that after the fall of
Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church Government had been established by
law, the rank, and especially the wealth, of the Bishops, Abbots, Priors, and so
forth, were no longer vested in ecclesiastics, but in lay impropriators of the
church revenues, or, as the Scottish lawyers called them, titulars of the
temporalities of the benefice, though having no claim to the spiritual character
of their predecessors in office.
Of these laymen, who were thus invested with ecclesiastical revenues, some were
men of high birth and rank, like the famous Lord James Stewart, the Prior of St.
Andrews, who did not fail to keep for their own use the rents, lands, and
revenues of the church. But if, on the other hand, the titulars were men of
inferior importance, who had been inducted into the office by the interest of
some powerful person, it was generally understood that thenew Abbot should grant
for his patron's benefit such leases and conveyances of the church lands and
tithes as might afford their protector the lion's share of the booty. This was
the origin of those who were wittily termed Tulchan Bishops, being a sort of
imaginary prelate, whose image was set up to enable his patron and principal to
plunder the benefice under his name.
There were other cases, however, in which men who had got grants of these
secularised benefices, were desirous of retaining them for their own use,
without having the influence sufficient to establish their purpose; and these
became frequently unable to protect themselves, however unwilling to submit to
the exactions of the feudal tyrant of the district.
Bannatyne, secretary to John Knox, recounts a singular course of oppression
practised on one of those titular abbots (in 1571) by the Earl of Cassilis in
Ayrshire, whose extent of feudal influence was so wide that he was usually
termed the King of Carrick. We give the fact as it occurs in Bannatyne's
Journal, only premising that the Journalist held his master's opinions, both
with respect to the Earl of Cassilis as an opposer of the King's party, and as
being a detester of the practice of granting church revenues to titulars,
instead of their being devoted to pious uses, such as the support of the clergy,
expense of schools, and the relief of the national poor. He mingles in the
narrative, therefore, a well-deserved feeling of execration against the tyrant
who employed the torture, with a tone of ridicule towards the patient, as if,
after all, it had not been ill bestowed on such an equivocal and