Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe

2The state Church: Scotland

The Reformed Church in Scotland enjoyed a privileged position compared with many other centres of the movement. The settlement enacted by the Reformation Parliament meant that the Reformed faith became the country’s offi cial religion, with the membership encompassing the whole population. The Kirk of Scotland also inherited the existing ecclesiastical infrastructure of the Catholic Church, but these buildings posed their own challenges when it came to their adaptation for Reformed worship. This chapter will therefore examine the ways in which these medieval churches were adapted for preaching the Word of God and the impact that being the offi cial state Church had upon the development of the Reformed movement and its temples in Scotland during the early modern period.

Establishing the Reformed Church

Although Protestant ideas had circulated in Scotland since the 1520s and had become well established in some areas during the 1540s and 1550s, it was not until the meeting of the Reformation Parliament in August 1560 that offi cial measures were taken to uphold these beliefs. The Reformation Parliament adopted the Scottish Confession of Faith and went on to pass legislation that rejected papal authority and its jurisdiction, and revoked past laws ‘not agreeing with God’s Word and now contrair to the confessioun of oure fayt’, as well as proscribing the celebration of the mass.1 The result was to establish a religious settlement that was broadly Calvinist in its outlook. However, this was only a partial settle-ment as it did not address the more controversial issues of the Church’s structure and more signifi cantly its endowments. The reform and reorganisation of the Church had been considered by a commission earlier in the year, and some of the measures began to be introduced, but it was not until the beginning of the

1 APS, II, pp. 526–35.

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THE STATE CHURCH: SCOTLAND 41

following year that the First Book of Discipline was adopted.2 The First Book of Discipline was concerned with ‘the reformation of

Religion’ and set forth measures ‘for common order and uniformitie to bee observed in this realme concerning doctrine, administration of Sacraments, election of Ministers, provision for their sustenation. Ecclesiastical discipline and policie of the Church’.3 It therefore not only addressed spiritual matters such as doctrine and the administration of the sacraments but also outlined the desired changes to the organisation of the Church. The Reformers believed that they would inherit the patrimony of its predecessor, its buildings and its endow-ments, and so included ambitious fi nancial proposals as well as important state-ments about the existing church fabric. These statements provide perhaps a unique insight into the expectations and concerns of the Reformers during the early, heady days of the Scottish Reformation.

The third chapter of the Book of Discipline – ‘Touching the Abolishing of Idolatrie’ – reinforced the opening sections on doctrine and the sacra-ments. The authors balanced the need for ‘Christ Jesus to be truly preached and his holy sacraments rightly administered’ with a denunciation of idolatry, which was defi ned as ‘the Masse, invocation of Saints, adoration of images and the keeping and retaining of the same. And fi nally all honouring of God, not conteined in his holy word’. Therefore all ‘monuments and places’ of idolatry, such as ‘Abbeyes, Monkeries, Frieries, Nonries, Chappels, Chanteries, Cathe-drall Churches, Chanonries, Colledges, others then presently are Parish Churches or Schooles, [are] to be utterly suppressed in all bounds and places of this Realme’.4 The Book of Discipline was not merely concerned with the overthrow of monuments of idolatry; it was also concerned lest ‘the word of God and ministration of the Sacraments by unseemlinesse of the place come in contempt’. The churches where the people gathered for worship were to ‘be with expedition repaired with dores, windowes, thack [thatch], and with such preparation within as appertaineth as well to the Magestie of God as unto the ease and commodity of the people’. Furthermore the Book of Discipline speci-fi ed what it viewed as being the essential requirements of a Reformed place of worship: ‘every kirk must have dores, close windowes of glasse, thack able to withhold raine, a bell to convocate the people together, a pulpet, a basen for baptizing and tables for the ministration of the Lord’s Supper’.5

The Book of Discipline therefore represented an attempt by the Reformers to codify the measures which had already begun to change the appearance and application of the existing buildings in accordance with the new priorities for

2 The First Book of Discipline, ed. J.K. Cameron (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 3–14, 70–5. 3 Ibid., pp. 85–6. 4 Ibid., pp. 94–5. 5 Ibid., pp. 202–3.


CALVINIST CHURCHES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE42

Reformed worship. The reformation of monuments of idolatry had its anteced-ents in the iconoclastic outbursts in the 1530s and 1540s, particularly following the charismatic preaching of men such as John Rough and George Wishart.6 Attacks upon religious images had continued into the 1550s. In Edinburgh, the images of the Holy Trinity and St Francis had been removed in 1556, and in July 1558 the statue of St Giles, which was carried in procession on the patronal feast day, was stolen, ‘drowned’ and then burnt.7

The sequence of events leading to the Reformation Parliament had begun with a riot following an infl ammatory sermon by John Knox in St John’s Kirk in Perth on 11 May 1559. The rioters sacked the friaries in the town, such that ‘the walles onlie did remane of all these great edifi cations’. The iconoclasm spread westwards to Fife, encouraged by Knox’s preaching at Crail and St Andrews, where his text was on Christ’s purging of the temple.8 In the subsequent weeks as the forces of the Lords of the Congregation gathered momentum and estab-lished their hegemony, a number of religious houses and churches fell victim to the demands of the Reformers. At the abbey of Lindores ‘altars [were] overthrowne, their idols, vestments of idolatrie and masse bookes were burnt’; the abbeys of Scone and Coupar Angus were similarly purged.9

The iconoclasm of 1559–60 represented not merely an attack upon the institutions of medieval Catholicism but also a clear attempt to establish places suitable for Reformed worship, to make the transition from the privy kirk to the burgh kirk. The comments of one eye-witness indicate a similar distinc-tion to that later made in the Book of Discipline between religious houses and parish churches. He observed that ‘they pull doune all maner of freryes and some abayes which willyngly resavis not ther reformatioun. As to paroys churchis, they cleyns them of ymages and all other monumentis of ydolatrye and commandis that no messis be said in them; in place therof the booke sett fourthe be godlye Kyng Edward is red in the same churches’.10 Seeing the direction that events were taking, some of the religious houses and burgh churches took steps to safeguard their church plate and other valuables. In Edinburgh, the arm bone of St Giles in its jewelled reliquary, religious vessels and other church plate and vestments were transferred from the burgh church for safe-keeping. The town council also removed the choir stalls, which it had recently had constructed,

6 M.H.B. Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation. People and Change, 1490–1600 (East Linton, 1997), pp. 49–50, 68–9.

7 M. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 73, 85, 393; J.C. Lees, St Giles’ Edinburgh. Church, College and Cathedral from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Edinburgh, 1889).

8 D. McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’, in D. McRoberts (ed.), Essays on the Scottish Reformation, 1513–1625 (Glasgow, 1962), p. 429.

9 Ibid., pp. 431–2; The Works of John Knox, ed. D. Laing, 6 vols (Wodrow Society, 1846–64), VI, pp. 21ff.

10 McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, p. 433; Works of John Knox, VI, p. 34.



to the safety of the tolbooth.11 Similar precautionary measures took place in Aberdeen, where the chaplains of the burgh church of St Nicholas approached the council requesting that they took care of ‘the chalices, siluer work, kaippis, and ornaments of the same’ as the best means of protecting their church.12

The Book of Discipline legitimated this assault upon ecclesiastical build-ings, and in May 1561, the General Assembly petitioned the Lords of the Secret Council for suppression of idolatry. According to Knox, the Privy Council directed the earls of Arran, Glencairn and Argyll to the west of Scotland, where they set fi re to Paisley Abbey and the abbeys of Crossraguel, Failford and Kilwin-ning were cast down; Lord James Stewart was sent to the north for the same purpose.13 The General Assembly itself had earlier in December 1560 ordered that the kirk of Restalrig, ‘as a monument of idolatrie, be raysit and utterlie castin downe and destroyed’.14 Nonetheless the scale of the destruction should not be overemphasised. The Book of Discipline’s attack on idolatry excluded those buildings which had a parochial status. A number of the cathedrals and monastic churches had served the local community, either wholly or in part as parish churches even before the Reformation. These included Holyrood in Edinburgh and the abbeys of Coupar Angus, Jedburgh and Melrose.15 Further-more in 1573 the General Assembly ordered ‘the sustaining and upholding of Cathedrall kirks which are paroch kirks’.16 While the gaunt ruins of St Andrews Cathedral stand as apparent testimony to the destructive impact of the Refor-mation, Glasgow Cathedral was one of those buildings that was taken over for Reformed worship, although there have been suggestions, now largely discounted, that the cathedral would have been pulled down if it had not been for the intervention of the town guilds. The crypt or lower church may

11 RBE, ed. Marwick and Wood, III, pp. 42–5, 59–60. 12 Aberdeen City Archives, Town Council Minutes, 23, pp. 172–4. 13 Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson, 3 vols (Maitland

Club, 49, 1845), I, p. 8; Works of John Knox, I, pp. 360, 362, 364. 14 Acts and Proceedings, I, p. 5. McRoberts suggested that as this was a parish church, the motive may

have been Knox’s dislike of the dean of Restalrig, John Sinclair. The collegiate church erected within the grounds of the parish church was an important centre of pilgrimage to which the Reformers would have objected. Furthermore, the General Assembly deemed that ‘the whole parochin of Restalrig, be within the kirk of Leith’, where a new church had recently been erected. Restalrig was therefore deemed superfl uous to requirements with this reorganisation of the parish, raising the St Mary’s Church, Leith, to parochial status. McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, p. 440n; I.B. Cowan and D.E. Easson (eds), Medieval Religious Houses, Scotland (London, 1976), pp. 224–5; Acts and Proceedings, I, p. 5.

15 These included Aberdeen Cathedral, Brechin Cathedral, Cambuskenneth Abbey, Canonbie Priory, Coupar Angus Abbey, Dunkeld Cathedral, Glenluce Abbey, Haddington Priory, Holyrood Abbey, Jedburgh Abbey, Kilwinning Abbey, Lesmahagow Priory, Melrose Abbey, Newbattle Abbey, Paisley Abbey, St Bothans Abbey, Strathfi llan Priory, Torphichen Preceptory. I.B. Cowan, The Parishes of Medieval Scotland (Scottish Record Society, 93, 1967), pp. 1, 2, 22, 25, 26, 36, 53, 76, 79, 91, 110, 130, 146, 155, 161, 191, 198.

16 Acts and Proceedings, I, p. 280.



have been used for parochial worship before the Reformation.17 Similarly the parishioners of Canongate (Holy Rood), Coupar Angus, Jedburgh, Melrose and Paisley continued to worship in the monastic churches, but came to restrict themselves to only part of the existing structure. At Jedburgh, the crossing was quickly established as ‘a public kirk’, while much later during the early seven-teenth century the parish church at Melrose was reconstituted in the former abbey choir.18 The Reformation allowed the townspeople of Peebles to abandon their parish church, which was in a ruinous condition following the English raids, and to adapt the friary as their new place of worship.19

At the Reformation, the Kirk assumed responsibility for over 1,100 parishes across Scotland, some encompassing vast areas of wild and diffi cult terrain. The churches taken over by the Kirk in 1560 naturally refl ected an ecclesiastical system very different from that to which the new regime aspired and, with the rejection of the contemplative life, included a number which were deemed to be superfl uous to requirements. There has been a tendency to regard the parish churches on the eve of the Reformation as being decayed, neglected and ruinous, partly as a result of warfare but also because of the impropriation of tithes. For some historians this has provided the opportunity to demon-strate that the Reformation was not responsible for the destruction and casting down of Scotland’s religious heritage, while others in contrast have pointed to the richness and vitality of the material culture of the Kirk in the early sixteenth century.20 The situation is far from being so clear cut. A visitation of the Merse, Berwickshire, in 1556 had revealed that twenty-two churches were in a particularly poor state of repair, some virtually ruinous, but this was a border region which had been devastated by the English incursions during the 1540s.21 Elsewhere in Scotland, money was being spent on the completion and the refurbishment and embellishment of burgh churches during the 1530s and 1540s, with several new collegiate foundations also dating from this period. At a parochial level, in spite of the appropriation of tithes, bishops and religious houses contributed to the maintenance of churches. Furthermore several new parish churches and chapels were erected or underwent major rebuilding or

17 McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, p. 442; E. Williamson, A. Riches and M. Higgs (eds), The Buildings of Scotland: Glasgow (London, 1990), p. 110.

18 RCAHMS, An Inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Roxburghshire (Edinburgh, 1956), pp. 196, 268; E.P. Dennison and R. Coleman, Historic Coupar Angus (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 23, 25.

19 RCAHMS, An Inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Peebleshire (Edinburgh, 1967), p. 204.

20 D. Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland. Causes, Characteristics, Consequences (London, 1910), p. 353; G. Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 23, 96; D. Howard, Scottish Architecture from the Reformation to the Restoration, 1560–1660 (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 170; McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, passim; D. McRoberts, ‘The Glorious House of St Andrew’, Innes Review, 25 (1974), 95–158.

21 NAS, CH8/16, 19; Donaldson, Scottish Reformation, p. 23.



additions during the early sixteenth century.22 Although there were clearly regional differences and further research is needed, the impression that the buildings inherited by the Kirk were ruinous needs to be re-evaluated.

The pre-Reformation churches had evolved in response to the very different liturgical and spiritual priorities of the medieval Catholic Church. Whereas in the past the congregation had largely come and gone when they pleased during the parish mass, and the whole congregation was expected to attend and receive communion only on Easter Sunday, the expectations of the Reformed Kirk were quite different. The First Book of Discipline, refl ecting what had become the practice in Geneva, had advocated that the Lord’s Supper should be administered four times a year (on the fi rst Sundays of March, June, September and December). This was modifi ed by the General Assembly in 1562 so that it was held quarterly in the towns and only twice a year in the countryside.23 When the sacrament was administered, the practice in Scotland was for the congregation to sit communally at trestle tables or boards erected to accommodate them along the length of the nave, although in some of the larger churches the choir was reserved for communion.24 However, because of the high regard for this sacrament, it could be administered only by minis-ters, and not by exhorters or readers. With the diffi culty that the Kirk faced in establishing a Reformed ministry across Scotland, this meant that the service fell into abeyance, in some places not being held for years, and even in urban centres it was administered less frequently than the ideal.25 As a consequence,

22 R. Cant, The Building of St Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, (Friends of St Machar’s Cathedral, Occasional Papers, 4, 1976), 7; D. McRoberts, The Heraldic Ceiling of St Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen (Friends of St Machar’s Cathedral, Occasional Papers, 2 (1974), 2; R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation, 1371–1560 (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 88–9, 149, 178–9, 180–1, 188, 198, 203, 218, 219, 221–2, 224, 225–7, 333; C. McWilliam, Buildings of Scotland: Lothian (London, 1978), p. 323; Lees, St Giles’ Edinburgh, pp. 82–3; Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, p. 29; J. Smith, The Hammermen of Edinburgh and their Altar in St Giles Church (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. xxvii–xxxvii; Rentale Dunkeldense being Accounts of the Bishopric (A.D. 1505–1517), ed. R.K. Hannay (SHS, 2nd ser., 10, 1915), pp. 11–12, 13, 83, 91, 92, 109, 110, 124, 140, 148, 198, 204, 206–7, 218, 259, 266; Rentale Sancti Andree, ed. R.K. Hannay (SHS, 2nd ser., 4, 1913), pp. 96, 107; J. Gifford, The Buildings of Scotland: Highlands and Islands (London, 1992), pp. 623–4; RCAHMS, Canmore Database, at www.rahams.gov.uk/search.html#canmore: NN85SE6, NO11NW2, NJ42SE1, NJ16NE2, NJ76SE2

23 First Book of Discipline, pp. 183–4; Acts and Proceedings, I, p. 30. 24 M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. 102–3; G.B.

Burnet, The Holy Communion in the Reformed Church of Scotland, 1560–1960 (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 26–7; W. McMillan, The Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, 1550–1638 (London, 1931), p. 163.

25 A. Spicer, ‘“Accommodating of thame selfi s to heir the worde”. Preaching, Pews and Reformed Worship in Scotland, 1560–1638’, History, 88 (2003), 408; First Book of Discipline, pp. 105–7, 111; R.M. Healey, ‘The Preaching Ministry in Scotland’s First Book of Discipline’, Church History, 58 (1989), 344; M. Lynch, ‘Preaching to the Converted? Perspectives on the Scottish Reformation’, in A.A. MacDonald, M. Lynch and I.B. Cowan (eds), The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture Offered to John Durkan (Leiden, 1994), pp. 310–11. See also Stirling Presbytery Records, 1581–1587, ed. J. Kirk (SHS, 17, 1981), p. xxv.



while the authorities were mindful of the occasional need to erect communion boards,26 it was the preaching of the Word of God rather than the administration of the sacraments which determined the adaptation of the existing churches for Reformed worship.

