“THE Autobiography and Diary of James Melvill,” apart from the great interest it has for the student of Church history, is a work of rare literary execution. Its graphic pictures of important events, its skilful and masterly pen portraits of the leading men of the time, make the work one of the most interesting in the early ecclesiastical literature of our nation. But undoubtedly its chief interest lies in the account it gives of ecclesiastical matters and the distinguished part his uncle, “Mr. Andro,” played in them. The work covers the important period from 1556 to 1601. These were years when momentous events took place, affecting the destiny of the Church of Scotland.
James Melvill was one of the sons of the Rev. Richard Melvill, of Baldovy, minister of the parish of Maryton, near Montrose. In his Autobiography, a simple, unaffected account is given of his early life and education. He received the rudiments of his education at Logie and Montrose. According to information supplied by Dr. Lee to the editor of the Autobiography, it would appear that Melvill matriculated as a student at St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews, in 1569, though Melvill in his Diary mentions the year 1571. On the appointment of his uncle, Andrew Melvill, to the Principalship of Glasgow University, James, at the early age of nineteen, was appointed Regent, to teach Greek, Logic, and Rhetoric. Dr. M’Crie, in his Life of Melvill, informs us that he was the first Regent in Scotland who read the Greek authors in the original language to his class. In 1580, when his uncle returned to St. Andrews, James was appointed Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages in the same University. Six years afterwards he was ordained minister of the parish of Anstruther-Wester. His predecessor, Wood, had charge of the additional parishes of Pittenweem, Abercrombie, and Kilrenny. Melvill exerted himself to get ministers placed in three of the parishes under his charge, and in 1590 restricted himself to the ministerial duties of the parish of Kilrenny. The people of Anstruther-Wester felt the matter keenly, and a Minute of the Kirk-Session tells us what feelings took possession of the parishioners. “Mr. James Melvill took his good-night from this congregation the said month of October, 1590, and took him to Kilrenny to be their minister. God forgive him for doing so! For I know and saw him promise that he should never leave us for any worldly respect so long as he lived, except he was forced by the Kirk and his Majesty; but never being forced either by Kirk or his Majesty, left us.”
The noble and courageous stand which James Melvill took in resisting the many plans of designing men for the overthrow of Presbyterianism in Scotland is somewhat obscured, as he is usually found acting alongside of his distinguished relative, Andrew Melvill; but the reader of the ecclesiastical history of Scotland must be blind indeed if he does not feel that here we have a man who, for courage and devoted loyalty to the cause of truth, was second only to Knox’s great successor. In the Autobiography the part he played in the events of the time is narrated with becoming modesty and dignity, and if he can get in a good word for “my uncle, Mr. Andro,” he does not seem to be much concerned about his own honour. In 1584, along with other ministers, he had to flee from Scotland, and spent the years of his banishment at Newcastle and Berwick. It was while at the former place he lost the wife of his youth, Elizabeth Dury. She was the daughter of John Dury, minister of Edinburgh, and had been married to James Melvill in 1583. His reference to his first meeting with the girl who was afterwards to prove such a devoted wife and helpmeet to him, is interesting. “Taken with the godly order,” he tells us, “and exercise in the family of John Dury, and with that careful walking with God I saw in him, as also with some appearance of God’s fear and honesty I saw in the face and manners of the bairn—being about eleven or twelve years of age—I resolved with my God to settle my heart there, take her for my love, and put all other out of my heart; and this almost four years before our marriage.”1 About two years after his first wife’s death he married Deborah Clerke, daughter of the then deceased Rev. Richard Clerke, A.B., Vicar of Berwick-on-Tweed. His uncle was strongly opposed to the match, as may be learned from the correspondence that passed between him and his nephew at this time, an extract of which will be found in Dr. M’Crie’s Life of Andrew Melvill. In Calderwood’s History of the Church of Scotland it is recorded that in October, 1607, Sir John Anstruther was sent with the offer of a bishopric to James Melvill. But, true to his principles, Melvill preferred banishment to the bishop’s mitre and the ease and comfort such a position might secure him. He might have stood very high in the favour of the Court had he been willing to barter his principles, but