2. Ministry in Kirkcudbright
Welsh was one of the 400 commissioners to the General Assembly of 1596 and so he would have joined in their solemn confession of the sins of all ranks within the realm, and especially of the sins of the ministers. They renewed with uplifted hands their covenant with God, engaging thereafter “to walk more warily in their ways and more diligently in their charges”. “While they were humbling themselves,” declares David Calderwood, the Church historian, “for the space of a quarter of an hour there were such sighs and sobs, with shedding of tears, among the most part of all estates that were present, everyone provoking another by his example . . . that the kirk resounded, so that the place might worthily have been called Bochim; for the like of that day was never seen in Scotland since the Reformation, as every man confessed.”
Welsh saw this Assembly as the high point of the prosperous course of the Reformed Church in Scotland. “O Scotland,” he exclaimed, “what nation was like unto thee, that had the gospel so freely preached, Christ’s sacraments so purely ministered, His censures and all the privileges of His kingdom in such liberty executed, as thou has had? For what one nation under heaven has God done so great things as for thee? What one kingdom is to be found in the whole earth where idolatry was so fully rooted out, where all the means of His glory and all the privileges of His kingdom were so fully restored to their own integrity and perfection, as they were first instituted, wherein all these means of the Word, sacraments and discipline have continued for so long a space in such peace, in such purity, in such liberty, without heresy or schism, as in thee, O Scotland?”
The Assembly appointed Welsh a member of a “Commission for the Visitation of Kirks”, whose duty it was to visit the most spiritually destitute parts of the country, for there were large areas where the impact of the Reformation was very limited, to say the least. Welsh was assigned to a large district of the Borders, along with five other ministers who included John Davidson of Prestonpans, Moderator of the 1596 Assembly.
From that time the King interfered more and more in the affairs of the Scottish Church, with drastic consequences for her purity, liberty and peace. The change followed the death of Chancellor Maitland, declared by James Melville to have been “a great instrument in keeping the King out of the Church and from favouring of Papists”. The King took the opportunity to begin putting into effect that project which was so close to his heart — of removing the Presbyterianism of the Church of Scotland and replacing it with Prelacy, which, he rightly judged, would be more amenable to his desire to have everything in Church and state under his control. And in that he was correct. To take Maitland’s place in the government of the country he appointed eight men — hence called the Octavians — of whom, said James Melville, “the one half were suspected Papists, and the rest little better.” Yet it was only six years earlier that the King had declared that he “praised God that he was born in such a time . . . to such a place as to be King in such a Kirk, the sincerest Kirk in the world. . . . And I . . . so long as I possess my life and crown, shall maintain the same against all.”
The first victim of the King’s new policy was David Black, minister of St Andrews, “a man”, we are told, “mighty in doctrine and of singular fidelity and diligence in the ministry”. After Black was summoned to appear before the King and the Privy Council for allegedly abusing the freedom of the pulpit, the Commission of the General Assembly decided that it would be their wisdom to continue to meet in Edinburgh to keep an eye on proceedings. They were afraid that “the free preaching of the Word and the doctrine of all ministers” would be brought “under the same censure and control” (of the King). The commissioners were soon ordered out of Edinburgh. They disobeyed the order the first time it was given, but when it was repeated they decided that it would be wiser to submit, knowing that other faithful men would take their place. Welsh was one of those who stepped into their shoes.
Shortly afterwards Welsh was appointed to preach on the Sabbath in the pulpit so long occupied by his father-in-law — that of St Giles’. One of Welsh’s fellow-ministers, John Forbes of the Aberdeenshire town of Alford, a man who is yet to appear prominently in our story, reported, “Mr John Welsh both gravely, wisely and solidly, in great liberty and freedom of the Spirit . . . uttered the counsel and will of God to His Majesty and his counsellors, not sparing to rebuke their known enormities”. This could not have been meant to imply that the King was present, for at the time he was resident in the palace at Linlithgow.
News, however, reached him the following day that Welsh had asserted “that His Majesty was possessed with a devil, and that after the outputting of that devil, there joined to His Highness seven devils, which were His Majesty’s Council, using this example, that as it was lawful for sons having a frantic father to bind him, so it was lawful for His Highness’s subjects to bind His Majesty, who was in the like case.” Welsh’s biographer assumes that this report was made “by one of the court spies, who were employed at this crisis to take notes of what was said in the pulpits and who, it may be presumed, were more disposed to please their masters than scrupulous about accuracy”. Orders were at once given for Welsh’s arrest, but he fled in time to some now-unknown hiding place.
The Privy Council soon despatched a messenger to Kirkcudbright to summon him before the King and Council, charged “touching certain speeches given out by him in the pulpit” of St Giles’. He was also charged with involvement in a disturbance which had taken place the day before Welsh preached that sermon. Welsh could not expect justice in these circumstances, so he did not appear. Accordingly he was put to the horn, that is, he was proclaimed an outlaw, and his possessions were confiscated and given to a relation of his wife. Six months later he was declared to be no longer an outlaw after a painstaking inquiry — in the course of which many statements were taken from witnesses — had shown that no conspiracy whatever lay behind the disturbance in Edinburgh.