While the depredations of the iconoclasts and the precautionary measures of ecclesiastics and local authorities had cleared some churches of the furnish-ings associated with Catholic worship, the Reformers were keenly aware of the need to adapt these existing buildings. The lords charged with cleansing the cathedral at Dunkeld in 1560 were warned to ‘faill not but ze tak guid heyd that neither the dasks, windchs nor durris by ony ways hurt or broken’. Similar injunctions may have been issued to the despoilers of Glasgow and Dunblane cathedrals.27 These instructions may refl ect the fact that Dunblane and Dunkeld cathedrals also served their local communities as parish churches, a role that they continued to fulfi l after the Reformation.28

In the towns, the establishment of Reformed worship and adaptation of churches was relatively swift. The accounts for the Protestant seed bed of Ayr in 1559–60 record payments for the construction of a new pulpit and desks and the enlargement of the church windows.29 Towns such as Dundee and Perth may have also made provision for Reformed worship in advance of the Refor-mation Parliament.30 In Edinburgh, St Giles or the High Kirk had been purged of idolatry by the Lords of the Congregation in July 1559 and again in April 1560, yet it still took until the following spring for the church to be adapted.31 There had been over forty altars in the church on the eve of the Reformation, and although many had been cast down, ten workmen were still employed for nine days to remove all the altars as well as to dismantle the rood screen; weekly payments were made to various masons, wrights and whitewashers for clearing the church.32

Whereas previously the whole of St Giles’ Kirk had been dedicated for worship, the reduced spatial demands of Reformed worship prompted the Council to resolve its own acute accommodation problems by subdividing the

26 The Records of Elgin, 1238–1800, ed. W. Cramond (New Spalding Club, 35, 1908), pp. 240, 241–2.

27 The Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. J. Sinclair, 21 vols (Edinburgh, 1791–99), XX, p. 422; E. Henderson, The Annals of Dunfermline and Vicinity (Glasgow, 1879), p. 201.

28 Cowan, Parishes of Medieval Scotland, p. 53; E.P. Dennison and R. Coleman, Historic Dunblane (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 21, 24.

29 Ayr, Ayrshire Archives Centre, Ayr Burgh Records, B6/25/1, f. 59. 30 M. Lynch, ‘From Privy Kirk to Burgh Church. An Alternative View of the Process of Protestan-

tisation’, in N. MacDougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society. Scotland, 1408–1929 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 88.

31 Lees, St Giles, Edinburgh, pp. 109, 117. 32 Edinburgh City Archives, Dean of Guild Accounts, 1552–67, pp. 123, 124, 277; R. Lindesay

of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. A.E.J.G. Mackay, 3 vols (Scottish Text Society, 43, 1899), II, p. 163.



building and allocating some of it for secular use. They resolved in 1560 that ‘haiffi ng mair commodious place and sic rowmes within thair kirk as may be ane fair tolbuithe for serving the towun in thair affairis, and of all other necessary rowmes vpoun the west pairt of thair said kirk, and siclyke vpoun the est pairt of the saamyn ane other convenient rowme for ane scole to thair bairnis, beside suffi cient rowme for the preiching and ministratioun of the sacramentis’. The Dean of Guild was ordered to erect dividing walls within the church and to undertake the work necessary to create room for the school, tolbooth, prison and clerks’ chamber.33 The town council did however also provide the neces-sary furnishings for Reformed worship and ordered one James Barroun to ‘mak saittis, furmes and stullis … for the people to syt upoun the tyme of the sermoun and prayarris within the Kirk and uther thingis till do as salbe thocht gude for decoring of the said Kirk’.34 Galleries or lofts were also erected in the 1560s, which provided seating for the king (Darnley), the lords and the corporation.35 In 1569 a pulpit was also set up in the tolbooth, so that it could also be used for preaching.36

During the 1560s, other town councils similarly took responsibility for reordering their churches, and although the pace of change varied the altera-tions were probably effected more quickly than in Aberdeen, where it took almost twenty years for the Catholic ascendancy to be overthrown.37 Although a minister had been appointed in 1560, the parish church of St Nicholas had not been adapted for Reformed worship. After Regent Moray visited Aberdeen in 1574, the Privy Council admonished the town council, ordering that ‘the organis with all expeditioun be removed out of the kirk and maid profi tte of to the use and support of the pure, and that the preystis stallis and bakkis of altaris be removed furth of the places quhair men may be best easit be thame to heir the sermonis, and sic things as servis not for that use to be utherwyise disponit or maid money of’.38 The town responded promptly and adapted the interior of St Nicholas by moving stalls from the choir into ‘ye body of ye kirk’, dismantling the organ and erecting a stool of repentance.39

33 RBE, ed. Marwick and Woods, III, pp. 66, 99. 34 Ibid., III, pp. 62, 67. George Hay argued that these seats were not provided until much later,

although references in the Dean of Guild accounts would seem to contradict this view. 35 Edinburgh City Archives, Dean of Guild Accounts, 1552–67, pp. 200, 245, 248; RBE, ed.

Marwick and Woods, III, p. 67. 36 Ibid., III, p. 259. 37 Dundee City Archive and Record Centre, Council Minute Book, pp. 49, 90; Lynch, ‘From Privy

Kirk to Burgh Church’, p. 88; A. White, ‘The Menzies Era. Sixteenth-Century Politics’, in E.P. Dennison, D. Ditchburn and M. Lynch (eds), Aberdeen before 1800. A New History (East Linton, 2002), pp. 228–37.

38 The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ed. J. Hill Burton et al., 14 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–98), II, p. 391; M. Lynch and G. DesBrisay with M.G.H. Pittock, ‘The Faith of the People’, in Dennison et al. (eds), Aberdeen before 1800, pp. 292–3.

39 Aberdeen City Archives, Kirk and Bridge Accounts, p. 15.



The conversion of churches was often a more gradual process in the countryside than it was in urban areas. Structurally the transformation of the smaller parish churches, which were often little more than rubble-built rectan-gles, was relatively straightforward. The rood screen and altar were removed, and a pulpit was erected, usually on the south wall of the church. In many cases the removal of these fi ttings has left few archaeological or archival traces.40 At Foulis Easter, however, when the church was visited in 1612 it was found still to have a rood loft and painted interior. The local laird resisted the removal of these ‘monumentes of idolatrie’ for several years, and, although the church was eventually whitewashed and the screen taken down, the panels survived as did the fi fteenth-century font and sacrament house.41 This is an exceptional example, as the Kirk did attempt to ensure that the rural churches had also been adapted and furnished for Reformed worship.

Visitations allowed the Kirk to oversee the preaching of the Word and exercise of discipline at a local level, but they also provided an opportunity to examine whether these churches had what were regarded as the necessary furnishings for Reformed worship, which had been spelt out in the First Book of Discipline. In 1586, the visitors of the Diocese of Dunblane were required ‘to consider of the fabrik of the kirk and quhair neid is to tak ordur for reparatione of the same, alsweill wythin as wythout, wyth neidfull and decent thingis’. At Fowlis Wester, the church was described as ‘reasonable weill decorit wyth pulpit, settis and communione tables’; similar observations were made elsewhere, although at Kincardine, the church ‘lakis necessar ornamentis within, namely a decent pulpit, communione table, honest settis for the pepill and a place for publict penitentis’. Tulliallan was recorded as having a new pulpit, communion table and seats, and furthermore there was ‘tymmer preparit to be settis’ and the laird had promised a basin for baptismal use.42 By the late sixteenth century, baptismal basins, often attached by a bracket to the pulpit, had come to replace the pre-Reformation fonts.

The Reformed Kirk was also concerned from the outset to ensure that its churches were kept in a good state of repair, and the reports of the poor condi-tion of some buildings have no doubt contributed to the argument asserting their neglect before the Reformation. In 1562, the General Assembly ordered

40 Although the Old Church at Tarbat was largely rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth century, excava-tions have not revealed evidence in the earlier remains of structural changes before the 1620s. Tarbat Discovery Programme, Bulletin 3 (1997), www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/staff/sites/tarbat/bulletins/bulletin3/church.html, accessed 23 August 2006.

41 NAS, CH2/154/1, pp. 120, 136, 176, 198; M.R. Apted and W.N. Robertson, ‘Late Fifteenth Century Church Paintings from Guthrie and Foulis Easter’, PSAS, 95 (1961–62), 262–79.

42 Visitation of the Diocese of Dunblane, ed. J. Kirk (Scottish Record Society, new ser., 11, 1984), pp. xliii, 23, 30, 33–4, 36, 44, 54, 84.



that ‘the kirks to be repairit that are decayit’.43 The Privy Council heard a complaint from the town and parishioners of Dunfermline the following year about the state of the abbey, where ‘it is griet danger and perrell to the saidis compleneris of thair lyvis to enter, remane or bide within the said kirk, owther in tyme of prayeris, teching or preching the Word of God’. This prompted the Privy Council to act lest the ruinous condition of the churches mean that ‘the preching of the Word of God, ministratioun of the sacramentis, and reding of the commone prayers cessis, and the people thairthrow becumis altogidder without knowledge and feir of God’. They ordered that all churches which had fallen into neglect were to be repaired and rebuilt and that fi nancial responsibility for this was to be divided between the parishioners, who were to meet two-thirds of the expenses, and the minister, who was to fi nance the remainder.44 This concern received statutory force the following year, and it became the responsibility of the superintendents to ‘consider what kirks within his bounds need reparation or re-edifi eing’. It was a refl ection of the nature of the Scottish Reformation and the fact that the patrimony of the Catholic Church had not passed to the Kirk that the superintendents were required to negotiate with the collectors of the thirds over which church was in greater need of repair.45

One prominent fi gure, the Bishop of Orkney, Adam Bothwell, was called to account by the General Assembly in 1567 on a number of issues relating to his pastoral duties. In spite of his having made a creditable attempt to introduce the Reformation on taking up his diocese in 1561, the accusations against him included the claim that ‘all the said kirks, for the most part, wherein Christs evangell may be preached, are decayed, and made, some sheepfolds, and some so ruinous, that none darre enter into them for fear of falling; specially Halrud-house’. In his defence, Bothwell claimed that a number of these churches had been pulled down ‘at the fi rst beginning of the Reformatione’ by ‘some greedy persons’. He went into more detail concerning the abbey church at Holyrood, stating that for twenty years it had been ‘ruinous through decay of two principall pillars, so that none were assured under it; and two thousand pounds bestowed upon it, would not be suffi cient to ease men to the hearing of the word, and the ministration of the sacraments’. He therefore proposed that repairs be under-taken to the ‘superstitious ruinous parts, to wit, the Queir and Croce kirk’ in order to worship safely, and also commented that he had repaired St Cuthbert’s and Liberton churches, which had been in poor repair.46 In spite of his defence,

43 Acts and Proceedings, I, p. 17. 44 Register of the Privy Council, I, pp. 246–8. In a sermon before the General Assembly in 1571, the

minister of Dunfermline attacked the ‘miserabill rewyne and decay’ of the churches, which were more like sheep cots than houses of God. David Ferguson, Ane sermon preichit befoir the Regent and Nobilitie, vpon a third Chapter of the Prophet Malachi (St Andrews, 1572, repr. 1840).

45 Acts and Proceedings, I, pp. 34, 53. 46 Ibid., pp. 162–3, 167–8; J. Kirk, ‘The Superintendent. Myth and Reality’ in J. Kirk, Patterns of



Bothwell was suspended from the ministry. Nor was Bothwell an exception: the superintendent of Fife was accused of negligence by the General Assembly in 1570 because of the ruinous state of the kirks, and the superintendent of Angus was similarly criticised four years later.47 A poem dedicated to John Erskine of Dun, superintendent of Angus and Mearns, in 1572 attacked the maintenance of the kirks:

The rowmis appointit pepill to consider,To heir Gods Word, quhair thay suld pray togidder,Ar now conuertit in scheip Coits and Fauldis,Or else ar fallin becaus nane thame uphauldis;The Parische Kirkis, I mene, thay sa misgydeThat nane for wynd and rane thairin may byde.48

The following year Erskine had to refute claims that he had deliberately demol-ished the church of Inchbrayock.49

Besides these diffi culties in maintaining the fabric of the existing churches, the Kirk faced two other problems with its medieval inheritance. The location of some parish churches refl ected the pre-Reformation sacred landscape rather than being ideally sited to fulfi l the demands of Reformed worship. This was particularly the case in the Highlands and Islands, where churches were often situated on holy sites associated with the Celtic saints, sometimes on islands, rather than in places convenient to the local population. So long as these functioned as pilgrimage sites and were used for special festivals, this did not really pose a problem, but after the Reformation, the churches were expected to house the whole congregation every Sunday. This inevitably caused serious logistical problems: at Inishail the congregation had to be ferried to the church, which stood on an island in Loch Awe. The cost of building more convenient churches was beyond the means of the Highlanders, and some communities therefore sought alternative accommodation or even worshipped in the open air.50 Such problems, although more extreme, were not confi ned to the more remote areas of Scotland, for elsewhere the locations of the parish churches did not always correlate with the centres of population. Some of the earliest post-Reformation churches were built as a result of ‘transporting’ the parish kirk to

Reform. Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 214–15. 47 Acts and Proceedings, I, pp. 175, 314; L.J. Dunbar, Reforming the Scottish Church. John Winram

(c.1492–1582) and the Example of Fife (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 63, 81, 120–1, 123–4. 48 ‘Lamentation of Lady Scotland’, in Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. J. Cranstoun

(Scottish Text Society, 20, 24, 28, 30, 1891–93), I, p. 232. 49 Dunbar, Reforming the Scottish Church, p. 121. 50 J. Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’, in A. Pettegree, A. Duke and G.

Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 243–5. The church of Inishail remained in use until the eighteenth century before being replaced by a more conven-ient church at Cladich. RCAHMS, Argyll. An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments, 7 vols (Edinburgh, 1971–92), II, pp. 134–5.



a more convenient location. Forfar was served by a medieval chapel within the parish of Restenneth, but this was replaced in 1568 with a new building; by 1586 Forfar was regarded as a separate parish although the two were formally disjoined only in 1591.51 The new churches at Fraserburgh (1571), Arbroath (1580–90) and Burntisland (1592) each similarly represented a move to a more convenient location for the townspeople of the burgh.52

Even where the churches were conveniently located, other issues were raised by the attendance of the entire congregation every Sunday and the expec-tation that they should remain for the whole service. This was enforced by kirk offi cers who searched the town during the service; absentees were examined by the kirk session and often fi ned for their non-attendance.53 The limited capacity of some medieval churches, particularly in a century which saw signifi cant population growth, meant that compulsory attendance at the sermons could lead to overcrowding.54 The provision of fi xed seating provided one means of accommodating more people within the building as well as encouraging a more attentive audience for the sermon. Overcrowding nonetheless remained a signifi cant problem into the seventeenth century. The erection of galleries or lofts within the body of the church provided another solution, often at either the (now redundant) east end or the west end of the church.55 In more extreme situations, the capacity of the existing churches was increased through new extensions such as those at King Edward in Aberdeenshire, where the nave was extended in 1570, and at St Fillan’s, Aberdour, where a new south aisle was built before 1588.56

The problem of overcrowding was more easily resolved in the larger burgh churches. Much of the space within the burgh churches had been rendered redundant by the demands of Reformed worship and had either been assigned to other uses or remained unused. In Glasgow, concerns about the safety of the cathedral meant that the congregation gathered in the ‘laigh church’, but in 1588 they resolved that ‘because of the littleness of laigh kirk, not holding the inhabitants, that therefore the mind of the act is that on Sunday, quhen it is not stormy even though in the winter time they shall goe to the high kirk’.57 At St Giles in Edinburgh, a decision was taken to create a new church within the existing structure in 1578. A wall was erected separating the former choir from

51 E.P. Dennison and R. Coleman, Historic Forfar (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 20; Cowan, Parishes of Medieval Scotland, p. 171.

52 APS, IV, p. 74; see below, pp. 56–60. 53 Todd, The Culture of Protestantism, pp. 31–9. 54 I.D. Whyte, Scotland’s Society and Economy in Transition, c. 1500–c. 1700 (Basingstoke, 1997), p.

