THE LIFE

OF

ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.

THE name of Leighton occurs in some of the oldest annals of Scottish history. It belonged to a reputable family, proprietary of the barony of Ulishaven, otherwise called Usan, which is a demesne in Craig, a considerable fishing-village in the county of Forfar. Of this name the spelling is very various, as will commonly be the case with the patronymic of a family of which the scattered vestiges appear, at wide intervals, in the wilderness of the unlettered ages. It is spelt, Leichtoune, Lichtoun, Lyghton, Lighton, and in several other fashions, which are not respectively fixed to certain dates, but seem to have obtained indiscriminately in the same eras. One may remark, however, that the modern orthography of the name is the same, which presents itself in registers of the greatest antiquity. In the Rotuli Scotia, which have lately been published from the original records in the Tower, we read that A. D. 1374, John de Leighton, clericus de Scotia, obtained a safe-conduct to Oxford, there to prosecute his studies. Whether or not this zealot of literature were of the Usan race cannot now be certainly determined. To the ancestors of that family, however, may be assigned the meed of sturdy warriors, on the authority of a quaint chronicle which relates, that

Schir Walter of Ogilvy, that gud knycht,

Stout and manful, bauld and wycht,

being sheriff of Angus, was killed in 1392 at Gasklune or Glenbrerith near Blairgowrie in Perthshire, by a party of three hundred Highlanders. Ogilvy, with Sir Patrick Gray, Sir David Lindsay of Glenesk, and about sixty men, encountered the enemy. Gray and Lindsay were wounded; and Sir Walter Ogilvy, his uterine brother Walter Leighton of Ulishaven, and some of their friends, were killed.

Besides this testimony to the prowess of a Leighton in the days of feudal lawlessness, there is proof of the same family, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, having been inscribed in the lists of ecclesiastical dignity and political importance. Mention is made by Keith, in his Catalogue of Scottish Bishops, of one Henry Leighton, parson of

VOL. I.

B

Duffus and chantor of Moray, "legum doctor et baccalaureus in decretis," a son of the ancient family of the Leightons of Ulyshaven, who was consecrated Bishop of Moray, in 1414 or 1415, and was translated about ten years afterwards to the see of Aberdeen. He was one of the commissioners sent to London to negotiate the ransom of James I., with whom he returned to Scotland; where he is supposed to have died A. D. 1441.

Although it may be received for a fact, that the subject of our memoir was descended of this ancient and respectable family, yet it has been found impossible to trace all the steps of his pedigree. The family itself had undoubtedly declined in wealth and credit, before the birth of the individual, who was destined to reflect upon it a new and transcendant lustre for it is on record that, A. D. 1619, a part at least of its original estates had been alienated; and in 1670, there is a grant under the great seal to Charles Maitland of Halton of the barony of Ulishaven, escheated to the king by the death of John, earl of Dundee, without male issue.

The father of Archbishop Leighton was Dr. Alexander Leighton, a presbyterian clergyman of unhappy celebrity. His sufferings and the causes of them are notorious. In the reign of Charles I, he was sentenced by the Star-Chamber, for a virulent attack upon episcopacy, to be whipt and pilloried, to have his ears cropt, his nose slit, and his cheeks branded. This barbarous punishment was rigorously inflicted; and to it were superadded, during a long imprisonment, such atrocious severities, as savoured more of vindictive malignity than of judicial retribution. No apology would be valid, or even decent, for cruelties, which were alike revolting to justice, to humanity, and to religion. That the wretched sufferer, however, was of a cross, untowardly disposition, may be conjectured from his having brought himself under the lash of the law, in the preceding reign, by stubbornly refusing to abandon the irregular practice of medicine. There is a fact, moreover, not generally known, which may account for the extreme rigour with which his subsequent offences were visited. Not only was the book, for which he was so maltreated, and which is entitled “Zion's Plea against Prelacy," outrageously scurrilous and inflammatory in its contents, but there were collateral circumstances attending its publication, that betokened a michievous purpose in the writer. In the first edition, neither the name of the author nor of the printer is given, and nstead of the date in the usual way, we find—“Printed the year and moneth wherein Rochell was lost." The frontispiece exhibits on one page a lamp burning, supported by a book, and guarded by two men with drawn swords; which hieroglyphic is explained by the legend: Prevailing prelats strive to quench our light, Except your sacred power quash their might.

tower.

On the other page is the representation of an antique, dilapidated Out of its ruins grows an elder-bush, from the branches of which several bishops are tumbling, one of them holding in his hand a large box. This device is interpreted by the motto:

The tottering prelats, with their trumpery, all

Shall moulder down, like elder from a wall.

The place of Archbishop Leighton's birth has been much debated. It is commonly believed that he was a native of London; on the strength, I imagine, of Burnet's assertion, that he was sent from thence to be educated in Scotland. This, however, is inferring too much for he may have been carried up, in his infancy, from Scotland to London, when his father settled in that city. Craig also claims him for her son but this claim seems to have no stronger foundation, than the fact of his direct or collateral ancestors having been considerable proprietors in that village; a fact too weak to sustain the hypothesis raised on it by the inhabitants, through a virtuous solicitude to make out their affinity with so eminent a person. To my mind there are unanswerable reasons for assigning that distinction to Edinburgh. In the inscription on his tombstone, Leighton is said to have died in his 74th year; and deducting 73 from 1684, the undisputed year of his decease, we shall have 1611 for the year of his nativity. The same amount is obtained by deducting 30, the number of his years when he took orders, from 1641, which is the date of that transaction. Now his father was at that time professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh college, and did not go up to London until two years afterwards*; and it is certainly to be presumed, not a shadow of evidence appearing to the contrary, that the son was born in the place wherein the father was then residing. He had one brother, of whom mention will be made hereafter, who was younger than he; and two sisters, one of whom was married to a Mr. Lightmaker, a gentleman of landed property in Sussex; and the other to Mr. Rathband, as appears from a single allusion in one of her brother's letters.

