647 



SPOTSWOOD, JOHN. 



SPOTS WOOD, JOHN. 



.618 



the acts and proceedings of that and several subsequent Assemblies 

 " were framed as best might serve for advantage to the corrupt party." 

 In the Assembly again, which met at Burntisland in 1601, which, says 

 the historian, " began with small contentment to either party," and 

 ended, he intimates, in not much more, Spotswood was one of twenty- 

 five members commissioned to act with the king's ministers, or any 

 sine of them, in supplying ministers to churches in burgh-towns. 

 And perhaps tin re may be other dccasions on which he is mentioned 

 that may have escaped us, for Calderwood's large volume is without 

 an index. 



Spotwood's father had, before becoming minister of Calder, been 

 employed by Matthew, earl of Lennox (afterwards regent, and the 

 father of Darnley) ; and now, 1601, when the earl's descendant Ludo- 

 wick was sent on an embassy from King James of Scotland to France, 

 Spotswood was appointed to attend him as his chaplain. While in 

 Paris, according to Calderwood, the parson of Calder " made no 

 scruple to go to mass." Spotswood has himself given a detailed 

 account of the embassy (' History,' pp. 465-6), but does not descend 

 to such particulars. He returned in the duke's retinue through 

 England, " having, while in France," according to his biographer, " so 

 discreetly carried himself as added much to his reputation, and made it 

 appear that men bred up in the shade of learning might possibly 

 endure the sunshine, and when it came to their turns might carry 

 themselves as handsomely abroad as they whose education being in a 

 more pragmatic way usually undervalue them." At the last General 

 Assembly however Spotswood was delated (or indicted) for his 

 attendance at mass while in France ; and Calderwood Bays, " he was 

 removed, notwitstanding of the opposition of the king and some 

 ministers ; many voting that he should be suspended or deposed." 

 We should conjecture the word 'removed' here to be a misprint for 

 ' reproved.' " The king and commissioners," it is added, " packed it 

 up." There is no hint of this little affair either in Spotswood himself 

 or his biographer. 



When James set out for England, in April 1603, Spotswood was one 

 of five Scotch clergymen whom he appointed to attend him on his 

 journey, along with the Bishops of Ross and Dunkeld, the Duke of 

 Lennox and other noblemen and gentlemen. While his majesty was 

 at Burleigh House, near Stamford, lie received intelligence of the 

 death, at Paris, of James Bethune, archbishop of Glasgow ; on which 

 he immediately nominated Spotswood to that see, which he had never 

 hitherto regarded as vacant, although Bethune had been out of the 

 country for many years, and continued to adhere to the old religion as 

 long as he lived. Spotswood thus elevated, was, as he tells us himself, 

 immediately sent back to Scotland to attend the queen on her journey, 

 and serve her for ' eleemosinar,' or almoner. He was also made a 

 privy councillor for Scotland. It is remarkable however that none of 

 the Scotch bishops were consecrated till 1610, when Spotswood and 

 the Bishops of Brechin and Galloway were summoned to London for 

 that purpose, and, being consecrated at London House, on the 21st of 

 October, by the Bishops of London, Ely, Bath and Wells, and 

 Rochester, conveyed their new character in the same manner to their 

 brethren on their return home. The Bishop of Ely (Andrews) would 

 have had them be ordained first deacons and then priests before their 

 ordination as bishops, as was in fact done in the case of Sharp and 

 Leighton, when they were appointed to the sees of St. Andrews and 

 Glasgow, after the Restoration ; but in the present case, according to 

 the relation of Spotswood himself, " the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. 

 Bancroft, who was by, maintained that thereof there was no necessity, 

 seeing, where bishops could not be had, the ordination given by the 

 presbyters must be esteemed lawful; otherwise that it might be 

 doubted if there were any lawful vocation in most of the reformed 

 churches." This was applauded by the other bishops, and Andrews 

 acquiesced. Burnet's account is that Andrews's objection was over- 

 ruled by the king himself, " who thought it went too far towards the 

 unchurching of all those who had no bishops among them." Neither 

 of the archbishops were appointed to officiate in the consecration of 

 Spotswood and his brethren, to prevent its being supposed that there 

 was any intention to revive the old claims of the sees of Canterbury 

 and York to a supremacy over the Scottish Church ; this was James's 

 own arrangement, and the eame precaution was taken in the consecra- 

 tion of Sharp and Leighton in the next age. 



The next year Spotswood returned to London, bearing a letter or 

 petition from the Synod of Lothian, supplicating the king for a 

 General Assembly, a prayer which his majesty did not grant, and 

 which the archbishop probably did not very earnestly urge. " Return- 

 ing from court," writes Calderwood, "he rideth out of Haddington 

 when the people were repairing to the kirk to hear sermon upon the 

 Lord s day. And it was always the custom of this profane bishop to 

 cross the ferries or to ride upon the Lord's day in time of sermon" 

 (p. 487). The historian afterwards inserts some Latin verses on the 

 Scotch bishops, which, he says, were spread in Edinburgh, in January 



09, beginning, 'Vina nmat Andreas, cum vino Glasgua amores' 

 (p. 601). 



