| On the other hand, David Calderwood’s Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, beginning at Patrik Hamilton and ending at the death of James the Sixt, is the work of an indefatigable adversary of prelacy, whose opinions, on this head, caused his expulsion from presbytery and assembly in 1608, and, nine years later, though expressed with moderation, led James to denounce him to his face as “a very knave.” After undergoing both imprisonment and exile, he returned to Scotland in 1625, 11 and, in 1641, was allowed to sit in the general assembly, though without the rights of a member. Two years before his death, he was granted a handsome pension in order to complete his History, which is a methodised and corrected revision in three volumes of the larger work—the latter being regarded by him rather as a commonplace book of facts and documents than as a finished history. Yet, to students, the complete work is the most valuable, as containing the actual language of Knox and the other reformers, which, in the revised edition, Calderwood more or less assimilated to his own. |
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