Crown and papacy

In 1301 the immensely learned canon lawyer Master Baldred Bisset advised the Pope that the Scots had been converted to Christianity some 400 years before the English and that no fewer than thirty-six kings had ruled over the Scots while the English languished in paganism. In 1565 the Bishop of Dunblane, on a mission to raise a papal subsidy to aid a Catholic restoration under Mary, Queen of Scots, gave Pope Pius V much the same history lecture. For 1,364 years, ever since the pontificate of Victor I, he argued, a long and unbroken line of kings of Scots had protected the Church and defended the faith on behalf of the papacy.20 At least 400 years of this history were apocryphal, as was Pope Victor, but there was an essential truth amidst these durable historical myths. The papacy and the Scottish crown had long enjoyed a special relationship, and the emergence of a Scottish Church had owed as much to successive kings of Scots as they had relied on it to underpin their own authority. The Cum universi bull of Pope Celestine III, which in 1192 had established all the Scottish sees except Galloway as the "special daughter' of Rome, was reissued twice within the following thirty years, by Innocent III and Honorius III. In the process, Rome cast off the grand strategy of Pope Gregory the Great which had divided the whole of Britain into two provinces, controlled by bishops based in London and York. The twelfth century had also seen successive petitions sent to Rome by Scottish kings from Alexander I onwards as part of their resistance of claims to jurisdiction over the Scottish Church made by both Canterbury and York. It had been the encouragement given by the same kings to religious orders such as the Augustinians, with mother houses in England, and the appointment of a wave of Anglo-Norman bishops which had done much to encourage an English connection.

Papal recognition of the Scottish Church did not extend to the granting of metropolitan status to it. The anomaly of a national church, specifically under papal protection but lacking a metropolitan - which lasted until the erection of St Andrews into an archbishopric in 1472 - had two effects. It encouraged an unusually close liaison between Scotland and the papal court and representatives of both the Scottish Church and crown grew adept in the complex arts of lobbying in Rome; but it also resulted in a close interest expressed by Scottish kings in church appointments. The development after 1225 of a national provincial council of the Scottish Church, headed by a Conservator rather than an archbishop, had the effect of accelerating both tendencies. The council seems to have been ready to accept papal pressure for the centralisation of authority within the Church, usually in the form of either demands for papal taxation or the implementation of statutes for reform of the life and conduct of the clergy already enacted elsewhere.21 It also seems on occasion to have been used by both Alexander II and III as a channel of royal interest in ecclesiastical affairs. By the 1260s what would later come to be called the 'Conservator of the Privileges of the Scottish Church' had emerged, an office rotating amongst the bishops which exerted virtual archiepiscopal functions on behalf of the council. It is likely that these provincial councils developed a higher notion of their powers than Rome may have allowed, as well as an undoubted sense of group solidarity amongst the hierarchy which would be given practical effect in pleading the Scottish cause at Rome and elsewhere during the Wars of Independence.