141. 55 See Spicer, ‘“Accommodating of thame selfi s to heir the worde”’, 414–15. 56 RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NJ75NW2; RCAHMS, Inventory of Monuments and Constructions

in the Counties of Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan (Edinburgh, 1933), pp. 15–17. 57 NLS, MS 2782, f. 33.



the central area of the building, thereby forming the ‘New Kirk’ or ‘East Kirk’ (as distinct from the ‘Great Kirk’ or ‘Middle Kirk’), which was then furnished for preaching.58 The creation of new churches also had other advantages. In the past the Scottish burghs had each formed a single parish, providing a symbol for the burgh community and through the endowment of the building an indication of the wealth and status of the burgh. However, the closer scrutiny required by the Kirk, with elders visiting the parishioners as part of the process of church discipline, as well as the increasing population and overcrowding, meant that this arrangement was no longer feasible after the Reformation, so Edinburgh was divided into four parishes in 1598.59 A similar subdivision of the interior of St Nicholas’s, Aberdeen took place in 1596 to create a ‘preiching kirk for the preaching of the word of God, and ministratioun of the sacramentis’ for two congregations.60

The liturgical arrangements of these churches was described by Fynes Moryson, who visited Edinburgh in 1598 and attended a service at St Giles’s Kirk:

… the Kinges seate is built some few staires high of wood, and leaning upon the pillar next to the Pulpit: And opposite to the same is another seat very like it, in which the incontinent use to stand and doe penance; and some few weekes past, a Gentleman being a stranger, and taking it for a place wheir Men of better quality used to sit, boldly entered the same in Sermon time, till he was driven away with the profuse laughter of the common sort to the disturbance of the whole congregation.

The account refl ected not only the prominence of the pulpit, but also that of the stool of repentance, which was described as ‘a high place in the church where men and woemen does penance for whoredom in white sheetes’.61 Richard James also commented that the ministers

… are sociable men but in their offi ce exceedinge vehement; tis nothinge strainger to heare them in the churches leave their text and raile in person against this or that man and speake plaine Scots words against those whoe set in their stoole of repentance when they come downe to acknowledge their fault and their praiers in publique evidence of themselves or with his helpe for their amendement, and that they offend not in the like sorte any more to these and other offenders he speakes lode and thumps the pulpet lustily.62

58 RBE, ed. Marwick and Wood, I, p. 87. 59 M. Lynch, ‘Introduction: Scottish Towns 1500–1700’, in M. Lynch (ed.), The Early Modern Town

in Scotland (London, 1987), pp. 28, 35n. 60 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1570–1625, ed. J. Stuart (Spalding Club,

19, 1948), p. 135. 61 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS James 43**, f. 5v. 62 Ibid., f. 5–5v. See also W. Brereton, Travels in Holland the United Provinces England Scotland and

Ireland, ed. E. Hawkins (Chetham Society, 1, 1844), p. 107. For an account of the ritual of repentance, see Todd, The Culture of Protestantism, pp. 130–68.



Moryson’s account also refl ected the importance of social status in the seating arrangements at St Giles. This was noticed by other visitors to Scotland, such as Christopher Lowther, who noted the separate galleries occupied by the trade guilds, the segregation of women and the prominent seating for the lairds. At Selkirk he commented:

… they have a very pretty church, where the Hammermen and other Tradesmen have several seats, mounted above the rest, the gentlemen below, the Tradesmen in the ground seats. The women sit in the high end of the church, with us the choir … My Lord Bucplewgh’s [Buccleuch] seat is the highest in the church, and he hath a proper passage into it at the outside of the vaulted porch.

He went on to note that ‘All their churches be lofted stagewise about Edinburgh, Leith etc; the women at Leith in one church had chairs all along before the men’s seats’.63 These interior arrangements refl ected not only the local hierarchy and a degree of social control but also the attempt by the Reformed Kirk to encourage a more attentive congregation for receiving the Word of God.64 The remodelling also demonstrated the fundamental change in the perception of a church as a sacred space, which had also led to the abandonment or secularisa-tion of parts of the larger pre-Reformation churches as a result of their different liturgical requirements.

New churches

Although in most cases it was possible remodel the existing parish churches for Reformed worship, the construction of new churches in the decades following the Reformation was probably more extensive than has been generally assumed, but the surviving architectural evidence is often limited and in some cases is diffi cult to date conclusively. Nonetheless, the churches of Eassie, Inveravon, Kilmaveonaig, Kinkell (St Bean), Nevay and possibly Parton have all been dated to the late sixteenth century.65 These simple rubble-built churches had a rectan-gular plan, representing in many ways a continuation of pre-Reformation forms for rural parish churches, but three of them have a particular characteristic of post-Reformation churches: window openings on the south wall (and nothing

63 C. Lowther, Our Journall into Scotland ... 1629, ed. R. Fallow and P. Mauson (Edinburgh, 1894), p. 15.

64 See Spicer, ‘“Accommodating of thame selfi s to heir the worde”’, passim; M. Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, in W. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church (SCH, 27, 1990), pp. 237–94; Todd, The Culture of Protestantism, pp. 320–1, 323.

65 RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NJ13NE7.00, NN86NE11.00, NN91NW8, NO34NE3, NO34SW1.00. A church was supposedly constructed at Eastwood in 1577 but it has not been possible to verify the source for this assertion. McMillan, The Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, p. 363.



on the north wall), which ensured a light interior.66 The church at Kemback can be dated more precisely, as ‘1582’ is inscribed on the door lintel; unusually the window openings are on the north wall, while to the south is a later lateral aisle which opens on to the main body of the church through a segmented arch (Figure 2.1). Although there is a large east window, the rectangular rather than arched doors and windows, as well as the crow-stepped gables, give the church a more domestic character.67 Similar in style is the church at Stenton, which may well predate Kemback as it was built after the parish was transferred there from Pitcox in 1561, although certain architectural details suggest that the building may have incorporated part of an earlier struture (Figure 2.2).68 It too has a longitudinal plan, but with a crow-stepped tower at the corner of the west end.69

Although these new churches commonly had a rectangular ground plan, a more sophisticated church was erected in the Borders at Eccles. The building

66 D. MacGibbon and T. Ross, The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Scotland, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1896–97), III, pp. 560–1, 579–80.

67 Howard, Scottish Architecture, p. 178; RCAHMS, Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan, p. 160; MacGibbon and Ross, Ecclesiastical Architecture, III, p. 576.

68 Cowan, Parishes of Medieval Scotland, p. 165; RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NT67NW15, NT67SW8.

69 Howard, Scottish Architecture, p. 178.

Figure 2.1 The church at Kemback showing the east end and entrances on the north side.



Figure 2.2 The church at Stenton.



contract of 1601 describes a cruciform or ‘cross kirk’, with each section being 60 feet long and having two doors and fi ve windows. The mason John Fall was contracted to undertake the work for 1,000 marks, and was required to provide the necessary stone, some of which would come from the old church; the parish-ioners undertook to supply the lime and sand for the project.70 The church was demolished during the eighteenth century, to accommodate the needs of its increased congregation, but the minister of Eccles recalled that it was:

a Gothic building, in the form of a cross, vaulted and covered with large fl ag stones, dedicated to St Andrew … and ornamented with a cross, and a very elegant steeple. The building might have stood for many centuries, and it was with the greatest diffi culty it was taken down.71

Eccles therefore provided an early example of the cruciform church, which became a more common form of Reformed church design during the course of the seventeenth century.

Increasing economic prosperity and urban expansion provided further impetus for church building after the Reformation.72 The earliest known post-Reformation church was erected at Forfar in 1568, although little is known about the building.73 At Arbroath, the Duke of Lennox allowed the council in 1580 to ‘tak away all and hail ye stainis, tymmer, and other pertinents of our house, ye dormitory in ye said Abbey … because we haiv disponit ye sam to them for biggyn of ane kirk’. The Convention of the Royal Burghs granted the town £20 in 1582 and 1587 ‘for supporting their kirk wark’; the burgh was also excused attendance for three years in 1589 and its commissioner given ‘suffi cient dillegence vpon the bestowing of £60 in the apparrelling of thair kirk’.74 Mindful of the costs of attendance, the convention excused the burghs of Kilrenny, Dunbar, North Berwick, Elgin, Lauder, Rutherglen, Nairn, Renfrew, Banff, Rothesay and Whithorn from attending for three years, depending on the location of the meeting, so that the money could be applied to ‘thair brigs, harberis, tolbuithis, kirks, or other maist necessar commoun warks’.75 The east church at Cromarty would seem to fi t into the same pattern of corporate

70 NAS, CH8/51. 71 Statistical Account of Scotland, XI, p. 239. 72 Whyte, Scotland’s Society and Economy, pp. 115–16, 141. 73 Dennison and Coleman, Historic Forfar, p.20. See above, p. 51. The church at Dumbarton has

been attributed to 1565; it was fortifi ed in 1568 but much of the parish church was demol-ished in 1570 to provide building material for the castle. It had been rebuilt by the seventeenth century. E.P. Dennison and R. Coleman, Historic Dumbarton (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 22, 63–6; F.H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1882–85), II, p. 384; J. Gifford and F.A. Walker, Buildings of Scotland. Stirling and Central Scotland (London, 2002), pp. 22, 395.

74 G. Hay, History of Arbroath to the Present Time (Arbroath, 1899), pp. 92–3, 208–9; Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland, 1295–1597, ed. J.D. Marwick et al., 7 vols (Scottish Burgh Records Society, Edinburgh, 1870–), I, pp. 134, 267, 303, 311, 354.

75 Ibid., pp. 439–40.



enterprise (Plate 1). A new charter of erection raised the town to the status of a royal burgh in 1593, and the church has been dated to the same period.76

Undoubtedly the most important church constructed in this period of urban expansion and renewal was that at Burntisland (Plate 2). As at Arbroath, where the initial assistance from the convention was not just for the ‘upbigging of the kirk’ but also for work on the harbour, the church at Burntisland should be seen as the latest of a series of civic enterprises, rather than as an isolated venture. The town had been granted the status of a royal burgh in 1541 and had been admitted to the convention in 1587. The church was one of a series of projects undertaken by the town during the late sixteenth century and was followed by the erection of a tolbooth in 1605 and a gateway to the town in 1636.77 The minister and congregation petitioned the General Assembly to grant the new church parochial status, because it was ‘most comodious for the parochin, both in respect of the greatnes of the congregatioun, and ewitnes of the place, and alwayes more convenient then the auld kirk, quhilk is not able to receive the congregatioun, and is farther distant from them’.78 The town had sought the support of the convention of Royal Burghs in 1589 towards the costs of construction and three years later was granted permission to tax shipping bringing timber into the harbour. It petitioned the convention again in 1597 for assistance in ‘accomplisching of the godle wark with the biging of thair paroche kirk’ and was granted a levy of 300 marks for this purpose.79 The structural work seems to have been largely completed by this date, with fi nal payment being made to John Roche in July 1596 for his work on the church, but there still remained the erection of the steeple and the fi tting out of the inside of the building, for which the town was stented in 1598.80 The wooden steeple was completed two years later, although not without some complaints about the ‘insuffi cientie of ye wark’ of the wright, John Scott of Leith. The steeple was surmounted by a weathercock, and a separate smaller steeple or turret was erected by William Graham to house the new bell.81

The appearance of the church is so completely at odds with the conven-tional rectangular form of many Scottish churches that a number of attempts have been made to seek precedents for the design. The Dutch models that

76 RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NH76NE10.00; Gifford, Highlands and Islands, pp. 396–7. Although it was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, the survival of medieval features within this structure has led to the post-Reformation date of the church being questioned. I am grateful to Dr David Alston for this information; see also his ‘Cromarty Old Parish Church. A History of the Building’, at www.srct.org.uk/Cromarty_Church.pdf, accessed 7 August 2006.

77 J. Gifford, Buildings of Scotland. Fife (London, 1988), p. 108. 78 Acts and Proceedings, III, p. 835. This change of status was also ratifi ed by Parliament in 1594. APS,

IV, p. 74. 79 Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs, I, pp. 376, 415; II, pp. 16, 30–1. 80 NAS, B9/10/1, Burntisland Burgh Court Book, ff. 15v, 83v, 84v, 85, 85v–86. 81 NAS, B9/10/1, ff. 106v, 107v, 108, 112, 116.



have been suggested, such as the Oosterkerk in Amsterdam, the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem and the Scots Kirk in Rotterdam, all postdate Burntisland. More recently it has been suggested that the design might have been derived from the Grand Temple in La Rochelle, but this too postdates it.82 The church was built to a centralised plan, square in shape, with four free-standing pillars supporting the tower, linked by semi-circular arches. The exterior was altered during the mid-eighteenth century when the wooden steeple was replaced with a pepper-box tower, and in 1822 the walls were heightened and corner buttresses added.83 A greater sense of the original design can be obtained from John Slezer’s late-seventeenth-century view of Burntisland (Figure 2.3).

In many ways the church of Burntisland represents a home-spun solution to the demands of Reformed worship, and this is most apparent in the initial furnishing of the church. In July 1602 the burgh offi cials decided to pavement the fl oor and to ‘furnissit with suffi cent seatis round about for men and wemin easment’. A further levy was imposed to raise the £400 to carry out this task, and the wright William Graham was again employed to undertake the work. He was contracted to ‘big ye seattys of ye kirk and compleit thrie quarteras of ye kirk with suffi cient seattis for men, viz. Thrie rankes with ane braice and lectrone yrupone’. The pews were ‘to ryis with sum degrreis in heigt’. The pews were to be made of oak and the seats of fi ne fi r. The following year

82 Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 181–3; Hay, Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, p. 32; see below, pp. 187–90.

83 Gifford, Fife, p. 110.

Figure 2.3 John Slezer, Burntisland; the church can be seen on the right of the picture.



Figure 2.4 Pew with the arms of Sir Robert Melville and his wife, Burntisland.

it was decided to erect a seat for visitors, and in 1606 a canopied pew for burgh offi cials. This may have resembled the pew bearing the same date and the arms of Sir Robert Melville and his wife which was erected around the north-east pillar of the church (Figure 2.4). The result was to create ranked seating



centred on the pulpit and the impression of an auditorium was increased with the erection of galleries around the church. The kirk session granted permis-sion for the craft guilds to erect lofts at their own expense so that ‘commodi-ously thay my heir & sie the minister at preaching & prayairs’84 (Figure 2.5). It is therefore understandable that the interior of the church could be dismissed by William Laud as resembling ‘a square theatre’.85 The archbishop’s jibe failed to appreciate that this was the point: it was a church designed for the hearing of the Word of God and the minister had therefore to be audible and visible to the entire congregation. Because the building was designed to fulfi l a quite different set of priorities, it is scarcely surprising that it was free ‘from all suspicion of being so much as built like an ancient church’.86

The erection of new churches was not confi ned to royal burghs; during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Scottish nobles exploited the economic climate and the opportunities afforded by the Crown to enhance their wealth. The development of burghs of barony was one means of diversifying their economic interests; sixty-four new burghs of barony were founded between 1600 and 1650.87 One of the more ambitious enterprises was the development of Fraserburgh by Sir Alexander Fraser of Philwoth, with the improvement of the harbour and the erection of a castle and public buildings. A church was built in 1571 and permission was granted by the Crown for a university to be estab-lished, Fraser’s intention being that the minister would also be the principal of the college.88 Although Fraserburgh was exceptional, other Scottish lairds had similarly ambitious plans. Following its erection as a burgh of barony in 1588, David Lindsay drew up a plan of the rebuilt town of Edzell entitled a ‘pourtraicte of ye new citie of Edzel’. Public buildings, in particular the kirk, manse, tolbooth and trons, feature prominently, and the town is centred on the mercat cross.89 Although at Edzell the medieval kirk continued to serve the community,90 the erection of some other burghs provided the opportunity to found new churches. In 1617, the laird of Bargany ‘vpoun verie religious and gryit zeale and affec-tioun vpoun his lairge and sumpteous chairges and expenss hes caused builde and edefi e ane kirk within the toun of Ballintrae now erected in ane burgh of

84 NAS, B9/10/2, f. 4; B9/12/1, Burntisland Council Minutes, ff. 8v, 11–14v, 33–33v, 43, 82; CH2/523/1, Burntisland Kirk Session Records, ff. 37v, 91v, 93, 93v, 110, 111v, 128v.

85 The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud D.D., ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss, 7 vols (Oxford, 1847–60), III, p. 313.

86 Ibid. 87 K.M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland. Wealth, Family and Culture from Reformation to Revolution

(Edinburgh, 2000), p. 63. 88 Ibid., p. 50; Acts and Proceedings, III, p. 958. 89 F.D. Bardgett, Scotland Reformed. The Reformation in Angus and the Mearns (Edinburgh, 1989), pp.

152–3. 90 RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NO56NE7.00. A burial aisle was erected by the Lindsay family

on the south side of the church during the sixteenth century.



baronie’.91 Although nothing remains of this church beyond the burial aisle, the church probably followed the common T-shape plan; more unusual is the church of Portpatrick (Figure 2.6), erected less than ten years after the creation of the burgh, which has a cruciform plan and a round tower.92

Beyond the burghs, the fi nancial responsibility for the maintenance of existing churches and the construction of new ones often fell to the local lairds but it was a responsibility that was sometimes only grudgingly taken on.93 The case of Prestonpans illustrates well the diffi culties that the Kirk faced, and the building was largely accomplished through the zeal of the minister John Davidson. The original parish church had been destroyed by the English during the 1540s, and the congregation of this growing burgh had been obliged to worship at Tranent, some miles away. A leading Scottish Reformer, Davidson was appointed to Prestonpans in December 1595 and immediately set about providing a place of worship. The presbytery of Haddington approached the local laird, Lord Newbattle, who initially agreed to discuss the building of a

91 APS, IV, p. 555. 92 J. Gifford, The Buildings of Scotland. Dumfries and Galloway (London, 1996), pp. 490–1. 93 Brown, Noble Society, pp. 238, 241.

