simply targeted individual benefices which he had earmarked for attention. Beginning with Clement IV in 1265, however, successive popes used general reservations to award themselves the right to nominate to an entire category of benefices which had become vacant in particular circumstances. Thus, for example, Rome could intervene in vacancies where the occupant had died at, or near, the Holy See, or where the cleric had resigned to take up a higher appointment, or even where he had died in any month other than March, July, September or December14. One way or another, the Holy See increasingly sought to bring appointments within its direct control, desiring both to increase papal income and particularly to make the Church’s authority more centralized. The result, according to Innes,15 was that every year, thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of benefices across Europe were affected.
In Scotland, the business of papal provisions was to sow the seeds of opposition but not, surprisingly, because the pope’s nominees threatened to supplant local preferences: the distance between Scotland and Rome was enough to ensure that papal fiat without indigenous consent was simply not enough for the pontiff to make his appointments prevail. Rather, it was for two other reasons that provisions engendered annoyance.
The first reason was that they led to a constant stream of litigation by rival claimants for benefices coming before the court at Rome, as well as a procession of hopefuls seeking to purchase pensions and preferments.16 This inevitably occasioned a steady drain of currency out of the country. To counteract it, James I passed a series of acts in 1424, 1427 and 1428, the last of which specifically condemned “thaim that dois barratry” —barratry being unauthorized dealing at Rome17—but the problem would not go away, and James III felt compelled to renew the legislation in 1482 and 1484.18
Secondly, and more importantly, as Rome became increasingly inclined to reserve to itself appointments to the “greater benefices”, or bishoprics, successive kings grew deeply uncomfortable. Since their predecessors had been generous founders of monastic houses, they had felt justified in looking upon these with the same proprietorial eye as that with which parochial lay patrons regarded the churches on their estates. Papal interference was unwelcome, and since senior clerics sat in Parliament or council, the king could ill-afford to see these preferments going to men who were unacceptable to him. The result was a battle of wills, from which the Crown eventually emerged the winner. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII issued an Indult, conceding the right of James III to nominate, within eight months, to such benefices belonging to monasteries and cathedrals, which were worth more than 200 florins, gold of the camera.
This was not the only success to come the Crown’s way. Earlier, it had decided that, by long-standing tradition, the monarch had the right, while an episcopal see was vacant, to present to any of the benefices for which the bishop had collation.19 It was a claim that was to provoke friction between Crown and Pope throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and into the sixteenth. However, while the papacy challenged the king’s “pretended custom”, by various deeds and statements, as in 1323, 1337 and 1440, the Crown was able to hold onto its position, thanks to supportive declarations from the Scottish Church (1450, 1457 and 1459) and Parliament (1462, 1481, 1482 and 1485)20.
With the 1487 indult, it might have appeared that at last a settled arrangement in Scottish relations with Rome over vacancies had arrived. However, instead of satisfying royal hunger, such concessions merely whetted the appetite. With monasteries and episcopal dioceses now firmly within its sphere of influence, from this point down to the Reformation in 1560, the Crown slowly pushed against limitations as to its power of nomination. A typical example of its mounting assertiveness can be seen in the Act of 1526, which bluntly claimed that the nomination to all vacant bishoprics or abbacies pertained solely to the king, and anyone entering such positions by other means “sall incur the cryme of tresone and leise majestie.”21
So then, thanks to royal resistance, the initiative in the nomination of higher clergy in particular that had been moving in the Church’s favor, flowed in the other direction and into royal hands. Thus Cowan suggests that, by the sixteenth century, the Crown may not have made all the gains it might have liked, but, “it possessed a far greater degree of patronage....than it had ever previously commanded.”22
As the continuing secularization of church property gained momentum in the century before the Reformation, the Crown was not of course the only interested party. Lay families made sure they did not miss out on what they could gain.23 However, their primary concern was income, and any right of patronage that was not subsumed into the Crown’s growing acquisitions, usually stayed within the Church’s hands. It was to be later, when a different ecclesiastical structure was in place, that a desire to consolidate every aspect of their acquisitions prompted a return of lay patrons’ attentions to this feature of property ownership.
After the Scottish Reformation of 1560
The dawn of the Reformation brought the opportunity to extend the royal stock of patronages even further. In this, the crucial contribution was the allowance made to the non-conforming clergy of the old faith to remain in their benefices during their lifetime and retain at least two thirds of the parochial teinds or tithes, while the remaining third was earmarked for the reformed ministers. While this situation obtained, it seemed logical to the reformers to allow much of the revenue system of the pre-Reformation Church to remain undismantled. However, this presented the Crown with the golden opportunity to step in and portray itself as the proper heir to the property of the bishoprics and religious institutions. The assets to be gained from such a claim were very considerable, since centuries of appropriation by religious houses and cathedrals had placed by far the greatest number of parish churches in the Church’s hands. Accordingly, the Crown wasted no time in asserting its claims, first with the benefices attached to religious houses, then with the bishoprics. Along with them came their presentation rights.
All this put the new, reformed Church in a difficult position. As a counter to the clericalism of the old faith, they saw a minister’s authority as something that came upwards from the parishioners, as opposed to coming down from a higher source. Thus, in their 1560 blueprint for reform, the (first) Book of Discipline, they declared that “election of Ministers in this cursed Papistrie hath altogether bene abused”, and, following Luther and Calvin, ordained instead that “It appertaineth to the people and to every severall Congregation to elect their minister.”24 However, although the Acts of the August Parliament of 1560 had swept away the Mass and the authority of the Pope, until its legislation was ratified by the monarch, doubts would always remain as to the legitimacy of the new order, and when Catholic Queen Mary arrived in 1561, she showed no inclination to do so. This obstacle, coupled with the Crown’s growing interest in adding to its rights and privileges, did not make it a favorable opportunity for the reformers to insist on their demands regarding patronage.
The situation was made worse by worry over the desperate financial straits of the ministers. Accordingly, on the 24 June 1565, the General Assembly sent Queen Mary a plea to grant legislation on its main claims and desires, prominent among which (Article Two of six) was the request that “sure provision” be made for sustaining the ministry, especially access to the “thirds.” The way the reformers saw urgent provision being achieved was by Parliament regularizing the position of the reform clergy already in livings, and by its disponing, one by one, any vacant charges to those approved by the new Church. Presentations are not condemned,
