Chapter XXVII: The Curates
So writes Wodrow regarding the dispossessed Covenanters, and it is probable his statement is not exaggerated. Of the fate of the ministers of the Abbey, we have ample information. On 6th January, 1663, .Mr. Alexander Dunlop, after having been previously “silenced from preaching,” was summoned before the Council for refusing to take the usual oaths. He was ordained “to be banished forth of his Majesty's dominions, the Lords reserving to themselves to fix the time of his removal, and in the meantime ordained him to confine himself within the bounds of the dioceses of Aberdeen, Brechin, Caithness, Dunkeld, and allow him the space of ten days to go home to order his business and affairs.” His sentence would have been heavier if the King's physician, [3] Sir Robert Cunninghame, had not interfered on his behalf. He was to have been sent to Holland with seven other Nonconformists, but Sir Robert “told the Chancellor that they might as well execute him on a scaffold as send him to the sea, for he could not be twenty-four or forty-eight hours upon the sea but it would be his death, for by his extraordinary study and labour at Paisley he had brought his very strong body so low that he could not live upon the sea for a very short time.” He seems to have lived in retirement at Culross, and after the hopes of the Covenanters were disappointed by the defeat of the insurgents at Pentland, he died, his biographer tells us, of a broken heart. [4] His colleague, Mr. Stirling, went, after he was driven from the Abbey, to the East Indies, where he died in 1671 or 1672 from the effects of a fall from a horse at Bombay. [5]
In 1662 a Presbytery was established in Paisley by virtue of an order of the Archbishop and Synod “to act as a presbytery in all matters that concern the discipline of the Church, and particularly to do all things incumbent on them for planting vacant churches.” The minutes of this court have been preserved, and they are very curious. Like their predecessors, the curates met generally in the Abbey, but the matters that occupied their attention were very different from those that engrossed the Covenanters. The discipline they exercised was not so much over offenders against morals and “suspected Papists” as over those who refused to take the oaths, or ventured to decline the office of the eldership; and instead of the imposition of the Covenant, we have the enforcing of the test and the denouncing of conventicles. The whole character of the men as exhibited in their records is of a lower type than, that of their predecessors. Compelled to act the part of common informers, to hand those who opposed them to the Magistrates, often detested by their parishioners, and looked upon by them as intruders into the ministry, it was no wonder that their tone was not so high as it should have been. We give a few extracts from the minutes of Presbytery as throwing light upon the history of the time. One difficulty the curates felt was getting men of respectability to act as elders and to form kirk-sessions. It was at last held to be criminal to refuse, and there are many cases in the records of the Sheriff Court [6] where heavy fines were imposed upon those who declined the office of the eldership. Many of them in doing so pretended they were addicted to drunkenness and other sins, in which case they were at once ordered to stand in sackcloth before the congregation.
[3] Wodrow's Analecta, Vol. IV., p. 19.
[4] “He was about forty-seven years when he died at Borrowstouness in 1667. He was so concerned and troubled about the fall of that worthy company at Pentland that his deep concern for that terrible disaster did truly kill him and hasten on his end. For whenever he heard of their being broken he sat down and wept most bitterly ; and when Mr. Hasty would after that have come in to see Mr. Dunlop, he would have seen him sitting with his gown among the ashes, in a most forlorn and dejected like condition, and he would have said to him, 'You look not like yourself What makes you carry so?' He would have answered, What's the matter of me, Saunders, how I sit when I see the work and people of God sit so low 1 I never thought that the pulse of this nation would have beat so feverish as now I find it does.' ”—Wodrow's Analecta, Vol. III., p. 10.
[5] “There, riding upon a great Indian horse, the horse cast him, and he took a fever and died. There was a soldier told my brother that afterwards riding upon the same horse he had almost broke his neck upon him.”—Wodrow's Analecta, Vol. III., p. 26.
[6] See a very interesting volume on the “Records of the Sheriff Court of Renfrewshire,” ably edited by Mr. Hector, Sheriff-Clerk of the County.