The absorption of the Bishopric and Kirklands (commenced without a shadow of title, and in the infancy of public opinion) has been so slow, silent and serpentine, that their final assimilation as British property is an act of the present reign. The first advance bore the harmless form of a courteous recognition of the Bishop’s rights by his new Sovereign, in a charter of Regality (10th October 1490). The assumption of a concurrent sanction of the Norwegian presentee of the Kirklands (1491–2), was followed by the sole presentation (under Papal Sanction) of a Commendator and Successor to the Bishop (8th April 1498), and shortly afterward by the defiant appointment of an Archdean of Zetland, with a protest against “the temerity and presumption” of the Danish Presentee (8th January 1501–2), and in the civil feuds which long shook the Norwegian throne the Scottish Patronage of the See of Orkney was thenceforth undisputed. The right to dispose of the Church rents during a vacancy (2nd March 1559), and to confirm the Feu Charters of Church lands (1560), flowed naturally from the Charter of Regality; the Act of Annexation (29th July 1587) seemed a necessary precaution against the rapid spoliation of the Church; and the Excambion of Earldom and Bishopric (4th October 1614), was too obviously beneficial to both to look like usurpation. During the convulsions of Church and State in the seventeenth Century, the Bishopric was repeatedly applied to secular uses; but the final act of appropriation was that which established Presbytery (22nd July 1689); the Church lands were vested in the Scottish Exchequer, and ultimately transferred to the British Board of Woods and Forests, by whom, in Imperial contempt of all nationalities, Scandinavian or Scottish, the Orkney Bishopric has been sold (1854–56), and the price expended in the adornment and luxury of London.