With the 1487 indult, it might have appeared that at last a settled arrangement in Scottish relations with Rome over vacancies had arrived. However, instead of satisfying royal hunger, such concessions merely whetted the appetite. With monasteries and episcopal dioceses now firmly within its sphere of influence, from this point down to the Reformation in 1560, the Crown slowly pushed against limitations as to its power of nomination. A typical example of its mounting assertiveness can be seen in the Act of 1526, which bluntly claimed that the nomination to all vacant bishoprics or abbacies pertained solely to the king, and anyone entering such positions by other means “sall incur the cryme of tresone and leise majestie.”21
So then, thanks to royal resistance, the initiative in the nomination of higher clergy in particular that had been moving in the Church’s favor, flowed in the other direction and into royal hands. Thus Cowan suggests that, by the sixteenth century, the Crown may not have made all the gains it might have liked, but, “it possessed a far greater degree of patronage....than it had ever previously commanded.”22
As the continuing secularization of church property gained momentum in the century before the Reformation, the Crown was not of course the only interested party. Lay families made sure they did not miss out on what they could gain.23 However, their primary concern was income, and any right of patronage that was not subsumed into the Crown’s growing acquisitions, usually stayed within the Church’s hands. It was to be later, when a different ecclesiastical structure was in place, that a desire to consolidate every aspect of their acquisitions prompted a return of lay patrons’ attentions to this feature of property ownership.
After the Scottish Reformation of 1560
The dawn of the Reformation brought the opportunity to extend the royal stock of patronages even further. In this, the crucial contribution was the allowance made to the non-conforming clergy of the old faith to remain in their benefices during their lifetime and retain at least two thirds of the parochial teinds or tithes, while the remaining third was earmarked for the reformed ministers. While this situation obtained, it seemed logical to the reformers to allow much of the revenue system of the pre-Reformation Church to remain undismantled. However, this presented the Crown with the golden opportunity to step in and portray itself as the proper heir to the property of the bishoprics and religious institutions. The assets to be gained from such a claim were very considerable, since centuries of appropriation by religious houses and cathedrals had placed by far the greatest number of parish churches in the Church’s hands. Accordingly, the Crown wasted no time in asserting its claims, first with the benefices attached to religious houses, then with the bishoprics. Along with them came their presentation rights.
All this put the new, reformed Church in a difficult position. As a counter to the clericalism of the old faith, they saw a minister’s authority as something that came upwards from the parishioners, as opposed to coming down from a higher source. Thus, in their 1560 blueprint for reform, the (first) Book of Discipline, they declared that “election of Ministers in this cursed Papistrie hath altogether bene abused”, and, following Luther and Calvin, ordained instead that “It appertaineth to the people and to every severall Congregation to elect their minister.”24 However, although the Acts of the August Parliament of 1560 had swept away the Mass and the authority of the Pope, until its legislation was ratified by the monarch, doubts would always remain as to the legitimacy of the new order, and when Catholic Queen Mary arrived in 1561, she showed no inclination to do so. This obstacle, coupled with the Crown’s growing interest in adding to its rights and privileges, did not make it a favorable opportunity for the reformers to insist on their demands regarding patronage.
The situation was made worse by worry over the desperate financial straits of the ministers. Accordingly, on the 24 June 1565, the General Assembly sent Queen Mary a plea to grant legislation on its main claims and desires, prominent among which (Article Two of six) was the request that “sure provision” be made for sustaining the ministry, especially access to the “thirds.” The way the reformers saw urgent provision being achieved was by Parliament regularizing the position of the reform clergy already in livings, and by its disponing, one by one, any vacant charges to those approved by the new Church. Presentations are not condemned, yet noticeably, there is no suggestion that either action should be accompanied by one.25 The queen, however, decided that if she let this wording pass, it would set a precedent which had financial implications. In her reply, she said she considered “it no ways reasonable that she should defraud herself of so great a part of the patrimony of the Crown, as to put the Patronage of Benefices forth of ther own hands; for her own necessity in bearing of her port [living and retinue] and common charges will require the retention thereof’.”26
Accordingly, when the next Assembly met, at Edinburgh, on the 25 December 1565, it had much on its mind. Not only was it unhappy with the queen’s answers to its six Articles, but it beheld a ministry now so starved of income, that it was “like to decay and fail.”27 Agreeing it could not be fully satisfied with the former, and having appointed John Row, minister of Perth and former canon lawyer, to draw up answers, it proceeded to approve a supplication to the Crown for an urgent remedy of the stipend problem. It must be guessed whether desperation was responsible for the tone of the entreaty, but it was certainly polite to the point of being conciliatory.
Moreover, a softer note also appeared in Row’s responses to the queen’s letter, to which the Assembly returned the following day. In the first Article, the Mass was firmly repudiated, but not discourteously. Then, in the second, the Book of Discipline’s scruples on presentations were discretely ignored: “[our mind is not] that her Majesty or any other patron of this realm should be defrauded of their just patronages. But we mean, whenever her Majesty or any other patron does present any person to a benefice, that the person presented should be tried and examined by the judgement of learned men of the Kirk.....and as the presentation of benefices pertains to the patron, so ought the collation thereof, be law and reason, pertaining to the Kirk.”28 Thus Row, as an ex–canonist, was able to echo the aspirations articulated by Pope Alexander.
Clearly, the Assembly judged it expedient to compromise on the issue of patronage. However, such forced civility was motivated not only by financial considerations. The Assembly’s reply reveals yet another cause of alarm to the new Church. Since 1560, it had become obvious that the Crown was increasingly returning to the practice of the early medieval period, namely, the filling up of benefices purely on the authority of the patron’s gift, without due deference to the Church’s rights of collation.29 This was not just in respect of abbeys and priories and the lesser benefices that went with them, but even parish churches. Moreover, the appointment would often be merely that of a lay titular.30 For the sake of its authority, this was not something that the Church could ignore, and it is highly likely that it prompted the conclusion that it was better to negotiate a modified system of presentations, than stage an attempt at abolition and subsequently fail on all counts. In addition, if, as would be likely, the new Church’s own landowning supporters were lukewarm about dismantling a system that had much to offer them, the Assembly probably felt that, overall, it was no time to be over-ambitious.
In the event, the queen’s response to the Assembly was her customary one of delay and prevarication, which left the Assembly’s commissioners no option