1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (25 page)

Chapter 29

Montrose took a deep breath. He had been addressing this collection of divines—about half and half between dunderheads and lunatics, based on the last few days’ performance—for over an hour now, largely reiterating His Majesty’s instructions that he’d given in his opening address. He’d had daily reports that showed that most of the stern royal instructions had been ignored.

The session of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland would continue for days yet, weeks more likely, trying to settle a final text for His Majesty’s approval. Which might or might not be forthcoming. The private letters coming from the earl of Cork seemed to suggest that the king’s grasp of reason was getting shakier. The king had wanted a plain compromise of governance between the presbyterians and episcopalians in the General Assembly, a
via media
such as his great-great-aunt Elizabeth had presided over in England all those years ago. It was, of course, transparent that he regarded that as a first step toward unifying the churches of England and Scotland, and the presbyterians were standing firmly on the National Covenant in opposition to any such thing.

He looked over the assembly. If he hadn’t known the allegiances of the principal players there’d be no way of telling them apart. Clerical dress, of varying degrees of smartness and grooming, and while there was a general trend toward plainness among the presbyterians, some of them dressed fancy and others managed the well-tailored sleek variety of plain that managed to look richer than a braw show of gold braid and lace.

By the same token, more than one of the bishops’ hangers-on was able to make the vestments of as high a church as Scotland ever got look like the weeds of a country curate. It meant gauging reactions was hard work. He had more than a few laddies watching the room, and he was keeping his eye on the key players, but it was a trial and no mistake to tally expressions to affiliations. While he ran a finger along the brief he’d laid on the lectern, he idly wondered if he couldn’t prevail on this august body to vote itself conveniently-colored hats?

For all that, the next words out of his mouth were going to be unpopular with every man in the room, and he’d drawn out the rhetorical pause all he needed to.

“I will say in final summation,” he said, letting out the breath, “and with the full command of His Majesty Charles, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith”—and it was to be hoped that the style of Defender of the Faith was not about to become as nominal as the king of France part—“that in as much as the divines and clerks of Scotland desire an established Kirk, it shall be a Kirk with His Majesty in command, as Christ’s General of His Army on earth.”

Montrose looked over the room again. He’d got the truly appalling phrase out without puking. He’d left it to the end. If the letters from Cork hadn’t hinted, that instruction would have come as a shock. Telling an assembly of divines to shut up and do as they were told was strong medicine at the best of times, and with them all feeling unsettled to begin with—

He took another rhetorical pause. No heckling. That was a
very
bad sign. Shock? Probably. He’d done his best to keep all but the vaguest tenor of his remarks away from anyone likely to give a warning. Surprise? Doubtless, as this august body was used to being able to argue with its sovereign in many things. Fear? It was to be hoped. And while they were still in open-mouthed shock—

“Thus, my lords, gentlemen, clerks and divines, His Majesty’s most fond and earnest hope is that he may avoid having to take such measures in Scotland as he has most regrettably taken elsewhere in his Dominions. With which I bid you a good day, and pray God’s grace and wisdom guide the remainder of your deliberations.”

Out
. Quickly. If they were to have uproar in the chamber, they could do it without his presence—since he was here to represent the king, letting them be emboldened by having contempt of the royal presence go unpunished would simply not do. Also, there was the faint—faint!—possibility that the theologians would learn by example the business of reaching a natural conclusion and stopping talking.

He managed a full six paces along the corridor past the closed doors of the chamber before the shouting erupted.

It was a full two hours before the first cleric arrived. Montrose nodded as the fellow was announced. About what he had expected, and if his soothsaying ran to form it would be a fellow of middling rank; enough to be sent as an envoy, low enough to be disregarded. He would, doubtless, ask for “clarification” with the clear implication that his principals would like the points in question clarified entirely out of existence.

“The Very Reverend Doctor James Hannay, Dean of St. Giles’, Your Grace.”

“Will ye have a seat?” Montrose invited the fellow when he had been announced.

