journal of jesuit studies 7 (2020) 103-116

brill.com/jjs

Jesuits in the Highlands: Three Phases

Alasdair Roberts University of [email protected]

Abstract

The Jesuit mission to Scotland began with minimal numbers in the sixteenth century but built up with the support of Catholic nobles. Leading members of the Society had serious hopes of converting James vi to his mother’s religion although the king merely used them and their lay patrons as a counter to Presbyterian pressure. Apart from the show-piece victory at Glenlivet there was no Jesuit presence in the Highlands. John Ogilvie was not, as has been suggested, a Highlander. During most of the seventeenth century, gentry families in the Grampian mountains were served on a small scale from neighbouring Lowland bases. No knowledge of Gaelic was required. The final phase represented a change of approach, as Jesuits worked among some of Scotland’s poor- est people in forbidding terrain and extreme weather. Setting themselves to learn the Gaelic language they achieved notable success in Braemar and Strathglass.

Keywords

Counter-Reformation – Glenlivet – Scots mission – Jesuit Leslies – Braemar – Gaelic – Strathglass – Jesuit Farquharsons

At the end of the sixteenth century members of the working in Scotland had grounds for optimism about their “way of proceeding.”1 This combined a focus on influential members of society with a well-informed reli- ance on orthodox doctrine and practice as defined by the Council of Trent. The politics of the time let James vi (1566–1625; r. [Scotland] 1567–1625; [England] 1603–25) encourage Catholic-minded members of the nobility as a balancing

1 Thomas M. McCoog S.J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England, 1541–1588: “Our way of proceeding?” (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

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104 Roberts restraint on Presbyterian pressure. The Scots Mission was concerned with high international politics, with Robert Persons (1546–1610) at the head of those who were confident that James would adopt the religion of his mother: “Our chief hope is in Scotland, on which depends the conversion not of England only, but of all the north of Europe.”2 North-east Scotland became a bastion on behalf of the old religion, and cas- tles were raised. In the wake of image-smashing and kirks beyond control (of- ten unfit for use) the cult of Christ’s wounds was revived: Arma Christi adorned the domestic chapels of gentry families and the ihs Jesuit monogram became a symbol of Counter-Reformation.3 The Jesuit John Hay (1547–1607), who was related to the earl of Erroll, visited the tower-houses of his kin at Delgaty and Towie Barclay on his pioneering 1579 mission to Scotland.4 The Society’s supe- rior in Scotland James Gordon (1541–1620), uncle to the earl of Huntly, finally gained access to the royal presence in full hope of achieving a conversion:

After dinner the King disputed with him in his chamber from 2 o’clock till 7, in the presence of all his officers and gentlemen of the Court as well as some of the principal ministers, whom the King commanded not to speak […]. On two points the King was convinced and agreed with Mr James as to justification and predestination, but he said this was not a papist doctrine and that he would not sign his hand to it. Mr James re- plied that he would both write it and sign it.

Gordon admired the king’s “keen intelligence, and a very powerful memory, for he knows a great part of the Bible by heart.”5 However, no hint of conversion emerged during two months of following James “to the chase and everywhere else.”6 Meanwhile Anna, his queen, was received as a convert by the Jesuit Rob- ert Abercrombie (1536–1613). He had no illusions about the king’s firm inten- tion to be the next supreme governor of the Church of England.7

2 Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stewart and James vi, ed. William Forbes-Leith, S.J. (, 1885), 166. 3 Ian B. D. Bryce and Alasdair Roberts, “Post-Reformation Catholic Houses of North-East Scot- land,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 123 (1993): 363–72. 4 Forbes-Leith, Narratives, 148. 5 Calendar of State Papers, Spain, ed. Martin A. S. Hume, 4 vols. (London, 1899), 4:260. The original is in the Archives of Simancas, iv, 1587–1603. 6 Forbes-Leith, Narratives, 203. 7 For politics involving Alexander Seton at the heart of government see Maurice Lee, “King James’s Popish Chancellor,” in The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland, ed. Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw (Edinburgh, 1983), 170–82.

