Abstract
In the eighteenth century, the seminary at Scalan played a pivotal role in the Scottish Mission – promising Lowland boys were first instructed there, before training for the priesthood at one of the Scots Colleges on the Continent. The education of those boys was entrusted to a succession of masters who were conscious that the survival of the Catholic faith in Scotland partly depended on the success of their endeavours. The chapter will focus on the correspondence of John Geddes, master at Scalan (1762–1767), then Rector of the Scots College, Valladolid (1770–1780) and eventually Coadjutor to the Vicar Apostolic of the Lowland District, and that of John Paterson, the longest-serving Scalan master (1770–1783), who had been a pupil of John Geddes’s in the 1760s. I will explore the various functions – advice, instruction, support and comfort, among others – served by the correspondence of the master with bishops and senior priests on the one hand, and with his former pupils on the other.
My grateful thanks are due to the Catholic Record Society which awarded me grants out of the David Rogers Research Fund.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Scottish Catholic Archives, Blairs Letters [thereafter SCA, BL], George James Gordon to Alexander Smith, 7 March 1763. The foreign shops were the Scots Colleges on the Continent; ‘Mr Nicop’ was one of Bishop Gordon’s aliases: he was Bishop of Nicopolis.
- 4.
‘I should be very glad to see my old Nest, for which I still retain a very warm attachment; but fear it will not be in my power’. SCA, BL, George James Gordon to John Geddes, 19 June 1765. George James Gordon was a student at Scalan from 1717 to 1725. He was ordained there in September 1725 and came back as master in 1727, an office he fulfilled for over ten years.
- 5.
George James Gordon was ordained alongside Hugh MacDonald, the first Vicar Apostolic of the Highland District. Francis MacDonald was ordained in 1736, but apostatised a few years later to become a Royal Bounty catechist. John Gordon was ordained in 1754 and was appointed to the mission of Glenlivet, but died in 1757, aged 28.
- 6.
More often than not, that meeting was held in the summer at Scalan and was the occasion for drafting ‘Italian’ letters, that is to say letters to various dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome.
- 7.
See note 4 above. Both the aliases and the metaphors were too transparent by then to afford the people involved any protection.
- 8.
SCA, BL, John Geddes to Alexander Smith, 3 March 1765. The ‘peace’ refers to a lull in the priest-hunt in the north-east, but also to the end of the Seven Years’ War, as the naval blockade made it extremely difficult for Scottish boys to get to the Scots Colleges abroad.
- 9.
SCA, BL, George Hay to John Geddes, 9 March 1774.
- 10.
The Bishops’ plan had foundered the previous year on another priest’s categorical refusal to move to Shenval.
- 11.
George Hay had been appointed procurator, which meant he had to be stationed in Edinburgh. Geddes himself later confided to Hay: ‘I own to you, that I thought nothing could excuse the sending Mr Thomson to Scalan […] but downright Necessity’. SCA, BL, John Geddes to George Hay, 28 November 1769.
- 12.
Royal Scots College, Valladolid (now Salamanca) [thereafter RSC], John Paterson to John Geddes, 9 June 1776: ‘My ambition is, to be stil’d a second Mr John Geddes, this I hope you will say is not unlawful.’
- 13.
Alexander Cameron, James Cameron, John Farquharson, John Gordon (later vice-rector at Valladolid), William Hay, Alexander Innes and John Paterson were taught by Geddes. Thomas Bagnall, Andrew Dawson, Alexander Farquharson, John Gordon (John Geddes’s nephew), Peter Hay, Lachlan MacIntosh and George Mathison by Paterson. The last two mentioned only spent a few months in Scalan under Paterson’s supervision, but left the seminary to be trained by Geddes at Valladolid. One further priest, Paul Macpherson, must be added to the list. Though he was a pupil of John Thomson’s at Scalan, he was first taught reading and writing by Geddes, his local priest, and later studied for the priesthood at Valladolid while Geddes was Rector of the College.
- 14.
Besides Paterson, the recipients of these letters were John Thomson, one-time master of Scalan and by then in charge of the mission of Strathavon, and the newly-ordained Alexander Cameron, who was stationed at Tomintoul.
- 15.
RSC, James Grant to John Geddes, 28 September 1770. Soon after he arrived at Scalan, Geddes wrote to Bishop Smith: ‘I am very sensible of the Advantage I may draw from corresponding with Mr George at Abdn, & shall most willingly obey you in having Recourse to him in Doubts’. SCA, BL, John Geddes to Alexander Smith, 27 November 1762.
- 16.
SCA, BL, John Geddes to George Mathison, 3 May 1779. Obviously, Geddes would have wanted his Scalan pupils to let him know about the situation in the Scots Colleges they studied at, which they did. Indeed, the letters Geddes received from the Scots College at Rome in the late 1760s and 1770s were the Bishops’ main source of information on that College’s dysfunctional state.
- 17.
References to such letters can be found in Paterson’s correspondence with Geddes, but none of them is extant. See, for instance, RSC, John Paterson to John Geddes, 6 July 1774: ‘Give my kindest Complts and blessing to your young folks, especially to my old Pupils[.] I would willingly write to them, but really time will not permit, hope therefore that they will excuse me at present, next time I write to you by post, shall add a few lines in that letter to them…I received Jo: Gordon & George Mathison’s Letter do thank them for their kind rembrance [sic] of me, shall write them as I said before some other time.’