Figure 2.5 The maltsters’ badge on their gallery, Burntisland.



Figure 2.6 The church at Portpatrick.



kirk and the provision of a stipend with the laird of Preston. Newbattle however prevaricated and in the end reneged, preferring to have ‘ane kirk within his ane bounds for his awin people’. The church was therefore built on land provided by a lesser laird, Lord Hamilton of Preston.94

While some landowners carped about the expense of church building, it was a responsibility others took on more readily. The Kirk encouraged the role of the godly magistrate and berated those who failed to take responsibility for the actions of their own servants and tenants.95 The provision of a suitable place of worship could readily be seen as an extension of that role. There was certainly a sense of paternalism expressed in the motives of John Schaw of Greenock in seeking to build a new church in 1591. Parliament granted permission for him ‘to erect and big ane kirk designne ane manse and yaird thairto in an vpoun ony pairt or place within the bounds of his awin landis and heretage quhair he sall think maist comodious and convenient quhairat his haill tennentis salbe haldin to convene to heir goddis word and ressaue the sacramentis in all tyme cuming’. Parishioners previously had to attend a church four miles away and had to pass over ‘ane greit river’ which was diffi cult to cross in the winter. Furthermore, as the act made clear, it was not merely a matter of the cost of providing a new building: Schaw and his successors also took on the responsibility of providing the stipend for the minister of this new church.96

The motivation for church building was not always strictly religious or to meet the particular needs of a local community; churches, in some instances, provided an important vehicle for political imagery and architectural display. This was particularly true of the chapel royal erected at Stirling Castle, which was rebuilt for the baptism of Prince Henry in 1594. Although the chapel had been purged of its monuments of idolatry and reformed under the direction of the Earl of Mar, by the 1580s it was deemed to be ‘ruinous, and too little, [and it was] concluded that the olde chapel should be utterlie rased, and a new erected in the same place that should be more large, long and glorious’. A levy of £100,000 Scots was raised to pay for the chapel and the baptismal ceremonies and celebrations, which were attended by ambassadors from Bruns-wick, Denmark, England, France, Magdeburg and the United Provinces.97 The interior of the chapel

94 NAS, CH2/185/1, Presbytery of Haddington, ff. 124v, 125v, 126v, 127; R.M. Gillon, John Davidson of Prestonpans. Reformer, Preacher and Poet in the Generation after Knox (London, 1936), pp. 135–42; Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 183–5.

95 K.M. Brown, ‘In Search of the Godly Magistrate in Reformation Scotland’, JEH, 40 (1989), 553–81, esp. 561–2, 568; Bardgett, Scotland Reformed, p. 151.

96 APS, III, pp. 549–50; RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NS27NE1. 97 Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 25, 30–5; [William Fowler], A True Reportarie of the Most Trium-

phant, and Royal Accomplishment of the Babtisme of the Most Excellent, Right High and Mightie Prince, Frederick Henry ([London], [1594]).



Figure 2.7 Entrance to the chapel royal, Stirling.



… was richlie hung with costlie tapestries: And at the North-East ende of the same, a royall seat of Estate, prepared for the kings Maiestie: and on his right hand, was set a faire wide chaire, with the dew ornamentes pertaining thereto, over which was set the armes of the king of France. Next thereunto was a princelie travers of Crimoson Taffata for the Ambas-sador of England, and over his head the armes of England: on the deske before him, lay a cushion of red velvet …98

These ostentatious furnishings were intended to impress the foreign dignitaries, but it was also no doubt hoped that it would emphasise the Protestant creden-tials of the king, at a time when James’ relations with the Kirk were tense and he faced increasing criticism for his failure to act against the Catholic earls.99 Although constructed to a simple rectangular plan, the building is rich with symbolism, allusion and classical details. The chapel has an Italianate appear-ance with its round-headed windows and the central main entrance in the form of a classical triumphal arch (Figure 2.7). The proportions suggest an allusion to Solomon’s Temple and thereby the identifi cation of James VI as the new Solomon.100 The architecture is remarkably different from that of the contemporaneous church at Burntisland, but both were intend to impress and to enhance the status of the people behind the projects.

On a lesser scale, two further churches were erected by early seven-teenth-century courtiers who found royal favour in the wake of the Gowrie conspiracy and were ennobled by James VI. The churches at Dirleton (1612) and Falkland (1620), although on a far less grand scale than the chapel royal, refl ect a diffusion of court architecture to a parochial level. A new church was built at Dirleton (Figure 2.8) at the instigation of Sir Thomas Erskine to replace Gullane, which was ‘situat at the outsyde of the haill parochin’ and was ‘sa incommodiouslie situat besyde the sea sand that the same with the kirkyard thairof is continewallie owerblawin with sand’. Parliament granted permission in 1612 for Gullane to be demolished and for the stone, timber and other materials to be used for the construction of the new church. Dirleton was ‘ane fl orising toune’ and a central location within the parish, but it was also close to Dirleton Castle, whose lands had been granted to Erskine by the king in 1600.101 In spite of its classical detailing, Dirleton is a relatively restrained example of courtier architecture from the early seventeenth century.

The church erected at Falkland, demolished in the nineteenth century, was probably a more high-status building. This was one of a series of building schemes

98 Ibid. 99 A.R. MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625. Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy (Aldershot, 1998),

pp. 55–7. 100 A. MacKechnie, ‘James VI’s Architects and their Architecture’, in J. Goodare and M. Lynch

(eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton, 2000), pp. 163–5. 101 APS, IV, p. 490; M.D. Young (ed.), The Parliaments of Scotland. Burgh and Shire Commissioners, 2

vols (Edinburgh, 1992–93), I, pp. 230–1.



undertaken by Sir David Murray, who had built Scone Palace out of the abbey ruins as well as rebuilding the neighbouring church. The contract for Falkland from 1620 shows that although the architect for the church was John Mylne, Murray had considerable infl uence over its appearance; it was to cost £2,000. It was to be in a T-shape with a north aisle for the laird with a separate entrance, the design of which was to be determined by Murrary, who was also to decide on the number of doors and windows. There was also to be ‘ane fair heiche belhous … as the said Lord sall dewyis’. The interior was to be fi tted with panelling and was to refl ect ‘the forme and workmanschipe of the kirk of Scone’.102

On a smaller scale, a number of Scottish lairds similarly contributed to the appearance of the post-Reformation churches through building private accommodation for themselves and their families from which they could follow the services. The Kirk’s requirement that the parish worshipped communally led to the gradual disappearance of the chapel from Scottish country houses.103 Lairds therefore began to provide themselves with suitable accommodation in their local churches either by taking over redundant chancels or by continuing the late-medieval practice of erecting lateral aisles. In the past these aisles had served as family chapels and burial places, but in the new religious climate they provided space for a private pew opening on to the church above a burial

102 R.S. Mylne, The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland and their Works (Edinburgh, 1893), pp. 110–11; C. McKean, The Scottish Chateau. The Country House of Renaissance Scotland (Stroud, 2001), p. 209.

103 Ibid., p. 9.

Figure 2.8 The church at Dirleton. The neo-classical projecting aisle was erected in 1650.



Figure 2.9 The church at Dalgety Bay. The aisle can be seen on the left-hand side, at the west end of the building. The remains of another aisle can be seen in the foreground as well as steps at the east end to reach an aisle in former chancel area of the church.

vault.104 They served as a further affi rmation of status within the community and as a vehicle for heraldic display and iconography, becoming increasingly ostentatious as the seventeenth century progressed. Furthermore the erection of private aisles, which opened on to the church directly in front of the pulpit, came to give Scottish churches what became their characteristic T-shape. One of the most substantial aisles was constructed around 1610 by Alexander Seton, James VI’s Lord Chancellor, at the west end of the church at Dalgety Bay (Figure 2.9). Seton was one of a group of important courtier builders in the early seven-teenth century. The aisle, which includes the family burial vault, takes the form of a small tower house and completely dominates the church. The lairds’ loft, which opens on to the church, also includes a retiring room with a fi replace. The walls of these rooms are stone-panelled with frames for heraldic devices.105

104 Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, pp. 229–30; A. Spicer, ‘“Defyle not Christ’s Kirk with Your Carrion”. Burial and the Development of Burial Aisles in post-Reformation Scotland’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 149–69.

105 NAS C/C/53; Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 30, 50, 64, 83, 87, 103, 106, 213, 218; M. Bath, ‘Alexander Seton’s Painted Gallery’, in L. Gent (ed.), Albion’s Classicism. the Visual Arts



Figure 2.10 Screen for the Skelmorelie aisle at Largs; part of the painted ceiling can be seen in the background.



Just as impressive was the aisle erected at Largs by Sir Robert Montgomerie of Skelmorelie around 1636 (Figure 2.10). The aisle, also built over a burial vault, has a decorative painted ceiling, while the loft is divided from the church by a stonework screen elaborately decorated with strapwork.106 These are perhaps the two most exceptional examples of the uniquely Scottish combination of private gallery and burial aisle constructed during this era, but many humbler versions were added to churches during the early modern period.107

Early seventeenth century

The architecture of the kirk at Burntisland, through being designed for preaching the Word of God, has been seen as representative of Scottish presbyterianism, which reached its apogee in the mid-1590s, 1596 being depicted as the annus mirabilis.108 But the pendulum began to swing in the other direction with the king’s reaction against his impotence in Church affairs which resulted from presbyterian measures such as the Golden Acts of 1592. James therefore under-took the gradual restoration of the episcopate, which was superimposed on the existing ecclesiastical structure. The bishops were to serve as the agents of the Crown; they had seats in Parliament and on the Privy Council, and the majority of them were commissioners of the Kirk, thereby serving as a link between Church and state.109 Following James’s accession to the English throne, he developed a taste for the Anglican liturgy, and his religious policies in Scotland increasingly came to be directed towards achieving ‘congruity’ between the Kirk and the Church of England.110

The king’s changes in religious policy were refl ected in architectural form in the refurbishment of the chapel royal at Holyrood. The chapel, not the abbey church, dated from 1571 and had already been refurbished, in 1583. This included the erection of ‘ane honorabill saitt’ for the king ‘with

in Britain, 1550–1650 (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 79–108; Gifford, Fife, pp. 170–1; A. MacKechnie, ‘Design Approaches in Early Post-Reformation Scots Houses’, in I. Gow and A. Rowan (eds), Scottish Country Houses (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 21.

106 A. MacKechnie, ‘Evidence of Post-1603 Court Architecture in Scotland?’, Architectural History, 31 (1988), 115; T. Grant, ‘“Devotional Meditation”. The Painted Ceiling at Skelmorlie Aisle’, Church Monuments 12 (2002), 68–88; Howard, Scottish Architecture, p. 203; see below, pp. 86–87. For a further example, see D. Howard, ‘The Kinnoull Aisle and Monument’, Archi-tectural History, 39 (1996), 36–53.

107 See Spicer, ‘“Defyle not Christ’s Kirk”’, passim. 108 MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, p. 60. 109 J. Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’, in A.

Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 214–15; MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, pp. 94, 120, 143.

110 Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, p. 216; MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, p. 156.



ane chanchelar [perforated screen] wall of tymmer withe ane trym powpeit [pulpit] and fformes and saittis encirclat rownd abowt’. The king therefore sat at the foot of the pulpit and the seating for the royal entourage and the court arranged either within or outside the screen. The simplicity of the arrangement served to emphasise the centrality of the sermon but also justifi ed an observer’s comment that ‘the court does not show much royal splendour’.111 The trans-formation of the chapel in 1617 for the king’s visit refl ected James’s enthu-siasm for the Anglican liturgy. The work was undertaken by London craftsmen, possibly under the direction of Inigo Jones, and was shipped to Edinburgh for installation. The fi ttings included carved stalls, desks, an organ frame and a richly decorated screen to be erected at the west end of the chapel. There was an ornate entrance into the chapel through the screen, while above it was a private closet to accommodate the king and queen during the service. This was in marked contrast to the previous seating arrangements and refl ected the English custom of the monarch following services from behind the windows of their privy closets.112 The inclusion of an organ in the refurbishment dis quieted the Scots, who had disposed of these instruments at the Reformation, but it was the plan to include portraits or statues of the apostles, to be set into the pews, which provoked the strongest reaction. It was seen as tantamount to the introduction of papist customs, but the king reacted angrily to his opponents’ inability to distinguish between decoration and idolatry.113 Although this part of the design was dropped, the controversy illustrated the different attitudes towards the inclusion of religious iconography in places of worship during the early seventeenth century.

The newly refurbished chapel provided the setting for the Whitsun services, conducted according to the English liturgy, at which the bishops and nobility knelt to receive communion. These changes in ritual were the precursor to the introduction of the Five Articles of Perth put forward the following year, whereby James attempted to introduce some of the religious practices and observances that he most admired in the Church of England.114 The attempt to enforce the Five Articles dominated James’s religious policy in Scotland for the remainder of his reign. The articles enjoined kneeling to receive communion from the minister, confi rmation by bishops, private baptism and communion and the observance of holy days (Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension and Whitsun). However, it was kneeling to receive the sacrament that provoked perhaps the greatest opposition, suggesting, as it did, reverence

111 P.E. McCullough, Sermons at Court. Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 27, 28.

112 Accounts of the Masters of Works, ed. J. Imrie and J.G. Dunbar, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1957, 1982), II, pp. lxxxvi–lxxxvii, 441; McCullough, Sermons at Court, pp. 20–3, 29.

113 Accounts of the Masters of Works, II, pp. xxi–xxii; MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, p. 158. 114 Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, p. 220.



for the sacrament with the resulting undertones of idolatry and transubstantia-tion. There was widespread evasion, with communicants attending churches where they would not be obliged to kneel.115 Kneeling to receive the sacrament and more frequent communions clearly had implications for the furnishing and interior arrangements of the Scottish churches. This measure went against the Reformed tradition of gathering communally around a table to share and pass the bread and wine between the communicants.116 It promoted widespread hostility in certain regions and even led to some groups meeting privately in houses or even in the open air, abandoning their parish churches – which had become the sole places for worship after the Reformation – and serving as precursors to the conventicles of the later seventeenth century.

One church from this period particularly refl ects this religious policy, and in particular the permission that was granted under the terms of the articles for the private administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The church

115 MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, pp. 158, 164–70; McMillan, The Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, pp. 178–82.

116 See Todd, The Culture of Protestantism, pp. 102–4.

Figure 2.11 The church at Dairsie. The pitched roof and small turret were later additions.



erected by Archbishop Spottiswoode at Dairsie in 1621117 was intended for private family worship rather than use as a parish church and needs to be seen in the wider context of Spottiswoode’s other projects at Dairsie (Figure 2.11). The architecture is an eclectic mixture of Gothic and classical styles; the west door is a triumphant classical arch with pilasters surmounted by capitals in the form of angels’ heads, with Spottiswoode’s arms above. It is lit by huge Gothic tracery windows, and an octagonal belfry is projected corbelled out over buttresses, while there was originally a fl at lead roof.118 The overall effect is more reminiscent of an Oxford or Cambridge college than of rural Fife. A visitation of the church in 1641 found ‘a glorious partition wall, with a degrie ascending thereto, dividing the bodie of the kirk fra there queir’. The visitors objected to the display of the archepiscopal heraldry, the ‘ornament of some desks’ and ‘above the great doore of their queir, so called, the armes of Scotland and England quartered, with divers crosses about and beside them’. The heritors and minister were therefore ordered to level the fl oor of the church and to remove the screen and other superstitious decoration.119 Spottiswoode later wrote that he publicly and upon his own charges ‘built and adorn’d the church of Darsy after the decent English form, which if the boisterous hand of a mad Reformation had not disordered is at this time one of the beautifullest little pieces of church work that is left to that now unhappy country’.120 Nonetheless it is telling that at the time Dairsie was built, the year in which the Five Articles were approved by the Scottish Parliament, Spottiswoode saw no contradiction between his own orthodox Calvinism, which later prevented him from wearing Anglican vestments at the funeral of James VI, and architectural and heraldic display in a place of worship, which could be regarded as a forerunner of the ecclesiological policies of Charles I.

