Saint Giles and the Book of Common Prayer

Today is the feast of St. Giles on the calendar for the 1962 Roman Missal and for the Church of England. He is the patron saint of the Church of Scotland Cathedral in Edinburgh. It was, course, founded as a Catholic church, but in the throes of the Scottish Reformation during the regency of Mary of Guise for her daughter, Mary, changed hands between the Catholics and Reformers a couple of times.

According to the History page on the Cathedral website, John Knox took over in 1559:

John Knox was a Scottish priest who converted to Protestantism in the 1540s and fled into hiding and exile. In Geneva he befriended the French reformer John Calvin. On his return to Scotland he marched an army of followers into St Giles’ and preached there for the first time. The following week he was elected its minister and the building was stripped of its Catholic decoration.

And by government fiat in 1560, it was desecrated and descralized as a Catholic church:

The Scottish Parliament abolished papal authority in 1560 and decreed that Scotland was now a Protestant country. This was despite Scotland still having a Catholic queen, Mary Queen of Scots. St Giles’ 400 years as a Catholic church officially came to an end. Inside the building the stained-glass windows were removed and old church silver was melted down and sold to raise funds for redecoration. To read a more detailed account of the Reformation, click here.

When King Charles I of England and Scotland attempted to impose the Book of Common Prayer, there was a riot:

Scotland and England began to share the same monarch following the 1603 Union of the Crowns, though the two countries still had separate legislatures. In 1637 King Charles I attempted to draw the Scottish church, which was Presbyterian, into line with the English church, which was Anglican. Scottish opposition came to the boil when Charles I attempted to impose a new prayer book in St Giles’ and made St Giles’ a cathedral. A local woman named Jenny Geddes picked up her stool and threw it at the preacher, starting a riot. Church services were suspended for a week for fear of public uprising.

And that event is depicted above!

Although he didn't succeed in imposing the Book of Common Prayer, St. Giles in Edinburgh is still a cathedral.

The Scottish "War on Christmas"

You've heard of the Puritan ban on Christmas in England and the British Colonies: but the Reformation in Scotland, led by John Knox, led to a long, long ban on the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus (starting in 1640), according to this article in The Catholic Herald:

Unlike the recent “wars on Christmas”, the four centuries-long Scottish indifference to the birthday of Jesus was rooted in the Reformation and John Knox’s rejection of many forms of Catholic worship. Until then Yule had happily been celebrated with “games and feasting”.

The present minister at Canongate, the Rev Neil Gardner, explains that “Knox took a dim view on this, and associated Christmas with excessive frivolity”. Knox, having abandoned the grandeur of St Andrew’s Cathedral, also rejected celibacy for priests and nuns, bishoprics, belief in purgatory, the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, saints, the Pope, holy water and incense. The fiery preacher did not stop there. He set his face resolutely against the observance of the Christian year and all its festivals, including Christmas, on the grounds that the Lord’s Day alone could claim scriptural authority.

In 1640, an Act of the Parliament of Scotland abolished the “Yule vacation and all observation thereof in time coming … the kirke within this kingdome is now purged of all superstitious observatione of dayes…”

The historical basis of the Christmas feast was not difficult for Knox and other Reformists to challenge. As Jews didn’t celebrate birthdays, there is nothing in the Gospels, or even in the books by Josephus, about the month, let alone the day, when Jesus was born. But it is well known that in the 4th century Emperor Constantine introduced December 25, the feast day of his former god, Mithras, as the birthday of Christ – a convenient date as it coincided with multitudes of other pagan celebrations around the European winter solstice.

The Rev Charles Robertson admits that Christmas is “a Christianised pagan festival” but thinks it is a special date for all Christians as “it is important to walk through the year with Christ, marking it with the events of Jesus’s life – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost”. When I asked what he thought had brought around the change in Scottish attitudes to Christmas, he spoke of the influence of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and the inheritance of their liberalising attitudes.

I doubt that David Hume, who thoroughly despised Catholicism, would have much to do with the revival of Christmas. The Enlightenment did not really liberalize attitudes toward Catholics or anything connected to Catholicism. Remember that John Locke in England denied that Catholics were even Christian! Perhaps it was the number of Irish coming to Scotland in the nineteenth century adding to the numbers of native Catholics who had survived the long period of oppression or the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland by Pope Leo XIII in 1878 that brought the celebration of Christmas back. 

Christmas became a public holiday in 1958.

David Rizzio's Murder

Today is the anniversary of the murder of David Rizzio, Mary of Scotland's Court musician and secretary for diplomatic relations with France, in 1566. The report is that he was stabbed 56 times by followers of Lord Darnley, after a scene of great violence to the pregnant Mary, in Holyroodhouse.

The National Galleries of Scotland have "The Murder of David Rizzio" by Sir William Allan on display. This site has the following details about this horrendous event:

On the evening of Saturday 9 March, while the Queen, Rizzio and some others were at supper in the privy chamber off the Queen´s bedroom in Holyrood Palace, Darnley and Ruthven entered, followed by the other conspirators. On the 9th of March 1566 Mary, Rizzio and a small group of friends were enjoying a late supper in the small room by the Queen’s bedchamber. Darnley suddenly appeared, speaking to Mary as a group of armed nobles made their way to the Queen’s chambers. Mary immediately realised that David’s life was in danger and confronted the plotters - ‘Leave our presence under pain of treason.’ When Ruthven told Darnley to seize his wife a fight broke out. Rizzio hid behind the Queen’s dress as her friends and servants struggled with Ruthven.

David Rizzio was dragged screaming from the supper room and murdered in the stairway outside the Queen’s chambers. He was stabbed over 50 times before his body was dumped down the stairs. Darnley refused to stab Rizzio but his dagger was left in the body to show his complicity.

