The Rebel Minister
Updated: 25 minutes ago
Mull, Iona and Argyll, 1645–1649
Historical Background
By 1645, the quarrel that had begun with arguments over worship and the government of the Scottish Kirk had become a civil war in which religion, loyalty, land and clan could no longer be kept neatly apart. The Covenanters, who had bound themselves in 1638 to defend Scotland's Reformed religion, now faced Royalist forces fighting in the name of Charles I. In the Highlands the King's most successful commander, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, joined forces with Alasdair MacDonald - better known as Alasdair MacColla - whose Irish Confederate soldiers provided the hard military core around which Montrose built his Highland army.7
For the Western Isles, this was not a distant war. Alasdair MacColla had landed in western Scotland in 1644, and the fighting drew in families whose loyalties had been shaped by generations of rivalry, obligation and disputed land. Sir Lachlan Maclean of Duart brought Maclean men into the Royalist cause, while the Marquis of Argyll and the Covenanting government stood on the opposing side. The result was a conflict in which a minister might find the men of his own parish marching with those whom his Church had declared rebels.1
The Kirk expected more than neutrality from its ministers. Excommunication was not merely a private judgement on a man's soul; it carried consequences for those who continued to associate with him. Ministers were expected to avoid the company of excommunicated persons and to give neither religious nor social legitimacy to men who had placed themselves outside the discipline of the Church. During the wars, the Synod of Argyll investigated several ministers for what it called "compliance" with the Royalist forces, and the surviving records show that this could include travelling with them, preaching or praying for excommunicated men, eating and drinking in their company, or providing other forms of assistance and familiarity.28
Martin MacGillivray was particularly exposed to that conflict. By 1643 he had been admitted to the ministry of Iona, or Icolmkill as it appears in the records, after years of service elsewhere on Mull.6 His congregation lived within a Gaelic world where the authority of a clan chief was immediate and practical, while the authority of the Kirk reached into the same homes by a different route. Martin had already learned, during his confrontation with Lochbuie in 1631, what could happen when those two forms of power collided.
In 1648 the Synod of Argyll began examining the conduct of ministers who had remained in the islands through the Royalist rebellion, and Martin was among them. This time the record does not leave us guessing at the substance of the accusation, because it preserves his confession in remarkable detail.
The Rebel Minister
Martin had answered the first question, but the men before him were not yet finished. The clerk continued writing, his quill moving steadily across the page while the members of the Synod listened. Somewhere beyond the room there would have been the ordinary business of the day - horses shifting in a yard, men speaking as they waited, the wind moving around stone walls - but Martin's world had narrowed to the table before him and the words being entered into the record. He had gone with Sir Lachlan Maclean's men, and that much he admitted; what the Synod wanted to know was why.
"Sir Lachlan had joined James Graham and Alasdair MacDonald," one of the examiners said. "He raised his men in arms to march to Lochaber and meet Graham. You went with them." Martin looked towards the clerk before answering that he had gone with the people. Asked whether he had gone willingly, he said no and gave the explanation that would appear in the minute: he had been threatened to go by Sir Lachlan.
It was a small sentence for something Martin remembered as anything but small. In April 1645 Mull had been filled with news of war, and men who ordinarily concerned themselves with cattle, boats, rents and the uncertain promise of a harvest found themselves summoned in another man's cause. Weapons were brought out, messages travelled from township to township, and the old obligations between chief and clansman acquired a harder meaning when a body of men was expected to march. Sir Lachlan Maclean of Duart had committed himself to Montrose; Martin had not, but the distinction was easier to explain in a church court three years later than it had been when armed men were gathering on Mull.
A message from a powerful chief rarely required elaborate language. Sir Lachlan expected his men to go, and Martin understood that the expectation extended to him. He could have refused, and that possibility would later sit quietly beneath every explanation he gave to the Synod, yet the freedom contained in the word was not necessarily the freedom available to a minister living among the families of a Highland chief. Martin therefore went with Maclean men moving towards Lochaber, where Montrose's army had become the hope of Royalists and the terror of their enemies. He did not claim to have carried a weapon for them, nor did the Synod accuse him of fighting; what mattered to the men who judged him was that, when Sir Lachlan's people moved towards the rebellion, their minister had moved with them.12
When the clerk had finished that part of the confession, the questioning turned to Sir Lachlan himself. Martin admitted that after the chief had been excommunicated he had still preached and prayed with him on two occasions, once at Icolmkill and once at the place recorded as Rodill in the North Isles. No one in the room needed an explanation of why this mattered. Excommunication was intended to separate a man visibly from the fellowship of the Kirk, and a minister who continued to preach and pray with him weakened that separation, whatever reason he might offer for doing so.
