English society and that of the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland. Anti‐popery in England and Scotland was also part of the popular culture due to the overwhelming success of Protestantism there compared with Ireland, though it had weakened at the start of the nineteenth century.137 In Glasgow, Anglican immigrants from England and Ulster brought with them this active cultural fear of the Pope and his foreign legions of idolators. It was a fear which, for the English anyway, had little to do with actual experience of Catholicism. In both England and Scotland Roman Catholic numbers prior to nineteenth‐century Irish immigration were tiny.138 But popular anti‐popery was stimulated back into robust life by the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics. In Anderston anti‐Catholic prejudice was probably exacerbated because it was one of the centres of Catholic settlement in Glasgow. By the early 1850s, for example, a branch of the Glasgow Protestant Laymen's Association dedicated to ‘opposing and exposing Romanism’ was established in the district.139 This active suspicion of popery in Irish and English Anglicanism was borne out in the particular congregational accusations that D'Orsey reported to the bishop in order to demonstrate their absurdity. He believed the opposition was a push by three laymen who had largely succeeded in getting the support they did by banging the anti‐popery drum. It engendered accusations which seem to have been general suspicions of the Episcopal Church by these new immigrants in addition to those against D'Orsey himself.140 The mistake of one clergyman in reading Queen Adelaide's name in the prayer book after her death was sufficient to result in an accusation of praying for the dead. The clergy were believed to worship the cross in the church, to worship saints, and bowing at the altar was taken to be idolatrously bowing to the sacred monogram, an ‘IHS’, on the altar cloth. D'Orsey was thought to give each communicant a cross or crucifix; the finials over the prayer desks were crosses in disguise; the font was a holy water basin; (p.182) D'Orsey taught baptism and salvation were the same thing; he insisted on private auricular confession; he feigned illness to go officiating at Page 30 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism Roman chapels; he was a friend of Father Ignatius;141 and the previous week he had read his public recantation of the Episcopal Church at St Andrew's Catholic church. D'Orsey had heard such things from his curates, or from parishioners whom he trusted, and some in letters to him containing charges of ‘Puseyism’, ‘Popery’, or ‘holding forms essential to salvation’.142 These expressions of anti‐popery were merely dismissed by D'Orsey as ignorant, but they do provide some insight into the piety of his congregation. They reveal that religion continued to be important to the members of a congregation with significant working‐class membership, sufficiently interesting to be a topic of conversation, gossip, and for individuals to publicly oppose their priest. While some comments demonstrate an unfamiliarity with the new forms and furniture introduced into St John's, others reveal a degree of religious knowledge sufficient to draw theological distinctions between baptism and salvation. Even the gross misrepresentations, such as idolatrously worshipping the altar, were expressed in religious language that derived from traditional Protestant anti‐ Catholic theology. This suggests that centuries of Protestantism in Scotland, England, and Ireland had indeed permeated the lowest social orders, if only with antagonistic aspects of its world‐view. However, it may be that hostile expressions of Protestantism may have reflected anxieties by Anderston Episcopalians about the economic or social consequences of Irish Catholic immigration into the area. But the willingness of some of his working‐class adherents to disagree with their priest over an issue obviously significant to their religious leader is important. D'Orsey had already drawn attention to the readiness of some in this class to take advantage of the poor relief resources he controlled. The fact that individuals at this economic level were willing to oppose the official holder of ecclesiastical and economic (p.183) power in the congregation suggests that their beliefs mattered to them. It was entirely possible that such disagreement could result in their own social, religious, or economic disadvantage or deprivation if the priest elected to become personally vindictive to these opponents. The same working‐class anti‐popery, combined with religious attachment, can be seen in a similar controversy in St Mary Magdalene's, Dundee in the 1860s. This was a congregation established primarily among Irish immigrants. William Humphrey, a young Aberdonian with Romish leanings, was appointed there by Bishop Forbes in 1867, but soon found himself at odds with his congregation over ritualism. The older members disliked the way in which he never preached against the errors and superstitions of Rome. One Sunday when Humphrey decorated the altar with a green frontal, his congregation were convinced he was demonstrating his Roman Catholic sympathies over the battle of the Boyne, the anniversary of which coincided with that particular Sunday. Eventually, estrangement was caused by Humphrey celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. It appears that none of the members were persuaded by his rationale that the ‘Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ was, in fact, a prayer Page 31 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism book feast (8 September, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary). One elderly churchwarden complained to the bishop, who was evidently exasperated by his priest's lack of moderation. He fobbed the old man off by retorting that the suspension of Humphrey could end up in the civil courts, in which case the churchwarden better have £500 to meet the legal expenses. Such high‐handed treatment left the old man with no course of action, because such a prospect was beyond his means.143 The propensity of both working‐class and middle‐class members at St John's to come and go from the parish according to their attitude to his innovations prompted D'Orsey to reflect on the need for the laity to be educated to acknowledge a more binding connection between the congregation and their priest. This raised for him the model of mission he was operating from. It was naturally one in which sacerdotal authority, characteristic of both (p.184) High Churchmen and Tractarians, was paramount. D'Orsey believed the laity should essentially be passively receptive towards his leadership, a view exacerbated by the fact that St John's had been largely built through his own initiatives and unpaid hard work. If then, the Church was built without their aid, & if we give our services without remuneration, what right have they to dictate or complain of any style of architecture or ritual that I may have deemed it my duty to adopt, so long as it does not violate the principles of our religion, or the practices of our Church? Had they built the Church, & engaged me as their Clergyman & had I then ‘introduced’ changes into a service already established, there might have been some ground for the present proceedings. But it is all the reverse. My late Bishop sent me to them, to collect the ‘scattered sheep’. It was not from them, but from him I derived my mission. It is for them to accept the donation or reject it, as they deem right, but surely not to murmur against the matter of the gift, the manner of the giving, or the motives of the giver.144 This hierarchical and paternalistic understanding of his slum ministry was also accompanied by an acknowledgment that much was expected from those to whom much had been given in the way of ecclesiastical authority. Not only did this result in his own exertions, but he also wanted the Episcopal Church seriously to attend to its mission among the labouring urban poor. His colleague at St Andrews, James Gordon, in 1859 wrote that D'Orsey wanted to see a mission chapel staffed in every street in the poorer areas, floating chapels on the Clyde, and services whose nature made the poor feel comfortable attending in their working clothes.145
D'Orsey's conflicts with his congregation were compounded by his ongoing differences with his bishop. In part the struggle between them boiled down to two issues. One concerned authority and the extent to which Trower could compel his priest's conformity against the cleric's insistence on rubrical exactness. Then there was a paternalistic issue over who best knew the needs and wishes of the poor, the priest or the bishop. The validity of each position is Page 32 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism difficult to determine because the extant (p.185) correspondence is almost completely that of Trower rather than D'Orsey. But it is noticeable that colouring Trower's opposition to liturgical change was a propensity to see in all such innovations the dark hand of a Tractarianism that he regarded as anti‐episcopal. He alluded to this suspicion when, at the start of 1851, he drew attention to D'Orsey's intransigence in persisting with his reforms. ‘I can assure you that this disposition which is shown by a powerful party in Scotland (from which you have been markedly different) to set at naught the counsel of those whom God has at this time called to the chief ministry in this Church, is such as to require from all its true members every support to its Bishops which can be afforded by a loyal & trustful spirit of deference & co‐operation.’146 Trower was pushing the characteristic Episcopalian exaltation of the divine origin of episcopal authority. To argue with the bishop was dangerously close to arguing with God, at least from a Scottish bishop's point of view! Meanwhile the whole disagreement had become more public through a review in the Scottish Magazine of Trower's ten‐page pamphlet written as a letter to ‘an Incumbent in Glasgow’.147 The reviewer regarded D'Orsey as a bastion of the ‘nationality’ of the Scottish Episcopal Church against those ‘who are leaving no stone unturned to Anglicize her’, clearly having in mind the English Trower.148 The ceremonies D'Orsey introduced into the new church would be regarded by ‘Churchmen’ as ‘improvements’. These consisted primarily of the evening service on Sunday having intoned prayers, plus chant for the canticles and psalms in place of the customary metrical psalmody. There was also chanting of psalms at all services, the chanting or intoning of the Ten Commandments, turning eastwards for the Creed, and omitting the usual collects before and after the sermon.149 The anonymous author disputed Trower's charge of alienating the poor through Romish ritual. ‘Conduct the services in a catholic and reverential manner, and no doubt at first they will be displeased, while some may even cease their attendance. Experience, however, has (p.186) proved, that the poor are quite capable of appreciating and profiting by services properly conducted, and that little more is necessary to overcome their prima facie prejudices than gentleness combined with perseverance, and a word or two of kindly remonstrance and explanation from any third party to whom they may be supposed to look up.’150 In other words, those who would not succumb to such pastoral blandishments properly supported by episcopal authority could be regarded as ingrate Dissenters and not true Churchmen at all. The author went on refute Trower's charge that D'Orsey's reforms gave the appearance of being ‘a badge of a party’ (i.e. Tractarianism) by claiming they were merely ‘rubrical exactness’. Therefore rather than D'Orsey it was Trower who was at fault in opposing his priest's intention to live up to the standards of the prayer book. Trower's position only provided ammunition for the ‘unthinking and semi‐ Dissenting portion of the laity’ who were overly keen on levelling charges of
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Urban Episcopalianism Romanism.151 Strict observance of the prayer book was the remedy for turning out congregations of real Churchmen, albeit they would be smaller ones.152 Trower's pamphlet, or the now public nature of the disagreement, or some other factor, made D'Orsey prepared to concede something to the bishop.153 However, the intended reconciliation fell by the wayside when D'Orsey announced in a printed letter to his congregation that he was resuming most of the discontinued ceremonies, which Trower regarded as direct disobedience.154 This led to episcopal threats of a formal trial before the diocesan synod. But the reason for this change of heart by D'Orsey was that he had been faced with a revolt by his churchwardens, who had threatened to resign if he submitted to the bishop. One of them, a Mr Dewar, a bank official, wrote to his fellow warden, James Chadwick, setting out their position as he saw it.155 He was very opposed to canvassing the congregation's view over the matter. As (p.187) far as he was concerned they were the congregation's representatives and as such had recommended to D'Orsey the discontinued services be resumed. They were necessary to raise the income to its former level. The proper course for any congregational opposition was to elect new wardens at the next annual general meeting. Any congregational vote would simply divide the congregation.156 The warden's decision was purely prompted by a need to reverse the slide in revenue. This suggests that the sung service was indeed popular, but among the monied middle classes financially able to maintain the congregation. In a contest for the loyalties of the priest over moderate ritualism, it is significant that the middle‐class lay male leaders of St John's were more influential than the bishop. Anderston was not the only initiative towards the working class by the Episcopal Church in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was preceded a decade earlier by the work of the Revd David Aitchison in the Calton and Bridgeton districts. Aitchison was an Englishmen licensed by Bishop James Walker in November 1835 who began his mission in Calton by buying an empty schoolhouse at his own expense for evening services.157 In evidence Aitchison gave to the Royal Commission on Religious Instruction in Scotland in 1837, the congregation was comprised of 1,300 persons, including children. These were overwhelmingly poor and working class, mostly handloom weavers and a few tradesmen. This occupation assisted Aitchison in his recruiting as he regularly found the weavers and their families at home when he called. Evidently, the Calton handloom weavers were still employed in domestic outwork rather than in factories. Most were Irish of the Church of Ireland but there were a few Highlanders. As in Anderston, it was the large numbers of these non‐Scottish Anglican immigrants which raised the consciousness of clergy about domestic mission. However, the mention of Episcopalian Highlanders in both districts indicates that traditional Episcopalian populations moving into the cities were not forgotten either. The working‐class nature of the congregation seems borne out by the occupations of those who signed a petition to the bishop (p.188) asking for financial assistance for their prospective chapel. Of the seventeen Page 34 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism male signatories, eight were weavers, there was a tailor, a shoemaker, and a potter; the others were labourers or gave no occupation. There was also a Sunday school attended by 100 girls and 166 boys. The congregation had been gathered by Aitchison entirely from his pastoral visiting in the area designed to discover immigrant Anglicans and native Episcopalians.158 Like Bridgeton, Calton was a major industrial area of Glasgow, dominated by populations of handloom weavers who were experiencing a steady erosion of their living standards.159 In 1800 there were 58,000 handloom weavers in Scotland, a population which rose to 84,500 by 1840 but thereafter petered out until in 1880 there were just 4,000.160 In Glasgow they were concentrated in centres like Calton, Mile End, and Camlachie, where they mainly worked on plain muslins.161 Not all were male; women and children also worked looms in order to increase declining incomes by greater production.162 But their income was falling permanently behind the cost of living so that by the 1830s handloom weavers were among the most destitute of the skilled working class, and just a step removed from the unskilled labouring poor. Calton weavers had a history of reaction against their impoverishment. In October 1800 they were one of the areas of Glasgow, like Anderston, which saw food riots.163 But their trade was subject to repeated cycles of boom and bust, due to an oversupply of labour, British competition, and the passing on to the weavers of any downturn in prices by the small capitalist manufacturers who comprised most of the industry.164 Despite this, handloom weaving continued to attract an expanding labour force, particularly among Irish immigrants.165 Domestic work meant traditional family life could persist and it did not have the unattractive discipline of the factory. It was a trade which required little initial (p.189) capital and was comparatively free to enter and easy to learn. So weavers were very reluctant to leave the trade and persisted despite living below the poverty line by 1840 when the rapid increase in power looms began to destroy their trade forever. In 1830 Calton weavers were spending 2s. on rent and fuel which was 35 per cent of the total family outlay of 5s. 8d., with food still to provide.166 In 1834 it was estimated that a weaving family needed a minimum weekly income of 7s. This equation often meant that the need to survive left many Calton families behind in their rent, which frequently resulted in forfeiture of goods by landlords.167 But it was not only rent that ate into a weaving family's declining income. Pawnbrokers became increasingly common in Glasgow from 1820 and were a common way to raise quick money. But that meant high interest charges to be met.168 Even the food they could afford was often adulterated and therefore less nutritious, if not dangerous to their health.169 Therefore, the declining earning power of weavers meant that in the frequent times of cyclical depression they were faced with destitution, many pawning even their bedding and their clothes to avoid the real prospect of starvation.
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Urban Episcopalianism Pauperization, which faced so many Calton weaving families in the nineteenth century, left them little recourse. Attention has already been drawn to the fact that the Scottish Poor Law did not recognize the category of the able‐bodied unemployed as necessitous. Weavers had traditionally undertaken various forms of self‐help to protect their livelihood, such as friendly and burial societies, and savings banks, the sort of response that the Victorian middle class admired as indicative of respectability and moral fibre.170 But membership had dwindled to nothing by the 1830s under the pressure of declining incomes. This left the destitute at the mercies of private charity, although this was not always welcome to the proud weavers with their history of being the labour aristocracy of industrial Britain. In 1816, for example, a soup kitchen established in Calton led to a riot which only the (p.190) military could stop.171 But being cast upon the middle‐class mercies of private charities was a situation that could be made more difficult if there was a history of intemperance in the family. Not only could drink eat up the meagre income of the family, it was increasingly regarded by charities, especially church ones, as a sign of moral turpitude. In addition, the Irish, who predominated among the weavers of Aitchison's congregation, were commonly regarded as steeped in drunkenness and idleness. By their mere ethnicity they were numbered among the undeserving poor, to be relieved only when faced with ultimate starvation. In the face of this prevalent middle‐class culture of antagonism towards the unemployed Aitchison seems to have had his priorities right as regards the income his congregation could raise. Door collections at the Sunday services raised an average of 5s. for poor relief. There were no seat rents and the congregational expenses were met entirely by Aitchison himself so that the collections could go completely to poor relief. Aitchison himself received no stipend.172 Evidently he was in a position to be so altruistic regarding money because he had private means, for he subscribed £300 personally towards the cost of his new church at Mile End.173 He was also able to live at Shawfield Cottage, near Rutherglen, a still rural village near Glasgow with a population in 1831 of just 4,700.174 In his history of the Scottish handloom weavers, Norman Murray argues that religious observance among the Scottish handloom weavers slumped markedly after 1815, and that by the 1830s many weavers in the west of Scotland ceased to attend church. Neither does he limit this disengagement from organized religion to just the native‐born Scots weavers, asserting ‘by the 1830s the only sector of the Scottish hand‐weaving workforce who still assiduously attended church services were the woollen weavers of the Borders’. The lack of church accommodation was, for Murray, only a minor contributor to this religious decline. The fundamental reason for the fall‐off was the eroding living standards of weavers. Falling real wages prevented the payment of (p.191) pew rents and brought a reluctance to use the allocated free seats in church as this would be a public demonstration of pauperism. Such public appearances required decent clothes which struggling or impoverished weaving families did not possess, Page 36 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism having pawned them for food. For Murray, the only significant exception to this evolving pattern of church absence by weavers in the 1830s was the Irish Roman Catholics because the shabbily dressed constituted among them the normal congregation, and their church provided them with a community in an alien culture and environment.175 But this pattern of increasing distance from organized religion among Protestants is not borne out by the evidence from the Protestant Irish weavers who comprised most of Aitchison's congregation. According to Aitchison he received a genuine welcome when he went about the district on his recruitment visiting. ‘I generally find them at home when I call, and glad to receive a visit from me, on which occasions religion is usually the subject of conversation’.176 Now this may have just been gilding the lily for commissioners whose interest was in working‐class religion. But the evidence from the attendance at his services bears out Aitchison's claim of a genuine interest in his organized religion among the weaving families he visited. There was an average attendance on Sundays of 400 who met for morning service at a hall in Main Street, Bridgeton, and a further 500 for the evening service at another hall in Claythorne Street. Aitchison implied that there would have been more but for the capacity of the halls he used. ‘When my labours commenced in July last, there might have been present on the first evening, and for many subsequent evening, not above 200 persons; and for the last six weeks there cannot be fewer than 400. The room is calculated to hold as seated, 300 adults; but it is crowded in every part, and with many children.’177 His belief that more would have come but for a lack of church accommodation was probably the reason he so quickly and strenuously sought to build a church at Mile End for his two congregations. In 1837 he had already raised a subscription fund (p.192) of some £1,230 to erect a church seating 1,000, the congregation contributing £35 of this. The new Christ Church, Calton, had its foundation stone laid with splendid civic ritual. There was a public procession led by the band of the ninth regiment, followed by the children of the Sunday school, the congregation, members of Masonic lodges,178 Sheriff Alison, and the clergy and members of St Andrew's Episcopalian chapel, the whole line kept in order by an escort of dragoons at the sides and rear. Aitchison shared the platform with Sheriff Alison who alluded to the growing civil acceptability of Episcopalians. Alison trusted ‘that the days of bigotry were gone, when the Episcopalians of Glasgow and of Scotland would have shrunk in dread of personal violence from the open display of a pageantry like the present’. When the church itself was opened, almost immediately it had to build galleries along the side aisles in order to expand its accommodation to a thousand persons.179 Twenty years later one of the members of the congregation was still able to assert that the church ‘is filled every Sunday, and at both services (except in stormy weather), with above six hundred civilians, and from three to four hundred military. There are also, in connection with this Church,
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Urban Episcopalianism day and evening schools, and Sunday schools, attended by more than four hundred pupils’.180 Aitchison himself later claimed his mission was not a success. In a letter to the editor of the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal in March 1859 he reflected on the Calton mission. He believed that fault lay in a lack of ‘systematic infrastructure’. A mission in such a locality, to be successful, ought to be undertaken by a well‐organized body, composed of one chief missionary with a requisite staff of clergy and laity, male and female . . . I am persuaded that some such society ought ever to constitute a part of the missionary enterprise. It is of invaluable benefit to the rich as well as to the poor. The former it not only teaches the duty of almsgiving; it moreover gives them some assurance that their alms will be judiciously as well as profitably bestowed. To the latter it gives relief quietly and unostentatiously; it softens their hearts, and removes that asperity of temper which pinching (p.193) poverty is apt to produce; it exhibits Christianity as in truth it is, a religion of love, and it smooths the way for the approach of the ministry of peace and reconciliation. A great deal of money is often wasted in promiscuous alms‐giving. The really poor, as was found to be the case of Bridgeton, are ever slow to reveal their distress; while the least deserving, the improvident and the dissipated, are the most clamorous applicants upon all occasions. It is not enough to build a church and school—not enough to shower tracts about, accompanied by some long, dry homily; these all will fail in doing essential good, without affectionate sympathy and seasonable temporal aid in the hour of need. Without charity in the highest sense, no missions will be successful. There may be orthodox preaching, there may be splendid ritualism, but if there be no charity as well as almsgiving, our labour will be in vain.181 Aitchison was concluding there were two crucial ingredients in urban working‐class mission. There was a need for sufficient economic and human resources to respond practically to the destitution in the city slums. But in his case, he said, he arrived in Calton without experience, without assistants and stipend, and with no surplus money for charity. But perhaps even more crucially Aitchison's talk of ‘charity in the highest sense’ points to what would nowadays be called an identification and solidarity with the urban poor. For Aitchison this was the essential ingredient without which almsgiving, or splendid ceremonial in church, would avail little. It was not enough to give economic assistance to the labouring poor, though this was important; it had to be done in such a way as not to detract from the dignity of the recipient. Certainly, Aitchison felt his church was seriously deficient in the first requirement because of its tiny size and resources. ‘The truth is, ours is not a missionary Church,—effectively so, I mean,—to chalk out work for a giant, and set a pygmy to labour upon it’. He had earlier, in a similar letter in 1857, spelled out just what the resource deficiencies of the Episcopal Church were which contributed to it exhibiting ‘too much reserve’ in communicating its faith to Scots. These included little knowledge of Gaelic, inadequate Page 38 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism finance, and a lack of experienced men as pastors let alone as a pool of evangelists. But in addition to these there was a persistent Episcopalian mentality (p.194) of disengagement. ‘Add to these hindrances the still lingering, yet gradually fading away tradition of other years, that the Episcopal (so‐called) Church of Scotland is a non‐ aggressive communion, a quiet, orderly, aristocratic society, very punctilious, and esteeming ministrations to non‐Episcopalians as a sort of breach of etiquette.’182 This mentality was, as noted above, criticized by others in the mid‐Victorian decades. It was an outlook more appropriate to the penal eighteenth century than the nineteenth. Its persistence suggests that older social attitudes lingered long into the new century and were consequently debilitating, or at least preventative, for engagement with the new urbanizing society. This new society demanded a new mentality to energize a will for mission mostly lacking in the ecclesiastical leadership of the Episcopal Church.
Aitchison appeared to be indicating that the Calton mission was not successful because of a lack of understanding with those he sought to evangelize. There are grounds for such a possibility. First, the new church at Mile End gave control not to the workers whom he sought as members, but to the middle class who gave most of the money and felt it was their due. Of the initial seven trustees who signed the feu contract three were merchants, one a wine merchant, a manufacturer, an accountant, and one probably a laird.183 The initial vestry, in all likelihood the same sort of middle‐class males, had a great deal of congregational power. It controlled not just the traditional areas of plant and fabric, but, together with the trustees nominated the incumbents when required, and also the curate and other congregational officers such as the organist and sexton with the agreement of the incumbent. Though these powers were themselves subject to the bishop's approval, they gave a great deal of control in the congregation to middle‐class men. While this may have been in keeping with the hierarchical social norms and financial muscle of the day, it can have done little to have engendered a sense of belonging and control to the working class Aitchison sought out so assiduously.184 The appearance of the military in the church suggests that (p.195) Aitchison's mission became increasingly dominated by the middle class, like the work of D'Orsey and for the same reason. The building of a ‘proper’ church attracted the more respectable and the middle class, which alienated the lower orders who had felt at home in the environment of a hall because there they constituted virtually the entire congregation. Both these Glasgow missions underwent a rapid transformation from working‐class assemblies meeting for worship in a hall to middle‐class congregations gathering in a church building. It indicates that the building of a church could be detrimental to the maintenance of a working‐class congregation. This may have had to do with the culture of respectability. Churchgoing was a central requirement of respectability for the middle class, no less for Episcopalian middle‐class families in Glasgow than for any other denomination. However, in Glasgow in the late 1830s there were only two other congregations with church buildings: St Mary's and St Andrew's. The building of other churches, albeit in the less salubrious part of the city, gave Page 39 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism middle‐class Episcopalians a new option to attend church respectably, that is, in a recognizable church building. Consequently, they were willing to pay for its construction and its maintenance. They could fill it with the sort of furniture that gave them more opportunities to be known as generous and respectable church members, and they could also lobby and pressure for the maintenance of the sort of religion they preferred. In Anderston, this meant the aesthetic pleasures of choral music for which they were prepared to oppose the bishop, but not mild ritualism, against which they were ready to oppose their priest. Choral music was respectable, ritualism was not. Church buildings were a part of respectable religion, meeting in halls was not. The transformation of these Glaswegian Episcopalian efforts from working‐class missions into respectable churches raises questions about Callum Brown's claim of the necessity of church extension for the maintenance of church attendance among the working class.185 It would appear that church building alone was not sufficient. If the culture of the congregation, and control of its affairs, fell to the middle class then the working class felt alienated and began to quickly dribble away. The construction of churches (p.196) too often represented not an advance in mission, as clergy often believed, but a regression in terms of the maintenance of working‐class attendance. In these mid‐Victorian decades Episcopalian workers and their families did desire to attend church, and did so when the possibility existed in their locality and when it did not require too much of their limited cash resources. But respectable middle‐class controlled churches were not comfortable places for the working class to be. They heard their activities and their outlook denigrated in the pulpit by middle‐class clergy, and they were disempowered in the congregation's affairs by the middle‐class control of vestries and parish offices. Episcopalian church building in Glasgow represented a clash of cultures which resulted in the defeat of working–class culture. The workers' only option was to fulfil the role expected of them by the middle‐class clergy and laity and be passive pew holders or to leave. They exercised what power remained to them and voted with their feet. This middle‐ class dominance and the identification of the churches with the social status quo was, according to McLeod, the crucial factor in the growing working‐class alienation from the churches by 1900.186 However, working‐class resentment towards middle‐class control in their religious affairs was already emerging as a factor as early as the late 1830s. Aitchison himself revealed this lack of empathy for the culture of his working‐ class congregants. If one of his few published sermons was in any sense typical of his congregational instruction then workers would not have been encouraged to feel their priest understood their ways. In this diatribe in 1839 he lambasted absenteeism from church. Drawing a far‐fetched analogy from Bishop Ambrose's public rebuke to the Emperor Theodosius in the fourth century he asked, would his congregation submit to ecclesiastical authority in the same way as the emperor? Would they not rather respond by saying, ‘If you will not admit us Page 40 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism here, we will go to another church? This answer has been given to me by ungodly people, whose children I have refused to baptize until they attended divine worship?’187 He then went on to point (p.197) out the exalted nature of the clergy's spiritual authority over the laity. When you, the people of the Lord, the brethren of my own faith, the sheep of my own pasture, fall into great and grievous sin; when you spend your money in strong drink, so that you will not even spare one penny in the week to procure a seat in church, though weekly you spend sixpence in a spirit‐cellar, what conclusion can we come to but this, that you will rather gratify your carnal lusts and appetites than worship the Lord your God.'188 If his hearers would not amend their ways, come to church, procure a seat, and renounce spending that was, in his eyes, dissonant with their Christian profession, then Aitchison would resign.
But if, nevertheless, they will close their eyes against the light, and shut their ears against the truth . . . so that they will not return unto the Lord . . . then I will wash my hands of them . . . because they have rejected the Gospel, and the statutes and ordinances of the Most High. I have made this threat publicly before; this is now the last time . . . unless they repent. Otherwise, this Church shall be shut up, and its services shall cease; for it never can nor shall be sold.189 This hardly suggests the sort of ‘charity in the highest sense [without which] no missions will be successful’. Indeed, in its singling out of church absenteeism, failure to take up seat rents, and drink the sermon appears to denigrate the male culture of the lower orders from the perspective of the respectability culture of the middle class. Aitchison, like D'Orsey, appeared to be laying down a very clerical and middle‐class standard of Christianity on a take‐it‐or‐leave‐it basis. Either these criteria of religious practice were adopted by his working‐class members or he will leave.
The same sort of clerical condemnation of working‐class culture and its mores can be found in a contemporary of D'Orsey and Aitchison. James Gordon at St Andrews in 1859 lamented in the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal that Irish and English Episcopalians wasted their money on tobacco, whisky, and ‘extravagant weddings’. According to Gordon, getting them to make any (p.198) financial contribution to the church was like pulling teeth. This outlook was even worse in Glasgow because the manufacturing towns attracted the most dissolute and also the worst of the Irish. Therefore, Episcopalians should not wonder at their lack of success among this population. It was the fault of the immoral masses who were uninterested in any Christian commitment. If this were not so then the response would have been very much better because there was never more done for them in Glasgow than at present with special services, conveniently placed churches, and diligent house‐to‐house visiting by clergy. ‘There are thousands of English employed at Dixon's iron‐works on the south side, who have been over and over again visited’, but this did not translate into church attendance. He cited an instance thirteen years ago when Bishop Russell agreed to license him Page 41 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism for a service at Pollockshaws. For months he walked the eight miles to officiate at his fourth service on a Sunday. ‘I crowded a room with labouring people; but the consequence was, that instead of bringing more people from this large village to St Andrew's, what I had, dropped off, and depended upon me for their convenience.’ Gordon expected his Pollockshaws' labourers to come to church at St Andrews, but they seemed to prefer to attend when he came to them providing a service more adjacent to their homes. While he came to their district they turned up for church; if he would not come, then neither would they go to him at St Andrews. The problem he believed came back to money and the working class's notorious disinterest in paying for the religious services. It was a requirement necessary for the church to sustain such services. Just like others, clergy also needed an income to live on. ‘A Mission was also opened for the Gaelic members of the Church in Glasgow; but let the Rev. Donald McKenzie, Duror, tell in your next what amount of stipend these devout Highlanders paid their shepherd.’ If the workers and the poor would not pay something, then the church inevitably had to have recourse to those who would, though not always successfully. He went on with acerbity to comment that wealthy west‐enders were just as parsimonious when it came to churches for others. ‘The farther east our churches are the shorter west are they from the alms‐deeds of our merchant princes, who, for an occasional relaxation in an (p.199) afternoon, turn their faces toward some of our churches in the east, and have the conscience to deposit in the alms‐basin, for the support of holy offices, one maik,—in English coinage the value of two farthings!’190 These three mission priests, D'Orsey, Aitchison, and Gordon, all had attitudes which indicated a clerical culture which measured religious practice in its own terms. This culture, for example, contributed to disputes over baptism. Like D'Orsey, Aitchison demanded a standard of church attendance as a prerequisite for baptism. But he rather overlooked the persistence with which workers' families came to him seeking baptism for their children. In 1836, the first full year of register entries during Aitchison's ministry, there were 96 baptisms; 63 of which were in weavers' families. Other occupations given in the register for that year were collier, shoemaker, dyer, porter, calico printer, dresser, nailer, glass maker, smith, tailor, engraver, printer, soldier, traveller, potter, moulder, and labourer. The following year there were 92 baptisms, including the children of 41 weavers. The next highest was 16 labourers and the rest are skilled workers' families. Additional occupations not already covered in the previous list were cardmaker, mason, cotton spinner, spoon maker, dealer, quarrier, tile maker, hedgeman, fireman, carter, warehouseman, and a broker. There were a very few from the lower middle class or petite bourgeoisie, but among these were the families of a policeman, a traveller, an excise officer, and a publican. In 1838 baptisms rose marginally to 101, including the offspring of 23 weavers, 6 spinners, and 8 labourers. New occupations listed included a carpenter, tenter, coffee roaster, nailer, plane maker, cabinetmaker, and twister; in addition to a Page 42 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism cotton waste dealer and, more substantially, a carpet manufacturer. In Aitchison's last year, 1839, there were just 33 baptisms. When his outburst in vindication of his position over baptisms and church attendance is recalled, it is perhaps not surprising there was such a dramatic fall‐off leading to his ultimate resignation in December. The next few years saw a further decline with 32 in 1840 and a nadir of only 14 in 1841. But from that point there was a marked increase in baptismal numbers. In 1842 there were 47, the following year the (p.200) number rose to 63, and in 1844 to 77. Baptisms climbed steeply from then on. In 1845 there were 195, and in 1846, 360; in 1847, there were 322, and in the next year, 332. In the last three years there were 93 weavers' families in 1846, 72 in 1847, and 75 in 1848. The next largest occupational group was still labourers with 39 in 1846, 48 in 1847, and 59 in 1848. In that final year other groups with over ten recorded baptisms were shoemakers, soldiers, and spinners. There were still very few middle‐class occupations represented, including a grocer, spirit dealer, policeman, coal merchant, excise officers, confectioner, clerk (just two), architect, undertaker, merchant (a vague term covering a multitude of possibilities), prison warder, shopkeeper, traveller, and a civil engineer. But the great majority of families came from the skilled working class. All the occupations listed in addition to those already given were: foreman, fireman, brushmaker, engineer, chainmaker, sailor, coachman, mason, bundler, turner, baker, plasterer, carter, boilermaker, mechanic, warper, miller, hatter, wright, pensioner, slatter, plumber, lastmaker, yarn driver, jobber, bricklayer, furnaceman, brickmaker, foundryman, jeweller, sharper, miner, cooper, rope spinner, stockingmaker, boltmaker, tenter, sawyer, iron moulder, block cutter, gas worker, brick burner, umbrella maker, cotton‐yarn dresser, sugar baker, and a groom. It is overwhelmingly a list of the skilled working class, showing some fine but understood distinctions (spinners and rope spinners; baker and sugar baker), with some in semi‐skilled employment (a jobber, warper, and a cotton‐ yarn dresser).191 Aitchison's last word on the subject of Episcopalian mission seems to have come in 1859, also as a letter to the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal. ‘Supposing one thus qualified can be found to open a mission in Glasgow, he will hardly succeed without a staff of clergy whose duties shall be pointed out by him, and who shall be entirely under his own control.’192 This was to repeat the idea of Alexander Lendrum of a college of priests under the command of one ecclesiastical superior. This sort of proposal was a commonplace among Anglo‐Catholics who often mooted a company of celibate priests for urban mission. But, for Aitchison, ordained (p.201) missioners were insufficient. Laymen, and particularly laywomen, were also requisite. Laymen could exercise responsibility for the finance and physical infrastructure of the mission. This would leave the clergy to their own unique and autonomous spiritual sphere. Aitchison was prepared to welcome, and even endorse, the ministry of women to assist clergy in more pastoral duties, including visiting and relief of the sick. He was confident that in Page 43 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism these areas they could do things men could not. This was also increasingly common among Anglo‐Catholics who used similar arguments as grounds for the acceptability of sisterhoods in the Anglican Church.193 Perhaps Aitchison, as a middle‐class man, felt less comfortable and effective in relating to women in the private sphere of the home in his pastoral visits? But he was not prepared to have his vision for urban mission sunk by flying Anglo‐Catholic colours. In his approach to women's ministry he explicitly disclaimed the need for vows and other trappings of the religious life of the sisterhoods. His reference to plain dress for women visitors may suggest a hankering after religious habits. But his reasons suggest an awareness of class‐ distinctions. Fine middle‐ or upper‐class dress could merely provoke hostility among the working class and the poor to the detriment of the evangelistic agenda. Aitchison was silent, however, about the similar effects of the middle‐ class dress of male visitors, including clergy like himself. Following the example of the Apostles, he should have besides a company of laymen to attend to the temporalities of the mission, and chiefly to take heed to the necessitous poor. Indiscriminate alms‐giving is most mischievous; and although many will be attracted towards a mission eleemosynary as well as spiritual, from improper motives, yet alms‐giving should ever accompany all efforts to reclaim the irreligious. There will be numbers of the poor, suffering, and deserving people, whose wants it is the bounden duty of the Christian Church to supply. For this purpose chosen members of the laity are requisite. Females, moreover, are of vast importance as beneficial auxiliaries in all missionary schemes, whether called deaconesses, sisters of mercy, or district visitors, the name is quite unimportant; it is sufficient that the (p.202) head of a mission have at his command a company of females not bound by vows, but for Christ's sake devoted to ministering to the poor and sick. There are many things to be done for the poor which females can do far better than men can. I hold, therefore, that female assistants are quite indispensable if good is really to be effected. Uniformity of dress is a matter of indifference, it has its conveniences and its inconveniences, but the dress of females so employed should by all means be as plain as possible. Female finery in the dwellings of the poor is positively injurious, it jars upon their feelings, and not infrequently creates a sentiment of jealousy instead of thankfulness.194 Aitchison's mission model, with its inclusion of poor relief, was clearly not limited to specifically religious areas of life. He himself became involved in public health in 1837, when he began serving as a member of the Bridgeton Board of Health founded that year to alleviate cholera. He evidently did so because of his experience of the living conditions of his congregation at Calton. ‘I have seen [families] raised from the sick bed, weak from disease, and impoverished by long confinement, and though unfit for the task, endeavouring Page 44 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism to find employment but in vain. I have seen the husband and father, obliged to strip a comfortable dwelling to buy food . . . I have even known individuals of a family, trying to support existence on a potato a day.’195 His personal experience among the destitute, and of serving on the Board, changed his attitude to poor relief. Though previously opposed to giving cash relief rather than food he came to believe that the small money disbursements of the Board were better suited to the feelings of the poor. The unemployed would not go to soup kitchens where their poverty was on public display. Money relief, on the other hand, bolstered the ‘independent spirit of the decent, hardworking people’ because it was private not public relief and therefore unknown to friends and neighbours. It also meant that the impoverished were prevented from slipping into complete destitution. The small amounts of money prevented them pawning their furniture and clothing ‘which, when we know the small amount of a weaver's wages, it is no easy matter to replace’.196 Interestingly, (p.203) the Bridgeton committee was, according to Aitchison, composed mostly of Dissenters and ‘shopkeepers and mechanics’, yet this cooperation with the laity was so satisfying to Aitchison that he later claimed to look back on this service with ‘infinite satisfaction’.197 It is perhaps a pity that he didn't remember the lessons of maintaining the dignity of the working class and poor members of his congregation when he acceded so much power to the middle class in Christ Church. Ironically, in the same year that he was demonstrating such understanding of working‐class culture on the Board of Health he was revealing his alienation from it in his sermon on absenteeism. A similar middle‐class clerical superiority was demonstrated in the visiting technique of James Nicolson, Dean of Brechin and incumbent of St Salvador's, Dundee. Nicolson generally remained standing when he visited the homes of his working‐class congregants, and his visits lasted only a few moments. He fired off a number of questions about their health, interlarded with questions about their church attendance, or lack of it. The result, according to his clerical memorialist in the Scottish Standard Bearer, ‘really did stir the family up to a renewed sense of the importance of their religious duties, at least in most cases’. However, it is questionable whether the results of such an guilt‐inducing and superior visitation, in which the priest declined even the minimal hospitality which would no doubt have been offered him by the family, would have been lasting in most cases. Such middle‐class class superiority from their clergy cannot have been demonstrative of much understanding to the working‐class families visited in this way.198 Genuine religion, according to Dean Nicolson, was to be measured primarily, or even solely, in terms of church attendance. Aitchison's mission constituted, in the 1830s, one‐third of the tiny Episcopal Church presence in Glasgow. When it is compared with the other Episcopalian congregations in Glasgow at the end of the 1830s the working‐class missions in Bridgeton and Calton were clearly minority initiatives in a middle‐class church. The oldest congregation in the city was St Mary's and dated from 1715. Page 45 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism According to the evidence of the minister, George Almond, to the (p.204) Religious Instruction Commissioners, only about a fifth of the congregation were poor or working class, though the managers did allow these persons to sit in unlet seats. There were no seats set aside solely for the poor, but the collections at the Eucharists were entirely devoted to poor relief. When pressed Almond suggested there might be about sixty poor persons attending. Nor were these among the poorest, but they were predominantly tradesmen.199 The only other congregation in Glasgow in 1837 was St Andrew's, which had been established as a qualified congregation in 1750, but which came into union with the Episcopal Church in 1806. In this case the amount of working‐class involvement was greater than St Mary's, being approximately 200 out of a congregation averaging about 600 in regular attendance. But these were not all strictly working class as they included petty shopkeepers among the weavers and dealers in old clothes. There were some free seats, but most of the seat rents began at 5s. a year, with the majority taken up at rates between 7s. and 15s. The poor would not therefore be able to afford St Andrews any more than they could St Mary's whose seat rents were similar in price. According to William Routledge, the minister, working‐class members did take up rents at 6s., 8s., and 10s. a year, but these rents are suggestive of the respectable skilled working class and petite bourgeoisie. Unlet sittings were able to be occupied free by those who could not afford rents, but those who did were ‘respectable persons’. That is, they were probably decently dressed and suitably grateful for their accommodation.200 The Glasgow missions of the 1830s and 1840s suggest some answers as to why the Episcopal Church failed to benefit from urban working‐class evangelism to the degree that other Scottish churches did. In D'Orsey, Aitchison, and other clergy there was an obvious enthusiasm and energy for the hard graft of urban mission to the labouring masses, but this was not translated into widespread Episcopalian adherents. Brown has suggested this was due to the catholic ethos of the church alienating the large numbers of Irish Anglican immigrants, or to its identification with (p.205) the culture of the landed classes alienating prospective working‐class members.201 But the ministries of Aitchison and D'Orsey, and that of Forbes in Dundee,202 indicate that the Irish were not as ‘almost uniformly neglected’ as Brown claims, though undoubtedly some found Scottish Episcopalianism uncongenial.203 Among the reasons for a failure to achieve greater evangelistic success may well have been the perennial lack of clergy, a long‐term consequence of the church's eighteenth‐century decline and impoverishment. This examination of urban Episcopalian mission indicates that the Episcopal Church had an inherent structural difficulty in responding to the rapidly changing urban society of the mid‐nineteenth century. While there were evangelistic clergy they did not always meet with understanding, flexibility, and support for their endeavours from the leadership; that is, the bishops. This distinct lack of unqualified support was serious for the Episcopal Church Page 46 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism because of the virtually unlimited power of the bishops. Consequently, episcopal caution about urban mission, not to say lack of sympathy, in the mid‐Victorian period, coupled with limited economic resources, had an exaggerated impact in constraining the evangelistic initiatives of a number of clergy. Ecclesiastical structures, and the theology of divine‐right episcopacy which upheld existing internal monopolies of power could, and did, work against the professed aims of the Episcopal Church. By the time that church had widened its formal power base to automatically include the clergy and the middle‐class laity in the 1870s, working‐class ecclesiastical alienation had already begun in Britain.204 Episcopalian urban evangelism was not merely a product of the infusion of Anglo‐Catholic extremism and vitality.205 The younger generation of traditional Episcopalian High Churchmen could also respond to a changing Scottish society with evangelistic zeal. This would correspond to the same generational shift of attitudes found in the contemporary Church of England with the likes of (p.206) William Farquhar Hook at Leeds. Neither, in this Glaswegian study, was Episcopalian moderate ritualism a result of Tractarianism but of a missionary initiative by High Churchmen. It was caused by their experience of the new social conditions, of encountering at first hand the religious and social deprivations of the labouring classes in industrializing Glasgow. The evangelistic initiative this prompted in Scottish High Churchmen indicates that this tradition was not as moribund as the Tractarians asserted in the 1830s. But in the case of Anderston this High Church zeal did cause a division among High Churchmen between the younger D'Orsey and the more restricted theology of older High Churchmen such as Walter Trower. When allied with an exalted and defensive position regarding episcopal authority, as it did in Trower, this older outlook was unnecessarily confining of Episcopalian expansion. Yet the older attitude was more realistic about the anti‐Catholic attitudes of much of the laity. The laity also were divided over ritualism. As well as its opponents High Church moderate ritualism also had its lay supporters, from both the middle and lower classes. However, lay support for ritualism was not always due to ritualist zeal. The churchwardens of Anderston, for example, accepted it merely because they acknowledged it drew worshippers to attend the church and this had consequent financial advantages. Moreover, ritualism as a means of invigorating the Episcopal Church did run up against traditional Protestant no‐popery, particularly vociferous from immigrant Anglicans from England and Ireland. While such anti‐popery was directed not against a Tractarian but, in D'Orsey, against a normal High Church Episcopalian, it still resulted in accusations of Puseyism and Romanism. This suggests that in the Episcopalian lay mind ritualism, not the theology it represented, was the focus of attention. Nice theological distinctions between High Church and Tractarian as identified by Peter Nockles simply passed most laity by;206 though they were of concern to the official religious caste, the clergy. It was the outward ceremonial of ritualism that the laity lined up for and against, not necessarily its underlying theology. Page 47 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism That lay religion also had its variations, but (p.207) not between doctrinal possibilities such as High Church and Tractarian. Lay religion among the Episcopalian working class varied as a faith practised somewhere on a scale between the home and the church. The conflict between D'Orsey and Aitchison and their congregations over baptism and church attendance suggests more work needs to be done to identify the characteristics of lay religion in Victorian Scotland. There are indications, however, that the clergy had difficulty recognizing as Christian the religion of the laity when it was disconnected from the church building. For the clergymen this was the correct place for the Christian community to focus its life. Laity who asked for their ministry and the liturgy of the prayer book, but in a domestic setting or without attending church, were judged to be dubiously or inadequately Episcopalian. But they may simply have been going about their religion differently. Finally, Episcopalian urban mission in Glasgow in the mid‐Victorian period points to there being not one Episcopalianism but a plurality of Episcopalianisms and that a significant reality is lost sight of when denominations are treated monochromatically by historians. In fact, in the case of Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a bishops' Episcopalianism, a clerical Episcopalianism, a middle‐class Episcopalianism, and a working‐class Episcopalianism. The Episcopalianism of the bishops during this period emphasized evangelistic caution in mission, loyalty to the state, and conformity in society. This meant bishops highlighted caution by their disavowal of proselytism to avoid the risk of offending the powerful Established Church. This would bring down the ire of those politicians who upheld the concept of the establishment of religion in England and possibly ruin hopes for the overturning of the restrictions on Episcopalian clergy imposed in the 1792 Relief Act. Social and political conformity were the means by which the stain of Episcopalianism Jacobitism could be overcome and benefits flow from a closer and more public relationship with the Church of England. But the predominant motif of the bishops' Episcopalianism was the maintenance of their authority as the governing power in their church. This, they believed, was entrusted to them by Christ's foundation of the episcopal order and by the history of the early church. (p.208) Therefore, their Episcopalianism tended to be theologically backward‐ looking. They kept their eyes on the model of the primitive church as the theological security for their pre‐eminence surviving from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. The Episcopalianism of the clergy shared with the bishops a hope for the overturning of their clerical disabilities in England and of strengthening ties with the Church of England, but it departed from it in other ways. Clerical culture wanted a share of ecclesiastical power with the bishops and desired their inclusion in diocesan synods, a breakthrough that was achieved in 1811. By the mid‐century the younger clergy working in the urban areas wanted an Episcopalianism that was more aggressive and less shackled by the timidity of Page 48 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism the past. For them Episcopalianism required mission not mere maintenance of the status quo. Theirs was an Episcopalianism which measured authenticity in Christianity in terms of ecclesiastical and institutional outcomes which made sense to them professionally. This translated into church attendance, regular giving, and communicants. For clerical Episcopalianism evangelistic success was focused around the church building as the centre of their work and their lives and the society of committed believers. Middle‐class Episcopalianism also predominated in the outlook of the bishops and clergy as it was the culture of the class they were recruited from. Both middle‐class clergy and laity had in common a belief in those behaviours that constituted Victorian respectability. It was as much a part of their evangelistic message to the working classes as was the Christian gospel. For them, Christian commitment was also to be measured by outcomes of respectable behaviour. Middle‐class Episcopalianism believed good Christians behaved just like the middle class. They were thrifty, temperate, churchgoing, and serious. However, clerical and lay middle‐class Episcopalianism differed in some important respects that could bring them into conflict at times. For the laity he (and it was mostly males) who paid the piper called the tune. This rubbed up against the clergy's belief in their superior spiritual authority in the congregation. There was an urban working‐class Episcopalianism that is not easy to tease out as there is little in the way of sources directly from (p.209) this section of the Episcopalian population. But the Anderston and Calton missions do point to a number of components of working‐class Episcopalian culture. Paying for religious services did not have a high priority. Not only did this come after providing rent, food, and clothing, but also, as far as men were concerned, after legitimate entertainment and relaxation such as that provided by the public house. Working‐class Episcopalians preferred to meet for worship in their own locality, even if this meant a hall rather than a true church building. Nor did they want such an ecclesiastical building if it meant a dominance of their religious lives by the middle‐class, though they were prepared to exempt the middle class clergy from this dislike. Urban working‐class Episcopalianism was also mostly a non‐Scottish affair, in that populations of English and Irish were the majority of urban Episcopalians. These wanted the sort of the Anglicanism they were used to at home, using the Book of Common Prayer with a minimum of liturgical fuss and lively preaching. They were impatient with native Scottish traditions centred around the Scottish Communion Office because such traditions were unfamiliar and consequently they felt no allegiance to them. Urban Episcopalian Highlanders did, but they also wanted the sort of good (Gaelic) preaching and inexpensive religion desired by other urban Episcopalians and they were prepared to migrate to the Church of Scotland in Glasgow to secure it.
