Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/360

 astrology. He retaliated by combining with Lochy, the rector of the university, in charging Graham with obtaining the power of a nuncio without the consent of the king. Lochy is said by Spotiswood to have gone the length of excommunicating the archbishop, a step which he not unnaturally treated with contempt. But his implacable enemies, obtaining the king's assistance, carried the case to Rome. To add to his difficulties, he was obliged to conciliate the king and his courtiers by grants from the revenues of his diocese, which left him unable to meet the demands of the Roman bankers who had lent him the necessary money to procure the bulls. Several brief notices in the treasurer's accounts show that proceedings against him began as early as August 1473 before his return to Scotland, when a reward was paid to a chaplain at St. Andrews for information against him, and ships belonging to him were arrested in the king's name. On 6 Sept. on his way home from Rome the Carrick pursuivant was sent with letters of summons to him at Bruges, and in November a council was called to consider his case. Its records have not been preserved, but the result was his suspension from office by the appointment of Scheves as his coadjutor, the sequestration of the revenues of the see, and the reference of the accusations against him to the pope. The pope sent John Huseman, dean of Suza in the diocese of Cologne, his nuncio and commissioner to Scotland, who reported the conclusions of his inquiry to the papal consistory. So far as these appear in official documents they are to be found in the bull of 5 Dec. 1476, by which Huseman was appointed, and another of 9 Jan. 1478, in which the charges against Graham are declared proved, and sentence of deposition from his see pronounced against him as guilty of heresy and simony. The crimes for which he was condemned were maladministration of his diocese by oppression both of his ecclesiastical and lay subjects, especially the members of the university; erasure and falsification of the papal briefs, and disobedience to their orders; the celebration after excommunication or interdict of mass three times a day; blasphemy and defamation of the holy see; the declaration, both in the presence of Huseman, the pope's delegate, and at other times, that ‘he was himself a pope elected by God and crowned by an angel for the reformation of the church;’ the creation of prothonotaries and legates, and the revocation of indulgences granted by the pope on the ground that they had been purchased. The generality of some of these charges and the nature of others led to two opposite theories as to the conduct of Graham, which first appear in historians comparatively near his own time and have been repeated since. One was that he was mad; but apart from the occurrence of the word ‘dementias’ in the former of these bulls, which in the redundant style of the Roman chancery, when associated with ‘inquietationes atque molestias,’ can hardly refer to actual insanity, there is no support for this view in contemporary documents, though it is hinted at by Buchanan and Lesley. The other, for which Buchanan's narrative, followed by Spotiswood, is probably the original authority, is that Graham was really a precursor of the reformers. Mr. Dickson, in his preface to the treasurer's accounts, goes so far as to say that ‘it is not improbable that he had become a convert to the reforming principles of the Lollards,’ and that ‘it may not have been thought expedient to betray too broadly the direction in which so great a dignitary of the church had apostatised.’ But this is an inference for which the facts we know afford insufficient foundation. The celebration of three masses a day, almost the only specific charge against Graham, scarcely savours of Lollardism, though Buchanan gives it something of that colour by his remark that the bishops of that age seldom celebrated so many in three months. The declaration that he was himself a pope and appointed to reform the church may, however, point to a tendency in Graham to correct the abuses which, by the confession of the most catholic historian of Scotland, Lesley, were then corrupting the ecclesiastical state of Scotland, especially in the appointments to benefices of unworthy persons for money or favour, and this seems to have been the opinion of Spotiswood. The general verdict of historians is certainly favourable to Graham, who is represented as a good bishop, and his deposition as an act of oppression under the guise of a judicial process. The remainder of his life was spent in prison, first in Inchcolm, then for fear of his release by the English fleet in Dunfermline, and finally in the castle of Lochleven, where he died in 1478. He was buried in the chapel on the island of St. Serf. The bull deposing him says that Huseman sent a full notarial report of the inquiry into the charges against him to Rome. The publication of the Vatican records may further elucidate his singular fate. His character has hitherto been judged by the acts of his adversaries rather than by his own.

[Theiner, Vet. Mon. Hib. et Scotiæ and histories of Lesley, Buchanan, and Spotiswood; Keith's Cat. of the Scottish Bishops; Dickson's Pref. to Accounts of High Treasurer of Scotland; Lyon's Hist. of St. Andrews, i. 250.] 