when truth was at stake, James Melvill knew nothing of the fawning servility of courtiers, and his plain-spoken words, though not so pointed as his uncle’s, must have been anything but pleasant in the ears of James VI. It is told of him that on one occasion after an interview with the King, James was heard to say to some of his courtiers:—”This is a good simple man. I have streaked cream in his mouth! I’ll warrant you he will procure a number of votes for me to-morrow.” But James had mistaken his man, for when the time to vote came, Melvill voted directly against the Court measure. On another occasion, since persuasion failed, the King resorted to threatening, and, in order to intimidate Melvill, he was informed that the King had placed one of his letters in the hands of the Lord Advocate with the intention of prosecuting Melvill. But so little effect had the matter on him that Sir Robert Murray, who had been deputed to report the proceedings of the Synod of Fife to the King, informed His Majesty that James Melvill had become more fiery than his uncle.1
In January of 1614 James Melvill passed from the troubled scene of ecclesiastical politics to his everlasting rest. In the Account of the Last Illness and Death of Mr. James Melvill2 we are told how this faithful servant went down to the bridgeless river, what friends accompanied him thither, and what hope he had as he bade them a long farewell. But as Dr. M’Crie in his own masterly way has summed up the happenings of those last days, a quotation from his Life of Andrew Melvill may be permitted. “A letter,” he says, “from Sir James Fullerton, which he (Mr. Andrew) received in the month of April, 1614, gave a shock to his feelings which it required all his fortitude to bear. His dearest friend and most affectionate and dutiful nephew, James Melvill, was no more. His health had for some time been in a state of decline, which was accelerated by grief at the issue of public affairs in Scotland which his extreme sensibility disposed him to brood over with too intense and exclusive interest. In consequence of the importunity of his friends, and an apparently earnest invitation from Archbishop Gladstanes, he set out for Edinburgh, in the beginning of the year 1614, to arrange matters for his return to Kilrenny, or, if this was found impracticable, to make permanent provision for that parish. But he had not gone far when he was taken so ill as to be unable to proceed on the journey, and with difficulty returned to Berwick. The medicines applied could not impede the progress of the distemper, which soon exhibited alarming symptoms. He received the intimation of this with the most perfect composure, and told his friends that he was not only resigned to the will of God, but satisfied that he could not die at a more proper season. On Wednesday the 19th of January, he ‘set his house in order’; and all his children being present, except his son Andrew (who was prosecuting his theological studies at Sedan), he gave them his dying charge and parental blessing. His brother-in-law, Joseph Durie, minister at St. Andrews, and Hume of Ayton, a gentleman who had showed him great kindness during his residence at Berwick, waited by his bedside. He was much employed in prayer. When he mentioned the Church of Scotland, he prayed for repentance and forgiveness to those who had caused a schism in it, by overturning its reformed discipline. And, addressing those around him, said: ‘In my life, I ever detested and resisted the hierarchy, as a thing unlawful and anti-Christian, for which I am an exile; and I take you all to witness that I die in the same judgment.’ He made particular mention of his uncle at Sedan; he gave him a high commendation for learning, but still more for courage and constancy in the cause of Christ; and prayed that God would continue and increase the gifts bestowed on him. In the midst of the acute bodily pain which he endured, during that night and the succeeding morning, he expressed his resignation and confidence, chiefly in the language of Scripture; and often repeated favourite sentences from the Psalms in Hebrew. Being reminded of the rupture of the Apostle Paul, he said: ‘Every one is not a Paul; yet I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, and I am assured that I shall enter into glory.’ ‘Do you not wish to be restored to health?’ said one of the attendants. ‘No; not for twenty worlds!’ Perceiving nature to be nearly exhausted, his friends requested him to give them a token that he departed in peace; upon which he repeated the last words of the martyr Stephen, and breathed gently away. He died in the fifty-ninth year of his age, and in the eighth year of his banishment.” So died the man concerning whom Calderwood said: “He was one of the wisest directors of Kirk affairs that our Kirk had in his time, and for that cause was ever employed by the General Assemblies and other public meetings appointed by the King and General Assemblies.”
