Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England

Abstract

King James VI of Scotland was known to have had a stormy relationship with the Scottish Presbyterian clergy. Sometime before moving south to become king of England in 1603, so it was said, he happened to hear a sermon by a Presbyterian minister who began railing from the pulpit against king, church and state. Taken aback, James commanded the preacher 'either to speak sence, or come down'. Unfazed, the preacher 'saucily' replied: 'I say Man, I'le nowther speak sence, nor come downe'. 1 This anecdote appears in a manuscript commonplace book held in the collections of the British Library. Little is known about the provenance of the book, except that it dates from the later seventeenth century, but the collector was seemingly writing down things he had heard or read -'Apothegms ancient and modern' he styled them -so we can presume that this tale of King James's encounter with the Presbyterian cleric was in more general circulation. Some nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historical works related the story as if true (without citing any sources), though they disagreed over whether the sermon had been delivered in Edinburgh or St Andrews and whether the king in question was James VI and I (r. 1567-1625) or James VII and II (r. 1685-88). One confidently named the preacher as the Edinburgh minister Robert Bruce (1554-1631). 2 What we can say for certain is that our commonplacer was in the business of collecting things he found amusing. On the page immediately preceding the anecdote about King James he wrote of 'a certain Man that was exceeding fat, and corpulent, yet alwayes rode upon a very leane Horse'; when people 'ask'd him the reason thereof', he explained this was because 'he fed himself, but trusted others to feed his horse'. 3 Thus the story about King James and the preacher was clearly a joke, though a joke that might have been based on an event that had actually happened. It was at a certain level a joke at the expense of the Scots, as the mocking of the Scottish accent makes clear, 4 and it embodies a stereotype of the Scots, or rather of a particular type of Scottish clergyman. The stereotype reflects a prejudice, suggesting as it does that English people tended to prejudge people based on their accent.