James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews, spent 28 October 1669 in a succession of arguments over the extent of the royal supremacy over the Church. He said ‘wild things’ to the earl of Tweeddale in the morning, had a ‘sound bout’ with the earl of Lauderdale after lunch, was ‘towzled’ in a committee by a number of nobles, and went another round with Lauderdale in the evening. The clash was unusual because Sharp and Lauderdale, the king's Scottish secretary and now commissioner to parliament, had been close allies while the Restoration settlement was shaped in Scotland during the years from 1660 to 1663. Both formerly leading presbyterians, they had helped shepherd the Church of Scotland through the transition back to episcopacy under a ruling monarch after twenty-three years of presbyterianism established in defiance of royal control. Now, however, Lauderdale was pushing for a new Act of Supremacy, to which Sharp and his fellow bishops objected strenuously. While Sharp's opposition was eventually worn down, Lauderdale ‘found the old Spirit of Presbitry did remaine with some of the Bishops (soe unwilling are Church-men, by what name or title soever they are dignified to part with power)’, and rushed the act through parliament before they could organize any opposition.Footnote ¹ This apparent divergence between bishops and statesmen over the supremacy has usually been seen as a proxy struggle over the government's newly tolerant religious policy, or as a matter of power politics, with little attention being given to the underlying intellectual issues for the churchmen. This article explores how episcopalian attitudes to the royal supremacy changed during the 1660s and 1670s by examining the different ways clerical writers used the Church under the Roman empire in their arguments.

Our knowledge of the intellectual and religious culture of Restoration Scotland has advanced considerably in recent years. Where once it was believed to be populated with corrupt and persecuting politicians and bloody-minded religious fanatics, now historians see that Restoration Scotland had its share of political thinkers engaged in lively public debate, as well as base violence. Clare Jackson has shown that the governing royalists were engaged in a deliberate and sophisticated project of restoring order after the civil wars, at the centre of which was the uncompromising assertion of royal power over all other sources of authority.Footnote ² Alasdair Raffe has shown how, from a kernel of disagreement over the decision to restore bishops in the Church of Scotland in 1661, the differences between religious conformists and nonconformists grew as they repeatedly argued and sought to distinguish themselves from each other, until presbyterians and episcopalians had developed quite separate religious cultures.Footnote ³ Political and constitutional thought on the presbyterian side of the divide has been explored by Caroline Erskine, but the political thought of the episcopalian clergy has not yet received much dedicated attention.Footnote ⁴ Conformist ministers and bishops have been seen, by default, as rather unimaginative royal yes-men: so-called Erastians who accepted complete royal control of the Church.Footnote ⁵ As we shall see, however, what drove Sharp and his fellow bishops to oppose the Act of Supremacy was a theory of the royal supremacy which limited the king's powers over the Church. That their opposition was something of a surprise to Lauderdale is due to the fact that episcopalians talked about the royal supremacy in very different ways during the course of the period.

Uncovering the pattern of this change is hampered by the relative lack of episcopalian material, which is no small reason for the neglect. Raffe has noted that episcopalians put considerably fewer works into print during the period, a weakness which contributed to episcopacy's ultimate failure.Footnote ⁶ Nor did they benefit from such a dedicated antiquarian in the early eighteenth century as Robert Wodrow, who made it his life's work to preserve vast quantities of manuscript material relating to Restoration presbyterians.Footnote ⁷ Given the uneven extent of source material, a good way to recover episcopalian attitudes and track how they changed is to follow one type of argument over time. Alongside Scripture and the works of Protestant divines, ministers regularly looked for precedent in the Christian Church during its first four or five centuries of existence under the Roman empire. The ‘primitive Church’ was taken to be a purer, uncorrupted form of Christianity. This is useful for our purposes, since the idea that the early Church had been governed by bishops became increasingly important for Scottish episcopalians as time went on.Footnote ⁸ As well as ecclesiology, clergy also considered the early Church's relationship with the Roman empire, and the implications this had for the Scottish Church's relationship with the crown. They thought the Scottish monarch's authority was of the same kind as that of the Roman emperor. Antiquity thus provided a model, not just for a better Church, but for better Church-state relations. It therefore offered an ideal standard by which to judge the relationship between the Scottish Church and the royal supremacy.