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Jesuits In The Highlands: Three Phases 105

Gordon had greater success at local level in debate with George Hay (c.1530– 88). Based at Rathven near Speymouth, Hay was praised as “the most learned of the ministers, a man of good birth, fairly versed in Greek and Latin literature.”8 According to the report that went to Rome, however, he was no match for a properly educated Jesuit. Gordon’s rejection of Hay’s “garbled quotations” from the church fathers led to a pause:

Then the minister, sending to his own house which was at some leagues distance, procured a whole horse-load of books, and among them the writings of the ancient doctors. By means of these, in the presence of a great concourse of nobles and ladies, Father Gordon vanquished the min- ister by bringing forward complete sentences and not isolated phrases from the ancient writers to whom the minister had appealed. This occur- rence made a great noise and produced a great effect, for a large number of persons returned in consequence to the religion of their fathers and others were encouraged to persevere therein.9

The event serves to illustrate the importance of local advocacy in vernacular Scots beyond pamphleteering from abroad, based on a sound understanding of theology through Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Members of the Society of Jesus were required to send reports from many countries to the superior general in Rome and they did so fully on Scotland. William Forbes-Leith employed his time on the staff at Stonyhurst translat- ing the college’s “Scotia” file which led to three volumes in print.10 Too readily dismissed in the past, Forbes-Leith has lately been gaining respect.11 Hubert Chadwick, historian of the college’s Flanders era,12 continued the process.

8 Forbes-Leith, Narratives, 203. Hay published The Confutation of the Abbot of Crossraguel’s Masse in 1563, a King’s College lecture, M. G. Hay oratio habita in gymnasio Aberdonensis in 1571, and he helped Andrew Melville to draft the Second Book of Discipline in 1578. Rich- ard L. Greaves, “George Hay (c.1530–1588),” in odnb, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy .lib.gla.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-12716 (accessed September 2, 2019). 9 Forbes-Leith, Narratives, 204. 10 Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the xviith and xviiith Centuries, ed. William Forbes- Leith S.J., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green: 1909), following Narratives. “Scotia” at Stony- hurst was first filed in Jesuit archives as “Anglia 42.” 11 Peter Davidson and Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., “Father Robert’s Convert: The Private Catholicism of Anne of Denmark,” Times Literary Supplement, November 24, 2000. 12 Hubert Chadwick, St Omers to Stonyhurst: A History of Two Centuries (London: Burns & Oates, 1962).

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106 Roberts

While teaching at St. Aloysius College in Glasgow, Chadwick researched and wrote about Scotland.13 Peter Shearman paid tribute to Chadwick’s “consid- erable contribution to our knowledge of the history of the Jesuit Mission in Scotland.”14 Back at Stonyhurst, he transcribed the Society’s correspondence for that country, including some two hundred letters for the years 1594–1627. Held in the Farm Street archive, they were translated by retired Jesuits advised to avoid an elaborate prose style. The last of them, Myles Lovell, confirmed that the result was “rough and ready.”15 He helped to make eighty-six letters up to 1606 available in English. A further 110 documents await translation. Thomas McCoog, responsible for Farm Street archives around the turn of the millennium, made his own contribution by placing Scotland in a British and Irish context.16 There was early Jesuit activity between Ireland and the Hebrides, with James Galwey (1579–1634) making his first converts in Islay about the time of John Ogilvie’s (1579–1615) death:

After seven days there he was denounced, and went with two compan- ions to Oronsay where there was a chapel of St Columba, and thence to Colonsay; in both he reconciled forty people of mature age who had nev- er seen a priest before, and he said Mass for them.17

Galwey was also at Arran, Jura, Gigha and mainland Kintyre, but he was too close to Campbell power in Argyll. More success was to be enjoyed among MacDonalds by Franciscans.18 McCoog has shown that a surprisingly large