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Urban Episcopalianism These diverse Episcopalian cultures came into close proximity in the new expanding cities of nineteenth‐century Scotland. When they did so they were often unwilling or unable to understand each other. Clergy, for example, needed an income to live on but working families were unwilling, or unable, to pay them. Workers' families needed baptism for their children but were confronted by clergy who were not prepared to provide it without a commitment to church attendance. Consequently, the shaping of urban Episcopalianism in nineteenth‐ century Scotland was largely a result not just of inadequate resources and previous history, but also of the interaction of Episcopalian cultural pluralism. Notes:
(1) Sermons (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co., 1825), 250–70. (2) T. M. Devine, Exploring the Scottish Past (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 116. (3) R. H. Campbell, Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2nd edn. 1985), 135. (4) R. J. Morris, ‘Urbanisation and Scotland’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 74. (5) The Making of Urban Scotland (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 9. (6) The Making of Urban Scotland, 152. (7) T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (London: Fontana Press, 1972), 233. (8) Devine, Exploring the Scottish Past, 116–28. (9) Ibid. 121. (10) Language about classes will be used in this study, although it has to be said the whole issue of analysing Scottish society in terms of stratified, increasingly self‐conscious classes is a contentious one in the literature on the subject. However, in using it I am aware that a threefold tier of classes is inadequate to grasp the nuances of a society which was only too well aware of the differences between an Edinburgh lawyer and a shopkeeper, though both supposedly middle class; and between an Irish labourer and a Glasgow weaver. There were in fact a number of distinct tiers within the broad‐sweep of a society of working, middle, and upper or landed classes. (11) Nicholas Morgan and Richard Trainor, ‘The Dominant Classes’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 121–2. Page 50 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism (12) Stana Nenadic, ‘The Rise of the Urban Middle Classes’, in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1760–1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 109–26. (13) Ibid. 121. (14) Eleanor Gordon, ‘Women's Spheres’, in Fraser and Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 1830–1914, 224. (15) Angels were traditionally regarded as sexually neuter in Christian belief and mythology, and Victorian religion and culture preferred it if women could be likewise. See e.g. the ethereal and rather sexless depiction of women in the works of the male Pre‐Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (16) Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and the American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). (17) Christopher A. Whatley, ‘The Experience of Work’, in Devine and Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1760–1830, 227–51. (18) Nenadic, ‘Rise of the Middle Classes’, 122. (19) Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80. (20) W. Knox, Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland 1800– Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 94–103. (21) Whatley, ‘Experience of Work, 239–40. (22) Gordon, ‘Women's Spheres', 207–18. (23) Whatley, Experience of Work’, 241–7. (24) Campbell, Scotland since 1707, 146. (25) Adams, Urban Scotland, 156. (26) Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working‐Class Housing 1780– 1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), 75. (27) Quoted ibid. 74–5. (28) Campbell, Scotland since 1707, 150. (29) Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, repr. 1991). Page 51 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism (30) Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976), 176–87. (31) A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950 (London: Collins, 1986), 192–3. (32) In addition to Gilbert these include E. R. Wickham's pioneering urban history of Sheffield, Church and People in an Industrial City (London: Lutterworth Press, 1957) and K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Class in Victorian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). Inglis, like Wickham, concluded there had been a long‐standing alienation of the working classes from organized religion for most, if not all, of the 19th cent. (33) Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1974); id., ‘New Perspectives on Victorian Working‐Class Religion: The Oral Evidence’, Oral History, 14 (1986), 31–49; Callum Brown, ‘Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?’, Urban History Yearbook (1988), 1–14; id., ‘Religion and Secularisation’, in A. Dickson and J. H. Treble (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1914–1990 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 48–79. Also Jeffrey Cox, English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). (34) English Churches in a Secular Society, 93–5, 276. (35) Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 101–10. (36) Piety and Poverty: Working‐Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996), 84. (37) The Condition and Duties of a Tolerated Church: A Sermon (Edinburgh: S. Cheyne, 1806). (38) The Motive and Recompence of Duty in the Christian Ministry, especially in Circumstances of Depression and Suffering: A Sermon (Edinburgh: S. Cheyne, 1810), 12. (39) For a similar repressive reaction in England see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), chs. 1–5. (40) Bruce Lenman, Integration and Enlightenment: Scotland 1746–1832 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 100–4. (41) Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 128.
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Urban Episcopalianism (42) R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783–1852 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), ch. 1. (43) Hole, Pulpits, 102. (44) Ibid. 108. (45) Ibid. 111. (46) Hole, Pulpits, 132, 137. (47) Ibid. 126. (48) George Grub, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861), iv. 101–9. (49) J. Skinner, Annals of Scottish Episcopacy, from the Year 1788 to the Year 1816 Inclusive (Edinburgh: A. Brown & Co., 1818), 263–4. (50) Ibid. 47. (51) Ibid. 49. (52) A Charge (Peterhead: A. Scott, 1829), 2–3. (53) The History of the Church of Scotland from the Reformation to the Present Time, (London: John Lendrum, 1845), iv. 541. (54) The Church of Scotland her own Best Advocate: A Sermon (Edinburgh: R. Lendrum & Co., 1850). (55) SMCR (Aug. 1851), 389–98. (56) ‘A Lay Inquirer’ to the editor, SEJ (15 Oct. 1857), 154. (57) P.C.J., ‘The Two Communions in Scotland’, Union Review, 4 (1866), 125–58 at 152. (58) Bp Robert Eden, Diocese Fund AGM, London House, 24 June 1861, Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC, EC 1/3, 16–17. (59) Report of the Scottish Episcopal Church Society, SEJ (Dec. 1855), 200–2. (60) ‘Representative Church Council’, SG (13 Oct. 1876), 180–3. (61) A. C. Cheyne, Transforming the Kirk: Victorian Scotland's Religious Revolution (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1983), ch. 5. (62) W. H. Marwick, ‘Social Heretics in the Scottish Church’, RSCHS 11 (1953), 227–39. Page 53 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism (63) Stewart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). (64) Id., ‘Thomas Chalmers and the Communal Ideal in Victorian Scotland’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1992), 49–80. (65) Over 450 ministers signed the Deed of Demission relinquishing their Church of Scotland perquisites, though not all stayed in the Free Church. Stewart J. Brown and Michael Fry, Scotland in the Age of the Disruption (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. viii. This was some 40% of the Church of Scotland total. Ibid. 21. The new Church also included 40% of the total membership of the Church of Scotland and over 400 of its schoolteachers. Brown, Thomas Chalmers, 334–6. (66) Bishop Russell to D'Orsey, 5 Dec. 1845, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 6. (67) D'Orsey to Russell, 8 Dec. 1845, ibid., fo. 8. (68) Religion and Social Class: The Disruption Years in Aberdeen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 38. (69) The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1975), 63. (70) ‘Religion, Class and Church Growth,’ in Fraser and Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914, 313. (71) ‘Religion, Class and Church Growth,’ in Fraser and Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914, 318. (72) Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). (73) Ibid. 118–19. For John Alexander and St Columba's see Ch. 5 below. (74) e.g. L. E. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder & the Ritualist Movement (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1982); John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo‐Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996.), ch. 8. (75) D'Orsey to Russell, 8 Dec. 1845, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 8. (76) Gilbert Burnett, Exposition of the XXIX Articles (1699). (77) John Pearson, Exposition of the Creed (1659).
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Urban Episcopalianism (78) M. Russell, The Historical Evidence for the Apostolical Institution of Episcopacy: A Sermon (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1830). (79) Russell to D'Orsey, 12 Dec. 1845, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 10. (80) William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). (81) Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 8 vols. (1593–1662). (82) John Potter, Discourse of Church Government (1707). (83) Thomas Brett, nonjuring divine, possibly his Dissertation on the Ancient Liturgies (1720); or his answers to Joseph Bingham's, History of Lay Baptism (1712). (84) Joseph Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae: Or the Antiquities of the Christian Church (1708–22). (85) Charles Wheatley, The Church of England Man's Companion, or a Rational Illustration . . . of the Book of Common Prayer (1710). (86) Russell to D'Orsey, 23 Jan. 1846, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 16. (87) Peter Nockles, ‘ “Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, JEH 47 (1996), 655–82. (88) T. M. Devine, ‘The Urban Crisis,’ in id. and Gordon Jackson (eds.), Glasgow: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 403, 404. (89) Ibid. 406. (90) Ibid. 410. (91) Derek Dow and Michael Ross, Glasgow's Gain: The Anderston Story (Carnforth: Parthenon, 1986), 22. (92) Ibid. 44. (93) Ibid. 67. (94) Ibid. 72. (95) Russell to unknown, 3 July 1846, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 28. (96) ‘Ecclesiastical Intelligence: St John's Church, Anderston, Diocese of Glasgow’, SMCR 2 (1850), 461. (97) Russell to D'Orsey, 12 Dec. 1845, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 10. (98) ‘Scottish Clergy List and Ecclesiastical Table’, SEJ (May 1851), 96. Page 55 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism (99) Russell to D'Orsey, 2 Sept. 1846, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 31. (100) Russell to D'Orsey, 30 July 1846, ibid., fo. 30. (101) Ellsworth, Charles Lowder, 8. (102) Peter Anson, Fashions in Church Furnishings 1840–1940 (London: Studio Vista, 1965), 104. (103) Russell to D'Orsey, 1 Dec. 1846, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 38. (104) Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1910–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 127–8. (105) Russell to D'Orsey, 2 Dec. 1847, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 54. (106) Russell to D'Orsey, 27 Sept. 1847, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 49. (107) Russell to D'Orsey, 2 Sept. 1846, dated 4 Sept. 1846 at end of letter, ibid., fo. 31. (108) Russell to D'Orsey, 16 Nov. 1846, ibid., fo. 36. (109) ‘Ecclesiastical Intelligence: St John's Church, Anderston, Diocese of Glasgow’, SMCR 2 (1850), 459. (110) Mr Dewar to D'Orsey, 20 Mar. 1851, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 194. (111) ‘Ecclesiastical Intelligence: St John's Church, Anderston, Diocese of Glasgow’, 462–3. (112) ‘Ecclesiastical Intelligence: St John's Church, Anderston, Diocese of Glasgow’, 461. (113) Ibid. 462. (114) Alexander D'Orsey to the editor, SMCR (May 1849), 250–2 (115) Anon., ‘St John's Church, Glasgow’, SSB (Mar. 1895), 62–3 (116) William Walker, Three Churchmen: Sketches and Reminiscences (Edinburgh: R. Grant & Son, 1893), 77. (117) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fos. 132–45. (118) Indecipherable to D'Orsey, 21 Jan. 1851, ibid., fo. 163. (119) Trower to D'Orsey, 20 June [1847], ibid., fo. 73. Page 56 of 61
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Urban Episcopalianism (120) Trower to D'Orsey, 9 Nov. [1849], NLS, MS 19325, fo. 92. (121) Printed notice to congregation, May 1850, ibid., fo. 114. (122) Trower to D'Orsey, 8 M[oray] Place, 14 Dec. [1849], ibid., fo. 101. (123) Trower to D'Orsey, n. d. [?1850], ibid., fo. 146. (124) The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), ii. 63, 84, 236, 244; iii. 25. (125) The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, iv (1980), 14. (126) Ibid. 333. (127) Ibid. 39. (128) Ibid. n. 3. (129) Petition, St John's, Anderston, congregational members to Trower, n.d. [? 1850], D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 128. (130) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], NLS, MS 19325, fo. 145. (131) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], ibid., fo. 145. (132) Trower to D'Orsey, ‘S. Thomas Night’ [21 Dec. 1850], NLS, MS 19325, fo. 130. (133) D'Orsey to Tower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], ibid., fos. 132–45. (134) Bernard Palmer, Reverend Rebels: Five Victorian Clerics and their Fight against Authority (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993), ch. 1. (135) D'Orsey to Tower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fos. 132–45. (136) Trower to D'Orsey, 9 Jan. [1850], ibid., fos. 151–4. (137) John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 10–16. (138) Ibid. 17, quoting from John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570– 1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd), 1975. (139) Dow and Ross, Glasgow's Gain, 61. (140) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fos. 132–45.
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Urban Episcopalianism (141) ‘Father Ignatius’ was the Revd Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837–1908), an eccentric Anglican deacon intent on re‐establishing the Benedictine order in the Church of England. He dressed in an odd Benedictine habit, and attempted to found a monastery in Wales. However, he also had a powerful evangelistic ability that led to a number of successful missions in England, ironically using secular buildings. (142) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fos. 132–45. (143) W. Humphreys, Recollections of Scottish Episcopalianism (London: Thomas Baker, 1896), 36–7. (144) D'Orsey to Trower, 27 Dec. 1850 [copy], D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fos. 132–45. (145) SEJ (Jan. 1859), 8. (146) Trower to D'Orsey, 15 Jan. 1851, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 160. (147) Anon., [Review of Bishop Trower's] ‘Letter to an Incumbent in Glasgow’, SMCR 1 NS (1851), 62–8, 111–21. (148) Ibid. 63. (149) Ibid. 65. (150) Anon., [Review of Bishop Trower's] ‘Letter to an Incumbent in Glasgow’, SMCR 1 NS (1851), 66. (151) Ibid. 68. (152) Ibid. 112–15. (153) Trower to D'Orsey, 14 Feb. 1851, D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325, fo. 168. (154) Trower to D'Orsey, 17 Feb. 1851, ibid., fo. 174. (155) Ibid., fos. 174–7. (156) Mr Dewar to James Chadwick, Western Bank of Scotland, 17 Feb. 1851, ibid., fo. 182. (157) Anon, ‘Christ Church, Glasgow, seventy years ago’, SSB (Sept. 1906), 192– 4. (158) Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8) 104–7, 314–15.
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Urban Episcopalianism (159) Norman Murray, The Scottish Handloom Weavers 1790–1850: A Social History (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978), 13. (160) Ibid. 21, 23. (161) Ibid. 26. (162) Ibid. 28. (163) Ibid. 50. (164) Ibid. 32, 33, 67. (165) Ibid. 62. (166) Norman Murray, The Scottish Handloom Weavers 1790–1850: A Social History, 99. (167) Ibid. 109. (168) Ibid. 111–12. (169) Ibid. 113. (170) Ibid. 141. (171) Norman Murray, The Scottish Handloom Weavers 1790–1850: A Social History, 135. (172) Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 314. (173) Anon., ‘Christ Church, Glasgow, seventy years ago’, SSB (Sept. 1906), 192– 4. (174) Christ Church Minute Book, GCA, TD 1378. 2. 1, fo. 187. (175) Murray, Scottish Handloom Weavers, 166–7. (176) Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 314. (177) Ibid. (178) Aitchison was Deputy Grand Chaplain of the Masons. (179) Anon., ‘Christ Church, Glasgow, seventy years ago’, 192–4. (180) ‘Simonides’ to the editor, SEJ (20 Jan. 1859), 7.
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Urban Episcopalianism (181) Aitchison to the editor, SEJ (Mar. 1859), 42–3. (182) Aitchison to the editor, SEJ (Nov. 1857), 173. (183) Christ Church Minute Book, GCA, TD 1378. 1. 1. (184) Ibid., 6 Oct. 1834. (185) ‘Religion, Class and Church Growth’, 313. (186) Piety and Poverty, 103. (187) A Vindication of the Office of Ambassadors of Christ: Addressed to the Protestant Episcopalians Scattered through the Eastern District of Glasgow and its Suburbs (Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1839), 15. (188) A Vindication of the Office of Ambassadors of Christ: Addressed to the Protestant Episcopalians Scattered through the Eastern District of Glasgow and its Suburbs, 16. (189) Ibid. 17. (190) J. F. S. Gordon to the editor, SEJ (20 Jan. 1859), 7–8. (191) Christ Church baptismal registers 1836–1848, GCA, TD 1378. 2. 8. (192) Aitchison to the editor, SEJ (Feb. 1859), 28. (193) Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 48–57. (194) Aitchison to the editor, SEJ (Feb. 1859), 28. (195) David Aitchison, A Charity Sermon preached at Christ Church, Glasgow (Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1838), 11. (196) Ibid. 19–20. (197) Aitchison to the editor, SEJ (Mar. 1859), 42–3. (198) Provost Ball, ‘Personal Recollections of Two Scottish Deans’, SSB (Nov. 1899), 234. (199) Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 451–3. (200) Ibid. 84–7, 254–6. (201) Brown, Religion and Society, 35–6.
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Urban Episcopalianism (202) Strong, Alexander Forbes, 69. (203) Brown, Religion and Society, 35; Strong, Alexander Forbes, 86. (204) McLeod, Piety and Poverty, 177. (205) William Perry, The Oxford Movement in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 84–6. (206) The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760– 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 6.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0005
Abstract and Keywords Looks at the impact on Scottish Episcopalian of two major reforming movements in nineteenth‐century Anglicanism, namely, Evangelicalism and Anglo‐ Catholicism. It particularly seeks to recover the influence and impetus of Evangelicalism among Scottish Episcopalians. It finds this largely within separate congregations alienated by the increasing Anglo‐Catholic culture in that Church, and also by the indigenous traditions of High Church Episcopalianism. Both Anglo‐Catholicism and Evangelicalism were largely divisive and anglicizing movements within the Episcopal Church, which contributed to its nineteenth‐century reputation as the ‘English Kirk’. Keywords: anglicization, Anglo‐Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Scottish Episcopal Church
For our own part, we have been painfully forced to the conviction, that the Scotch Episcopal Church is moving down an inclined plane, and shortly will be in a position to fit it for union with Rome.2 I felt it a duty bound upon my soul by Christ and his Church to tell those who SOUGHT my advice, that ‘If St Jude's were separated from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Glasgow, and presided over in this rent and riven state by an unauthorized English presbyter, the Church would be schismatical, and all connected with it Schismatics’.3
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 So wrote two of the many protagonists in the myriad of words and pamphlets that Episcopalians poured out over the emergence of independent Episcopalian Evangelical chapels and over the development of Anglo‐Catholic ritualism, from the 1840s onwards. The author of the first comment, John Hull, was minister of the English Episcopal chapel of Huntly, which was one of the independent chapels that the author of the second, Robert Montgomery, was so excoriating at St Jude's in Glasgow. One group of Episcopalians shouted ‘papists’ at the other group, who hurled back the epithet ‘schismatics’. The divisiveness of both groups intensified during the century, building on previous traditions and developments within Scottish Episcopalianism, and (p.211) exciting their advocates to great works on behalf of their chosen brand of Episcopacy. This was a partisan and divided Episcopalianism that further prevented the Episcopal Church becoming a major player in the social and religious life of nineteenth‐ century Scotland. It was also a manifestation of the increasing pluralism of Episcopalian culture as the ecclesiastical movements of nineteenth‐century Anglicanism divided the church. Internal divisions were nothing new to the Episcopal Church which was fractious throughout the eighteenth century. So the two major ecclesiastical movements of the nineteenth century—Evangelicalism and Anglo‐Catholicism—came into a Scottish Episcopalian culture that had already experienced internal stresses. Evangelicalism had a well‐established existence in Scotland by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Evangelical, or Popular, Party within the Church of Scotland owed its life to the Evangelical Revival of the mid‐eighteenth century. By the turn of the century it was well on the way to the accession of numbers in the General Assembly which would bring it to dominance over the old Enlightenment Moderates by the 1830s. Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, while differing in emphases, were devoted to the eradication of patronage in appointments to livings; to a practical theology which sought to apply godly Christianity to individual conversion and social reform; and they had developed a social and political conservatism in reaction to the French Revolution. Although members and groups within the party could differ quite markedly over significant religious and secular issues they had a common agreement about the unique and paramount authority of Scripture as divine revelation. This, it was agreed, was the basic starting point for all matters.4 This biblicism of Scottish Evangelicalism was a central influence which permeated Victorian culture. One of the leading historians of British Evangelicalism, David Bebbington, has analysed Evangelicalism's other features as ‘conversionism’, or the goal of personal conversions so that there was a clear dividing line in society between the converted and the unconverted. Such conversion was regarded as the sole hallmark of the authentic Christian. Evangelical (p.212) ‘activism’ reflected the high level of activity of ministers and laity in working for such conversions in congregations and in the multiplicity of their voluntary societies, and in striving for the godly transformation of British society. Finally, there was the centrality of Page 2 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 the doctrine of the atonement for Evangelicals, what Bebbington has called ‘crucicentrism’. This was the motivation for their activism as Evangelicals responded with gratitude for their gracious salvation by God in Christ by labouring to bring others to that salvation also. However, Evangelicals were divided over just who it was that Christ saved—only the elect, or all humanity.5 The first indication of Evangelicalism within the Episcopal Church was the visit to Edinburgh around 1820 of a leading English Evangelical minister in the Church of England, Gerard Noel. It had a greater impact within the church when, in 1826, Noel's disciple, Edward Craig, challenged the doctrine of baptismal regeneration.6 Craig, an English clergyman, was minister of St James's, Broughton Place, in Edinburgh, and his short pamphlet war with the Episcopalian professor of theology, James Walker, served to rally the clergy in Walker's defence.7 Concern over this attack on what was universally regarded as the doctrine of the church prompted the calling of an Episcopal Synod in 1826. But in the event the bishops did nothing because they were afraid to impose on Craig a discipline he was most likely to reject or ignore. The bishops limited themselves to commending a declaration by over thirty clergy criticizing Craig and upholding Walker for his defence of ‘true doctrine’.8 Craig had previously been embroiled in controversy with Bishop Gleig of Brechin over the same doctrine. In 1820 he had taken issue with a charge of Gleig's to his diocesan clergy in which the bishop challenged the doctrine of a limited atonement as ‘horrible’ and (p.213) upheld the salvation of all the baptized as being regenerate. Craig presumed that when Gleig made anonymous reference to Evangelicals who changed the words of administration of the Eucharist to conform with a doctrine of partial atonement Gleig was referring to Craig's own practice. It stirred Craig into a correspondence with the bishop which he eventually published.9 In it Gleig expressed the common dislike of the bishops towards Evangelical emphasis on the particularity of the atonement. He asserted that ‘there are doctrines now for the first time disseminated in the Scotch Episcopal Church, which, if generally received, will quickly overturn all churches, those of the Congregationalist Independents excepted; and those strange doctrines I am very desirous, as I am duty bound, to drive away from us’.10 The uniform backing that Gleig had from the clergy during the 1820s over the High Church doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and against a limited atonement, demonstrates how marginal Evangelicalism was in Scottish Episcopalianism at the time. But the emergence of Evangelicalism within Episcopalianism in the 1820s raises two questions. Why was it so very late in appearing within Episcopalianism compared with other British Protestant churches which had been experiencing the effects of the Evangelical Revival since the mid‐eighteenth century? Secondly, why were the bishops and clergy of that church generally so hostile to Evangelicalism? The answers are partly to be found within the Episcopal Church itself. During the eighteenth century it had repudiated Calvinism under the Page 3 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 influence of the English nonjurors, whereas Calvinism, aside from the Methodists, formed the major theological paradigm for Evangelicalism. So Evangelicalism was unlikely to develop within the Episcopal Church which was homogenously High Church in its theology by the end of the eighteenth century, even if that tradition was somewhat divided within itself. Also, Scotland itself presented a range of existing Evangelical churches or parties within churches sufficient for any Scottish Evangelical. Not only was there the increasingly dominant Popular Party of the Church of (p.214) Scotland and the voluntarist Presbyterian Churches, but also a burgeoning group of new Evangelical churches and movements such as the Haldanes' missions.11 It was therefore likely that any homegrown Scots Evangelicals would make their way into one of the existing, explicitly Evangelical, churches rather than the Episcopal Church. Consequently, Evangelicalism within the Episcopal Church had to arrive as an imported product by way of Anglican migration from one of the other countries of the British Isles. Such migrant Evangelical influence in the Episcopal Church would only have a chance to establish itself if it was not assimilated into one of the existing congregations led by High Church clergy. That meant either Evangelical clergy from outside Scotland coming into the country, as in the case of Edward Craig; or sufficient immigrant Evangelicals in one place to begin a new congregation or to take over an old one. As mentioned previously, there had been English and Irish clergy in Scotland since the previous century in qualified congregations, but these do not seem to have been Evangelicals. Craig appears to have been the first consciously Evangelical clergyman licensed to a charge in the Episcopal Church. That the first Evangelical clergyman should only have arrived in 1820 can be explained again by the migration factor. For a cleric to minister in the Episcopal Church he required a bishop's licence, something which High Church bishops would not have been disposed to do for Evangelical clergymen. Something needed to override the bishops' theological aversion. That something could only have been the continued clerical shortage in a recently legalized church, or a congregation asserting itself to insist upon an Evangelical clergyman. This congregational Evangelicalism required sufficient numbers of laity who were exposed to Evangelical ways which they would not have got in the Episcopal Church at that time. Therefore, such a congregation required either non‐Scots migrants or Scots formed in the Anglicanism outside the Episcopal Church. It would appear that St James's in Broughton Place, Edinburgh, was the first such congregation willing to appoint a known Evangelical as its (p.215) minister. The congregation was a new one formed in 1821 with Craig as their first minister.12 To do so the congregation had to brave the hostility of the bishop. Daniel Sandford, Bishop of Edinburgh, called the teaching of Gerard Noel during the latter's locum at St James's a ‘fanaticism’ which would transform the Episcopal Church if left unchecked.13 Sandford was not a Scot but a High Church Page 4 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Englishman who had been minister of a qualified chapel in Edinburgh before his consecration in 1806. The anti‐Evangelicalism of Sandford and Gleig was therefore a trait common to both Scottish and English High Church clergymen in the Episcopal Church at this time. But it went back to the eighteenth century if the attitudes of the two elderly female disciples of Bishop Petrie mentioned previously were any indication. These women refused to attend Evangelical sermons on account of their ‘glibness of tongue on deep mysteries’.14 However, Craig was the thin end of the wedge. As Evangelicalism was the most active and vital strand in British Christianity by the 1830s, Anglican Evangelicals would inevitably be part of the increasing migration into industrial Scotland and these would desire clergymen of their own stamp to minister to them. When that happened it was also probable that there would be a dispute, or even a confrontation with the bishops. This was exactly what occurred with increasing frequency from the 1840s onwards. The conflict began over a clash of ecclesiastical cultures and droned on through the century with intermittent bitterness on both sides. Initiated in the emergence of an independent congregation in Edinburgh under the Revd David Thomas Ker Drummond, it was a schism that escalated from an absurdly small beginning. It was a start which showed how intransigent were both parties to the dispute. Originally an argument between an Evangelical clergyman and a High Church bishop, the initial estrangement became coloured and intensified by the emergence of Anglo‐Catholicism from the 1840s. Unlike in the Church of England, in a (p. 216) small church the clash of the three dominant strands of the British Christianity could not be contained and Scottish Episcopalianism became divided in the nineteenth century as a consequence. Evangelicalism largely remained outside the church in secessionist or independently founded chapels. But given the predominance of Evangelicalism in Victorian culture, this was a division that ultimately harmed the ability of the Episcopal Church to capitalize on its new public status and capture a greater breadth of Scottish society. At the time of the dispute between Drummond and his bishop there were just two former qualified chapels, Perth and Montrose, still existing outwith the communion of the Episcopal Church, so there were reasonable hopes that this eighteenth‐century division would soon heal itself. Instead, what became known from the Episcopal side as the Drummond Schism revived Episcopalian divisions for the remainder of the century. A Scot, David Drummond had attended Edinburgh University and had graduated BA from Worcester College, Oxford, in 1830. He then served a curacy in Bristol for two years.15 He was instituted to the charge of St Paul's, Carrubbers Close, Edinburgh in 1832. Drummond was not the first Evangelical appointed to the charge; Edward Craig had resigned it in 1821. But, like Craig, it was apparently not until Drummond's next appointment that his Evangelical proclivities became more evident, or at least objectionable. At all events, Drummond's ministry at St Paul's was satisfactory enough for him to be appointed to the new congregation of Trinity chapel at Page 5 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Dean Bridge in 1838. It was here that his Evangelical innovations clashed with High Church traditionalism. At Trinity, Drummond began evangelistic work by holding prayer services and Bible classes in regular weeknight meetings in the Clyde Street Hall, consisting simply of hymns, Scripture exposition, and extempore prayers. According to the historian of the schism, the dispute began as a result of Bishop Charles Terrot's reluctant decision to enforce on Drummond the requirements of a new canon 28 which required all clergy not to officiate or preach without the use of the prayer‐book (p.217) liturgy.16 This canon was passed at the General Synod of 1838. Any cleric persisting with such unauthorized services was to be admonished by the bishop for the first offence, and suspended if the practice was persisted with. It is true that the argument began with Terrot's initiative, when he wrote to Drummond in 1842 citing the binding requirement of the canons, but there is a problem with the standard account of the split. Terrot could not have been stimulated into action by the passing of a new canon in 1838 because he did not take up his cudgels against Drummond until his first letter to him written on 3 October 1842. As the historian of the schism himself admits, Drummond maintained his prayer meetings in the Clyde Street Hall for four years without opposition, four years in which the new canon could have been used against him but was not. So it can hardly have been the passing of the canon which caused the bishop to take disciplinary action in 1842, for by then the canon was four years old.17 The only intimation that Terrot gave in his correspondence for raising the matter with Drummond was that it was a consequence ‘of suggestions from a quarter that I am bound to respect’ and which he agreed with.18 In other words, the conflict began not because of any new canon passed by the church, but rather because a person or persons that the bishop respected raised objections about Drummond's ministry. Given that the High Church bishop agreed with these informers they had to be either of his own churchmanship, or from influential social groups. It therefore seems likely that these opponents of Drummond's found his evangelistic strategies in worship intolerable departures from Episcopalian norms, or they used these as an excuse to attack Drummond's Evangelicalism because they found that an unacceptable deviation from customary Episcopalianism. (p.218) The dispute and its outcome were an early example of the increasing partisan nature of nineteenth‐century Anglicanism. The High Church bishop could not countenance services other than those of the authorized prayer book. The Evangelical Drummond could not forsake the extempore mission services for the sake of conformity with church law, although he had already agreed to abide by the canons in the oaths he took on being instituted to his two incumbencies in the Episcopal Church. Terrot, while offering some degree of flexibility, would not deviate from a very narrow and restrictive interpretation of the canon, while Drummond chose virtually to ignore it. The consequence was that Drummond resigned his charge at the end of the same month in which their correspondence Page 6 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 began. The haste with which he did this indicates not only the level of commitment he felt towards his Evangelical services, but also an intransigence towards a bishop reluctantly pushed into the full rigour of the canon by others and by Drummond's unwillingness to compromise. Consequently, a group of Drummond's supporters formed themselves into a support committee and advertised the establishment of a separate congregation claiming allegiance to the Church of England, with Drummond as their minister. This new independent congregation was only the first of a number of such Evangelical congregations that formed in Scotland after the inauguration of St Thomas's, Edinburgh, in 1842. Throughout the century there were a total of twenty‐five English chapels established, though a number of these were short‐lived, or were private chapels of local gentry or aristocrats.19 In 1847 ‘Church of England Chapels in Scotland’ were designated by themselves as numbering nine: St Paul's, Aberdeen; St Thomas's, Edinburgh; St Jude's, Glasgow; St Ninian's, Nairn; Huntly; two recent erections at Dunoon; Gask; and Perth, whose minister, the Revd H. A. Skete, had recently died.20 Two years later, in the report of a debate in the House of Lords generated by this groups of Episcopalians, ten chapels were specified under this (p.219) designation, with Fochabers and Galloway House chapel, the seat of the Earl of Galloway in Wigtonshire being added. Both Fochabers and Huntly were said to be under the patronage of the Duchess of Gordon.21 In 1870 there were eleven similar congregations: St Thomas's and St Vincent's in Edinburgh; St Jude's and St Silas's in Glasgow; St James's, Aberdeen; St Peter's, Montrose; St John's, Dundee; a chapel in Nairn; and private chapels in Dunoon, Gatehouse, and Wemyss Bay.22 One of these, at Montrose, was a congregation that had previously been a Scottish qualified chapel in the previous century. However, the Montrose congregation lent its name to these associations of ‘English’ or Church of England in Scotland' Episcopalians, and therefore the term ‘English Episcopalians’ is also used in this chapter generically to describe these congregations of independent Evangelical Episcopalians in Scotland. The division initiated by Drummond was not entirely a case of Evangelicalism versus Episcopalianism, for there were Episcopal clergy sympathetic to Evangelicalism who did not agree with Drummond's actions. The Evangelical Church Missionary Society had been in the habit of sending an annual deputation to Edinburgh, supported by a number of sympathetic clergy in the diocese. However, in 1843, the Society was informed by some Scottish clergy that they would not offer the use of their churches on Sundays if the deputation proposed to include in their itinerary Drummond's separated congregation.23 These Evangelical clergy within the Episcopal Church evidently ministered without hindrance from the bishops. It is therefore possible that Drummond's separation would have remained an isolated case but for the growing influence of the Oxford Movement from the 1840s. This gave Drummond the opportunity to portray the Episcopal Church as hotbed of popish ways and beliefs, exemplified particularly in the traditional Scottish Communion Office. Page 7 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Drummond used this interpretation as the major barrage in his (p.220) war of self‐justification against the church, claiming that his separation was due to conscientious objections to the Office and the near‐Romanism of the Puseyite Episcopal Church.24 But despite this retrospective self‐justification Drummond's separation from the Episcopal Church had little to do with the Scottish Office or with Tractarianism. It was a dispute over forms of worship new to the Episcopal Church, but blown out of proportion by an opinionated Evangelical and a stubborn High Churchman. Presbyterian and Evangelical suspicion towards the Episcopal Church was undoubtedly stirred up by the advent of the Oxford Movement in Scotland. Most of the separate Evangelical congregations were founded as a consequence of Evangelical anxiety about the growing influence of the Oxford Movement in the Episcopal Church. The new chapel at Nairn, for example, seceded in 1845 after the majority of the subscribers voted to withdraw from the Episcopal Church because of Oxford Movement disturbances. They claimed to place themselves under English bishops though the bishops of Exeter, London, and Canterbury all repudiated this. They did, however, receive public support from the Bishop of Cashel.25 The priest at Huntley, John Hull, an Irishman, formed the ‘English Episcopal Chapel’ there following the secession to Rome of Newman and others in 1845. His defence in the form of public letter to the Bishop of Exeter, explicitly claimed he had taken this action because of Oxford Tractarianism. Your lordship cannot be aware, that the principles and tenets of the Scottish Episcopal Church are precisely identical with those, which, as put forth in the Oxford tracts, have fallen under the merited reprehension of almost every Bishop of the Church of England. Nay, more—that the closest sympathy and identity of object and interest exists, between the Tractist party, and the community of this country, of which your lordship stands forth as so zealous a champion. That which, south of the (p.221) Tweed, is placed under the episcopal ban, north of it is favoured and fondled.26 Robert Daly, the Bishop of Cashel, echoed the same sentiments to Bishop Low when he explained why he chose to support the breakaway chapels in Scotland. It was because the Episcopal Church had departed from the doctrines of the Church of England, ‘particularly at the present moment, when the Tractarian movement in England is doing so much towards an approximation to the Church of Rome. It grieves me that the Scotch Episcopal Church should throw the weight of her countenance into the scale of the unsound members of the Church of England’.27
Oxford Movement ritualism intensified this clash of ecclesiastical cultures within Scottish Episcopalianism. The genuine Evangelical anxiety that such ritualism was a harbinger of Rome in the Episcopal Church and the consequent loss of the truths of the Reformation caused them to be alienated from that church. Such fears focused on the Scottish Communion Office which Evangelicals believed to propound the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Drummond had latched Page 8 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 onto this as a reason for his own split from the church, and from the 1840s other, mainly English, Anglican Evangelicals in Scotland constantly expressed abhorrence for the Office's supposed transubstantiation. The arrival of Oxford Movement ritualism in the Episcopal Church during the same decade of the 1840s as the first Evangelical split from that church inevitably embittered the situation by giving apparent credence to the Evangelicals' argument that the Episcopal Church was itself a Romish church. It meant that there was little or no hope of any reconciliation between the church and the separate Evangelical congregations during the 1840s, or in the 1850s when the Eucharistic Controversy inspired by the Tractarian Bishop Forbes was raging. The existence of separate Evangelical chapels from the 1840s claiming intolerance and Puseyite popishness on the part of the Episcopal Church attracted sympathy in England and Ireland (p.222) where Anglican Evangelicalism was stronger. To foster this the independent chapels formed themselves into an association: the Church of England Association in Scotland. In 1847 the members of the Association consisted of St Paul's Aberdeen, Dunoon, St Thomas's Edinburgh, Gask, St Jude's Glasgow, Huntley, St Peter's Montrose, St Ninian's Nairn, and the old qualified chapel in Perth.28 A deputation of the Association called on a number of leading English bishops in 1846 in order to facilitate support for their position, in addition to holding meetings with like‐minded clergy and laity. Their public report was taken up with presenting their case for continued separation, of which their main plank was that the Episcopal Church was not identical with the beliefs and practices of the Church of England. Instead it was crypto‐Romanist by virtue of its sympathy for the Oxford Movement, its maintenance of the Catholic Scottish Communion Office, and some other aspects of its beliefs and canons. It had a debatable and probably invalid apostolic succession from England; and the legal toleration granted to the qualified clergy and chapels in the eighteenth century was claimed as the legal basis for their own existence as English Episcopalians in Scotland.29 This English Evangelical connection, though never a formal or institutional one, could be very powerful indeed. It was sufficient to initiate a debate in the House of Lords in May 1849 when Lord Brougham agreed to present a petition from members of the independent chapels on the basis that they were members of the Church of England in Scotland. In the preface to the published edition of the debate the leaders of the separated chapels pointed (p.223) to the spectre of Tractarianism in alliance with the Episcopal Church subverting the Protestant faith. They call public attention to the fact that the united energies of the Tractarian party throughout the kingdom are continually, systematically, and avowedly directed to the maintenance and extension of the particular dogmas of the Scottish Episcopal Communion. And why is this? Because Page 9 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 the Tractarians desire to maintain, at all costs, the doctrines exhibited in the Scotch Communion Office; and they believe that this office is in danger . . . Members of the Church of England in Scotland will remain, by the grace of God, faithful to the principles of the glorious Reformation; in order to secure these principles, they are constrained to assert that union with the bishops in Scotland is absolutely impossible.30 While Lord Brougham's speech was confused and misleading, claiming that the Scottish bishops were not bishops at all though they did undoubtedly ordain in their own quasi‐church, the speeches of the English bishops involved were more pertinent. The Bishop of Salisbury opposed the petition as the Scottish Episcopal Church was undoubtedly a church that did not have to practise uniformity with the Church of England, although its doctrine was the same. Archbishop Sumner of Canterbury, an Evangelical, expressed some sympathy with those Anglicans in Scotland who found themselves having to use a liturgy that differed from the prayer book, and who did not enjoy in Scotland the ministrations of like‐minded clergy. He stated he would be willing to accept any of the independent clergy in Scotland should they be presented to a benefice in his diocese. The Bishop of Worcester said that he, along with the Bishop of Norwich, fully agreed with the petition which sought to establish the right of the independent chapels to a legal existence, and also the right of their clergy to be licensed to benefices should they return to England. Bishop Henry Phillpotts of Exeter, as expected of such a combative High Churchman, strongly opposed the petition on the basis that to have members of the Church of England residing in Scotland was a nonsense, as that church was conterminous with the geographic boundaries of England. As Anglicans, the (p.224) petitioners were either members of the Episcopal Church or they were schismatics. Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford similarly upheld the communion of the Episcopal Church with the Church of England. The report also contained letters from the Bishops of Hereford, Llandaff, and Chester, who were not present at the debate but also stated their willingness to accept the independent clergy in their dioceses.