Although the overall thrust of episcopalian references to the Roman empire was to argue that a Christian's duty was to obey their sovereign, the precise emphasis shifted over time. The period can be divided into three phases. In the first, immediately after the Restoration, churchmen used early Christian obedience to pagan emperors to defend Charles's temporal authority in the face of those who (quite rightly) doubted his commitment to covenanted presbyterianism. Then, later in the 1660s, they encouraged conformity to the Restoration settlement, by showing that it had been established by a legitimate use of the royal supremacy in the tradition of Constantine. Finally, after the 1669 Act of Supremacy had given Charles sweeping ecclesiastical powers, the ancient Church was used to justify complete royal control over the Church, in order to stop resistance from presbyterians and episcopalians alike.

Initially, though, we need to note that episcopalian thought was rooted in mid-century presbyterianism in two ways. First, most of the episcopalian clergy had been presbyterians prior to the Restoration, and they retained some of the basic assumptions. Presbyterians had long been committed to a ‘two kingdoms’ theory of Church-state relations, in which the Church was to have absolute control over spiritual matters without interference from the civil magistrate. As we shall see, episcopalians continued to defend the idea of a spiritual sphere with inherent legitimacy, distinct from the monarch. When Lauderdale complained about the ‘old Spirit of Presbitry’ in recalcitrant bishops, he was describing their intellectual history as well as making a dismissive joke.

Secondly, episcopalian thought, and indeed the episcopal settlement itself, developed in reaction to the radical constitutional theories associated with presbyterianism. Although under the ‘two kingdoms’ theory ministers were not meant to act directly in secular politics, they were nonetheless thought to have the liberty to criticize the government publicly when they deemed it to be behaving contrary to God's law. Combined with a willingness to sanction resistance to monarchs who overstepped their bounds, this meant in theory that the king had no influence upon the Church but the Church could demand that an ungodly king be resisted.Footnote ⁹ When this theory had been put into practice in a rising against Charles I, the Scottish episcopate had been abolished. The General Assembly of the Church at Glasgow in 1638 declared episcopacy inconsistent with the National Covenant, an oath required by all ministers which was supplemented by the more overtly anti-episcopal Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, both sworn in defiance of the king. (These covenants were the grounds on which almost a third of Scottish ministers refused to conform after 1662).Footnote ¹⁰ This link between presbyterianism and a contractual theory of monarchy explained why royalists favoured an episcopal settlement in the early 1660s. Thomas Sydserf, the last surviving pre-Restoration bishop, wrote a memorandum for Charles II in the summer of 1660 in which his main argument was that ‘Presbyterian government as it is in this age professed and exercised in Scotland, is directly inconsistent with Kingly power, even as Soveraignetie be established by the Lawes of Scotland’.Footnote ¹¹ Charles needed little persuasion after his brief but bruising time in Scotland in the early 1650s, and he ordered the restitution of bishops in August 1661, noting presbyterianism's ‘unsuitableness . . . to our monarchical estate’.Footnote ¹² From its roots, episcopacy in Restoration Scotland was linked to obedience to the monarch.