Martin could remember a simpler reality than the one now being constructed from the record: a man before him, a prayer asked for, the familiar words of Scripture, and the knowledge that refusing a chief was never quite the same thing as refusing an ordinary parishioner. Yet the Synod was not judging a private moment. It was deciding whether one of its ministers had treated an excommunicated Royalist leader as though the sentence of the Church could be set aside whenever circumstances became inconvenient. Whatever distinction Martin had made at the time between pastoral duty and political allegiance did not look as clear once it had been written down.
The questions moved to December 1645, a time that remained colder in Martin's memory. Alasdair MacColla was in Lorn, and Martin had crossed from Mull to the Royalist army. He could remember the smell of wet wool and smoke, the ground churned by boots and horses, and the strange intimacy of an army at rest. Men who had burned houses and broken other men in battle still needed fires, food and somewhere to sleep; war seen from a distance belonged to banners and causes, while close to the ground it was mud, hunger, leather, iron and tired men warming their hands. Martin remained among them for three nights, and that too went into the record.
When the examiner asked whether he had met Alasdair MacDonald, Martin said that he had. He was then reminded of the detail that made the meeting more difficult to diminish: he had taken Alasdair by the hand. Martin could offer no useful way of making the gesture smaller, because he had greeted MacColla as men greeted one another, and again he relied upon the explanation already given. Sir Lachlan, he said, had compelled him. The men judging him had heard enough claims of necessity during the war to know how elastic the word could become; a chief's command might indeed carry threat, but every act committed beneath that threat still left the uncomfortable question of how much choice remained to the man who obeyed.
Then came the question Martin could not answer by pointing to Sir Lachlan. One of the examiners asked how it was that the Macleans and their men, being upon a course of rebellion against the Covenant, religion and the kingdom, had allowed Martin to live peaceably at home and keep his goods and lands when neighbouring ministers had been burned out and spoiled. The implication was unavoidable: if Martin had truly resisted the rebels, why had the rebels treated him so differently?
Martin looked from one face to another before giving the answer that the clerk preserved. It had been, he said, "God's good providence", and because the Macleans had a desire to have the Gospel continued within their bounds.12 It was an answer that may have satisfied Martin more readily than it satisfied the Synod. He was a minister, and if armed men wished the Gospel to remain among them, perhaps he had regarded that desire as something to preserve rather than evidence of political sympathy. Yet the very fact that his ministry had been useful to the men in rebellion made it harder to distinguish between preserving the Gospel and accommodating those who protected him.
The Synod had other evidence that suggested the problem was not confined to moments of immediate danger. In the summer of 1647, long after Sir Lachlan had been excommunicated, Martin travelled with him through the North Isles for fifteen days. During that time they ate and drank in one another's company, and at meals Martin did what he had probably done at thousands of tables throughout his life: he bowed his head and said grace. The act itself was ordinary, but the man beside him had been placed outside the Church, and the length of the journey made it difficult to present their association as a single unavoidable encounter.
Martin may have remembered meals in which there was little worth remembering - food, weariness after travel, men speaking about weather, boats or the road ahead - and he had not needed to agree with Sir Lachlan's politics in order to thank God for bread. The Synod nevertheless regarded familiarity itself as part of the offence, because continuing to share table, travel and prayer with an excommunicated man suggested fellowship where the Kirk had ordered separation.
There was also Duart. At some point in those troubled years Martin had seen the Earl of Antrim and Alasdair MacDonald there after their return from Ireland and had conversed with them. The Earl of Antrim had been deeply involved in the Royalist enterprise that brought Irish Confederate troops into western Scotland under MacColla.8 To the Synod, Martin's presence among such men added another strand to a pattern that could no longer be explained as one threat, one journey or one uncomfortable compromise.
When the clerk had completed the confession, Martin remained before the Assembly while its members considered what they had heard. There was no charge that he had fought for Montrose, no witness accused him of wielding a sword in the Royalist line, and nothing in the surviving minute says that he had preached victory over the Covenant. The case against him was less dramatic but sufficiently serious in the eyes of the Kirk: he had travelled with men marching towards the rebellion, preached and prayed with an excommunicated chief, spent three nights with the Royalist army, greeted Alasdair MacColla, travelled for fifteen days with Sir Lachlan while eating, drinking and saying grace in his company, and conversed at Duart with men at the heart of the western Royalist cause. Most troubling of all, when neighbouring ministers had suffered for their opposition, Martin had been permitted to remain on his lands with his goods intact. Taken separately, each act might be explained; taken together, they had become the thing the Synod called compliance.
The clerk recorded that the Assembly had heard not only the written confession but Martin himself "at large", and so he had been given the opportunity to explain before sentence was passed. The judgement was unanimous. Martin MacGillivray was deposed ab officio et beneficio - from office and benefice.12 For a minister, those words reached well beyond professional embarrassment, because he lost both the authority to exercise his ministry and the living attached to it. The man who had once been thrown bodily from a kirk by Lochbuie's armed retainers had now been removed from the pulpit by his own Church, and this time no door needed to be locked against him because the sentence itself was enough.
