Review: Ann Shukman 'Bishops and Covenanters: The Church in Scotland 1688-1691'

It is the contention of this book that the abolition of order of bishops and the establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland was not a foregone conclusion ... The fall of episcopacy in Scotland was neither expected nor inevitable (pp.1 & 7).

Ann Shukman's Bishops and Covenanters: The Church in Scotland 1688-1691 (2012) is a story of missed opportunities.  Perhaps surprisingly, it is King William III who emerges as the wise figure in this account of the Scottish church settlement, his desires for comprehension frustrated by a combination of radical Covenanters and Jacobite bishops. 

William's initial desire was for the Restoration Church of Scotland to continue, with its combination of episcopacy and presbytery. As Shukman states, "his attitude towards the Scottish Church was rather on balance to have favoured episcopalianism" (p.12). Henry Compton, the Williamite Bishop of London, had made this clear to Alexander Rose, Bishop of Edinburgh, in 1688/89, declaring that, if the Scottish bishops pledged allegiance to William, he would "take you by the hand, support the Church and Order, and throw off the Presbyterians" (p.18). A turning point in this matter came when Rose was introduced to William, who asked if the Scottish bishops would "follow the example of England". Fatefully, Rose stated "Sir, I will serve you as far as law, reason, or conscience shall allow me" (p.19) - in other words, a polite, diplomatic statement of Jacobite allegiance. This "spelled the end of the negotiations", leading William to recognise that he required a presbyterian settlement in Scotland.

It was the Jacobite intransigence of the Scottish bishops which squandered the likelihood of the Restoration episcopal settlement continuing. Shukman - and she is not alone amongst historians in this - regards the Restoration Church of Scotland as a rather weak ecclesial body.  She unfavourably contrasts the Hookerian "urbane ... less vehement and essentially non-ideologial" defence of episcopacy by Andrew Honyman - Bishop of Orkney 1664-76 - with the revolutionary zeal of 'presbytery by divine right' Covenanter writers. A similar view is found in Alasdair Raffe's essay 'Restoration, Revolution and Episcopacy in Scotland', in the collection of essays The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy (2015). Raffe insists that the modest and moderate ecclesiological claims of episcopalians in the Restoration Church of Scotland was a key contributing factor to "episcopacy's weaknesses". 

Despite such interpretations, there are more than a few points in Shukman's book which suggest otherwise, that the very moderation of the Restoration Church of Scotland attracted support. For example, she notes that the Test Act of 1681 - requiring all officer-holders in Church and State to pledge their allegiance to the King as Supreme Governor and assent to the 1560 Scots Confession - was accepted by all but a few, not least because "the preservation of civil order" was regarded as more significant than divine right claims for presbytery (p.72). This is also suggested when presbyterian opinion refused the call by the Williamite episcopalian June 1689 'Address from the Synod of Aberdeen' for a General Assembly of the Scottish Church. The Aberdeen Address hoped for "accommodation ... and the peace of the church" on "matters of church government". Radical presbyterian voices had no interest in this and refused the idea of General Assembly for fear "the Presbyterians would be outnumbered" (p.43f): this fear does at least suggest that the Restoration Church of Scotland had deeper roots than some historians suggest.

There is good reason to think this would be so, with the Restoration Church of Scotland's combination of episcopacy and presbytery being no new invention in 1660, but a return to the order that had shaped in the Scottish Church in the decades before the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The experience of those wars would also have contributed to support for the compromise that was the Scottish order. Likewise, this order could invoke the Hookerian thought and moderation of the 'Aberdeen Doctors', the group of eirenic thinkers around Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen 1618-35. It was not, in other words, a church order without intellectual weight, with Honyman standing as a successor to the Aberdeen Doctors. Also to be noted, and contrary to Shukman's claim, the combination of "Calvinism and episcopacy" was not "unique in Europe" (p.10). Leaving aside the Calvinist episcopal voices in the Church of England, both before the civil wars and after the Restoration (as Hampton's pre- and post-civil war studies have demonstrated), the Reformed churches of Hungary and Transylvania had a form of episcopacy (celebrated, of course, by Diarmaid MacCulloch). Rather, therefore, than being an odd, unsteady local compromise, the order of the Restoration Church of Scotland reflected other European Reformed churches.