The first task for royalist churchmen at the Restoration was to push back against the covenanting resistance theories which had predominated in the 1640s and 1650s. They started doing this in the summer of 1660, immediately after the king had returned but before episcopacy was restored, through a series of sermons given in celebration of Charles's restoration. At this point the Church was bitterly divided. On one side were a radical minority faction, known as the Protesters, who had opposed Charles II during his time in Scotland for being insufficiently committed to presbyterianism. In the early 1650s they had pushed the Church into declaring that Charles could only be permitted to exercise power if he was bound by the covenants, and they continued to suggest that an ungodly magistrate should be actively resisted. On the other were the moderate faction, the Resolutioners, who had supported Charles and most of whom later conformed to the episcopal settlement.Footnote ¹³ The surviving printed Restoration sermons come from moderate Resolutioner ministers from a number of towns, all of whom later conformed to episcopacy, and some of whom became bishops. The key purpose of these sermons was to counter the Protesters’ position that the obedience due to a king was linked to his being an orthodox Christian, and not merely orthodox but Protestant, and not merely protestant but presbyterian, and not merely presbyterian but presbyterian according to the covenants sworn in the 1640s.Footnote ¹⁴

The Resolutioner preachers asserted that Charles's authority was supreme, and could not be challenged. As the minister of Linlithgow (and later bishop of Dunblane), James Ramsay argued, since the king's authority was direct from God, ‘he is [ac]countable to none else but to God only’.Footnote ¹⁵ A subject's duty, as several preachers emphasized, was obedience rather than judgement or reproof.Footnote ¹⁶ John Menzies, professor of Divinity at Marischal College, Aberdeen, himself formerly a Protester, undercut any claims radicals might make to be defending Protestant orthodoxy by citing ‘the testimony of judicious Calvine’ on the duty of obedience to the magistrate.Footnote ¹⁷ To soothe any worries, the Resolutioners played up the benefits to the Church of a king who could act as a ‘nursing father’, ending the Cromwellian toleration of errors, healing splits in the Church and supporting the spread of the gospel.Footnote ¹⁸ Crucially, these arguments referred to Charles's temporal authority. At this point, the clergy who were shortly to conform to episcopacy were simply aiming to disassociate the Scottish Church from radical resistance theories, part of the same backlash which would lead to the return of bishops. For now, these ministers did not have anything controversial to say about royal power over the Church.

Most of the supporting examples given in the sermons themselves were biblical. However, when the sermons came to be printed, and so made available to a wider (and better educated) reading public than the initial hearers, John Menzies and Alexander Scroggie both added dedications that discussed classical precedents. Menzies opened his argument with the ringing declaration that ‘Loyaltie was the glory of the Primitive Christians, Confessours & Martyrs, both under the heathen Persecutions, & afterwards under Hereticall Emperours’. Reusing material from a previous series of public divinity lectures in which he had given ‘pregnant instances of primitive Loyalty’, he focused on the presence of Christians in the armies of heathen and Arian emperors: soldiers of the Emperor Julian (who was guilty of ‘grosse heathenism’) had declared themselves to be long-standing Christians after Julian's death, providing an example of ‘a Christian Army, which retained their allegeance under the Worst of Princes, under that Heathenish Apostate Iulian’. Similarly, the orthodox Christian commanders under the Arian Valens told the emperor of his errors ‘with such humble freedom as became Loyall Subjects’ but ‘abstained from all violence, and contained themselves within the bounds of Loyall freedom of admonition’. Menzies cited the opinion of Valentinian II, also Arian, that St Ambrose ‘had such influence upon his Army, that if he would have given a word to the Souldiers, they would have seised on the Emperour and laid him fast’, but Ambrose's true Christian loyalty prevented this. Lastly, he cited the third-century writer Tertullian to argue that, under persecution, Christians had refrained from avenging themselves even though they were numerous enough to do so.Footnote ¹⁹ As he had noted in the body of his sermon, since ancient Christians had obeyed a pagan emperor, Scotland should consider itself blessed that its sovereign was at least Protestant.Footnote ²⁰

The Aberdeen minister Alexander Scroggie brought together several other examples in his dedicatory epistle to show ‘the heroick Loyalty of the holy Fathers, Commanders and Christians in primitive times’. To the obedience of Julian the Apostate's soldiers and the non-resistance witnessed by Tertullian, he added a quotation from Cyprian: ‘We do not resist . . . although our numbers be great; if we would be revenged, we could not want force’. This non-resistance was illustrated with the legend of the 6,666 soldiers of the Theban Legion who reputedly suffered martyrdom under Emperor Maximian rather than resist him. Scroggie turned this against Protesters in the Church by noting: ‘If others should not resist, far lesse [should] Ministers who should be Paterns [do so]’.Footnote ²¹ By appealing to the precedent of the Church in supposedly purer times, these ministers were able to present resistance theories as modern innovations which should be dispensed with. But although they were amplifying royal power to discredit presbyterian political theories, they were not yet challenging presbyterian ideas about royal power over the Church.

