Scotland the Brief

Part 1: The Community of the Realm
5 Rough Wooing and Reformation

The Tudors had modernised their state and were now a formidable international force. In 1536 Henry VIII split from Rome for dynastic reasons: a Spanish bride who could not give him a male heir. The result was a sort of proprietary church, on which would-be reformers could operate, financed by spectacular looting of church property. In 1542, with a son by Ann Boleyn, he tried to renew the union project by marrying the future Edward VI to the infant Mary Stuart. Not famous for tact, he chose a scorched earth policy and effectively drove the Scots into the arms of the French. The widow of James V, Mary of Guise, became Queen Regent and the infant Queen of Scots was sent to France and betrothed to Dauphin Francis. But France s influence meant ironically that Scots supped with the ideologues of the reformed faith at the French universities. The Scots Reformation, when it came, would be the sophisticated urban Calvinism of Paris, Amsterdam and Geneva, not an attempt to repair a backward and corrupt domestic Catholicism after half a century of pillage for kings and nobles, as Commendators, looted as enthusiastically as the Tudors and their nobles.

In fact there was little enough ideology about the laity on either side: Mary of Guise and her daughter were clever, tactically flexible, and (compared with the Tudors) executed only a few reformers. Likewise, the grand Scottish nobles manoeuvred with realism. In 1560 the Earl of Hamilton (whom the Guises had bribed with the Dukedom of Chatellerault) went over to the Lords of the Congregation, who had backed the reformers, and preachers like John Knox and Andrew Melville, who wanted Papism extirpated. They thought it worse than the English, protestants of a sort, so they joined them at the Treaty of Berwick, 1560, and chucked the French, and the Auld Alliance, out.

This was the country to which Mary Queen of Scots returned in 1561, as widow of the young French king Francis I. Athletic, healthy and amorous, she married her cousin Henry Darnley and outmanoeuvred some reformers. Then she got caught up in court intrigue. She probably conspired to kill her husband when he became unstable (through syphilis?) ended up in the party, and bed, of a leading reformer, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Other reformers, headed by John Knox (whose role was probably self-exaggerated; he wrote the history of the Reformation) and Andrew Melville, cast the lovers out and defeated their small force. In 1567 the Queen abdicated, and went south to England, to conspiracies against her reluctant host, Elizabeth Tudor, and to eventual martyrdom in 1583.

he reformers came in with a blueprint for a Godly Commonwealth based on a federation of parishes, presbyteries, synods, with at the summit a General Assembly of the Kirk: a clerical parliament whose ambitions ranged over most of society. this instantly ran into conflict with the nobility, but the educational pretensions survived, producing in 1595 an Act anent Education which promised a school in every one of Scotland s 1800 parishes.