On Whitsunday in June 1593 William Sinclair of Galwaldmuir and two of his sons attended a kirk near Stirling to hear the Sabbath day's sermon. Perhaps they and some of their fellow parishioners were inspired by hearing the word of God, but not everyone in the neighborhood was in a forgiving mood. Just after they left the kirk, “immediatlie aftir sermond,” the Sinclairs were attacked by Sir Archibald Stirling of Keir and several of his followers. When the melee was over, the three Sinclairs lay dead. This was no random act of violence. Rather, it was part of an ongoing feud; Sinclair of Galwaldmuir had earlier been involved in the killing of Stirling of Keir's brother James. The discord originated with a disputed title to the lands of Auchinbie in the parish of Dunblane. The Sinclairs claimed that they held it in feu from the king, while the Stirlings countered that they held it on similar terms from their kinsman William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, and they had backed this with a royal confirmation of the feu charter the previous December. The attack was also a significant incursion of profane activity into sacred space—an act situated in such a way as to maximize its dramatic impact.

By following the course of the Sinclair-Stirling feud to its conclusion and also drawing on other examples in which officials of Scotland's Reformed Kirk became involved in conflicts, either as peacemakers or antagonists, this article will examine two related issues.

In January 1773, Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the colonies, received a letter urging him to appoint no more Scots or Irishmen to offices in America. While the author claimed that, as a “Cosmopolite” he had no vulgar “national Prejudices,” he declared that “the English, particularly the Americans,” had conceived such Prejudices against the Scots and Irish, that it is great Impolicy to nominate them for governors or for any Employ in America….” One cannot know exactly what public relations disasters might have inspired this strong advice. Nevertheless, recent changes in both the United Kingdom and the empire at large had clearly heightened age-old English prejudices against these “alien” groups. Never before had so many Scots and Irishmen held public office in Britain and its colonies, and Scottish merchants were making considerable inroads in imperial trade at the expense of their English counterparts. However, jealousy on account of this new-found power does not completely explain the widespread animus against these groups. Many Englishmen and Anglo-Americans also perceived that Scots and Irishmen approached imperial government in ways that threatened English liberty. While it would be going too far to accept the contemporary English notion that Scots, and indeed most non-Englishmen, were “tinctured with notions of despotism,” this stereotype points toward the reality that officials from the fringes of the British Isles took a new approach to imperial government: they emphasized metropolitan authority while, at the same time, regarding the Crown's diverse subjects from a cosmopolitan perspective.

In the late nineteenth century professionalism and consumerism collided in a vociferous debate over the commodification of health. In medical journals, before government panels and through independent publications, doctors condemned “quackery,” especially patent medicines—the Victorian appellation for over-the-counter drugs. They dismissed myriad pills, tonics and appliances as addictive, dangerous, or useless. This professional critique, doctors claimed, was an altruistic defence of patients. Their commercial opponents, patent medicine men (and frequently the press), countered that the professional critique was rooted in a pecuniary struggle to achieve monopoly. While ascribing different motivations to each other, both sides assumed that medical professionals were unanimous in their condemnation of so-called “secret remedies.” Peter Bartrip has shown, though, that professional opposition to patent medicines was far more complex and muddied by self-interest. The British Medical Journal, while criticizing patent medicines, carried ads for them, which made the BMA the focus of allegations of hypocrisy in the Journal of the American Medical Association and before the Select Committee on Patent Medicines (1912). At the organizational level, Bartrip has established that the financial interests of the British Medical Association undercut its opposition to patent medicines. This compromised position, I will argue, permeated the profession. If the British Medical Association could not resist the advertising revenue derived from patent medicines, it was equally true that many doctors could not resist recommending patent medicines to patients. Far from epitomizing professional altruism, the patent medicine question demonstrates the reluctance of doctors to abandon individual self-interest in the wake of consumerist challenges that would ultimately transform twentieth-century medical practice. In doing so, the patent medicine debate engages and complicates arguments about the role of collective social mobility in the history of the professions.