Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

During my years in Parliament I had one curious interlude. In 1933 and 1934 I was Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in succession to Sir Iain Colquhoun. The King's Commissioner opens and closes the Assembly, appears daily at its meetings, and fulfils a multitude of other engagements; for a fortnight he lives in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where he entertains the Church and the World according to his means and his inclination.

I gladly accepted the office, for the Scottish Church had always been a principal part of my background. I was born and brought up in a manse. I was an elder of the Kirk, my historical studies had lain to some extent in Scottish church history, and I had had a small part in bringing about the union of the United Free Church (of which my father had been a minister) with the Church of Scotland It was an office thickly encrusted with history. In the seventeenth century the Lord High Commissioner presided over the Scottish Parliament as well as the General Assembly, and a stormy time he had of it. (I remembered Hamilton at the epoch-making Glasgow Assembly of 1639.) Since the Union of 1707 he presides at the Assembly alone. But memories of early sturt and strife still cling to him. On the night of his arrival, when the Scots nobility are invited to a state dinner, he receives from the Lord Provost the keys of the city of Edinburgh; he himself chooses the password for the Palace guards; the Lord Provost and the Sheriff of the Lothians are given the highest precedence; -- all relics of the past when the King's Commissioner took his life in his hands and had at any cost to mollify the local dignitaries. The same atmosphere hangs over the Assembly itself. The proceedings are opened with an historic ritual, and the close has in it the whole history of the Scottish Kirk, which has always claimed, and is now admitted by statute, to be completely self-governing. The High Commissioner formally declares the sederunt closed and promises to report to the King that everything has been done decently and in order. The Moderator then rises and has the last word, appointing the date of the next Assembly, "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, _the only Head of this Church_."