On the vexed matter of liturgy in the Scottish church, after the calamity of 1637, the Restoration Church of Scotland did not have a liturgy required of its ministers. That said, the bishops did require that ministers at least included the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and the Doxology in worship, and there is considerable evidence of the English liturgy being used wholly or in part in parishes. Indeed, Shukman points out that during the 'rabblings' - the violent Covenanter attacks on episcopal clergy in the parishes of the south-west, beginning in 1688 - the Book of Common Prayer was burnt when it was found in parishes (p.53). Likewise, when Alexander Monro, the episcopalian principal of Edinburgh University, was hauled before a Presbyterian commission in 1690 on a variety of accusations, the accusation that he had used the English liturgy was dropped when he answered that its use in Scotland had been widespread and was not forbidden (p.119ff). As an article on 'The Scottish Liturgies' in Fraser's Magazine in 1841 stated:

[Following the Restoration] the clergy began to use from memory portions of the English liturgy, in their prayers before and after sermon. In most of the parish churches portions of the liturgy were used prior to the Revolution in 1688; and in some cases the portions were considerable. Whenever a consecration of a bishop or an ordination of presbyters occurred, the English service was entirely used. It is certain that no ordination was ever celebrated between the Restoration and the Revolution but according to the liturgy of the Anglican Church. 

This argument for a rather more robust Restoration Church of Scotland also coheres with Shukman's view that a series of contingent political circumstances - rather than any notion of inherent weakness - led to its undoing and replacement by a Presbyterian order.

What were these circumstances? The first was William's assumption that a Presbyterian settlement in Scotland would share the same characteristics as his native Dutch Reformed Church. After it became clear that the Scottish bishops would not abandon their Jacobite allegiance, William and his Scottish advisers "planned that the model of the Church should be what they had known in Holland" (p.82):

the Presbyterianism he was familiar with in the Netherlands was tolerant and stable; it coexisted alongside other denominations ... its ministers were employed by the State and it certainly did not interfere with political matters. Now in the Scottish situation he encountered an ideology which combined the theory of the 'two kingdoms', with the divine right of presbytery (p.61f).

William's assumption that an established presbyterian order in Scotland would, after the Dutch example, heed the voice of the civil magistrate, resulted in an "unhappy and fruitless stalemate ... through his reign" (p.134). William and his advisers seemed to be initially entirely unaware that the Covenanters at the forefront of Scottish presbyterian opinion had contempt for the Dutch Reformed tradition, describing it as "a Promiscuous Conjunction of Reformed and Lutheran malignants and sectaries" which is was "against the Testimony of the Church of Scotland to joine" (p.28).

Secondly, William's political managers lost control of the Scottish Parliament, to the extent that both his authority as Supreme Governor and his insistence that lay patronage be protected were lost in the Scottish church settlement. His model for a moderate presbyterian order with lay patronage and acceptance of ministers with episcopal ordination, while presented to the Parliament, was outflanked by radicals abolishing lay patronage and restricting the ministry to those presbyterally ordained (p.44f).

Thirdly, William was at war. This distracted him from exerting his royal authority in the debates over the Scottish church settlement:

The overriding factor which explains why William and [his advisers] took their eye off the Scottish scene is that, besides a real threat to William's regime from the Highlands, William was engaged in a life and death struggle against James in Ireland and his French allies (p.93).

Even with such burdensome distractions, William did seek to moderate the Scottish church settlement, particularly its exclusion of all clergy who had received episcopal ordination. As he stated in his address to the first meeting of the General Assembly in October 1690:

Moderation is what Religion enjoins, Neighbouring Churches expect from you, and We commend to you (p.96).

In June 1691, William and Mary encouraged episcopal clergy to address the General Assembly Commissioners, "stating their willingness to own William's authority, to join the Church judicatories with their Presbyterian brethren and to subscribe to the [Westminster] Confession of Faith" (p.127). Two such addresses were made by groups of episcopal clergy. These, however, were rejected because of "hostility to the King's interference in Church matters and the fear of diluting 'pure Presbytery' by admitting episcopalians" (p.128).

