Читать книгу Montrose - John Buchan - Страница 17

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To balance the claims of the Kirk there was no strong apparatus of secular government. The so-called Parliament, with its three estates of clergy, tenants-in-chief, and burgesses, delegated its power in the Lords of the Articles, who had the sole right to initiate business, and the selection of whom was controlled by the king. It was neither representative nor free. "The Crown manipulated elections, determined the composition of the committee through which all business must pass before it reached the throne, sternly limited the time allowed for the discussion of the committee's report, forced a long series of measures through the House at a single sitting, and cajoled or threatened opponents."[60] The Privy Council, the equivalent of the Cabinet, was almost identical with the Lords of the Articles. The Convention of Royal Burghs was a kind of minor parliament charged with burgh concerns, and its existence did much to distract the interest of burgess members from national affairs. In all this mechanism there was no authority which could act as a makeweight to the growing popular authority of the Kirk, guard the liberties of Scotland against royal encroachment, or, on behalf of the nation at large, control the traditional high-handedness of the nobility.

The Scottish nobles from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century were probably the most turbulent, rapacious, and ignorant in Europe. Resolute champions of indefensible privileges, they resisted all the reforming efforts of their kings, and were the death of more than one sovereign. They had not even the merit of patriotism, for often they were in arms against their own land, and Scottish history is stored with ugly tales of treason. Their prime foes had been the king and the church, and they had always cast longing eyes at the fat abbeys and the rich glebes of their clerical rivals. The Reformation gave them their chance. Two-thirds of the church plunder fell into their hands, and their Protestantism was mainly determined by self-interest. Knox complained, not without reason, that in all the Lords of the Congregation there was not one righteous man. A few became dogmatic enthusiasts, but the majority cared as little for the difference between priest and minister as for the Ten Commandments. Nor were they, like many of the great families of England—like Pembroke in Wiltshire, or Stanley in Lancashire, or Beaufort on the West Marches—magnates who performed useful duties of local administration. Their mediæval satrapies were antagonistic to the first principles of a modern state. Knox had struggled to win from the old church property reasonable endowments for his new Kirk, but the tithes and the lands went to the nobles and barons, who were determined not to disgorge. Their opposition to the Anglicanism of Charles was largely due to the fact that it involved sooner or later a redivision of ecclesiastical plunder; they would vehemently oppose any church except one which they could starve.

At first sight it would seem that there could be little in common between a proud Kirk, with a great popular following, laying down the austerest rule of life, and a nobility which was irreligious and oppressive, which clung to wealth which Knox had destined for the Kirk, and of which the Kirk was sorely in need. Indeed it was only the blundering of the king that prevented a breach between the two, with the clergy for once on the royal side. The tithe had become a crying scandal, for the feudal lords, to whom it had passed, could levy it in kind much as they pleased and when they pleased, so that the tenant could not get in his harvest till the lord had taken his toll. In 1625 Charles undertook the work of reform. He removed the judges from the Privy Council, that they might have time for their proper business of the Court of Session, and by the Act of Revocation of 1625 he attempted to recover as much as he could of the old church property for national uses. In the most modern way he appointed a royal commission to work out the details; the teinds were to afford a living wage to the ministers, and the holders of church lands were in future to pay rent to the Crown. Mr. Gardiner calls the measure the "one successful act of Charles's reign," and considers that it "weakened the power of the nobility, and strengthened the prerogative in the only way in which the prerogative deserved to be strengthened . . . by the popularity it gained through carrying into effect a wise and beneficent reform."[61] But no popularity followed. Perhaps the money-getting motive was too clear in the reform, for it was instituted after the English Parliament had refused to grant adequate supplies; perhaps the royal interference with property suggested further revolutionary designs. At any rate the king got no gratitude from the Kirk, and he incurred the deadly displeasure of the aristocracy. The way was prepared for an alliance between the two contraries, who were agreed only in their stubborn conservatism—nobles desperately intent on holding what their fathers had won, and churchmen desperately in earnest about their spiritual prerogatives. It was a very pretty powder-magazine for the inevitable spark.

The time was one of deep poverty for the common people. The bonnet-lairds and the tacksmen, the labourers and shepherds, the petty craftsmen in the villages, even the burghers in the little towns, lived very near the edge of destitution. The rudimentary and wasteful system of agriculture, with its sodden in-fields and its rank out-fields, its wretched grain, its shallow ploughing, placed the farmers at the mercy of an indifferent climate and a poor soil—for the richer valley bottoms were uncultivable from lack of drainage. Stock was in no better case, for the cattle were stunted and perpetually lean, and the sheep were moving masses of tar and vermin. At the close of each winter the spectre of starvation came very near to man and beast. Idyllic pictures have been drawn of the Covenanting peasant as a stalwart fellow in good homespun clothes and blue bonnet, and of his house as a snug dwelling like an illustration to The Cotter's Saturday Night. The truth seems to be that the physique of most was early ruined by poor feeding and incessant toil, that they had small regard for bodily cleanliness, that their clothes were coarse at the best and generally ragged, and that their dwellings resembled a Connemara cabin. Recurrent plagues carried off their thousands, and foul habits and a diet of thin brose and bannocks weakened the survivors. Nasty, brutish, and short was the life of the seventeenth-century Lowlander. Education did something to counterbalance the economic defects, but it is easy to exaggerate the extent of Scottish education at this era. Kirkton, indeed, records that before 1660 "every village had a school, every family almost had a Bible, yea, in most of the country all the children of age could read the Scriptures"[62]; but Kirkton was laudator temporis acti, and his testimony is not borne out by parish and burgh records. Knox's great scheme remained largely an unrealized ideal; the report of the commission of 1627 reveals very many parishes in the Lowlands and the Borders without school or schoolmaster; and the remedial Acts of 1633 and 1643 were for the most part a dead letter. The fact that the new religion was based on private Bible-reading was indeed an inducement to literacy, but in the very places where theological interest was keenest we find a surprising proportion unable to write, while Wodrow was told by his father that in his day "the generality by far in the country . . . could not read."[63]

There was no middle-class to act as a force of social persistence and a sober nursery of new civic ideas, like the great bourgeoisie which was the strength of English Puritanism. Scottish commerce was a petty thing; her noblesse de robe were reactionary manipulators of a reactionary law; her burghers and bonnet-lairds were too near the peasant; she had no parallel class to the yeomanry and merchantry of England. If strife came it would be conducted between king, nobles, and Kirk, with the bulk of the people obedient under the spiritual narcotics of the last. There was little hope for that fruitful political dispute which is the basis of a free polity, but for wild and barren explosions there was an uncomfortable amount of powder.