What the debate indicated is that there was a degree of sympathy with the independent chapels from a significant number of bishops, including two of the most prominent who were not Evangelicals. Both Edward Stanley of Norwich and Henry Pepys of Worcester were Whigs and reforming bishops. Stanley was a theological liberal who supported the liberty of conscience and the right of private judgement as the basis for the foundation of the Church of England.31 Pepys welcomed signs of religious zeal as indications of an improving religious climate in Britain.32 So there were reasons other than party allegiance for Evangelical Episcopalians to expect support from powerful sections of the English Church. But their strongest support undoubtedly came from Evangelicals south of the border who, by the late 1840s, were becoming accustomed to organizing themselves in pursuit of their own objectives.33 The Scottish bishops discovered just how influential such support could be when they went south on a deputation of their own to advocate the lifting of the vestigial legal restrictions remaining after the 1792 Relief Act. The bishops sent three of their number in 1857 to Page 10 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 canvass support for an Act of Parliament to rescind these disabilities. On their return Bishop Terrot gloomily reported on their lack of success, attributing it primarily to opposition from English Evangelicals. Among those we expected wd. favour us, we find that our proposition is considered subversive of the Establishment principle, & hostile to the supremacy of the crown. But the strongest opposition is from the Low (p. 225) Church—from the party represented by the Record, by Exeter Hall, & considered as headed by Lord Shaftesbury. A Society of this party called the Protestant Defence Society, have issued a course of papers directed against the Scotch Epl. Church; and though many of their misrepresentations are so gross as to disgust those who know us, I regret to say that they have been too successful in persuading many, that we ought not be to received into an nearer communion with the Ch. of England.34 Opposition to the Episcopal Church was not limited to separated Evangelical Episcopalians, or their co‐religionists in England; it was also strong among Scottish Evangelicals and Presbyterians generally. The General Assemblies of both the Free Church and the Church of Scotland in 1857 debated the establishment of committees to keep a watch on the renewed campaign by the Episcopal Church against the legal disabilities. Some, in both churches, feared that the Episcopal Church sought a union with the established Church of England, which would threaten the establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland. In the event, the Free Church voted for such a committee, whereas the Established Church turned the overture down as contrary to religious toleration and as giving credence to unrealistic fears.35 But the Free Church's decision was perhaps more indicative of Presbyterian hostility towards Episcopalianism. In 1842 Queen Victoria visited Scotland where it was decided she should not attend the services of the Established Church lest this be seen as giving tacit support to the dominant Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland. These were currently leading the fight against the government over patronage which would result in the Disruption of that church the following year. Consequently, Dean Edward Ramsay of Edinburgh was invited to conduct a service at the Duke of Buccleuch's mansion in Dalkeith where the royals were staying. This roused rancour in at least one Evangelical source in the Church of Scotland for whom the Episcopal Church was Fundamentally popish . . . and if our countrymen are content that it should be the national religion, they may be lighting their wax tapers, (p.226) and erecting their crucifixes as fast as they please. But if there linger yet in Scottish breasts one spark of that love to presbytery, and heart‐hatred to prelacy, which burned in the bosoms of their ancestors, they will not allow the ministers, who have put this studied and intentional slight in the Scottish church, to leave the country without some public demonstration Page 11 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 how keenly they feel the insult which has thus been put upon the ancient kingdom of Scotland.36 The fact that most Scottish Episcopalians and certainly all the bishops in 1842 had never used, let alone desired to use, either candles or crucifixes was not allowed to get in the way of a good argument.
Although Episcopalianism Evangelicalism was relatively small beer, its sympathizers in other churches were not. According to one hostile source, a leader writer in the Scottish Guardian, such sympathizers came from three very significant sources in Scotland and England. There were the Broad Churchman of the Presbyterian Establishment, represented by Principal John Tulloch's Missionary Record,37 the Scotsman, and the Glasgow Herald—the latter two the most influential newspapers in Scotland. Then there was the conservative Evangelical wing of the Free Church and their organ the Edinburgh Daily Review. Finally, these Episcopalian Evangelicals could count on the Evangelicals of the Church of England, whose organ the Record often wrote in their favour.38 In 1876 Lord Shaftesbury chaired a meeting in Glasgow of the English Episcopalians who were concerned to secure the ministry of a bishop to administer confirmation in their congregations. This resulted in an exchange of letters between Shaftesbury and Lord Kinnaird which was later published by mutual agreement.39 Lord Kinnaird evidently began the correspondence. George William Fox, ninth Baron Kinnaird, unlike his brother Arthur who was a staunch Evangelical MP, was a prominent High Churchman who made his reputation as a radical laird, instigating (p.227) various agricultural improvements in Perthshire, and philanthropic social schemes in Dundee. In November 1876 he wrote expressing sorrow that the earl was ‘heading a Crusade’ against the Episcopal Church. He lamented Shaftesbury's support for the English Episcopal chapels when the Episcopal Church retained the loyalty of many poor Scots, a section of society which Shaftesbury had done so much for in England. Shaftesbury's support, claimed Kinnaird, merely resulted in greater bitterness and division among struggling Episcopalians in Scotland, and he sent him three papers by bishops and clergy in the hope of altering the earl's position.40 Shaftesbury replied, turning Kinnaird's accusation of a crusade on its head, by asserting that he was in fact resisting such a crusade by the Episcopal Church and the English bishops, ‘in conjunction with all that is Ritualistic and Sacerdotal in both countries’ to force these chapels into that church. According to Shaftesbury, the aggression was all on the side of the Episcopal Church against the English congregations who merely asked to be left alone. The Scottish bishops' attitude smacked to Shaftesbury of ‘Sacerdotal assumptions’ which threatened the ‘right of private judgement’ in religion by interposing an unauthorized higher episcopal authority. This was to put an ecclesiastical philosophy above that of the Bible.41 Kinnaird then pointed out that the bishops had not made any move against the rights of such congregations, though this rather overlooked their public opposition to the prospect of an English bishop Page 12 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 for the Evangelicals. He used the usual Episcopalian argument of the paradox of congregations claiming to be ‘Episcopal’, yet rejecting the authority of both the Scottish and the English bishops.42 Shaftesbury reiterated that his support for the congregations was necessary now that the English bishops ‘almost, I believe, without exception’ had sided with the Scottish bishops and urged the congregations to enter into a concordat with the Episcopal Church.43 The correspondence grew more pointed. Shaftesbury objected to Kinnaird's labelling of David Drummond as a ‘schismatic’. The (p.228) use of such terms made Shaftesbury feel that ‘I had rather betake myself to the General Assembly, than live under the government of Bishops who have taught you so to think and speak of sincere and humble followers of Jesus Christ’.44 He then sent a short note proposing the publication of the correspondence.45 This prompted a very long letter from Kinnaird, which he admitted was not entirely his own creation, setting out in a more organized fashion the position of his church. In this he stressed the communion between the Episcopal Church and the Church of England. Kinnaird then came to the initial cause of the correspondence, which was the desire of the English congregations for their own bishop. The establishment of such a bishop was deplored as the creation of a rival episcopate which perpetuated division and placed discord above the Lord's express command for unity. Kinnaird was taking his turn to accuse his opponent of putting ecclesiastical preferences above biblical commands.46 Not unnaturally in such a point‐scoring correspondence Shaftesbury objected to having to correspond with an additional anonymous third party, which called into question the private nature of the correspondence.47 Kinnaird responded that he had written to Shaftesbury entirely on his own initiative, but then he felt he needed some help to answer Shaftesbury accurately.48 The correspondence petered out that December with Shaftesbury maintaining that the involvement of a third party made their letters cease to be private and therefore he was giving them to friends in Scotland to publish or not as they saw fit. Kinnaird offered to share the expense, requesting only that it be done as a pamphlet so that copies could be had. But Shaftesbury continued to accuse Kinnaird of acting as the shield for another writer whose arguments were ignorant and weak. However, claimed the earl, ‘I rejoice to have received them, because they reveal the true sentiments of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Bigotry and anathema are dominant in that Church; and they show to us from what we have been delivered, and to what we shall return, unless, (p.229) by God's blessing, the old Protestant Spirit be revived among us’.49 In conclusion Kinnaird asserted that as Shaftesbury was going to send their letters to Scottish sympathizers to publish as they saw fit, he was going to have them published without additional comments so as to prevent his opinions being misconstrued.50
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 From the entrenched and politely barbed comments of these two aristocratic supporters of the two sides, it was evident that tempers on both sides needed little to stimulate them into a reiteration of entrenched positions. But the situation became inflamed when the English Episcopalians finally managed to convince a bishop to provide them with episcopal ministry. In March 1877 they formed another group, an Association of English Episcopalians in Scotland, to enter an agreement with Bishop Edmund Beckles, formerly Bishop of Sierra Leone, and currently vicar of St Peter's, Bethnal Green, London.51 The establishment of the Association involved D. T. K. Drummond, St Thomas's, and St Vincent's, Edinburgh; St Silas's and St Jude's, Glasgow; St Peter's, Montrose; St John's, Dundee; St James's, Aberdeen. The incumbents of the English Episcopal chapels at Nairn and Cally were unable to be present at the meeting but sent letters stating their concurrence with the Association.52 According to the agreement, the bishop agreed to act in return for £500 per annum for his expenses and an allowance, an annual fund being established for the purpose from the contributions of each participating congregation.53 The public knowledge of the agreement immediately raised Episcopal Church hackles and caused the Primus, Bishop Robert Eden of Moray and Ross, to write to Beckles questioning his credentials. He asked from whom Beckles had received the authority for his appointment, evidently not (p.230) recognizing the authority of the congregations themselves as sufficient for episcopal authority. Beckles responded by avoiding the question, instead pointing to the invitation to exercise his episcopal office from ‘members of our own communion resident in Scotland’. To this Eden remonstrated with him for the schismatic character of his action.54 Condemnation for Beckles also came from the Church of England which, unlike the debate in the House of Lords in 1849, expressed a more unified opposition to this initiative of the English Episcopalians. The Convocation of York passed a resolution opposing Beckles's appointment as an ‘intrusion . . . within the Dioceses of Bishops in North Britain’ and a violation of ecclesiastical order.55 The Convocation of Canterbury followed suit later that April, the Lower House resolving that Beckles's action was an ‘intrusion contrary to the principles of the Universal Church’ and calling it ‘schismatical’, while the bishops resolved that Beckles's action ‘cannot be defended’.56 But the English Episcopalians were not deterred from their alliance with Bishop Beckles and enjoyed his episcopal ministry from 1877 to 1887. Only one congregation, St James's, Aberdeen, severed their connection with the Association as a consequence of these statements by the Church of England.57 By the 1880s it had become apparent to some influential Episcopalians that the best hope for a reconciliation lay in a period of quiet to allow tempers and suspicions to cool and the more moderate counsels of leaders on both sides to prevail. That had been unlikely while, on the one side, Drummond remained influential, because he had publicly invested a great deal in his separation from the church and rather gloried in it.58 Nor did reconciliation stand much chance Page 14 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 while the prevailing attitude of (p.231) the Scottish bishops and clergy was that these Evangelicals were schismatics whose only recourse was to return to the Episcopal Church on its terms. A less confrontational approach had already been advocated by Bishop Charles Wordsworth of St Andrews over the Beckles controversy. Writing to Bishop Eden in April 1877 he had argued for more of the carrot and less of the stick with the independent congregations. He cautioned against making too much of opposition to Beckles as being counter‐productive. Rather, the appointment of Beckles most concerned the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury should simply be asked to deal with the matter as he saw fit. On a more positive note Wordsworth suggested a policy of greater understanding as more productive of reconciliation. In my opinion our main object should be to endeavour to disarm those congregations of their disaffection . . . what I would recommend is this: that we should appoint a small committee, consisting say, of three bishops and three presbyters, to ask for a conference with a deputation, as large as they please, from those several congregations (with Bishop Beckles; if they desire his presence, at their head), and endeavour to ascertain what the real causes are of a separation which . . . has ceased to be justifiable; and to see whether . . . something may not be done to remove them.59 Wordsworth was rather unusual among the Scottish bishops in that, although a High Churchman, he had a passionate concern for unity and laboured unfruitfully all his life for the union of Episcopalians and the Church of Scotland. Perhaps this perspective gave him a greater empathy for these Evangelical Episcopalians than was customary among his High Church colleagues.
Whether inspired by Wordsworth or not, the bishops did alter their traditional uncompromizing attitude in the 1880s. This may also have been a result of a change of heart among the Evangelical leadership as well. David Drummond had died in 1877. Others had arisen in the next generation, some of them Scots rather than immigrant English or Irish. One of the most significant was Dr William Forbes Skene who was from an old Episcopalian family in Aberdeenshire, and was cousin to Bishop Forbes of (p.232) Brechin. Between these two religious opponents there was great mutual esteem. This may have stemmed, in part, from their common attachment to history. Skene was a major Scottish historian and, in 1881 was appointed to the prestigious but nominal post of Royal Historiographer of Scotland. Skene was a long‐standing member of St Vincent's in Edinburgh, a congregation that had split off from Drummond's St Thomas's congregation. Evidently Skene had approached Bishop George Mackarness of Argyll and the Isles, for in July 1881 Mackarness wrote back dissenting ‘entirely from your every statement’.60 It was not a promising beginning to what became a successful effort on both sides at reunion. Skene was probably prompted to his initiative by his belief that since the 1863 General Synod which overturned the primary authority of the Scottish Communion Office in favour of the English Book of Common Prayer there were no longer sufficient Page 15 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 grounds to remain separate from the Episcopal Church. In 1884 he wrote a letter to this effect in the leading Evangelical journal, the Record. I maintain that this places the Scotch Episcopal Church on the same platform in respect to doctrine with the Church of England, that she receives the Articles of that Church as interpreted by the Ecclesiastical Courts . . . Since 1863, Evangelical clergymen officiate in Evangelical congregations within the Scotch Episcopal Church, with the same liberty which they do in England . . . I therefore consider that, looking to the present constitution and spirit of the Scotch Episcopal Church, separation from her on such grounds can no longer be justly maintained, and that the time has come when it ought to be given up.61 Yet Mackarness also referred to his own attempted reconciliation in his own diocese, which may have been why Skene chose to write to him in the first place. Mackarness had offered to accept any English clergyman, low or high, who came into his diocese with Letters Commendatory from an English bishop. In return he asked that the independent chapel at Dunoon would remove the nomenclature of ‘The Church of England in Scotland’ on its noticeboard and have their clergy accept his licence. The (p.233) managers of the chapel refused his offer. Mackarness could not see the differences between his church and the Church of England maintained by the English Episcopalians. ‘Some of my Clergy are Low and have Evangelical services—some are High and have ritualistic services . . . I really absolutely fail to see where the grievance is or how anything can be done to remedy it. I am ready to take any steps—but in my ignorance of what the grievance is, what can I do?’ As for the Scottish Office, it was not used in any of the localities where the Evangelical congregations were, and to positively forbid those congregations which used it and loved it to give it up was not practical either. He claimed he was ready to urge his brother bishops to do anything to heal the rift.62
This was a constructive response, despite the bishop disagreeing with Skene initially. It led the layman to reply in some detail. He played down the ministry of Bishop Beckles as one of ‘occasional exercize of an Episcopal function, [i.e. confirmation],’ rather than episcopal superintendence. Nor did he believe that the whole association of the chapels called themselves ‘The Church of England in Scotland’, though he acknowledged some individual chapels did so. Moving beyond such quibbles, Skene nominated one of the revised 1838 canons as an outstanding obstacle, it being designed, he said, to put down the Evangelical congregations. It was this canon which was used against David Drummond and he feared it might be rigorously applied again. Though Skene did not refer to a particular canon, the reference was to number 19 of the 1838 canons requiring the use of the Liturgy in public worship.63 Skene did not see the Scottish Communion Office as the obstacle it was before the changes made at the 1863 General Synod. ‘The English Office is the authorised service and the Scotch Office merely permitted to certain congregations. Now certainly I am not going to ask for toleration for myself and in the same breath object to a similar toleration being given to others.’ What he (p.234) wanted was freedom and Page 16 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 toleration in the Episcopal Church for Evangelical teaching and usages which were permitted in the Church of England. Accordingly, Skene proposed two courses of action. First, the canons could be revised to remove restrictions against Evangelical freedom. ‘They bear the impress of the old High and Dry notions when everything beyond the performance of morning and evening service on Sunday and Communion once a month was discouraged and a dry formalism maintained.’ They were not longer relevant in the context of the diversity of worship services necessary to modern congregations and to mission. An agreement on such a revision could lead to a preliminary conference between the two parties. Secondly, Evangelical clergy accepted by Scottish bishops could promise obedience to the English canons, as well as canonical obedience to the Scottish bishop in whose diocese their congregation was placed. Any disagreement should be referred to the English archbishops.64 Mackarness explained to Skene that he had sent their letters, with Skene's permission, to the Primus, Robert Eden, with the comment of an experienced bishop, ‘with regard to the Canons I fear they are not very strictly observed when they run counter to individual needs as to impose any heavy restraint on people's consciences.’65 Eden was encouraged by Skene's courtesy in his letter, and responded by recommending the proposed conference immediately, prior to the forthcoming annual Episcopal Synod in Edinburgh that October.66 There, unfortunately, the deposit of correspondence in the National Archives of Scotland ends, and with it the glimpse behind the scenes at the reconciliation between the two old foes. However, the conference was held and was evidently productive, for in December the following year the bishops issued a pertinent statement. In this the bishops referred to the two offending canons. Canon 30 ‘Of Holy Communion’ referred to the Scottish Communion Office. They pointed out it was only sanctioned in congregations where it was desired by the majority and that otherwise the English Book of Common Prayer was the (p.235) service book of the church. Subscription to this canon was not an approval of the Scottish Office or its doctrine, but an acceptance that the Scottish Office was an accepted use by some congregations. This was in keeping with ‘principles of comprehension and toleration which ought to regulate to government of every Christian Church’. The second canon mentioned in the declaration was canon 31 ‘Of Divine Service’, which was the canon Skene had alluded to being applied in the Drummond case. The bishops declared that ‘no Bishop would desire to use the power given him under that Canon to interfere with other services for devotion and instruction by any of his Clergy, such as are now of frequent occurrence amongst us over and above the stated services both on Sundays and other days’. It was simple recognition by the bishops that worship had moved on since the 1840s and that the public life and mission of the Episcopal Church, having advanced considerably since then, had moved with it.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 The declaration broke the decades‐long theological and cultural logjam between the church and the congregations of English Episcopalians. The majority of congregations now entered not into a union with the church but into a concordat arrangement which enabled them to retain some congregational independence as part of the Scottish dioceses. In April 1884 the Association devised for the maintenance of the ministry of Bishop Beckles was dissolved, though two congregations, St Silas's, Glasgow, and St Peter's, Montrose, maintained a continued independence.67 In the case of the Montrose congregation it was the longest separate existence of an independent chapel in Scottish Episcopalianism. Beginning as a qualified chapel in 1724 it did not finally unite with the Episcopal Church until 1920, as the last of the old eighteenth century qualified chapels in existence.68 The other divisive ecclesiastical import into Scottish Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century was the Oxford Movement and its attendant ritualism. Its arrival in Scotland from the 1840s resulted in a cultural and religious battle for the soul of Scottish Episcopalianism fought between its traditional High Church adherents and the vanguard of the battalions of English (p.236) Anglo‐ Catholicism in Scotland. One of the most useful interpretations of Anglo‐ Catholicism in the last decade has been that by John Reed who has proposed that in its later ritualist development it can best be understood as a counter‐ cultural movement. For this reason Anglo‐Catholicism was deliberately provocative and challenging to prevailing religious respectability. It was a movement in deliberate opposition to dominant values. This made it attractive to the young and the religiously marginalized, especially to women and those who found the predominant Victorian ‘muscular’ Christianity unattractive. ‘Anglo‐ Catholicism’, says Professor Reed, ‘thrived on opposition; it attracted adherents in part because of who opposed it. A movement like that has little to gain and much to lose from compromize.’69 According to Reed, this counter‐culturalism explains the extremism of Anglo‐Catholicism and also its often bemusing lack of common sense. This analysis of the Oxford Movement in Scotland takes up Professor Reed's insight and treats it as a new cultural movement that came up against the existing culture of traditional Scottish Episcopalianism, whose aspects have been described in the previous chapters of this book. Therefore the history of the Oxford Movement in Scotland examined here does not focus on the standard aspects of an institutional ecclesiastical movement developing within the structures of an existing church; it is rather concerned with the meeting and clashes of two religious cultures: existing Episcopalianism and radical Anglo‐ Catholicism. The initial impact of this cultural coming together can be examined in the inauguration and development of one congregation: St Columba's, in the old town of Edinburgh. St Columba's was an initiative of upper middle‐class laymen from the elite of Edinburgh society, supported by a priest whose family history was steeped in the traditional nonjuring religion of the North‐East. At least one of these men, Page 18 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 William Forbes, also came from a staunch Episcopalian family with links to both the nonjuring and qualified traditions. William Forbes was the oldest son of Sir John Hay Forbes, Lord Medwyn of the Court of Session, and grandson of Sir William Forbes, the Edinburgh (p.237) banker who, as a financier of the bishops, had been instrumental in uniting the qualified chapels to the church in the early decades of the century. Although his social position virtually required Sir William to attend a qualified chapel, he had a strong personal sympathy for the nonjuring tradition which he had passed on to his son.70 The Forbeses were then the most prominent Episcopalian family outside the ranks of the aristocracy. The Revd John Alexander was the son of the provost of Banff. His mother was a descendant of Jacobites who fought at Culloden. He attended Marsichal College where he studied for the Scottish bar, but instead was ordained in 1842 and licensed as a missionary to the charge of St Paul's, Carrubber's Close, in the old town of Edinburgh.71 By the 1830s the area was one of the most degraded areas of the city, the upper ranks of society having long abandoned it for the Georgian splendours of the new town. In 1843 Alexander proposed that a new church be built specifically to attract and minister to the urban poor of the old town as it seemed, at that date, that St Paul's was too dilapidated and antiquated to fulfil this purpose. The idea prompted a vehement protest from other clergy determined to defend their own turf. They were worried lest an oversupply of churches should have detrimental effects on their own congregational numbers.72 Alexander's reply to their memorial to the bishop set out in more detail the purposes of the project. Responding to the criticism that the poor came to his church for alms rather than religion, Alexander was convinced that poor relief needed to go hand in hand with religious ministration if the destitute were to be in any state to respond to the Gospel. Only it is to be remarked, that if a man has from the pressure of hopeless poverty failed to procure his breakfast, and does not know where he is to get his dinner, he is not in a situation to be spoken to on the subject of religion. It is necessary that the Missionary should be enabled either by himself or by others not only to give his fellow creatures so situated (p. 238) religious consolation, but some little assistance towards the relief of his physical wants.73 Alexander was often an intemperate man who would not back away from a fight. He once burned a kneeler donated by someone who had left his church in protest against Alexander's ministry.74 But he was committed to a new church being built away from the disreputable location of Carrubber's Close. Services there were battered by ‘ballad singers, and performers on violins, individuals uttering cries of all sorts, and boys knocking at the doors . . . modest females can scarcely ever go to the Close in question without being put to the blush by some indecent scene or other’. According to Alexander, the poor were fundamentally respectable and a better church for worship in a quieter environment could only improve their basic respectability. He asserted that
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 ‘the poor ought to be congregated for divine service, not in dirty haunts where the beer house and the brothel significantly appear, but in places which they can frequent without any molestation or annoyance from such matters’.75
Despite the fact that continued clerical opposition forced the scheme to be withdrawn for a period in 1844, it was reconstituted under a committee of laymen whom the clergy found more difficult to oppose publicly because it included prominent persons such as William Forbes and Sir Archibald Edmonstone. A site was procured on the Castle Hill and the committee assured the diocese ‘that they have no party views . . . nor did they ever contemplate that the church proposed or the services to be performed therein should be marked by any distinctive character’.76 The committee claimed that they had deliberately avoided all discussion of ritual matters because this came under the regulation of the bishop. The bogey of Tractarianism was obviously very much in the minds of the committee as one of them, E. D. Sandford, wrote to the secretary of the committee explaining his opposition to it. ‘I am very much opposed to the errors of Tractarianism as, a thorough (p.239) decided Member of the Protestant Episcopal Church from education, & conviction can be; but I acknowledge the obligation of those who belong to the household of faith, & venerate the Apostolic Church, to enlarge its boundaries if possible’.77 Evidently, rumours were flying that the new church was to be a haven for ritualism because Alexander wrote to the committee promising them that there would be no variation in the mode of worship from that presently operating in St Paul's. The committee also passed a motion affirming they were only interested in providing a church for the poor and they had ‘no intention of proposing any alteration upon the ritual of the church at present used in this Diocese’. But some hint of trouble to come was indicated when one of the members, Robert Campbell, unsuccessfully proposed an amendment that the motion could not constrain members of the committee acting in an individual capacity.78 It is clear that there were at least two other agendas operating in addition to the public aim of building a more comely church and school for the poor in the old town. One of them was led by William Forbes for whom the project offered the opportunity of having the Scottish Communion Office revived in Edinburgh. As he explained to Bishop Skinner in December 1844, he was involved in a group editing a new edition of the Scottish Office, ‘with the hope of having it restored to this Diocese in Mr Alexander's chapel’. His father and his younger brother George were also part of this group and, along with their friend Robert Campbell, the two Forbes brothers had offered the new church committee the princely sum of £1,100 provided the Office was made the permanent use of St Columba's. However, Bishop Terrot was ‘violently opposed’ to the idea, but the group was determined upon it.79 The offer was formally made to the committee by the two Forbes brothers and Campbell at its meeting on 23 January 1845 on the grounds that ‘those who have been accustomed to it from their youth, as well as those who from conscientious motives prefer it to the English Office’. If the (p.240) committee did not grant this request then its proposers would Page 20 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 withdraw from the new church project and seek to achieve their aim in some other way. This financial pressure caused the committee to pass a motion that while ritual was not within their jurisdiction, they were prepared to support the proposal to the bishop. The committee were doubtless relieved by the strategy proposed to secure the Office. It was first to be introduced in St Paul's by the consent of the congregation and the vote of the vestry. This meant that the new church could still be publicly separated from ritual alterations because the proposed change would be occurring in the existing St Paul's congregation before it relocated to the new church. This new agenda divided the committee into groups for and against the Scottish Office and for some time the poor were lost sight of in the internal tussle over the liturgy. Various members wrote to the much‐pressed Charles Reid, the committee's secretary, stating their intention to withdraw, resign, or stop their subscriptions if their views for or against the Office were not upheld. A number of resignations later, when the dust finally settled, it was a victory to the Office party. The vestry of St Paul's resolved on 28 September that the Scottish Office be the exclusive use of their congregation which, as an existing congregation under the canons, they could do without the permission of the bishop. In this way they avoided putting Terrot in a public position where he would have to side with one part of his diocese against another.80 The motivation of the Scottish Office supporters was explained in a long letter from Sir Archibald Edmonstone, probably to Charles Reid, on 1 June 1845. It was a letter that sought a place in the sun in the south of the country for the nonjuring tradition he had grown up with. He recognized the declining situation of the northern tradition in the church and therefore sought to secure a place for its central aspect, the Scottish Communion Office, in the nation's capital. Edmonstone was also claiming that such recognition would uphold the essential unity of the Episcopal Church by the public acceptance and use of its two authorized liturgies in the most important city of the nation. His letter was, in effect, a plea to uphold the traditional Episcopalian tradition as developed (p. 241) in the eighteenth century as a recognized component of nineteenth‐ century Episcopalianism in the increasingly Anglicized south. But the Scottish Office is notwithstanding the authoritative Office of the Church, and the question, if I comprehend it right, now is whether this authoritative Office is to be altogether proscribed in the Capital. Now if our Episcopal congregations really do form one Church, governed by one Church law, what can be more anomalous or self‐condemnatory than proscribing at Edinh. what is upheld paramount at Aberdeen? . . . it is little enough for a Northern Churchman to have one Church in Edinh. where he may worship according to the form he approves.81
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 But it was significant that by this date Edmonstone had to deny explicitly that the Office was a draw‐card for Romanism in the church. ‘Far from leading to Rome, it leads directly from Rome’ because it was an authentic representation of the beliefs of primitive tradition against the innovations of Roman tradition.