This same set of stories was repeated by later writers in the 1660s and 1670s, once bishops were re-established, to support much the same argument: the authority of the monarch and the law should be obeyed meekly and without resistance; this included the laws underpinning the return of bishops.Footnote ²² However, other ancient examples were also cited to address much more specific aspects of the Restoration settlement dealing with the royal supremacy, marking a second phase in how the early Church was used. Rather than acknowledging the temporal authority of pagan emperors, episcopalians now looked at the Church under Christian emperors.

The leading episcopalian apologist of the 1660s was Andrew Honeyman, bishop of Orkney, who in 1668 and 1669 wrote lengthy replies to the notorious presbyterian pamphlet, Naphtali. He used Tertullian, Cyprian and the Theban Legion to argue that episcopalian conformists were following in the footsteps of the early Christians by obeying the king and his laws, while nonconformists were betraying that tradition by refusing to submit to Charles's just authority.Footnote ²³ However, he also used the Church under the Roman empire to address a controversy over the king's power relating to church courts. While bishops were being restored in 1661 and 1662, the king had banned church courts from meeting, for fear that they would petition against the change. Honeyman himself had been on the receiving end of an earlier form of this policy, having been deeply suspicious of bishops. He drew up just such an anti-episcopal petition for the synod of Fife before the synod was dramatically dismissed by the earl of Rothes.Footnote ²⁴

It is worth noting that church courts were much more important in Scotland than in England: kirk sessions in each parish, local presbyteries and provincial synods were fundamental to how the Scottish Church functioned. Their suspension, albeit temporary, was deeply traumatic. It was an affront to ‘two kingdoms’ theorists, who saw it as an unwarranted incursion by the king into the spiritual sphere. When church courts met again under bishops, they did so with royal permission, which presbyterian nonconformists thought showed them to be invalid: true church courts met under a warrant derived from Christ himself, without reference to the civil magistrate.Footnote ²⁵ Even those like Honeyman who ultimately reconciled themselves with the new order were proud of the independence of synods and presbyteries from secular interference: one of the factors which persuaded Honeyman that the Restoration Scottish Church was legitimate was that, unlike the Church of England, its disciplinary courts remained under clerical control, and had not become dominated by lay lawyers and officials.Footnote ²⁶

Honeyman was writing to win over moderate presbyterians, who on the one hand were unwilling to defy the Church established by law, but on the other did not want to abandon the presbyterian principles they had held during the 1640s and 1650s.Footnote ²⁷ He therefore had to strike a subtle balance between a king who did not have total power over the Church but could not be resisted, and a Church which retained some inherent power but not so much that it became dangerously independent of the king. To negotiate this tricky subject, he turned to the position of church councils under Christian Roman emperors in the fourth and fifth centuries. Practice in this period showed that all ecumenical councils were ‘convocated by emperors’, and Honeyman argued that imperial laws were what allowed lesser synods and courts to meet. He underscored this by appealing to the presence of emperors or their commissioners at church councils, in particular Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and Marcian at Chalcedon in 451.Footnote ²⁸ Since Christian emperors had had the power to convene synods and councils, Honeyman thought the Scottish crown retained the same right. Indeed, he went further, and argued that even pagan and persecuting emperors like Nero and Tiberius had theoretically had that right, but had disqualified themselves by their actions; the claims of a supportive Protestant monarch like Charles II were therefore unimpeachable.Footnote ²⁹

