ARISTOCRATIC FACTIONS

The first Scottish martyr to the Protestant cause was one George Wishart, who was burnt at the stake in 1546 as a heretic.(16) He had made few but dedicated converts, and some of these proceeded to murder Cardinal Beaton, Archbishop of St. Andrews and leader of the pro-French party. But religion and diplomacy were not the only causes for the assassination. Beaton had made many enemies in local disputes, and had threatened the interests of some noble families by his land and succession policies.(17) After his death, the affairs of state were in the hands of the queen dowager and the new archbishop, John Hamilton, half-brother to the heir apparent to the throne, the earl of Arran. While the French alliance was uppermost in the mind of the queen dowager, Hamilton's main interests were those of his family. As it was more to the advantage of the Hamilton family for the French influence to be restricted (since Arran would inherit the throne if Mary Stewart died childless, and also because Arran ' s son was a contender for Mary Stewart's hand), archbishop and queen dowager did not always see eye to eye, and the domestic as well as foreign policy of this period by no means had the unanimous support of all the factions in the country. In religion, reforms by the hierarchy took place side by side with the wooing, by different political factions, of the growing Protestant elements.(18) Some of the converts to Protestantism were no doubt sincere, while others had less honest motives; but despite their growing numbers, they did not form a coherent group until after John Knox, an unknown preacher implicated in the murder of Beaton, returned from exile to the Continent and training under Calvin in 1555. The struggles between the queen dowager, the Hamiltons, and the supporters of Lord James Stewart of Moray, bastard half-brother of Mary Stewart, were reaching a crisis because of domestic disputes and the marriage of Mary to King Francois II of France. Knox was able to unite the Protestant nobles, in a 'Common Band' of the Lords of the (Protestant) Congregation in 1557. Religious reform thus merged with political rebellion against the regent queen dowager. When factions of Protestant as well as Catholic nobles, such as Huntly, succeeded in toppling the regent, the Reformation in Scotland officially began. The decisive campaign was fought in 1560 between the French troops of the government and English troops sent by Queen Elizabeth to support the rebels of the Congregation and to prevent French hegemony in her northern neighbour. The Protestant army entered Edinburgh in the spring of that year. In June, the queen dowager died. And in August, the Scottish Parliament abrogated Papal authority, prohibited the Mass, and adopted a reformed Confession of Faith drafted by Knox and his comrades. That same year, Knox et alii also produced the First Book of Discipline. outlining their Calvinistic ideas of religious, social, and educational reforms. Meanwhile, the organisation of local congregations in place of the old parishes continued apace. Although it was some years before the Church of Scotland was firmly set up, the old Scottish Church had come to an end.

SUMMING UP

Such, in brief, were the events leading up to the establishment of Protestant power in Scotland. The multiplicity of causes and motives is evident. Although abuses in the old Scottish Church were common, and although the sincerity of religious motives in some of the reformers is not to be doubted, the Protestant Reformation in Scotland was probably not religiously inevitable. If the situation had been different in the aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and diplomatic arenas, a Catholic Reformation might have been successful. As it was, the fact that the Scottish Reformation was Calvinis t rather than Lutheran was ironical in that the Auld Alliance, which had initially kept Scotland Catholic, also led the Scottish Reformers to seek inspiration in the French-speaking, rather than the German-speaking lands of the Continent. And Calvinism, thus translated into English, soon became the Puritanism of old and New England.

16)Dickinson, 128-130. Brown, op. cit., 60-70, J. Durkan, 'Scotland, Church of', in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, op. cit., 1235-1236.

17)Dickinson, 119-121. Brown, 68-69.

18)Lee, 20. Brown, 272. New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1232, 1236.

19)Brown, 300, et seq. Lee, 22-23. D. Mc Roberts, 'Knox, John', in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, op. cit., viii, 242-243.

20)New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1232-1233, 1236. Lee, 53, 57.