Rev K M Watkins
By the end of the fifteenth century, the truth of the gospel as taught by Wycliffe had taken root especially in the south west of Scotland. Resby and Craw, the Lollards martyred in 1407 and 1433 respectively, “had not died in vain. The simple evangelical doctrines of Wycliffe had spread in various districts of the country, and in no place so widely as the central part of Ayrshire called Kyle.”2
In 1494, Blackadder, Archbishop of Glasgow, accused no fewer than 30 persons before the King, nearly all from Kyle. Among them were men and women of the gentry. It is clear from the 34 “articles”, for which they were accused, why they were called the Lollards of Kyle. A few articles selected from the list given in full by Knox3 will demonstrate the direct connection from Wycliffe to Kyle.
Wycliffe witnessed against the pope; so do the Kyle articles: “12. The pope is not the successor of Peter, but where he said, Get behind me, Satan. 13. The pope deceives the people by his bulls and his indulgences. . . . 17. The pope exalts himself against God, and above God. . . . 32. The pope is the head of the Kirk of Antichrist.”
Wycliffe witnessed against Romanist idolatry; so do the articles: “1. Images are not to be had, nor yet to be worshipped. 2. The relics of saints are not to be worshipped. . . . 28. We should not pray to the glorious Virgin Mary, but to God only.”
Wycliffe witnessed against the mass; so do the articles: “6. Christ ordained no priests to consecrate. 7. After the consecration in the mass, there remains bread; and . . . not the natural body of Christ. . . . 14. The mass profits not the souls that are in purgatory. . . . 23. True Christians receive the body of Jesus Christ every day. . . . 31. Such as worship the Sacrament . . . commits idolatry.”
Wycliffe witnessed against pardon of sin being placed in the hands of men; so do the articles: “15. The pope and the bishops deceive the people by their pardons. . . . 18. The pope cannot remit the pains of purgatory. . . . 26. The pope forgives not sins, but only God.”
Wycliffe argued for the priesthood of all believers, with direct access to God through Christ; so do the articles: “10. Every faithful man or woman is a priest.”
Wycliffe argued against the Church having equal authority to Scripture; so do the articles: “30. We are not bound to believe all that the doctors of the Kirk have written.”
Some of the other articles were unjust accusations. Knox has been followed by others in demonstrating that, on the contrary, the Lollards of Kyle maintained Scriptural views of these matters,4 but as for those that are fairly stated, and which strike against Romanist corruptions, rightly does Calderwood say: “By these articles may appear that, in the time of greatest darkness, the Lord made the light of His truth to shine to some few, when prophecy and sound of preaching of the Word in public had decayed”.5 Knox had noted divine providence in the articles being recorded: “By these Articles, which God of His merciful providence caused the enemies of His truth to keep in their registers, may appear how mercifully God hath looked upon this Realm, retaining within it some sponk6 of His light, even in the time of greatest darkness”.7 “The men who held these views,” says Hay Fleming, “had travelled a long way on the road which led to Protestantism.”8 Workman stated, “They had not departed widely from Wycliffe’s teaching”.9
1This is the third and final part of a paper given at the Theological Conference in October 2014. The first two parts outlined Wycliffe’s life and witness and the spread of his doctrine to Scotland during the first half of the fifteenth century.
2John Macpherson, A History of the Church in Scotland, Paisley, 1901, p 70.
3John Knox’s Works, edited by D Laing, Wodrow Society, 1846, pp 8-10.
As for the trial itself, Adam Reid did most of the speaking for the Lollards, and was given Wycliffe-like wisdom against their adversaries. “Adam Reid appears to have taken the chief part in the defence, and to have answered with such spirit, point, and humour, as to amuse [King] James, and baffle the bishop, completely.”10 MacEwan cites an example: “Blackadder charged Reid with not believing that God is in heaven, to which Reid retorted that he believed that God was both in heaven and on earth, whereas Blackadder and his faction believed not that God was on earth: otherwise they would not play the proud prelate and neglect the charge of Christ to preach the gospel”.11 Echoes of Wycliffe’s voice are unmistakable.
4Knox, Works, pp 8-11.
5David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, Wodrow Society, 1842, p 51.
6Sponk “literally meant a spark of fire, but its early uses in Scots were largely figurative” for “a spark . . . a trace . . . of something”. Perspectives on the Older Scottish Tongue, ed Christian J Kay and Margaret A Mackay, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p 14.
7Knox, Works, vol 1, p 10.
8D Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1910, p 26.
9Herbert B Workman, John Wyclif, a Study of the English Medieval Church, vol 1, Clarendon Press, 1926, p 11.
Their spirited defence, along with the fact that some of them were known to the King12 meant that they escaped punishment. Besides, “the young King . . . was not of the stuff of which inquisitors are made, and he good-naturedly contrived to end the trial in a jest”.13 They were set free, with a warning to be content with the Church’s teaching, and not to adopt any of the new doctrines. Calderwood ascribes all to the grace of God: “The Lord inclined the King’s heart to favour them . . . The Lord also assisted them with boldness and courage, to answer to their accusers with liberty.”14
10William M Hetherington, History of the Church of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1843, p 11.