However, there were limits to what Honeyman would allow the king. His general principle was that although the king gave the Church permission to exercise its function, it ultimately derived the authority for that function from an inherent spiritual power, granted by Christ, with which the king could not interfere. It was an accepted part of the royal supremacy in England that, although the king could direct the Church in external matters, matters like ordination and the administration of sacraments were beyond his reach, and reserved to clerics.Footnote ³⁰ Honeyman tried to extend this to include church discipline. Discipline was much more important within the Scottish Church, both practically and theoretically: kirk sessions kept a stern watch within each parish, and the public repentance and shaming of sinners was a regular part of weekly worship. Scottish presbyterians had also long held that discipline as administered by sessions, presbyteries and synods was one of the Church's divinely ordained functions. In its 1560 Confession, the Scottish Church had made a rare departure from Calvin and made ecclesiastical discipline a mark of the true Church. This was still the standard position a century later: Bishop Honeyman's brother, James, included discipline among the signs of the true Church in a set of theses presented to his local presbytery in 1665.Footnote ³¹ Even while arguing for royal supremacy over Church courts, Andrew Honeyman therefore tried to carve out some protection for them. For instance, he would not directly defend Charles's dissolution of presbyterian synods. He noted that the king had the right to dismiss ‘a heretical or seditious meeting, calling themselves a Synod . . . as some of the antient Emperors have done with Pseudo-synods’. Although he strongly implied that any court which opposed royal policy would find itself in this category, he did not allow the king to dissolve a properly constituted, well-behaved meeting of ministers. Even the power of the ancient emperors was not arbitrary.Footnote ³²

More significantly, Honeyman also denied that the king could interfere with the sentences and censures passed by church courts, be it public repentance or excommunication. Although he could investigate the process and ensure that church courts were not abusing their powers, the judgments themselves could not be overturned. Only in the case of a church court's corruption or misconduct could the king step in. Honeyman illustrated this with St Paul's own appeal to Caesar, which he attributed to a desire to avoid the corrupt court of the Jewish priests.Footnote ³³

This careful limitation of the king's influence over church censures might seem to be a pedantic point of little practical significance, but a few months after Honeyman wrote, in 1669, it provoked a direct clash with royal policy which dramatically altered the balance of power between Church and state in Scotland. In an attempt to deal with numerous vacant parishes and widespread nonconformity, the government determined on a policy of indulgence, licensing deposed presbyterian ministers to preach in vacant parishes. Bishops and other conformist churchmen were greatly disturbed by this circumventing of their authority. In particular, they were affronted that some of the deposed ministers who were to be indulged had been deposed and censured by synods: that is, the king was to give preaching licenses to those whom church courts had directly forbidden to preach. The episcopalian synod of Glasgow passed a remonstrance condemning this as a humiliation which would fatally undermine their authority.Footnote ³⁴

The government responded ruthlessly to this defiance. The 1669 parliament passed an Act of Supremacy to remove any legal doubt about the king's ability to grant indulgences, prompting the rows between Archbishop Sharp and Lauderdale noted earlier. The king was declared to have ‘supreme authority and supremacy over all persons and all causes ecclesiastical’, and to have the power to make act and edicts about any churchman ‘and concerning all ecclesiastical meetings and matters to be proposed and determined in them’.Footnote ³⁵ As a warning to the Church, Charles used the powers gained from this act to force the resignation of Alexander Burnet, who had made repeated legal objections to the policy of indulgence, as archbishop of Glasgow. The other bishops were cowed, and the indulgences continued to be granted to censured ministers.Footnote ³⁶ Despite Honeyman's earlier attempts to persuade presbyterians that the king could not and would not ride roughshod over church courts, the crown had done precisely that.

