THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND OF THE REFORMATION, 1513-1625

Abstract

Centenary commemorations seem in some ways inappropriate to the Scottish reformation. The date 1560 marked neither an end nor a beginning it its development. The work ofthe Reformation Parliament was of doubtful legality and uncertain permanence. In part, the achievements of 1560 were merely transitional; in part, they were no more than a skeleton of principles, never to be clothed in actual flesh. Not for another generation did Scottish protestantism acquire fully its characteristic presbyterian government, and not for another century after that was the kirk secure in either its constitution or its doctrine. A beginning is still harder to locate than an end. The burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1528 was a portent, no doubt; but the 1525 act against Lutheran books suggests that Hamilton's death was itself a climax rather than a beginning. And in those early years, sixteenth-century protestantism seems to have mingled with the last traces of fifteenth-century Lollardy. Yet the significance of 1560 escapes these reflections. The medieval catholic church in Scotland did not, in fact, recover from the blows struck by the Reformation Parliament. Even at the time the events of 1559-1560 were evidently revolutionary. This is particularly important in the present context; for it was the overthrow of the established temporal authority, the seizure of political power, and the use of that power to bring down the church that made these years revolutionary. Protestant and catholic were alike aware of this.2 The reformation was a revolution, dependent for its success on the wielding of political power. The politics, moreover, must be external as well as internal. Scotland was a small but integral part of the European states system. Allied to catholic France, neighboured by the England in which Elizabeth's accession brought about the decisive overthrow of Catholicism, Scotland moved with limited freedom in a dangerous world.3 The political world, domestic and foreign, in which the Scottish reformation took place, was governed by forces that had little to do with theological controversies. It is true that in the sixteenth century politics and religion interacted in a way that is hard to understand in a secular age such as our own; and it is important to avoid the solecism of talking