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Patrick Primrose: A Dominican in Seventeenth‐century Scotland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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In August 1670 the Privy Council in Edinburgh considered reports that ‘Mr Patrick Primrose’ had been ‘used to say messe’ in ‘the house of Kinnairdie in the paroch of Aberchardour, within the shyre of Banff’. Indeed, ‘there is usuall resort publickly to masse every Lords day’; ‘four families of the heretours in the said paroch doe upon ringing of the bell goe to a roume in the said house where there is ane altar erected and preists doe officiat’. When the sheriff of Aberdeen had verified that Mass was being said, he was ‘to make inquyrie for the preist’ and ‘to apprehend and committ him to prison, and to seize upon any vestments or other popish ornaments made use of in their superstitious worship and service’. In November the Council discussed the priest’s capture; he was by then in the tolbooth1 of Banff. On 22 December, having been informed that he was a chaplain to the Queen, Catherine of Braganza, they set him free, on condition that he went into exile, never to return, ‘under the payne of death’, without permission of the King or the Council.
Early in January 1671, being evidently too frail to travel, he was allowed to stay in Scotland until 5 February. On 4 March 1672, the sheriff of Aberdeen was instructed to back the bishop and clergy in their efforts to root out popery and quakerism, this to include demolishing the ‘superstitious monument erected upon the grave of the deceast Mr Patrick Primrose’.
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- Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Tolbooth: town hall where tolls etc. were collected, with prison cells.
2 Charles II's Queen, Catherine of Braganza, brought two Dominican friars with her from Portugal in 1662, where Irish Dominicans were well established.
3 The struggle between episcopalians and presbyterians in the reformed Church of Scotland was not settled until 1689/90 when the Edinburgh parliament accepted William and Mary provided that the Kirk became presbyterian; episcopalians were expelled or withdrew; the Scottish Episcopal Church, in the Anglican Communion, with seven bishops, is said to have about 70 thousand active members.
4 Ross, Anthony OP, ‘Dominicans and Scotland in the Seventeenth Century’, The Innes Review 23 (1972): 40–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See the magisterial work of Macfarlane, Leslie J., William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland 1431–1514: The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen, 1985, 1995)Google Scholar.
6 Cajetan's candidate to succeed him as Master of the Order in 1518 is said to have been John Adamson; the best study of the Dominicans in Scotland remains unpublished: Janet Foggie, ‘The Dominicans in Scotland 1450‐1560′ (University of Edinburgh PhD 1998). For John Adamson see Laurent, M.‐H. OP, ‘Léon X et la Province dominicaine d'Ecosse’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum XIII (1943): 149–161Google Scholar, including 4 letters from the Pope to Adamson; and White, Allan J. OP, ‘Dominicans and the Scottish University Tradition’, New Blackfriars 82 (2001): 434–449CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Much has been written about her but (to my mind) nothing better than the devastating critique by Wormald, Jenny, Mary, Queen of Scots: Politics, Passion and a Kingdom Lost (London and New York 2001)Google Scholar.
8 John Rough went to England to preach, married in Newcastle, fled when Mary Tudor came to the throne but made the mistake of returning to London where he was arrested, condemned, and burned at Smithfield in 1557.
9 For John Knox see Kyle, R., The Mind of John Knox (Lawrence, Kansas 1984)Google Scholar; Greaves, R., Theology and Revolution in the Scottish Reformation (Grand Rapids 1980)Google Scholar; and Sefton, H.R., John Knox (Edinburgh 1993)Google Scholar.
10 Neither the First Book of Discipline (1560‐1), reforming the polity of and securing endowment for the Kirk, extending education and poor relief, nor the Second (1578), suppressing the episcopal system, received the government sanction which would have enabled them to be carried out fully.
11 Often forgotten, though not by Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London 1991), John Black, a Dominican friar, one of the Queen's four special preachers, was murdered on the same night in March 1566 as Riccio, by an anti Catholic gang; some of Black's books have survived.
12 The metrical Psalms have been central in Scottish Presbyterian worship. The only pre‐Reformation composition by David Peebles (fl. 1530–76) which survives is his beautiful Pentecost motet ‘Si quis diligit me’.