13 Hubert Chadwick, “Father William Creighton S.J., and a Recently Discovered Letter (1589),” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu [ahsi] 6 (1937): 259–86; Hubert Chadwick, “A Memoir of Fr. Edmund Hay S.J.,” ahsi 8 (1939): 66–85. See also his “The , Douai, 1580–1613,” English Historical Review 56 (1941): 571–85. 14 Peter Shearman, “Father Alexander McQuirrie, S.J.,” Innes Review 6, no. 1 (1955): 22–45, here 26. 15 Personal communication, April 28, 1999. Father Lovell, retired from Aberdeen to Chip- ping Norton, died later that year. 16 McCoog, Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England, 219. See also his The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of St Peter on the King of Spain’s Monarchy (New York: Routledge, 2016). A Protestant perspective on Spanish plotting came from Collected Essays and Reviews of Thomas Graves Law, LL.D, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1904), 217–43. 17 Edmund Hogan, S.J., Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century (London: Burns and Oates, 1894), 494. See also James Corboy, S.J., “Father James Galwey, S.J. (1579–1634),” Irish Monthly (February 1944): 58–67. 18 Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland, 1619–1646: Documents from Roman Archives, ed. Cathaldus Giblin (Dublin: Assisi Press, 1964).

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Jesuits In The Highlands: Three Phases 107 number of Scotsmen were involved with the Society of Jesus.19 By no means all of them returned to Scotland, and it could be argued that their influence was stronger in the Baltic lands.20 But for more than half a century after the Refor- mation Parliament of 1560, the most active priests in the country were Jesuits, particularly at the end of the period.21 Over a longer period forty-four secular priests also worked in Scotland. Twelve became regulars, five as Jesuits.22 This “way of proceeding” started with failure to win support from Mary Queen of Scots (1542–86; r.1542–67) through Perthshire23 and ended in the de- fiant counties of Aberdeen, Banff, and Moray.24 Military success was gained at Glenlivet in 1594 by the “popish earls” of Hay and Gordon, when papal and Spanish subsidies for cannons and cavalry provided a peak level of support. Chaplains heard confession, blessed weapons and painted white crosses on breastplates. The men who had been so impressed by James Gordon’s debating victory over George Hay “attributed their victory to the fathers of the Society who continued on their knees all the time of the engagement.”25 Old scars and memories stayed with these men, “God having proved by that victory which religion he favoured.”26 Jesuits were very much present in the Highlands for that battle but not yet working there. Acceptance of the king’s religion by George Gordon, “Cock o’ the North” (1561/2–1636),27 foreshadowed the end of what has sometimes been

19 Thomas M. McCoog, “‘Pray to the Lord of the harvest’: Jesuit Missions to Scotland in the Sixteenth Century,” Innes Review 53, no. 2 (2002): 127–88. A twenty-seven-page catalog fol- lows the text. 20 See Roman Darowski, “John Hay, S.J., and the Origins of Philosophy in Lithuania,” Innes Review 31, no. 1 (1980): 7–15; Martin Murphy, “Robert Abercromby, S.J. (1536–1613) and the Baltic Counter-Reformation,” Innes Review 50, no. 1 (1999): 58–75. 21 In his report of September 30, 1633 to Jesuit General Muzio Vitelleschi, John Leslie drew a contrast between “not above sixteen” Jesuits sent to Scotland by 1616 and “one-and- twenty” since then, twelve “still at work in the deserted vineyard.” Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, i, 159. 22 Brian M. Halloran, Scottish Secular Priests, 1580–1653 (Glasgow: John S. Burns, 2003). 23 Michael J. Yellowlees, “Dunkeld and Nicholas de Gouda’s Mission to Scotland, 1562,” Innes Review 44, no. 1 (1993), 14–47. 24 Michael Yellowlees, “So strange a monster as a Jesuiste”: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth Century Scotland (Isle of Colonsay: House of Lochar, 2003). See also John Durkan, “Wil- liam Murdoch and the Early Jesuit Mission in Scotland,” Innes Review 35, no. 1 (1984): 3–11. 25 Durkan, “William Murdoch,” 225 attributed to Crichton’s ms. 26 George Conn, De duplici religionis apud Scotos (Rome, 1628), 150. 27 Charles Gordon, Marquess of Huntly, The Cock o’ the North (London: T. Butterworth, 1935).

