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This picture of St Andrew’s is more than a century old. It has not changed much

The last large-scale religious persecution in Scotland was in 1746. After that there were still penal laws on the statute book, and religious minorities often had reason to grumble, but never again were troops used to burn down churches. The heartland of the Episcopal Church was the north-east of Scotland, and the intention was to extirpate it. They said you could go from the Tay up and round to the Spey and beyond, and never be out of sight of the column of smoke from a burning Episcopal chapel. There was a fire risk in bigger towns, so the chapels in Stonehaven and Peterhead and Inverness were demolished, and the bill for the demolition was sent to the congregation.

Two of the chapels burnt down were St Andrew’s Chapel in Banff, and the chapel at Portsoy (New Durn). After about five years St Andrew’s was rebuilt on the same site, and the present St Andrew’s is a rebuild of the replacement. It may well be that a future archaeologist will find traces of burning in the foundations of the present church. St Andrew’s had to disobey its bishop in order to become legally qualified to rebuild. The new “Qualified” chapel by law had to have a clergyman ordained in England. For forty years they sent north-east loons down to England to be ordained. (One was ordained by an Irish bishop on holiday, but that’s another story). Then Charles III (‘Bonny Prince Charlie’) died and the Episcopal Church decided after all to pray for King George, and the “Qualified” priest at Banff happily became what he had always wanted to be, an ordinary Scottish Episcopalian. It took several years before the government recognized that this particular religious minority was no threat.

You might say that this religious persecution was political, not religious. The Episcopal Church was hunted down because, in conscience, they supported a rival line of kings. Historically, there have been cases were religious groups stacked guns in their cellars. But burning down churches, and saying by law that no minister may be in a room with more than five other people, are deeds of tyranny.

It is good to think that St Andrew’s Church is still there, in the same place on the High Street as when Cumberland’s dragoons burnt it down on November 10th 1746, and you can see, now on loan in the Museum of Banff, the chalice rescued from the ruins of the New Durn chapel.

 In 1862 John Kynoch was digging a grave in the old St Mary’s kirkyard in Banff, then still in use. He hit stone and was, he said, “compelled to use the pick in place of the spade”. Then he realised he had uncovered part of a statue. The pick had done serious damage in the process. Not being an archaeologist, he did not gather up the bits broken off. He took his find to the manse, where it stayed for a time, but then was put back in the kirkyard as an attraction for visitors. Twenty years later, there was a gathering of the northern Scientific Societies at Banff, and they were shown Mr Kynoch’s find. The learned minister of Nairn, Dr Grigor, said ‘That is a late-mediaeval Pieta”. The Catholic priest at Banff, Fr Chisholm, later a bishop, contradicted him, because the Middle Ages are Catholic, not Presbyterian, territory. It was too small to be a Pieta. He thought it might be part of a set of Stations of the Cross, the one that shows Christ being taken down from the cross after the crucifixion. Perhaps you could have a version of the thirteenth station showing him being lifted down and placed on his mother’s lap.

The statue was taken to Edinburgh and showed to scholars there, and Dr Grigor brought a picture of Michelangelo’s Pieta in Rome to the next meeting of the Banffshire Field Club, and it was agreed that what Banff had was a Pieta. It is likely that the word Pieta was a new one to Banffshire. Now classified and recognised as an amazing local survival of medieval art, the Pieta was at once moved to Banff Museum in 1883, and it has been there ever since. There is little doubt that it is local. A stonemason could tell you this is old red sandstone, common along this coast, and still quarried in Morayshire. (Incidentally old red sandstone can be yellow too.) Some say that the fact that the heads are missing is evidence of deliberate iconoclasm at the Reformation, but Banff quite liked images of Our Lady, and across the room in the Museum is the original Mercat Cross, with a statue of the Virgin and Child which survived in a public place throughout the Reformation and on. It is sadly possible that a man with a pick will knock off bits that stick out before he realises he has found a statue.

In a way, Michelangelo’s masterpiece has been a nuisance in interpreting what we have got in Banff, as if the sculptor in Banff must have had it as his model. On the continent there were hundreds of Pietas going back 200 years before Michelangelo, most common in Germany, but in France and Italy as well. No other Pietas, or indeed Stations of the Cross, have emerged from mediaeval Scotland. It is actually a problem to make one that looks right. A mother with a baby is easy, but a woman with the corpse of a full-grown man looks not just tragic but somewhat grotesque. So earlier Pietas often do not achieve what Michelangelo managed. Measured against them our Banff sculptor did all right.

Presumably it stood in the parish church, or perhaps in the Carmelite church, now lost.