Here was another missed opportunity. That such Williamite episcopal clergy were prepared to serve in a presbyterian order perhaps indicates the enduring strength of the eirenicism of the Aberdeen Doctors. It was, after all, Patrick Forbes who had declared in his A Defence of the Lawful Calling of the Ministers of Reformed Churches (1614) that forms of ecclesiastical government should not impair communion:

Whereby, it is, that our Reformed Churches agreeing soundly in all the substantiall points of faith, & without break of communion, yet, heerein, for the matter of governement, have take libertie, diverslie as seemed best to each, to rule either by Bishops, or the common counsel of Elders.

Also noteworthy is the fact that these episcopal clergy were prepared to assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Indeed, Alexander Monro was an example of this. When questioned by the Commissioners responsible for the purging of Edinburgh University, Monro stated his willinginess to subscribe to the Confession: "he accepted it very cheerfully in its generality, as vinculum unitatis ecclesiasticae ['a bond of ecclesiastical unity]".  When hardline Commissioners, desiring to ensure his eviction, demanded he subscribe to it point by point , with each article essential to faith, Monro responded by invoking a wider Protestant understanding of subscription:

Was it not enough [he asked] that he was content to Sign the Confession of Faith, with that Freedom and latitude the Protestant churches used to impose Confessions upon their Members (p.123).

Perhaps with greater, undistracted royal pressure, and with greater support from moderate Presbyterian voices, episcopal clergy could have been part of the presbyterian order of the Church of Scotland, carrying with them the eirenic ethos of the Aberdeen Doctors, which may have aided William in securing a Scottish Church much more akin to the Dutch Reformed Church. Such a Church of Scotland - aligned with, rather than hostile to, the Continental Reformed tradition - would have had significant consequences for the ecclesiastical and cultural history of 18th Scotland, Great Britain, Ireland, and North America.

The Church of Scotland had been broken and irrevocably split (p.130).

The ideological of pursuit of 'pure Presbytery' did indeed break the Church of Scotland. The radical Covenanters were certainly to blame - but so too were the Scottish bishops with their foolish, intransigent allegiance to the House of Stuart. As Shukman notes, later Episcopalian historians recognised this and were not shy about apportioning blame. Frederick Deane, Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney 1917-43, accused the bishops in1688-91of "link[ing] the fortunes of the Church to a dying dynasty, and brought it down to ruin for the sake of a king who had fled his country and lost three kingdoms for a Mass" (p.105).

Nor was it the case that the Church of Scotland split into merely two separate communions: it was three. Alongside the Jacobite, non-juring Episcopalians were "the burgeoning 'qualified' episcopal communities which began to flourish in Scotland during the reign of Queen Anne" (p.108) and which - often forgotten - in the 19th century contributed to the creation of the modern Scottish Episcopal Church. 

At the conclusion of Shukman's excellent book, my thoughts turned to the loss of the noble order of the Restoration Church of Scotland, viciously attacked (verbally and physically) by radical Covenanters and abandoned by its bishops in favour of loyalty to the Stuarts. It was William, however, who desired and sought its continuation.  In this, he was - we might propose - a successor to Hooker, a voice for a Reformed eirenicism, finding expression, he hoped, in episcopal churches in his three kingdoms. The same Hookerian vision was to be found amongst Williamite episcopal clergy in Scotland, as seen in the Aberdeen Address, with its call for a national synod of episcopalians and presbyterians:

And in order to the prosperous success of the said assembly in so great and good a design, if it may be thought fit that previously thereto some judicious and moderate ministers of different persuasions in matters of church government might be appointed to meet and concert the matters in difference, and to propose overtures for the accommodation of them and the peace of the church, the ministers of the said synod will be very willing to give their concurrence therein, and to testify how sincerely they desire that the terms of communion among Protestants may not be straitened, and that nothing may be imposed on either hand which may be heavy to the consciences of any of us, or bring any dishonourable reflection upon our holy calling. 

That contingent political events, radical Covenanters, and Jacobite bishops ensured that this order, ethos, and vision was - to quote Hooker's famous words - "to pass away as in a dream" was a profound and sad loss for Christendom.