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108 Roberts thought of as a Counter-Reformation in Scotland.28 The departure of James for London, followed by the Gunpowder Plot, led to repression north of the bor- der and the execution of John Ogilvie in 1615.29 The Buchan plain of the Hays along with upland Strathbogie of the Gordons constituted a Lowland region distinct from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands.30 A single point may be made here about the man canonised as St. John Ogilvie in 1976. A northerner from Keith in Banffshire, he has sometimes been mistaken for a Highlander.31 When Charles I (1600–49; r.1625–49) succeeded to two crowns his French Catholic queen Henrietta Maria (1609–69) brought a considerable clerical entourage to London. There were hopes of toleration north and south of the border, and record numbers of Jesuits came to serve a Scots mission based at the Hay seat of Slains in . Sixty-eight years after the Reforma- tion Parliament, it was possible to claim that a majority of gentry families in north-east Scotland were Catholic.32 However, this period of grace was quickly followed by the Privy Council’s suppression, through fines and imprisonment, of “the Catholic North.”33 Father John Leslie (d.1635) gave a full description of Charles’s Scottish coro- nation at Holyrood’s Abbey church in January 1633. He and his Jesuit brother Andrew served gentry families in the Grampian Highlands, the latter based at Aboyne on lower Deeside. When the secular priest Gilbert Blackhall arrived, he was told by the chatelaine (a Hay who had married a Gordon but was wid- owed) that the Jesuit was sometimes away “fyve or six months together.”34 An- drew Leslie described his brother John’s last illness after Edinburgh, brought

28 See Mark Dilworth, “The Counter-Reformation in Scotland: A Select Critical Biography,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 22 (1984): 84–100. 29 William E. Brown, John Ogilvie: An Account of His Life and Death with a Translation of the Documents relating thereto (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1925). 30 See Alasdair Roberts, “Popery in Buchan and Strathbogie in the Early Seventeenth Cen- tury,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 27 (1997): 126–55. 31 David McRoberts, “Was John Ogilvie a Highlander?,” Innes Review 15, no. 2 (1964): 183–85. The error is repeated with “two Jesuit Fathers in the Highlands” by Forbes-Leith in Mem- oirs, 1:2. Earlier he had this correct as two “in the north.” Narratives, 348. 32 In 1628, John Leslie made reference to “the north, where Catholics were in the majority.” Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 1:18. With William and Andrew, he was one of three brothers who became Jesuit priests. They were from Conrack near Rothes in the Laigh (or low district) of Moray. 33 Ian B. D. Bryce and Alasdair Roberts, “Conrack, New Leslie and the Suppression of the Catholic North,” Northern Scotland 17 (1997): 1–16. 34 A Breiffe Narration of the Services Done to Three Noble Ladyes by Gilbert Blakhal, ed. John Stuart (Spalding Club: Aberdeen, 1844), 62.

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Jesuits In The Highlands: Three Phases 109 on by “a long journey through the passes of the mountains, in deep snow, in order to keep the festival of the Nativity with the Catholics who lived there.”35 A new Highland phase had begun, still with a focus on leading families. In light of what came later it is worth emphasising that the Leslies would not have needed Gaelic for them. One of the leaders was William Gordon at Minmore in Glenlivet, who brought two hundred men from neighbouring Strathavon to Montrose’s victory at Alford. Gordon had been among the “papists” identified at the urging of the Privy Council; a quarter of a century later he was excom- municated for “obstinacie in poperie.”36 The link was maintained but it was not a strong one. When a Jesuit returned to the district in the late 1660s, he told one of his Braemar converts “I have some few in Glen Livet, very few in Strathaven.”37 During the seventeenth century, priests were educated at Scots colleges in Rome, Paris, Douai and Madrid, all but Paris run by Jesuits as renowned educa- tors. Some also came to Scotland from the Benedictine monastery at Ratisbon or Regensburg in Bavaria. Rome’s Congregation for the Propagation of Faith recognized a need for more secular missionaries in Scotland, and in 1653 Wil- liam Ballentine (1618–61) was made prefect or “First Superior of the Secular Clergy in Scotland.”38 Jesuit letters on this period held at outside Aberdeen have been impressively presented by Malcolm Hay.39 He recorded a