13 See Fasti Aberdonenses: Selections from the Records of the University and King's College of Aberdeen 1494‐1854 (Aberdeen 1854); for general background to the Reformation in Scotland see ‘Reformation’, in The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, edited by Michael Lynch (Oxford 2001); or ‘In Search of the Scottish Reformation’ by the same author in Scottish History: The Power of the Past, edited by Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (Edinburgh 2002); or Julian Goodare's chapter in The Reformation in National Context, edited by Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge 1994); for Aberdeen see David Stevenson, King's College, Aberdeen, 1560‐1641: From Protestant Reformation to Covenanting Revolution (Aberdeen 1990); B. McLennan, ‘Presbyterianism Challenged: a study of Catholicism and Episcopacy in the North‐East of Scotland 1560‐1650′ (Aberdeen PhD 1977); and Allan J. White, ‘Religion, Politics, and Society in Aberdeen 1543‐1593′ (Edinburgh PhD 1985). For the move ‘from a profoundly sensual and ceremonial experience of religion to the dominance of the word through Book and sermon’ see Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven 2002), a superb book.
14 Photocopies of the title pages in Ross, 1972. Most of the detail here is reconstructed from clues in Robert Douglas, The Peerage of Scotland, etc. (Edinburgh 1764 and later editions).
15 See Selected Justiciary Cases 1624‐1650 edited by Stair A. Gillon (Edinburgh 1953).
16 A Catalogue of the Graduates in the Faculties of Arts, Divinity, and Law of the University of Edinburgh since its Foundation (1858).
17 For an attractive picture of Robert Leighton see David Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo‐Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540‐1690 (East Linton 2000): chapter 5.
18 Clement (?1200–?1258), leader of the first Dominicans in Scotland, became Bishop of Dunblane in 1234 and launched the building programme of which the cathedral, roofless in Leighton's time but partly restored in the nineteenth century, remains an impressive result.
19 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh 1971): chapter 16; Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement 1625‐1641 (Edinburgh 1991).
20 No doubt the noblemen were attracted by a political theology that placed limitations on royal authority; for the history (and mythology) of Scots attempts since 1320 to curb state power see A Claim of Right for Scotland, edited by Owen Dudley Edwards (Edinburgh 1989).
21 For ‘covenant theology': David Stevenson, The Covenanters: The National Covenant and Scotland (Edinburgh 1988); and David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism 1590‐1638 (Oxford 2000).
22 For Irish Dominican life on the Continent at the time Patrick joined the Order, and some remarkable characters he must have heard of, see Thomas S. Flynn OP, The Irish Dominicans 1536‐1641 (Dublin 1993).
23 For Howard, Hackett, and a somewhat misleading account of Primrose (he was not baptised Peter, so Patrick was not his name in religion; we cannot be sure that he joined the Order in France; he did not die in prison), see Godfrey Anstruther OP, A Hundred Homeless Years: English Dominicans 1558‐1658 (London 1958).
24 For Ballentine and Walker see M.V. Hay, The Blairs Papers (London and Edinburgh 1929)
25 All this in Ross, 1972.
26 The who's who of Catholic Scotland, ‘Prefect Ballentine's Report, circa 1660′ appears’ in The Innes Review 8 (1957): 39–66, 99–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, for the important role of lairds’ wives, Roberts, Alastair, ‘The role of women in Scottish Catholic survival’, Scottish Historical Review 190 (1991): 129–50Google Scholar; for recusancy generally, Macinnes, Allan I., ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws’, Scottish Church History Society Records 23 (1989): 27–63Google Scholar; and the maps in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707 edited by Peter G.B. McNeill and Hector L. MacQueen (Edinburgh 1996): 406–410 (marking Frendraught but not Kinnairdy); for the North‐East see Roberts, Alastair, ‘Popery in Buchan and Strathbogie in the early seventeenth century’, SCHSR 27 (1997): 126–155Google Scholar.
27 See Margaret H.B. Sanderson, Mary Stewart's People: Life in Mary Stewart's Scotland (Edinburgh 1987): 34–54.
28 For Blackhall see David Mathew, Scotland Under Charles I (London 1955); and David Stevenson, King or Covenant? Voices from the Civil War (East Linton 1996): chapter 4. For the life of priests in Scotland at the time see Szechi, Daniel, ‘Defending the True Faith:Kirk, State, and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1654–1755’, The Catholic Historical Review 82 (1996): 397–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar (repeating the mistake that Patrick Primrose died in prison).
29 The Academic Gregories (Edinburgh 1901).
30 See Anthony Ross OP, Dogs of the Lord: The Story of the Dominican Order in Scotland, published to coincide with the exhibition ‘Dogs of the Lord’ held at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 15 October‐28 November 1981.
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