Of his early years there is left but a scanty though valuable notice. It comes to us on the unquestionable authority of his sister, that his singular teachableness and piety, from his tenderest age, endeared him greatly to his parents; who used to speak with admiration of his extraordinary exemption from childish faults and follies.

At college his behaviour was so uniformly excellent, as to attract the notice of his superiors; and one of them, in a letter to Dr. Leighton, congratulates him on having a son, in whom Providence has made him abundant compensation for his sufferings. There is still in existence a humorous poem on Dr. Aikenhead, warden of the college, which

* See Chalmers's Biograph, Dict,

Leighton wrote when an undergraduate. It evinces a good-natured playfulness of fancy, but is not of a merit that calls for publication.

After taking his degree, Leighton passed several years in travel, and in the studies proper to qualify him for future usefulness. It was his mature opinion, that great advantages are to be reaped from a residence in foreign parts; inasmuch as a large acquaintance with the sentiments of strangers, and with the civil and religious institutions, the manners and usages of other countries, conduces to unshackle the mind of indigenous prejudices, to abate the self-sufficiency of partial knowledge, and to produce a sober and charitable estimate of opinions that differ from our own. Many years afterwards, he recommended a similar course to his nephew, alleging, that "there is a very peculiar advantage in travel, not to be understood but by the trial of it;: and that for himself he nowise repented the time he had spent in that way."

During his stay abroad, Leighton was often at Douay, where some of his relations were settled. In this seminary he appears to have met with some religionists, whose lives were framed on the strictest model of primitive piety. Though keenly alive to the faults of popery, he did not consider the Romish church to be utterly antichristian; but thought he discerned in it beautiful fragments of the original temple, however disfigured with barbarous additions, and almost hid beneath the rampant growth of a baleful superstition. Having learnt from these better portions of that corrupt establishment, that its constitutions were not altogether dross, he went on to discover that the frame of his own church was not entirely gold: nor did it escape him, that in the indiscriminate extermination, so clamorously demanded in Scotland, of all those offices of devotion, which symbolized with the Roman Catholic services, there would be swept away some of the noblest formularies and most useful institutes of the primitive church. It was probably from this period that his veneration for the presbyterian platform began to abate.

He was thirty years old before he took holy orders; and in postponing to so ripe an age his entrance on the ministry, as well as in retiring so early as he did from its more laborious province, he acted agreeably to his avowed opinion, that “ some men preach too soon, and some too long." His judgment of what is most reverent towards God corresponded with those canons of the Levitical economy, which prescribe a mature age for engaging in the more arduous department of the sacerdotal office, and grant an honourable superannuation at that period of life, when the strength of mind and body commonly begins to decay. It was on the sixteenth day of December, A. D. 1641, that Leighton was ordained and admitted minister of Newbottle, in Midlothian, a parish in the presbytery of Dalkeith. All diligence has

been used to retrieve traditional reminiscences of the manner in which this holy man discharged the duties of the office, in undertaking which he had evinced so much religious caution. But research has been fruitless. No distinct traces remained of those parochial ministrations, which doubtless fill an ample page in that book of the Divine remembrance, from which no work of faith, no labour of love, is ever obliterated.

Of the general tenor, however, of his life and ministerial occupations, we have a few short but invaluable notices in Burnet's History of his own Time. Engrossed with the care of his parish, he seldom mixed in the convocations of the presbyters, whose practice of descanting on the Covenant from the pulpit he greatly disapproved; and still more their stern determination to force that bitter morsel on conscientious objectors. It was his aim not to win proselytes to a party, but converts to Jesus Christ. And exemplary indeed must he have been, since the picture of a finished evangelist, which his intimate friend has drawn in the beautiful Discourse of the Pastoral Care, was correctly copied from the lively pattern exhibited by Leighton. Yet the blameless sanctity of his manners, his professional excellence, and his studious inoffensiveness, were not enough to content the zealots of his church. In a synod he was publicly reprimanded for not "preaching up the times." Who," he asked, "does preach up the times?" It was answered that all the brethren did it. "Then," he rejoined, "if all of you preach up the times, you may surely allow one poor brother to preach up Christ Jesus and eternity."

Although Leighton was averse, both by temper and principle, from meddling with politics, yet there were certain conjunctures of perplexity and peril, in which he thought himself bound to set an example to his flock of intrepid loyalty. In the year 1648, he acceded to the Engagement for the King; a step which would have involved him in serious trouble with the republican government, but for the interposition of the Earl of Lothian, and the charm of his personal character. When the Engagement expired, in the discomfiture of those enterprises to which it had given birth, he was placed in a very delicate predicament; in which, however, his behaviour was not less creditable to his political discretion, than to his Christian boldness and integrity. Called upon in his official capacity to admonish some of his parishioners, after they had made a public profession of repentance, for being actively concerned in that Engagement to which he himself had subscribed, he directed their consciences to the many offences against morality and religion which they had committed in the course of their military service; and of these, without touching on the grounds of the expedition and the merits of their cause, he solemnly charged them to repent.