What followed cannot be reconstructed with the same intimacy, for the surviving minutes become quieter about Martin. They do not tell us where he spent each day after his deposition, who first spoke to him about seeking restoration, or how long it took before anger, humiliation or certainty gave way to something the Synod would recognise as repentance. What they do tell us is that he came back. Martin could have treated the judgement as the end of his ministry or decided that a Church which regarded his conduct during war as rebellion no longer deserved his obedience, but instead he petitioned to be received again.
The same provincial court that had examined his conduct and removed him from office now had to decide whether the man before it had changed. By then Hector Maclean and Farquhar Fraser, ministers who had also been punished for compliance in the islands, were being restored after suspension. Martin's position was more difficult because his sentence had gone further: he had been deposed, and the Synod no longer possessed the authority simply to put him back into a parish. That decision belonged to the General Assembly.34
The minute concerning Martin's return is brief, but its wording is markedly gentler than the charge against him. It recalled that he had been deposed for his "complyance with the rebells" and his "familiarity with excommunicated persons", yet now he had supplicated to be received again and had shown what the Synod described as "lykely signs of reall repentance".4 The men who had closed his ministry were therefore prepared to recommend that it be opened again, ordering a letter in his favour to the Commissioners of the General Assembly so that, in the striking phrase preserved by the clerk, "his mouth may be opened."34
For Martin, whose life had been shaped by preaching, the image could hardly have been more exact. Months earlier the judgement had silenced him; now the Synod was asking a higher court to give him back his voice. There was still no certainty that Edinburgh would agree, because a recommendation was not a decision and the General Assembly could read the same confession, see the same pattern that had troubled Argyll and conclude that repentance had come too late. Martin could do little except wait upon men who knew the difficult years of his life largely through what other clerks had written about them.
The General Assembly met in Edinburgh in the summer of 1649 amid a country still divided by the consequences of war. Ministers across Scotland were being judged for political and ecclesiastical conduct during years in which the boundary between the two had almost disappeared, and Martin's case occupied only a few words in the surviving index of the Assembly's unprinted acts. Those few words nevertheless changed the remainder of his life. In Session 34 the clerk recorded: "Reposition of Mr. Marten Makilwrae, with a Recommendation to the Synod of Argyle to settle him in some charge in the Ministery."5
The spelling of his name had changed again, but the man had been restored. The decision did not declare that the Synod of Argyll had been wrong to depose him, nor did it erase the confession that remained in its book. Restoration was not acquittal. The Church accepted that Martin had crossed lines it believed a minister should not have crossed, while also accepting that repentance could restore a man whom discipline had removed.
Within the following years the records place Martin once more in active ministry, first associated with Ardnamurchan and then at Kilninian and Kilmore on Mull.6 Whatever he had learned from the years of rebellion, judgement and restoration went with him, although the records do not tell us how often he thought of the question that had once been put to him so sharply: why had the rebels left Martin MacGillivray in peace when other ministers had been spoiled? His answer had survived in ink long after everyone in the room was dead. God's providence, he had said, and their desire to have the Gospel among them. The Synod had not found that answer sufficient to save his ministry in 1648, but in 1649 it had found sufficient reason to ask that his mouth be opened again.
Two years later, at Kilninian, the Presbytery of Lorn sent Martin another set of instructions. This time he was not the minister summoned to answer for his own conduct but the minister entrusted with summoning other men to answer for theirs. A boat belonging to Thomas Hamilton had been robbed on the Sabbath, and when Martin opened the paper and began to read the names, another troublesome chapter of his ministry was about to begin.
Historical Note and Sources
The central events in this story are taken directly from the surviving minutes of the Synod of Argyll, preserved by the National Records of Scotland under reference CH2/557/1.
