The Disruption of 1843

On 18 May 1843 a procession of ministers walked out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh and down the hill to a hall at Canonmills, where they founded a new church. By the time the split was complete, 474 of the Church’s roughly 1,200 ministers had left, giving up their churches, homes and salaries. The event became known as the Disruption, and it was the most important upheaval in Scottish religious life since the Reformation. Its leader was Thomas Chalmers, who had made his name as a minister in Glasgow, and its effects reshaped the churches, schools and skyline of the city.

The question of patronage

The dispute was about who should choose a parish minister. Under the law of patronage, restored by Parliament in 1712, the right to appoint a minister to a parish usually belonged to a landowner or other patron, not to the congregation. Many church members, especially in the growing evangelical party, believed that this violated the spiritual independence of the church and the right of congregations to call their own ministers.

In 1834 the evangelicals won a majority in the General Assembly and passed the Veto Act, allowing a congregation to reject a minister imposed on it by a patron. The law courts disagreed. In the Auchterarder case, decided in 1838, the Court of Session ruled that the church had exceeded its powers, and the House of Lords upheld the decision. Further cases followed over the next few years, in which the courts and the church took opposite sides, a period known as the Ten Years’ Conflict. When Parliament rejected the church’s Claim of Right in January 1843, the evangelicals concluded that they could not remain in an established church controlled, as they saw it, by the civil courts.

The walk-out

When the General Assembly met in St Andrew’s Church, George Street, Edinburgh, on 18 May 1843, the retiring moderator, David Welsh, read a formal protest and left the building, followed by more than a hundred ministers and many elders. Crowds lined the streets as they walked to Tanfield Hall at Canonmills, where the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland was held, with Thomas Chalmers as its first moderator.

The ministers who left made a real sacrifice. They gave up their stipends, their manses and their churches, and many had no idea how they would support their families. The painter David Octavius Hill, who was present, decided to record the scene in a great painting. To capture the likenesses of the hundreds of people involved, he worked with the photographer Robert Adamson, and their partnership produced some of the earliest and finest photographic portraits ever made.

Chalmers and Glasgow

Thomas Chalmers had become famous as a preacher at the Tron Church in Glasgow from 1815, and from 1819 he led the parish of St John’s, where he carried out his celebrated experiment in tackling poverty through voluntary effort, dividing the parish into districts and founding schools. His years in Glasgow shaped his belief in a church close to the people and responsible for their welfare, and many Glasgow ministers and congregations followed him out of the established church in 1843.

Wealthy evangelical merchants and businessmen, in Glasgow as elsewhere, gave generously to the new church. Their money paid for churches, manses and schools at astonishing speed, and helped to fund the national Sustentation Fund that Chalmers devised to pay all Free Church ministers a basic stipend from a central pool.

Building a new church

Within a few years the Free Church had built hundreds of churches across Scotland, and Glasgow’s skyline began to fill with Free Church spires. The church also founded its own schools and colleges to train ministers. In Glasgow its theological college was built between 1856 and 1861 to designs by the architect Charles Wilson, on the hill at Park, with a group of tall Italianate towers that remain one of the great landmarks of the West End skyline. The building, later known as Trinity College, has since been converted into flats.

The competition between the Church of Scotland and the Free Church also drove a burst of church building by both, and a rivalry in education and charitable work that lasted for the rest of the century.

Reunion

The divisions of 1843 did not last forever. In 1900 most of the Free Church united with the United Presbyterian Church to form the United Free Church, while a small minority continued as the Free Church of Scotland. Parliament gradually removed the grievances that had caused the Disruption, abolishing patronage in 1874 and later recognising the spiritual independence of the church. In 1929 the United Free Church reunited with the Church of Scotland.

The legacy of the Disruption can still be seen across Glasgow, in the many church buildings, some now used for other purposes, that were built in the decades after 1843, and in the towers above Park Circus. The broader story of the city’s churches is told in our religion chapter.

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