Edmonstone's High Church tradition was willing to go far in support of his familiar Scottish Office but it was not at all sympathetic to Rome or to Romanizing Anglo‐Catholicism. His Roman reference was undoubtedly deliberate due to local opposition from Low Churchmen and southern Episcopalians who cried ‘Papist’ against the Office due either to its departure from the liturgy of the Church of England or to its support from Tractarians.82 This support was a distinct disadvantage in June 1845 for by that date a number of John Henry Newman's younger disciples had already gone over to Rome and his own conversion was widely expected.83 The distinction between Tractarianism and the northern tradition was clear to old representatives of that (p.242) tradition like Edmonstone. The antagonism felt by them towards Romanising ritualism is also evident in the other, ritualist, agenda being pushed within the new church committee. Supporters of the Office at St Columba's were engaged in a defence of the most important facet of their religious culture. By the 1840s it was a culture which they felt to be at risk in the south of Scotland where immigration and Anglicization had whittled away at what they believed were genuine native traditions of Episcopalianism. This defence was jeopardized by the connection of some of its supporters with ritualism. For at least one, possibly two, of the committee it was not enough to secure a place in the capital for the old northern tradition; they also wanted a base in the city for the advanced ritualism currently being advocated in England by the younger generation of Tractarian disciples. This difference of position between Scottish High Churchmen and ritualists can be seen in the reaction of Lord Medwyn to one such ritualist proposal. Speaking of plans to put in a stone altar in the new church he called it ‘a folly’ which he hoped would not happen.84 The chair of the committee, E. D. Sandford, also opposed the dedication of the church to any saint but one of the twelve apostles.85 But the ritualists were intent on their plan to transform the new church. The proponents of the stone altar were Robert Campbell who had offered the vestry £100 for the purpose, and William Forbes who was prepared to give a stone font on condition that the altar be installed. The vestry accepted both offers.86 But Campbell had further plans for the interior of the church and in August 1846 he wrote to the vestry offering to pay for an open rood screen of carved oak which was also accepted.87 But when it came to the design of the screen Campbell's religion and that of the vestry began to part company. Campbell had proposed that a large cross occupy a central position on the screen which caused the vestry sufficient anxiety that they sent a deputation in May 1847 to look at the design. As a consequence they reversed their previous (p.243) decision and declined to accept the screen if Campbell persisted with the cross. Their sensibilities would not have been offended by a small carved cross embedded among the carved flowers, but not a Page 22 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 large standing cross on top of the screen that was redolent of medieval Catholicism. Nor was this all. Campbell had now made his gift of the altar conditional upon having candles lit on it and so the vestry decided to decline that as well.88 Consequently, Campbell withdrew his offer for both the screen and the altar.89 However, thanks to William Forbes's mediation the vestry again reversed their decision over the altar and the lights, and referred the matter of the screen to the architect.90 In December 1847 Campbell was elected to the vestry.91 This gave him an unprecedented opportunity to advance his ritualist agenda and the following April he was at it again. This time he proposed parts of the service be chanted rather than said. Alexander was disposed to agree, and the vestry agreed to accept the change, but on festival days only.92 Either the vestry or Alexander were becoming more wary of Campbell by this date for there was a report at the May meeting that Campbell had pledged himself to seek no further changes in the conduct of the services.93 However, lay ritualists were by then dominating the vestry so that the report of the consecration of the church in January 1848 in the Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review was a mixture of denials of Romanism and breathless descriptions of a ritualist interior. The incumbent, it was reported, was ‘in principle opposed to every Romanistic practice—opposed to the Romish Church, and to Romanizing tendencies . . . And to this genuine spirit of orthodoxy we willingly accord that implicit credit which we should never allow to the superficial opponent of mere rites and ceremonies arbitrarily termed Romanistic’. To those ill‐informed critics who chose to persist in equating ritualism and Romanism the anonymous writer thought it sufficient to encourage such a person to attend St Columba's in order for their opposition to be (p.244) overcome by its splendour. ‘The Altar is of stone . . . covered with richly carved foliage, and displaying the sacred Monogram, the Agnus Dei, and the Pelican in her piety . . . The eastern window of the chancel is filled with stained glass, exhibiting . . . the Crucifixion, with St Mary and St John on either side, and . . . a figure of St Columba, between St Andrew and St Paul . . . A very elegant and beautiful rood . . . above which in the centre, rises a magnificent cross.’94 This Edinburgh ritualism was driven by younger High Churchmen such as William Forbes and Robert Campbell while older Episcopalians like Lord Medwyn, and northern churchmen such as Alexander, either opposed it or were more cautious. Alexander, for example, in a letter about a disagreement between himself and a Mr Davidson, wrote of ‘the recent very disreputable Romanizing movement in the Church’ as the cause of the argument. It would seem that Alexander's agenda was to provide more effective ministry to the poor and a place for the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Advanced ritualism simply clouded these issues, though at St Columba's he was willing to go along with powerful members of his vestry who were generous benefactors to the new church. His anti‐Romanism was of long standing and a product of the tradition he grew up Page 23 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 in. In 1845, when still the incumbent of St Paul's, he wrote misleadingly to the treasurer over the arguments arising from the use of both the Office and the English prayer book at Sunday services. ‘However much I may prefer the Scottish Office as an exponent of Catholic Truth and a stern protest against Romish error, I shall use no undue influence to forward its cause.’95 There could hardly have been a more volatile mix than the Scottish Communion Office and ritualism in very proper Edinburgh. It was a case of two unknown and questionable cultures arriving at the front door of respectable southern Episcopalianism without even considering using the quiet tradesmen's entrance. Here was a public scheme, launched by leading citizens including advocates and Writers to the Signet, which not only proposed to use the dubious Scottish Office but which also showed (p.245) increasing signs of advanced ritualism. It was no wonder that a number of sensibilities were injured, for Edinburgh Episcopalianism was very decent and upper middle class. One who recalled the society of Edinburgh during the mid‐century remembered Edinburgh Episcopalians as very bourgeois. ‘We were in those days too respectable. I think we knew then why we were Church people, most of whom firmly believed in baptismal regeneration, in the need of the Episcopal order, and we reverenced the Prayer Book. As to services then, they were very plain and infrequent compared with the present day.’96 A priest writing of Edinburgh Episcopalianism in the 1860s described it as still retaining its traditional social cachet. ‘It was an alarmingly respectable form of religion; eminently unprogressive and unaggressive; not without a liberal and kindly, if somewhat condescending, care for “the poor”, but quite content to live and let live, without attracting too much notice. Its theological colour was nebulous, and tended towards a sort of Evangelical Latitudinarianism.’97 This reverence for respectability in middle‐ class Edinburgh Episcopalianism is evinced in the response of one citizen who happened to see the curate of All Saints', Alexander Haldane‐Chinnery, whose wife was a wealthy woman, driving past in a carriage. When the gentleman was told it was the curate's own private carriage he is said to have remarked, ‘The Curate of All Saints' keeps a carriage. By Jove! I'll go and hear him.’98 It was then no surprise that representatives of this customary Edinburgh Episcopalianism should have vociferously objected to the St Columba's project. Correspondence between one member of St Paul's congregation, a Mr Edwards, and John Alexander was eventually published in July 1845 as a pamphlet entitled The Church in Danger. Edwards had been a member of St Paul's for five years and sought a strict conformity to the liturgy and practice of the Church of England. He believed the introduction of the Scottish Office had ‘a Popish motive or tendency’ because the Office encapsulated the doctrine of transubstantiation. Alexander's reply (p.246) was the classic defence of a northern churchman in pointing to the Office as the distinctive mark of the Scottish identity of Episcopalianism:
Page 24 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 surely there is nothing unreasonable in Scottish churchmen preferring their own national Liturgy, which is declared in our Canons to be of primary authority in this Church;—a Liturgy which is used in nearly one‐ third of our Chapels, and by which the Primus of the Scottish Church, Bishop Skinner (our Archbishop of Canterbury) communicates; a Liturgy which must be used at all consecrations of our Bishops, and at the opening of all General Synods. That this Scottish Office teaches the doctrine of transubstantiation in one shape or another, I must explicitly deny. Were such the case, I could not use it.99 Alexander drew Edward's attention to his denouncement of the ‘extreme Oxford party’ from the pulpit, and said that supporters of the Office such as Lord Medwyn and his sons were as opposed to extreme ritual gestures such as crossing oneself and making obeisance's to the altar as he was. He had also expressly forbidden using the water of the font to bless oneself with. But Edwards was not appeased, claiming later that the ‘present attempted change is put in favour of persons from the North: I fear it emanates from the Oxford fountain to the South’.100
The St Columba's project instigated a number of clashes between an increasing diversity of religious cultures which were, by the late 1840s, coming to replace the older northern and southern ones in Scottish Episcopalianism. There were defenders of the northern tradition, such as Edmonstone and Medwyn who, as upholders of the Scottish Office and chary of ritualism, were representative of its conservatism which had been honed in the trials of the penal years to cling tenaciously to its distinctiveness. Then there were those like Sandford and Terrot, who had been raised in the southern parts of the church and had little time for the Scottish Office as exotic, and for ritualism as Romanizing. Into this traditional mix of Episcopalian cultures came foreign Anglican cultures. One of them, upheld by Edwards, was particularly prevalent among middle‐class English immigrants into the city who wanted the same sort of religion as they had known in the (p.247) Church of England and were impatient with different services from their familiar English ones. This Anglicizing culture was espoused by moderate High Churchmen who, like Edwards, were prepared to join the Episcopal Church in Scotland. It was also dear to the hearts of English Evangelicals for whom a double bind kept them outside the church which was foreign to their Englishness and antagonistic to their Evangelicalism formed in England and Ireland. As if that cultural mix was not sufficient it was made more complex by a generation gap. Younger men and children of Scottish Episcopalians were more prepared to embrace ritualism than were their elders in the church. Scottish Episcopalianism was increasingly culturally diversified and becoming divided by the mix of religious pluralism caused by the industrialization and urbanization of modern Scotland. The ritualism of St Columba's was a project inspired and implemented by laymen who had the financial means to provide the expensive furnishings of a more extravagant liturgy and the ecclesiological setting that was deemed proper to it. Page 25 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 The priest, John Alexander, was a fellow‐traveller in this ritualism rather than its initiator. This was a common pattern in Scotland. Early ritualism north of the border was a lay project rather than a clerical one, which was a contrast with England where clergy were more often at the forefront of the push for liturgical change. In the Episcopal Church not only was ritualism initially a lay project, but it involved laity who were exclusively from the upper ranks of society whose Anglo‐Catholic convictions were realized because they had the financial muscle to insist upon them. In Scotland, Anglo‐Catholicism and its attendant ritualism arrived during the 1840s in two major projects that provided inspiration and example to others who had not themselves experienced the English original first‐ hand. The first of these was the design of Cecil Chetwynd Ker, Marchioness of Lothian, who built a shrine to Tractarianism in her new church of St John's, Jedburgh, in 1844. Up until the death of her husband, John William Robert Ker, seventh Marquis of Lothian, in 1841, Lady Lothian followed the religious example of her husband, attending the Church of Scotland. This was in keeping with the advice of her father, Lord Charles Talbot, to ‘let your (p.248) husband reign in your heart’, after ‘the Almighty’.101 She had, in fact, been brought up in a moderate Anglican household by Lord Talbot, attending the Church of England and having regular family prayers from the Book of Common Prayer. In other words, until she became a widow her religious practice was determined for her by the superior males in her aristocratic household. However, after her husband's death she gained an unprecedented freedom to follow the dictates of the Almighty as she herself saw fit. This meant responding to her growing interest in Tractarianism. Her new religious direction was probably initiated by her brother‐in‐law, Henry Ker, who was vicar of Dittisham in Devon. He had been one of the country clergy that John Henry Newman had initially had in mind as the audience for his Tracts for the Times. Under this new religious influence she ceased to attend the local parish kirk and began to drive into Edinburgh for Holy Communion. She also had accepted the comforting doctrine of prayer for the dead from her reading of Tract 72.102 In 1842, just a year after her husband's death, the marchioness launched a plan for a new Episcopal church at Jedburgh, close to her favourite residence of Monteviot. It was not just to be any church, but one which would give expression in its form and furnishings to her new Tractarian convictions. It was to be built according to the medieval principles of the Cambridge Camden Society and had a stone font at the west end, open benches and not box pews, a lectern not a reading desk, and even a stone altar. The cruciform of the Gothic church made this altar the focus of the building. Lady Lothian even managed to have Bishop Michael Russell of Glasgow, into whose diocese Jedburgh fell, agree to the use of the Scottish Communion Office in the new church, though this was unprecedented in southern congregations, except for Stirling. The bishop, overseeing a diocese with masses of unchurched urban immigrants from Page 26 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 England, Ireland, and the Highlands in its towns and cities, was in no position to refuse this unexpected aristocratic gift. The consecration of the church was (p. 249) a High Church and Tractarian bun fight involving Walter Hook, John Keble, William Dodsworth, and Robert Wilberforce.103 However, the marchioness proved detrimental to the fortunes of her new allegiance when she later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851, due to the influence of Henry Manning and the Gorham Judgement.104 Whereas her very high status in the Scottish aristocracy had given kudos to the Oxford Movement in Scotland, her conversion only served to cement in the minds of many Episcopalians the unacceptable apparent connection between that movement and Rome. The major centre of early ritualism in Scotland was the foundation of St Ninian's cathedral in Perth. It was the brainchild of the aristocratic Tractarian laymen Horace Courtney (later Lord) Forbes and George Frederick Boyle (later sixth Earl of Glasgow). Both young aristocrats were at Oxford University, Boyle entering Christ Church in 1844 as a gentleman‐commoner and graduating in 1847, while Forbes was at Oriel from 1846 to 1849.105 It was during this period that both came under the lifelong influence of the Oxford Movement, instilling in them a vision of reclaiming Scotland for the catholic faith through the agency of their church. Under their instigation St Ninian's would prove to be a vastly more contentious establishment than St John's, Jedburgh, and a place of almost permanent strife within the Episcopal Church caused by differing reactions to its alien Anglo‐Catholicism. The ritualist clergy of the cathedral were to exemplify Reed's point about the bellicosity of Anglo‐Catholicism as a counter‐cultural movement. In 1873, for example, Canon Henry Humble unsuccessfully presented his bishop, Charles Wordsworth, for trial before the bishops, on the basis that the bishop's charge against ritualism the previous year had been an attack on himself (p.250) personally.106 Native Episcopalians were divided about the institution. Their uncertainty was not helped by the fact that its aristocratic founders were from old Scottish families. In addition, the establishment was initially favoured by two leading northern clergy, Bishop Patrick Torry of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane, and his younger and energetic protégé, Alexander Lendrum, the priest at Crieff. It was a mixture of support that demonstrates the way in which the lines of demarcation between the cultures of native Episcopalian and imported Anglo‐Catholicism were often blurred. This was a reality which facilitated the argument of Evangelicals and southern High Churchmen that northern High Church traditions and Romanizing ritualism were two aspects of the same coin, a coinage they believed could only devalue the strength of Anglican Protestantism in Scotland. The foundation of the cathedral seemed to prove the contention of the Evangelicals and southerners that the Episcopal Church, at least in its northern traditions, was succouring the Romanizing fifth column. Its driving force was the wealth and Tractarian discipleship of Horace Forbes and Boyle who had devised plans for a splendid cathedral while at Oxford together. They conceived of it as a Page 27 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 base for Episcopalian mission, empowered by having a bishop freed from dependence on a congregational stipend and having around him a band of missionary priests attached to the cathedral. Perth was chosen because it was a reasonably large urban centre; it had a central position geographically in Scotland, which indicates they saw it as a place of national influence; it attracted more tourists than any other place in Scotland except Edinburgh; the new seminary of Trinity College was nearby; and Bishop Torry was likely to be the most sympathetic diocesan.107 There was already a Tractarian presence in Perth in the form of the mission of the Revd John Charles Chambers. Chambers had been appointed by Torry as a missionary in Perth in 1846 in an endeavour to reconstruct a church congregation after the failure of the old qualified (p.251) congregation there to enter the Episcopal Church. Chambers was an Englishman who was ordained deacon in 1842, and priested in the Diocese of Ripon in 1846.108 In a short time this new priest had introduced standard ritualist dimensions to the mission including the daily office, choral services, and a surpliced choir, in addition to the Scottish Office at Torry's insistence. By Christmas there were just thirty communicants enrolled, mainly dissidents from the qualified congregation whose petition for reunion with the church had been prevented by a majority led by the Earls of Mansfield and Kinnoull. Popular anti‐ Episcopalianism in a strongly Presbyterian town was also held to be responsible for the slow progress.109 However, Chamber's mission did mean that an extant congregation, albeit a very small one, was in the offing for the Tractarians' cathedral scheme for Perth.110 Until the consecration of the Tractarian Bishop Alexander Forbes in 1847 Patrick Torry was unique among the Scottish bishops in his overt support for manifestations of Tractarianism in his diocese. It would therefore appear that Torry's policy was sufficient grounds for the truth of the claim that Tractarianism and the Episcopal Church were in catholicizing cahoots together. For Torry was a thoroughly northern churchman, unashamedly and assertively so. He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1763 and ordained priest in 1783, serving under Bishop Kilgour at Peterhead. He succeeded Kilgour in the charge and remained there the rest of his life. In 1808 he was consecrated Bishop of Dunkeld, becoming Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane when the church revived the old medieval titles in 1844.111 He remained a persistent and determined upholder of the Scottish Communion Office. It was only with great reluctance that he agreed, in 1849, to forgo insisting on the use of the Office for the former qualified (p.252) congregation in Perth when they did eventually unite with his diocese in that year.112 Torry was prepared to use whatever energetic forces were at hand to extend or invigorate his beloved northern tradition and Scottish Office. Those included English Tractarians, if they, like Chambers, would undertake work in his diocese. But he made sure in Chamber's case, that whatever innovations might be imported by the Tractarian missionary, the Scottish Office was a condition of his work. It is also significant that in the Page 28 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 first letter Torry wrote to Lord Forbes about the intended cathedral he included a long history of the sufferings of the church during the penal years, calling the Scottish Office ‘her chief glory’.113 He clearly intended one of the principals involved in the scheme to understand and sympathize with the Scottish history of his church. But despite this episcopal approval the main diocesan supporter of the cathedral project was not Torry so much as Alexander Lendrum. Lendrum was the bishop's right‐hand man in the diocese, a de facto vicar‐ general, for which role he had justifiable credentials. He had trained in Edinburgh under Bishop Walker and Torry had ordained him priest in 1832 when he was just 21. He became curate to his grand‐uncle, the old nonjuror Alexander Cruickshank, at Muthill. He eventually succeeded the long tenure of Cruickshank (1782–1834) and showed great energy and zeal in the area in the cause of Episcopacy. Crieff at the time was expanding in its population due to its reputation as a spa and Lendrum gradually moved the centre of his work there from Muthill. It was Lendrum who had located Chambers for the Perth mission, and who pushed for a weekly communion service there, but Torry's preference for a traditional monthly one prevailed.114 Lendrum's support for Tractarianism is noted by a number of Episcopalian historians, but why this was is nowhere explained.115 In 1847 Torry wrote to Lord Forbes about the cathedral plan, explaining that he was informed of the project by Lendrum, who later visited the (p.253) bishop to brief him on the details with which Lendrum was obviously very familiar.116 As Lendrum explained to Primus William Skinner, it was he that Forbes first approached in January 1847, an involvement which Skinner was none too happy about given that the cash‐strapped church was pressed to support already existing funds and projects.117 In reply, and in later correspondence on the cathedral, Lendrum presented it to supporters and opponents as providing a secure home for the Scottish Office.118 However, if Lendrum and Torry supported the cathedral for its potential as a prominent place for what they called ‘the national liturgy’, it was equally clear that the founders desired a Tractarian citadel in their own country. It is a matter of significant regret that all of George Boyle's correspondence and papers relating to the foundation of the cathedral have apparently been destroyed. However, the founders' Tractarianism can be evinced from the initial constitution of the cathedral and the appointments and outcomes of the first years after its consecration and partial completion in 1850. The constitution vested all real power not in the bishop but in the dean and residentiary canons. Only they could appoint staff or change the constitution, subject to the bishop's ratification.119 The original staff selected by the chapter were convinced English ritualists. The dean was the Revd Edward Fortescue, incumbent of Wilmacote, near Stratford‐on‐Avon, who had been an Oxford undergraduate in the late 1830s. He had little to recommend him for a Scottish appointment having little knowledge of the country, the people, or the Episcopal Church. But his main interest was ritual and in this he was pugnaciously supported by the only Page 29 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 residentiary canon, Henry Humble.120 Humble, also ordained in England, in a public letter to Torry's successor set out the ritualist aspiration to make the cathedral a model of catholic worship in Scotland or, as Humble put it, to be an example to the church of ‘correct Ritualism’.121 This ritualist programme was certainly borne out in the ensuing years. Almost immediately the eastward position at the altar was adopted for the (p.254) Eucharist, the chalice was mixed with water in addition to wine, and unleavened bread, candles, incense, and vestments were used, as well as Gregorian chants instead of the Anglican style used in English cathedrals.122 This was advanced ritualism indeed when it is realized that the English Church Union did not adopt most of these as de rigueur ritualism in its famous Six Points until 1875.123 Only the zealous cathedral Anglo‐Catholics can have been surprised that such radicalism provoked opposition, and it came from significant High Church clergy and even previous supporters of the cathedral. Two of the most important were John Torry, son of the bishop and dean of the diocese, and Charles Wordsworth, the new warden of Trinity College. Torry was on the original planning committee for the cathedral but, by 1851, he was an acknowledged opponent. In that year he wrote to Dean Fortescue carpingly criticizing the decorating of the altar with flowers and different coloured seasonal frontals as a ‘stumbling block to many’. But behind what appeared trivial matters there lurked for John Torry the spectre of Rome. ‘We should not’, he advised, ‘imitate her’.124 Even more important than Dean Torry's anxieties about the Romeward direction of St Ninian's ritualism was the increasing opposition of Charles Wordsworth, who became bishop of the diocese in 1852. Wordsworth had arrived in Scotland from England at the invitation of William Gladstone to be warden of the new Trinity College. He was the nephew of William Wordsworth and older brother of Christopher Wordsworth, later the prominent Bishop of Lincoln (1869–85). The brothers came from an impeccably High Church family, with Hackney Phalanx connections through their father, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.125 Wordsworth was to have a running battle with St Ninian's throughout his episcopate, culminating in his decision in 1859 to withdraw from the cathedral to St John's, Perth. This separation lasted until 1872 when a reunion was somewhat patchily effected. In part, it was a consequence of determined, (p. 255) even officious personalities, particularly those of Wordsworth and Humble.126 But it also had to do with the bishop's conservative High Church distaste for extreme ritualism. This hostility was not mere reaction, for he himself used the eastward position while celebrating Holy Communion in Trinity College chapel and had put the school choir into surplices.127 Consequently, Wordsworth had to suffer a campaign waged against him by one fiery parent for ritualism. Major Jelf Sharp publicly accused Wordsworth in December 1847 of initiating Tractarianism at the college. This was, according to Sharp, ‘that slippery path down which so many have fallen into the vortex of Romanism’. He claimed that the cause of this accusation was his receipt of a letter from Page 30 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Wordsworth remonstrating with him for not having knelt during the chapel prayers. Other things Sharp found objectionable were the intoning of prayers, the observance of saints' days, and regular fast days, including Fridays. As a member of the Church of England living in Scotland Sharp huffily proclaimed his shock at these things. However, behind this was a deeper and more public embarrassment experienced by Sharp when Wordsworth had refused him Communion in the college chapel because he was a member of the independent Church of England chapel in Perth. The issue could not be resolved, Wordsworth proving intransigently High Church about schismatics, and Sharp withdrew his son from the school.128 Wordsworth was therefore sympathetic to some ritual reforms in worship but two High Church considerations prevented him from finding the Anglo‐ Catholicism of St Ninian's agreeable. He came from the strand of conservative High Churchmanship which placed a high value on legal establishment for the church, in his case seeing it as almost an article of faith and an expression of the place intended by Christ for his church in society.129 Therefore, he desired closer connections with the Established Church in Scotland, something which Anglo‐ Catholicism prevented. Also, he feared advanced ritualism as the outrider of Rome, as an (p.256) unnecessary barrier in the way of greater Scottish sympathy with the Episcopal Church, and as an impediment to greater understanding with the Church of Scotland. So St Ninian's Anglo‐Catholicism raised suspicions of Romanizing in the anxious Protestant minds of Scottish High Churchmen and Episcopalian Evangelicals alike. At the heart of this cultural clash were the different and incompatible values each placed on Protestantism. Both High Churchmen and Evangelicals fundamentally valued the English Reformation and were glad their church had embraced it. For the Evangelical this was a more fervent appreciation because it was believed that the gross error, superstition, and idolatry of Rome, which was a total corruption of the Gospel, had been replaced by Evangelical truth. This meant that Anglicanism was a totally Protestant church because only in Protestantism was Christ's truth found. The High Church tradition also welcomed the English Reformation, but as a readjustment of medieval error rather than as its replacement. The Reformation had corrected some distortions that had developed in Catholicism since the pristine faith of the Early Church, a period of the first Christian centuries which the High Church called ‘Primitive Christianity’. Consequently, for the High Church party Anglicanism was a reformed, but still Catholic, church. High Churchmen valued the tag of ‘Protestant’ but as a refining description of the more basic description of ‘Catholic’. However, Anglo‐Catholicism would have none of either of these positions. It viewed Protestantism as the Evangelical did Catholicism—as a religion of total error. Anglo‐Catholicism was uncompromising in its antagonism towards Protestantism, and sought to challenge and extirpate both it and any sympathy for it within Anglicanism, be that Evangelical or High Church. Anglo‐ Page 31 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 Catholicism sought to de‐Protestantize Anglicanism, while the High Churchmen, and even more the Evangelicals, sought to preserve their church's Protestant heritage. Both cultures believed their own views of Protestantism were a matter of life and death, on an eternal scale, for both conceived of Protestantism in extreme terms. It was a matter of religious truth or of heresy and either alternative was believed directly to affect the salvation of souls. For both cultures it was like fighting the sixteenth‐century (p.257) English Reformation all over again, but with the positions of Catholic and Protestant in the church reversed. In such a cultural war there could be no prisoners and no compromise. However, the cathedral was an institution that was part of a diocese and even its zealous clergy had to temper their ways somewhat because of that, albeit reluctantly and never as much as the bishop and others would have liked. But there remained another foundation which did not have the same need to compromise and for this reason it was the most overtly Anglo‐Catholic in Scotland. This was the collegiate church founded on Great Cumbrae Island by George Boyle, and sustained by his interest and his finances. Boyle was already financing St Ninian's by an annual grant when he began this, the pet project of his life. By 1851 Boyle had given his new island church £15,000 and intended another £8,000 in endowment.130 Eventually the establishment was estimated to have cost him a staggering £20,000 plus an endowment of about £10,000, which is in addition to the money he poured into St Ninian's.131 His role as the major financier of Tractarianism in Scotland was facilitated by his living poorly for one of his class with his mother in her dower house on the island. His means were further extended in 1869 when he increased his substantial wealth enormously by inheriting his brother's title and vast estates as the sixth Earl of Glasgow. But Boyle's vision of a second Iona training young men in Anglo‐Catholicism and immersing them in the quasi‐monasticism of a celibate priestly college was a romantic Victorian folly for which Boyle eventually near bankrupted himself. The island was too remote from population centres to have any widespread influence in the Episcopal Church, and its small staff of often talented clergy were reduced to a marginalized intellectual role in the church. Aside from intermittent numbers of largely English undergraduates on summer reading parties, and a fitful life as a theological college for the few bishops willing to send students to such an ultra establishment, Cumbrae remained a peripheral establishment in Scottish Episcopalianism. Its congregation, and that of the other chapel Boyle established also at the island's town (p.258) of Millport, came largely from tenants and dependants of the Boyle family. This source came to an end when his family left Cumbrae permanently after his financial disaster in 1885 and the island was bought by the Marquis of Bute, a Roman Catholic convert.132 Bishop Ewing in 1854 had attempted to moderate the college's ritualism and bring it into the mainstream of the diocese by making the bishop its visitor with a power of veto. Accordingly, the customary ritual was reduced by forgoing altar lights at week‐day services, non‐resident clergy were free to use a Page 32 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 surplice for the Eucharist instead of the hitherto compulsory alb and chasuble, bowing to the altar was not to be so ‘ostentatious’, attendance at the daily office was no longer to be compulsory, and these services were to be adapted from the prayer book rather than those currently in use. There are suggestions in these changes that a rather precious and romanticized medievalism had prevailed at the college until then. The dress of the clergy was to be the same as in the English universities and the ‘oratory’ was to be renamed ‘the chapter house’.133 Today the ‘Cathedral of the Isles’ remains a small Victorian gem of ecclesiastical architecture and a tribute to one man's religious devotion and zeal; but it never achieved the prominence in Scottish Episcopalianism that it did in George Frederick Boyle's imagination. In the 1840s Scottish Anglo‐Catholicism remained a tiny plant, imported into the life of the Episcopal Church by the unilateral initiative of wealthy Tractarian aristocrats. As long as this remained the basis of its Scottish sponsorship its influence remained limited. It was only when Anglo‐Catholicism began to be taken up by clergy and laity at the congregational level that it began seriously to impact on the ordinary life of the church. But this congregational development was much later in the century when it was primarily a product of clerical initiative. In the old qualified congregation at Dumfries which united with the Episcopal Church in 1812, immigration by English and Scots necessitated the building of a new church in 1867. In the early 1840s the innovation of a combined service of Matins and Holy Communion had been firmly opposed by the local gentry as too (p.259) different from the worship of the Church of Scotland. The new church, however, was built with plans approved by the Ecclesiological Society, and featured a reredos with a glass mosaic, and carved angels on the new wooden altar. More elaborate ritual, including a surpliced choir, Hymns Ancient and Modern, facing east for the creed, and genuflections were introduced by the English priest. There were congregational objections to these, and public hostility from the congregation towards the evergreen decorations at Christmas in 1872. Two years later when a new constitution was being considered one lobbyist issued a circular which called on members of the congregation to assist the bishops in their opposition to ‘Ritualistic practices and doctrines'. The agitation was successful in retaining a simple unadorned service in the new church for another eighty years.134 The congregation at Helensburgh, founded in 1841, built their first church in 1843. Services consisted of the normal Matins and Evensong each Sunday, with quarterly Communions. Monthly Communions began in 1845 and it was not until the growth of the town in the 1860s that fortnightly Eucharists and on saints’ days began in 1862.135 It is interesting that at this time control of the church still remained in the hands of the managers, mostly Glasgow businessmen. At St Andrews, the Episcopal Church there was extended in 1853, but it still retained its box pews with doors, and a black Geneva gown for preaching, and the altar was covered throughout the year with a crimson velvet cloth embroidered with a chi‐rho. The clerk still Page 33 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 sang the responses and amens alone probably well into the 1860s. When the new church was built in the 1860s a jewelled altar cross was offered by a well‐ known layman in the diocese but refused by the vestry, as were candlesticks. It was not until 1893 that seasonal liturgical colours were used.136 In Campbelltown the innovative ritualist practices of the new priest led to congregational division and some laity leaving the church, but that was not (p. 260) until 1883. These new ways included the introduction of two large candlesticks and flower vases on the altar. The Revd Samuel Rowson explained that these were the sort of changes that were common in hundreds of English parishes by that date, and in most of the cathedrals. He also demonstrated the clerical initiative behind these changes in the religious culture of customary Episcopalianism when he bluntly stated that the ‘real question at large is, whether even the majority of a congregation have a right to forbid to the clergyman the use of things not only sanctioned but enjoined by the laws of his Church’.137 The same late development of ritualism can be found in traditional northern congregations. The new church at Muchalls was built in 1831 and the gallery furnished with seats in 1842. The service described in 1844 had sung metrical psalms, and the surplice was used. It was not until after the induction in 1861 of the Revd William Proby, an Englishman and former naval officer, that ritual changes occurred in 1865 with the addition of a chancel to the church.138 At Keith in the Diocese of Moray where a new church was opened in 1807 the new organ installed in 1815 was the first ‘kist of whistles’ in the area since the Revolution. However, a stone altar was not placed in the church until 1885.139 The new church at Muthill, where Alexander Lendrum became incumbent in 1834, was consecrated in 1836, at which time it had only a small wooden altar, and all the pews faced the pulpit which was anathema to ecclesiologists and Tractarians. Lendrum's quick adoption of the surplice excited much local comment and he was anxious to introduce the old eighteenth‐century usages into the Eucharist. He was one of the few priests to actually use the controversial edition of the Scottish Communion Office, known as Bishop Torry's prayer book. But these ritual changes owed everything to Lendrum's native northern tradition and nothing to Tractarian ritualism. In 1856 the incumbency was assumed by (p.261) Fanshawe Bingham when the congregation had been reduced to sixteen families in the village and the landed gentry in the surrounding area. Some modifications of the interior were made at that time, but there was still only a very small sanctuary at the east end. It was not until another new incumbent that, in 1904, the interior of the church assumed the medieval form and furnishings beloved of the Ecclesiological Society and advanced ritualists.140 Therefore, many traditional congregations were anything but the hotbeds of Anglo‐Catholicism suggested by contemporary Evangelicals and later historians. Their ritual changes occurred at dates often decades behind those in numerous parishes in England, or they were independent products of Page 34 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 zealous young northern priests. When such liturgical changes did occur it was most often the result of priestly initiative, and frequently by priests who were imported from England due to the persistent shortage of Scotsmen for the ministry. That such priests were recruited by diocesan bishops may indicate an acceptance of ritualism in its less extreme forms as the century progressed. But it may also have meant that Scottish bishops had little choice of personnel, and were willing to accept what priests they could get within the loose parameters of what ‘High Church’ had come to mean by the second half of the nineteenth century. These liturgical changes in southern and northern congregations were, as the Revd Rowson pointed out, moderate ritualism when compared with developments in England. But even purpose‐built Anglo‐Catholic churches or extreme ritualist clergy transforming congregations were modifications that came well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The most famous shrine of Edinburgh Anglo‐Catholicism, Old St Paul's of Carrubber's Close, only developed its reputation with the appointment of the Anglo‐Catholic priest Mitchell Innes in 1884.141 At the other end of the country there was an equally notorious Puseyite shrine in St John's, Aberdeen, under the Revd John Comper, forerunner to the even more ritualist St Margaret's in the Gallowgate. Comper did not arrive at St John's until (p.262) 1861 when he was restricted in his liturgical developments by his obedience to the bishop until he went to St Margaret's in 1870, by which time Bishop Suther's respect for Comper's liturgical scholarship and slum ministry left him unconstrained.142 However, Comper learned the basics of his ritualism not from the Tractarians but from his years as curate at Muthill to that energetic northern churchman Alexander Lendrum.143 Cries of ‘Rome’ and ‘Puseyism’ did not necessarily equate to the real thing. The difficulty for the historian in determining their accuracy is that English unused to traditional Scottish liturgical practice could cry up the Anglo‐Catholic wolf. Rather than the manifestations of the Oxford Movement that they imagined such practices to be, what they could have been witnessing were the customs of the nonjuring north persisting into the nineteenth century. The mixed chalice was nearly universal among northern clergy;144 reservation of the Eucharist was a common practice for the sick and aged unable to attend on Sundays;145 it was also common for the altar to be covered in some form of fine coloured cloth, often with an embroidered symbol on it.146 Such customs, and others, were commonplace religion for generations of traditional Scottish Episcopalians, dating from the eighteenth century or even before. They owed nothing to either Oxford or to Roman Catholicism. However, to immigrants and visitors in Scotland from the 1840s when the purported Romanizing of the Tractarians became a commonplace, and who were unaccustomed to such worship, the conclusion seemed obvious. Here was a church that had sold its Protestant soul to Rome or to the Puseyites. It was a conclusion that can only have bewildered Page 35 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 generations of northern High Churchmen for whom Rome was as much anathema as to any subscriber to the Record. Pointing out the Puseyite devil could also be done by Scots like (p.263) Bishop Ewing who fervently wished such differences done away with in favour of greater uniformity with the Church of England. But by the 1840s this was fast becoming an artificial desire given that the Church of England was itself experiencing ritualism and liturgical diversity on a greater scale and with more radical extremes than anything in the tiny Episcopal Church. Bishops like Trower and Ewing, and laity protesting the lack of uniformity with England, were in fact liturgical fossils. They were endeavouring to hold their church to an old‐fashioned High Church line which had long since been superseded, not just by ritualist and Evangelical objectors, but also by the younger generation of High Churchmen such as Walter Hook and Charles Wordsworth. The pluralism of Anglican culture which had begun with the Evangelicalism and Anglo‐ Catholicism of England could not be stopped at the border. For all English Anglicans and Scottish Episcopalians religious diversity was sweeping the old religious cultures away. It was a current of irreversible change that left in its wake an Episcopalianism at the end of the century that was more partisan and argumentative than the Episcopalianism that had begun it. Notes:
(1) ‘Anglo‐Catholic’ is used in this chapter and in others to describe those clergy and laity who, under the influence of the Catholicizing Oxford Movement, endeavoured to transform Anglican worship according to Catholic models. It is recognized that this usage is anachronistic for the 19th century (Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 333). The contemporary term ‘ritualist’ was, however, an epithet used by their antagonists. Such ‘ritualists’ usually preferred to describe themselves as ‘Catholics’, but this leads to confusion with Roman Catholics. Consequently, the more distinctive and less derogatory term ‘Anglo‐Catholic’ has been used here. (2) J. D. Hull, A Letter Respectfully Addressed to the Right Rev the Lord Bishop of Exeter (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1845), 5. (3) Letter from the Rev. Robert Montgomery, M.A., to one of the Managers of St Jude's (London, 1844), 1. (4) John R. McIntosh, Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party 1740–1800 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 233–6. (5) David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 1–19.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (6) A Respectful Remonstrance Addressed to the Rev James Walker, A.M. Senior Minister of St. Peter's Chapel; on the Subject of a Sermon Preached before the Bishop and Clergy of the United Diocese of Edinburgh, Fife, and Glasgow, in St. John's Chapel, on the 22nd of June, 1825 (Edinburgh: David Brown, 1826). (7) James Walker, A Serious Expostulation with the Rev Edward Craig . . . (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1826); Edward Craig, A Reply to the Rev James Walker M.A. Rendered Necessary by his Serious Expostulation on the Subject of Baptismal Regeneration (Edinburgh: David Brown, 1826). (8) George Grub, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861), iv. 180–1. (9) Correspondence Between the Right Rev. Bishop Gleig, &c. and the Rev Edward Craig Respecting an Accusation Lately Published in a Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Episcopal Communion of Brechin (Edinburgh: J. Hay & Co., 1820). (10) Ibid. 25. (11) Donald Meek, ‘Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth‐Century Highlands’, Scottish Studies, 28 (1987), 1–34. (12) David M. Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy 1689–2000 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 570. (13) Grub, Ecclesiastical History, iv. 174–5. (14) J. B. Craven, Records of the Dioceses of Argyll and the Isles 1560–1860 (Kirkwall: William Pease, 1907), 269. See above p. 92. (15) Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 241. (16) R. Foskett, ‘The Drummond Controversy 1842’, RSCHS 16 (1969), 99–109 at 101–2. (17) Foskett also incorrectly cites the canon and the place of the General Synod. The General Synod in 1838 which revised the code of canons was held in Edinburgh, not Aberdeen, and the stipulated canon was the 28th and not the 27th. Canon 28 ‘On the Uniformity to be observed in Public Worship’ was the one requiring clergy to use only the prayer‐book services in conducting public worship, whereas Foskett refers to canon 27 on p. 102. (18) D. T. K. Drummond, Correspondence between the Right Rev. C. H. Terrot, Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and the Rev D. T. K. Drummond, Minister of Trinity Chapel, Dean Bridge, Edinburgh. In Consequence of which the Latter has Resigned his Charge (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842), 9. Page 37 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (19) Bertie , Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 655–8. (20) Report of a Deputation Appointed at a Meeting held in Aberdeen, May 1846, of Ministers and Laymembers of the Church of England Representing the Congregations Adhering to her Forms and Doctrines in Scotland, in Order to Visit England and Communicate with the Bishops and Other Parties in the Established Church on the Subject of their Ecclesiastical Position in Scotland (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1847), 64. (21) Episcopacy in Scotland. Revised Report of the Debate in the House of Lords, May 22 1849, on the Occasion of the Right Honourable the Lord Brougham Presenting a Petition from members of the United Church of England and Ireland Resident in Scotland (London: J. Hatchard, 1849), 232. (22) Andrew Macwhirter, ‘Lesser Known Church Law Cases’, RSCHS 11 (1955), 149–59 at 152. (23) Anon., ‘The Drummond Schism’, Christian Remembrancer, 6 (1843), 103. (24) Examples of Drummond's anti‐Tractarian argument can be found in various lengthy pamphlets by him, including Reasons for Leaving the Scottish Episcopal Church (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842); A Sermon for the Times (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842); The Scottish Communion Office Examined and Proved to be Repugnant to Scripture and Opposed to the Articles, Liturgy, and Homilies of the Church of England (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842); Historical Sketch of Episcopacy in Scotland from 1688 to the present Time (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1845). (25) John Archibald, The Historic Episcopate in the Columban Church and in the Diocese of Moray (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1893), 311–12. (26) Letter to the Bishop of Exeter, 6. (27) Letters on the Subject of the Scotch Episcopal Church by the Right Rev the Lord Bishop of Cashel to the Right Rev David Low, one of the Bishops of that Church (Aberdeen: George Cornwall, 1846), 3. (28) The list of these chapels given in the report of the deputation to England in 1849 lists St Pauls, Aberdeen; Dunoon; St Thomas's, Edinburgh; Fochabers; the estate of the Earl of Galloway, Galloway House, Wigtonshire; Mrs Oliphant's chapel at Gask; St Jude's, Glasgow; Huntly; St Peter's, Montrose; St Ninian's, Nairn. The chapel at Perth given in the 1847 Report of a Deputation is no longer listed. Episcopacy in Scotland, 232. Yet George Wood, Horace Skete's successor as incumbent of St John's qualified chapel there (who led that congregation into union with the Episcopal Church in 1849) certainly used this term in A Pastoral Address to the members of the English Chapel, Perth which he printed in 1848 encouraging union with the Episcopal Church. This terminology, along with the Page 38 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 adherence of the Montrose congregation to these associations of English Episcopalians suggests that the formerly qualified congregations saw their interests as similar to those of the new independent chapels of the 19th cent. (29) Episcopacy in Scotland, 9–10. (30) Episcopacy in Scotland, pp. xi–xii. (31) The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Gerard Tracey, vii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 355–6. (32) R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783–1852 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 431–2. (33) e.g. the Church Pastoral Aid Society was formed in 1836 to secure benefices for Evangelical clergy by buying advowsons. (34) Quoted in Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 112. (35) ‘Scottish Episcopal Church’, Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland (May 1857), 249–52; ‘The General Assembly’, Edinburgh Evening Courant (2 June 1857). (36) Quoted from the Church Intelligencer in SG 1 (1868), 599. (37) John Tulloch (1823–86), Principal of St Mary's College, University of St Andrews, was the leading theologian of the Church of Scotland. Propounding a Broad Church theology that sought to offer an alternative to the old Moderates and the Evangelicals, he upheld the establishment of the Church of Scotland as a defence for its theological comprehensiveness. (38) ‘Scottish versus English Episcopacy’, SG (30 Mar. 1877), 148. (39) Correspondence between the Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Kinnaird regarding the Position of English Episcopalians Worshipping in Scotland (Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1877). (40) Kinnaird to Shaftesbury, 13 Nov. 1876, ibid. 3–4. (41) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 17 Nov. 1876, ibid. 4–6. (42) Kinnaird to Shaftesbury, 22 Nov. 1876, ibid. 7–9. (43) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 24 Nov. 1876, ibid. 9–10. (44) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 24 Nov. 1876, ibid. 10. (45) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 30 Nov. 1876, ibid. 11. Page 39 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (46) Kinnaird to Shaftesbury, 30 Nov. 1876, ibid. 11–18. (47) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 2 Dec. 1876, ibid. 18–20. (48) Kinnaird to Shaftesbury, 7 Dec. 1876, ibid. 20–2. (49) Shaftesbury to Kinnaird, 11 Dec. 1876, ibid. 22–3. (50) Kinnaird to Shaftesbury, 14 Dec. 1876, ibid. 23. (51) Beckles had been an indolent bishop in Sierra Leone who had frustrated Henry Venn's plans for indigenous control of the Church Missionary Society mission in Sierra Leone. C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self‐Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 27–8, 29, 31–2, 31 n. 239. (52) Printed record of ‘a Meeting of Representatives of English Episcopalian Congregations in Scotland, held in the Religious Institution Rooms, Glasgow, on Tuesday, the 6th March 1877’, NAS, CH 12. 16. 126. (53) ‘Meeting of Representatives of English Episcopalian Congregation in Scotland, held in the Religious Institution Rooms, Glasgow, on Tuesday, 6th March 1877, (for private circulation only)’, ibid. (54) Correspondence between Beckles and Eden, SG (13 Apr. 1877), 184–5. (55) Copy of the resolution of the Convocation of York, 19 Apr. 1877, NAS, CH 12. 59. 22. (56) John Hassard, Registrar of the Convocation of Canterbury, to Bishop Eden, 28 Apr. 1877, ibid. (57) Macwhirter, ‘Church Law Cases’, 156–8. (58) In Dec. 1872 Drummond was part of a delegation of English Episcopalians who spoke at a meeting of the Evangelical Church Association in England. There, Drummond described to the gathering how he been at a Presbyterian gathering where he was roundly cheered because, he was told, the Presbyterians were ‘interested in the stand’ he was making. This experience was, said Drummond, ‘worth all the work and all the anxiety of the struggle’. ‘Deputation of “Church of England Congregations in Scotland” to the Church Association’, SG (16 Dec. 1872), 343–6, 345. (59) Bishop Wordsworth to Bishop Eden, 21 Apr. 1877, SG (4 May 1877), 220–1. (60) Bishop Mackarness to William Skene, 2 July 1881, NAS, CH 12. 16. 126.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (61) William Skene to the editor in the Record (10 Oct. 1884), repr. in SG (24 Oct. 1884), 595–6. (62) Bishop Mackarness to William Skene, 2 July 1881, NAS, CH. 12. 16. 126. (63) As amended at the 1838 General Synod this canon read in part: ‘And it is further decreed that if any Clergyman shall officiate or preach in any place publicly without using the Liturgy at all, he shall for the first offence be admonished by his Bishop, & if he persevere in this uncanonical practice shall be suspended until after due contrition he be restored to the exercise of clerical functions’. Records of the General Synod, 29 Aug.–6 Sept. 1838, NAS, CH 12. 61. 1, p. 23. (64) William Skene to Bp Mackarness, 7 July 1881, NAS, CH 12. 16. 126. (65) Bp Mackarness to William Skene, 9 July 1881, ibid. (66) Bp Eden to William Skene, 16 Sept. 1881, ibid. (67) Macwhirter, ‘Church Law Cases’, 153. (68) Bertie , Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 652. (69) Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo‐Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), p. xxiv. (70) Strong, Alexander Forbes, 5. (71) Anon., ‘The incumbents of St. Columba's, Edinburgh’, SSB (Feb. 1898), 36– 8; Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 158. (72) ‘Memorial for certain incumbents of churches in the diocese of Edinburgh to the Right Revd The Bishop of Edinburgh’, 28 Dec. 1843, Scottish Episcopal Church, St Columba's, Edinburgh, NAS, CH 12. 5. 1, fos. 7–16. (73) John Alexander to Bishop Terrot, 5 Jan. 1844, NAS, CH 12. 5. 1, fos. 22–3. (74) Lord Medwyn to unknown, 20 Mar. 1846, NAS, CH 12. 5. 34, bundle B. (75) John Alexander to Bishop Terrot, 5 Jan. 1844, NAS, CH 12. 5. 1, fo. 29. (76) Committee and Minute Book, St Columba's, 18 Apr. 1844, ibid., fo. 54, copy of the resolution transmitted to the dean of Edinburgh by the committee. (77) E. D. Sandford to Charles Reid, 22 Apr. 1844, NAS, CH 12. 5. 34, bundle E. (78) Committee and Minute Book, St Columba's, 7 Dec. 1844, NAS, CH 12. 5. 1, fos. 82–7.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (79) William Forbes to Bishop William Skinner, 23 Jan. 1845, Dowden Papers, NLS, MS 3560, fos. 8–9. (80) Vestry Minute Book, St Columba's, 28 Sept. 1846, NAS, CH 12. 5. 2. (81) Sir Archibald Edmonstone to unknown, 1 June 1845, NAS, CH 12. 5. 34, bundle C. (82) Both Pusey and Keble were enthusiastic about the Scottish Communion Office on the basis it had a more explicit expression of the new Tractarian doctrine of the real corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In 1862 both signed a petition to the bishops of the Scottish church supporting the retention of the Office in the Episcopal Church. So also did the advanced Anglo‐Catholic ritualist John Mason Neale, who believed it was closer to patristic models of what constituted good liturgy than the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Signatories to the Petition to the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church from clergy and laity of the Church of England, against alterations to the primary authority of the Scottish Communion Office in exchange for the removal of the Scottish clerical disabilities’, NAS, CH 12. 59. 10; J. M. Neale, An Earnest Plea for the Retention of the Scotch Liturgy: A Letter to the Lord Bishop of Brechin (London: Joseph Masters, 1862). (83) It came just five months later, on 9 Oct. 1845. (84) Lord Medwyn to unknown, 24 Nov. 1845, NAS, CH 12. 5. 34, bundle C. (85) E. D. Sandford to unknown, 4 Nov. 1846, ibid., bundle B. (86) Robert Campbell to the vestry, St Columba's Minute Book, 7 July 1846, NAS, CH 12. 5.2 (87) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 4 Aug. 1846, ibid. (88) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 10 Apr. 1847, ibid. (89) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 3 May 1847, ibid. (90) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 24 Aug. 1847, ibid. (91) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 20 Dec. 1847, ibid. (92) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 20 Apr. 1847, ibid. (93) St Columba's Vestry Minute Book, 1 May 1847, ibid. (94) SMCR (Jan. 1849), 77–81. (95) John Alexander to John Muir, 22 Mar. 1845, Edinburgh City Archives, ED 10. 14. 34. Page 42 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (96) James Dun, ‘Recollections of the church in Edinburgh half a century ago’, SSB (June 1911,) 135–6. (97) Thomas Isaac Ball, A Pastoral Bishop: A Memoir of Alexander Chinnery‐ Haldane DD Sometime Bishop of Argyll and the Isles (London: Longmans, 1907), 82. (98) Ibid. 84. (99) [William Edwards], The Church in Danger (1845), 9 (100) Ibid. 13. (101) Cecil Kerr, Cecil, Marchioness of Lothian: A Memoir (London: Sands, 1922), 11–12. (102) Rowan Strong, ‘Coronets and Altars: Aristocratic Women's and Mens' Support for the Oxford Movement in Scotland during the 1840s’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History: Gender and Christian Religion, 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998), 393–4. (103) Strong, ‘Coronets and Altars’, 34, 395–8. (104) The Gorham case caused severe disquiet to numbers of High Churchmen and Anglo‐Catholics because it suggested the Church of England was, after all, an Erastian church. The High Church Bishop Henry Phillpotts of Exeter had taken one of his clergy, G. C. Gorham, an Evangelical, to the church courts for being unsound on the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. When the ecclesiastical courts found for the bishop Gorham took the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a secular court. This court found in his favour and in the consequent controversy a number of Anglicans, including Gladstone's great friends, James Hope and Henry Manning, converted to Roman Catholicism. (105) Strong, ‘Coronets and Altars’, 400. (106) John Wordsworth, The Episcopate of Charles Wordsworth (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1899), 198–201. (107) George T. S. Farquhar, The Episcopal History of Perth (Perth: James H. Jackson, 1896), 281–2. (108) Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 206. (109) Farquhar, History of Perth, 260, 267–70. (110) By the time the scheme was beginning to be seriously considered in 1848 the mission congregation numbered 115 members, comprised of 46 from the former qualified congregation, 19 Presbyterian converts, and 50 new residents, Page 43 of 46
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 of which 54 were communicants, and there was a school with some 50 children. J. H. Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn: A History of the Church at Muthill from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dumfries: R. G. Mann, 1907), 57–8. (111) Rowan Strong, ‘Torry, Patrick’, article for forthcoming New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (112) Farquhar, History of Perth, 277. (113) J. M. Neale, The Life and Times of Patrick Torry DD (London: Joseph Masters, 1856), 308–14. (114) Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn, 32, 40, 48–53. (115) Ibid. 68; William Perry, The Oxford Movement in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 51. (116) Neale, Patrick Torry, 307–9. (117) Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn, 54–5. (118) Ibid. 55–7. (119) Farquhar, History of Perth, 299–30. (120) Ibid. 310. (121) Ibid. 311. (122) Farquhar, History of Perth, 312. (123) The Six Points consisted of defending the use of the mixed chalice, altar lights, unleavened bread, the eastward position, Eucharistic vestments, and incense. (124) Letter (copy): Dean Torry to Dean Fortescue, 22 Dec. 1851, NAS, CH 12. 12. 2271. (125) Wordsworth, Charles Wordsworth, 1. (126) Wordsworth, Charles Wordsworth, 124–30. (127) Ibid. 9. (128) Printed (circular?) letter: Jelf Sharp to the Council of Trinity College, 13 Dec. 1847, Buccleuch Muniments, NAS, GD 224. 998. 7, p. 9. (129) Wordsworth, Charles Wordsworth, 15.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (130) Henry Caswell, Scotland and the Scottish Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1853), 107–8. (131) Perry, Oxford Movement in Scotland, 58. (132) Craven, Records of Argyll, 386–8. (133) CC, Register of Services, 22 Apr. 1854, in wall cupboard in sacristy. (134) Jean S. Maxwell, The Centenary Book of St John's, Dumfries (Dumfries: Robert Dinwiddie, 1968), 33, 45–58. (135) Barbara M. Thatcher, ‘The Episcopal Church in Helensburgh in the Mid‐ Nineteenth Century’, in John Butt and J. T. Ward (eds.), Scottish Themes (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 98–123. (136) T. T. Oliphant, Historical Notes Relating to the Episcopal Congregation at St Andrews from the Time of the Revolution to the Present Day (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1896), 53, 78, 90. (137) ‘St Kieran Episcopal Church’, Campbelltown Courier (19 May 1853); Letter, the Revd Samuel Rowson to the editor, Glasgow Herald (18 May 1883), 9. I am grateful to the archivist of the Argyll and Bute Council, Mr Murdo MacDonald, for drawing my attention to this Campbelltown controversy. (138) John Paul Hill, The Episcopal Chapel at Muchalls (London: Mowbray, 1956) 48, 61–2. (139) John Archibald, History of the Episcopal Church at Keith in the Diocese of Moray in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, with other Reminiscences of the Dioceses of Moray and Ross (Edinburgh: R. Grant, 1890), 102, 122. (140) Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn, 45–6, 48, 59, 79–81. (141) Mary E. Ingram, A Jacobite Stronghold of the Church (Edinburgh: R. M. Grant, 1907), 108–24. (142) ‘The Rev. John Comper’, SSB (May 1894), 95–7. In 1865 Comper agreed to forgo the use of eucharistic vestments and candles at St John's. ‘Correspondence’ between Comper and Bishop Suther, Union Review, 4 (1866), 218–21. (143) Shepherd, Episcopacy in Strathearn, 67–8. (144) F. C. Eeles, Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1910), 43.