Mr. Pitcairn, in his prefatory notice to the Autobiography and Diary published by the Wodrow Society, gives a list of Melvill’s writings, with bibliographical notes. His chief work, apart from the Diary, was his Ad Serenissimum Jacobum primum, Britanniaram Monarcham, Ecclesiae Scoticanae Libellus Supplex, apologetikos kai olophurtikos. This work was not published until 1645, many years after his death. Dr. M’Crie describes it as written “in an elegant and impressive style.” Melvill also wrote a number of poems, but none of them, says the same authority, rises above mediocrity with the exception of some parts of his Black Bastill or a Lamentation of the Kirk of Scotland. Melvill’s claim to be remembered as an author, however, lies in his Autobiography and Diary. This work, as has already been noticed, was published by the Wodrow Society in 1842 under the editorship of Robert Pitcairn, F.S.A.Scot. In preparing the work for the press, the editor made use of the MSS. preserved in the Libraries of the Faculty of Advocates and the University of Edinburgh. The first part of the work consists of the Autobiography and Diary of Mr. James Melvill. The second part of the work as published by the Wodrow Society is Melville’s “True Narratioune of the Declyneing Aige of the Kirk of Scotland, from 1596 to 1610,” which has always been regarded as a continuation of the Autobiography.1 The edition of the Autobiography and Diary with the True Narratioune as published by the Wodrow Society retains the old Scottish spelling and the pithy vernacular idioms, but the modern reader is helped along by useful footnotes giving the meaning of words that look strange to us in these modern days.
The value of the Autobiography has been so well recognised by writers on the ecclesiastical affairs of Scotland that we find Calderwood and Row in their histories quoting very largely from it, while Dr. M’Crie, in his Life of Andrew Melvill, uses it as the groundwork of this biography. There are many reasons that inspire the reader with confidence in Melvill’s work. There is a fine conscientiousness about the man who acted such an important part in the great ecclesiastical events of his time. He awakens in his readers a profound feeling of respect, and his integrity allays any feeling of suspicion that this is a man who could play with the great facts of history. With a skill that is rare in ecclesiastical writings, he by a few masterly strokes sketched the portraits of some of the great men of his time. He had the good fortune to meet John Knox, and posterity has read with interest the graphic lines in which he has described the great Reformer. Thus he writes of Knox’s stay at St. Andrews in 1571: “But of all the benefits I had that year was the coming of that most notable prophet and apostle of our nation, Mr. John Knox, to St. Andrews; who, by the faction of the Queen occupying the castle and town of Edinburgh, was compelled to remove therefrom with a number of the best, and choosed to come to St. Andrews. I heard him teach there the prophecy of Daniel that summer, and the winter following. I had my pen and my little book and took away such things as I could comprehend. In the opening up of his text he was moderate the space of an half hour; but when he entered to application, he made me so to shudder and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write. I heard him oftimes utter these threatenings in the height of their pride, which the eyes of many saw clearly brought to pass within few years upon the Captain of that Castle, the Hamiltons and the Queen herself. He lodged down in the Abbey beside our College; and our Regents, Mr. Nicol Dalgleish, Mr. William Colace and Mr. John Davidson, went in ordinarily to his grace after dinner and supper. Our Regent tarried all the vacation to hear him, howbeit he had urgent affairs of his brother’s sons to handle, to whom he was tutor. Mr. Knox would sometimes come in and repose him in our College yard and call us scholars unto him and bless us and exhort us to know God and His work in our country and stand by the good cause, to use our time well and learn the good instructions and follow the good example of our masters.”1 His description of Knox in the pulpit is even more graphic and interesting: “Mr. Knox with his family,” he writes, “passed home to Edinburgh. Being in St. Andrews he was very weak. I saw him every day of his teaching go hulie and fear,1 with a furring of matricks about his neck, a staff in the one hand and good, godly Richard Ballanden, his servant, holding up the other oxtar, from the Abbey to the parish kirk; and by the said Richard and another servant, lifted up into the pulpit, where he behoved to lean at his first entry: but, or he had done with his sermon, he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit in blads and fly out of it.”2 From descriptions such as these one gets some idea of the extraordinary power Knox’s preaching had over his hearers. But the figure that stands out pre-eminent in James Melvill’s pages is Knox’s great successor—”My uncle Mr. Andro” as Melvill lovingly calls him. The ties that bound uncle and nephew together were of the tenderest nature. The uncle’s sorrows and trials were felt keenly by the nephew, and when death came to break the tender ties of deepest affection, the uncle mourned the loss of his nephew as one that had lost an only son, dearly and well beloved. The noble and courageous attitude of Andrew Melvill at some of the critical periods in Scotland’s ecclesiastical history are here narrated with a vividness that embalms them with undying interest. No Boswell ever sketched the career of his Johnson with deeper affection than did James Melvill that of his uncle, “Mr. Andro.”