Spotswood, as might be expected, employed his best exertions in 

 re-edifying and strengthening the ecclesiastical system, of which he 

 had thus been appointed one of the chief overseers; but the detail of 

 the proceedings in which he bore a. part must be sought for in the 

 histories of Scotland and of the Scottish Church. " At his entry to 



the archbishopric of Glasgow," says his biographer, " he found the 

 revenues of it so dilapidate, that there was not one hundred pounds 

 sterling of yearly rent left to tempt to a new sacrilege ; but such was 

 his care and husbandry for his successors, that he greatly improved it, 

 and yet with so much content to his diocese, that generally both the 

 nobility and gentry, and the whole city of Glasgow, were as unwilling 

 to part with him as if he bad been in the place of a tutelar an^el to 

 them." Yet, " part with him they must," as this cordial panegyrist 

 procseds to relate; for in June 1615, on the death of Archbishop 

 Oladstaces, Spotswood was appointed to the metropolitan see of 

 St. Andrews. According to Calderwood, " when he returned from 

 London to Glasgow on the 10th of that month, he seemed to be alto- 

 gether ignorant who had obtained the gift [of the vacant mitre], till 

 one of his servants, attending in Edinburgh upon the king's patent, 

 sent to him advertisement to come in haste to Edinburgh. When he 

 came, he seemed to be miscontent, as desirous to stay still at Glas- 

 gow ; but in the meantime his gift passeth the seals." He had pre- 

 viously (in 1609) been appointed an extraordinary lord of session, 

 when it was proposed to restore that court to its ancient constitution 

 of a mixed civil and ecclesiastical tribunal ; but this design was aban- 

 doned the following year, on the erection of the two courts of High 

 Commission, over one of which Spotswood was appointed to preside, 

 and which were united under his presidency on his removal to St. 

 Andrews. 



As soon as he obtained the primacy, his biographer informs us, " he, 

 by his favour with the king, procured three hundred pounds sterling 

 of yearly rent (being by the sacrilege of former times swallowed up in 

 the crown revenues) to be restored to his see ; " and, continues the 

 same authority, " all King James his time he lived in great favour 

 with him, and was the prime instrument used by him in several 

 assemblies for the restoring the antient discipline, and bringing that 

 church to some degrees of uniformity with her sister church of 

 England. . . . Nor was his industry less for the recovery of some 

 remnants and parcels of the church's patrimony, which, although they 

 were but as a few crumbs in comparison of that which at a full njeal 

 sacrilege had swallowed, he found to be an hard province ; yet by his 

 zeal and diligence he overcame many difficulties, and so little regarded 

 his own ease, that, for the effecting of this, and what else conduced to 

 the recovery of that church in patrimony and discipline, they who 

 knew the passages of his life have computed that he made no less than 

 fifty journeys from Scotland to London." Spotswood was succeeded 

 in the see of Glasgow by Law, bishop of Orkney. "Here it is to be 

 observed," writes the acrimonious Calderwood, " that Mr. John Spots- 

 wood and Mr. James Law, both sometime ministers within the presby- 

 tery of Linlithgow, two pretty foot-ball men, are now the only two 

 archbishops in Scotland, and have now, as we use to say, the ball at 

 their foot. They were both near the point of suspension in the purer 

 times for the profanation of the Sabbath ; now they have power to 

 suspend, deprive, imprison, fine, or confine any minister in Scotland. 

 Out of preposterous pity they were spared then ; but'now they spare 

 not the least and the most blameless." (p. 655.) 



The same royal favour that he had enjoyed in the time of James, 

 Spotswood retained under the new king Charles I., whom he crowned 

 in the abbey church of Holyrood on the 18th of June 1633. The 

 writer of his ' Life ' states, that besides procuring the revenues of the 

 priory of St. Andrews, which were then in lay hands, to be added to 

 his see, he prevailed with the king to separate so much of his diocese 

 as lay to the south of the Forth, and to erect it into the new bishopric 

 of Edinburgh. This was in 1633. Within two years after, on the 

 death of the Earl of Kinnoul, Spotswood was made Lord High Chan- 

 cellor of Scotland. 



He had not yet attained this last height of promotion when in 1634 

 he drew upon himself a storm of popular odium by his conduct in 

 instigating the oppressive proceedings against Lord Balmerino, who, 

 on the ground of his having had in his possession a petition, considered 

 to be seditious, which had been drawn up with the design of being 

 presented to the king by a number of tbe opposition peers, and the 

 knowledge of which had been betrayed to the archbishop, was arraignt-d 

 for the then capital crime of leasing-making (verbal sedition), brought 

 to trial before the court of justiciary (in which Spotswood's second 

 son, lord president of the court of session, sat as cue of the assessors 

 to the justice-general), found guilty by an intimidated jury, condemned 

 to death, and only pardoned at last, after a long imprisonment, in 

 consequence of the government becoming afraid to permit the execu- 

 tion of the sentence much, it was understood, to the disappointment 

 of the archbishop and the other prelates. The part that Spotswood 

 took in this business excited the greater disgust from his notorious 

 hereditary enmity to Balmerino, whose father also had been disgraced 

 and destroyed six-aud-twenty years before, chiefly through his manage- 

 ment. The prosecution of Lord Balmerino contributed as much per- 

 haps as any other single cause to produce the general dissatisfaction in 

 Scotland which a few years later broke out into so wild a flame. It 

 was followed iu 1637 by the ill-managed attempt to impose a liturgy 

 on the Scottish church, which was the immediate provocation of the 

 rebellion against the government. This scheme too has been attri- 

 buted to Spotswood by some of his indiscriminating admirers : Marline, 

 in his 'Reliquiae Divi Andrew ' (p. 251), describes this "grave, sage, 

 and peaceable prelate," as deserving " a singular note and mark of 