- 18.
SRC, Paul Macpherson to John Geddes, 4 July 1776.
- 19.
SRC, Paul Macpherson to John Geddes, 24 April 1777.
- 20.
SRC, John Farquharson to John Geddes, 8 February 1776.
- 21.
When Geddes took up his position in 1762, Scalan appeared to be lacking even in the bare essentials: ‘I’m sorry your house is so ill provided of accommodation and the most necessary implements. But tho’ the circumstances of times do not allow to be at great expences in the present uncertainties, yet I think that, at all events, the most requisite things for a decent tables [sic], clean beds &c should be got. Sure I am Mr Robn will agree to this and allow the expences, if you represent the matter properly to him.’ SCA, BL, George James Gordon to John Geddes, 9 June 1763.
- 22.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 20 October 1771.
- 23.
SCA, BL, John Geddes to Alexander Smith, 13 September 1762. Six years later, looking back on his tenure as master with mixed feelings, lamenting the ‘money & Pains…lost on Boys of whom we can have little Hopes of their ever being of Use’, he reminded Bishop Grant of the extra burden he had had to shoulder: ‘I must also take Notice, that during almost all the time I had the Care of that House, I had it not in my Power to give one half of the Attendance I saw necessary; so that I thought it but Justice to attribute a great deal of the things, that did not please me to the Want of a prudent Superiour present with them more constantly’. SCA, BL, John Geddes to James Grant, 7 March 1768.
- 24.
SRC, John Farquharson to John Geddes, 8 February 1776. Scalan lay by the banks of Crombie Burn.
- 25.
See, for instance, SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 25 December 1770: ‘Much Honour’d Sir & Loving Father’; John Paterson to George Hay, 20 December 1771: ‘I am Much Honour’d Sir, and most affectionate Father, your most loving and most obedt Child while I am John Paterson’.
- 26.
SCA, BL, George Hay to Alexander Cameron, John Paterson and John Thomson, 12 September 1772.
- 27.
SCA, BL, Alexander Cameron to John Geddes, 25 July 1783: ‘I find, amongst my other papers, a more than half-finished letter to you, in which I tell you I had the pleasure of your letter of 26 Septr by last post’.
- 28.
RSC, Alexander Cameron to John Geddes, 9 June 1776.
- 29.
SCA, BL, Alexander Cameron to John Geddes, 26 March 1781.
- 30.
SCA, BL, Paul Macpherson to John Geddes, 28 October 1783: ‘as I cannot expect to have the pleasure of seeing you soon I must write you some thing in regard of myself’.
- 31.
Prunier 2007.
- 32.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 22 March 1771.
- 33.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 6 May 1771.
- 34.
RSC, John Paterson to John Geddes, 13 November 1770.
- 35.
The three priests were ‘neighbours’. Only three letters are extant, but there might have been more.
- 36.
SCA, BL, George Hay to Alexander Cameron, John Paterson and John Thomson, 12 September 1772.
- 37.
It is difficult to form a judgment from William Hay’s letters whether Geddes did—the Coadjutor’s letters are not extant.
- 38.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to John Geddes, 28 December 1782.
- 39.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to John Geddes, 31 January 1783.
- 40.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 11 March 1771.
- 41.
See, for instance, SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 6 May 1771, quoted above.
- 42.
RSC, Paul Macpherson to John Geddes, 5 April 1776.
- 43.
SCA, BL, John Thomson to John Geddes, 16 February 1783. When Geddes left Spain, John Gordon, his former pupil at Scalan, then Vice Rector of the Scots College in Valladolid, made a similar request. Though he was in much friendlier surroundings, he used the same words: ‘Your letters will be at all times a cordial to me’. SCA, BL, John Gordon to John Geddes, 26 February 1781.
- 44.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 14 September 1770.
- 45.
RSC, Geddes Papers, John Geddes, ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Seminary of Scalan’. The text of another copy, in the Scottish Catholic Archives, can be found in ‘The College for the Lowland District of Scotland at Scalan and Aquhorties: Registers and Documents’, W. J. Anderson (ed), Innes Review 14 (1963), 89–212.
- 46.
See SCA, BL, George James Gordon to John Geddes, 19 June 1765: ‘I do not think you should entertain any thoughts of exchanging your present business, which plainly appears to be the place in which God would have you to be, for your former or any other station. We are allwise best and may expect the greater blessing and happy success in the situation the Divine Providence puts us in, by the order of good and wise Suprs.’
- 47.
SCA, BL, John Paterson to George Hay, 12 November 1771. It is not clear why Paterson apprehended their correspondence would lapse at that point, except for the fact that he was fully settled at Scalan by then and might have feared that Hay would no longer feel it necessary to write regularly to him.
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Prunier, C. (2013). ‘Every Time I Receive a Letter from You It Gives Me New Vigour’: The Correspondence of the Scalan Masters, 1762–1783. In: Dunan-Page, A., Prunier, C. (eds) Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 209. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5216-0_8
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