At some time in 1598 a man in Welsh’s congregation was in discussion with a Roman Catholic who declared that, if Welsh could prove that anyone had professed the Reformed faith before Martin Luther, then he himself would give up his religion. The man told Welsh about the conversation and asked him to put down in writing what might convince the Roman Catholic, who seemed to be sincere but ignorant. Welsh gladly drew up a document to demonstrate what the man wanted to know, something which was not particularly difficult to prove: that the Reformed faith is as old as the New Testament. When he sent it on to the Roman Catholic it somehow fell into the hands of Gilbert Brown, Abbot of the nearby Newabbey. Brown was one of the more able controversialists that the Roman party possessed at the time, but when Welsh saw the reply to his paper he quickly realised that the Abbot’s arguments were weak. “I thought it surely the Lord’s good providence”, Welsh later declared to Brown, “that . . . now by writing you have set your foot into the battle, who have been such a sore enemy to the gospel of Jesus Christ in the country of Nithsdale and Galloway and have resisted the preaching of it vehemently, that it may be seen that but darkness was your strength, and lies (were) the foundation of your religion.”
Welsh felt that the easiest way of carrying on the controversy was to engage in personal discussion, and so one day he and another minister made their way to Newabbey, but the Abbot made an excuse and declined to debate. Instead Welsh devoted what time he could spare from other duties during the next 15 months to preparing a detailed Reply to the Abbot’s Answer. No less a person than King James strongly encouraged Welsh to have the volume printed; he examined the manuscript and in a friendly spirit suggested some corrections and improvements.
Printed in 1602, it was the first handbook against Roman Catholicism published in Scotland. It is worth noticing God’s providence at this point, for if Brown had been willing to stand against Welsh in debate it is unlikely that this book would ever have been written, and Scotland would have been for some time longer without a reference book for the points at issue in Romish controversy.
The book does show some signs of the hurried way it was put together, but we can quote W K Tweedie’s assessment in 1845: “The work indicates both Welsh’s acuteness as a controversialist and his learning as a theologian. . . . Divested of some of the peculiarities of those times, it would still form an admirable handbook of the whole Popish controversy. The amount of Welsh’s learning, as indicated by its frequently subtle (in the old sense of ingenious) and elaborate treatise, is a matter of surprise. . . . He underrated his antagonist when he speaks of him as unlearned; for though Brown was no match for him, either in acuteness or in learning, he must have been one of the most respectable men of his order as a scholar. Perhaps with a few retrenchments, this treatise, embodying the arguments of Brown, would, if republished, afford as complete a view of the Popish controversy on both sides of the question, as could be found in any single volume of the same size.” The work was indeed republished before the nineteenth century was over, in 1878, under the new title The Morning Star.
Welsh sent a copy of the Reply to the Abbot with a letter dated 6 August 1599, begging him to come out of Babylon so that he would not be partaker of her woes. He went on, “I desire of you that, if you are ever able to put to your hand to make an answer, you set down mine word for word and answer every point thereof severally as I have set your’s down here. . . . Otherwise I will take it for . . . a manifest demonstration that you are convicted in your conscience of the truth of our doctrine and of the falsehood of your own.” The Abbot did not continue the controversy; one assumes he felt unable to do so, although he had earlier been confident enough to describe himself as a “defender of the Catholic faith.”
The General Assembly which met at Montrose in March 1600 appointed Welsh and his friend Robert Wallace of Glenluce to visit Nithsdale “to inquire into the life, doctrine and qualifications of the ministers within the said bounds; to try the sayers and hearers of the mass within the same; and to plant and transport ministers into such places as they shall think most expedient for the glory of God, and the weal of the Kirk”. The two ministers discharged their responsibilities as well as they could, but in a district where Roman Catholics were so numerous and powerful, and where Welsh’s predecessor, David Blyth had been one of the two ministers who had met a violent death only a few years before, it was quite out of the question to attempt anything against the supporters of the mass without an armed guard, which of course they did not have.
It was this General Assembly of 1600 which appointed commissioners to investigate whether a call to Welsh from Ayr should be placed in his hands. After visiting Kirkcudbright the commissioners decided that Welsh should be translated to Ayr as quickly as possible. They would have recognised the great significance of Ayr, for at that time it was second only to Glasgow in importance in the west of Scotland. Welsh mourned over how little he had achieved in Kirkcudbright. In his letter to Gilbert Brown he had expressed himself thus: “It is a lamentable and pitiable thing to see the glorious gospel of God’s dear Son, our Saviour, so obscured and darkened in this country of Nithsdale and Galloway with the smoke (see Rev. 9:2) of the kingdom of darkness of yours, that has ascended . . . out of the bottomless pit, to their eternal damnation who are blinded and deceived thereby. I have sorrow in my heart for it, and it is my earnest desire to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that once in His mercy the smoke of that furnace may be scattered by the light of His glorious gospel.”
However, it is indeed recorded that in Kirkcudbright Welsh’s “labours were singularly blessed of God, for many were brought by his ministry to see the error, superstition and idolatry of Popery, and to embrace the truth; and many were really converted to God, and others were edified and built up, confirmed, comforted and strengthened; so that he, as a shining and burning light, did enlighten that whole country, which at that time was in many places destitute of pastors”. And when in 1627 Samuel Rutherford commenced his ministry in nearby Anworth he began to find among his hearers some who had once been members of Welsh’s congregation in Kirkcudbright. Many were the letters which Rutherford wrote to them from his northern prison of Aberdeen, for besides his correspondence with Marion M’Naught there were letters to people like the Gordons of Earlston and Cardoness.
It was when he was about to leave for Ayr that Welsh met young Robert Glendinning, just back from his travels on the Continent. A thoughtless young man, Glendinning was fashionably dressed in scarlet and silver lace. Welsh told him that he must give up his gay clothes and his present way of life, which was so lacking in true seriousness, and he must begin to study the Scriptures. And he is said to have added, “You will be my successor in Kirkcudbright”. Glendinning did in fact become in due course minister of Kirkcudbright, and was, we are told, “eminent for grace and gifts, for faithfulness and success”. Then it was no longer his great concern that others would look up to him and admire him, but that God would look down upon him graciously.
(To be continued)