The defence of the new form of royal supremacy was left to Gilbert Burnet, one of the government's favourite churchmen in the early 1670s and, after the 1688 Revolution, the Williamite bishop of Salisbury. This marked the third stage in how the ancient Church was used. Burnet had to remove any claim that synods or presbyteries might make to an inherent power independent of the king, and to do so he too turned to the Church under the Roman empire. His 1673 Vindication of the Authority, Constitution and Laws of the Church and State of Scotland was written in the form of a dialogue. It is a testament to the emphasis placed on examples from the ancient Church that the episcopalian character was named Philarchaues, ‘lover of antiquity’, while another participant, Polyhistor, a historian, was largely included as a conduit for lengthy discussions of the early Church.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, Burnet used Polyhistor to advertise his own forthcoming Observations on the First and Second Canons, commonly ascribed to the Apostles, in which he compiled the opinions of a number of early Christian writers on the offices of bishops, presbyters and deacons, and which was published the same year as a sort of aficionado's appendix to his dialogue.Footnote ³⁸

Burnet argued that the king as civil magistrate had entire power over synods ‘for there can be but one Supream; and two Coordinat Powers are a Chymaera’.Footnote ³⁹ That is, even the very limited independence Honeyman had tried to establish was too close to the inevitable chaos of presbyterian polity. While Honeyman had defended ‘godly discipline’ as a part of the clergy's inherent prerogative, Burnet denied that it could be, arguing that ‘till a divine Command be produced for Synods or Discipline, it cannot be lawfully gone about without or against [the king's] authority’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Church might claim a power of discipline (and count it as one of the marks of a true Church), but this had ‘no positive warrant from scripture’.Footnote ⁴¹ The crux of his argument against church courts having any independent authority was based on their history under the Roman empire. In Burnet's telling, it was only towards the end of the second century that churchmen began to associate together in provincial synods based upon the borders of imperial provinces – a ‘mould from the division of the Empire’, as he put it. Since this development came long after the apostles, and was based upon secular considerations, Burnet felt it showed that synods and presbyteries ‘can be derived from no divine Original, and so were, as to their particular form, but of human Constitution’.Footnote ⁴² Since the constitution was human and changeable, it ought to be determined by the laws of the civil magistrate. Burnet further justified this close secular oversight by pointing to the Church of Antioch's appeal to the pagan emperor Aurelian in a dispute over church property, and the imperial nomination of bishops after the Council of Laodicea in 364.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, although church courts could indeed dole out godly discipline, their ability to do so was based not on some intrinsic spiritual power, as Honeyman had maintained, but on the laws laid down by the civil magistrate. Just as the early Church under imperial power had been moulded by civil demarcations and considerations, so now in the Restoration the Church could not claim any prerogative that threatened the king's authority.

In conclusion, Scottish episcopalians had a more varied approach to the royal supremacy than has previously been thought. They initially turned to the Church's relationship with the Roman empire in order to persuade presbyterians to abandon nonconformity and doctrines of resistance. Andrew Honeyman had used the emperors’ convocation of church councils to justify the specific features of the Restoration royal supremacy as it related to church courts. Nonetheless, he tried to demarcate a special role for church courts as instruments of discipline independent of the king. By citing ancient precedent, he hoped to reassure moderate presbyterians that the king's actions were no threat to the power of the Church. After the clash over Indulgences and the 1669 Act of Supremacy, however, this limited conception of the supremacy became impolitic. Gilbert Burnet's use of ancient exempla was therefore markedly different from that of his predecessors. Previous authors, including Honeyman, had turned to the ancient Church to illustrate what they saw as eternal Christian truths, which they hoped presbyterians might respect. Burnet used it to show how dramatically the Church had changed over time, particularly with regard to its institutional structures, something he catalogued at length in his linked Observations.Footnote ⁴⁴ From this he denied the legitimacy of any church discipline distinct from secular laws, a radical shift which would be disputed not only by presbyterians but also by moderate episcopalians like Bishop Honeyman. The Church under the Roman empire, much like the royal supremacy itself, had changed from an instrument to encourage conformity to a means of delegitimizing any clerical opposition to royal policy, even from within the established Church.