“I will, at that, Your Grace,” Hannay said, “but I should mention to begin with that I may have permitted those who despatched me here to form a slightly false impression of my purpose in coming.”

Montrose schooled his face to stillness, and carefully raised an eyebrow. Hannay was, perhaps, a little young for a fellow leading a collegiate church like St. Giles, but doubtless the canons knew their own governance best. Or perhaps, with St. Giles about to become a cathedral in fact as well as name, the episcopal party had forced one of their own in to the position, with the presbyterians insisting on a younger, and hopefully more pliable candidate. And, possibly, one with sympathies they could play on. Hannay had been minister to a small-to-middling village in a parish south of Glasgow, far enough from any authority that he would have had a taste of pastoral independence. He was certainly more of the aggressively plain version of episcopalian than anything else, if that was his party, a function of his clothes not yet having caught up with the more generous benefices he would have as dean of a major church. Was that the pretense he was referring to, however obliquely? He was a presbyterian sent to bear word from episcopalians?

Montrose waited until the man was seated comfortably and the servants were ensuring he had a drink. Then he said: “Since we are doubtless to discuss the manner in which which His Majesty rendered the General Assembly speechless this afternoon, I would be concerned to find that the things I had to say were being said to the wrong man.”

Hannay smiled a small, just-between-ourselves sort of smile. “Oh, set your mind at rest, Your Grace. From your point of view, I’m just the right fellow.” The smile broadened. “It is simply the case that, perhaps, I’m also the fellow that goes down in history as having had a creepie-stool flung at him by some angry wee wifie that objected to episcopal prayers. Which I’m in favor of, myself, as it happens, but I rather think that some of my superiors have been away from the pastoral life a little too long to recall that a minister is, by definition, outnumbered by his congregation.”

Montrose couldn’t help but laugh. “Aye, I can see that that might concentrate a man’s mind. That would have been you? Was you? Ye ken what I mean.”

“Aye. I was tempted, the while, to write back to the Reverend Green and ask if his books had the name of the wifie, so I could perhaps ask her what she meant by it.” The jocular expression vanished from Hannay’s face. “But, I felt, on the whole, that taking my fellow creatures to task for wrongs they had not yet done was somehow sinful. Presuming to know how His grace would work in the hearts of men, yes? And, now I am come to Edinburgh, a chance conversation tells me that the wee wifie has vanished altogether. Right after a lot of king’s men were searching high and low for her. I’d know the truth of
that
story, could I find anyone that would tell me it.”

Montrose stopped short before answering. He’d been entirely ready for a few measures of political fencing.
That
, however, was a genuinely interesting question. “I’d no’ thought about that,” he said, not entirely addressing Hannay, but not leaving him out either. “A moment while I mull that,” he went on.

Of course, it
was
political. The monarchy and the kirk were the twin axles of political power in the kingdoms of England and Scotland both, and there was simply no way in which—strangers, otherwise, so not even the possibility of friendly disputation—Montrose could address what was, in fact a
fascinating
idea without putting at least a drachm on one side of the political scale or the other. And
Oh DAMN the fellow!
He’d missed the thrust of it, what with not having been involved in the troubles south of the border. Hadn’t Strafford-that-was-now-Wentworth-again got himself in to trouble with just such a business? Those fellows from the English Parliament? And hadn’t the Campbell had to make rumbling noises to keep it from happening in Scotland as well?
And he, Montrose, Lord Lieutenant high-and-bloody-mighty of Scotland had just flat-footedly admitted the king might have sinned against his ain subjects.
If Hannay told a true tale, was one of those subjects—one of the small and helpless ones, yet, not as able to set proscriptions at defiance as the Campbell—so sinned against as to have disappeared.

It was only by great effort of will that the next word out of his mouth wasn’t a litany of all the filthiest profanities he knew. “I’m no theologian,” he said, his thoughts finally collected, “but is not evidence from that other history evidence of a man’s character to resist the divine grace?”