35 Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 1:168. 36 Extracts from the Records of the Synod of Moray, ed. William Cramond (Elgin: Courant and Courier, 1906), 24, 125. See also John Malcolm Bulloch, The Gordons and Smiths at Minmore, Auchorochan and Upper Drumin in Glenlivet (Huntly: Joseph Dunbar, 1910). 37 In 1778, at Bishop John Geddes’s request, Charles Farquharson wrote an account of his fa- ther’s conversion at Braemar and of Catholicism in upper Deeside. It was printed in John Grant, Legends of the Braes o’ Mar (Aberdeen: A. King & Co., 1861, 1876, 1910), cited here at 192. 38 Title-page of Ballentine’s A Preparation for Death. The preface to a second 1715 Douai edi- tion controversially had seculars “added to the Regular clergy” at 11. William J. Ander- son, “William Ballentine, Prefect of the Scottish Mission, 1653–1661,” Innes Review 8, no. 1 (1957): 19–20. See also his “Narratives of the Scottish Reformation, iii. Prefect Ballentine’s Report, circa 1660, Part Two,” Innes Review 8, no. 2 (1957): 99–129. 39 M. V. Hay, The Blairs Papers 1603–1660 (London: Sands & Co., 1929). Despite title dates, most of the book is concerned with the 1650s. Hay’s work as a wartime code-breaker helped him to unlock historical evidence in new ways. Alice Ivy Hay, Valiant for Truth: Malcolm Hay of Seton (London: Spearman, 1970), 125, quoting Basil Fitzgibbon, S.J. From letters at Blairs, see Hay’s Failure in the Far East: Why and How the Breach Between the Western World and China First Began (London: Scaldis, 1957). Will Leslie was Roman agent for Scotland’s secular clergy for half a century. Hay showed that he conspired tirelessly against the Society.

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110 Roberts change in clergy influence. At the head of those northern Catholics who opted to follow England’s “church papists” into occasional conformity by attendance at kirk were the Gordons of Huntly. After moving into the principal Gordon seat at Strathbogie, Ballentine permitted a less rigid practice. This was opposed by the Society of Jesus for mission countries generally, bringing about new con- ditions: “Alace good old kynd Strathboggie is very low. I know non of owrs that hanteth it for the present.”40 The short reign of James ii and vii (1633–1701; r.1685–89), which brought high politics back into view, need not detain us here. Jesuits continued to act as chaplains to those few families which held on to their estates, five of them in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh and five with “good lodgings in the north.”41 Easy living is implied. At century’s end, Thomas Nicholson (c.1644–1718), Scot- land’s first vicar apostolic after the Reformation, was regarded as “the Highland bishop.”42 His visitations from the new Gordon seat at Fochabers required a Gaelic interpreter, and the same was true for his successor Bishop James Gor- don (1665–1746) on arduous journeys to the “farr West.”43 There were no Jesuits on that side of the Highlands. New hands appeared in 1670, the annual report making what happened sound like chance rather than policy: “One of these is familiar with the Erse language, used by the mountaineers of Scotland, and he is labouring with great success among them.”44 The Gaelic-speaking Jesuit has been identified as Henry Forsyth, an Edinburgh man who learned Irish in Tipperary. Thomas Rob as superior in Scotland described Forsyth as working feliciter (happily) in the mountains.45 Canon Sandy MacWilliam knew him as Mr. Forsey who came very secretly to the only two Braemar Catholics of that time. He convert- ed Lewis Farquharson of Auchindryne who was then a minister but later the

40 Hay, Blairs Papers, 207. James Anderson, Douai, to Gilbert Talbot or Bissett, Rome, April 14, 1655. Five additional secular priests were being funded by Propaganda at one hundred crowns per annum. Hay, Blairs Papers, 186. For the impoverishment of Jesuit patrons and an overview of regular-secular relations see 231–35. See also Tom McInally, The Sixth Scot- tish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575–1799 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 41 Alphons Bellesheim, History of the of Scotland from the Introduction of Christianity to the Present Day, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1890), 4:369, from a 1698 report by John Irvin, procurator of the Scots Mission in Paris. 42 Bellesheim, History of the Catholic Church of Scotland, 4:369. 43 Scottish Catholic Archives, BL 2/162/16. Bishop James Gordon, Glastirum near Fochabers, to Lewis Innes, Paris, November 2, 1710. 44 Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 1:120. 45 Records of the Scots Colleges of Douai, Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Ratisbon (New Spald- ing Club: Aberdeen, 1906), 39.