Dairsie was however exceptional, and the religious policies pursued by the Crown after 1603, and the impact that these had upon the more high-status churches, should not overshadow the more gradual programme of renewal that was taking place on a smaller scale across Scotland, where there was a resur-gence of building (Figure 2.12). During the opening decades of the seventeenth century, the Kirk underwent a period of self-refl ection and consolidation.121 One of the major problems that it faced concerned the supply of suitably quali-fi ed personnel to maintain the ministry in over 1,000 parishes across Scotland. Initially the Kirk had managed to establish suitable pastoral oversight relatively

117 M. Ash, ‘Dairsie and Archbishop Spottiswoode’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 19 (1976), 128–9.

118 Gifford, Fife, p. 169; Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 188–90. 119 Ecclesiastical Records … Synod of Fife, pp. 129, 135, 141. 120 D. MacGibbon and T. Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland from the Twelfth to

the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols (Edinburgh, 1887–92), V, p. 155. 121 Lynch, ‘Preaching to the Converted?’, pp. 304–6.



quickly after 1560 with the conversion of pre-Reformation clergy.122 By 1574 90 per cent of the posts in parishes outside the Highlands had been fi lled, but more than three-quarters of these the posts were fi lled by readers, whose responsibilities were circumscribed.123 In spite of this early success the Kirk had begun to experience a serious shortfall in personnel by the 1590s, with some areas more poorly provided for than they had been in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation. This was combined with the severe economic crisis that the Kirk faced in fi nancing its ministry.124

As early as 1563, the Kirk had attempted to deal with the issue of ensuring adequate pastoral provision through the redefi nition of parochial boundaries. In that year, the General Assembly had successfully petitioned the Crown for permission to amalgamate parishes which ‘wher two or thrie are within two or thrie myles distant, the same to unite, and cause the inhabitants to resort to ane of the said kirks, to heir the word and receive the sacraments; because the scarecenes of ministers permitts not every kirk to have a severall minister’ and ‘the smalness of the parishes require not the same’.125 Such initiatives to improve pastoral provision and to provide a more convenient place of worship continued on an individual basis. In 1600, for example, the General Assembly received a

122 J. Kirk, ‘Recruitment to the Ministry at the Reformation’, in Kirk (ed.), Patterns of Reform. Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 130–1, 135, 152–3.

123 Lynch, ‘Preaching to the Converted?’, p. 308. 124 Ibid., pp. 308–9, 312–14. 125 Acts and Proceedings, I, pp. 33, 34.

Figure 2.12 The church at Balnakiel. One of a number of churches erected in the early seventeenth century.



petition from the parishes of Eassie and Nevay, which had been united under one minister. It decided that a new church should be built for the two parishes, the total population of which amounted to fewer than 500 people, and that a new and more convenient site should be chosen so that ‘the farthest part of both the saids parochines will not be distant halfe a myle from the place, quher the said kirk sould be biggit’. The Kirk also admitted that it lacked the fi nancial resources ‘to sustaine two sundrie Ministers at the saids two kirks’.126

During the early seventeenth century, a more formal procedure was established for dealing with these problems that faced the Kirk. James VI had appointed a commission in 1617 for the plantation of kirks and the augmenta-tion of stipends. This was a temporary commission, largely intended to address the problem of stipends, but it also had the power to unite parishes where this offered a fi nancial solution. Calderwood accused the commission of uniting as many as 200 benefi ces.127 More effective was a second commission authorised by Parliament in 1621. The tenor of the act for ‘the plantation of kirkis as yet unplantit’ was somewhat different from that of the 1617 commission; it was more focused on the Kirk’s pastoral provision and churches. Mindful of the work of the 1617 commission, the act commented that some parishes had been united but would be better served if the union were dissolved and separate services held in each place. Nonetheless it also demonstrated an awareness of the some of the problems of the existing parochial structure:

sum kirkis qroff the Parochin is of so Lairge boundis that manye of ye parochon-eris duelling in roumes of ye parochin so remote frome the kirk who for ye gryit distance of ye place or for the interiectioun of wateris betuix thair roumes and ye kirkis whiche often tymes and in speciall in winter ar not passable Or for sum suche vther knawin Impediment can not haue access to repair to the paroche kirks at the ordinarie tymes appoyntit for diuyne seruice and worschipe and enioye the confort of the exercise thereoff.128

The commissioners had the power to order the ‘erecting and building of new kirkis in anye parochines that they sall fi nd necessitie’ but were also responsible for ensuring the provision of adequate stipends for the ministers.

The act also addressed a number of petitions which had been made for new churches to be erected on less remote and inconvenient sites, such as at Fetteresso (Aberdeenshire), or Lenzie, Kirkintilloch and Rosneath in the diocese of Glasgow. In Kintyre, the three parishes of Kilcharrane, Kilmichell and Kilchusland and the two parishes of Kilcolmekill and Kilblane had been united to become single parishes in 1617, and each requested permission to

126 Ibid., III, p. 961. 127 APS, IV, pp. 531–4; W.R. Foster, The Church before the Covenants. The Church of Scotland, 1596–

1638 (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 161–4. 128 APS, IV, pp. 605–6.



erect a new church. John, Lord Hay of Yester sought permission for a new church to be erected on his lands at Meggat for his tenants, who were ‘impedit by storme of wether frome cumming to ye kirk of Lynes’.129 Although there is evidence that some of these churches were built, little is generally known about the work of this commission, although progress does seem to have been made with regard to stipends by the time of James’s death.130

Nonetheless the work of the commissions represented a real attempt to reorder the religious landscape of Scotland, so that churches were no longer associated with places of particular sanctity or ancient sites but refl ected the pastoral needs of the communities and were located in more accessible places. This often meant the abandonment of the medieval churches, which might be demolished for their building material – although burial aisles, often former chancels were left – and new churches erected on more central sites within the parishes.

In certain dioceses the newly restored episcopate was also actively engaged in the regeneration of the rural parishes. Bishop William Cowper of Galloway (1612–19) had boasted that he was the fi rst to plant churches in parts of Galloway, Annandale and the Borders. He had been similarly active earlier in his career when in 1587 he was appointed to the ruinous kirk at Bothkennar, which he set about rebuilding. Such was the enthusiasm of the local congrega-tion that ‘there needed no letters of horning, not other compulsitories; neither content to have it built onely, they adorned it within and without, not inferior to any Church of such quality round about it’.131 Bishop Patrick Forbes of Aberdeen (1618–35) similarly proved to be a particularly energetic diocesan, appointing ministers to long-vacant benefi ces, dividing parishes that had been united in 1617, and building new churches in the newly created or disjoined parishes of Longside, Old Deer, Ordiquhill, Strichen, Pitsligo and Inverboyndie during the 1620s and 1630s.132 Forbes’s concern for repairing and maintaining his cathedral, which served the parishioners of Old Aberdeen was lauded in the eulogy delivered at his funeral:

His fi rst and foremost care, was for the House of God; and especiallie of the Cathedral Church where he did reside, aedifying, and repairing the ruines thereof, and furnishing it with ornamentes convenient; and which had lyen waste and desolate since the Reformation.133

129 Ibid. 130 Foster, Church before the Covenants, p. 164. 131 The Workes of the Mr William Cowper Late Bishop of Galloway (London, 1629), p. 4. 132 W.G.S. Snow, The Times, Life and Thought of Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen, 1618–1635 (London,

1952), pp. 112–13. 133 Funerals of a Right Reverend Father in God. Patrick Forbes of Corse, Bishop of Aberdene, ed. D. Lindsay

(Aberdeen, 1635), pp. 64–5; Records of Old Aberdeen, ed. A.A. Munro (New Spalding Club, 20, 1899), p. 54.



Forbes, as a bishop, but also a laird with his own estates, may have been excep-tional, but other bishops were also prepared to ensure that there was appro-priate provision made for worship within their jurisdiction. Further afi eld in the sprawling diocese of Argyll, for example, the bishop berated Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy for his unwillingness to provide a new church.134

Synod and presbytery records demonstrate a similar drive to repair parish churches or build new ones during this period. The regular visitations by the presbyteries were principally concerned with ensuring an effective ministry, the exercise of discipline and church attendance, but they did also enquire into the state of repair of church fabric. The visitations conducted by the presby-tery of Aberdeen in 1600 found that the kirk at Drumaok was now ‘watter tight and wind tight’ but repairs were needed to the steeple and walls, and at Maryculter money was to be raised for the ‘reparatione & glassing’ of the kirk.135 The presbytery of Ellon had a protracted campaign to raise funds for the

134 NAS, GD112/39/34/6; Brown, Noble Society, p. 238. 135 NAS, CH2/1/1, pp. 68, 70.

Figure 2.13 The church at Anstruther.



construction of the church at Udny, as well as directing repairs to the churches at Cruden and Logie.136 The synod of Fife protested about the failure of the 1621 commission to settle the question of stipends for some churches and went on to divide the parishes of Newburgh and Ebdie, with the inhabitants of Newburgh required to attend ‘the kirk already buildit within the said burgh’.137 In the 1620s the synod of Moray variously directed the repair and construc-tion of the churches at Kingussie, Kincardine, Urquhart and Glenmoriston, Ardclach and Edinkillie, Conveth and Kiltarlity.138 Additional research will no doubt yield further architectural evidence of the resurgence and consolidation of the Reformation in rural communities.

Construction was not solely confi ned to such communities: new churches were also built at South Queensferry in 1633 and Anstruther Easter, in the following year. These coastal towns lay within parishes which stretched into their rural hinterland and were at some distance from the church. The erection of churches within these burghs not only refl ected their civic aspirations – as was demonstrated by the prominent coat of arms on the tower at Anstruther (Figure 2.13) – but also ensured a more conveniently located place of worship

136 NAS, CH2/146/1, ff. 58, 58v, 59, 94, 102v, 114, 115v; CH2/146/2, ff. 8, 8v, 43v, 73. 137 NAS, CH2/154/1. 138 J. Kirk, ‘The Jacobean Kirk in the Highlands’, in Kirk, Patterns of Reform, p. 476.

Figure 2.14 Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh



for the burgeoning population.139 Perhaps more signifi cant than these smaller coastal ports was the growing

population of Edinburgh, where the Greyfriars Kirk had been completed a decade earlier (Figure 2.14). Although it had been decided as early as 1595 to provide a parish church for the south-western congregation in the burgh graveyard at Greyfriars, construction was slow and it was not completed until 1620. The design harked back to the medieval preaching halls of the friars, being a simple rectangular structure of six bays, measuring 120 by 60 feet, with entrances to the north, south and east, while there was a tower at the west end. With the exception of the curvilinear gable at the east end, this was a relatively conservative, even utilitarian, building, re-using material from the convent of Sciennes, with harled walls and solid ashlar buttresses.140 Although a series of later vicissitudes have left a much altered structure, the original building lacked any galleries and the pulpit was erected against a pier on the south arcade; there was also a stool of repentance on which three women sat during the sermon when Sir William Brereton attended a service in 1635.141 Its interior arrange-ments resembled those of a number of other churches erected during the early seventeenth century, as the Kirk attempted to respond to the problems posed by its medieval patrimony and to meet the needs of Reformed worship.

Religious policies of Charles I

Studies of the religious policies of Charles I have tended to concentrate on the liturgical changes that he attempted to introduce into Scotland. The king continued his father’s efforts to establish a uniform liturgy for the Church in Scotland to replace the Book of Common Order, which lacked statutory authority and did not prescribe a set form of worship.142 He also sought to enforce uniformity in religious practice; consequently, the disputes about kneeling to receive communion continued into his reign,143 as Sir William Brereton noted:

139 NAS, GD75/719; Howard, Scottish Architecture, pp. 190–1; Gifford, Fife, pp. 67–9; McWilliam, Lothian, p. 433. Anstruther was not formally detached from the parish of Kilrenny until 1649. St Andrews University Library, Special Collections, CH2/1132/18, pp. 153, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 168–9.

140 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, I, pp. xiv, 129, 295, 300; Hay, Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, pp. 45–8; J. Gifford, C. McWilliam and D. Walker, The Buildings of Scotland. Edinburgh (London, 1984), pp. 152–4.

141 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, I, p. 309, II, pp. 72, 92, 215; Brereton, Travels, pp. 107, 109. 142 Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, pp. 233, 235; G. Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer

Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954), pp. 31–4. 143 McMillan, The Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, pp. 182–4; A.I. MacInnes, Charles I and the

Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 128–9.



When the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is administered a narrow table is placed in the middle of the aisle, the whole length of the aisle about which most of the receivers sit, as in the Dutch and French churches, but now the ceremo-nies of the Church of England are introduced, and conformity is much pressed, and the gesture of kneeling is also much pressed.144

However, these liturgical developments represent only a part of the religious changes that were introduced during the Caroline period. During the early seven-teenth century there had been a move within the English Church to establish a more appropriate setting for worship and the administration of the sacraments which gave due reverence to the presence of God and the ‘beauty of holiness’.145 Although this development began earlier, it has generally been associated with Archbishop Laud, who was later (mistakenly) demonised by the Covenanters for effecting the religious policies of the 1630s in Scotland.146 While the appearance of Dairsie would seem to accord with its initial development, it was not until the 1630s that the ‘Laudian’ style began to emerge in Scotland.

The development of this ‘Laudian’ style can be seen in the alterations and refurbishment of the royal chapels and in particular improvements to Holyrood Abbey, which was chosen as the setting for the king’s coronation in 1633. Over £17,000 was spent in six months on the alterations and repairs to Holyrood Palace, much of this being spent on the abbey; by June 1633, sixty-two masons and carvers and fi fty-one wrights were working on the project, many for seven days a week.147 The building work included the partial rebuilding of the east and west gables of the church, the repairs to the steeples and the complete remod-elling and decoration of the interior. There was also a peal of bells for the north-west steeple, although Brereton commented that ‘none here knew how to ring or make any use of them, until some came out of England for that purpose, who hath now instructed the Scots in this art’.148 It was however the internal arrangements that so alarmed the Scottish observers:a communion table was placed at the east end like an altar, with candles and a basin and with a tapestry placed behind ‘wherein the crucifi x was curiously wrought’.149 Work had been undertaken at the chapel royal in 1629 at Stirling, where part of the frieze survives, and later in conjunction with the coronation visit, at Falkland Palace (Figure 2.15). The decoration at Falkland has been obscured by restoration in the nineteenth century, but the original ceiling had strapwork and was painted

144 Brereton, Travels, p. 110. 145 P. Lake, ‘The Laudian Style. Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K.

Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 161–85. 146 Ibid., pp. 162–3; Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, pp. 231–3. 147 Accounts of the Masters of Works, pp. lxxxviii–lxxxix. 148 Brereton, Travels, p. 111. 149 J. Spalding, History of the Troubles and Memorable Transactions in Scotland and England, ed. J. Skene,

2 vols (Bannatyne Club, 25, 1828–29), I, p. 17.



with cartouches bearing royal emblems, monograms and coats of arms, and the date ‘1633’ (Figure 2.16; see also Plate 3).150 There is no evidence as to the liturgical arrangement of these chapels, but as the English Prayer Book was used they were presumably also furnished in a similar way to Holyrood with a communion table at the east end.151

One of the major ecclesiastical projects of Charles’s reign stemmed from his coronation visit in 1633, and that was the restoration, and elevation to cathedral status, of St Giles’s Kirk in Edinburgh. The radical alterations which had taken place after the Reformation meant that only part of the building was dedicated for liturgical use. The internal divisions shocked Alexander Baillie during his brief visit from Germany in 1622; as a Scottish Benedictine, he regarded the changes as sacrilege and drew a comparison with what confronted Christ before he threw the moneychangers out of the temple:

… the bare vuals & pillars al cled with dust, sweepings & cobwebs, in steed of painting & tapestrie: & on every side beholding the restlesse resorting of people treating of their worldly effaires; some writing & making obligations, contracts & discharges: others laying countes or telling-over sowmes of mony: & two & two walking & talking to & fro, some about merchandice or the lawes & too many allas about drinking or courting of woemen, Yea & perhaps about worse nor I

150 Gifford, Fife, p. 217; RCAHMS, Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan, pp. 139–40; Accounts of the Masters of Works, pp. ci–cii.

151 See above, p. 79.

Figure 2.15 Decorative scheme in the chapel royal, Stirling



can imagine; as is wont to be done al the day long in the common Exchanges of London & Amsterdam & other great cities; And turning … towards the west end of the Church which is devided in a high house for the Colledge of Justice, called the Session or Senathouse, & a low house, called the Low Tolbooth, where the Bailiues of the toune use to sit, & judge common actions & pleas in the one end therof, & a number of harlots & scolds for fl yting & whoredome inclosed in the other; … such abominable desolation that where altars were erected, & sacrifi ces with continuall praises & praiers were wont to be offered up to the lord, in remembrance of that bloody sacrifi ce of Christ on the crosse, there now ar holes for whores & cages for scolds; where nothing bot banning & swearing, & every one upbraiding another.152

152 Alexander Baillie, A Trve Information of the Vnhallowed Offspring, Progresse & Impoisoned Fruits of our Scottish Caluinian Gospel (Wurtzburg, 1628), pp. 27–8.

Figure 2.16 Detail of the wall and ceiling decoration in the chapel royal, Falkland Palace.