One feels, after reading the Autobiography, that this Mr. Andro was a brave man—brave in the truest and highest sense; one who never trimmed his sails to favouring breezes if by so doing truth was compromised. He stands out before us rugged, like the granite rock, with none of the fawning airs of the courtier, but like one who owed allegiance to a greater than any earthly monarch. He had not learned the courtier’s fine-arts of saying smooth and pleasant things in the king’s ears when the interests of a kingdom and the greater interests of men’s souls demanded that matters should be presented as they really were. Here is one of James Melvill’s illustrations of “his heroic courage and stoutness.” “The Regent, seeing he could not divert him by benefits and offers, he calls for him a day indirectly, and after long discoursing upon the quietness of the country, peace of the Kirk, and advancement of the King’s Majesty’s estate, he breaks in upon such as were disturbers thereof by their conceits and far-fetched dreams, imitation of Genevan discipline and laws; and after some reasoning and grounds of God’s Word alleged, which irritated the Regent, he breaks out in choler and scolding: ‘There will never be quietness in this country till half-a-dozen of you be hanged or banished the country.’ ‘Tush, sir,’ says Mr. Andro, ‘threaten your courtiers after that manner. It is the same to me whether I rot in the air or in the ground. The earth is the Lord’s. Wherever my home is, it is well. I have been ready to give my life where it was not half so well spent, at the pleasure of my God. I lived ten years out of your country as well as in it. Let God be glorified, it will not be in your power to hang or exile His truth.”1 His famous admonition to King James at Falkland in 1596, when the banished papist lords were likely to be allowed to return to Scotland, is one of the great speeches in the cause of religious liberty. The Commission of the General Assembly had met at Couper and appointed some of their number to inform the king of the intentions of the papist noblemen. “So Messrs. Andrew Melvill, Patrick Galloway, James Nicolson, and I (James Melvill) came to Falkland, where we found the king very quiet. The rest laid the burden upon me to be the speaker, alleging that I could propose the matter substantiously, and in a mild and smooth manner, which the king liked best of. And entering into the cabinet with the king alone, I showed His Majesty that the Commissioners of the General Assembly, with certain other brethren ordained to watch for the welfare of the Kirk in so dangerous a time, had convened at Couper; at the which word the king interrupts me, and angrily quarrels our meeting, alleging it was without warrant and seditious, making ourselves and the country to conceive fear where there was no cause. To the which, I beginning to reply in my manner, Mr. Andrew could not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and irresistible a manner, that howbeit the king used his authority in a most crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but ‘God’s sillie vassall,’ and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, through much hot reasoning and many interruptions: ‘Sir, we will humbly reverence your Majesty always, namely, in public, but since we have this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is ye are brought in extreme danger, both of your life and crown, and with you the country and Kirk of Christ is like to become a wreck, for not telling you the truth and giving you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our duty therein, or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore, Sir, as divers times before, so now again, I must tell you there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus, the King, and His kingdom, the Kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king nor a lord nor a head, but a member. And they whom Christ has called and commanded to watch over His Kirk and govern His spiritual kingdom, have sufficient power from Him and authority so to do, both together and severally, the which no Christian king nor prince should control and discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise they are not faithful subjects or members of Christ. And, Sir, when ye were in your swaddling-clothes Christ Jesus reigned freely in this land in spite of all His enemies, and His officers and ministers convened and assembled for the ruling and weal of His Kirk, which was ever for your welfare, defence, and preservation also, when these same enemies were seeking your destruction and cutting off.”1
The Autobiography also contains ecclesiastical documents of much interest to the student, such as the “Heads and Conclusions of the Policie of the Kirk, MDLXXXI,” commonly known as the Second Book of Discipline; the “Ordor and Maner of Exercise of the Word for Instruction, and Discipline for Correction of Maners, used in the Companie of those Godlie and Noble Men of Scotland, in tyme of thair aboad in Englande, for the guid cause of God’s Kirk, thair King, and Country”; “Animadversions of Offences conceaved upon the Actes of Parliament maid in the year 1584, in the monethe of May, presented be the Commissioners of the Kirk to the King’s Majestie at the Parliament of Linlithgow, in December, 1585,” and many other documents of like import.
