Nicol Burne: 'plane disputation bayth at libertie, and in presone'

Abstract

Nicol Burne's Disputation concerning the Controversit Headdes of Religion, published in Paris in 1581, forms part of a flurry of polemical exchanges between Scottish Catholics and Protestants in the late 1570s and early 1580s.1 In some respects—and insofar as the two elements can be distinguished and separated at that period—the debate belongs to, and has been treated as part of, the history of political ideas rather than theological controversy. In the political context, the precipitating event was the belated publication, in 1579, of George Buchanan's De iure regni apud Scotos. No doubt the debate prompted by Buchanan's radical 'resistance theory' was itself much concerned with what we may call political theology; but the period also saw animated discussion of broader and more fundamental doctrinal issues. Such discussion had of course been going on throughout the years since the effective launching of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland in 1560.3 In one instance, indeed, we can point to an individual whose contributions to the debate span the earlier and later phases and touch both its wider and its more narrowly political aspects. Ninian Winzet's Flagellum Sectariorum, completed before (though published together with) his riposte to Buchanan's political dialogue, took up in a more 'professional' vein the theological issues on which he had challenged Knox and others in Scotland twenty years before.4 Yet there was