Although a partisan account, Baillie’s description shows that the appearance and use of St Giles fell far short of the ‘Laudian’ perception of an appropriate setting for worship and the pursuit of holiness.

In October 1633, following the creation of the Diocese of Edinburgh, the king ordered that St Giles, ‘designed by us to be the Cathedrall Churche of that bishoprik, be ordered as is decent and fi tt for a church of that eminence and according to fi rst intentioun of the erectors and founders thairof which was to be keiped conforme to the lairgenes and conspecuitie of the foundatioun and fabrick, and not to be indirectlie parcelled and disjoynit by walls and partitiounes as now it is …’ (Figure 2.17)153 As Archbishop Laud was later to comment:

his Majesty having, in a Christian and princely way, erected and endowed a bisho-pric in Edinburgh, he resolved to make the great church of S. Giles in that city, a cathedral; and to this end, gave order to have the ‘galleries’ in the lesser church, and the ‘stone wall’ which divided them, taken down. For of old, they were both of one church, and made two by a wall built up at the west end of the chancel; so that which was called the lesser church, was but the chancel of S. Giles with galleries round about it; and was for all the world like a square theatre, without any show of a church.154

But the restoration of St Giles went beyond the removal of the dividing walls, which is often all that is commented upon by architectural historians, for it involved the reordering of a new liturgical space for worship. Laud himself directed the authorities to take advice on the design from, among others, Archbishop Spottiswoode,155 and it seems to have drawn particularly on the example of Durham Cathedral. In fact the dean of the new cathedral went to Durham, and the council minutes of February 1636 refer to his ‘setting doune ane plott of the queir to be repaired within Sanct Jeillis and to doe all thingis which may facilitate that worke to the toun’.156 Furthermore the king, en route to his coronation, had visited Durham Cathedral, where he had called for the removal of seating from the choir. In Edinburgh, too, the galleries, including the royal loft, were removed from chancel and the shops built against the church demolished.157 The accounts show that wainscot was purchased for the choir and payments were made to John Mylne for the ‘reparing ye edifi ces of St Geilles church’ in 1636–37.158 Less than a month after the Prayer Book riot

153 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd ser., V, pp. 136–7; RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, I, pp. 133–4. See also A. Spicer, ‘“Laudianism” in Scotland? St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, 1633–39. A Reappraisal’, Architectural History, 46 (2003), 95–108.

154 Works of William Laud, III, p. 314. 155 ‘Unpublished Letters of Archbishop Laud and Charles I’, ed. W.H. Hutton, English Historical

Review, 7 (1892), 715. 156 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, III, p. 174. 157 The Correspondence of John Cosin, D.D., Lord Bishop of Durham, ed. J. Omsby (Surtees Society, 52,

1868), pp. 215–16; RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, III, pp. 134, 136, 137, 147, 154, 155. 158 Edinburgh City Archives, Treasurers’ Accounts 1636–50.



at St Giles which sounded the death knell for Charles’s religious policies north of the border, the corporation reached an agreement with John Mylne ‘for repairing the gritt eist window in the queir of the said churche for hewing up

Figure 2.17 St Giles, Edinburgh, from Gordon of Rothiemay’s bird’s-eye view of 1647.



and setting up of the staine worke thairof conforme to the plott schewen’.159

The high-minded ideas of the Crown, which kept a close eye on develop-ments, were not achieved without some considerable expense to the citizens of Edinburgh. The costs of the coronation visit, the increase in ministerial salaries ordered by the Crown and another major capital project, the construction of the new Parliament House with the Court of Justice, alone amounted to £141,000. This all placed a severe fi nancial strain upon the town at a time when the economic prosperity of the earlier decades of the century was coming to an end.160 Furthermore the conversion of St Giles into a single church meant that the other congregations, which had worshipped in the partitioned building, were displaced and had to be found alternative accommodation. The citizens of Edinburgh were therefore paying not only for ‘the edifi cie of the kirk of Sanct Geilles to be repaired the beautye wherof is no littill defaced’ but also for ‘two churches buildit of new within this citie’.161 The church planned for Castle Hill was never fi nished while the other church, the Tron, was not completed until the mid-seventeenth century.162

The restoration of St Giles needs to be placed in the wider context of the ‘Laudian’ programme being undertaken in cathedrals south of the border, but it also formed part of a wider campaign to restore Scottish cathedrals during the 1630s. Royal approval was given for a collection for the repair of Dunkeld Cathedral in 1630, which had been re-roofed by 1610, and Parliament sympa-thetically considered a petition three years later for the maintenance of the nave of Kirkwall Cathedral by the Crown as successors to the earls of Orkney.163 Major repairs were undertaken in 1630 and although the Glasgow Assembly later accused the bishop of withholding ‘portions of ministers stipends for building his cathedrall’, the kirk session complained in 1639 about ‘the ruinous estate of their kirk’.164 Restoration work had been undertaken at Dornoch, but by 1634 the nave still remained in ruins and the king wrote to the Earl of Sutherland, urging him to work with the Bishop of Caithness to raise money in the diocese for its completion.165 Parliamentary confi rmation of the charters of the city of Glasgow recalled their various civic responsibilities, including ‘the great cair, paines, and chairges sustenit be thame in vpholding of the great Kirk

159 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, III, p. 191. 160 MacInnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, p. 152n. 161 Partial accounts survive for the public subscription to the project in 1636–37. Edinburgh City

Archives, list of subscribers to repair St Giles 1636 to 1637. 162 See below, p. 92. 163 The Earl of Stirling’s Register of Royal Letters, Relative to the Affairs of Scotland and Nova Scotia from

1615 to 1635, 2 vols, ed. C. Rogers (Edinburgh, 1885), II, p. 471; Cooper, ‘Dunkeld Cathe-dral’, Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society, 6 (1912–15), 34; APS, V, pp. 52–3.

164 Kirkwall, Orkney Library and Archives, OCR14/74, p. 38, OCR4/1, p. 2; The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. D. Laing, 3 vols (Bannatyne Club, 75 1841–42), I, p. 163.

165 C.D. Bentinck, Dornoch Cathedral and Parish (Inverness, 1926), pp. 187–9, 211–12.



of Glasgow and edifi ce thairof, eftir the auncient maner and fi rst fundation of the samyne’.166 Archaeological evidence shows that the cathedral at Whithorn was remodelled at about the same date, with the east end being elevated for the altar enclosure.167 The king also ordered repairs, and made fi nancial provi-sion, for the ancient cathedral of Iona. Considerable work seems to have been undertaken in adapting the eastern part of the church to serve as the cathedral for the Diocese of the Isles.168

Probably the king’s most ambitious scheme related to the cathedral of St Andrews, which had been abandoned at the time of the Reformation in favour of the parish church of Holy Trinity. He issued instructions in 1634 that ‘being resolved to reedifi e the cathedrall church of St Androis, our pleasour is that you, with our masteris of worke and such uthers as you sall fi nd to be under-standing men in architectorie, in presence of the Archbishope of St Androis, survey the vestiges of the sayd churche and how the same may best be helped or of new built’. The following year the revenues of the priory of St Andrews were returned to the Kirk, with the intention that they would be employed in fi nancing the restoration of the cathedral.169

Fragmentary those these references are, there was a defi nite policy on the part of the Crown to restore the Scottish cathedrals as part of its religious programme in Scotland. James VI had ordered the use of the English Book of Common Prayer in the chapel royal, and during Charles’s coronation visit it had been used at St Giles’s Kirk as well. In October 1633, Charles ordered the continued use of this liturgy in the chapels royal, the bishops’ private chapels and also St Salvator’s, the chapel of St Andrews University. The following year this was extended to include all university chapels and cathedrals.170 No doubt indicative of these new liturgical forms was the order made in 1631 for organs to be erected in the cathedral churches.171 One further liturgical innovation which dates from this period was the consecration of new churches for worship, one of the earliest being the inauguration of the church at South Queensferry in August 1635. Although this represented the spread of English liturgical practice north of the border, it also refl ected the increasing distinctiveness of churches as places set apart for worship.172

166 Charters and Other Documents Relating to the City of Glasgow, AD 1175–1649, 2 vols, ed. J.D. Marwick (Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1894), I, pt 2, p. 351.

167 G. Donaldson and C.A. Ralegh Radford, ‘Post-Reformation Church at Whithorn’, PSAS, 85 (1950–52), 121.

168 RCAHMS, Argyll. An Inventory of Monuments, IV, pp. 52, 78, 94, 149. 169 Hay Fleming, Reformation in Scotland, pp. 608–9; Works of William Laud, III, p. 313. 170 Donaldson, Making of the Scottish Prayer Book, pp. 42–3. 171 McMillan, The Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, p. 98. 172 NAS, CH2/1/1; A. Spicer, ‘“What Kinde of House a Kirk is”. Conventicles, Consecrations and

the Concept of Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Scotland’, in W. Coster and A. Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 81–103.



Besides the structural and ceremonial changes, the ‘beauty of holiness’ also related to the appropriate setting for worship. The chapels royal provide some indication of the form that this took, but the decorative ceilings at Grandtully and the Skelmorelie aisle also date from the 1630s. Perhaps rather than being regarded as curiosities or in the case of the former ceiling Catholic, these should be considered as further evidence of ‘Laudianism’ and an attempt to establish the ‘beauty of holiness’ in Scotland. The chapel at Grandtully was extended in 1636 and the ceiling painted with Renaissance decorative borders of swags of fruit and fl owers, and trumpeting fi gures which surround over twenty panels containing monograms, heraldic devices and the depiction of the four evange-lists as well as Biblical scenes; the large central panel records the Last Judge-ment.173 The ceiling of the Skelmorelie aisle at Largs was painted about the same time as that at Grandtully and includes texts from the Geneva Bible, signs of the zodiac, coats of arms of the tribes of Israel and depictions of the four seasons (Figure 2.18).174 These rare survivals demonstrate that for some patrons there

173 A. Graham, ‘The Painted Ceiling in the Church of St Mary, Grandtully’, PSAS, 77 (1942–43), 147–54.

174 A.W. Lyons, ‘The Painted Ceiling in the Montgomery Aisle of the Old Church at Largs, Ayrshire’, PSAS, 35 (1900–01), 109–11; Grant, ‘“Devotional Meditation”’.

Figure 2.18 Depiction of winter on the ceiling of the Skelmorelie aisle at Largs, together with verses from Scripture and two signs of the zodiac.



was no contradiction between Reformed worship and elaborate iconographical schemes that drew upon Scripture as well as secular and heraldric imagery. How far these ceilings were intended to be seen by others is debatable but they nonetheless demonstrate that decorative schemes were not out of place in some Reformed churches.

Cathedrals and private chapels were high-status places of worship and far removed from the parish churches attended by the majority of the population. Nonetheless in St Andrews, the parish church of Holy Trinity came under royal scrutiny. The king wrote to the council stating that ‘we intend to have the paroch church of that citie, being the metropolitane of that kingdome, ordored in such decent and conspicuous maner as we have alreadie caused begin at St Geill’s Church, in our citie of Edinburgh, to the end the fabrik may, according to the fi rst lawdable intention of the founder, appear in the trew forme and propor-tion thairof, without being any wayes parcelled or pestred within the beautie of the walls or lights obscured without’. The council were urged to demolish a structure built at the east end of the church and to take Spottiswoode’s advice on ‘the further decoreing of that church’.175 In denying responsibility for this programme, Laud made it clear that the intention was to establish an appro-priate setting for worship, through ‘taking down galleries and stone walls, in the Kirks of Edinburgh and St Andrews, for no other end but to make way for altars and adoration towards the east’.176

The alterations to Holy Trinity in St Andrews were made in advance of the Scottish canons issued in 1636. The canons maintained the attempt to establish uniformity in religious practice in the northern kingdom but they also repre-sented a continuance of the move towards congruity between the English and Scottish churches. The ordinances relating to the furnishing of churches for divine worship and the administration of the sacraments were largely copied from the English canons of 1603.177 Every church was required to have a copy of the King James authorised version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalter, and a ‘decent and comely’ pulpit was to be placed in ‘a conven-ient part of the church for the preaching of the Word of God’. However, it was the fi ttings associated with the administration of the sacraments that repre-sented the greatest change to the layout and furnishing of the church. The basin bracketed to the pulpit which had been used for baptisms in the past was to be replaced by a font ‘placed somewhat near the entry of the church, as anciently used to be’. In addition, ‘a comely and decent table for celebrating the holy communion shall be placed at the upper end of the chancel or church’.178 This

175 Earl of Stirling’s Register of Royal Letters, II, pp. 751–2. 176 Works of William Laud, III, p. 314. 177 The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, ed. W. Bray (Church of England Records Society, 6, 1998), p.

lxxi. 178 Ibid., p. 547.



even went beyond English canons, where the placing of the communion table was left to the discretion of the ordinary.179 The canons provoked considerable opposition not merely because of their content, but because they were intro-duced by royal diktat, without consultation of the clergy, and raised alarm about the forthcoming Prayer Book.180 The canons did not in fact have an impact upon the liturgical arrangements of the Scottish churches as their implementation was overtaken by events, but they demonstrate the effect that the policy of congruity would have had within the local kirk.

The Crown’s religious policies came to a head with the introduction of the new Prayer Book in a service at St Giles’s in Edinburgh in July 1637. Amid accusations of ‘poperie’, there was rioting in the church ‘with such a loud clamour and uproare, so that nothing could be heard’, while ‘others did cast their stoolls agains the Dean’s face’. In the subsequent months, further attempts by the bishops to introduce the new service book met with determined opposi-tion and sometimes violence. In the chapel royal at Holyrood, it was reported the following year that ‘the costlie organes [were] altogidder destroyit and vnvsefull’.181 The culmination of this opposition to the new Prayer Book was the signing of the Covenant in Greyfriars Kirk in 1638, which upheld the tradi-tions of the Kirk of Scotland, and the meeting of the Glasgow Assembly. The Assembly saw its role as being ‘for the removing of those evils wherewith the Church is infested, and for settling that order which becommeth the house of God’.182 The episcopate was abolished, and the collapse of the Caroline religious policies was evident at St Giles, where the city authorities resolved in January 1639 to erect again a wall separating the ‘haill est pairt of the churche wich formerlie includit the haill queyr quherby ane commodious and beutifull churche salbe gayned’ and so provide accommodation for the displaced city congregations.183

From the Covenant to the Glorious Revolution

The Covenanting movement achieved a religious and constitutional revolution between 1638 and 1641; the religious policies of the Crown were dismantled, government had been transformed, and a Parliament free from royal control

179 Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, p. 234n. 180 Anglican Canons, p. lxxii; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp.

783–4.181 J. Row, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. D. Laing (Wodrow Society, 4, 1842), pp. 408–9;

J. Spalding, Memorialls of the Trubles in Scotland and in England. A.D. 1624–A.D. 1645, 2 vols (Spalding Club, 21–2, 1850–51), I, pp. 79–81, 82–3, 86–7.

182 [W. Blacanquhal], A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland (London, 1639), pp. 248–9

183 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, III, p. 213.



had been established. The Kirk was in the ascendancy, the purity of the Scottish Reformation having been confi rmed by the terms of the National Covenant. In spite of religious divisions and the background of rising political crisis with the outbreak of the Civil War and eventual execution of the king, at a local level the Kirk continued to be concerned about the appearance, maintenance and adequate provision of places of worship.

In the midst of the Bishops’ Wars, the General Assembly meeting at Aberdeen ordered a further reformation of kirks, ordering the demolition of idolatrous monuments – ‘such as Crucifi xes, Images of Christ, Mary and Saints departed’ – which had previously escaped the attention of the authorities. The measure, which was enacted by Parliament the following year, required the presbyteries to remove ‘idolatrous images’ which remained ‘within kirkis, colledges, chapelles and other publict places’.184 The Assembly believed that more of these images survived in the ‘north parts’; at Aberdeen, the iconoclasts began with the cathedral, where:

our blessed Lord Jesus Christ his armes to be hewen out of the foir front of the pulpit thereof, and to take down the portraitt of our blissed Virgine Mary and her dear sone Jesus in her armes, that had stood since the upputting therof … besydes, wher ther was any crucifi x sett in glassen windows, this he caused pull out in honest men’s houses. He caused ane mason strike out Christ’s armes in hewen work, on ilk end of bishop Gavin Dunbar’s tomb; and sicklyke chissell out the name of Jesus, drawen cipher wayes, IHS, out of the timber wall on the foirsyde of Machir Isle, anent the consistorie door. The crucifi x on the Old Toun cross dung down; the crucifi x on the New Toun closed up, being loth to brake the stone; the crucifi x on the west end of St Nicholas’ Kirk in New Aberdein dung down, whilk was never troubled before.185

In spite of the apparently thorough purging of the city’s ecclesiastical build-ings, a visitation to the cathedral two years later demanded the taking down of the back of the former high altar then located in one of the aisles, which was ‘curiously wrote in wainscot, matchless within all the kirks of Scotland, to be dung down as smelling of idolatry’.186 Remarkably, the iconoclasts left intact the early sixteenth-century heraldic ceiling, which included the arms of Pope Leo X and the entire Scottish episcopate on the eve of the Reformation.187 The minister of Elgin, Gilbert Ross, complained to the presbytery about the imagery of the rood loft in the ruined cathedral, which, although exposed to the elements, ‘on the west side was painted in excellent colours, illuminat with

184 Records of the Kirk of Scotland Containing the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies, ed. A. Peterkin (Edinburgh, 1838), p. 279; APS, V, p. 351.