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­father of two Jesuits.46 Although the region became part of a Highland District which reached out to Barra in the Outer Hebrides, Braemar in Aberdeenshire was close to the old Catholic north, and a seminary for the Lowland District was opened at Scalan in Glenlivet.47 Of the five Jesuit chaplains in or around Edinburgh, two were with the Wauchope family at Niddrie and two more at Garleton near Haddington. The families were linked, Barbara Wauchope having married Sir George Seton of Garleton (d.1718 or 1720). There was a great scandal over Sir George’s woman- ising in the Canongate, and John Gordon advised Lady Seton on canon law in relation to her successful divorce.48 The contrast between the unprincipled Sir George and his brother Robert (1671–1732) is striking. Father Robert Seton reached the Braes of Mar from Douai in 1699: Jesuit records emphasise that “avoiding his noble and wealthy relatives, he proceeded to the rough Highland districts where he assiduously and zealously worked for nearly thirty years.”49 MacWilliam paid tribute to Seton for his part in this new beginning; also to fellow-Jesuits John Innes (1667–1734) and Hugh Strachan (1672–1745). All expe- rienced the rough conditions which he described:

I have a district some sixty miles long entrusted to my care […]. The dis- trict was at that time suffering grievously from famine, and the inhabit- ants could only with great difficulty supply themselves with the absolute necessities of life. My food was barley bread, my drink cold water, my bed the hard ground or a little chaff or straw. A barn full of cracks and chinks was my bedroom, study and oratory; and so, for the most part, it is still.

Seton told Superior General Tirso González (1624–1705; in office 1687–1705) in Rome of his “constant journeys by day and night over steep and pathless hills, covered with snow the greater part of the year.” Today, Braemar is regularly the coldest village in Britain. He continued:

46 Alexander S. MacWilliam, “The Jesuit Mission in Upper Deeside, 1671–1737,” Innes Review 23, no. 1 (1972): 22–39. 47 See John Watts, Scalan: The Forbidden College, 1716–1799 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999). 48 Louise Yeoman, “Garleton Castle: Southwest Lodge, Athelstaneford, East Lothian” on behalf of the Wemyss and March Estates and the Pollock Hammond Partnership (2013): 83–85, http://www.chcheritage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GarletonCastle_web .pdf (accessed September 2, 2019). 49 Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 vols. (London: Burns & Oates, 1877–83), 7:700.

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112 Roberts

I cannot state precisely the number of those whom the Lord has been pleased to bring through my means to the knowledge of the truth, and indeed in these difficult times I should not have thought it safe to keep a written list of them. But unless my memory deceives me, a hundred adults have come into the bosom of our holy Mother the Church, and a much larger number of young children have received baptism […]. Since I first began to traverse this region, no child has died without baptism, no adult without receiving the last Sacraments […]. While the most Rev- erend [Bishop Thomas] Nicolson was visiting this district, which is con- fided wholly to my care, over six hundred persons were anointed by him with the holy Chrism. 50

Further testimony confirms this account, with emphasis on a peripatetic mis- sion: “It was his constant practice to collect the children of the villages and give them familiar catechetical instructions.”51 Hugh Strachan “composed a Catechism of controversy in this Highland tongue” and explained it to non-­ literate listeners of all ages.52 The Braemar register of marriage and baptism is a remarkable record of Gaelic on the page, with elaborately stated names of people and places.53 Language was a challenge for these men. John Innes wrote: “It cost me immense toil and much time to learn to speak the extremely difficult language of this country but I am master of it now, and can get through all the duties of my office by means of it.”54 And there is the positive judgement of a modern diocesan priest: “Their sending of non-Gaelic speaking missioners to the Highlands was an adventurous gamble that paid off magnificently.”55 Soon after Hugh MacDonald (1699–1773) was given charge of a new High- land District in 1728, secular clergy on both sides of the country fell out over Jansenism (Lowlanders under suspicion) and the distribution of money from Rome.56 Scotland’s Jesuits kept out of the Jansenist dispute which was

50 Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 2:198–200. 51 Foley, Records, 7:701. 52 Foley, Records, 7:202. 53 National Archives of Scotland, RH 21. 54 Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 1:195. 55 Brian M. Halloran, “Jesuits in 18th-Century Scotland,” Innes Review 52, no. 1 (2001): 80–100, here 99. 56 James McMillan, “Jansenists and Anti-Jansenists in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: The Unigenitus Quarrels on the Scottish Catholic Mission,” Innes Review 39, no. 1 (1988): 12–45. See also John Watts, Hugh MacDonald: Highlander, Jacobite and Bishop (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2002).