“Do we presume to know that the Almighty will not exert His grace differently in a history he clearly intends to be different?”

That raised Montrose’s eyebrows. “Is that consensus, or merely one disputant position? That He has revealed an intention by the Ring of Fire?”

“It’s considered…suggestive. It’s being forcefully advanced as perhaps expressing some measure of divine exasperation with His creatures.”

“Advanced by whom?” Montrose felt his curiosity aroused. And, to certain extent, annoyance. He’d ordered full appreciations of what the theologians were thinking and saying, and this had formed no part of it.

“The Reverend Doctor Green,” Hannay said, “Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

“Which one?” Montrose could call to mind a number of divines by that name, none of them in the main currents of the Church of Scotland.

“The one in Grantville. Nobody wants to be seen to be corresponding with the man, but it seems Archbishop Ussher rather poked a beehive when he wrote to the fellow as the only pastor there who was a Doctor of Divinity. He’s also, it seems, an indefatigable correspondent, an ardent presbyterian, and entirely willing to look up everyone in every history of modern Christianity he can find and send them a letter along with copies of the history relating to the fellow. Hence my knowing about the Prayer-Book riots and my part in their beginning. Although he addressed the letter to the dean of St. Giles’ Cathedral when it was no’ a cathedral and I was no’ dean of it. Fortunately the letter was passed to me when it was realized I was the intended receiver, along with much jesting about the lunatic sending letters to me. Two years later, here I am dean of St. Giles’ soon-to-be cathedral. It lent the man…credibility. Among other things that came to pass from the future history that he predicted, or would have done. Nobody’s discussing his letters publicly, mind, but everyone’s wondering what to make of them in private.”

“And this leads you to be other than your chiefs, if I may call them that, think you are, how?” Montrose could feel a whole different series of problems and opportunities lining themselves up in front of him. The sensation was a frightening one, he could admit to himself in the silence of his own heart. Knowing how to deal in political and religious certainties he’d grown up with. Knowing how to follow a plan he’d made in careful consideration of all that was before him with the best advice he could find and take, those were things a man might face with fortitude. Being confronted, unwarned, with something entirely new from a source he’d not known existed—he schooled his face to impassivity.

Blast it all!
He’d taken pains to understand what he thought was the new theology coming out of the Germanies. The Rudolstadt Colloquy had had its proceedings widely circulated. For all that the final resolution had been practical to the point of dullness, the proceedings that led up to it had given no small amount of support to the separation of church and state from the
religious
side. The Magdeburg Colloquy was rumbling on and giving out all manner of interesting material—and dangerous to circulate in England, even with Laud out of the picture. King Charles Stuart of England and Scotland really did
not
like the idea of the religious prop under his kingship being taken out from under him.

And now it turned out that as well as their governors sticking their collective oar in at the great and learned councils of religion, their small ministers were communicating with their counterparts abroad. Which was a normal occurrence, of course. Ministers argued with each other all the time about theology, it was part of what they did. And, reflecting on the last few days, the whole of how they made a bloody nuisance of themselves.

Montrose took a deep breath. First principles, then. “None of this has reached my ears. If it has reached His Majesty, he did not choose to inform me. And, perhaps, it has reached few enough ears that not everyone is aware of the arguments of the Reverend Doctor Green, do I have that right?”
Best to make sure
, he thought,
as someone is going to hear at length about me being surprised at this late stage.

“You have the minister’s name correct, yes. I shall see your secretary has the man’s address before I leave. And you presume correctly, Your Grace, the good Reverend Doctor seems to have a fairly short list of correspondents. He gives me to understand that he has written to everyone mentioned by name in the various history books he has to hand as bearing on the history of religion in England, Scotland and Ireland. Once His Grace the Primate of Ireland gave him the idea, of course. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, if a trifle over-earnest in some matters. He says he doesn’t presume to substitute his own advice over the guidance of the Holy Spirit to those he writes to. He simply shows us how things might have played out but for the emergence of his own home town in to this time.”