185 Spalding, History of the Troubles, I, pp. 234–5. 186 Ibid., II, p. 106. 187 McRoberts, The Heraldic Ceiling.



starris of bright gold, the crucifi xion of our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ’. The minister and the local lairds hacked down the screen for fi rewood the following month.188 In 1643, a statue of St Finane which had been found in private hands was burnt in Inverness on the orders of the presbytery, while the synod of Argyll, which had ordered the demolition of idolatrous images the previous year, wrote to the owner of a private chapel requesting that two idols ‘called our Lady and her babe, trimed up in their apparel and ornaments’ be surren-dered so that they could be destroyed.189

This assault on religious imagery was not confi ned to the northern parts of the kingdom. At the High Kirk in Glasgow, ‘superstitious pictures and cruci-fi xes’ were found, including a depiction of the Five Wounds and the Holy Lamb, but the hypocrisy of the provost and burgesses was criticised by one observer:

For such as superstition most did hateAnd tore the crosse from the Church of lateIn Christ crosse postures now themselves doe put,And drink as hard as soldiers in a hutt.190

There was some resistance to the legislation at Dunkeld, where in October 1640 the presbytery of Perth and Stirling expressed concern at the survival of ‘sundrie monumentes of idolatrie’ including ‘two stones lyk two croces having the portrait of Christ & his 12 Apostles, standing without ye kirk on the west side of the doores a more on the top of the east gavel …’. Two years later, the presbytery learned that these ‘reliques of superstition’ had not been demolished ‘because they have not seen the act of parliament anent sik reliques’ and when action had still not been taken by October 1643, they called upon the sheriff of Perth to intervene and force their removal.191 Although the legislation was primarily directed against the pre-Reformation survivals, efforts were made by the synod of Fife at this time to remove the choir screen and ‘monuments of superstitione’ from the church at Dairsie.192

It was not only the appearance of churches that was altered during the 1640s; the ceremonial forms which had been characteristic of the Prayer Book and the canons gave way to the Directory for the Publique Worship of God

188 NAS, CH2/144/1, p. 32; Spalding, History of the Troubles, I, p. 286. 189 NAS, CH2/553/1, p. 151; Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, 1639–1661, ed. D.C. MacTavish, 2

vols (SHS, 3rd ser., 37–8, 1943–44), I, pp. 42, 68. The presbytery of St Andrews similarly dealt with ‘monumentes of supersitition’ on a private house. Special Collections, St Andrews University Library, CH2/1132/18, pp. 36, 37.

190 NLS, MS 2782, ff. 30, 43–43v; P.J., ‘A Scottish Journie being an Account in Verse of a Tour from Edinburgh to Glasgow in 1641’, ed. C.H. Firth, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, II (SHS, 44, 1904), pp. 276, 280. He also noted that at Linlithgow Palace, ‘Next the Chappell we visit, where there stood / And Altar yet with stories carvd in wood, / And curiosity could serve time / To bayle it now, for ’tis condemned to burne.’

191 NAS, CH2/449/1, pp. 15, 35, 52. 192 Ecclesiastical Records … Synod of Fife, pp. 127–30, 133, 141, 146.



throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, which had been agreed by the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Although the Scots had only been present as observers, the Directory was accepted by the General Assembly in February 1645. In marked contrast to the prayer books, the Directory empha-sised the importance of preaching. The congregation were enjoined to abstain from ‘all private whisperings, conferences, salutations, or doing reverence to any persons present, or coming in; as also from all gazing, sleeping, and other undecent behaviour, which may disturbe the Minister or people, or hinder themselves or others in the service of God’.193 This refl ected the importance of the reading of the Word of God and the sermon in the form of service enjoined by the Directory, which also included detailed guidelines for preaching.194 Unlike the Book of Common Order, the Directory did not specify any set forms of words, except for the administration of communion or baptism, but merely provided guidance.195 Although there are no specifi c rubrics in the Directory, there are some simple statements concerning the administration of the sacra-ments which refl ect the rejection of the liturgical arrangements of the 1630s and a return to earlier Scottish practice. Baptism should not be ‘administred in private places, or privately, but in the place of Publicque Worship, and in the face of the Congregation, where the people may most conveniently see and heare; and not in the places where Fonts in the time of Popery were unfi tly and superstitiously placed’. At the administration of the Lord’s Supper, it remarks on ‘the Table being before decently covered, and so conveniently placed, that the Communicants may orderly sit about it’.196 A fi nal statement in the Directory addressed the sanctity of churches:

As no place is capable of any holiness under pretence whatsoever Dedication or Consecration, so neither is it subject to such pollution by any superstition formerly used and now laid aside, as may render it unlawfull or inconvenient for Christians to meet together therein for the publicque worship of God. And therefore we hold it requisite that the places of publicque assembling for worship among us, should be continued and imployed to that use.197

Few churches had been consecrated in Scotland during the early seventeenth century and the practice had been condemned by the Glasgow Assembly in 1638, and while there was a growing movement among more radical members of the Kirk which favoured private meetings outside the churches, the measure

193 A Directory for the Publique Worship of God throughout the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1644), pp. 10, 11.

194 Ibid., pp. 12–14, 27–36. 195 G. Donaldson, ‘Covenant to Revolution’, in D. Forrester and D. Murray (eds), Studies in the

History of Worship in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 59, 61–2. 196 Directory, pp. 39–40, 50–1. 197 Ibid., pp. 85–6.



upheld the continued importance of using existing buildings as places of worship.198

Architectural historians have noted but not explained the continued construction of churches during the 1640s,199 but it was a building programme which refl ected the sustained effort by the Kirk to ensure the effective delivery of the Word of God. Visitations continued as before, the presbytery of Dalkeith, for example, noting at Stracathro that the church fabric was in good order but that contributions were being sought for a new pulpit and that the heritors should be approached to provide a bell. But the presbyteries dealt with petitions for new churches as well as the implementation of these measures.200 This refl ected at a local level the impact of the Commission for the Plantation of Kirks and Valuation of Teinds set up by Parliament in 1641. The commission looked back to the earlier Caroline legislation of 1633, and although Charles I’s revocation scheme had caused widespread discontent, it was resurrected by the Covenanters as part of their attempt to deal with the practical and parochial consequences of the abolition of the episcopacy.201 The commission was concerned with the redistribution of teinds and the attempt to ensure that there was a suffi cient stipend for the maintenance of the minister, but its remit also extended to the pastoral provision for each parish, thereby ensuring that the locations of kirks matched current ecclesiastical needs rather than ancient precedent. They were given powers to erect and plant new churches, as well as to divide or join parishes and dismember a district from a parish where it would be more convenient for the inhabitants to attend the church in a neighbouring community. Any changes required the approval of the local community as well as that of the presbytery or provincial assembly of the Kirk.202

In some instances the work of the commission was a continuation of initiatives that had not previously been completed, for as the case of Lyne illus-trates it could take some time for a new church to be built. Permission had been given to Lord John Hay of Yester in 1621 for a church to be ‘vpoun ye masit Commodious place of his Landis of Roddono or Meggat for serveing of the inhabitantis thereof at suche tymes as they suld be impedit by storme of wether frome Cuming to the kirk of Lynes’.203 Nonetheless he again sought in 1644, and obtained, the recommendation of the synod of Lothian and Tweed-dale to the commission ‘ffor the erecting of the lands of Meggatland (whereof

198 Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, I, pp. 160, 161; Records of the Kirk of Scotland, pp. 170, 171. See A. Spicer, ‘“What Kinde of House a Kirk is”’, pp. 81–103; D. Stevenson, ‘The Radical Party in the Kirk, 1637–45’, JEH, 25 (1974), 135–65.

199 Howard, Scottish Architecture, p. 194. 200 NAS, CH2/40/1, pp. 9, 43, 98. 201 MacInnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, pp. 72, 76, 203. 202 APS, V, pp. 400–3. 203 Ibid., IV, p. 621; see above p. 75.



my lord is heretor) and Hinderland and others in the parish kirk, in respect they ly discontingue frae the parish kirk forsaid of Lyne, ten long myles, the river Tweed great and unpassable, mountains interjected’.204 Five years later the General Assembly recommended a visitation of the parish as the proposed changes would cause a reduction of the church’s endowment, result in a congre-gation of only forty and a parish less than one and a half miles long, which was regarded as unsustainable.205 While the discussions for the division of the parish were going on, Lord Yester rebuilt the church at Lyne between 1640 and 1644, and furnished it with an oak pulpit complete with sounding board as well as two oak pews bearing his monograms and those of his second wife.206 This was not an isolated example of the protracted process of erecting new churches. The presbytery recommended in 1627 that the parishes of Dalgarno and Closburne, where there were 630 communicants, should be disunited because ‘none of the fabriks of anie of the two Churches can accommodate the whole number of both parochins without inlargment’. The presbytery repeated its recommenda-tion to the commissioners again in 1648, the issue presumably having become more serious as the number of communicants had increased to ‘roughly’ 700 in the intervening period.207

The local community and the Kirk were not always of the same mind when it came to the building of new churches. In 1648, Parliament was obliged to resolve a dispute between the inhabitants of Bassendean and the local presby-tery. A church had been erected at Bassendean in 1647, but following the work of the commission and the addition of the district of Westruther, the presby-tery wanted the place of worship for the parish to be more centrally located. Parliament therefore gave approval in 1649 for a new church to be erected at Westruther, which was regarded as equidistant from all the heritors and parish-ioners.208 The synod of Lothian and Tweeddale recommended the subdivision of the parish of Dunbar to the commission and Parliament in spite of objections from some of the heritors. The synod decided to take action against the town for their failure to ‘assist so guid a work’ and ‘a reasone of their backwardnes in that pious and necessarie work’.209

The desperate need for the redistribution of churches was acutely felt in the Highlands and Islands. In October 1642, the synod of Argyll decided to appoint a committee as:

204 The Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 1589–1596, 1640–1649, ed. J. Kirk (Stair Society, 30, 1977), p. 138.

205 Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, pp. 210–11. 206 RCAHMS, Peebleshire, pp. 199–200. 207 Reports on the State of Certain Parishes in Scotland, ed. A. MacDonald (Maitland Club, 34, 1835),

pp. 31–2. 208 APS, VI, pt 2, p. 228. 209 Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, pp. 290–1.



there are many paroaches within this province as yet unvalued, many kirks unbuilded, and many unplanted, having no minister at all nor yet any established maintenance for them, many paroaches to be disunited and some paroaches to be dismembered, and that there is many other thing to do within the province which will concerne the furtherance of this happie work of reformation.210

Its extremely detailed report, presented at the next session, refl ected the real diffi culty that the current arrangement and size of parishes as well as the geography of the region posed for the congregations. The committee recom-mended a series of changes to parish boundaries and the erection of no fewer than fi fteen new parish churches.211 This resulted in a special commission which met in Inverary between 1650 and 1651 to deal specifi cally with the problem and which drew up ambitious plans for the reorganisation of parishes and erection of churches.212 The synod failed, however, to get these proposals ratifi ed by Parliament, and in spite of its continued efforts, the lack of resources across the region meant that it was not until the nineteenth century that churches were established in accessible locations; in the meantime congregations were obliged to seek temporary accommodation.213 There were a few exceptions to this pattern in the northern parts of the kingdom; churches were erected at Lochalsh (1641) and at Kirkhouse on South Ronaldsay, for example.214 Perhaps more signifi cantly, church building seems to have been part of the development of Lochhead (Campbeltown), which had been established in 1609; a cruci-form church for the Gaelic congregation was erected in 1642 and one for the Lowlanders in 1654.215 The interests of the Gaelic inhabitants of Inverness were also addressed at this time, and the town was taxed in 1645 and 1648 to settle the minister’s stipend and to fi nance a new church.216

The political circumstances were hardly propitious for continued building, and even the presbytery of Lanark refl ected that ‘the tymes ar lyk to be verie dangerous, the peace of our kirk not lyk to be concluded’.217 Nonetheless new churches continued to be erected following either the traditional rectangular

210 Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, I, p. 49. 211 Ibid., I, pp. 49–59 212 APS, VI, pt. 2, pp. 424–5; Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, I, pp. 227–54. 213 Ibid., II, pp. 33–4; Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd’, p. 245. 214 Gifford, Highlands and Islands, p. 310; Statistical Account of Scotland, XI, p. 426. It has been

suggested, however, that the stone bearing the date ‘1642’ at St Peter’s Kirk at Kirkhouse may refer only to building repairs rather than to a completely new structure. I.B. Craven, Church Life in South Ronaldshay and Burray in the Seventeenth Century (Kirkwall, 1911), p. 9; S.D.B. Picken, The Soul of an Orkney Parish (Kirkwall, 1972), p. 79.

215 F.A. Walker, Buildings of Scotland. Argyll and Bute (London, 2000), pp. 32, 151, 153, 155. 216 Records of Inverness, ed. W. Mackay and G.S. Laing, 2 vols (New Spalding Club, 38, 1924), II, pp.

189, 201. 217 Ecclesiastical Records. Selections from the Registers of the Presbytery of Lanark, 1623–1709 (Abbotsford

Club, 16, 1839), p. 19.



plan or the T-plan (Dunlop, 1641) or the cruciform ground plan (Fenwick, 1643; Kirkintilloch, 1644). In Inverness, rather than building a second church, the solution to the cramped conditions was to reintegrate the former choir into the place of worship.218 One of the more important churches completed during this period was the Tron church in Edinburgh. Relations between the Kirk and the city corporation were particularly tense, with issues of stipends and patronage being the main issues of contention. Nonetheless, in spite of the council’s straitened fi nancial circumstances, work on several churches was completed during the 1640s.

The Tron was one of two churches which Charles I had ordered to be built to accommodate the congregations ejected from St Giles. The new church not only refl ected the architectural response to the demands of Reformed worship but had a more sophisticated design. The work was undertaken by the newly appointed royal master of works, John Mylne Jun., and the wright John Scott. The Tron was built in the T-shape with its projecting south aisle; in its classical architectural style it provided a clear visual counterpoint to the Gothic former cathedral of St Giles, which had been restored during the previous decade. The infl uence of Hendrik de Keyser and the Dutch style, through the Architectura moderna (1631), can be seen in the obelisk pinnacles and Iconic pilasters as well as the round-arched and corniced main entrance surmounted by an inscribed cartouche. The windows of the main façade in particular are reminiscent of de Keyser’s design for the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.219 Work on the masonry was completed in 1643, but ambitious plans to roof the church in copper and attempts to source the metal in 1644 were impeded by the declining political situation.220 The church was fi nally roofed in 1652 but work on the steeple began only in 1671.221 Work on the other church, at Castlehill, had also progressed slowly, and was fi nally abandoned in 1648 when the stone was used in the restoration of the steeple at St Giles’s Cathedral and the timber for the roof of the Tron church.222 In the meantime, another church was completed in 1647 through the generosity of Lady Yester, who had provided 1,000 marks ‘out of her pious zeal to the glorie of god and fl ourishing of the gospell within this burgh of Edinburgh’, together with an endowment of 5,000 marks for stipends. An even more generous proposal was made by Thomas Moodie of Dalry, who offered in December 1649 to provide 20,000 marks for the construction of a new church in the city, which would include an aisle for himself and his descendants. The council responded positively, recognising ‘so pious ane intentioun for the guid

218 NAS, CH2/553/1, p. 103. 219 D. Howard, ‘Dutch Infl uence on Scottish Architecture’, in J. Lloyd Williams (ed.), Dutch Art

and Scotland. A Refl ection of Taste (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 41; Gifford et al., Edinburgh, pp. 172–4. 220 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, IV, pp. xlvi, 54–5, 183, 184, 209, 221 Ibid., IV, pp. xlvi, 284, 298, 317, 319, 337; VI, p. 109. 222 Ibid., IV, pp. xlvi–xlvii, 182, 284.



of this burgh and the furtherance of the gospel thairin’, but the scheme does not seem to have been taken any further.223 In spite of this continued construc-tion, the council discussed a motion in 1650 from the ministers ‘for divyding the Toun in mae congregatiouns and appointing places for them to preache in and about ane new assemblie hows’.224

The primacy of the Kirk was challenged by the English invasion following the Scottish defeat at the battle of Dunbar in September 1650. The invading army attacked what the English regarded as the tyrannical authority of the Kirk over its congregations, which they saw as being symbolised by the pulpit and the stool of repentance. One pamphlet questioned ‘whether to take down the Covenant from Church-pillars, where it hath been this while ago affi xed’, and went on to muse:

Whether the Pulpit of a Scottish Presbyterian Minister should not be made of Box-wood by reason of the many knocks, raps and bounces it is like to receive of its angry inmate?Whether that Stool of Repentance which being made of a Pulpit, turned after-wards to be a Gibbet, was not such another transformation, as if Box-wood, after it had brought forth fi gs should become thereafter a Pine-tree?Whether the Pulpit and Stool of Repentance being of a like elevation, the Minister and the Fornicator … commune it not on equal terms?225

The churches certainly suffered from the invasion, with some being used as stables, while in Edinburgh the diarist John Nicoll recorded in November 1650:

… three kirkes viz, the College kirk, the Gray Frier kirk, and that kirk callit Lady Yesteris kirk, the Hie Scule and a great pairt of the College of Edinburgh wer all wasted, thair pulpits, daskis, loftes, saittes, windois, dures, lockes, bandis and uther thair decormentis, war all dung doun to the ground by these Inglische sodgeris, and brint to ashes.226

In contrast to the destruction in Edinburgh, the kirk at Scone was ‘fi ttinglie prepared’ by the Scots for the coronation of Charles II in January 1651, 227 but

223 Ibid., IV, pp. 42, 108, 223. 224 Ibid., IV p. 232. 225 Mercurius Zeteticus. The Theme, Scoto-Presbyter ([London], [1652]), pp. 4, 5. 226 John Nicoll, A Diary of the Public Transactions and Other Occurrences, Chiefl y in Scotland, from January

1650 to June 1667, ed. D. Laing (Bannatyne Club, 52, 1836), pp. 31, 35. Dunfermline Abbey was also burnt by the English troops at this time. Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, ed. G.M. Paul, 3 vols (SHS, 61, 2nd ser., 18, 3rd ser., 34, 1911–40), II, p. 97.