But the Autobiography is an intensely human piece of writing. Life’s joys and its poignant sorrows chase each other across these interesting pages. The mighty men of renown, who fought our battles for us, who bared their bosoms to the storm, and who felt within them the irrepressible longings to obey the loud trumpet-call of duty heralded from no earthly throne, have been generally regarded by many as men across whose countenances no kindly smile ever flitted, and whose homes were never brightened by innocent laughter. Here is a descriptive sketch of Bishop Adamson, who played with matters of high moment, in which Melvill’s sense of the ludicrous gets free scope. “Notwithstanding the king coming to St. Andrews about the end of July, and separating himself there from the lords that had seized about him at Ruthven, the Bishop becomes at once a whole man and occupies the pulpit before the king, lustily declaiming, as it was marked, in a possessed and enraged manner, against ministry, lords; and all their proceedings; and he that often professed from pulpit before that he had not the spirit of application, got the gift of application by inspiration of such a spirit as never spake in the Scriptures of God. And because it was reported for truth that the duke in Paris had died a Papist, he made open contradiction thereto, affirming for certain that he died a good Protestant, which he proved by showing a scroll in his hand which he called the duke’s will. But an honest, merchant woman, sitting before the pulpit and spying it narrowly, affirmed it was an account of a four-or-five-year-old debt that, a few days before, she had sent to him, whereof she got no more payment than the duke’s executors made her!”2
But James Melvill experienced the pang of life’s sorrows as well as its joys, and his account of the removal of a dearly-beloved child is given with all the tenderness of a father’s heart. “The bairn,” he says, “was extremely beautiful, loving and merry, and seemed to be of a fine sanguine constitution until three months after he was weaned; but since whether by worms or a hectic consumption, I know not, but his flesh and colour failed, and by the space of a quarter of a year consumed and pined away, keeping always the sweetest and pleasantest eye that could be in one’s head. I was accustomed to set him at the end of the table in time of dinner and supper as the Egyptians did the picture of death to acquaint me therewith; and yet when he died, I marvelled at my own heart that was so wrung and moved with it, so that yet, when I wrote this I was not free of the boundings of the bowels of that natural affection. And if we that are earthly worms can be so affected to our children, what a love bears that heavenly Father to His! He was my first present and offering to heaven. I cannot forget a strange thing at his death. I had a pair of fine milk-white doves, which I fed in the house. The one whereof that day of his death could not be kept from his cradle, but stopped from sitting above it, crept in and sat under it, and died with him. The other, at my home-coming on the morrow, as I was washing my hands, came, lighted at my feet, and piteously crying, “Pipe, pipe, pipe!” ran a little away from me. Then I called for peas and beans to give it, but they showed me it would not eat. I took it up and put a little in its mouth, but it shaked them out of its throat; and parting from me with a pitiful piping within two or three hours died also.” On this his “first gift and present to heaven,”1 he composed a few verses expressive of his deep sorrow:—
I set thee in my sight at even and morrow,
My heart to humble acquainting me with death;
But, O the love of parents! what a sorrow
Did seize on me, from once thou lost thy breath!
Oh! first like pleasant flower on earth thou grew
Then pined to death, with doves to heaven thou flew.
1 “Propyne and hansell” are the words used by Melvill, of which the above are equivalents, though not quite so expressive as the old words.