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Partisan Episcopalianism: Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics 1 (145) Id., Reservation of the Holy Eucharist in the Scottish Church (Aberdeen: W. Jolly & Sons, 1899). (146) Eeles, Traditional Ceremonial, 23–5.
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Aristocratic Episcopalianism Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0006
Abstract and Keywords The religious cultures of both male and female members of the Scottish nobility are examined. While some members of this class began to exercise a greater interest in religion during the nineteenth century, their impact upon Episcopalians was ambiguous. As patrons, largely interested in local influence or exercising a genuine religious conviction, their wealth and status could be enabling in the development of local and even national infrastructure for an impoverished Episcopal Church. However, that power could also become divisive when it came into conflict with the religious allegiances and traditions of naïve Scottish Episcopalians. Keywords: aristocrats, Episcopalian traditions, patronage, women–aristocratic
The need for church extension in the Episcopal Church was arguably greater in proportion to its size than other Scottish churches because of its previous illegal status. This meant that few, and often inadequate, chapels were constructed before 1800. Yet the official leaders and organs of the church were constantly bemoaning the lack of generosity towards their church by Scottish Episcopalians. It had the record, the Daily Mail reported in 1886, ‘of being the smallest giver per member of any Church in Christendom’. In that year its members gave £12,121 to support all the agencies of the church, including stipends, which was 7s. 8d. per member. Even at its highest diocesan rate, that of St Andrews with 14s. 2d. per member, it was still considerably below that of other Scottish churches. Aberdeen and Brechin gave just 4s. 11d. and 4s. 10d. per communicant respectively. According to one of the clergy at the Representative Church Council meeting that year this was due to the fact that Page 1 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism the church was weakest among the middle classes, who were the mainstay of financial support in other churches. ‘They had not got a hold on the middle class, they had not got those who were the backbone and sinew of Scotland; they had those who stood at the top of the ladder, and they were proud of them.’ Even the incomes of the bishops were, according to the newspaper, ‘apostolic in their meagreness’.1 The traditional remedy for this financial lack was to look to the wealth and generosity of the landed class. One of the ways the aristocracy and lairds most liked to respond was in the building of chapels, either wholly on their own, or as the major contributor to a more local effort. This building boom went on for most of the nineteenth century in a bid to catch up with increasing demand. Not only were chapels needed for new congregations, but also for (p.265) older ones as inadequate eighteenth‐century meeting houses were either torn down, extensively renovated, or abandoned for new buildings. The congregation at Fochabers, in Moray, for example, met in a thatched cottage until a new church was built in 1834, courtesy of the Duke and Duchess of Gordon.2 Similar noble and lairdly generosity was forthcoming throughout the country. Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch has already been mentioned in connection with Argyll. His family's West Indian fortune enabled him to build not only a new mansion house costing £100,000, but also a church at the new family seat at Poltalloch costing £5,000. This was in addition to a new church, bishop's house, and school at Lochgilphead in combination with a Miss Orde of the village.3 In Aberdeenshire, Mr Leslie of Rothie gave the site for a humble parsonage and chapel in the 1760s for the congregation at Meiklewart. When the congregation subsequently moved to Meiklefolla he again gave the site for a chapel in 1796.4 Sir John Forbes built a chapel in 1835 after he bought the planned village of New Pitsligo from Sir William Forbes.5 At Old Deer land for a church was also given by the local proprietor, James Russell, on his estate of Aden. The first chapel in the grounds was burned in 1745, and the second on the estate was built in 1766 to seat 500. The third, St Dronstane's, was built in 1850.6 George William Fox, ninth Baron Kinnaird, built a chapel at his seat of Rossie Priory, near Inchture, which was one of the finest private chapels in the country, to which any of the surrounding inhabitants was welcome to attend. Numbers did so, despite its advanced ritual. Lord Kinnaird was accordingly praised by one Church of Scotland minister, the Revd Allan Menzies of Abernytie, who drew from his example a lesson for all the landed class of Scotland, though Menzies deplored the aristocrat's Episcopalianism as separating him from the Presbyterian lower classes. (p.266) Lord Kinnaird discharged faithfully and zealously the duties of his position as a landed proprietor; and it is a fact worthy of the attention of the nobility and gentry of this country, that by residing upon their estates and filling their natural position among the people they have it in their power to secure great influence and great affection. Though Lord Kinnaird Page 2 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism unfortunately cut himself off from the people in point of religious worship, and lost to a great degree the support of that agency which can do more than any other to bind the different ranks of society together, still by living among his people, and taking an interest in them and their concerns, he made himself their leader as a nobleman ought to be.7 The Duke of Buccleuch built and endowed a chapel at Dalkeith, his border seat, in response to a petition from local Episcopalians.8 Claude Bowes Lyon, twenty‐fourth Lord of Glamis and Earl of Strathmore, a very devout Episcopalian who served on the vestry of St John's, Forfar, restored the chapel of Glamis castle which served as a chapel for local Episcopalians, and he was the major contributor to restoring the parsonage of the Forfar charge.9 So there seems to have been a rise in the commitment of the landed class to the Episcopal Church. This was most often connected with their Scottish estates and consequently with the basis of their local influence.
Unfortunately the Scottish landed class are still awaiting their historians and have not received as much attention recently as the middle and working classes.10 This is unfortunate as they remained the most influential and powerful class in Scotland throughout the nineteenth century, though having to share their political power with the middle class as the century wore on. But at the local level, where their religious patronage was largely focused, they ruled supreme in rural Lowland Scotland. In 1878 just sixty‐eight titled persons owned half the land of Scotland, (p.267) while 580 owned three‐quarters. At the top of the landed class were the great aristocratic houses, such as Arygll, Bute, Atholl, Buccleuch, and Sutherland. The aristocracy and rural lairds managed to retain their power in the localities because they, and their tenant farmers, were largely successful in meeting the rising demands of industrial society for rural products by aggressive agricultural improvement. But even on improved farms the required energy remained a combination of animal and human power that kept the need for farm labour constant. Consequently, rural areas in Lowland Scotland were not that different in 1900 in their social structure than they had been at the beginning of the century, though there had been depopulation in the southern Lowlands. Unlike the Highlands, Lowland hereditary estates remained largely intact in these areas. This cementing of the place of the hereditary rural landlord meant that, despite in the Highlands this class being decimated in the mid‐nineteenth century, rural society remained hierarchical, and deferential, though less so in the North‐East because of the real possibility of servants becoming small farmers. In other rural areas the lack of peasant ownership of land continued to mean a dependent tenantry.11 There has been even less examination of the religious lives and agendas of the Scottish landed classes.12 But aristocratic women have been the subject of some attention by recent researchers.13 Therefore, some recourse has had to be made here to research into the religious lives of English aristocracy in the nineteenth century. This is not as disconnected from the Scottish experience as it would Page 3 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism have been a century earlier, because by the nineteenth century the hereditary landed classes of Scotland were becoming increasingly British in their outlook and culture. Throughout the (p.268) century, at an ever greater rate they sent their sons to be educated at English public schools and at English universities. But this meant a growing disconnection with native Scottish culture as more and more of the scions of the Scottish landed families were imbued with an Anglocentric Britishness. The Scottish aristocracy increasingly adopted the English ways of their southern counterparts so that it is likely there were similarities in the religious purposes of both sets of aristocrats in their localities. The locality continued to be the focus of most of the hereditary landed class. It was the seat of their traditional power which took on a new lease of life with the development of estates for hunting and fishing as recreational activities in the nineteenth century. Country house parties outside the London season were increasingly possible even for Scottish aristocrats with the development of railways in the mid‐Victorian decades. This even gave the Highlands a new lease of proprietal life when estates became desirable for their recreational use, rather than their agricultural value. Also, the lesser lairds and aristocracy could not afford the expense of a London‐based political life. Consequently, life on their estate and estate management was the central fact of their lives. As Lowland estates became increasingly profitable this opened up new British horizons for them, so that they were able to enjoy excursions to partake of the metropolitan life of London and parties in the country houses of England. This of course further increased their social and economic distance from the rest of Scottish society, as well as their solidarity with the English landed class. But for both great magnates and small lairds, it was the estate and its adjacent district that remained the basis of their existence and the centre of their attention.14 Aristocratic religious philanthropy of various kinds has usually been seen by historians as a manifestation of their desire to exert social control and maintain the pre‐eminence of their class in the state and in the locality. Funding local religion by the English aristocracy was, according to J. V. Beckett, a standard way of displaying their ‘social leadership’ and maintaining traditional social cohesion under aristocratic control. But they also felt a sense of duty towards the less advantaged on their estate, whom (p.269) they were customarily expected to relieve. Beckett believes that their engagement in church provision was because the local church was simply too important an agent of social control to be neglected. Like their regular appearance on their estates, religious philanthropy, for those given to it, was a means of cementing ties of deference in their district and preserving the existing hierarchical social order.15 A recent study of the aristocracy in nineteenth‐century Carmarthenshire highlights the way that aristocratic ideology undergirded their religious funding. They showed most readiness to support local initiatives by way of renovating the parish church, and particularly upheld religious education in local schools. It was an expression of their highly developed paternalism with its expectations of Page 4 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism benevolent duty and understated self‐sacrifice towards dependants from those who regarded themselves as natural leaders of the community. Such benevolence towards tenants, expressed in giving tenants' families first options on vacant farms, was at the heart of what Matthew Cragoe terms the ‘moral economy of the landed estate’. In Carmarthenshire this encouraged local proprietors to increase their giving towards the established Church of England when it came under threat financially from the reform of the church rates, and from the growing threat of disestablishment.16 What neither Beckett nor Cragoe mentions is the element of personal belief in the religious philanthropy of the landed class. In addition to the social control, and class ideology, the respective Christian beliefs of the local aristocracy were an important factor in their religious support during the nineteenth century. The landed class were becoming more religious than their eighteenth‐century forebears. Not across the entire upper class of course; as in other classes there were nobility and gentry who were swells as well as those who were earnest.17 But in Victorian Britain there were a lot more religiously earnest members of the upper classes than there had been. The intensifying of aristocratic and gentry piety owed much to the Evangelical Revival, and particularly the (p.270) efforts of the upper‐middle‐class ‘Saints’ William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and Hannah More. Inspired by the thought of the French Revolution as a consequence of upper‐class infidelity they successfully spread their religious message among the upper orders who had no desire to see the guillotine set up in Westminster. When Victoria came to the throne the religious assault on the upper echelons of British society had even managed to influence its supreme pinnacle, the royal court, which under her predecessors had withstood the Evangelical challenge in favour of a rather more frivolous eighteenth‐century lifestyle.18 The religiosity of the ruling classes received a further boost of energy in the 1830s when some of the children of the upper‐class Evangelicals of Wilberforce's generation turned to the new religion of the Oxford Movement.19 The pervasive Evangelicalism of nineteenth‐century Britain created a moral seriousness in the religious individual and in society. This moral earnestness was common to British Evangelicalism, and also to its major rival in the Anglican Church, Tractarianism or Anglo‐Catholicism.20 It drove Evangelical aristocrats such as Lord Shaftesbury to his life's work of social reform; and Anglo‐Catholic nobility like Charles Wood, Viscount Halifax, to spend his energies spearheading the Anglo‐Catholic defence organization, the Church Union. Episcopalian landed proprietors likewise spent most of their religious efforts, if they had them, acting as patrons to local Episcopalian congregations which were adjacent to their estates or in areas their family was traditionally associated with. The Earl of Kellie was prominent in the Episcopalian campaign in the 1790s for the repeal of the penal laws, but he spent more time supporting the Pittenweem congregation in Fife, which was close to his estates. In 1805 he gave 50 guineas for a new chapel there. When he died in 1830 the title passed to Page 5 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism another branch of the family which was non‐resident in Fife and the congregation lost the (p.271) interest of the succeeding earl.21 The Duke of Gordon provided land for a small chapel at Huntly in 1770 at the nominal feu duty of 3s. a year.22 Lord Panmure paid an annual donation of £10 to enable the provision of a priest in the new industrial settlement of Lochee in Dundee.23 The Earl of Elgin gave £100 towards the establishment of a new congregation at Dunfermline comprised of Dissenters from the Church of Scotland.24 At Cruden, in Aberdeenshire, the Earl of Errol largely funded the new church, built in 1843 according to the best standards of the Ecclesiological Society, complete with chancel, three steps to the altar, and sedilia. At Muchalls, it was only when an Episcopalian bought Muchalls castle from non‐Episcopal landlords that the local proprietor began to support that congregation.25 The Earl of Airlie and Sir James Ramsay were constant contributors to the new Episcopal church at Alyth. In 1857 Ramsay subscribed £409. 14s. 10d. for the church, and the earl gave the site.26 The earl also gave £50 to the Kirriemuir church building fund in 1849, and in 1867 the priest wrote to thank him for the £6. 10s. for repair of the ‘hot water apparatus’.27 It is evident from these examples, and the earlier ones of chapel building in Chapters 3 and 5 by the landed class, that it was the local congregation within the reach of their estates that prompted the most significant financing by the aristocracy and the lairds. Indeed, a number of these chapels were actually on estate land and were obviously built to serve as an estate chapel for the proprietor and his family, and the estate workers, as much as they were ostensibly meant to be a home for existing Episcopalian populations. One of the most characteristic examples of this motivation by the local laird was the new chapel of Fasque in the Diocese of Brechin. It was William Gladstone who persuaded his father to build a chapel on grounds of his new estate at Fasque in (p.272) Kincardineshire in 1844. Previously, when the devout High Church William could not get to the Episcopal chapel at Laurencekirk, he had perforce to attend the parish church at Fettercairn.28 A more convenient chapel was the one thing lacking to William Gladstone in his spiritual home in Scotland. The chapel was built despite the fact that there were only thirteen Episcopalians resident in the area.29 A congregation was built up from the estate servants and those that the Gladstone influence could persuade to attend. This example encapsulates the way in which both faith and class interest lay behind Episcopalian upper‐class patronage of their church in the locality of their estates. Some of the most persistent and direct patronage came from aristocratic women. According to K. D. Reynolds such upper‐class feminine patronage was distinctive in four respects, compared with that of the religious involvement of middle‐class women. It was confined to rural churches where the women's family were the primary patrons; the social, economic, and political position of these women enabled them to exercise uncharacteristic female authority over Page 6 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism the local clergy; it provided such women with the opportunity to discuss religion with men of influence; and ‘few, if any, belonged to Protestant Nonconformist churches’.30 This last generalization needs to be nuanced a little with regard to Scotland, where the Episcopal Church was Protestant Nonconformist, although Episcopal clergy disliked the term Dissenter being applied to them. As far as they were concerned they were not Dissenters but had been summarily ejected from the Established Church in 1689. While the predominance of aristocratic support for the Established Churches of England and Scotland is undoubtedly true, this had a detrimental effect for the Episcopal Church. Despite the nominal Episcopalianism of many, perhaps most, of the Scottish landed classes this did not translate into widespread support. It was precisely because it was not the Established Church in Scotland that numbers of the purportedly Episcopalian lairds and aristocracy either did not attend it, or (p.273) were lukewarm towards it. As one Episcopalian writer remarked of the Earl of Strathmore, he was in a minority among his class in being ‘consistently a Churchman on both sides of the Tweed’.31 That is, in Scotland he supported the Episcopal Church in preference to the Established Church. However, aristocratic Episcopalian women in Scotland certainly confined their patronage to the locality of their estates, which was probably where their limited power as women was most able to be exercised. Successive Duchesses of Argyll were constant supporters of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles. In 1855 Anne Campbell32 wrote to Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford explaining that ‘the [Episcopal Church] also in this place mainly looks to the means God has placed in my power’.33 She somewhat exaggerated the reliance the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles placed upon her, for it had other wealthy supporters such as the Earl of Glasgow. But, undoubtedly, the support of the Duchess of Argyll for such a poor church was obviously very significant in terms of her local prestige as much as for any influence and wealth she could bring to bear. Elizabeth Campbell34 was a fervent supporter of the Episcopal Church, having been raised in an Anglican family as the daughter of Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, a devout Tractarian and intimate of William Gladstone.35 Amelia, Duchess of Argyll, also was a devout Episcopalian, and the daughter of Bishop Claughton of St Albans.36 She was instrumental in gaining the permission of her husband, the eighth duke, who was overlord of the island of Iona, to grant a feu for the Episcopal Church to build a retreat house on the island in 1894. It was probably her influence that was able to surmount local clerical opposition, when the Church of Scotland minister presented a petition to the duke, purportedly from all the island's inhabitants, opposing the Episcopal Church's plans. The duke merely drew attention to the existence of both Free and (p.274) Established Churches on the island and remarked that he was not about to prevent others enjoying similar religious liberty.37
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism A number of these aristocratic Episcopalian women were just as likely as their male counterparts to fund and support more extreme religious causes. Lady Frances Kinnaird was a stalwart supporter of the Tractarian Alexander Forbes, Bishop of Brechin, and in the magnificent private chapel of Rossie Priory she installed a stone altar with its suggestions of Eucharistic sacrifice.38 In the 1860s the parish minister of Monimail, in Fife, found he could no longer rely on the support of the patron, Lady Elizabeth Cartwright. It was all due to pernicious Tractarian influence, he confided to a friend, remarking that he was glad to see others of her family at church, ‘but sorry to miss Lady Elizabeth. You have no idea how great a loss a person of her influence is to a country church. Bother the Puseyites.’39 Unlike Lady Kinnaird, Elizabeth Cartwright's gender did not compel her to rely for her patronage on the position of her husband. Being patron herself by virtue of owning land in her own right gave Lady Cartwright more autonomy to act publicly in accordance with her own religious beliefs. But a more powerful example of this female religious independence in aristocratic Episcopalian patronage was exercised by Elizabeth, Duchess of Gordon. The risks that the Episcopal Church ran in its necessary alliance with aristocratic wealth can be seen in the changing agendas of the Duchess of Gordon with respect to the congregation at Fochabers. The Duke of Gordon was one of the great landowners in the North‐East. In 1813 the then Marquis of Huntly, heir to the Duke of Gordon, married Elizabeth Brodie (1794–1859), daughter of Alexander Brodie, MP for Elgin, and of Elizabeth Wemyss, who was a granddaughter of the Earl of Wemyss.40 The duke and duchess began to plan in 1832 an Episcopal chapel in the grounds (p.275) of Castle Gordon, their main residence, which was nearby the village of Fochabers. It was completed in 1834 at a cost of £1,300, the duchess selling some her jewellery to finance it.41 Such a substantial expression of piety had evidently more to do with the duchess than her husband for, in 1827, one of the Episcopal clergy urged his bishop to write to her rather than the duke to encourage the design, commenting, ‘She is a very pious person’.42 But the duke's influence may not have been insignificant in these early years as he was, although a ruling elder of the Church of Scotland, by preference an Episcopalian, as she herself had been since birth.43 However, by 1832 the duchess's piety was already causing disquiet to Bishop Low of Moray and Ross. In April that year he wrote to James Munro, a carpenter and leader of the little congregation of native Episcopalians. Munro had been in correspondence with the duchess before this but these letters have not survived. From the bishop's letter it is clear that Low wrote to strengthen Munro's arguments in support of the Episcopal Church for the duchess was beginning to have some doubts about it. She apparently maintained that the beliefs of the Episcopal Church could be changed merely by a decision of the Episcopal Synod, and that some of its doctrines were unscriptural. The bishop reminded Munro that the bishops themselves were subject to the code of canons that only a General Synod could change. As for unscriptural doctrines, if this were so then Page 8 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism the Church of England would have ceased to remain in communion with the Episcopal Church.44 There the matter of the duchess's devotion remained for a few years. In October 1834 she wrote to David Low's successor as bishop of Moray, Alexander Jolly, asking permission to use the Book of Common Prayer for the Eucharist rather than the Scottish Communion Office. She was supported in this request by another proprietor, Gordon of Cairnfield.45 Jolly, a firm supporter of the (p.276) Scottish Office, was prepared to grant her request as it was for a new congregation, but not without reminding her first of some uncomfortable facts with regard to her lairdly supporter. Cairnfield's family had for generations been worshippers in the Arradoul congregation where his parents still attended church. However, Cairnfield had taken a dislike to the Scottish Office and in doing so had encouraged others in similar objections which had resulted in the division of the Arradoul congregation. Cairnfield refused to communicate in any chapel that maintained the use of the Office, having encouraged a change to the English liturgy in both Elgin and Enzie. But Jolly wanted it clearly understood that he was granting the use in Fochabers because it was a new congregation whereas he would not sanction the change in an existing congregation because of the superiority of the Scottish liturgy. Unlike Cairnfield the Gordons had not refused to communicate where the Scottish Office was used, and Cairnfield's actions were, the bishop asserted, an attack on the unity of the church.46 But the duchess's disquiet about the Episcopal Church persisted, and the issue came to a head in 1847, as a consequence of a deepening of her Evangelicalism between 1844 and 1847.47 In April the congregation addressed a memorial to their benefactor. A successor to the previous priest was needed and the duchess again proposed to appoint one herself, only this time without seeking the sanction of the bishop's licence. This, the little group of memorialists pointed out, would effectively separate them from their church. They accordingly begged her to reconsider in a petition signed by forty‐three members of the congregation. Under these circumstances we feel it our duty to represent to your Grace, with the deepest respect, our earnest desire to continue in that Communion to which we now belong, and from which we can see no sufficient ground of separation. It is in justice to ourselves and to the Church of which we are Members that we have felt called upon to address your grace on the subject of an appointment the nature and condition of which are not in accordance with our religious feelings and convictions.48 (p.277) There were just five members who did not sign. One was a churchwarden, a surgeon, who was peeved at the bishop for not answering a letter he had sent to him, and because the congregation did not have the means to pay for an incumbent without the duchess's money. Another was the churchwarden's niece; while another was a Presbyterian convert who maintained she was already under the authority of an Page 9 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism English bishop.49 The duchess was unmoved. Two days later her reply informed them that an English clergymen, George Williamson, had already accepted the charge, supported by several members of the congregation and the Duke of Richmond, who had inherited the Gordon title in 1836. Her initiative, according to the duchess, would make the chapel an English one on the same footing as other chapels ‘in the colonies or in Foreign Countries’. But the duchess was confident her appointment would contribute to their edification and to ‘the establishment of many in sound Scriptural truths’.50 It must have come as something of a surprise to the Scottish Episcopalians at Fochabers to be equated with a colony or a foreign country.
Elizabeth Gordon's unilateral appointment of an English clergyman without the sanction of the diocesan bishop placed the congregation, against their will, in schism from their church and was a direct consequence of the duchess's fervent Evangelicalism. Hers was no sudden stereotypical conversion, but a gradual development over the years subsequent to her marriage. Whatever the cause her Evangelicalism became evident by 1821 when her Bible‐reading and increasing religious habits led to her being called a ‘Methodist’ by other women in her circle. In London in the early 1830s she regularly attended the preaching of a number of Evangelical clergy. Her husband, the sixth Duke of Gordon since 1827, died in May 1836 and the title passed to his maternal nephew, the Duke of Richmond. She went to live in their former home of Huntly Lodge where she transformed the household into a model of Evangelical piety.51 Her patronage of the Episcopal church at Fochabers was based on an Evangelical agenda, as she herself explained in 1833. ‘I think I told you about my wish to have (p.278) an Episcopal Chapel here (together with an infant school‐house), as the most apparent way to opposing the increase of Popery, if we can procure a gospel minister, which I look in faith that God will provide.’52 By 1840 her views had solidified somewhat. ‘I was brought up by Episcopalians; I believed my mother to have been one . . . But having been led by a way I knew not to enter the Episcopal Church, it was in that Church that I was brought to the knowledge of the truth . . . and to that chamber I have been the honoured instrument, and the only one so honoured in the North, of bringing the presence of the Bridegroom in “the word of his truth”.’ In other words, she had been a chosen instrument of God to bring the light of Evangelical truth to the northern parts of the Episcopal Church. However, she was now considering the respective Evangelical merits of both the Episcopal and the Church of Scotland. In this weighing of the truth she was initially convinced that she should remain as she was. ‘I am led solemnly and conscientiously’, she told a friend, ‘to prefer that to which God in his providence has led me to belong . . . I believe that were I now to leave the Church of England, I should act contrary to the mind of the Spirit, the leadings of providence, and my own conscience.’53 But it was clear that continued Episcopalianism was conditional on her being able to continue to propagate that Evangelical truth which, to her, was a higher loyalty than that she felt towards the Episcopal Church. She would attend the parish church (for she was opposed to voluntarism) for the sermon, but communicated only in the Episcopal. But, in 1840, influenced by the preaching reputation of one of the supply ministers at Page 10 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism Fochabers parish church, she finally went to Communion in the Church of Scotland. The following morning she received a note from the Episcopal minister remonstrating against her action as schismatic. Such an antagonistic interpretation, though quite traditional in North‐Eastern Episcopalianism, cannot have endeared the Episcopal Church to her Evangelical spirit.54 She became intensely divided at the Disruption over whether to support the Established Church or the Free. She remained (p.279) opposed to voluntarism, but was drawn to the Evangelical convictions of the Free Church and its ministers. Ultimately, the question of religious allegiance turned for her around the head‐ship of Christ over the church and church discipline, although by this time she had a dislike of the formal liturgy of the Anglicans. It was on the basis that her church had surrendered its discipline over its members that she left the Episcopal Church for the Free Church in 1845.55 This was the same year in which a number of Tractarians followed Newman into the Roman Communion. Possibly the duchess felt it was the inability of the Church of England to control the Romanizing Tractarians that appeared to her such an unpardonable lapse of discipline and which catalysed her change of religious allegiance. So, in 1847, the Fochabers Episcopalians were faced with the power of their former benefactor being turned against them as a consequence of her changing religious beliefs. The Fochabers congregation sent the duchess a second memorial in which they apologized for not being able to agree with her ‘views with regard to Episcopacy’. Their customary views on the matter were that if they were not under a Scottish bishop then they could not be under any other bishop at all and still be members of the Anglican Church. The alternative was that episcopal authority was unnecessary, but if that were so then Episcopalians were at an end and ‘we cannot be persuaded to join in causing their extirpation’. All they asked was for the status quo to be maintained; that is, to remain a congregation of the Episcopal Church under a Scottish bishop. Nor did they understand how the duchess could claim the support of members of the congregation. This numbered just forty‐eight persons and forty three of these had signed the previous petition against the unlicensed clergyman. In conclusion they drew attention to the dependence they had on the chapel, with virtually everyone unable to reach any other church on Sundays.56 In a letter to an unnamed correspondent the same year the duchess explained her motives further than she condescended to do to the congregation. Here she spelled out her Evangelical (p.280) agenda to transform that part of the country in her own religious image. ‘You are quite aware that ever since I was asked to procure a Clergyman for Elgin in 1828, my anxious wish has been to bring to that part of the Country, those who would preach the same Evangelical Doctrines;—Scriptural in their Essence and according to the literal and natural sense of the Articles of the Church of England.’ To do this she admitted that she had to go outside the ranks of the Episcopalian clergy, but that she had not, until Page 11 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism then, found anything objectionable in the Episcopal Church itself. However, now she believed that the canons of that church were contrary to essential scriptural truths and she could not, consequently, ask an English clergyman to sign them as a precondition to accepting a charge in the Episcopal Church. She claimed she was supported in this view by an English bishop who also maintained that an independent English clergyman in Scotland was an Episcopalian solely by virtue of his episcopal ordination.57 However, the duchess's appointed clergyman, George Williamson, did not last long. The congregation had overwhelmingly boycotted the chapel and preferred instead to travel to a more distant one for occasional Sunday services. In December 1849 the congregation was again petitioning her with regard to his successor, a petition in which the Duke of Richmond and Gordon's factor, Edward Wagstaffe, was prominent. From the beginning the congregation had not merely acquiesced in her appointment, but had written (presumably explaining their objections) to Williamson the day before he began his duties there, and to the English bishops. They again requested her to nominate a clergyman who would accept the bishop's jurisdiction. The local people attempted to appeal to the class instincts of the duchess by drawing attention to the inconvenience of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon under the present arrangements. Despite the Fochabers chapel being on the grounds of Castle Gordon, the schismatic nature of the chapel meant the duke had to bring in an Episcopalian chaplain for worship at the castle.58 But the (p.281) duchess would not budge. She would not, she replied, give ‘any countenance to the Scottish Episcopalian Church, which I believe to be in error’.59 The majority of the congregation remained persistent in their endeavours to have ‘their’ chapel remain canonically Episcopalian, and in March 1852 they tried again in another petition to the duchess signed by thirty members. They entreated the duchess ‘for our immortals Souls' sake’ not to reject them this time. Before your late revered husband the Duke of Gordon built the present Chapel here we had a place of worship where we used to meet—but when the New Chapel was built, we, feeling confident that we should never want it again, gave it up. But alas: the change in your Grace's religious opinions having led to the breaking‐up of our little congregation we are left desolate. We have no house of prayer of our own, such as we once had. We have no minister to dwell among us, to care for our souls, to visit us in sickness or sorrow, or to teach & catechise our little ones. If your Grace did but know how deeply we feel this loss, but inadequately supplied by our visits to a distant Chapel, you would we confidently believe not refuse us the great favour we now ask—permission to use the Chapel, which is now useless, &, we grieve to see, falling into ruin & decay. If your Grace
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism will grant us the use of the Chapel, we will at once apply to our Bishop, and ask him to send us a Pastor.60 The duchess replied shortly that the chapel was now the responsibility of the Duke of Richmond who could act as he thought proper in the matter and that, despite ‘the misstatements’ of the petition which gave her ‘much pain’ she wished only good for the subscribers and the people of Fochabers.61 The petitioners responded the next month that, despite many careful rereadings of their paper, they could find no misstatements. ‘We have too much cause to remember the former kindness which we have received in times past from your Grace to be wilfully guilty of such an act.’ Therefore, they asked if the duchess could specify just what she meant and they would apologize for it.62 (p.282) In the final word in this correspondence in the Gordon papers the duchess replied to this deferential strategy by the dogged Fochabers Episcopalians. She objected to the reference to the change in her religious opinions in the last petition, and claimed that these had remained constant from the time the chapel was built. It was only the change in the canons of the Episcopal Church in 1838 that had prevented her appointing another clergyman who would subscribe to them. That alteration had, she maintained, made the canons incompatible with the ordination vows of the Church of England. It was now, she said, out of her power to be of any more service to them.63 While her objection to the 1838 canons was reiterated in her correspondence over the chapel, the duchess never elaborated further than to claim they were incompatible with English ordination vows. The changes that the 1838 General Synod made to the code of canons were mainly administrative, and it is difficult to understand what could have been seen as a fundamental change by the duchess.64 It may have been the dropping of the designation ‘Protestant’ from the church's title, but this had only been inserted in 1828. Possibly it was the new twenty‐first canon which extended the mandatory use of the Scottish Office to include the opening of General Synods as well as the consecration of bishops. Evangelicals in Scotland and England were increasingly vehement in their opposition to the Office because its epiclesis and theology was seen to be expressing a popish doctrine of real presence in the Eucharistic bread and wine. Perhaps, given the way in which her opponents went to great lengths to prove that bishops were subject to General Synods, it was one of the new rules about altering the canons which troubled her. But most likely it was nothing substantial in particular but a growing dislike for the high Episcopal Church by an increasingly fervent Evangelical. In that sense the Fochabers petitioners were right when they stated her religious opinions had changed between the building of the chapel in 1834 and the appointment of an independent clergyman in 1847. She was certainly an Evangelical in the 1830s but one prepared to tolerate the (p.283) Episcopal Church, which she was not able to do in 1847. By that time she regarded that church as so deficient of scriptural truth that she could conscientiously no longer support it. She had changed from being a supporter to Page 13 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism being an opponent of the Episcopal Church as a consequence of her Evangelicalism. But it was a consequence that placed at risk the viability of the Fochabers congregation because of their reliance on her financial patronage. The most interesting aspect of this contest between the duchess and the Episcopalians of Fochabers is the light it throws on class and religious divisions between Episcopalians with respect to aristocratic patronage. The majority of the congregation were ready to accept a number of points in the duchess's favour. They were not averse to her appointing the clergyman with, presumably, little or no input from themselves. Neither did they object to the use of the Book of Common Prayer for the Eucharist rather than the Scottish Communion Office. Nor did they mind that the clergy appointed were English rather than Scots. Even the duchess's Evangelicalism was apparently acceptable to this local congregation. They welcomed her interest and financial patronage because it gave them what they had not had before: a handsome, purpose‐built stone church adjacent to their own village. But that did not mean they were prepared to tolerate anything their patron might do. They drew a clear, but determined, line when it came to removing their congregation from the Episcopal Church by the appointment of a clergyman without the bishop's license. If the duchess crossed that line then they were prepared to withdraw their attendance from the Fochaber's chapel and attend elsewhere, albeit at considerable inconvenience in travelling time. As regards the duchess, she entered into the patronage arrangement with the local congregation and the Episcopal diocese on the basis of her own religious agenda. The same was true of the High Church William Gladstone at Fasque who initiated a chapel there that the Episcopal Church did not really need. Aristocratic assumptions of social power were also evident in the actions of the Marchioness of Lothian in building her Tractarian chapel seemingly for the Episcopalians of Jedburgh. (p.284) There is no record of her discussing her plans with the local Episcopalians. In October 1842 she wrote to the Duke of Buccleuch asking him to be one of the five trustees of the prospective chapel, commenting, ‘I am anxious that you should accept this office as I think that having such a quorum as you & I & the Bishop shd make, in the event of any difference of opinion, as to the choice of Clergyman is most desirable. We are more likely to choose a good man than the other two I sd imagine’.65 As one of the other two trustees was Lord Douglas's factor it was unlikely that the trustees would pose any threat to the control of the two leading grandees of the area. The new priest appointed by the marchioness was perhaps not surprised to find that the very first Sunday of his new incumbency, immediately after breakfast, Lady Lothian sat down with him to discuss that morning's Communion Service.66 For all of these aristocratic patrons it was their own religious outlook that determined the shape of their local Episcopalian patronage, rather than the local needs of the Episcopal Church. Aristocratic patrons were prepared to support Page 14 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism the church, often spending substantial sums of money, but in accordance with their own religious or class agendas. The small size, genuine poverty of the Episcopal Church, and its desperate need of a public infrastructure gave those with wealth and influence an unprecedented opportunity to exercise a powerful patronage within it. When William Gladstone and James Hope (later Hope‐Scott) were instigating their own pet project of Trinity College, a combined public school and seminary to be built at Glenalmond in Perth‐shire, both were conscious of the need for aristocratic endorsement for a successful outcome. Hope explained to Gladstone that ‘rank and family should, if possible, be put prominently forward’. The consequent appeal to the aristocratic patronage was fruitful with leading Scottish nobility agreeing to head the subscription list, including the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earls of Errol, Home, and Elgin, and Lord Walter Forbes, the father of Horace.67 Local Episcopalians seem prepared to accept the imposition of these aristocratic religious agendas even when they were foreign to (p.285) them, as long as they had the countenance of Anglican practice guaranteed to them by the concurrence of their bishop. But such acceptance was not the same as unquestioning deference. There were limits to the tolerance of local Episcopalians for the religious impositions of their social superiors. They would tolerate diversity, even radical innovations such as Cecil Kerr's Tractarianism, when it was sponsored by the traditional leaders of rural society, the hereditary landed classes. But they proved doggedly determined to reject anything which took them outside the boundaries of their church. Aristocrats could lead them but they could not own them, and they were prepared to act autonomously to preserve their Episcopalian identity as they understood it. A higher social class was insufficient reason for local Episcopalians to lose their religious identity at the behest of their social superiors. In the end, the Fochabers Episcopalians had a greater loyalty towards their bishops than the Duchess of Gordon believed. Such freedom of action indicates that Episcopalianism had far greater roots among its traditional adherents, and far more ownership by them, than historians have allowed who see it as merely a religion of the middle and upper classes. There were some contemporary, if middle‐class, criticisms of the church patronage of the landed proprietors. Bishop Trower, in a meeting of the London branch of the Episcopal Church Society in 1853, passed a motion condemning the disinterest in the church prevalent among many of the Episcopalian landed families. ‘With respect to the landed proprietors in Scotland, the old feeling was not yet expunged, that they had no duties towards the Scottish Episcopate, that they were members of the Church of England, worshipping in chapels where her Prayer Book was used . . . The feeling was diminishing no doubt, but it still met him from quarters that ought to know better.’68 Trower's criticism was aimed at improving the ecclesiastical loyalties of the highly Anglicized Episcopalian landowners. He wanted more of their commitment and finance, not less, because Page 15 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism they mostly overlooked the struggling Episcopal chapels in their backyards in favour of the Established Churches north and south of the border. One correspondent in the London Guardian in 1851 was more (p.286) critical of the consequences of such aristocratic patronage for the Episcopal Church. It cannot be questioned that the modern Church of Scotland, notwithstanding its Episcopal government, has presented itself externally too much in the character of an appanage to the state and comfort of its wealthier members. That rich noblemen and gentlemen, when they returned to their country houses in the north, should find a pew in the chapel in the nearest town, seemed to be with many of its lay members of the higher class to be the only end of its existence.69 The writer did see the upper‐class endowment of St Ninian's cathedral as a hopeful sign of change. But as this was a Tractarian establishment by Tractarian aristocracy and gentry, it suggests the writer was trotting out the old Tractarian stereotype of a lifeless Church prior to the advent of the Oxford Movement.
But criticism of the landed proprietors for being a group of Anglicizers within the Episcopal Church was stated by another contemporary in the same year. Writing in the Scottish Magazine this correspondent claimed that a number of landed proprietors were responsible for the supersession of the Scottish Office by the English liturgy, including Gordon of Cairnfield and the Duchess of Gordon. ‘The conduct of the Anglicizers has been throughout miserably dishonest; and what is far more lamentable, the ready disposition of our Bishops to yield everything to them has betrayed not merely an entire want of discrimination and judgement, but sad unfaithfulness to the Church and the sacred deposit entrusted to them.’70 Both these contemporary criticisms of the Episcopal Church have been reiterated by historians, who have commonly asserted that the numbers of the landed classes who were Episcopalian, with their money and influence, made it merely a church of, and for, them and their class. For Callum Brown the Episcopal Church was one which was dominated by the Anglicizing middle class, but alongside these were as much as two‐thirds of the landowners. This meant that the Episcopal Church identified with these superior classes which made connections with those lower (p.287) down the social scale difficult.71 According to Andrew Drummond and James Bulloch the Episcopal Church failed to make a greater mark on Scottish national life because in the countryside she was ‘the Church of the lairds and the great landed gentry, and these classes were to decline in importance’.72 But, as this short study of aristocratic Episcopalianism suggests, social dominance and financial clout in the Episcopal Church was not the same thing as total control. Local Episcopalians would not be compelled beyond what they understood to be the limits of Episcopalianism membership. Their church was not only the church of the landed classes. Nor, despite Christopher Smout's claim that the Episcopal Church ‘became a popular Page 16 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism country church in the north‐east after the Napoleonic Wars’ was it without a much older popular history and culture.73 There was great influence and expenditure exercised by both the upper and the middle classes within the Episcopal Church, but it was the same with other Scottish churches also. The landed classes did espouse social and religious agendas by their patronage, such as respectability, self‐interest, social control, and Anglicization. But they also expressed in this way their own sincere religious beliefs that were sometimes at odds with those of local Episcopalians. This divergence eventuated because of the greater exposure of the aristocracy to new religious movements due to their British, and even international horizons. This greater cultural breadth was in contrast to the more circumscribed lives of local people and their attachment to traditional ways. Undoubtedly such aristocratic patronage, and the traditional, though often nominal, Episcopalian allegiance of the Scottish landed classes gave that church a social cachet that was important to some in the upper and middle classes. But this did not necessarily translate into the widespread levels of upper‐class support that the Episcopal Church looked for in the nineteenth century. Nor did it result in unfettered ecclesiastical power within that church by the lairds and nobility. Instead, the tales the fisherfolk Episcopalians continued to tell their children of the persecution (p. 288) during the penal years of the eighteenth century, and the stubborn Episcopalian loyalty of local people such as those at Fochabers, could circumscribe landed influence in some traditional congregations. In some areas there was a popular Episcopalianism which continued to act as a foil to the religious agendas of their social superiors. Notes:
(1) Daily Mail (19 Oct. 1886). (2) John Archibald, History of the Episcopal Church at Keith in the Diocese of Moray in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, with other Reminiscences of the Dioceses of Moray and Ross (Edinburgh: R. Grant, 1890), 98, 109. (3) Henry Caswell, Scotland and the Scottish Church (Oxford: John Parker, 1853), 112–13 (4) W.L.L., ‘The church at Folla‐Rule, parish of Fyvie, Aberdeenshire’, SSB (Sept 1896), 204–6. (5) Appendix to the Fifth Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 214–17. (6) John B. Pratt, rev. Robert Anderson, Buchan (Aberdeen, Lewis Smith & Co., 4th edn. 1901), 132–4. (7) In memoriam: Lord Kinnaird (Dundee, 1878), 18, 43. Page 17 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism (8) Thomas Stephen, The History of the Church of Scotland from the Reformation to the Present Time (London: John Lendrum, 1845), iv. 580. (9) SSB (Nov. 1894), 240–1. (10) A starting point for such an exploration can be found in the articles by R. H. Campbell, ‘The Landed Classes’, in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1760–1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 91– 108; and Nicholas Morgan and Richard Trainor, ‘The Dominant Classes’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 103–37. (11) S. and O. Checkland, Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2nd edn. 1989), 56–60, 66–9; R. H. Campbell, ‘Continuity and Challenge: The Perpetuation of the Landed Interest’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 123–7. (12) In his otherwise excellent book, Religion and society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Callum Brown omits entirely any treatment of the Scottish aristocracy and lairds, despite their undoubted influence in both 18th‐ and 19th‐cent. Scottish society and religion. (13) The religious roles of aristocratic women have been researched recently by K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chs. 2 and 3 on churches and philanthropy. Reynolds examines the religious lives of some of the leading Scottish aristocratic females. (14) Campbell, ‘Landed Classes’, 93–100. (15) The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 350–3, 369–70. (16) Matthew Cragoe, An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmarthenshire 1832–1895 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–4, 218, 220, 224. (17) Mark Girouard, ‘Victorian Values and the Upper Classes’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1992), 49–60. (18) David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (London: John Murray, 1997), 192–3.