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Jesuits In The Highlands: Three Phases 113

­exacerbated by a rogue Benedictine.57 Scotland’s Jesuits were regarded nega- tively (nicknamed ‘birlies’ after township clerks who laid down rules) by in- fluential members of the secular clergy.58 However, Bishop Gordon recorded his appreciation for the work Jesuits were doing with “fortitude and piety” and praised Stephen Maxwell (1660–1713), the superior based in Aberdeen, as “a man of extraordinary wisdom.” Gordon emphasised his personal “goodwill towards your Society which is not, I think, to be found in everyone.”59 Jesuit influence extended west through Inverey to the Grampians. To the east the mission of Glengairn was held by militantly papist MacGregors, and Calum Grierson alias MacGregor built a chapel for Hugh Strachan. Beside it, he raised a “very high crucifix on a little hill near his house, to be adored by all the neighbourhood.”60 Innes and Seton were also associated with Glengairn when they grew too old for icy tracks. Alexander Gordon (1702–46), who served this marginally Highland mission, grew up without Gaelic in the nearby Forest of Birse. The language of Highland Aberdeenshire was later described by a min- ister of the kirk as a “barbarous dialect.”61 That view was shared by the Arisaig- born priest Ewen MacEachen (1769–1849), who compiled a dictionary of the language during his time at Braemar. The Jesuit John Farquharson (1699–1782) who was born there is significant for having advanced to a high literary level from the lowly basis of Gairnside Gaelic.62 Farquharson’s Strathglass, west of Inverness, was the other Jesuit mission in the Highlands.63 Alexander MacRae (1762–48) left his native Kintail to study at the Scots College Douai as an Episcopalian Protestant (which was not un- common) and returned a priest. His reports emphasised problems in summer when he had to seek out people in high pastures: “I cannot track them in the mountains and forests without the greatest difficulty […]. The huts they live in

57 Alasdair Roberts, “Gregor McGregor (1684–1740) and the Highland Problem in the Scot- tish Catholic Mission,” Innes Review 39, no. 2 (1988): 81–108. 58 For a hostile critique of the Jesuits see William James Anderson, “Abbé Paul Macpherson’s History of the Scots College, Rome,” Innes Review 12, no. 1 (1961): 3–172. 59 Gordon to Jesuit General Michelangelo Tamburini, Rome, June 3, 1710. Forbes-Leith, Mem- oirs, 2:256. 60 Stuart, Breiffe Narration, xxxi. 61 Old Statistical Account, ed. John Sinclair, 21 vols. (Edinburgh, 1791–99), 12:219, “Glenmuick, Tulloch and Glengairn.” 62 See Alasdair Roberts, “Maighstir Eobhan Mac Eachainn and the Orthography of Scots Gaelic,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 65 (2002–4): 358–405; also Seumas Grandd’s appendix, “‘Garnside Gaelic’: The Gaelic of West Aberdeenshire,” 398–405. 63 Alexander S. MacWilliam, “A Highland Mission: Strathglass, 1671–1777,” Innes Review 24, no. 2 (1973): 75–102.