It's amazing but true to note that there is no public statue honoring Mary, Queen of Scots in Scotland! As this BBC story from last month notes:

Her life has inspired many film scripts and novels but no public monuments.

She became queen of Scotland when she was six days old but spent most of her childhood in France.

On her return her brief reign resulted only in disastrous marriages, murder and war.

She gave up the throne at the age of 24 and was a prisoner in England for most of the next 20 years until she executed on the orders of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.

Now, more than 400 years after her death, the monarch, whose son, James, became king of Scotland and England, is finally to have a monument to her erected in Scotland.

The statue will be unveiled later this spring but work is under way at Powderhall foundry in Edinburgh on a queen who has been notable by her absence.

The manquette of the sculpture is pictured above, used by the kind permission of The Marie Stuart Society, which has raised the funds for this long overdue tribute. 

Mary, Queen of Scots did not demand that everyone in Scotland practice the Catholic faith--no cuius regio, eius religio for her. She didn't replace the Protestants at Court who had been ruling in her absence after her mother, Marie of Guise died, but did have Catholics, including David Rizzio at Court in her household and practiced her Catholic faith by attending Mass even though the Scottish Parliament had "abolished" the Mass in Scotland. Fear of Catholicism in Scotland, however, fomented by John Knox, led to Rizzio's murder and the violence perpetrated against the reigning monarch. Mary had compromised, in consultation with her half-brother James Stewart, the first Earl of Moray, John Knox and his supporters refused to compromise and Knox consistently attacked Mary because she practiced her Catholic faith.

Four Important Events on May 2

1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason and witchcraft. She was taken to the Tower of London and to the very apartments she had used before her coronation:

As you know, Anne Boleyn was arrested on 2nd May 1536 at Greenwich Palace. Alison Weir writes of how Anne was accused of “evil behaviour” by Sir William Paulet, Sir William Fitzwilliam and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, charged with adultery and informed that both Mark Smeaton and Sir Henry Norris had confessed their guilt. Anne denied these charges but it was no good, she was allowed to return to her apartments for her dinner, under guard, and then she was escorted by barge along the Thames to the Tower of London.

Although Traitor’s Gate is often pointed out as the place where Anne would have disembarked, Alison Weir points out that Anne, as Queen, was taken to the Court Gate in the Byward Tower, a private entrance. Here she was met by the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, who was Sir William Kingston’s deputy and then Anne would then have been escorted along Water Lane (in the Outer Ward), past the back of the Lieutenant’s House to the entrance of the royal palace where she was to be imprisoned.

It was ironic that Anne Boleyn was imprisoned in the same lodgings that she stayed in before her coronation in 1533 – the Queen’s apartments in the Tower’s royal palace.

But where are these lodgings?

In “The Lady in the Tower”, Weir describes Anne’s lodgings as lying “on the east side of the inner ward between the Lanthorn Tower and the Wardrobe Tower” and writes of how these apartments were renovated for Anne’s coronation, with Cromwell spending the equivalent of over £1 million pounds to make them fit for the new queen. These Renaissance style apartments were therefore a luxurious prison for Anne Boleyn but a prison is a prison. If you go to the Tower of London today, it is not possible to see Anne’s prison because these lodgings were uninhabitable by the end of the 16th century and demolished by the end of the 18th century. The present half-timbered Queen’s House which overlooks the green is not where Anne was imprisoned as these apartments were not built until around 1540, at least 4 years after Anne Boleyn’s execution.

1559 – John Knox returns from exile to Scotland to become the leader of the beginning Scottish Reformation. He was thus able to contribute to the revolution that overturned the regency of Queen Mary of Guise for her daughter Mary, the Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, draft the Scots Confession for the Parliament, and argue with Mary, Queen of Scots.

1568 – Mary, Queen of Scots, escapes from Loch Leven Castle. She had been imprisoned there after the death of her husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and her abduction by and marriage to Lord Bothwell. Having lost the battle of Carberry Hill on June 15, 1567 before it even began, Mary was taken in custody to Edinburgh and then imprisoned in Loch Leven, where she miscarried and forced to abdicate. Then she escaped on May 2 and lost the battle of Landside eleven days later. By the middle of May in 1568 she was in England and in Elizabeth's custody.

1611 – King James Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker. According to the wikipedia article, things did not go smoothly:

The original printing of the Authorized Version was published by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, in 1611 as a complete folio Bible.It was sold looseleaf for ten shillings, or bound for twelve. Robert Barker's father, Christopher, had, in 1589, been granted by Elizabeth I the title of royal Printer, with the perpetual Royal Privilege to print Bibles in England. Robert Barker invested very large sums in printing the new edition, and consequently ran into serious debt, such that he was compelled to sub-lease the privilege to two rival London printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill. It appears that it was initially intended that each printer would print a portion of the text, share printed sheets with the others, and split the proceeds. Bitter financial disputes broke out, as Barker accused Norton and Bill of concealing their profits, while Norton and Bill accused Barker of selling sheets properly due to them as partial Bibles for ready money. There followed decades of continual litigation, and consequent imprisonment for debt for members of the Barker and Norton printing dynasties, while each issued rival editions of the whole Bible. In 1629 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge successfully managed to assert separate and prior royal licences for Bible printing, for their own university presses – and Cambridge University took the opportunity to print revised editions of the Authorized Version in 1629 and 1638. The editors of these editions included John Bois and John Ward from the original translators. This did not, however, impede the commercial rivalries of the London printers, especially as the Barker family refused to allow any other printers access to the authoritative manuscript of the Authorized Version.