227 ‘The kirk being fi tted and prepared with a table quhairon the honores of wer laid, and ane chyre set in a sitting place for heiring of a sermound, over aganes the minister, and ane uther chyre the uther syde, quhairon he sat quhen he received the croun, befoir quhich wes prepared a bensche and saitt, quhairon the noblemen, barones and burgeses wer placed. Thair wes also



the defeat of their forces at Worcester later that year resulted in the kingdom being incorporated into the Commonwealth, prompting secular iconoclasm in Edinburgh, where the royal coats of arms were removed from St Giles and other public buildings and in one instance hanged on the gallows.228

The privileged position of the Kirk of Scotland was weakened by the settlement reached in the union with England, which upheld its religious practices but also afforded protection for those ‘who not being satisfi ed incon-science to use that Form, shal serve and worship God in other Gospel way’.229 In spite of these measures, the religious pluralism which they encouraged had only a limited impact in Scotland. There were a few small congregations of Independents and Baptists and these occupied some churches, for instance in Edinburgh, where the East Kirk at St Giles was taken over by the soldiers under the command of General Lambert as their place of worship, while in Aberdeen the Greyfriars Kirk was briefl y taken over for a communion service by the Independents.230 There was one area in which the Cromwellian occupation contributed to the country’s religious landscape, and this was the construction of garrison churches within the citadels erected by the Protector at Inverness, Leith and Perth.231 As they are no longer extant, little is known about these buildings beyond contemporary accounts: at Leith there was ‘a good capacious chapel’,232 while at Inverness:

In the center of the citadel stood a great foursquare building, all hewn stone, called the magazin or granary; in the 3 story was the Church, well furnished with a statly pulpit and seates; a wide bartasin [battlemented parapet] at top, and a brave great cloak with 4 guilded dyalls holding a curious bell.233

Although these citadels were destroyed at the Restoration, the church at Inver-ness survived until 1681, when it was bought by the corporation so that the stone could be used for a new bridge.234

The medieval parish church of St John in Ayr had been commandeered and incorporated into the new citadel, and can be seen in John Slezer’s view of

a great staige erectit, upone quhich great staige another lytill staige wes erectit, on quhich the throne or chyre of stait wes set’. Nicoll, Diary, p. 43.

228 Ibid., p. 81. 229 A Declaration of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England Concerning the Settlement of Scotland

(London, 1652), pp. 3–4 . 230 Nicoll, Diary, pp. 68–9, 94; G.D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth Century Scotland

(Cambridge, 1937), pp. 104–5. 231 A.A. Tait, ‘The Protectorate Citadels of Scotland’, Architectural History, 8 (1965), 9–24. 232 Memorials of John Ray, ed. E. Lankester (Ray Society, 1846), p. 156. 233 James Fraser, Chronicles of the Frasers. The Wardlaw Manuscript, ed. William MacKay (SHS, 47,

1905), p. 414. 234 Records of Inverness, II, pp. 290, 295.



the town in 1693 (Figure 2.19).235 The town was therefore obliged to establish an alternative place of worship, and the council contracted Theophilius Rankine in June 1653 to erect a new church on the recently purchased site of the former Franciscan house (Figure 2.20). The church was to be 90 feet long, with ‘an isle of the length of three score six foot from the pulpit to the gavel [gable] thereof’, and an interior width of 30 feet. This substantial Gothic structure recalled the earlier parish church in its design and fenestration. Furnishing began in 1655 and included sixty pews, three lofts and a council loft with its own access, as well as the ‘pulpit and the seat around it, with the portallis’, for which the carpenter John Hunter was paid £600 Scots.236 The pulpit, with its sounding board and its bracket holding the baptismal basin, stands within a panelled enclosure that includes the reader’s desk and seats for the elders (Figure 2.21). Although such enclosures were a familiar feature of churches in the Nether-lands, this is the only one extant in Scotland.237 The town was compensated by Parliament with 1,000 marks ‘towards building of a church by reason their former church was employed for the publique’, but the fi nal cost of the new church was in excess of £20,000 Scots.238

235 John Slezer, Theatrum Scotiæ: Containing the Prospects of his Majesties Castles and Palaces (London, 1693), plates 29, 30.

236 Ayrshire Archives Centre, CH2/751/3/2, ff. 338v, 399v, 412, 415v, 451v, 461v, 465v, 467, 474, 483, 487, 488v, 489v; A. Mackenzie, William Adair and his Kirk. The Auld Kirk of Ayr, 1639–1684 (Ayr, 1933), pp. 100–11; Tait, ‘The Protectorate Citadels’, pp. 13, 18.

237 Hay, Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, p. 185, plate 29a. 238 Mackenzie, William Adair, pp. 103, 111.

Figure 2.19 View of Ayr from Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiæ (1693).



Although Ayr parish church was probably the most signifi cant new building of this period, others were also erected during the English occupation, at Alloway (1653), Cambusnethan (1650), Cramond (1656), Cumbernauld (1659), Dalserf (1655), Mertoun (1658), New Cumnock (1657), St Boswell’s (1652) and Sorn (1658); the mortuary chapel at Fordell also dates from this period.239 The erection of the church at New Cumnock (Figure 2.22) was the result of prolonged discussion within the presbytery of Ayr since the 1640s, and Robert Baillie, although preoccupied with the affairs of the General Assembly in 1653, still found time to write to the presbytery of Glasgow, urging ‘the speedie planting of the Kirk of Leinzie [Cumbernauld]’.240 Besides this new building work, divisions within the congregation at Stirling concerning the appointment of a second minister to the church could be resolved only through the establishment of two separate congregations, accommodation for which was found by erecting a wall between the choir and nave.241 The programme

239 RCAHMS, Canmore Database: NS3NW2.00, NS75SE13, NS77NE37, NS85NW1.00, NT17NE18, NT18NW5.00, NT63SW9, NT63SW23; Cruft, Borders, pp. 560, 656; Gifford et al., Edinburgh, p. 546; Gifford, Fife, p. 227.

240 Ayrshire Archives Centre, CH2/531/1, pp. 117, 118, 174, 314, 315, 323, 324, 333, 411, 415, 418, 419; Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, III, p. 202.

241 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling, A.D. 1519–(1752), ed. R. Renwick, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1887), I, pp. 224–5.

Figure 2.20 The church at Ayr.



of construction as well as regular visitations by the presbytery refl ected the continuing concern at a parochial level about religious provision during the Cromwellian occupation.

At the Restoration, the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant were

Figure 2.21 A nineteenth-century photograph of the pulpit at Ayr before restoration.



quietly put to one side by the Crown and in the subsequent religious settlement established by the Scottish Parliament which met in 1661. The episcopate was re-established and the presbyterian government of the Kirk undermined. In practice, kirk sessions, presbyteries and synods were permitted to meet but only with episcopal authorisation. Furthermore all parishes where appoint-ments had been made since 1649 were declared vacant, unless the incumbent ministers had applied to be, and had been, presented by the former patrons and collated by the bishops.242 Around 300 ministers are believed to have opposed the introduction of the episcopacy, with support coming from the Lowlands, in particular the dioceses of Glasgow and Galloway, and later in the 1670s from eastern counties.243 Particularly in the south-west of Scotland, many congrega-tions followed their ministers into nonconformity. They began to assemble in the open air, in barns or in private houses for worship rejecting their parish churches, in spite of increasing persecution.244 While these conventiclers were only a minority of the total population, their actions clearly had an impact on a Kirk which strived to enforce attendance at the parish church every Sunday.

In spite of the rise of nonconformity and the implications for ecclesiastical government, the Restoration had relatively little impact on the buildings and

242 I.B. Cowan, The Scottish Covenanters, 1660–88 (London, 1976), pp. 35–49. 243 Ibid., pp. 50–5; C. Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690. Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas

(Woodbridge, 2003), p. 105. 244 Cowan, Scottish Covenanters, p. 57.

Figure 2.22 The church at New Cumnock.



liturgy of the Kirk. Although the episcopate had been restored, there were no measures to re-establish the cathedrals as had been attempted in the 1630s. A number of the bishops served as town ministers in their episcopal cities; in Edinburgh, the East Kirk in the former choir of St Giles was assigned to the bishop, for example, and the Bishop of Galloway also served as a minister in Edinburgh for a time during the 1670s.245 In terms of liturgy, the Directory was abolished after the Restoration and the Act Recissory, if it applied to worship, restored things to the situation that had existed in 1633. There were tenta-tive steps towards introducing a new liturgy but they failed to make much progress, so that a combination of the Book of Common Order (although no further editions had been printed after 1644) and probably the Directory, English prayer books and even in some instances the 1637 Scottish prayer book were employed.246 In practice, the only signifi cant difference during this period was in the use of the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, baptism and the Nicene Creed.247 Nonetheless the changes were welcomed by John Nicoll, who commented that ‘now in this yeir 1662, the reiding of Scriptures wes of new broght in agane, and the Psalmes sung with this additioun, “Glorie to the Father, to the Sone and to the Holy Ghost”. This now brocht in by auctoritie of the Bischops with greater devotioun than evir befoir, for all the pepill rais at the singing, “Glorie to the Father”, &c’.248

In spite of the uncertainty over the liturgy as well as opposition to the restoration of the episcopacy, the construction of churches continued, although perhaps at a slower rate than in previous decades. The Commission for the Plantation of Kirks and Valuation of Teinds was reconstituted by the Restora-tion government and included the bishops among its members. Importantly in 1663, the decisions which had been made by the commissions since 1640 were excluded from the revocation of parliamentary legislation that had been passed during the Interregnum.249 The commission was renewed again in 1672, its chief concerns remaining the matter of teinds and also the intention ‘to cause erect & build new Churches’.250 Only two decisions were ratifi ed by Parliament during this period, and in the case of the church of Logie-Pert, it related to a decision which had been made by an earlier commission in 1648.251

The churches erected during this period, such as the rectangular kirk at

245 RBE, ed. Wood and Armet, V, pp. xxix, 135; VI, pp. xxvi, 126; W.R. Foster, Bishop and Presbytery. The Church of Scotland, 1661–1688 (London, 1958), p. 9.

246 Donaldson, ‘Covenant to Revolution’, pp. 63–6; Burnet, Holy Communion, pp. 135–7. 247 Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690, p. 110. 248 Nicoll, Diary, p. 382 249 APS, VII, pp. 48, 384, 475. 250 APS, VIII, pp. 78–80. 251 APS, VII, p. 291, VIII, p. 19. On discussions within the Brechin presbytery, see NAS, CH2/40/1,

pp. 98, 159.



Birsay on Orkney (1664) and the cruciform church designed by Sir William Bruce at Lauder (1673) (Figure 2.23), represented a continuation, albeit at Lauder a more sophisticated interpretation, of the forms of church archi-tecture that had evolved since in 1560.252 An unfl attering account of state of the buildings at this time was provided by one observer and illustrates this degree of continuity in the internal arrangements of these churches after the Restoration:

the churches of Scotland differ according to the Abilities and Tempers of the People where these Religious Buildings are. In the Countrey they are poor and mean, covered no better than their ordinary Cottages, and some of ‘em so low that they may be … more like Caves than Churches: But in the Boroughs and Cities they are Brick’d and Tile’d, and well enough furnished with Galleries and other Conveniences for the Parishioners. The Precentor’s Desk is under the

252 RCAHMS, Inventory of the Ancient Monuments of Orkney and Shetland, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1946), II, pp. 5–6.

Figure 2.23 The church at Lauder.



Pulpit, and under him the Stool of Penance or rather a Bench for fi ve or six to sit on, to be seen by the Congregation, and bear the shame of their Crimes. Chancels they have none, nor Altars: And tho’ there are Tabls for the use of the Presbyteries and to administer the Sacrament, yet they are differently placed in several Churches, lest the Uniform Situation of ‘em might end in Supersti-tion.253

The exception to this tradition is the the last church to be designed during the episcopal era, and in fact completed only after the Glorious Revolu-tion. It was erected for the Canongate congregation in Edinburgh, which had been evicted from Holyrood Abbey by James VII. The church was described by one architectural historian as ‘more appropriate to the needs of a Jesuit “mass-house” than those of a seventeenth-century parish kirk’.254 The architect James Smith had married into the Mylne family of Edinburgh architects and became overseer of the king’s works in 1683.255 He was responsible for converting the abbey into a chapel royal and was also appointed to erect a new church in the Canongate. It has been suggested that Smith may have been educated at the Scots College in Rome, or he may merely have travelled on the continent, but the basilican design of the church certainly suggests an Italian infl uence; it has even been mooted that the architect may have ultimately infl uenced the devel-opment of English Palladianism.256 The use of classical designs for Protestant places of worship may have been new in Scotland but the Vitruvian basilica had provided the basis for the infl uential Huguenot temple at Charenton. Nonetheless Smith’s design, with its crossing and apse, was more reminiscent of a Catholic church than of the classically inspired Reformed temples erected on the continent.

The Canongate church had an unusual design for a Scottish kirk but it refl ected the innovative approaches that communities and architects had taken during the Scottish Reformation to erect buildings that met their liturgical needs. It was a sophisticated building in its design and construction, but at odds with the simpler structures such as the churches at Burntisland or Fenwick, which with their centralised plans may also be regarded as matching the conti-nental Reformed temples but were in fact more homespun structures in their execution. The Kirk of Scotland was able to adapt the buildings that it inherited to meet the needs of Reformed worship, but its status as a state church meant that it was also subject to the legislation and liturgical demands of the Crown. These innovations had an impact on the way in which the church buildings were

253 T. Morer, A Short Account of Scotland being a Description of the Nature of that Kingdom (London, 1702), pp. 53–4. See also A Modern Account of Scotland being an Exact Description of the Country (London, 1679), p. 8.

254 Hay, Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, p. 67. 255 H.M. Colvin, ‘A Scottish Origin for English Palladianism’, Architectural History, 17 (1974), 8. 256 Colvin, ‘A Scottish Origin’, 10–11.



used for worship, although the fl uctuating political situation meant that the changes of the early seventeenth century were relatively short-lived and some measures such as the Book of Canons did not have a great practical impact. Nonetheless the implementation of the Five Articles and later the Restoration settlement did cause some radicals to abandon their parish churches and to fi nd alternative places of worship. The situation in Scotland also clearly demon-strates the importance of church building in its true Reformed sense, that of establishing new congregations. The concern that the whole community should be able to gather together for the sermon meant that the Kirk was concerned about the siting of churches and was prepared to abandon former parish churches for new locations where communities could more easily assemble for the preaching of the Word of God. Effectively this meant a reordering of the religious landscape of Scotland so that it no longer refl ected the sacred sites and holy places of before the Reformation, but now met the demands of preaching. The situation in Scotland provides an ample demonstration of how the princi-ples of Reformed worship could, with the backing of the state, effectively be implemented across a whole kingdom.


Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe

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