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism (19) For the story of how all of the sons of Wilberforce abandoned their father's Evangelicalism for the Catholicism of the Oxford Movement (two of whom went on further into Roman Catholicism) see David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforce's and Henry Manning (1966; Leominster: Gracewing, 1993). (20) Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). (21) William Blatch, A Memoir of the Right Rev. David Low (London: Rivingtons, 1855), 34, 45, 138–9. (22) Appendix to the Fifth Report of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8), 122–5; NSA xii. 1042–3. (23) Stephen, History of the Church of Scotland, 552. (24) Ibid. 611. (25) Hill, Episcopal Chapel at Muchalls, 78. (26) Airlie Muniments, NAS, GD 16. 4. 16; 16. 46. 116. (27) Ibid. 16. 46. 110; 16. 41. 118. (28) Richard Shannon, Gladstone 1809–1865 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 159. (29) David Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith & Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 74–5. (30) Aristocratic Women, 80–1. (31) SSB (Nov. 1894), 240–1. (32) Anne Colquhoun married the 7th Duke of Argyll in 1831 and became dowager duchess on his death in 1847. She died in 1874. (33) Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, 86. (34) Elizabeth Georgiana, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland, married George Douglas Campbell, in 1844. He became 8th Duke of Argyll in 1847 and she died in 1878. (35) Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, 78. (36) Amelia Maria Claughton, married the 8th Duke of Argyll in 1881 and died in 1894.
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism (37) Thomas Isaac Ball, A Pastoral Bishop: A Memoir of Alexander Chinnery‐ Haldane, DD, Sometime Bishop of Argyll and the Isles (London: Longmans, 1907), 157–60. (38) Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 72. (39) Id., ‘Coronets and Altars: Aristocratic Women's and Men's Support for the Oxford Movement in Scotland during the 1840s’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History: Gender and Christian Religion, 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998), 391–403 at 402. (40) Anon., The Last Duchess of Gordon (London, The Monthly Tract Society, n.d.). (41) J. B. Craven, History of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Moray (London, Skeffington, 1889), 307. (42) Ibid. 139. (43) A. Moody Stuart, Life and Letters of Elizabeth, Last Duchess of Gordon (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1865), 156–7. (44) Bishop Low to James Munro, 27 Apr. 1832, Gordon Papers, NAS, GD 44. 38. 86 (1). (45) Duchess of Gordon to Bishop Jolly, 14 Oct. 1834, in Archibald, Episcopal Church at Keith, 109–10. (46) Bishop Jolly to the Duchess of Gordon, n.d., ibid. 110–12. (47) Stuart, Elizabeth, Duchess of Gordon, 238–56. (48) Memorial [copy]: Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon, Fochabers, 21 Apr. 1847, Gordon Papers, NAS, GD 44. 38. 86 (13). (49) Memorial [copy]: Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon, Fochabers, 21 Apr. 1847, Gordon Papers, NAS, GD 44. 38. 86 (13). (50) Duchess of Gordon to the Congregation of Fochabers, 23 Apr. 1847, ibid. (12). (51) Stuart, Elizabeth Duchess of Gordon, 68–84, 110–18. (52) Stuart, Elizabeth Duchess of Gordon, 68–84, 150. (53) Ibid. 284–6. (54) Ibid. 287–8. Page 20 of 21
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Aristocratic Episcopalianism (55) Stuart, Elizabeth Duchess of Gordon, 319–20. (56) Memorial: Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon, 28 Apr. 1847, Gordon Papers, NAS, GD 44. 38. 86 (9). (57) Duchess of Gordon to unknown, Edinburgh, 27 Apr. 1847, ibid. (8). (58) Memorial: Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon, Fochabers, Dec. 1848, ibid. (4). (59) Duchess of Gordon to Edward Wagstaffe, Huntly Lodge, 23 Dec. 1848, ibid. (17). (60) Memorial [copy]: Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon, Mar. 1852, ibid. (3). (61) Duchess of Gordon to the petitioners, Huntly Lodge, 24 Mar. 1852, ibid. (6). (62) Forty‐four signatories of the Fochabers congregation to the Duchess of Gordon [copy], April 1852, ibid. (3 reverse). (63) Duchess of Gordon, Edinburgh, 21 Apr. 1852, ibid. (2). (64) G. Grub, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, iv (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861), 191–5. (65) Strong, ‘Coronets and Altars’, 394–5. (66) Ibid. 398. (67) Ibid. 401. (68) SEJ (July 1853), 163. (69) Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin, 249–51. (70) Anon., ‘The Scottish Prayer‐book and the Scottish Canons’, SMCR 1, NS (1851), 478–83. (71) Religion and Society, 34–5. (72) The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1875), 212. (73) A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950 (London: Collins, 1986), 190.
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Episcopalianism and Scotland
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
Episcopalianism and Scotland Rowan Strong (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199249229.003.0007
Abstract and Keywords The authenticity of an indigenous Scottish Episcopalianism is argued for in this chapter, using the debates around the Eucharistic liturgy known as the Scottish Communion Office. This liturgy developed in the eighteenth century as a genuine Scottish variant of the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. It was disliked by some clergy and laity, Scots and English, for its High Church theology and its distinctiveness from the Church of England. It was upheld by Scots, clergy and laity, who were steeped in the traditions of the nonjuring Episcopalianism of the eighteenth century. These fought a rearguard action against its abolition throughout the nineteenth century and can be identified as maintaining native Scottish religious traditions that were a departure from the Calvinism and Presbyterianism that all too often are what Scottish national identity is reduced to in its religious form. Keywords: anglicization, Book of Common Prayer, Calvinism, Church of England, English, High Church, national identity, nonjuring Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, religious identity, Scotland, Scottish Communion Office
In the mid‐1880s Episcopalians engaged in a little navel‐gazing about their national identity through the pages of their church's organ, the Scottish Guardian. The national question was prompted by a leader in the January issue entitled ‘Are we Historically or Practically an English Church?’. The leader concluded that ‘in the obvious facts of history there is much to justify the idea that we are an English institution, imported by a king, and never heartily accepted by the people’. The writer believed that this judgement was currently reinforced by the use of the Book of Common Prayer with its subtitle ‘according Page 1 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland to the use of the Church of England’, the adoption of the English Thirty‐Nine Articles of Religion, English‐styled neo‐Gothic churches, and an English hymn book and vestments.1 Another editorial the following month explored the question further. This time it was suggested that there had been too great an identification with the Church of England. Although this had been useful in the past when the Episcopal Church's resources had been so minimal, it was now an obstacle to the avowal of the church to a Scottish identity. ‘You cannot excite national interest merely by claiming it . . . In the country districts among the common people it is, no doubt, a hindrance . . . We are disliked, or not cared for, in the country because we are English, and therefore out of the ordinary.’ It was different in the towns because the church's Englishness often appealed to the Anglicized upper and middle classes. But the Anglicization of the church had now gone far enough.2 Another leader in August developed this line by maintaining that the Englishness of the church prevented its national influence. The way to correct this was by recruiting a Scottish clergy because the great numbers of English clergy in Scotland too often failed to (p.290) appreciate the different culture they had come to. ‘Let the large majority of our clergy be Scotsmen in every respect, Scotsmen by birth, by education, in sentiment, and even in accent . . . then we may expect that the Scottish people will listen to us with unprejudiced ears.’3 The paper claimed that English clergy were often the choice of congregational elites and were merely acquiesced to by the majority of the congregation.4 A number of letters which responded to this criticism of the inadequate Scottishness of the Episcopal Church suggest that some Episcopalians thought this was not at all a disadvantage. One correspondent in August 1885 asked how more Scottish clergy were possible when congregations preferred English to Scots clergymen, and when Lowland congregations were made up of decidedly Anglicized Scots. A Scottish accent was not desired by such congregations who tended to equate it with an inferior education or social position. Indeed, the people comprising these congregations were themselves busy trying to eradicate a Scots brogue in their own speech. The previous aesthetic appeal of the liturgical worship of the church to such Scots was, however, diminishing due to the greater congregational participation in Presbyterian worship. At the same time the choral services of the Episcopal Church were reducing congregational involvement.5 A ‘bishop's chaplain’ had far more assertively Anglicized ideas. He maintained that the Episcopal Church was merely a ‘dis‐established branch of the Church of England’, with nothing to distinguish it theologically or liturgically from the Mother Church, except a partial use of the Scottish Communion Service.6 A Scottish incumbent of an English parish echoed the same point, maintaining that those who laid stress on the necessity of a Scottish clergy forgot how far the Church was ‘de facto the Church of the English settlers’, especially in the south. Here a ‘clergyman on settling down will find two or three lairds, Scotchmen by birth, but in all probability brought up in England, and Page 2 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland possibly having married English wives. He will find his (p.291) congregation partly made up of English servants, partly of tradesmen and artisans who have some English connection, and only perhaps to a small extent of bona fide Scotchmen’.7 So was the Scottish identity of the Episcopal Church a myth, due to its Anglicization, as these Episcopalians believed? Did its history, as the original leader in the Scottish Guardian suggested, point to it being no more than an imported English institution grafted unsuccessfully onto Scottish life and culture? There were certainly good reasons by the later nineteenth century to support this view. As Christopher Knight has pointed out, Anglicization of the Episcopal Church was far advanced by the second half of the nineteenth century. This began as early as 1804 when the synod of Laurencekirk imported aspects of the Church of England into the Episcopal Church in its efforts at reconciliation with the qualified congregations. These included the Thirty‐Nine Articles, the surplice, vestries, and a greater impetus for use of the Book of Common Prayer. This Anglicization was later exacerbated by a general cultural Anglophilism in nineteenth‐century Scotland, English immigration, and the Evangelical and Anglicizers' attacks on the Scottish Communion Office. Knight argues that these changes were indicative of a battle between the native High Church tradition and the Anglicizers. The culmination of this was the death of that tradition in the decision of the General Synod of 1863 which overturned the previous dominance of the Scottish Office in favour of the English liturgy. This decision of the church left any genuine attachment to native tradition fighting only ‘a feeble rearguard action’. It was not until the late nineteenth century that there was any revival in the Scottish traditions of Episcopalianism caused by a romantic interest in their Jacobite past.8 To this gloomy picture of the ‘death‐throes’ of a Scottish Episcopalianism can be added a number of other Anglicizing forces at work in the church during the nineteenth century. These include the ever‐increasing numbers of English clergy, and particularly Englishmen as bishops. In 1800 there were six (p.292) bishops, all of whom were Scots.9 By 1877 there were seven bishops, of whom six were Englishmen.10 Inevitably, most Englishmen within the church either as bishops or clergy, as well as Episcopalians outside the church in secessionist chapels, looked to the Church of England as a determining model for ecclesiastical life and belief. Irish immigrants also came from Anglicized communities that were ignorant of Scottish Episcopalianism. This increasing attachment to the Church of England was enhanced after the decennial international consultation of Anglican bishops known as the Lambeth Conference commenced from 1867. Meeting always in England it accentuated the Anglo‐centricity of the emerging Anglican Communion. Among the international and colonial Anglican churches it was probably hardest of all for the tiny Episcopal Church on England's doorstep to withstand the ecclesiastical and cultural influence of England's powerful Established Church. This was Page 3 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland exacerbated by the development of the partisan Anglicanism of Evangelicals and Anglo‐Catholics, whose counterparts in Scotland were only too ready to use the party apparatus of the English Anglicans to support their causes. This view that the Episcopal Church was an Anglicized and Anglicizing church in the nineteenth century prevails among those historians who have given some attention to its place in the Scottish scheme of things. David Bebbington reduces Episcopalianism in Scotland in this period to the ‘spiritual kin of the Church of England’.11 Murray Pittock sees Episcopalianism as an increasingly marginalized force by the later eighteenth century, because of its dwindling size and Jacobite anti‐unionism. However, in its ecclesiastical life it was strongly unionist, that is, (p.293) Anglicizing in its deference to the Church of England.12 Colin Kidd also sees its challenge to Presbyterianism as defunct by the end of the eighteenth century, though it had previously mounted a serious historiographical alternative to Presbyterian Whig history. Episcopalians had emphasized the loyalism and antiquity of Episcopalianism against Presbyterianism's involvement with populism, fanaticism, and anarchy. But by the nineteenth century the dominance of Whig history meant that Episcopalianism was tainted by its association with the enemies of liberty: royal absolutism, Jacobitism, and feudal backwardness.13 It was a thoroughly unScottish religion. According to Pittock a recovery of a Scottish identity for Episcopalianism was not made until 1920 when, along with Jacobitism, Episcopalianism was seen by some nationalists as a patriotic movement.14 This had its beginning in the Oxford Movement's sympathy for seventeenth‐century Laudianism and the Stuart kings. It was a historical view that facilitated the connections between the Oxford Movement and the Episcopal Church and resulted in the latter's eventual rehabilitation among English Anglicans as a province of the Anglican Communion. This, according to Pittock, was a sign of the recovery of the native traditions of Scottish Episcopacy.15 If that was the case, then, ironically, it was a recovery of Scottishness stimulated and enabled by an English ecclesiastical movement and by an approval granted by an English‐dominated Anglican Communion. Callum Brown has pointed to an identification of the church with the Anglicized culture of the rural landowners and the English and Scottish upper classes as a major reason for its failure to attract more Scots into its membership. In addition, its catholicizing ecclesiastical culture alienated many potential recruits, especially those from the Church of Ireland.16 Not only in the nineteenth century, but also in its previous (p.294) history were there significant pointers to the Englishness of the Episcopal Church. Its episcopal succession derived from England in 1661 as part of the royalist restoration programme. The Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 was also a Scottish adaptation of the English one. Undoubtedly the church had been favoured by the Stuart kings who sought the advantages of control provided by a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure like the Church of England. After the restoration this royal support for episcopacy reached a point where Presbyterian deviations from Page 4 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland it were persecuted by the state when episcopacy was the established religion of the Church of Scotland between 1660 and 1689. After the Presbyterian victory in 1689 Episcopalians continued to draw theological and spiritual resources from English connections in the form of the English nonjurors and Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. This prayer book formed the basis for Episcopalian worship by the later eighteenth century, with only the Eucharistic liturgy in the form of the Scottish Communion Office being a departure from it. When identity is limited to these sorts of formal ecclesiastical indicators, then historians are generally correct in seeing the Episcopal Church by the late nineteenth century as predominantly the ‘English Kirk’. But a wider historical and cultural perspective raises some qualifications to this argument of the foreignness of Episcopalianism in Scotland. If Episcopalianism was to be disqualified from an indigenous identity on account of the English or foreign origin of a number of its traditions, then the same would apply to important aspects of Presbyterianism. Calvinism, so often held up as the major aspect of Scottish religious identity, was French in its theological origins, and Genevan in its ecclesiastical development. Evangelicalism, dominant in Scottish society and Presbyterianism by the nineteenth century, began with the Evangelical Revival in England, and Scots Evangelicals saw themselves as part of a British movement. Neither can a history of state oppression disqualify Episcopalianism from a claim to a Scottish identity for Presbyterianism was as much a royal creature as was Episcopacy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was, in fact, state support for Presbyterianism which was ultimately responsible for the drastic (p.295) erosion of the numbers of Scots Episcopalians from about a third of the nation in 1689 to a mere 2.5 per cent by the end of the eighteenth century. But historical point scoring aside, the ultimate claim of Episcopalianism to a Scottish religious identity in the nineteenth century is that Scots themselves maintained this connection with the religion of their forebears. These Scots were becoming few and far between it is true, and they were often swamped by greater numbers of English and Irish immigrants in the south, and by the Anglicizing leadership of their own church, but a native Episcopalian identity was a great deal more energetic than historians have credited. Scots Episcopalians were quick to reconstruct their Jacobitism so that it worked for and not against them in the nineteenth century. In 1822 the Scots bishops were all in a flutter over their invitation to a royal audience as part of the visit of George IV to Scotland. Primus George Gleig was worried lest their loyalty be called into question by being late at the levee. He was also anxious about the acceptable appearance of some of the elderly bishops, especially Bishop Jolly's disreputable wig.17 Evidently the wig was either replaced or the royal sensibilities were not crossed, for the bishops were accorded the privilege of a private audience in the royal closet. This personal consideration raised the ire of Page 5 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland parts of the Edinburgh establishment, the Scotsman calling it sycophantic and attributing it to the bishops' desire for the re‐establishment of their church.18 In the loyal address the bishops presented to the king, only the second Hanoverian monarch they had recognized, they alluded to their past not as a sign of rebellion, but as an indication of the persistence of their chosen loyalties. Within the wide compass of your Majesty's dominions, are no where to be found hearts more loyal than those which beat in the breasts of Scottish Episcopalians . . . should evil days come upon your Majesty's Royal House (which may God of his infinite mercy avert,) the House of Brunswick will find that the Scottish Episcopalians are ready to endure (p.296) for it as much as they have suffered for the House of Stuart, with heart and hand, to convince the world that in their breasts a firm attachment to the religion of their fathers is inseparably connected with unshakeable loyalty to their king.19 Their Jacobite loyalty was thereby reconstructed by the bishops to mean not rebellion towards the House of Hanover, but an act of principled loyalty to the royal dynasty they previously acknowledged. Having acknowledged the Hanoverian dynasty, the present monarchy could expect no less than the same degree of stubborn loyalty these former rebels had shown to his family's enemies. Jacobite rebellion had now become an argument in support of Episcopalian loyalism. It was a reconstruction that enabled the bishops to get around the obvious fact of previous disloyalty and to survive in the political environment of the new century. The royalism of Scots Episcopalians was secure, even if a different dynasty sat upon the throne.
If royalism was one of the characteristics of Scottish Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, this research has pointed to others that had developed as part of the indigenous tradition. But it is also clear that there was no such thing as a singular Scottish Episcopalianism encompassing all the Episcopalians present in Scotland by the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead there was a plurality of identities, each of which could legitimately describe itself as Episcopalian. These can be described under a number of subsets, namely class, structural, cultural, gendered, and partisan Episcopalianism. These subsets tended to look to an English or British identity. Most of these were of the sort of Anglicized Episcopalianism that historians have seen as characteristic of all Episcopalians. Yet there were also a few which were decidedly not Anglicized, and which drew their sustenance from a Scottish past and an indigenous social or ecclesiastical culture. The Episcopalianism of class was most evident in the towns where there was the greatest mixture of social classes, but it could also be found in the rural areas in the traditional divide between landowners and tenants. Aristocratic Episcopalianism was very Anglicized, in keeping with the English education and British (p.297) outlook of the nobility. It maintained its traditional role as patrons of religion. While this patronage role was mostly limited to support of the patron's own religious predilections, it could lift itself to a national Page 6 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland perspective in support of church initiatives, such as the Episcopal Church Fund or Trinity College. But aristocratic Episcopalianism preferred to act in the traditional local base of the family's seat or lands. Middle‐class Episcopalianism was almost exclusively an urban phenomenon. It emphasized managerial skills and indicators of respectability to claim for itself a share in the leadership of the church, particularly in local congregations which the middle classes dominated in urban areas. In pursuit of these goals they were prepared to engage in conflict with the traditional clerical leaders of congregations, and to dominate working‐class Episcopalians through their financial and social muscle. Working‐ class Episcopalianism in the cities and towns, particularly of the Lowlands, was predominantly comprised of Irish and English immigrants. It was prepared to use church services for rites of passage, but often preferred a household or domestic setting for these if possible. It was outspokenly anti‐Catholic, and could be anti‐middle class if it felt dominated or marginalized by middle‐class laity or clergy imposing their values in a congregation. In such instances working‐class Episcopalianism exercised its most powerful weapon of absenteeism from church. The Episcopalianism of gender restricted the identity of women to a passive role and only permitted males an active one in church affairs. The latter could exercise this role in church government, in clerical leadership, and in public initiatives, whereas females could not. However, a public lay role could be exercised if the woman was wealthy enough, as religion was one of the areas of nineteenth‐century life where women were expected to satisfy themselves. Episcopalian women of all classes could exercise a right of religious protest, because their names were found on a number of congregational petitions in support of various causes, such as that of the Fochabers congregation against the actions of the Duchess of Gordon. The only other exception to the passive Episcopalianism of females was to be found in the fisherfolk communities of the North‐East where women did exercise an explicit (p.298) spiritual leadership. Here their dominance of aspects of the household's fishing economy probably facilitated this religious role. There were also varieties of structural Episcopalianism, or the differences imposed by the ecclesiastical structure of the church between laity and clergy. At the top of this structure were the bishops. Their Episcopalianism was increasingly Anglicized as the numbers of Englishmen elected to episcopal office grew during the century. It was also conservative and cautious, conscious of their church's meagre resources and few friends. They emphasized Episcopalian political loyalism and supported social conformism and established authority. Particularly important to the bishops was the upholding of their own authority and the obedience of the church, especially the clergy, to their supremacy. The clergy's Episcopalianism often reflected their middle‐class origins with its concern for social conformity and emphasis on respectability, which constituted their preferred view of themselves and their congregants. Clerical Page 7 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland Episcopalianism highlighted the paternal authority of the clergy over the laity, which led to conflict with the leadership aspirations of middle‐class males. Of all the varieties of Episcopalian identity, it was the most concerned with theological distinctions. Consequently, clerical Episcopalianism tended to judge acceptable Episcopalianism according to categories approved by the ecclesiastical structure, such as churchgoing, and church‐approved religious ideas and beliefs. But there were also significant cultural Episcopalian identities with their roots deep in the Scottish past, namely Gaelic and North‐East rural Episcopalianism. The first was an identity formed around a connection between Gaelic language and the Episcopal Church. This was enshrined in the Gaelic Bible and the prayer book which became treasured family possessions. Gaelic Episcopalianism sought a Gaelic ministry from the clergy, and the sacramental provision of baptism and the Eucharist, when Gaels would eagerly seek to come together in the great feasts of the liturgical year for Holy Communion preceded by a number of preparation days. Episcopalian Gaels expected an evidently godly clergy able to preach well in their language and be good pastors, and they valued traditional reserve about high religious matters. Churches and gathering places for worship were important to (p.299) them, so that they were often prepared to contribute significantly to their erection. They tended to be deferential to the clergy and their traditional, landowning leaders. However, they were prepared to lobby, or even threaten withdrawal from, the church if their religious goals were not met. The culture of North‐East rural Episcopalianism had a similar reverence for sacred place, and a willingness to place limits on their acceptance of upper‐class or clerical leadership. Like the other Episcopalianisms it had a high sacramentality and a reverence for the Bible and the prayer book, and like the other cultural Episcopalianism in the Highlands it was generally ecclesiastically conservative and suspicious of innovation. However, although it retained a customary low profile in society, it could also be assertive towards Presbyterianism which it quixotically tended to look down on as an inferior brand of religion. North‐East rural Episcopalianism survived into the nineteenth century with a numerous enough population to have a sense of confidence in itself that could manifest as clannishness, prejudice, and intractability towards its Presbyterian rival. The third form of native cultural Episcopalianism was that of the North‐East fisherfolk communities. In the nineteenth century this Episcopalianism still constituted the dominant, and even almost exclusive, religion of some small fishing villages. Fisherfolk Episcopalianism placed a high value on lay spiritual leadership, mostly male but some female. Like its agricultural counterpart in the North‐East it could be assertive about its religion, and was insular, conservative, and deferential to the clergy, who were commonly regarded as the exception to the rule that only birth could enable acceptance as a fisher by fisherfolk.
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Episcopalianism and Scotland Finally, there were the partisan Episcopalianisms of Evangelicalism and Anglo‐ Catholicism and, to a lesser extent, the more amorphous High Church. Usually regarded as opposites and rivals, in the context of the Scottish Episcopal Church Evangelical and Anglo‐Catholic can be seen to have a number of aspects in common. Both relied on increasingly organized parties for a large provision of their identity, and both saw themselves as part of a transnational movement. Particularly, both looked to England for encouragement, support, and recruitment. This applied even to (p.300) those Evangelical Episcopalians who repudiated the Scottish Church and preferred instead the label of Church of England. The High Church in the Episcopal Church had no formal party organization, but it had well‐established informal connections to English High Churchmen. Like the other two partisan identities High Church Episcopalians founded their identity to some degree on their conscious opposition to the other two groups. Consequently, a partisan attitude was a central aspect in the identity of all these three groups within the Scottish Episcopal Church. However, except for the last, these subsets of identity were seldom exclusive. Bishop Robert Eden of Moray and Ross was an example of the intermingling of these possible identities. Eden as a High Churchman and a bishop was concerned to remove the clerical disabilities against Scottish clergy ministering in England, but this Anglicized agenda did not prevent him from also being a leading supporter of the Scottish Office. The campaign to retain the Office in the 1860s caused Eden, an Englishman, to lambast the cultural imperialism of the Church of England. He asked Bishop Forbes of Brechin, ‘is the Church of England to be Pope? Is she to be the judge of what is and what is not a National Church? & is she to dictate to other Churches what their rites, forms & ceremonies may be?’20 Forbes of Brechin was the principal leader of Anglo‐ Catholicism in Scotland during his episcopate from 1847 to 1875. As such he was a major force for Anglicization, drawing his inspiration directly from the English Tractarian leadership and importing into his diocese models of ministry and ceremonies developed in English Anglo‐Catholicism. Yet he was linked through his family to middle‐class and to aristocratic Episcopalianism, and to a tradition of support for North‐East and indigenous High Church Episcopalianism. Alexander Lendrum, though formed within Scottish High Churchism, was a fervent supporter of the Anglicizing and partisan St Ninian's cathedral; while the Marchioness of Lothian was liberated from her passive gendered Episcopalianism by her widowhood, but maintained the Anglicizing patronage role of her class. However much these subsets might become mixed in the lives of individuals and groups, they tended to support primarily either (p.301) a Scottish or a British identity for Scottish Episcopalianism. At one extreme were the class identities which were mostly shaped by the British dimension because the Scottish upper and middle classes, Episcopalian and otherwise, generally adopted an Anglo‐ philism that supported the Union and embraced aspects of nineteenth‐century Page 9 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland life which had a fundamentally English or British dimension. These included professions and economic activities that had British standards and trading bases. The aristocracy held lands across Britain, paraded British peerages, and included noble families with old Scottish titles who frequently desired titles in the British peerage or family connections and land throughout the British Isles. Then there were the British‐wide values such as the cult of respectability common to the middle classes of either Scotland, England, Wales, or Ireland. Working‐class Episcopalianism was overwhelmingly a matter of English or Irish immigrants who desired to keep their new Scottish church within the framework of the Anglicanism of their British home‐lands. Gendered Episcopalianism also tended to be British because it was primarily shaped by the predominantly earnest and middle‐class British cultural standards about the roles of women and men that dominated religion in Scotland as much as any other part of the British Isles. At the other extreme were those cultural Episcopalianisms which, along with indigenous High Church Episcopalianism, had been formed within Scottish society. These were undergoing erosion or decline due to the increasing British and Anglicizing cultural hegemony of the British ruling classes. But in so far as they survived they kept Episcopalianism connected to a purely Scottish identity and a Scottish past. All these varieties of Scottish Episcopalianism came together in the battle for and against the most distinctive manifestation of Scottish Episcopalianism found in its formal ecclesiastical culture: the Scottish Communion Office. This fight was an ongoing one throughout the century. In the first decades of the nineteenth century pro‐Office Episcopalians had the advantage. Northerners among the bishops controlled the church and the largest proportion of Episcopalians in Scotland were still found north of the river Tay. However, immigration by English and Irish into the (p.302) south, and the dominance of an Anglicized culture among the middle and landed classes who comprised the influential elites of the church, turned this around. By the later Victorian period it was the south where most Episcopalians were to found, and these were just those Episcopalians who were impatient of anything which set that church apart from the Church of England, or which smacked of popery. On both these counts the Scottish Office was anathema to most southern or Evangelical Episcopalians. Consequently, in 1863 the General Synod reversed the traditional ‘primary authority’ of the Scottish Communion Office and there was even talk of abolishing it altogether. The crux of this shift was the production of a new edition of the entire Scottish Book of Common Prayer in 1850, commonly known as Torry's Prayer‐book after Bishop Torry who gave the project his blessing. The eventual failure of the book indicated that the power base of the church by the mid‐century had shifted away from the indigenous Episcopalian tradition. But in the contest over that prayer book at the mid‐point of the century nearly all the varieties of Episcopalianism made their contribution. But as it was a controversy over an aspect of the official ecclesiastical culture of the church, and the prayer Page 10 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland book was virtually suppressed before it could be widely disseminated, the popular level of the church's membership did not play a part in the struggle. Nor did Gaelic Episcopalianism for the same reason and also because the prayer book, which was in English, would not have been of great interest to Gaels concerned about the maintenance of their culture. The revision project began when a group of clergy, representing Scottish and English High Churchmen in the diocese of St Andrews, petitioned Bishop Torry for the production of an edition of the entire Scottish Book of Common Prayer, taking into account the liturgical traditions which had developed in the church during the eighteenth century. Torry agreed and the work was chiefly undertaken by Alexander Lendrum and George Forbes, who was a sophisticated liturgical scholar. Its printing was funded by subscription, and among the subscribers were the males of the Forbes family and Robert Campbell. The book appeared in April 1850 under the following title: ‘The Book of Common Prayer . . . according to the use of the Church of Scotland’. It (p.303) contained a certificate from Bishop Torry which stated he had examined the book and found that it was ‘in strict conformity with the Usage of the Church of Scotland; and I accordingly recommend it to the Use of the Clergy of my own Diocese’. The consequence was a furore as Episcopalians lined up for and against the prayer book. Subsequently the bishops in Episcopal Synod that year demanded its suppression as having no synodical or canonical authority. The edition faded into obscurity, being used in only one or two places in Torry's diocese, including Crieff where Alexander Lendrum was the priest.21 Class identities played their part in the controversy. Lord Medwyn was an initial supporter of the book. As the controversy grew, however, his upper‐class role as a patron of the church began to conflict with his identity as a supporter of the indigenous traditions of Scottish Episcopalianism. He told his younger son that he saw ‘no advantage in not giving way to the tempest the Warden [Charles Wordsworth] is stirring up. It seems to be injuring our Episcopal Fund: at least subscriptions are coming in slow’. He went on to explain that the book and its defenders were drawing attention to differences with the Church of England ‘which will exclude the sympathy of many who otherwise might befriend a Church using the same Liturgy & Rites’.22 As the principal subscribers to the Episcopal Fund were middle‐ and upper‐class laity in Scotland and England, Forbes was evidently anxious that the prayer book might be objectionable to them as a contradiction to their desired Anglicizing uniformity with the Church of England. It is an indication that class Episcopalianism predominantly lined up with a British or Anglicized identity, and of the significance of patronage to upper‐class Episcopalians. In Lord Medwyn's case this assumed a priority over his cultural preference for native Episcopalian tradition. It is also significant that the principal opponent of this edition of the prayer book was Charles Wordsworth, Warden of Trinity College, Glenalmond. He was not an opponent of the Scottish Office, as he used it alternately with the English liturgy in the Page 11 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland college chapel. (p.304) However, the college was designed to attract the sons of Episcopalian middle‐ and upper‐class families, classes whose prevailing Anglicized culture would, as Lord Medwyn realized, not look favourably on departures from English norms. Almost exclusively those involved in the controversy were males, an indication that women were not expected to involve themselves in active public debate in religious disputes. This was reinforced in this contest due to it being an altercation within the official ecclesiastical structure which was exclusively male, with most of its public face involving synods from which women were excluded. The one exception to this gendered exclusion and expected passivity of women is one that proves the rule. The Marchioness of Lothian was the one female mentioned by the males involved in the prayer‐book project as a like‐ minded supporter. Four years previously Alexander Lendrum had written to Bishop Torry that he had sent a pamphlet to Lady Lothian. She had replied that she trusted God's blessing would rest upon the bishop as a faithful labourer for ‘the preservation & extension of the beautiful eucharistic office’.23 However, by the time of the public agitation she was well on her way to Rome and had withdrawn from public support of Episcopalianism. Lady Lothian was an exceptional female because her widowhood, wealth, and aristocratic family excluded her from the usual restrictions on the quiescent Episcopalianism of her gender. Partisan Episcopalianism came out both for and against the book. Forbes of Brechin was a supporter, but when the book looked lost he made his Tractarian agenda clear. It was the ritual Eucharistic usages which mattered most to him, and these had to be saved even though the book could not survive. ‘As to the Usages’, he urged his brother, ‘we must fight like grim death for them.’24 The book was also used by the Anglo‐Catholic clergy of St Ninian's cathedral, probably also for the licence it gave to Eucharistic ritualism, though the sanction of the bishop could of course be claimed until Torry's death in 1852.25 The ritualist (p.305) Robert Campbell was no doubt an active supporter and financier of the project for much the same reason.26 The function of the English connection for this partisan Episcopalianism is indicated by a comment in the Christian Remembrancer in 1850 refuting Wordsworth's accusation that his opponents were Anglicizers because they used the High Church and Tractarian English church press to advocate their cause.27 Inevitably, in such an ecclesiastical struggle the identities created by the church structure were to the fore. The bishops, with the exceptions of Torry and Forbes, were opposed to the publication of the book. Their condemnation of it in the Episcopal Synod of 1850 demonstrates significant aspects of their investment in Episcopalianism. Their caution and concern for unity is expressed in their anxiety in the controversy about the ‘many symptoms of that temper of religious excitement, which is one characteristic of the present age’. This could result in Page 12 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland ‘unauthorised and irregular movements’ and bring ‘disorder and division’.28 The note of episcopal authority was a dominant one in the bishops' proposed address to the Episcopalians of Scotland over the matter. This power, they affirmed, ‘resembles that of a Parent over his children, and (as the Bishops believe) is like it, on the one hand subject to limits of Law, reason, & usage; and on the other, such as it is impossible to define’. They went on to complain that ‘one of the least encouraging symptoms of the prevailing religious excitement . . . is the disposition to forget this essentially fatherly character of the bishop's office’.29 They then asserted their authority as the ultimate judges of the canons, subject only to General Synod, but certainly superior to that of the discretionary powers of the clergy in their congregations. The bishops went on to define their powers for the benefit of their church's members. And as each Bishop in his own Diocese is the Guardian of the Christian Doctrine and Discipline; So the Bishops collectively are the Guardians for the Church in general of its Doctrine and Discipline. No Bishop in his Diocese can so stretch his authority as to dispense with Rubrics and (p. 306) canons of the Church, although great weight is due, (as in the case of attempts to revise such Rubrics as may be desired) to his godly admonition and fatherly judgement. Nor can the Episcopal Synod either on the one hand supersede the Diocesan authority of each Bishop; nor on the other hand assume those Legislative Functions, which, by the Constitution of this Church, belong exclusively to the General Synod.30 The space spent in this address on the scope and nature of episcopal authority is a clear indication of the investment they had in this note of their identity. At least one of their targets, William Forbes, was in no doubt that this heavy‐handed repudiation of the book by the bishops was due to the fact that so many of them were English. Trower (and Wordsworth), he suggested, as Englishmen had no understanding of the Scots. Why was it, he asked peevishly, that those ‘who come among us, like Bp. Trower, discontented with the position of the English Church, shd desire to tye [sic] us hand & foot to that establishment’?31 In the hope that it would soften the bishops' attitude Forbes had written to the Primus to explain that the book was not the work of laymen but of diocesan clergy.32 But even this appeal to the solidarity and superiority of clerical as against lay identities failed to produce any benefit to the book's supporters. Nor was it entirely correct. Letters from Robert Campbell to Bishop Forbes in 1849 demonstrate that he was a main player in the project almost from the start, as was Lord Medwyn.33
However, the solidarity of clerical culture, encompassing both bishops and clergy, was significant in forming the opposition of most of Torry's own diocesan clergy to the prayer book. In June the synod of his diocese resolved that it agreed with the stand of the bishops in their Episcopal Synod of the previous April, and also expressed ‘strong disapproval’ of the use of the book. If any clergy were to use it, the resolution went on, diocesan proceedings would be instituted against them.34 The reasons for this surprising repudiation of their own bishop are evident in a petition of the (p.307) majority of the St Andrews Page 13 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland clergy against the book which circulated before the synod. It was signed by twelve clergy, including Bishop Torry's son, John, and Charles Wordsworth. They gave as their reasons that Torry had claimed a liturgical use which was not actually true, and were they to use it would involve them in conflict with their congregations. If they did not introduce it they would be seen as flouting the authority of their diocesan bishop. Secondly, the book contained several new ceremonies which was to usurp the authority of General Synod. It also put in question the good faith of the church in 1792 by claiming the title of the Scottish Established Church and by distancing itself from the Church of England, and seeming to reverse the expectations of many in their congregations about the recognition granted to the English Communion Office. Finally, the book was the work of only a minority of the diocesan clergy.35 These boil down to an opposition by the clergy to a decision imposed upon them by episcopal authority without their consultation. The book should have had diocesan and General Synod approval where the clergy constituted one of the two voting houses. In other words, clerical Episcopalianism was acting in defence of one of its most cherished notes, the central importance to it of the clergy's authority which they felt their bishop had invaded. For this reason they were willing to ally themselves with the bishops' authority expressed in Episcopal Synod, an authority they would normally be more wary of. Against this weight of opposition the book's main defenders, aside from Tractarian and Anglo‐Catholic ritualists, and a smattering of High Church laity like the pugnacious William Forbes, were a minority of Scottish High Church clergy of the northern tradition, in the forefront of which was the stubborn old man Patrick Torry. The bishop wanted to secure the lawfulness not only of the Scottish Communion Office but also of the liturgical ceremonies he believed were part of the native northern tradition.36 These usages, which had developed within the church during its nonjuring years were, for Torry, a principal sign of his church being ‘a distinct independent national church’.37 This note (p.308) of safeguarding and perpetuating a sign of the Episcopal Church's national identity was dear to Torry, and he sounded it more than once in his correspondence. In 1846 he attempted to help his son become more proactive for the Scottish Office in his congregation by arguing that it constituted the church's ‘Mark of Distinction, as an independent, national Church’. To relinquish it would, therefore, be ‘unpatriotic, even were the English & Scottish offices of equal merit, which I do not admit them to be’. The prospect of its loss in his own son's congregation fired the bishop to an eloquent defence of the connection between the Office and Episcopalian national identity. Only think how the Gentlemen of the law, & all others who have true Scottish feelings, would bristle up, were any one to step forward with a proposal to sweep away what is peculiar to our System of political law, and substitute for it the System of England. Would they not plead with indignation that, should such a proposal be ever realized, Scotland would Page 14 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland dwindle down into a province of England, and lose all its characteristic national distinction. And surely we have stronger reasons for cleaving steadfastly to our own superior eucharistic Office, than we should have for adhering faithfully to our Scottish system of political law: for we have the example & sanction of the whole Church of God in our favour for 400 years, at least, from the Ascension of Chas. I.38 This equation of the Scottish Office with Scots law was to raise the issue of the Office to a high level indeed, for the law, along with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and Scottish education, has commonly been regarded since the eighteenth century as one of the major carriers of a distinctive Scottish culture in the British union. It is indicative of the patriotic importance Torry gave the Scottish Office and its attendant liturgical customs in affirming the Scottish identity of his church. In a pastoral letter to his diocese in 1846 he bluntly stated that the Office had no equal anywhere in Christianity but was under threat from those who ‘have shown so little nationality and Scottish feeling’. It was, he wrote feelingly, ‘the brightest and only peculiar symbol of our own independence as a national, though dis‐established Church’.39
(p.309) Was this the last gasp of a genuinely Scottish Episcopalianism that looked back to a continuous history since 1689 and beyond, only to die with the death of its last aged leader in 1852? Or did it slowly wither with the decline of indigenous cultural Episcopalianisms in the Highlands and the rural North‐East? Did it have to wait until the nationalism of the twentieth century, or the romantic reconstruction of Jacobitism in the nineteenth, as has been suggested? There are indications that the traditions of Scottish Episcopalianism did not die with Torry, nor with the overturning of the primary authority of the Scottish Communion Office in 1863. It continued to be maintained by its traditional supporters throughout the nineteenth century, who were more vital than some have believed. There were the younger generation of Scots High Churchmen, such as Alexander Lendrum, who appropriated the traditions of their forebears. In 1846 Lendrum was echoing the same patriotic note in the next generation of northern Episcopalians when he described the Scottish Office as ‘our National Eucharistic Service’.40 These Scottish High Churchmen were indeed influenced by the Anglicizing Oxford Movement as Scotland became increasingly integrated into a Great Britain and as younger men drew inspiration from exciting movements of ecclesiastical change. But that did not mean they permitted their native traditions to be swallowed by English ritualism. Lendrum passed on his understanding of native liturgical life to John Comper, who became the leading ritualist priest in Aberdeen, but who remained all his life a supporter of the Scottish Office and acknowledged that his vision of ministry was based on the teaching he had received from Lendrum. The traditions of a truly indigenous Episcopalianism were also maintained by Episcopalian Gaels and North‐East farmers, crofters, and fisherfolk at least until the end of the century. Despite the continued erosion of Gaelic there were still Episcopalian Gaels in the Appin highlands into the twentieth century, and there Page 15 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland were still Episcopalian fishers and farmers who retained their traditional faith after the revivalism of the 1860s. It was rather the economic demise of the coastal fishing villages at the end of the century which saw these fisherfolk swallowed up in the larger (p.310) towns of Aberdeen and Peterhead, along with their Presbyterian and Evangelical counterparts. Aberdeen farming communities and the Episcopalians among them also survived into the new century. Undoubtedly, these were increasingly challenged by the incomers into Episcopalianism, for most of whom these traditions were unknown or undesirable. But most does not mean all. There were signs that some of the new Episcopalians also appropriated the old traditions and, consequently, some of these new arrivals could also be a source of their maintenance until the church once more began to value them. In 1866 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Thomas Longley, came to Scotland for the consecration of the new cathedral at Inverness. At the banquet which followed, the Primus, Robert Eden, gave voice to the sentiments of many Episcopalians in the 1860s. He spoke of the British and even Anglicized identity of his church when he voiced his appreciation that the presence of the archbishop meant ‘recognizing in this public way the direct and close communion between the great Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland’. Eden's expression of the delight Episcopalians felt in being so publicly affirmed by the principal English bishop resulted in great cheering from the assembly. But a more national note was sounded by Charles Wordsworth of St Andrews, Torry's great opponent in the 1850 squabble. In proposing a toast to the bishops of the Church of England and Ireland he felt moved to say, ‘much as we honour and love the Church of England, we do not rest upon it . . . Our cause is the cause of the people of Scotland, and if it is to succeed its success must be achieved by Scottish national indigenous influences’.41 Wordsworth's claim to a Scottish identity for his church was also greeted with acclaim. Undoubtedly there were other forces behind the recovery of Episcopalian Scottishness in the late nineteenth century, such as Romantic Jacobitism, nationalism, Anglo‐Catholic ritualism, and a historical fondness for the Stuart past. But the continuation of an indigenous Scottish identity by traditional and new Episcopalians throughout the century should not be discounted. It was probably the major reason why these traditions and a sense of national identity (p.311) survived long enough in the Episcopal Church for these other forces to be energized by it. Episcopalians in nineteenth‐century Scotland became increasingly Anglicized if they were Scots, and remained so if they were English and Irish immigrants. But so did most other British churches as England increasingly dominated the culture of Britain because of the appropriation of English culture, speech, and attitudes by the political and social elites of Scotland and Wales and Ireland who were the decision‐makers in the churches. But domination did not equal demise and indigenous Episcopalianism survived the cultural onslaught of Englishness in nineteenth‐century Scotland. It also survived, though not without continual Page 16 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland erosion, the drastically changing economic and social conditions of an industrialized and urbanizing Scotland. But, eventually, its future lay with the appropriation of its indigenous traditions by the newly dominant Anglicizing populations of Scotland who came into the Episcopal Church. In that respect, the new Scottish prayer book of 1929 with its Eucharistic rite a renovation of the Scottish Communion Office was Bishop Torry's last laugh. Notes:
(1) ‘Are we Historically or Practically an English Church?’, SG (27 Jan. 1882), 43– 4. (2) ‘Have we made a Mistake?’, SG (3 Feb 1882), 55–6. (3) ‘Our Church's Future’, SG (14 Aug. 1885), 895–6. (4) ‘Our Church's Future II’, SG (21 Aug. 1885), 407–8. (5) ‘A. H.’ to the editor, ibid., 408–9. (6) ‘A Bishop's Chaplain’ to the editor, ibid., 420. (7) ‘Scotchman beneficed in England’ to the editor, ibid., 421. (8) Christopher Knight, ‘The Anglicizing of Scottish Episcopalianism’, RSCHS 23 (1989), 361–77 at 364. (9) M. Russel [sic], An Historical Catalogue of the Scottish Bishops, down to the Year 1688 by the Right Rev Robert Keith (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1824), app. (10) The six were Robert Eden of Moray, Ross and Caithness; Charles Wordsworth of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane; Hugh Jermyn of Brechin; Henry Cotterill of Edinburgh; George Mackarness of Argyll and the Isles; and Thomas Suther of Aberdeen and Orkney. Suther was actually born in Nova Scotia but was educated and ordained in England, The solitary Scot was William Wilson of Glasgow and Galloway. ‘The Episcopal Church in Scotland 1876–1877’, SG (12 Jan. 1877), 18–21. (11) ‘Religion and National Feeling in Nineteenth‐Century Wales and Scotland’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Studies in Church History: Religion and National Identity 18 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1982), 497. (12) Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 43–4. (13) Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo‐British Identity 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23–7, 57, 69, 132–3, 187. Page 17 of 19
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Episcopalianism and Scotland (14) The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991), 142. (15) Ibid. 116–17. (16) Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 35–6. (17) J. M. Neale, The Life and Times of Patrick Torry DD (London: Joseph Masters, 1856), 105–10. (18) J. P. Lawson, ‘The Present State of the Scottish Episcopal Church’, British Magazine, 3 (1833), 257. (19) G. Grub, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861), iv. 172–3. (20) R. Eden to A. P. Forbes, 6 Mar. [1862], BrMS 1. 3. 576. (21) The clergy involved were John Torry, John Macmillan, Alexander Lendrum, Thomas Walker, J. Charles Chambers, Thomas Wildman. (22) John Hay Forbes to George Hay Forbes, ‘Thursday’ [1850], George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL, 19. 1. 115. (23) Alexander Lendrum to Bishop Torry, 2 Mar. 1846, NAS, CH 12. 12. 2398. (24) Bishop Alexander Forbes to George Forbes, n.d. [1850], George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL, 19. 1. 114. (25) John Wordsworth, The Episcopate of Charles Wordsworth (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1899), 14. (26) Robert Campbell to George Forbes, 14 Apr. 1850, Edinburgh, George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL, 19. 1. 1. (27) Christian Remembrancer, 20 (July–Dec. 1850), 513. (28) Meetings of the College of Bishops, 1822–60, NAS, CH 12. 60. 1, fos. 212– 13. (29) Ibid. (30) Meetings of the College of Bishops, 1822–60, NAS, CH 12. 60. 1, fos. 215– 16. (31) William Forbes to Bishop Torry, 13 Sept. 1850, NAS, CH 12. 12. 2411.
