God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [12]
As a result there was a tendency for convinced Calvinists to push for greater institutional security for an independent kirk. This was also associated with a desire to secure the four functions of the clergy in a form more akin to Genevan Presbyterianism, to develop the new institutions established alongside the skeleton of the old church in a Presbyterian direction and to separate their authority from that of the crown. The guiding spirit for this is usually assumed to have been Andrew Melville, former exile in Geneva and close ally of Beza, although there is little direct evidence to show that he did direct these developments. But from the 1570s onwards it was thought that the promotion of reform meant endowing the pastoral ministry at the expense of the remnants of the pre-Reformation church, and making it more answerable to the needs of the flock. This created a pressure to transform the kirk sessions, weekly exercises, superintendents and General Assembly into a fully developed Presbyterian church.29
Melville was certainly influential in the General Assembly which adopted the second Book of Discipline in 1578. This stated that the authority of the kirk flowed directly from God and had no temporal lord, and condemned the office of bishop. Bishops were excluded from the General Assembly and from 1581 membership depended on nomination from the kirk sessions. The political influence of Presbyterians was enhanced during a Catholic scare around 1580, when the dominance of the Earl of Lennox in secular affairs seemed to threaten rapprochement with the Roman church. In 1581 a Negative Confession was drawn up, denouncing popery in general and in a number of particular forms, and Lennox agreed to subscribe, again seeming to confirm that the kirk, not the civil power, was the guardian of the reformed faith.30 It was to become a key text in the Covenanting crisis, a benchmark of shared belief, promoted in the face of an ungodly civil power.
Although the General Assembly could adopt the second Book of Discipline as a programme, it would require crown and Parliament to give it legal force and the assembly certainly could not prevent the continued appointment of bishops by the crown. In 1582 Lennox was overthrown as a result of the Ruthven Raid, in which several prominent Presbyterian nobles, led by William Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, abducted James VI while he was staying at Ruthven’s castle. The King was kept in captivity for a year and during that time government was in Ruthven’s hands. A series of pro-Presbyterian proclamations followed, but when James was eventually free of the power of the Raiders he quickly revealed a determination to curb Presbyterianism. Legislation the following year (later known as the Black Acts) reasserted episcopal and royal authority. An Act of 1592 recognized the jurisdiction of Presbyterian courts and removed the bishops” jurisdiction, but did not acknowledge that Presbyterian discipline drew its authority directly from God. Neither did it abolish episcopacy, and although the General Assembly was given a statutory authority to assemble every year, the crown could still name the time and place of the meeting.31
James’s hostility to Melville’s views is often attributed to his political rather than strictly theological preferences. Indeed, there were few if any monarchs who would have welcomed Presbyterianism, because it was associated with ‘two kingdoms’ theory. The initial triumph of Protestantism, and the subsequent elaboration of Calvinist reform in Scotland, had come in opposition to a weakened monarch (and, indeed, with the military help of the English). Doctrines stressing a very clear separation of church and state were therefore a particularly worrying threat to monarchical authority in Scotland, where the nobility had plenty of recent ‘form’ in this respect. At a conference in 1596 Melville notoriously told James that he was ‘God’s silly vassal’: His