Conclusion

As is obvious from the preceding pages and from any reading of other secondary works, the influence of late sixteenth-and early seventeenthcentury narrative historians on modern views of the Jacobean Kirk can only be immense. They enhance the official record of both Kirk and state, providing details which would otherwise have perished. The seminal work was James Melville's Diary, completed in 1602, and his True Narratioune of the Declyneing Aige of the Kirk of Scotland, written in 1610. The degree to which his writings influenced anti-episcopalian historiography of Jacobean Scotland is difficult to overestimate. His works influenced and were heavily borrowed by later writers such as David Calderwood, William Scot and John Row.1 Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland is the most heavily used source for the period, drawing upon Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland for its early passages and upon Melville for the period between the 1570s and 1610. Much of Calderwood's text is taken almost verbatim from these earlier works and he fleshed out the rest from personal experience and an impressive collection of contemporary letters, tracts and official papers. The work of Archbishop John Spottiswoode, although he wrote from a very different perspective from that offered by the so-called 'presbyterian historians', has served only to bolster the impression of the period given by James Melville and his followers. That is because Spottiswoode used very similar frames of reference to those employed by his opponents. As a result of the personal fortunes of James Melville and John Spottiswoode, and of their respective political opinions, a misleading picture of Jacobean ecclesiastical politics developed. The use, by these writers, of such terms as 'the better sort' or 'the wiser sort' to describe different groups of ministers has given the impression of factions or parties within the Kirk and later writers have interpreted them in this way. What they actually appear to have denoted was the group of ministers which agreed with the author's

Although this comes closer than almost any other writer to the thesis proposed here, it goes on to discuss the subject of the actual process of Protestantisation. This is examined in terms of a challenge which faced the Kirk as a whole regardless of individuals' views on polity or jurisdiction but the very premiss of the existence of a 'Melvillian party' in the sphere of ecclesiastical politics is not questioned. As a result, such phrases as splits 'within Melvillian ranks' and 'the standard Melvillian protest vote' were still used.7