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Home Charles I and Domestic Affairs, 1625-42 1629-1640 1629-1640; Part 4 |
1629-1640; Part 4In Scotland, however, even more than in England, is the year 1637 one of importance, and, as the affairs in England and Scotland are so inextricably interwoven after this date, it will be convenient at this stage to summarize the relations between the first two Stuarts and their Scottish kingdom. The Parliament or Council of Estates in Scotland was a feudal assembly, and its business was controlled by a committee called the " Lords of the Articles", in the nomination of whom the Crown possessed considerable influence. The centre of opposition, therefore, was not the Parliament but the General Assembly of the Kirk (The Scottish name for Church) of Scotland, a body, however, in which laymen sat as well as the ministers of the Church. The General Assembly was much more democratic in character than the Council of Estates, and held in Scotland the position occupied by the House of Commons in England. Moreover in Scotland, in the seventeenth century, religion was not only, as in England, a dominating element in the popular mind; it was the sole element, to the exclusion of everything else. And it is on religious questions that the conflict came between the Monarchy and the Scottish people.The chief question that arose was that of Church government The Kirk in Scotland was Presbyterian in form. Each local congregation was governed by its kirk session, consisting of the minister and ruling lay elders, both elected by the congregation. The kirk sessions were subordinate to the Presbytery, consisting of all the ministers and one elder from each congregation in a district. The Presbyteries in a given area were subject to the Synod, and the Synod to the General Assembly, which consisted of ministers and elders chosen by the local Presbyteries. Upon this system the Crown wished to superimpose bishops. But the Scots hated bishops; indeed, both in Scotland and England, no epithet or synonym was, for the more extreme Protestants, too severe in speaking of a bishop (Thus one English writer calls the bishops " not the pillars but the caterpillars of the Church"; another in a parody of the Litany says: "From plague, pestilence, and famine, from bishops, priests, and deacons, good Lord, deliver us". The Scots are not behindhand— one calls the bishops "bellie-gods" regardless of the fact that some bishops, at all events, lived ascetic lives and were decidedly spare of frame; and another characterizes them as bunchy knobs of papist flesh. If the Stuarts believed in the Divine right of king and bishop, the Scottish people believed no less ardently that the Calvinistic creed and the Presbyterian form* of government were of Divine origin. The powers claimed by the Stuarts for the bishop were as nothing compared to those actually exercised by the Presbyterian leaders. The General Assembly wielded all the terrors of excommunication; the presbyters and ministers in their localities supervised every detail of private life. "New Presbyter", said Milton, and with some truth, "is but Old Priest writ large". |
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