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Episcopalianism and Scotland (32) William Forbes to George Forbes, 12 May [1850], George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL, 19. 1. 109. (33) Robert Campbell to Bishop Forbes, George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL, 19. 1. 64–5, 69–79. (34) Wordsworth, Charles Wordsworth, 13. (35) Petition of St Andrews' clergy to Bishop Torry, n.d., NAS, CH 12. 64. 39. (36) Neale, Patrick Torry, 273. (37) Ibid. 275–6. (38) Bishop Torry to John Torry, 29 Apr. 1843, NAS, CH 12. 12. 2391. (39) Bishop Torry, Pastoral Letter, 1846, NAS, CH 12. 5, 13. (40) Alexander Lendrum to Bishop Torry, 2 Mar. 1846, NAS, CH 12. 12. 2398. (41) ‘Laying the foundation stone of the cathedral at Inverness by the Archbishop of Canterbury’, SG (Nov. 1866), 512–22.
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Bibliography
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
(p.312) Bibliography Airlie Muniments, NAS: GD 16. 4. 16; 16. 41. 118; 16. 46. 110, 116. Ballachulish Episcopal congregation, rectory, Glencoe: Copy of the Register of Marriages and Baptisms from the original in the handwriting of the Revd Paul MacColl in a red book entitled ‘St John's Episcopal Church Ballachulish’. Bishop John Dowden Papers, NLS: Deposit 171. Buccleuch Muniments, NAS, GD 224. Christ Church, Glasgow, GCA: TD 1378. 1–2, 8–10. College and Church of the Holy Spirit, Cumbrae, DUL: MS 54. 1 (4), 3. 13, 9. 3, 10, 11. Cumbrae Cathedral, Millport, Cumbrae: Records in wall cupboard of sacristy: 1. Minute books of Chapter, 1851–1916, 2 vols. 2. Russet‐covered untitled book including register of Sunday services and diary of events in various hands by priests of the College 1851–. 3. Minute book of Trustees meetings 1851–. 4. Brown envelope marked ‘some fragmentary Chapter Minutes 1851– 1853’. Diocese of Aberdeen, AUL: MS 3320. 1. 12, 17–18; 6. 71, 116. Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, Diocesan Office, Aberdeen: 1. Various letters to Bp. Dowden about the SCO in file box marked ‘Scottish Communion Office’, and included in Liturgy section of Diocesan Library in upstairs room. Page 1 of 25
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Bibliography 2. Bound volume of printed submissions to bishop's court entitled ‘Cases of the Revd S. Allan and the Revd C. Wagstaffe’, also in Diocesan Library. 3. Bound volume of printed submissions to bishop's court entitled ‘Revd C. Wagstaffe Reasons of Appeal’, also in Diocesan Library. Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, ABC: EC 1. 2–3, 18–21, 28–9. Diocese of Brechin, DUL: BrMs 1. 3 (576, 634), BrMs 2. 1. 6 (15–16, 22); BrMs 2. 1. 7 (10); BrMs 4. 1. 12 (2). Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway, Diocesan Office, Glasgow, NRA(S) 2704. 153, 390. (p.313) Diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane, PLA: bundles 84,89. D'Orsey Papers, NLS, MS 19325. Dowden Papers, NLS, MS 3560. Bishop Alexander Ewing papers, LPL: MS 1597. George Farquhar, ‘Forty Three Years at the Cathedral Perth 1883–1926’ (n.d.), NLS, Dep. 271. Dean George T. S. Farquhar Miscellaneous Papers, Perth and Kinross Council Archives, A. K. Bell Library, MS 104, bundle 89. George Hay Forbes Papers, SAUL: 19. 1. 1, 64–5, 69–79, 109, 114, 115. Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, 5 letters (1782–3), EUML: Laing papers, La II. 82. Gladstone papers, BL MS 44154. Glenalmond College, Perthshire: 1. ‘Correspondence between Major Jelf Sharp and the Rev. the Warden of Trinity College, on four separate occasions’ (1846). 2. Printed pamphlet marked ‘private and confidential for Members of the Council only’. Gordon Papers, NAS: GD 44. 38. 86. Hope‐Scott Papers, NLS: MS 3672–4, 3667–71. Lothian Muniments, NAS: GD 40. 14. 31; 40. 9. 397–9, 404; 15. 70. (1)–(4). Old St Paul's, Carrubber's Close, Edinburgh, Edinburgh City Archives: ED 10. 1. 3; 10. 12. 1; 10. 14. 2, 15, 34; 10. 14. 36. 3. Page 2 of 25
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Bibliography St Margaret's, Gallowgate, Aberdeen: Minute Book of Aberdeen Ward, Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, 1868–1929. St Ninian's Cathedral, Perth, NLS: Deposit 251. St Paul's Cathedral records, Dundee. Scottish Episcopal Church, Episcopal Chest, NAS: CH 12. 9. 171, 197, 781, 782, 1153, 2188, 2189, 2208, 2223, 2238, 2269–77, 2310, 2312, 2393–6, 2400, 2409, 2413; CH 12. 12. 2391, 2398, 2411. Scottish Episcopal Church, Jolly Kist, NAS: CH. 12. 13. 80, 87–8; CH 12. 14. 111; CH 12. 16. 126–7. Scottish Episcopal Church, Crieff CH 12. 36. 1. Scottish Episcopal Church, Congregational Records, Diocese of Aberdeen CH 12. 50. 1–4. Scottish Episcopal Church, Congregational Records, Diocese of Edinburgh CH 12. 57. 1. Scottish Episcopal Church, St Columba's, Edinburgh: NAS:CH 12. 5. 1–2, 9, 19, 24–5, 34–5, 59–60, 74. Scottish Episcopal Church, Registers of the College of Bishops, NAS: CH 12. 60. 1, 3, 4, 6. (p.314) Scottish Episcopal Church, Representative Church Council Scrapbooks, NAS: CH 12. 77. 1–3. Scottish Episcopal Church, General Synods, Minutes (chamber of clergy) 1836– 8, NAS: CH 12. 61. 1. Scottish Episcopal Church, College of Bishops and General Synods, NAS: CH 12. 59. 4–5, 7–10, 17/3, 6, 20, 22, 30, 32. Scottish Episcopal Church, congregational, educational, and statistical returns to the Episcopal Church Society, (1851–64), NAS: CH 12. 64. 13, 14, 1: 6, 39; 12. 65. 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16; 69. 3–17. Nineteenth‐Century Journals and Newspapers
Campbelltown Courier Daily Mail Edinburgh Evening Courant Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland Page 3 of 25
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Bibliography Scottish Episcopal Review and Magazine (1817–22) Stephen's Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal (1833–4) Scottish Episcopal Times (1844) Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review (1848–54) Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal (1851–63) Scottish Guardian (1864–1901) Works Published Before 1900
Aitchison, David, A Charity Sermon preached at Christ Church Glasgow (Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1838). —— A Vindication of the Office of Ambassadors of Christ: Addressed to the Protestant Episcopalians Scattered through the Eastern District of Glasgow and its Suburbs (Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1839). Alison, Archibald, Sermons (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1825). Anon., ‘The Burial of the Dead in Scotland’, SMCR (June 1848). Anon., ‘The Drummond Schism’, Christian Remembrancer, 5 (1843), 295–311. Anon., ‘The Drummond Schism’, Christian Remembrancer, 6 (1843), 94–107. Anon., ‘The Gaelic Movement’, SG (July, Sept., Oct. 1865). Anon., The Last Duchess of Gordon (London: The Monthly Tract Society, n.d.). Anon., Letters on the Subject of the Scotch Episcopal Church by the Right Rev. the (p.315) Lord Bishop of Cashel, to the Right Rev. Bishop Low, One of the Bishops of that Church (Aberdeen: George Cornwall, 1846). Anon., ‘Rev. D. T. K. Drummond's Withdrawal from the Church’, British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, 33 (1843), 144–63. Anon., ‘[Review of Bishop Trower's] Letter to an Incumbent in Glasgow’, SMCR, 1, NS (1851), 62–8, 111–21. Anon., ‘[Review of] The Office of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, According to the Use of the Church of Scotland; with a Copious Local illustration, etc, etc, by the Rev. John Skinner, A.M., Aberdeen, 1807’, Christian Remembrancer, 4 (1843), 642–61. Anon., ‘The Scottish Communion Office [1843]’, Christian Remembrancer, 6 (1843), 569–70. Page 4 of 25
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Bibliography Anon., ‘Popery and Scotch Episcopacy compared’, McPhail's Journal, 8 (1850), 161–79. Anon., ‘The Scottish Prayer‐book and the Scottish Canons’, SMCR, 1, NS (1851), 476–83. Archibald, John, The Historic Episcopate in the Columban Church and in the Diocese of Moray (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1893). —— History of the Episcopal Church at Keith in the Diocese of Moray in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, with other Reminiscences of the Dioceses of Moray and Ross (Edinburgh: R. Grant, 1890). Blatch, William, A Memoir of the Right Rev. David Low (London: Rivingtons, 1855). Caswell, Henry, Scotland and the Scottish Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1853). Cheyne, P., The Authority and Use of the Scottish Communion Office Vindicated (Aberdeen: A. Brown, 1843). —— Six Sermons on the doctrine of the Eucharist (Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co., 1858). Chinnery‐Haldane, Alexander, A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1885). —— A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1887). —— A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles (Edinburgh: Master & Co., 1889). —— A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1891). —— A Charge (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1892). Church, R. W., The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan, 1892). ‘Christian Socialism or the Question of Associated Labour’, SMCR (Aug. 1851), 389–98. Code of Canons of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, as Revised, Amended, and Enacted, by an Ecclesiastical Synod, Holden for that Purpose, at Edinburgh, on the (p.316) 29th day of August, and Continued by Adjournment till the 6th of September, Inclusive, in the Year of our Lord MDCCCXXXVIII (Edinburgh: 1838).
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Bibliography Correspondence between the Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Kinnaird regarding the Position of English Episcopalians Worshipping in Scotland (Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1877). Correspondence between the Right Rev. Bishop Gleig, &c. and the Rev Edward Craig Respecting an Accusation Lately Published in a Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Episcopal Communion of Brechin (Edinburgh: J. Hay & Co, 1820). Craig, Edward, A Respectful Remonstrance Addressed to the Rev James Walker, A.M. Senior Minister of St. Peter's Chapel; on the Subject of a Sermon Preached before the Bishop and Clergy of the United Diocese of Edinburgh, Fife, and Glasgow, in St. John's Chapel, on the 22nd of June, 1825 (Edinburgh: David Brown, 1826). —— A Reply to the Rev James Walker M.A. Rendered Necessary by his Serious Expostulation on the Subject of Baptismal Regeneration (Edinburgh: David Brown, 1826). Craven, J. B., History of the Episcopal Church in Orkney 1688–1882 with some Notes on the Church in Caithness and Shetland during that Period; and an Introductory Sketch of the Earlier Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (Kirkwall: William Pease, 1883). —— History of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Moray (London: Skeffington, 1889). Drummond, D. T. K., Correspondence between the Right Rev. C. H. Terrot, Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and the Rev D. T. K. Drummond, Minister of Trinity Chapel, Dean Bridge, Edinburgh. In Consequence of which the Latter has Resigned his Charge (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842). —— Historical Sketch of Episcopacy in Scotland from 1688 to the Present Time (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1845). —— Reasons for Leaving the Scottish Episcopal Church (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842). —— The Scottish Communion Office Examined, and Proved to be Repugnant to Scripture, and Opposed to the Articles, Liturgy, and Homilies of the Church of England (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842). —— A Sermon for the Times (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1842). Edwards, William, The Church in Danger, in Consequence of the Recent Uncanonical Introduction of the Scottish Communion Office, and of other Innovations, into St. Paul's Chapel, Carrubber's Close, Edinburgh, as Developed in the Following Correspondence between the Rev. John Alexander, a Member of Page 6 of 25
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Bibliography his Congregation, and the Right Rev. the Bishop of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1845). Eeles, F. C., Reservation of the Holy Eucharist in the Scottish Church (Aberdeen: W. Jolly & Sons, 1899). (p.317) Ellis, Rowland, ‘Mission work in Scotland: present state and future prospects’, The Scottish Standard Bearer (May, 1890), 81–2. Episcopacy in Scotland. Revised Report of the Debate in the House of Lords, May 22 1849, on the Occasion of the Right Honourable the Lord Brougham Presenting a Petition from members of the United Church of England and Ireland Resident in Scotland (London: J. Hatchard, 1849). Farquhar, George T. S., The Episcopal History of Perth (Perth: James H. Jackson, 1896). —— The Position of the Episcopal Church: A Sermon (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1885). Foster, J. (ed.), Alumni Oxoniensis: The Members of the University of Oxford 1715–1886, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887). Gallwey, Father, Salvage from the Wreck: A Few Memories of Friends Departed, Preserved in Funeral Discourses (London: Burns & Oates, 1890). Gladstone, William, On the Functions of Laymen in the Church (1852). —— ‘Ritualism and Ritual’, Contemporary Review, 24 (1874), 663–81. —— ‘Scotch Ecclesiastical Affairs’, Quarterly Review, 77 (1845), 220–52. Grub, George, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1861). Hull, J. D., A Letter Respectfully Addressed to the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Exeter (London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley, 1845). —— Popery in the Scotch Episcopal Church (Aberdeen: Alexander Mitchell, 1844). Humphrey, W., Recollections of Scottish Episcopalianism (London: Thomas Baker, 1896). Lathbury, Thomas, A History of the Non‐Jurors (London: 1845). Lawson, J. P., History of the Scottish Episcopal Church from the Revolution to the Present Time, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Gallie and Bailey, 1843).
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Bibliography —— ‘The Present State of the Scottish Episcopal Church’, British Magazine, 2 (Oct. 1832)–4 (Oct. 1833). Lendrum, Alexander, The Church of Scotland her own Best Advocate: A Sermon (Edinburgh: R. Lendrum & Co., 1850). Letters on the Subject of the Scotch Episcopal Church by the Right Rev the Lord Bishop of Cashel to the Right Rev David Low, one of the Bishops of that Church (Aberdeen: George Cornwall, 1846). Menzies, Allan, In Memoriam: Lord Kinnard (Dundee, 1878). Mitchell, Joseph, Reminiscences of my Life in the Highlands, 2 vols. (Chilworth: privately printed, 1883–4; Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles Reprints, 1971). Montgomery, Robert, Letter from the Rev Robert Montgomery M.A., to one of the Managers of St Jude's (London, 1844). (p.318) Neale, J. M., An Earnest Plea for the Retention of the Scotch Liturgy: A Letter to the Lord Bishop of Brechin (London: Joseph Masters, 1862). —— The Life and Times of Patrick Torry DD (London: Joseph Masters, 1856). New Statistical Account of Scotland (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1845). Oliphant, T. T., Historical Notes Relating to the Episcopal Congregation at St Andrews from the Time of the Revolution to the Present Day (Edinburgh: St Giles, 1896). Ornsby, Robert, Memoirs of James Robert Hope‐Scott of Abbotsford, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1884). P.C.J., ‘The Two Communions in Scotland’, Union Review, 4 (1866), 125–58. Paul, William, Past and Present of Aberdeenshire, or Reminiscences of Seventy Years (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith, 1881). Rattray, T., An Essay on the Nature of the Church (Edinburgh: 1728). Report of a Deputation Appointed at a Meeting held in Aberdeen, May 1846, of Ministers and Laymembers of the Church of England Representing the Congregations Adhering to her Forms and Doctrines in Scotland, in Order to Visit England and Communicate with the Bishops and Other Parties in the Established Church on the Subject of their Ecclesiastical Position in Scotland (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1847). Reports of the Commissioners of Religious Instruction, Scotland, PP (1837–8). Page 8 of 25
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Bibliography Ross, Alexander J., Memoir of Alexander Ewing DCL Bishop of Argyll and the Isles (London: Kegan Paul, 2nd edn. 1879). Russel [sic], M., An Historical Catalogue of the Scottish Bishops, down to the Year 1688 by the Right Rev Robert Keith (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1824). —— The Historical Evidence for the Apostolical Institution of Episcopacy: A Sermon (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1830). Skinner, J., Annals of Scottish Episcopacy, from the Year 1788 to the Year 1816 Inclusive (Edinburgh: A. Brown & Co, 1818). —— A Catechism to be Learned by Children before they are Confirmed by the Bishop; The Second Catechism, for the More Complete Instruction of Young Persons in the Principles of the Christian Religion after they have Received the Benefit of Confirmation (Aberdeen: 1822). Smith, Alexander, A New History of Aberdeenshire (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith, 1875). Stephen, Thomas, The History of the Church of Scotland from the Reformation to the Present Time, 4 vols. (London: John Lendrum, 1845). Stephen, W., History of the Scottish Church, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1896). (p.319) Stephens, W. R. W., The Life and Letters of Walter Farquhar Hook DD (London: 1880). Stewart, John H. J., and Stewart Duncan, The Stewarts of Appin (Edinburgh: privately published, 1880). Stuart, A. Moody, Life and Letters of Elizabeth, Last Duchess of Gordon (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1865). Torry, Patrick, A Charge (Peterhead: A. Scott, 1829). —— ‘Explanatory Statement of the Bishop of St Andrews’, SMCR, 1 (1851), 333– 8. —— A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy and Laity of the United Diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane, from their Bishop (Edinburgh: 1846). Trower, W. J., A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway at the Visitation, September 8, 1852 (Edinburgh: R. Grant, 1852). Tulloch, J., Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971 repr. of 1885 edn.). Page 9 of 25
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Bibliography Walker, James, The Condition and Duties of a Tolerated Church: A Sermon (Edinburgh: S. Cheyne, 1806). —— The Motive and Recompence of Duty in the Christian Ministry, especially in Circumstances of Depression and Suffering: A Sermon (Edinburgh: S. Cheyne, 1810). —— A Serious Expostulation with the Rev. Edward Craig, M. A. in Reference to the Doctrine by him Falsely Attributed (in a Remonstrance addressed) to the Rev. James Walker: humbly submitted to the Judgement of the Bishops and Clergy and Earnestly Tendered to the Consideration of the Laity of the Episcopal Communion in Scotland (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1826). Walker, William, Life of the Right Reverend Alexander Jolly and the Right Reverend George Gleig (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1878). —— Three Churchmen: Sketches and Reminiscences (Edinburgh: R. Grant & Son, 1893). —— The Life of the Right Reverend Alexander Jolly DD Bishop of Moray (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 2nd edn. 1878). Wallace, Robert, ‘Church tendencies in Scotland’, in Alexander Grant (ed.), Recess Studies (Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas, 1870), 187–239. Wordsworth, John, The Episcopate of Charles Wordsworth (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1899). (p.320) Works Published After 1900
Adams, Ian H., The Making of Urban Scotland (London: Croom Helm, 1978). Allan, David, ‘Protestantism, Presbyterianism and National Identity in Eighteenth‐Century Scotland’, in Tony Claydon and Ian MacBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183–205. —— Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Anderson, R. D., ‘Education and the State in Nineteenth‐Century Scotland’, Economic History Review, 36 (1983), 518–34. Ansdell, Douglas, The People of the Great Faith: The Highland Church 1690– 1900 (Stornoway: Acair, 1998). Anson, Peter, Scots Fisherfolk (Banff: Saltire Society, 1950). —— Fashions in Church Furnishings 1840–1940 (London: Studio Vista, 1965). Page 10 of 25
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Bibliography Archibald, J., A Ten Year's Conflict and Subsequent Persecutions: Or, A Struggle for Religious Liberty (Dumfries: 1907). Ball, Thomas Isaac, A Pastoral Bishop: A Memoir of Alexander Chinnery‐ Haldane, DD Sometime Bishop of Argyll and the Isles (London: Longmans, 1907). Bebbington, David, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith & Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993). —— Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). —— ‘Religion and National Feeling in Nineteenth‐Century Wales and Scotland’, in Mews (ed.), Studies in Church, 180. 489–503. Beckett, J. V., The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Berlie, David M., Scottish Episcopal Clergy 1689–2000 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). Best, Geoffrey, Mid‐Victorian Britain 1851–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). Bowstead, Christopher I. K., Facts and Fancies Linked with Folk‐Lore about Kilmaveonaig (Edinburgh: R. Grant & Son, n.d.). Brock, M. G., ‘The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800–1833’, in id. and Curthoys (eds.), History of the University of Oxford: Nineteenth‐Century Oxford, Part 1, vi. 7–71. —— and Curthoys, M. C. (eds.), History of the University of Oxford: Nineteenth‐ Century Oxford, Part 1, vi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). (p.321) Brown, Callum, ‘Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?’, Urban History Yearbook (1988), 1–14. —— ‘Religion and Secularisation’, in A. Dickson and J. H. Treble (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1914–1990 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 48–79. —— ‘Religion in the City’, Urban History, 23 (1996), 372–9. —— ‘Each Take Off their Several Way? The Protestant Churches and the Working Classes in Scotland’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 69–85.
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Bibliography —— ‘Protest in the Pews: Interpreting Presbyterianism and Society in Fracture during the Scottish Economic Revolution’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 83–105. —— ‘Religion and Social Change’, in Devine and Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 143–62. —— Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). —— ‘Religion, Class and Church Growth’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 310–35. —— The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London: Methuen, 1987). Brown, Ford K., Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Brown, Stewart J., ‘Thomas Chalmers and the Communal Ideal in Victorian Scotland’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1992), 49–80. —— Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). —— and Fry, Michael, Scotland in the Age of the Disruption (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Broxap, H., The Later Non‐Jurors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). Butler, Perry, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism. A Study of his Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1858 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Campbell, Allan W., and Anson, Peter F., Religious Communities and the Scottish Episcopal Church (repr. from St Peter's Magazine, June 1955). Campbell, R. H., ‘Continuity and Challenge: The Perpetuation of the Landed Interest,’ in T. M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700– 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 122–35. (p.322) Campbell, R. H., ‘The Landed Classes’, in Devine and Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 91–108. —— Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2nd edn. 1985). Page 12 of 25
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Bibliography Cannadine, David, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). —— The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Carruthers, Gerard, ‘Culture’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Transformation of Scotland 1707–1850, 253–74. Carter, Ian, ‘Class and Culture among Farm Servants in the North‐East 1840– 1914.’, in MacLaren (ed.), Social Class in Scotland, 105–27. —— Farm Life in Northeast Scotland 1840–1914: The Poor Man's Country (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979). Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: SCM Press, 1966, 1971). Chalmers, Andrew, ‘Buchan in my Boyhood’, in J. F. Toucher (ed.), The Book of Buchan (Peterhead: The Buchan Club, 1910), 407–32. Checkland, Olive, Philanthropy in Victorian Scotland: Social Welfare and the Voluntary Principle (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980). Checkland, S. and O., Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2nd edn. 1989). Cheyne, A. C., Transforming the Kirk: Victorian Scotland's Religious Revolution (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1983). Claydon, Tony, and MacBride, Ian, ‘The Trials of the Chosen Peoples: Recent Interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain and Ireland’, in eid. (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland c.1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–29. Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Cooke, Anthony, and Donnachie, Ian, ‘Aspects of Industrialisation before 1850,’ in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Transformation of Scotland 1707–1850, 130–54. —— —— Macsween, Anne, and Whatley, Christopher A. (eds.), Modern Scottish History 1707 to the Present: The Modernisation of Scotland 1850 to the Present (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1988). —— —— —— and—— (eds.), Modern Scottish History 1707 to the Present: The Transformation of Scotland 1707–1850 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1998). Page 13 of 25
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Bibliography Cowan, Ian B., The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth Century Scotland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). (p.323) Cox, Jeffrey, English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870– 1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Cragoe, Matthew, An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmarthenshire 1832–1895 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Cranna, John, Fraserburgh: Past and Present (Aberdeen: Rosemount Press, 1914). Craven, J. B., A History of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Caithness (Kirkwall: William Peace, 1908). —— Records of the Dioceses of Argyll and the Isles 1560–1860 (Kirkwall: William Pease, 1907). Currie, R., Gilbert, Allan, and Horsley, Lee, Churches and Church‐Goers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Devine, T. M., Clanship to Crofter's War: The Social Transformation of the Highlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). —— Exploring the Scottish Past (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1995). —— The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). —— ‘Scottish Urbanisation,’ in id. (ed.), Exploring the Scottish Past: Theses in the History of Scottish Society (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 114–32. —— ‘Temporary Migration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 32 (1978), 344–59. —— The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy 1660–1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). —— ‘The Urban Crisis’ in id. and Jackson (eds.), Glasgow, 402–16. —— The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London, Penguin, 1999). —— and Jackson, Gordon (eds.), Glasgow: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). —— and Mitchison, Rosalind, (eds.), People and Society in Scotland: 1760–1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988).
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Bibliography Dodgshon, Robert A., From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands c. 1493–1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Donaldson, Gordon, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). —— ‘Covenant to Revolution’, in Forrester and Murray (eds.), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland, 59–72. —— ‘The Scottish Church 1567–1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), 40–56. Dow, Derek, and Ross, Michael, Glasgow's Gain: The Anderston Story (Carnforth: Parthenon, 1986). (p.324) Dowden, John, The Scottish Communion Office 1764 (Oxford, 1922). Drummond, A. L., and Bulloch, J., The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1975). —— The Scottish Church 1688–1843: The Age of the Moderates (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1973). Eeles, F. C., Ceremonial Connected with the Scottish Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910). —— Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910). Ellsworth, L. E., Charles Lowder & the Ritualist Movement (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1982). Fairweather, Barbara, The 300‐Year Story of Ballachulish Slate (Glencoe: Glencoe & North Lorn Folk Museum, n.d.). Farquhar, George T. S., ‘Forty Three Years at the Cathedral Perth 1883– 1926’ (n.d.). —— A Short History of St Ninian's Cathedral, Perth, to 1926 A. D. (Edinburgh: Scottish Chronicle Press, n.d.). Ferguson, William, ‘The Problems of the Established Church in the West Highlands and Islands in the Eighteenth Century’, RSCHS 17 (1969), 15–31. —— Scotland 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968).
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Bibliography Finlay, Richard J., ‘Keeping the Covenant: Scottish National Identity,’ in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds.), Eighteenth‐Century Scotland: New Perspectives (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 122–33. —— ‘National Identity: From British empire to European Union’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Modernisation of Scotland, 1850 to the Present, 25–46. Forrester, Duncan, and Murray, Douglas (ed.), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2nd edn. 1996). Foskett, R., ‘The Drummond Controversy 1842’, RSCHS 16 (1969), 99–109. —— ‘The Episcopate of Daniel Sandford 1810–1830’, RSCHS 15 (1966), 141–52. Franklin, R. W., ‘Pusey and Worship in Industrial Society’, Worship, 57 (1983), 386–412. Fraser, W. Hamish, ‘Social Class,’ in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Transformation of Scotland 1707–1850, 203–29. Fuller, R. H., ‘The Classical High Church Reaction to the Tractarians’, in Rowell (ed.), Tradition Renewed, 51–63. Gaskell, Philip, Morvern Transformed: A Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). (p.325) Gauldie, Enid, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working‐Class Housing 1780–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974). —— ‘The Middle Class and Working Class Housing in the Nineteenth Century.’, in MacLaren (ed.), Social Class in Scotland. Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976). Gilbert, E. R., Church and People in an Industrial City (London: Lutterworth Press, 1957). Gilbert, W., Edinburgh Life in the Nineteenth Century (1901; repr. Glasgow, 1989). Girouard, Mark, ‘Victorian Values and the Upper Classes’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1992), 49–60. Goldie, F., A Short History of the Episcopal Church in Scotland (London: Saint Andrew Press, 1951). Page 16 of 25
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Bibliography Gordon, Eleanor, ‘Women's Spheres’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 206–35. Gray, Malcolm, The Fishing Industries of Scotland 1790–1914: A Study in Regional Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). —— ‘North‐East Agriculture and the Labour Force 1790–1875’, in MacLaren (ed.), Social Class in Scotland, 86–104. —— ‘The Processes of Agricultural Change in the North‐East 1790–1870’, in Leah Leneman (ed.), Perspectives in Scottish Social History (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 125–40. Grisbrooke, W. J., Anglican Liturgies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Alcuin Club, 1958). Harvie, Christopher, ‘Culture and Identity’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History, 277–98. Haythornthwaite, J. A., Scotland in the Nineteenth Century: An Analytical Bibliography of Material Relating to Scotland in Parliamentary Papers 1800– 1900 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). Henderson, G. D., Mystics of the North‐East (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1934). Hill, John Paul, The Episcopal Chapel at Muchalls (London: Mowbray, 1956). Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (1988; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hole, Robert, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). (p.326) Houghton, W. E., The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Hunter, James, ‘The Emergence of the Crofting Community: The Religious Contribution 1798–1843’, Scottish Studies, 18 (1974), 95–116. Hylson‐Smith, Kenneth, Evangelicals in the Church of England (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988). Inglis, K. S., Churches and the Working Class in Victorian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).
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Bibliography Ingram, Mary E., A Jacobite Stronghold of the Church (Edinburgh: R. M. Grant, 1907). Kerr, Cecil, Cecil, Marchioness of Lothian: A Memoir (London: Sands, 1922). Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo‐British Identity 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kirk, James (ed.), The Church in the Highlands (Edinburgh: The Scottish Church History Society, 1998). Kitson Clark, George, Churchmen and the Condition of England 1832–1885 (London: Methuen, 1973). Knight, Christopher, ‘The Anglicizing of Scottish Episcopalianism’, RSCHS 23 (1989), 361–77. Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth‐Century Church and English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Knox, W., ‘The Political and Workplace Culture of the Scottish Working Class 1832–1914’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 138–66. —— Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland 1800–Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1995). —— ‘The Scottish Episcopal Clergy and the Ideology of Jacobitism’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982). —— Integration and Enlightenment: Scotland 1746–1832 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). Lochhead, Marion, Episcopal Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1966). Lynch, Michael, Scotland: A New History (London, Pimlico, 1992). Macinnes, Allan, I., ‘Evangelical Protestantism in the Nineteenth‐Century Highlands’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (p.327) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 43–68.
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Bibliography —— ‘Landownership, Land Use and Elite Enterprise in Scottish Gaeldom: From Clanship to Clearance in Argyllshire, 1688–1858’, in T. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994), 1–35. MacInnes, John, ‘Religion in Gaelic Society’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 52 (1983), 222–42. —— The Evangelical Movement in the Highlands of Scotland 1688–1800 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1951). McIntosh, John R., Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party 1740–1800 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1998). MacLaren, A. Allan, ‘The Liberal Profession within the Scottish Class Structure 1760–1860: A Comparative Study of Aberdeen Clergymen, Doctors and Lawyers’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994), 77–97. —— Religion and Social Class: The Disruption Years in Aberdeen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). —— (ed.), Social Class in Scotland: Past and Present (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d.). Maclean, Allan, ‘Episcopal Worship in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Forrester and Murray (eds.), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland, 107–25. MacLeod, Donald, ‘The Highland Churches Today’, in Kirk (ed.), The Church in the Highlands, 146–76. McLeod, Hugh, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1974). —— ‘New Perspectives on Victorian Working‐Class Religion: The Oral Evidence’, Oral History, 14 (1986), 31–49. —— Piety and Poverty: Working‐Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996). —— Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). MacLeod, John, Highlanders: A History of the Gaels (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996). Macwhirter, Andrew, ‘Lesser Known Church Law Cases’, RSCHS 11 (1952), 149– 59. Page 19 of 25
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Bibliography Marwick, W. H., ‘Social Heretics in the Scottish Churches’, RSCHS 11 (1953), 227–39. Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Maver, Irene, ‘Urbanisation’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Transformation of Scotland 1707–1850, 155–76. (p.328) Maxwell, Jean S., The Centenary Book of St John's, Dumfries (Dumfries: Robert Dinwiddie, 1968). Mechie, S., The Church and Scottish Social Development 1780–1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Meek, Donald, ‘Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth‐Century Highlands’, Scottish Studies, 28 (1987), 1–34. —— ‘Scottish Highlanders: North American Indians and the SSPCK: Some Cultural Perspectives’, RSCHS 23 (1989), 378–96. Mews, Stuart (ed.), Studies in Church History: Religion and National Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1982). Mitchison, Rosalind, Lordship to Patronage: Scotland 1603–1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). Morgan, Nicholas, and Trainor, Richard, ‘The Dominant Classes’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds.), People and Society in Scotland 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 103–37. Morris, R. J., ‘Urbanisation’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History 1707: The Modernisation of Scotland 1850 to the Present, 119–41. Mullan, David George, Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of an Idea 1560– 1638 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986). Murray, Norman, The Scottish Handloom Weavers 1790–1850: A Social History (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978). Neish, Robert, Old Peterhead: An Authentic Account of the Origin and Development of the Burgh of Barony of Old Peterhead (Peterhead: 1950). Nenadic, Stana, ‘The Rise of the Urban Middle Classes’, in Devine and Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 109–26.
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Bibliography Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Clarendon Press): ii–iii (1979), iv (1980), ed. Ian Kerr and Thomas Gornall; vii (1995), ed. Gerard Tracey. Newsome, David, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforce's and Henry Manning (1966; Leominster: Gracewing, 1993). —— The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (London: John Murray, 1997). Nockles, Peter B, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). —— ‘ “Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, JEH, 47 (1996), 655–82. —— ‘Church Parties in the pre‐Tractarian Church of England 1750–1833: The “Orthodox”—Some Problems of Definition and Identity’, in Colin Haydon, John Walsh, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 334–59. (p.329) —— ‘Continuity and Change in Anglican High Churchmanship in Britain 1792–1850’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1982). —— ‘Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties: The Oxford Movement and the University’, in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford: Nineteenth‐Century Oxford, Part 1, vi. 197–267. Norman, E. R., Church and Society in England 1770–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Overton, J. D., The NonJurors: Their Lives, Principles, and Writings (London: 1902). Palmer, Bernard, Reverend Rebels: Five Victorian Clerics and their Fight against Authority (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993). Parsons, Gerald, ‘Liberation and Defence: Victorian Church and Victorian Chapel’, in id. (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain: Controversies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 147–65. Payne, Peter L.. ‘Industrialisation and Industrial Decline’, in Cooke et al. (eds.), Modern Scottish History: The Modernisation of Scotland 1850 to the Present, 73–94. Perry, William, Alexander Penrose Forbes, Bishop of Brechin, The Scottish Pusey (London: SPCK, 1939). Page 21 of 25
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Bibliography —— George Hay Forbes: A Romance in Scholarship (London: SPCK, 1927). —— The Oxford Movement in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Pittock, Murray G. H., Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). —— The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991). Pratt, John B. rev. Anderson, Robert, Buchan (Aberdeen: Lewis Smith & Son, 4th edn. 1901). Reed, John Sheldon, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo‐ Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996). Reynolds, K. D., Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Richards, Eric, A History of the Highland Clearances: Emigration, Protest, Reasons (London: Croom Helm, 1985). —— A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886 (London: Croom Helm, 1982). Robb, George, ‘Popular Religion and the Christianisation of the Scottish Highlands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, JRH 16 (1990), 18–34. Robbins, Keith, ‘Religion and National Identity in Modern British History’, in Mews (ed.), Studies in Church History Religion and National Identity, 465–87. (p.330) Rowell, Geoffrey (ed.), Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers (London: SCM, 1986). Ryrie, A. C., A Vision Pursued: St John's Church, Jedburgh, 1844–1994 (n.d.). St Quintin, G., The History of Glenalmond: The Story of a Hundred Years (Edinburgh: T & A Constable, 1956). Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and the American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Shannon, Richard, Gladstone 1809–1865 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982). Sharp, R., ‘New Perspectives in the High Church Tradition: Historical Background 1730–1780’, in Rowell (ed.), Tradition Renewed, 4–23. Page 22 of 25
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Bibliography Shepherd, J. H., Episcopacy in Strathearn: A History of the Church at Muthill from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dumfries: R. G. Mann, 1907). Smith, Mark, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Smout, T. C., A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950 (London: Collins, 1986). —— A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (London: Fontana Press, 1972). Soloway, R. A., Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783–1852 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Strong, Rowan, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). —— ‘ “A church for the poor”: High‐Church Slum Ministry in Anderston, Glasgow, 1845–1851’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50 (1999), 279–302. —— ‘Coronets and Altars: Aristocratic Women's and Men's Support for the Oxford Movement in Scotland during the 1840s’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History: Gender and the Christian Religion, 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1998), 391–403. —— ‘High Churchmen and Anglo‐Catholics: William Gladstone and the Eucharistic Controversy in the Scottish Episcopal Church, 1856–1860’, JRH 20 (1996), 175–84. Summers, David W., Fishing off the Knuckle: The Fishing Villages of Buchan (Aberdeen: Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, n.d.). Terry, George F., Memorials of the Church of St John the Evangelist, Princes St, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Robert Grant, 1911). (p.331) Thatcher, Barbara M., ‘The Episcopal Church in Helensburgh in the Mid‐Nineteenth Century’, in John Butt and J. T. Ward (eds.), Scottish Themes (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 98–123. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). Thompson, F. M. L., The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (London: Fontana, 1988). Thompson, Paul, with Wailey, Tony, and Lummis, Trevor, Living the Fishing (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
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Bibliography Tracey, Gerard (ed.), The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Veitch, Thomas, The Story of St Paul's and St George's Church, York Place, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1958). Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Waterman, A. M. C., ‘The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology 1798–1833’, JEH 34 (1983), 231–44. —— Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Whatley, Christopher A., ‘The Experience of Work’, in Devine and Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, 227–51. White, Gavin, ‘Hutchinsonianism in Eighteenth‐century Scotland’, RSCHS 21 (1982), 157–69. —— ‘New Names for Old Things: Scottish Reaction to Early Tractarianism’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History: Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History (Oxford: Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1977), 329–37. —— ‘The Consecration of Samuel Seabury’, Scottish Historical Review, 63 (1984), 37–49. Wickham, E. R., Church and People in an Industrial City (London: Lutterworth Press, 1957). Williams, C. Peter, The Ideal of the Self‐Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). Withers, Charles, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region (London: Routledge, 1988). —— Urban Highlanders: Highland–Lowland Migration and Urban Gaelic Culture 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1998). Withrington, Donald J., ‘The Churches in Scotland, c.1870–c.1900: Towards a New Social Conscience’, RSCHS, 19 (1977), 155–68. —— ‘Non‐Churchgoing c. 1750–c.1850: A Preliminary Study’, RSCHS 17 (1972), 99–113.