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114 Roberts are so low and narrow that they will barely hold their families, and I am often obliged to sleep in the open air.”64 At Douai, he was celebrated as missionarius egregius in Scotia inter montanos (an outstanding missionary in the Scottish highlands).65 John Farquharson (son of the convert from Auchindryne) arrived from Douai in 1729 to take charge of a mission which extended from Beauly through the glens of Strathfarrar and Affric. Between them, he and MacRae turned the Strathglass mission into a “nursery of priests.”66 The upper part was Chisholm territory and seventeen clergy of the name worked in Scotland, two brothers becoming successive bishops of the Highland District.67 Before the 1745 Jaco- bite Rising, John Farquharson was assisted by the convert Jesuit Alexander Cameron (1701–46), brother of Donald Cameron of Lochiel (c.1700–48), whose Episcopalian Protestantism prevented the extension of their pastoral endeav- ours into that district. Both were made prisoners after Culloden. Cameron was badly treated on the voyage south and Farquharson provided consolation be- fore his death on a Thames prison hulk.68 After the Rising, John Farquharson returned to Fasnakyle, where Affric’s riv- er joins the Glass, and gave another five years to the mission before withdraw- ing to Douai. His last years, by then an ex-Jesuit following the 1773 suppression of the Society, were spent in the house of a nephew at Balmoral. The younger brother Charles (1713–79) came from Douai to replace Alexander Gordon in Glengairn. Having moved far beyond the John Ogilvie years, this account may quickly end with oral tradition. By the time John Grant came upriver from Glenfinzie on Gairnside to sit with tale-bearers at the “forenicht,” the old language had been largely replaced—in a different way from other parts of the Highlands:

64 Forbes-Leith, Memoirs, 2:194. 65 “An Outstanding Missionary in the Scottish Highlands,” Records of the Scots Colleg- es at Douai, Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Ratisbon (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1906), 1:57. 66 Odo Blundell, The Catholic Highlands of Scotland: The Central Highlands (Edinburgh: Sands & Co., 1909), 212. 67 The number of Chisholm priests was higher in British North America. Leaving aside Glen- garry County in Upper Canada, no fewer than eighteen Chisholm priests worked in Nova Scotia. Angus A. Johnston, Antigonish Priests and Bishops 1786–1925, ed. Kathleen MacK- enzie (Antigonish: Casket Printing and Publishing, 1994). 68 Thomas Wynne, “The Conversion of Alexander Cameron,” Innes Review 45, no. 2 (1994): 178–87. Alexander Gordon from Glengairn also died a prisoner at the Inverness tolbooth.

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Jesuits In The Highlands: Three Phases 115

“In this region Gaelic was supplanted by Broad Scots, not English.”69 From his bank-house at Tarland, Grant consulted everything in print, and his brother was also fully literate as a priest in Strathglass and bishop of the Aberdeen diocese.70 But John Grant’s stories about the Farquharson brothers come from oral sources, linking two missions: “The natives of Strathglass fondly love Maighistir Ian—Mr John—as they call him; and they welcome warmly, even now, a Braemar man for his sake.”71 The two men were thought of in terms of shared qualities:

Both the fathers, John and Charles, were held to be saints. Many persons possessed by devils were brought to them from far and near, and by them restored and cured. They had also, we are told, the gift of prophecy. Their piety gained them the veneration, their learning the esteem, and their urbanity the love of all those who knew them.

Exorcism aside, both achieved a great name for curing illnesses, or at least (ac- cording to the anecdotes) for telling people how their wrong ideas of treat- ment had proved fatal. A notable success was achieved by Charles for a cancer on the lip of one of Lord Fife’s gamekeepers which had defeated Edinburgh doctors: “He simply prescribed a potion made up by himself, and, without any outward application—without any surgical operation—that alone affected a cure.” Since this essay began with the highest in the land, it is pleasing to end with the priest’s passing and a reversal through the landlord: “The Earl of Fife met the funeral train as they came down the road. He dismounted immedi- ately and took off his hat. ‘I wish to God,’ said he, ‘that I were such as he was.’”72

69 Mark Dilworth, “Catholic Glengairn in the Early Nineteenth Century: Part One,” Innes Re- view 7, no. 1 (1956): 11–23, at 12. 70 Colin Grant did the final work on Ewen MacEachen’s translation of the New Testament which was published in 1875. A new edition of the Gaelic catechism followed, and a hu- morous lament on “Highland-English as found in Books,” Transactions of the Gaelic Soci- ety of Inverness 15 (1889): 172–81. 71 Grant, Legends, 228. 72 Grant, Legends, 230, 233, 234.

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