GRAHAM, PATRICK (d. 1478), archbishop of St. Andrews, was younger son of Sir William Graham of Kincardine, sometimes called Lord Graham of Dundresmore, by Mary, countess of Angus, a daughter of Robert III. Her first husband was George Douglas, first earl of Angus [q. v.] After his death in 1403 she married Sir James Kennedy of Dunure and became the mother of Gilbert, first lord Kennedy, and James Kennedy, the predecessor of Graham in the see of St. Andrews. Surviving her second husband she married Sir W. Graham. Their elder son James was the first laird of Fintry, the ancestor of Claverhouse. After the death of Graham she married for the fourth time Sir William Edmonstone of Duntreath. The date of Patrick's birth has not been ascertained. He was educated at the university of St. Andrews, where he was dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1457. His royal descent and connections through his mother's marriages with the powerful family of Angus and with the good Bishop Kennedy, his uterine brother, pointed to the service of the church as the road to high preferment, and in 1463 he was consecrated Bishop of Brechin. Three years later he succeeded Kennedy, who died in July 1465, in the primacy of Scotland. Soon after his succession to St. Andrews, Graham went to Rome to avoid the enmity of the Boyds, then at the height of their power in the Scottish court, and to procure his confirmation by the pope, and he remained abroad till the fall of the Boyds in 1469. He was present as conservator in a provincial council held in Scotland in July 1470, by which an end was put to the dispute between John Lochy, the rector of the university of St. Andrews, and the college of St. Salvator, on which Pius II had conferred the power of granting degrees in theology and arts. The rector resisted, but Graham obtained its recognition. He returned to Rome on the accession of Sixtus IV, and at his instance a series of bulls were issued by that pope in the first year of his pontificate, which raised St. Andrews to the dignity of an archbishopric and made the Scottish bishops subject to its see. These bulls are dated 17 Aug. 1472. The first contains the erection of the metropolitan see, the grant of the pall and cross, and jurisdiction over the other sees of Scotland. The others are addressed to the suffragan bishops, the chapters of their sees, the clergy, the people, and the king respectively, requiring due obedience to the new metropolitan. The cause of granting this dignity to St. Andrews is stated in the bull to have been the inconvenience of appeal to Rome necessary from the absence of a Scottish metropolitan. But it also noticed that appeals were sometimes taken to an illegal tribunal, and the bull was undoubtedly designed to terminate the long-slumbering but never abandoned claim of York, which Neville, its archbishop, at this time renewed, to supremacy over the Scottish church, as well as the claim of Drontheim or Trondhjem over the dioceses of Orkney and the Isles. The pope granted the priory of Pittenweem and several parish churches as a provision for the archiepiscopal see. This was followed by another papal bull on 17 Feb. 1473 constituting Graham papal nuncio for the purpose of raising supplies for the crusade against the Turks. The publication of these bulls in the September following was, according to Lochy, grateful to the people of Scotland, but they roused the jealousy of the other Scottish bishops now for the first time subordinated to one of their own number, and the contest for precedence and power broke out in Scotland with peculiar virulence. The Bishop of Aberdeen, the collegiate church of St. Giles in Edinburgh, and the university of St. Andrews obtained bulls exempting them from the jurisdiction of St. Andrews. Neville, the archbishop of York, protested against a change which deprived his see not only of its general claim to supremacy, but of jurisdiction over the see of Galloway, which up to this time it had exercised, and the Archbishop of Drontheim fifty years later made a similar protest against the severance of the Orkneys from his diocese. These were ineffective protests. Neville was then in prison, and the Scottish overpowered the English influence in the Roman curia. Denmark had still less influence, and was at this time probably restrained from active opposition by the recent marriage of James III to its princess. Within Scotland itself a more powerful combination of adversaries attacked the prelate who had asserted the supremacy of his see. The clergy raised a tax of twelve thousand merks, the last granted by them, to gain the king, who, notwithstanding his near kinship with Graham, the wise counsel he owed to Bishop Kennedy, and the interest of the crown in supporting the dignity of the primate, espoused the side of the enemies of the archbishop. The weak side of James III exposed him to be governed in the church by the able, ambitious priest William Scheves [q. v.], archdeacon of St. Andrews, as in his civil government by Cochrane, earl of Mar. Scheves's institution in the archdeaconry to which the king appointed him was refused by Graham on the ground that he was ignorant of theology and addicted to
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