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Bibliography (p.332) Withrington, Donald J. and Grant, Ian R. (eds.), The Statistical Account of Scotland 1791–1799 edited by Sir John Sinclair (East Ardley, Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1983). Wolffe, John, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Wolffe, John, ‘Roman Catholicism’, in Nigel M. de A. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993). Wood, Sydney, The Shaping of 19th Century Aberdeenshire (Stevenage: SPA Books, 1985). Yates, Nigel, Buildings, Faith and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). —— Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
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Index
Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society Rowan Strong
Print publication date: 2002 Print ISBN-13: 9780199249220 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0199249229.001.0001
(p.333) Index Aberdeen 42, 63, 141 Aberdeen, Diocese of 24, 36–7, 157–8, 264 adherents 38–41, 44–9 schools 49–51 Aberdeen, University of 12, 93 Aberdeenshire 19, 40–4, 80, 231, 251, 265 Adelaide, Queen 181 agriculture 141, 144 Highland 72–4, 101, 129 North‐East 40–4 Airlie, Earl of 271 Alison, W. P. 149 Alloa 20 Anglican Communion 292, 293 Anglicanism 1, 26, 135, 136, 218, 250, 256, 263 Anglicization 143, 241, 268 see also Episcopalianism Anglo‐Catholicism 26, 27–9, 137, 162, 165, 210 n. 1, 215, 236, 256–7, 270, 292 ritualism 62, 171, 180, 183, 221, 242–63, 304–5, 310 see also Episcopalianism Angus 3 Anne I, Queen of England and Scotland 12 anti‐Catholicism 177–8, 180–3, 297 Anti‐Jacobin Review 160 Ardrishaig 106, 131 Argyll 19, 71, 72, 76, 79, 81, 83, 87, 122–3, 125 Argyll, Duchess of, see Campbell, Amelia; Campbell, Anne; Campbell, Elizabeth Argyll, Duke of 71, 82–3, 267, 273–4 Argyll, synod of 83–4 Argyll and the Isles, Diocese of 103, 113–14, 122, 127–8, 137, 162, 273 aristocracy: England and Wales 267–70 see also Episcopalianism; Scottish society Ascension Day 90 Page 1 of 19
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Index Association of English Episcopalians 229–30, 235 Atholl, Duke of 267 Auchterarder 90 Australia 114, 117, 131, 156 Ayrshire 3 Badenoch 72 Bahamas 108 Ballintoul 111 Band of Hope Review 128 Banff 237 baptism 2, 8, 46, 47, 65, 77, 78, 89, 101, 103, 171–2, 175–6, 213, 298 Baptist churches 62, 71 Beckles, Edmund, former Bishop of Sierra Leone 229–30, 231, 235 Begg, James 164 Beza, Theodore 5–6 Bible 53, 57, 61, 68, 81, 227, 299 see also Gaelic Bible Bingham, Joseph 168 Bishops' Wars, 1639–40 8 Black Acts 7 Blaikie, William 164 Book of Common Prayer, see Church of England Bourignonism 17 Boyle, George Frederick, sixth Earl of Glasgow 29, 249, 250, 253, 257–8 Boyle, Montague, Countess of Glasgow 110 (p.334) Boyne, battle of 183 Brechin, Diocese of 24, 264, 271 Brett, Thomas 168 Brewster, Patrick 164 British Workman 128 Britishness 136–7 see also Episcopalianism Brodie, Alexander, MP for Elgin 274 Brougham, Lord 222, 223 Buccleuch, Duke of 225, 266, 267, 284 Buchan 40, 80 burial 34–5, 47, 53–4, 58–9 Burke, Edmund 156–7 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury 167 Bute, Marquis of 258, 267 Caithness 71, 78, 84 Calvin, John 3, 5 Calvinism 2, 6, 12, 17, 164, 213, 294 Cambridge Camden Society 248, 259, 261, 271 Cameron, Sir Duncan of Fassfern and Callart 100 Cameron of Callart 87 Cameron of Lochiel 79, 81, 111, 124 Campbell, Amelia, Duchess of Argyll 273–4 Campbell, Anne, Duchess of Argyll 273 Campbell, Bishop Archibald, Scottish nonjuror 13 Campbell, Elizabeth, Duchess of Argyll 273 Page 2 of 19
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Index Campbell, Sir John of Ardchattan 100, 101 Campbell, Robert 239, 242–3, 244, 302, 304–5, 306 Campbell of Auchendarroch 119 Campbells of Argyll 100, 125 Canada 117 capitalism 72, 74, 123, 124–5, 133, 144, 161, 163, 188 Carmarthenshire 269 Cartwright, Lady Elizabeth 274 Castle Gordon 280 Chadwick, Edwin 148, 169 Chalmers, Thomas 149, 164 Chandra mission 31 Charles I, King of England and Scotland 8, 12 Charles II, King of England and Scotland 8 children 147, 148, 158–9, 187 Chinnery‐Haldane, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles 118, 120, 137, 245 Christ Church College, University of Oxford 249 Christian Remembrancer 305 Christian Socialists 161 Christianity, ‘diffused’ 151 Christmas 8, 35, 90, 92, 259 church extension 172–3, 264 Church Missionary Society 219 Church of England 31–2, 106–7, 152, 161, 180–1, 212, 215–16, 221, 226, 227, 230, 231, 241, 245, 247, 255, 263, 272, 275, 292, 294, 302, 303, 307, 310 seventeenth century 8, 294 eighteenth century 15, 16, 20 bishops 222, 223–4, 232, 234 Book of Common Prayer 12, 15, 20, 25, 68, 90, 117, 135, 218, 232, 234–5, 245, 247, 275, 283, 285, 289, 291 conservatism 156–7 legal disabilities of Episcopalian clergy in 32, 224–5 Thirty–nine Articles of Religion 20, 280, 289, 291 see also Episcopal Church Church of England Association 222 Church of Ireland 15, 180–1, 187 Church of Scotland: sixteenth century 1, 2–7 seventeenth century 8–12 eighteenth century 12–13, 70–1, 75, 80–1, 82, 152, 211 nineteenth century 29, 30, 31, 33–5, (p.335) 40, 51, 53, 88–9, 93, 104, 105, 110, 116, 126, 132, 133, 134, 162, 164, 166, 213–14, 225, 226, 231, 247, 255, 265–6, 272–3, 273, 275, 278, 307, 308 Disruption of 53, 129, 163, 165 n. 65, 225, 278–9 episcopacy in 3, 5, 6–12 General Assembly 3, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 11, 88, 211, 225, 227 parishes 76, 97, 98 Aberfoyle 79 Ardnamurchan 79 Blair Atholl 78, 79, 111 Page 3 of 19
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Index Bracadale 98 Caputh 79 Contin 79 Croy 75 Cruden 38 Daviot and Dunlichty 75–6, 79, 80, 84, 93, 98 Deer 38 Dingwall 79 Diurinish 75 Douane 78 Dunkeld 78 Dunoon and Kilmun 97–8 Dunottar and Kinneff 65 Fetteresso 65 Foulis Wester 78 Huntly 38 Kenmay 38 Killearnan 79, 80, 84, 99 Kilmalie 77, 79, 80, 98 Kilmaveonaig 78 Kilmore and Kilbride 98 Kilmuir Wester and Suddy 77, 78, 98–9 Lethendy 78, 79 Lismore and Appin 78, 79, 82, 96–7, 100, 102 Logierait 78, 80 Monimail 274 Morvern 81–3, 126 Moulin 78, 99 Moy 77, 93, 98 Muthill 79 Peterhead 38, 40 Rosemarkie 99 Stornoway 118 Urquhart 77, 99 Urray 77–8, 79, 93 worship 4, 9, 51 Church Pastoral Aid Society 224 n. 33 Civil Wars, England and Scotland 8 clans, see Scottish society, Highland class 133, 142–3 see also Scottish society Claughton, T. L., Bishop of St Albans 273 clearances, 145 see also Highlands Coatbridge 142 Coillabol 128 confirmation 103, 178–9 Conformity, Act of, 1573 5 Congregationalists 30, 40 Coplestone, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff 224 Cotterill, Henry, Bishop of Edinburgh 292 n. 10 Page 4 of 19
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Index Court of Session 12 Cowie 65 Crieff 90 crofters, North–East, see Episcopalianism; Scottish society Cromarty 76, 84, 94, 104 Culloden, battle of, 1746 1, 126, 237 Cumberland 81 customs: folk 55, 59, 67, 100–1 religious 34–5, 51–9, 60–2, 65, 67–8, 88, 89, 89–93, 95, 102–3, 104, 120, 128–9, 151, 178–9, 259, 262 see also baptism; burial; death; marriage Daily Mail 264 Daily Review 226 Daly, Robert, Bishop of Cashel 221 (p.336) death 148 Denison, Edward, Bishop of Salisbury 223 Diack, William 85 disease 148, 175 Discipline, First Book of, 1561 2 Discipline, Second Book of, 1578 6 Dodsworth, William, of Margaret St chapel, London 249 Douglas, Alice, Countess of Morton 110 Douglas, James, fourth Earl of Morton 5, 126 Douglas, Lord 284 Dowden, John, Bishop of Edinburgh 32 Downie, Robert of Appin 100 Dundee 141, 148, 162, 165, 227, 271 Easter 8, 46, 53–4, 57, 90, 92, 119, 128, 173, 174 Easter Ross 71, 84 Ecclesiological Society, see Cambridge Camden Society Eden, Robert, Bishop of Moray and Ross and primus 22, 32, 162, 229–30, 234, 292 n. 10, 300, 310 Edinburgh 20, 141, 159, 237, 244, 248, 250, 295 Edinburgh, Diocese of 30–1, 171, 219, 244–5 Edinburgh, University of 216 Edmonstone, Sir Archibald 24, 238, 240–1, 242, 246 Education Act 1872 147 Elgin, Earl of 271, 284 England 140, 144, 308, 311 English Church Union 254 English Episcopal clergy: Hull, John, of Huntly 210, 220 Skete, H. A., of Perth 218 Williamson, George, of Fochabers 277, 280 English Episcopalianism 218–35, 292 Aberdeen, St Paul's 218, 222 Aberdeen, St James's 219, 229, 230 Cally 229 Dundee, St John's 219, 229 Page 5 of 19
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Index Dunoon 219, 222, 232–3 Edinburgh, St Thomas's 218, 219, 222, 229, 232 Edinburgh, St Vincent's 219, 229, 232 Fochabers 219, 276–83 Galloway House chapel 219 Gask 222 Gatehouse, private chapel 219 Glasgow, St Jude's 210, 218, 219, 222, 229 Glasgow, St Silas's 219, 229, 235 Huntly 210, 218, 222 Montrose 21, 216, 219, 222, 229 Nairn 218, 219, 220, 222, 229 Perth 218, 222, 235 Wemyss Bay, private chapel 219 see also Association of English Episcopalians; Church of England Association; Episcopalianism, Evangelicalism Enlightenment 81, 143 episcopacy, see Church of Scotland; Episcopalianism Episcopal Church clergy 22, 23–4, 65, 68, 86, 87–8, 92, 96, 106, 107, 111–14, 121, 132, 133, 136, 159, 163, 183–4, 289–90, 298, 306–7 Aitchison, David, of Christ Church, Glasgow 117, 187 Alexander, John, of St Columba's, Edinburgh 167, 237–8, 239, 244, 245–6, 247 Alison, Archibald, of Cowgate chapel, Edinburgh 138–9, 149, 152, 166, 167 Archibald, John, Episcopalian historian 26 Bingham, Fanshawe, of Muthill 261 Cameron, Alan, of Arpafeelie 85, 88 (p.337) Chambers, John Charles, Missionary Priest, Perth 250–1 Cheyne, Patrick, of Buckie 32, 65–6 Christie, James, of Turriff 48–9 Comper, John, of St John's, Aberdeen 261–2, 309 Craig, Edward, of St James's, Edinburgh 212–13, 214 Craven, James Brown, of Kirkwall 79, 94 Cruickshank, Andrew, of Muthill 85, 252 D'Orsey, Alexander, of St John's, Anderston, Glasgow 115, 116–17, 165–87 Drummond, David Thomas Ker, of Trinity chapel, Edinburgh 215–18, 219–20, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233 Erskine, William, of Muthill 85 Farquhar, George, Dean of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane 26 Forbes, George, of Burntisland 122, 130, 136, 239, 302 Fortescue, Edward, Dean of St Ninian's, Perth 253, 254 Gordon, James, of St Andrews, Glasgow 170, 171, 184 Greenshields, James, of Edinburgh 12–13 Humble, Henry, canon of St Ninian's, Perth 249–50, 253, 255 Humphrey, William, of St Mary Magdalene's, Dundee 185 Ilkin, John, of Ballachulish 108–9, 132 Innes, Mitchell, of Old St Paul's, Edinburgh 261 Kirk, Robert, Gaelic scholar 81 Kirkwood, James, Gaelic scholar 81 Lendrum, Alexander, of Crieff 160–1, 165, 250, 252–3, 260, 262, 300, 302, 304, 309 Page 6 of 19
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Index Low, William, of Cruden and Largs 52, 55–6 Lyon, Robert 16 MacColl, Donald, of Ballachulish 88, 116 MacColl, Dugald, diocesan supernumerary 129 MacColl, Neil, of Glencoe 109–10 MacColl, Paul, of Ballachulish 89–90, 109 MacKenzie, Donald, of Ballachulish 109, 128 MacKenzie, Duncan, of Ballachulish 108 MacKenzie, Duncan, of Strathnairn 93–4, 98 Marshall, John, of Blairgowrie 99 Medley, E. S., Precentor of Inverness cathedral 121 Montgomery, Robert 210 Moore, Hugh, of Stornoway 117–18 Murdoch, John, of Keith 66–7, 93 Paterson, William, of Arpafeelie 87, 104–5 Perry, William, Dean of Edinburgh 27 Pratt, John, of Cruden 48, 52–3 Proby, William, of Muchalls 260 Ramsay, Edward, Dean of Edinburgh 225 Rowson, Samuel, of Campbelltown 260, 261 Simpson, William, of Fort William 110–11, 132 Skinner, John, of Forfar 21 Skinner, John, of Langside, 17 Stephen, William, Episcopalian historian 26 Taylor, James, of Kilmaveonaig 87 Torry, John, Dean of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane 28, 254, 307 Walker, Thomas, of Kilmaveonaig 111–12 (p.338) Walker, William, Episcopalian historian 18 see also English Episcopal clergy; Episcopalianism Episcopal Church congregations and chapels: Aberdeen, St John's 261–2 Aberdeen, St Margaret's 262 Aberdeenshire 39 Alford 45–6 Alyth 271 Ardchattan 123 Ardnamurchan 83 Arpafeelie 94 Arradoul 66, 276 Ballachulish 87, 89–90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 108–10, 113, 114, 122, 127–8, 132 Black Isle 103 Blairgowrie 99 Burntisland 109 Campbelltown 105–6, 117, 259–60 Carroy 103, 105, 106, 113, 115 Cove 58, 65 Craignish 106 Crieff 112–13, 252, 303 Page 7 of 19
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Index Cruden 40, 45, 48, 52–8, 59–62, 63, 271 Cumbrae cathedral 105, 257–8 Deer 50, 51 Dingwall 94, 104 Dumfries 258–9 Dunfermline 271 Dunkeld 99 Dunoon 103, 105, 113, 125 Duror 96, 100, 109 Edinburgh, All Saints 245 Edinburgh, Cowgate chapel 138–9 Edinburgh, St Columba's 236–47 Edinburgh, St James's 212, 214–15 Edinburgh, St Paul's, Carrubber's Close 16–17, 216, 237–8, 239, 240, 245, 261 Edinburgh, Trinity chapel 216 Elgin 276, 280 Enzie 276 Fasque 271–2, 283 Fochabers 66, 163, 265, 275–83, 285, 297 Forfar 266 Forgue 45, 49 Forres 99 n. 62 Fort William 94, 95, 96, 98, 103, 105, 110–11, 113, 114, 119, 132 Fortrose 94, 99, 104 Fraserburgh 37, 40 Fyvie 45 Glasgow 103, 115–16, 160 Glasgow, Christ Church Calton 187–97 Glasgow, St John's Anderston 165–87 Glencoe 108, 109–10, 129, 132 Glencreran 96, 109, 126 Greenock 160 Helensburgh 259 Highfield 94, 99, 104 Huntly 271 Inverness 94–5, 103, 117 Iona 273–4 Jedburgh, St John's 247–9, 283–4 Keith 260 Kilmaveonaig 94, 95–6, 103, 111 Kincardine O'Neil 58–9 Kinlochmoidart 126 Kirriemuir 271 Knoydart 96 Laurencekirk 272 Lochgilphead 105, 106, 119, 125, 265 Longside 40, 45 Lonmay 37, 45 Meiklefolla 51, 56, 57, 265 Page 8 of 19
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Index Morvern 81–3, 89, 96, 127 Muchalls 65, 260–1, 271 Muthill 78, 90–1, 252, 260, 262 New Pitsligo 49–50, 265 Oban 105, 106, 119 Old Deer 265 (p.339) Perth, St Johns 216, 250–1, 251–2, 254 Perth, St Ninian's 29, 249–57, 286, 304 Peterhead 37, 40 Pittenweem 270–1 Portnacroish 89, 94, 95, 102, 103, 109, 113, 114, 119–20 Portree 106 n. 82 Rossie Priory 265, 274 Rothesay 103, 105, 113, 117, 119 Ruthven 66–7 Scotland xii–xiii Stornoway 103, 106, 113, 114–15, 117 Strathnairn 93–4, 98 Sunart 96 Tummel Bridge 99, 111 Turriff 45, 48–9 Woodhead 50–1 Episcopal Church Society 23, 25, 102, 107, 113, 162–3, 165 Episcopal Friendly Society 113 Episcopal Fund 113 Episcopalianism: sixteenth century 1, 5, 6–7 seventeenth century 7–12, 272 eighteenth century 12–19, 33, 35–40, 71–2, 75–93 Anglicization 25, 27, 29, 32, 80–1, 108, 120–1, 132, 133, 134–7, 185, 246–7, 285–6, 289–95, 296, 303, 311 Anglo–Catholicism 235–63, 299–300, 304–5, 307 aristocracy and lairds 23, 25, 32, 33–4, 34, 35, 49, 78, 86–7, 100, 110, 112–13, 113– 14, 123–7, 134, 135, 163, 166, 247–50, 257–8, 264–88, 289, 290, 293, 296–7, 303 Britishness and 300–1 canons, code of 14–15, 25, 167, 217–18, 233, 234–5, 280, 282 ‘Church of Scotland’ 36 n. 8 college party 14 crofters, North–East 33–59, 66–9, 276–83, 284–5, 310 diocesan party 14 episcopacy and bishops 21–2, 23–5, 36–7, 87, 133, 159–60, 161, 185, 212, 224–5, 227, 298, 231, 235, 291–2, 305–6 Episcopal Synod 14, 22, 24, 234, 306 Evangelicalism 211–35, 294, 302 see also English Episcopal clergy evangelism 160–5, 166, 172, 175, 183–4, 276–83, 299–300 female, see women fisherfolk 58, 59–66, 68, 118, 287–8, 297–8, 299, 309–10 Gaelic 70–137, 187, 298–9, 309 see also Gaels Page 9 of 19
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Index Gaelic clergy 105–11, 116 gender and 297–8, 304 General Synod 21–2, 25, 26, 217, 232, 233 n. 63, 275, 282, 291, 302, 305, 307 Highland, non‐Gaelic 117–18, 119–20 Highland famine and 130 historiography 26–8, 70–1, 166–7, 286–7, 291, 292–3 identity 136–7, 253, 295, 296–302, 307–8, 309–11 Irish, see migration loyalism 154–5, 157–8, 295–6, 298 middle class 21, 22–3, 25, 29, 32, 49, 138–9, 163, 172, 173, 174, 186–7, 264, 285–6, 287, 289, 297 North‐East 33–69, 287, 299, 309 northern 17–19, 25, 28, 172, 236, 240–1, 246, 250, 251, 260, 262, 278, 301, 307 see also High Church penal legislation and 15–16, 32, 75, 270 population of 19–20, 29–31, 295 qualified clergy and chapels 16, 20–1, 215, 216, 222, 235, 237, 250–1, 251–2 (p.340) ritualism, see Anglo‐Catholicism; High Church royalism 296 Scotland and 216, 249, 287, 289–311 southern 17–19, 25, 27, 28, 241, 244–5, 250, 290, 302 urban 138–9, 152–209, 289 views on society 152–65 working class and poor 46–9, 119, 162, 167, 172–3, 173–4, 175, 178–9, 181–3, 187– 8, 297 see also High Church; Jacobitism; Scottish Communion Office Erastianism 177, 249 n. 104 Errol, Earl of 48, 52, 271, 284 Erskine, John, sixth Earl of Mar 5 Eton College 22 Eucharist 2, 4, 8, 16, 25, 46, 67–8, 75, 77, 86, 89–92, 104, 234, 241 n. 82, 248, 254, 255, 274, 275, 298 Eucharistic controversy, 1850s 28, 114, 221 reserved sacrament 104, 262 usages 14, 304, 307 see also Scottish Communion Office Evangelical Church Association 230 n. 58 Evangelicalism 29, 32, 71, 72, 82, 83, 84, 91, 92, 133, 134, 149, 151–2, 211–12, 255, 261, 263, 269–70, 291, 292 English 211, 223–4, 224–5, 226, 247 see also Episcopalianism Ewing, Alexander, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles 99–100, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114– 15, 117–18, 125–6, 127–8, 129, 130–1, 132, 136, 137, 263 Falconer, Bishop William, Scottish nonjuror 15 Fife 3, 19, 270 fisherfolk, see Episcopalianism fishing 41, 62–4, 66, 74, 118, 131 Fitzmaurice, Sister Minna 118 Five Articles of Perth, 1618 8 Fleming, Colonel of Kinlochlaich 100
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Index Forbes, Alexander, Bishop of Brechin 22, 24, 28, 32, 122, 165, 166, 221, 231–2, 251, 274, 300, 304, 305 Forbes, Lord Horace 25, 29, 32, 249, 250, 252 Forbes, Sir John 265 Forbes, John Hay, Lord Medwyn 22, 23, 236, 239, 242, 244, 246, 304 Forbes, Lord Walter 284 Forbes, William 22–3, 236–7, 238, 242, 244, 306 Forbes, Sir William 23, 236–7, 265 Fox, Frances, Lady Kinnaird 274 Fox, George William, ninth Baron Kinnaird 226–9, 265–6 France 5, 155, 156, 157 Francis II, King of France 2 Free Church of Scotland 51, 104, 105, 110, 114, 118, 129–30, 132, 133, 134, 163, 164– 5, 166, 225, 226, 273, 278, 279 French Revolution 155, 156, 211 Friends of the People 155–6 Gadderar, Bishop James, Scottish nonjuror 13 Gaelic Bible 81, 108, 131, 132, 298 Gaelic language 85, 86, 87, 93–4, 100, 105–8, 109–11, 132–3, 298 Gaelic prayerbook 93, 106, 116, 128, 131, 132 Gaelic Tract Society 122 Gaels: eighteenth‐century Episcopalians 71–2, 74–92 nineteenth‐century Episcopalians 94–137 Appin Episcopalians 78, 82–3, 85–90, 99–103, 108–10, 114, 119–20, 127 Glasgow 115–17, 122 see also Episcopalianism; Highlands (p.341) Gairloch 104 Gascoigne, Colonel, of Craignish 106 Geddes, Jenny 8 gender, see Episcopalianism; women Geneva 5 George III, King of England and Scotland 19 George IV, King of England and Scotland 295 Gladstone, John 21–2 Gladstone, William 21–2, 32, 254, 271–2, 273, 283, 284 Glasgow 149, 153, 159, 164, 181 Anderston 168–70, 181, 182, 188 Calton 188–90 see also Episcopal Church congregations; Gaels Glasgow, University of 167 Glasgow and Galloway, Diocese of 30, 31 Glasgow Herald 128, 226 Gleig, George, Bishop of Brechin 17, 21–3, 160, 215, 295 Glencoe 89, 93, 132 Glengarry 89 ‘Golden Act’, 1592 7 Gordon, sixth Duke of 66, 265, 271, 274–5 Gordon, Duke of Richmond and 163, 277, 280, 281 Gordon, Elizabeth, Duchess of 265, 274–83, 286, 297 Gordon of Cairnfield 275, 276, 286 Page 11 of 19
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Index Gorham case 249 n. 104 Gowrie, Earl of 7 Graham, John, Bishop of Chester 224 Great Cumbrae Island 257 Great Glen 72, 83 Greenock 141 Grub, George, Episcopalian historian 25 Guardian 128, 285–6 Hackney Phalanx 254 Haldanes' missions 214 Hampden, Renn Dickson, Bishop of Hereford 224 Hanoverian monarchy 13, 38, 88, 157–8, 295–6 health 148 heaven and hell 155 Hebrides 76, 83, 84 heritors 78, 102, 127 Hickes, Bishop George, English nonjuror 13 High Church: English 18, 27, 31–2, 152, 177, 249, 254, 255 ritualism 167, 170–2, 176, 185, 226, 255 Scottish 29, 92, 231, 233, 234, 235, 242, 256, 261, 263, 291, 300, 307, 309 see also Episcopalianism, northern theology 10, 12, 156, 167–8, 183–4, 213, 255 Highland Emigration Fund 130 Highlands 11–12, 40, 42, 44, 60, 267 clearances 74–5, 123–4 famine 117, 123, 129–31 see also Gaels historians: Ansdell, Douglas 70–1 Anson, Peter 64–5 Bebbington, David 211–12, 292 Beckett, J. V. 268–9 Brown, Callum 150–1, 166–7, 267 n. 12, 286, 293 Brown, Stewart 164 Cheyne, Alec 163 Colley, Linda 136 Cox, Jeffrey 151 Cragoe, Matthew 269 Drummond, Andrew and James Bulloch 27, 166, 287 Gilbert, Alan 150 Hilton, Boyd 149 Hole, Robert 156 Inglis, K. S. 150 n. 32 Kidd, Colin 293 (p.342) Knight, Christopher 291 Macinnes, Alan 72 McInnes, John 71, 83, 84 MacLaren, Alan 166 Page 12 of 19
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Index MacLeod, Donald 71 McLeod, Hugh 150–1, 152 MacLeod, John 70 Nenadic, Stana 142–3 Nockles, Peter 27–8 Pittock, Murray 292–3 Reed, John 236 Reynolds, K. D. 272 Schmidt, Leigh 91 Smout, Christopher 150, 287 Stephens, Thomas 72, 160 Strong, Rowan 28 White, Gavin 27 Wickham, E. R. 150 n. 32 Withers, Charles 132–3 see also Episcoplianism, historiography Hogmanay 56, 57 Holy Communion, see Eucharist Home, Earl of 284 Hook, Walter Farquhar, vicar of Leeds 206, 249, 263 Hooker, Richard 168 Hope–Scott, James 284 Horne, George, Dean of Canterbury 156 housing 140 middle class 143 working class 147–8 Hutchinsonianism 17 industrialization 140–1 industry and manufacturing 41, 45, 52, 101, 140–1 Inverness 72 Inverness‐shire 76, 80, 84, 94, 98 Irish, see migration Jacobite Rebellion: 1715 1, 12, 15–16 1745 15–16, 33, 72, 80, 81–2, 100 Jacobitism 1, 36–8, 72, 80, 83, 88, 90 n. 49, 100, 154, 157, 158, 291, 292, 295–6, 309, 310 James VI, King of Scots 3, 6, 7–8, 10 James VII and II, King of England and Scotland 9 James Stuart, son of James VII and II 13 Jermyn, Hugh, Bishop of Brechin 292 n. 10 Jolly, Alexander, Bishop of Moray 21, 275–6 Kaffaria mission 31 Keble, John 168, 241 n. 82, 249 Kellie, Earl of Mar and 163, 270 Ker, Cecil Chetwynd, Marchioness of Lothian 247–9, 283–4, 285, 300, 304 Ker, Henry, vicar of Dittisham 248 Ker, John William Robert, seventh Marquis of Lothian 247 Kilgour, Robert, Bishop of Aberdeen and primus 16–17, 37, 87, 251 Kilmartin 105 Page 13 of 19
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Index Kinnaird, Arthur 226 Kinnoul, Earl of 251 Knox, John 3 lairds, see Episcopalianism laity 178, 247 ministry 118, 128–9, 132 representation in synods 21–5 Lambeth Conference 292 Lammas 92 landed classes, see Episcopalianism; Scottish society Langside, battle of, 1568 4 Laurencekirk, convention of, 1804 20 Leith 20 Leith, convention of, 1572 5 Leslie of Rothie 265 Lloyd 168 Loch Fyne 131 (p.343) Loch Linnhe 79, 80 Lochaber 72, 79, 87, 89, 109, 111, 114, 120, 121, 124, 127, 132 London 130, 151, 161, 162, 169, 170, 172, 268, 277 London, University of 174 Long Island 104 Longley, Charles Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 310 Lorn 72, 83 Lothian 3 Low, David, Bishop of Ross and Argyll 21, 105, 126, 130, 275 Lowlands 40, 102, 115, 129–30, 137, 141, 266, 267 Lyne, Joseph, ‘Father Ignatius’ 182 Lyon, Claude Bowes, twenty‐fourth Lord of Glamis, see Strathmore, Earl of McCall of Minefield 100 McDonald, John, of Glencoe 86 McDonald, Robertson, of Kinlochmoidart 126 McDonald of Dalness 100 MacFarlane, Andrew, Bishop of Moray, Ross, and Argyll 84, 87, 93, 104, 137 Mackarness, George, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles 106 n. 82, 232–4, 292 n. 10 MacKenzie, clan 83 Maclauchlan, Ewen, Gaelic scholar 93 MacLeod, Norman, Church of Scotland minister 82 MacLeod, Norman, minister of St Columba's, Glasgow 115, 116 Macrae, clan 83 Maitland, Sir John of Thirlestane 7 Malcolm, Neil, of Poltalloch 119, 125, 126, 127, 265 Manning, Henry, Archdeacon of Chichester 249 Mansfield, Earl of 251 Marischal College, University of Aberdeen 237 marriage 46, 47, 100–1, 103 Mary, Blessed Virgin 58, 183 Mary, Queen of Scots 2, 3, 4 Mary II, Queen of England and Scotland 9, 11 Page 14 of 19
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Index Matheson, Sir James 117–18, 123, 126 Maurice, F. D. 161 Mearns 3, 19 Melville, Andrew 5–6 Men, the 60, 84 Methodists 30, 40, 213 middle classes, see Episcopalianism; Scottish society Millport 258 migration: English 25, 117, 119–20, 126, 169, 246–7 Irish 25, 169, 181 from Scotland 114–15, 117, 122, 131 to Scotland 141, 144, 159, 162, 181, 214, 215, 295, 310–12 within Scotland 102, 103–4, 115, 116–17, 118–19, 122 mission 31, 183–4 Missionary Record 226 Moray 19, 83 More, Hannah 270 Motherwell 142 Muir, Thomas 155–6 Munro, James 275 music 259, 260 Muthill 20 mysticism 17 national identity, see Britishness; Episcopalianism National Society for the Education of the Poor 152 nationalism 310 Neale, John Mason 241 n. 82 New Zealand 117 Newman, John Henry 168, 176–7, 220, 241, 248, 279 (p.344) Noel, Gerard 212 Nonconformists 152, 272 nonjurors, English 13, 14, 18, 213 North‐East (Scotland) 11, 12, 17, 20, 33–69 revivalism 59–60, 61–2, 68 Old Statistical Account 38–40, 44–5, 75, 78–9, 93, 94, 101 opium trade 123 Oriel College, University of Oxford 176, 249 Orkney 118 Oxford, University of 22, 176, 249, 250, 253 Oxford Movement 26, 27–8, 220, 222, 249, 270, 286, 293, 309 Paine, Tom 155 Paley, William 168 Panmure, Lord 271 Parliament, Scotland 2, 5, 7, 10, 11 Parliament, United Kingdom 20, 224 House of Lords 12–13, 218, 222–4, 230 Pearson, John, Bishop of Chester 167 Pentecost 90, 92 Page 15 of 19
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Index Pentecostalism 71 Pepys, Henry, Bishop of Worcester 223, 224 Perth 250 Perthshire 19, 72, 77, 80, 83, 90, 98, 99, 103, 121, 227, 284 Peterhead 63, 251, 310 Petrie, Arthur, Bishop of Ross, Caithness, and Moray 16 n. 28, 84–7 philanthropy 144, 268–70 Phillpotts, Henry, Bishop of Exeter 220, 223–4, 249 n. 104 Pittenweem 20 planned villages 41, 42, 45, 118 Plymouth Brethren 62 Poland 139 political economy 130–1, 160, 163–4 Poor Laws, Royal Commission on, 1843 149 poor relief 89, 90, 149–50, 189–90 see also Scottish Poor Law popular religion, see customs Portree 106 potato crop 129 Potter, John 168 prayer book, Scottish 8, 14, 32, 53, 294, 311 Presbyterianism 1, 5–13, 33, 34–6, 40, 49–51, 67, 72, 80, 83, 92, 104, 110, 134, 137, 167, 170, 251, 265–6, 293, 294–5 Pretyman‐Tomline, George, Bishop of Lincoln 156 Protestant Defence Society 225 Protestantism 182, 223, 250, 256–7 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 28, 241 n. 82 Ramsay, Sir James 271 Rattray, Bishop Thomas, Scottish nonjuror 14 Record 225, 226, 232, 262 Reformation, England 256, 257 Reformation, Scotland 2–7 Reid, Charles 240 Relief Act, 1792 20, 94, 157, 224 Religious Instruction, Scotland, Royal Commission on, 1837 46–7, 94–6, 187 Representative Church Council 25, 163, 264 respectability, see Scottish society revivalism, see North‐East Revolution, 1688–9 9–12, 18, 90, 260 Riddell, Sir James of Ardnamurchan 123–4, 126 ritualism: anti‐ritualism 176–83, 221, 242–3, 244, 245–6, 258–9 see also Anglo‐Catholicism; High Church Robertson, William, of Kinlochmoidart 108 (p.345) Roman Catholicism 2, 3, 19, 26, 29, 30, 32, 40, 71, 81, 82, 88, 104, 152, 221, 240–1, 249, 254, 256, 258, 262, 279 see also anti‐Catholicism Rose, Alexander, Bishop of Edinburgh 9–10 Rose, Charles, Bishop of Dublane 16 n. 28, 85 Ross 19, 76, 80, 83, 84, 94, 104 Ross and Argyll, Diocese of 72 Page 16 of 19
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Index Russell, James, of Aden 265 Russell, Michael, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway 115, 116, 165–6, 167–8, 169, 170–1, 172, 174, 175, 248 Ruthven Raiders, 1582 7 St Andrews 5, 6, 20 St Andrews, Diocese of 264, 302, 303, 306–78 Sallust 87 Sandford, Daniel, Bishop of Edinburgh 153, 154, 160, 215 Sandford, E. D. 238–9, 242, 246 schools 80, 81, 88–9, 102, 108, 143, 146 see also Aberdeen, Diocese of Scots Confession of Faith, 1560 2 Scotsman 226, 295 Scott, James Hope 29 Scott, Walter 1 Scottish Church History Society 71 Scottish Communion Office 25–6, 29, 32, 68, 106, 114, 125–6, 136, 171–2, 219–20, 222, 223, 232, 233, 234–5, 239–41, 244–6, 248, 251, 251–2, 253, 275–6, 282, 283, 286, 290, 291, 294 eighteenth century 14–15, 18, 20 Bishop Torry's prayer book 260, 301–11 Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal 105, 112, 161 Scottish Guardian 110–11, 120, 226, 289, 290 Scottish Magazine 185, 286 Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review 161, 243 Scottish Poor Law 148–9, 189 Scottish society: farmers 42–3 fisherfolk 63–4 Highland 72–5, 80–1, 100–2 landed classes 43, 73–4, 142, 266–70 middle class 31, 142–4, 145–6, 151–2, 166–7 North‐East crofters 40–4 population 139, 141, 147–8 respectability 145–6, 146–7, 189 rural 139 secularization 150–1 urbanization 139–40, 152, 164 working class and labouring poor 144–9, 188–91, 237–8, 265–6 Seabury, Bishop Samuel 16 Seaforth, Earl of 71, 104 secularization, see Scottish society Shaftesbury, Earl of 225, 226–9, 270 Sharpe, Major Jelf 255 Shetlands 118 Skateraw 65 Skene, William Forbes 231–5 Skinner, John, Bishop of Aberdeen 19, 20, 29, 37, 160 Skinner, William, Bishop of Aberdeen and primus 22, 28, 40, 239, 246, 253 Skye 84, 98, 104 Page 17 of 19
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Index Smith, Octavius, of Ardtornish 126 smuggling 65 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 31, 131 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge 80–1, 89, 132 Society of United Scotsmen 156 South Africa 117 Stanley, Edward, Bishop of Norwich 223, 224 (p.346) Stewart, Alexander, of Invernahyle 85, 86 Stewart, Charles, of Appin 100, 102, 124–5 Stewart, Colonel, of Achnacone 100, 101 Stewart, James, Earl of Arran 7 Stewart, James, of Fasnacloich 86, 100 Stewart, Captain John of Fasnacloich 126 Stewart of Achnadarroch 87 Stewart of Ardsheal 100 Stewarts of Appin 83, 100 Stirling 20 Strathearn 90 Strath‐Garve 104 Strathmore, Earl of 266, 273 Strathtay 111 Stuart, Prince Charles Edward 19, 36, 37 Stuart, Henry, cardinal 19, 37 Sumner, Charles, Archbishop of Canterbury 223 Suther, Thomas, Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney 262, 292 n. 10 Sutherland 71, 78, 83, 84 Sutherland, Harriet, Duchess of 123, 267, 273 Talbot, Lord Charles 247–8 temperance 128, 130–1 Terrot, Charles, Bishop of Edinburgh and primus 171, 216–18, 239, 240, 246 Thornton, Henry 270 Thurlow, Edward, Chancellor of England 157 Toleration Act, 1712 12–13 Torridon 104 Torry, Patrick, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane 21, 28, 159, 160, 250, 251–3, 302, 303, 305, 307–8, 309, 311 tourism 113, 119 Tractarianism 22, 24, 27–8, 165, 168, 171, 183–4, 185, 186, 220, 223, 238–9, 240–1, 242, 247–9, 250–1, 255, 260, 262, 273, 279, 285, 286 Tracts for the Times 168, 177, 248 trade 141 transportation 42, 45, 141, 268 transubstantiation 221, 245 Trinity College, Glenalmond 29, 161, 250, 254, 255, 284, 303–4 Trower, Walter, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway 162, 166, 174, 175–80, 263, 285–6, 306 Tulloch, John, Principal of St Mary's College, University of St Andrews 226 Union, Act of, 1707 12, 80–1, 135, 136 Union Review 162, 165 United Presbyterian Church 105 Page 18 of 19
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Index United States, Protestant Episcopal Church of the 16, 21 101, 122, 130 urbanization, see Scottish society Venn, Henry, secretary of the Church Missionary Society 229 n. 51 Victoria, Queen 225 Virgil 87 Walker, James, Bishop of Edinburgh and primus 116, 152–5, 187, 212, 252 wars, French and Napoleonic 42, 74, 148, 154, 157, 287 Watson, Joshua 130 weavers 156, 187, 188–91 Wemyss, Earl of 274 West Indies 125, 265 Wheatley, Charles 168 Whigs 33, 224, 293 whiskey 130, 131 Wilberforce, Robert, Archdeacon of the East Riding 249 Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford 224, 273 (p.347) Wilberforce, William 270 William III, King of England and Scotland 9–10, 11 Wilson, William, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway 292 n. 10 women: aristocratic and landed 104–5, 110, 155, 247–9, 267, 272–84, 304 middle‐class 143–4, 265 ministry to fisherfolk 118 North‐East 44, 61–2, 63–4 working‐class 146–7 Wood, Charles, Viscount Halifax 270 Worcester College, University of Oxford 216 Wordsworth, Charles, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane 231, 249, 254–6, 263, 292 n. 10, 303, 307, 310 Wordsworth, Christopher, Bishop of Lincoln 254 Wordsworth, Christopher, Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge 254 Wordsworth, William 254 work 142, 143–4, 144–7 worship, see Church of Scotland; customs, religious; Eucharist; Scottish Communion Office
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