11Alexander R MacEwan, A History of the Church in Scotland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1913, vol 1, p 384.
Archbishop Blackadder feared where this would lead. From his point of view, his fears were not groundless. “This was a signal triumph to the Lollards. The trial made their principles better known in the country than ever they had been before; and . . . mightily quickened their progress.”15 “They were the real progenitors of the great reformation which, in a little more than half a century, was to raze to the ground the whole structure of the Romish Church in Scotland.”16
12Knox says they were his “great familiars”. Knox, Works, vol 1, p 11.
13Hume Brown, History of Scotland, Cambridge, 1902, vol 1, p 9.
14Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol 1, p 53.
So by the advent of the Reformation century, Wycliffe’s scriptural teachings of the gospel had already spread in Scotland. “The Lollards of Kyle in Ayrshire were claimed by Knox as the forerunners of the Scotch Reformation.”17 “To these Lollards of Kyle John Knox looked back as to his spiritual ancestors.”18 David Calderwood, speaking from the vantage point of the seventeenth century, put it like this: “We may see, that Luther is not the first author of our new religion, as the Papists call it, nor Mr Patrick Hamilton the first that professed it”.19 Of course, no one claims that Lollard light was equal to Reformation light. “It was the teaching and death of Hamilton that . . . decisively marked the beginning of the Reformation in Scotland.”20 Still, the followers of Wycliffe set the backdrop for the sixteenth-century Reformation.
15William Marshall, Wycliffe and the Lollards, Edinburgh, 1884, p 99.
16Macpherson, A History of the Church in Scotland, p 71.
One of the named Lollards of Kyle, George Campbell of Cessnock, had a son called John who was himself “notable . . . for his uncommon piety”, and had a chaplain “who used to read and expound the New Testament in the vernacular to him and his family”.21 Possessing the Bible in the common tongue, along with New Testament exposition, firmly places John Campbell in his father’s Wycliffite tradition.
17Encyclopedia Britannica, 1902, entry on Lollards by T M Lindsay, downloaded 21 October 2014 from: http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/L/LOL/lollards.html.
18Hume Brown, History of Scotland, vol 1, p 303.
19Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol 1, p 55.
20Hume Brown, History of Scotland, vol 1, p 373.
Sometime around 1500, this John Campbell, together with his wife and chaplain, were put on trial for heresy, during which he appealed to the King. John Campbell, however, had not been blessed with the gift of ready utterance, and, joined with a timidity of character, he could put his defence only weakly. However, the King then turned to his wife. Says Alesius: “So clearly and convincingly, by quotations from Scripture, did she disprove the charges made, that the King not only acquitted . . . all accused, but even rose and embraced the lady, greatly praised her study of Christian doctrine, and sharply chid the monks, threatening to take severe measures against them if they ever afterwards caused trouble of that sort to honest and innocent people”.22 Says D’Aubigné: “The brave Scotchwoman had fought a battle . . . and sounded the prelude to the Reformation.”23 And how had she done it? By reading the Bible for herself in her own tongue – one of Wycliffe’s key contentions.
21From the letter by Alexander Ales (also known as Alesius) to James V in the 1530s, in Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland, pp 27-29. Alesius was won to the Reformation cause by Patrick Hamilton’s arguments and martyrdom.
The Campbells of Cessnock were not “the only family which had a written copy of the New Testament in the vernacular”.24 A man called Murdoch Nisbet, of Hardhill, again in Ayrshire, imbibed Lollard doctrine about 1500. He fled overseas, probably to Germany, 13 years later, taking with him a copy of Wycliffe’s version of the New Testament modified into the Scots language. He had appended to it a translation of Luther’s prologue to his German Bible. On his return to Scotland, Nisbet had a vault dug under his house, where he read his book and instructed those who came to him. It would not be long before Tyndale’s New Testament would arrive in Scotland, but already the seed of God’s Word was being sown in the south west, thanks to Wycliffe’s endeavours. “Thus in Scotland, as well as in England and Bohemia, Wycliffe’s life-work was linked on with the larger reformation of which he was in popular opinion the ‘Morning Star’. Wycliffe’s revolt was not the ‘isolated movement’ without lasting effect which some historians have represented it to be.”25
22Quoted in Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland, p 28.
23D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Time of Calvin, London, 1875, vol 6, p 27.
It is no coincidence that Wishart and Knox were later to find such a ready audience for Reformation doctrine in Ayrshire. “It is not without desert of due commendation,” Calderwood comments, “that Mr Knox, in his History, calleth Kyle ‘an old receptacle to the servants of God'”.26 Hume Brown says: “It was in Ayrshire that George Wishart and [John Knox] were one day to find the quickest response to that teaching which was to issue in the ruin of the ancient Church”.27 Wishart preached there; and in his visit to Scotland in 1556, Knox preached in a number of houses in Kyle and in Ayr itself. In several places he even found people to whom he could dispense the Lord’s Supper in a scriptural manner.
24Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland, p 30.
25Workman, John Wyclif, a Study of the English Medieval Church, vol 1, pp 11-12.
Another circumstance in the south west takes us all the way to the Second Reformation in the seventeenth century. Samuel Rutherford was to find a welcome for his gospel labours there, and even that was connected with Wycliffe. Included among Rutherford’s correspondents were the Gordons, of Earlston. It is recounted that hidden in a wall at the old castle of Earlston was found a copy of Wycliffe’s Bible. “It seems,” writes A A Bonar in his “Sketch of Rutherford’s Life” prefaced to his edition of the Letters, “that the Lollards of Kyle . . . had brought it to Earlston. We know that there were friends and members of the family of Earlston who embraced the gospel even in those days.”28 Wodrow confirms this: the Gordons of Earlston “used to entertain the disciples of Wycliffe, and had a New Testament in the vulgar tongue, which they used in reading at meetings in the woods about Earlston House”.29
26Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol 1, p 55.
27Hume Brown, History of Scotland, vol 1, p 303.
Bonar makes the connection clear: “In the sixteenth century, some of the ancestors of Viscount Kenmure are found holding the doctrines of Wycliffe, which had been handed down to them. May we not believe that the Gordons of Earlston, in after days, were not a little indebted to the faith and prayers of these ancient witnesses who hid the sacred treasure in the castle wall? . . . Their faith and patience were acknowledged in after days by the blessing sent down on that quarter, when the Lord, in remembrance of His hidden ones, both raised up the Gordons of Earlston, with many others of a like spirit, and also sent thither His servant Samuel Rutherford, to sound forth the word of life, and make the lamp of truth blaze, like a torch, over all that region.”30
28Letters of Samuel Rutherford, Banner of Truth reprint, 1984, p 2.
29Quoted by J C Carrick, Wycliffe and the Lollards, New York, 1908, p 268.
It should also be noted that a number of the sufferers for Christ’s crown and covenant in the second half of the seventeenth century could trace their roots to Lollard ancestors in the south west. John Nisbet, a great-grandson of Murdoch Nisbet of Hardhill, mentioned above, fought at Rullion Green, Drumclog and Bothwell, before being martyred at the Edinburgh Grass-market in 1685. Likewise, William Gordon, “lineally descended from that famous Alexander Gordon who entertained the followers of John Wycliffe” at Earlston, mentioned above, was persecuted for his faithfulness to Christ. In 1667 he “was turned out of his house and all” before he was killed 12 years later.31 Thus Wycliffe’s influence on Scottish faithfulness can be traced even into covenanting times.
30Letters of Samuel Rutherford, p 2.
Fife was another part of Scotland where Lollardy took hold before the Reformation. John Andrew Duncan was the son of the laird of Airdrie, in Fife. He was taken to England, to Beverley in Yorkshire, where he imbibed Wycliffe’s doctrines and became a Lollard. On his return to Fife he was very close to Patrick Hamilton. As a result, it has been argued, “Hamilton was strongly prepossessed in favour of the new doctrines”32 – that is, the Wycliffite doctrines for which Hamilton was soon to give his life. Thomas M’Crie maintains that Duncan made an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Hamilton from his captors, saying that “in Fife the [Lollards] were so numerous as to have formed the design of rescuing Patrick Hamilton by force on the day of his execution”.33
31John Howie, Scots Worthies, Edinburgh, 1870, pp 403-409.
M’Crie also wrote, “We have been accustomed to suppose that Patrick Hamilton was the first who introduced the Reformed opinions into Scotland, that he acquired them abroad, and that they were embraced by very few of his countrymen previously to his martyrdom. This opinion requires to be corrected. Before that youthful and zealous Reformer made his appearance, the errors and corruptions of Popery had been detected by others, who were ready to co-operate with him in his measures of reform. The more the subject is investigated, the more clearly, I am persuaded, it will appear that the opinions of Wycliffe had a powerful and extensive influence upon the Reformation. Even in Scotland they contributed greatly to predispose the minds of men to the Protestant doctrine.”34
32Marshall, Wycliffe and the Lollards, pp 100-101.
33Thomas M’Crie, Works, Edinburgh and London, 1856, vol 2, p 405.
Wycliffe the Englishman never set foot on Scottish soil. But his influence most certainly did, preparing the way for the Reformation in Scotland, the purest of them all. “Link by link the Lollard influence in Scotland can be traced back to the very days of Wycliffe himself.”35 Thus our scriptural testimony today can be traced back more than 600 years, to what the Lord did through Wycliffe, that godly man of the 1300s.
34M’Crie, Works, vol 2, p 4.
35Carrick, Wycliffe and the Lollards, p 268.