The crucial proceedings appear on manuscript pages 150–153. The Synod ordered the examination of Martin MacGillivray and other island ministers for their conduct during the Royalist rebellion, specifically their association with forces led by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, and Alasdair MacDonald, or MacColla. The record then preserves a formal report of "the confession of Mr Martein me Ilvra".12
Martin confessed that in April 1645, after Sir Lachlan Maclean had joined James Graham and Alasdair MacDonald and raised his men to march to Lochaber, Martin "went along with the people", while alleging that Sir Lachlan had threatened him into going. He admitted preaching and praying with Sir Lachlan on two occasions after the chief had been excommunicated, once at Icolmkill and once at "Rodill in the north yles". He further confessed that in December 1645 he came out of Mull to the Royalist army in Lorn, remained for three nights and "took Alister be the hand", again claiming compulsion by Sir Lachlan.12
The Synod then asked why, if the Macleans were engaged in rebellion against the Covenant, religion and kingdom, Martin had been allowed to live peacefully at home and retain his goods and lands while neighbouring ministers were burned out and spoiled. Martin answered that this was due to "Gods good providence" and the desire of the Macleans to have "the gospell continued within their bounds".12
Martin also confessed that in the summer of 1647 he travelled in Sir Lachlan's company in the North Isles for fifteen days, during which he ate and drank with him and said grace, despite Sir Lachlan's excommunication. He acknowledged meeting and conversing with the Earl of Antrim and Alasdair MacDonald at Duart. After hearing both the confession and Martin himself "at large", the Synod unanimously deposed him ab officio et beneficio - from office and benefice.12
The later Synod minute, manuscript page 178, records the beginning of Martin's restoration. It recalls that he had been deposed for "complyance with the rebells, and familiarity with excommunicated persons", but states that he had now shown "lykely signs of reall repentance" and had petitioned to be received again. The Synod therefore ordered a letter of recommendation in his favour to the Commissioners of the General Assembly so that "his mouth may be opened".34
The General Assembly of 1649 subsequently recorded Martin's "Reposition" in Session 34, together with a recommendation that the Synod of Argyll settle him in a ministerial charge.5 Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae gives the traditional dating of his deposition as 11 November 1648 and his restoration as 1 August 1649, and places him in subsequent ministry at Ardnamurchan and later Kilninian and Kilmore.6
The dialogue, Martin's private thoughts, the physical setting of his examination, the sensory detail surrounding the Royalist camp and the manner in which he experienced the period between deposition and restoration are fictional reconstruction. The admissions attributed to Martin, his explanations of compulsion, the Synod's question about the preservation of his property, his answer, his deposition, his petition, the finding of signs of repentance and his restoration are all grounded in the surviving ecclesiastical record.
Reference Guide
Numbered references in the text correspond to the sources below.
1. National Records of Scotland (NRS), CH2/557/1, Argyll Synod Minutes, 1639–1651, manuscript pp. 150–153, accessed via Scotland's People. These pages contain the order to examine the island ministers, Martin MacGillivray's confession and the Synod's unanimous sentence of deposition. Scotland's People images include CH000200557-00001-00151.jpg and CH000200557-00001-00153.jpg. Source link
2. Duncan C. MacTavish, ed., Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, 1639–1651, Scottish History Society, Third Series, vol. 37 (Edinburgh, 1943), p. 120 and following. Published transcription of Martin's confession and the proceedings against the island ministers. Source link
3. National Records of Scotland (NRS), CH2/557/1, Argyll Synod Minutes, 1639–1651, manuscript p. 178, accessed via Scotland's People, image CH000200557-00001-00179.jpg. Records the Synod's decision to recommend Martin for restoration. Source link
4. MacTavish, Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, 1639–1651, p. 138. The published transcription records Martin's previous 'complyance with the rebells' and 'familiarity with excommunicated persons', the Synod's finding of likely signs of real repentance and its wish that 'his mouth may be opened'. Source link
5. Church of Scotland, The Acts of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland, 1638–1649, Index of the Unprinted Acts of the Assembly, 1649, Session 34, p. 581: 'Reposition of Mr. Marten Makilwrae, with a Recommendation to the Synod of Argyle to settle him in some charge in the Ministery.' Source link
6. Hew Scott et al., Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, vol. IV, entry for Iona: Martin M'Ilvra, M.A.; admitted 1 November 1643, deposed 11 November 1648 'for complying with the rebels', and restored by the General Assembly in 1649. The volume also records his later ministry. Source link
7. Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, 'The civil wars 1639 to 1651', via ScotlandsPlaces. Used for the broader chronology of Alasdair MacColla's landing in western Scotland, his junction with Montrose and the Royalist campaigns of 1644–45. Source link
8. Andrew Lind, 'Bad and Evill Patriotts? – Royalism in Scotland during the British Civil Wars, c.1638–1651', PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2020. Used for the wider context of clerical Royalism and ecclesiastical discipline in Argyll and the Highlands. Source link
Archive Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the National Records of Scotland for preserving the original Synod of Argyll minutes and to Scotland's People for providing digital access to CH2/557/1. The manuscript images consulted for this story are copyright National Records of Scotland and are cited here by archival reference; they are not reproduced.
I am also grateful to the Scottish History Society and the National Library of Scotland for making Duncan C. MacTavish's published transcription of the Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, 1639–1651 accessible for comparison with the original manuscript.
I am grateful to the Mull Museum, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, for preserving and making accessible the reference material used in researching this story, including file CHURCH 01-001, containing extracts and transcriptions from the Presbytery Records of Lorn.
The historical fiction in this series is intended to bring documented people and events back into human focus while keeping a clear distinction between what the surviving records state and what has been imaginatively reconstructed around them.
Comments