John Row secundus – The Reformation

JOHN ROW, ( secundus)
Minister of Culross.

He was  born Perth, his baptism is recorded as having taken place 6th Jan. 1568-9, third son of John R., the Reformer, min. of Perth; educated by his father, he was so precocious that he knew Hebrew at the age of seven, and read daily after dinner or supper portions of the Old Testament in the original. On the death of his father in 1580, his brother William and he received friar’s pensions from the King’s Hospital at Perth. At fifteen he became schoolmaster of Kennoway and tutor to his cousins, sons of Beaton of Balfour, whomhe accompanied to Edinburgh Univ. in 1586, where he graduated M.A. 1st Aug. 1590. Shortly afterwards he was elected schoolmaster of Aberdour, and was tutor to William, Earl of Morton. He continued his studies in divinity, and towards the end of 1592 he was ord. to this charge. He was one of the forty-five mins. who signed a Protest to Parliament, 1st July 1606, against Episcopacy, and in the same year, at Linlithgow, he met with the mins. who were to be put on their trial for holding the Assembly at Aberdeen in disobedience to the King’s command. In 1616 he declined a presentation to Aberdour, and later, a call to Culross. In 1619, and again on 29th Dec. 1621, he was summoned before the Court of High Commission for nonconformity and opposition to Prelacy. He was prevented by illness from obeying the former summons, but was represented by a son and a nephew. Sir George Bruce of Carnock also intervened on his behalf and sent a letter by one of his servants, Richard Christie, to the Archbishop. The Archbishop deposed two mins. but dealt more leniently with Row, who was simply “confined to his own congregation.” Richard Christie claimed as much credit for the light sentence as Row’s other friends “After sundry arguments, Christie came on with one weightie argument,” saying, “thir coals in your mines are very evil, and my master (Bruce) hath very many good coals: send up a vessel every year to Culross,and I shall see her laden with good coals.” After Row had been restricted to his small parish he organised the Communion services which gave Carnock a celebrity among the parishes of Scotland. This it retained for upwards of two hundred years. At a Communion in 1635 it is said there were no fewer than seventeen tables. Row was a member of the Glasgow Assembly of 1638, when he was app. one of a committee of mins. “come to years” to enquire from personal knowledge of the handwriting of clerks and their own recollection of events into the authenticity of certain Assembly Records which had been missing for sometime, the result being that their genuineness was established. By the same Assembly he was named one of a committee for considering such constitutions and laws ” as might prevent corruptions in the future, like those which had troubled the Kirk in the past.” He died 26th June 1646, after a few days’ illness, and was buried at the east end of Carnock Church, where a monumental stone was erected to his memory. This monument is surmounted bya Scottish thistle, immediately over which are the Hebrew words for “The Last House,”’ and the following Latin inscription: ” Hic Jacet M. Jo. Row, Pastor hujus ecclesise fidelissimus: vixit acerrimus veritatis et foederis Scoticani assertor: hierarchias pseudo-episcopalis et omanorum rituum cordicitus osor: in frequenti symmistarum apostasia

cubi instar constantissimus.”

 In ” Memorials of the
Family of Row”[in MS.] there is to be found this other epitaph:

‘”Though bald with age, and prest with weight, In crooked times this man went straight His pen kept hid things on record For which the Prelats him abhorr’d And his Carnock, his little quarter

For Canterbury he would not barter.”

He marr. 4th Jan. 1595 Grizel (died 30th Jan. 1659), described as “a verie comelie and beautifull young woman,” daugh. of David Fergusson, min. of Dunfermline,  and had issue David, a min. in Ireland, “who was obliged to return to Scotland after a residence of twenty-five years, fifteen of which he had spent in the ministry, with a wife and five children without means of support, because of persecution and oppression from Papists who burned, slew, and did all the hurt they could to those that fled not”; John, Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen (g.v.); Robert, min. of Abercorn; William, min. of Ceres Katherine (marr. (1) cont. 1st Sept. 1627, Robert Alison, merchant burgess, Dunfermline: f2) John Messone, burgess of Culross); Elizabeth (marr. cont. 4th April 1623, William Gibbon, indweller in Banhaird); Margaret (marr. David Robertson, of Murton-Elginch, and was great-great grandmother of Principal Robertson, the historian).