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Mary,
Queen of Scots
 In
1561, Mary, Queen of Scots, upset the applecart of the Protestant
Reformation. Her husband, Francois II, King of France had died unexpectedly,
and the Scots were more than a little surprised by the sudden appearance
of Mary's ship at Leith's port. Since 1542, Scotland had been ruled
by a series of regents acting in Mary’s name. By 1560, The
Lords of the Congregation had overthrown the power of Mary’s
mother, Mary of Guise, and created a provisional government, but
now she returned, bringing with her the glamour and authority of
Scotland’s royal court, and drawing nobles, both Catholic and
Protestant, to its intrigues.
The Protestant Kirk which had been established in defiance of royal
authority, found itself in limbo and subject to a Catholic monarch.
For ministers like John Knox, Mary represented a serious threat
to the whole Protestant cause. To his even greater annoyance, Mary
interfered but little in matters of religion: tolerating the Kirk
and even granting it revenues. However, Mary did refuse to give
her assent to the Scottish Parliament’s acts which abolished
the mass.
Catholic and Protestant
In the 16th century there was a wide spectrum of opinion on Church
reform, although most desired reform of some sort. In 1560, neither
Catholicism or Protestantism had been systematically defined (it
wasn't until the 1570s that the Council of Trent defined Catholicism),
and pressing questions were begging to be answered within the new
Protestant Church in Scotland. Which form of Protestantism did God
want: Lutheranism or Calvinism? How was a church created in defiance
of royal authority to be governed? Were there to be bishops or not?
Was the church to be known as Episcopalian or Presbyterian. Was
it to be under the control of a ‘godly’ prince or ‘godly’
ministers?
These
tensions are well represented in the two key figures
- James Stewart and John Knox. James Stewart, Earl
of Moray, was the half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
An Augustinian Canon, he was well educated and as
well cultured as any privileged landowner. A sincere
Protestant, he had led the Lords of the Congregation
in rebellion in 1559. However, with Mary’s return
he was drawn to court and advised Mary on many matters
of religion. It was Moray who carved out the compromise
deal which allowed Mary to have her own private mass
once the mass had been publicly banned, thus allowing
her to remain Catholic and continue her claim to the
throne of England, but without interfering with the
Reformation settlement.
John Knox on the other hand was born into a relatively
poor East Lothian background. For Knox ‘In religion
there is nae middes (middle): one is either of God,
or the Devil’. He was a man with a will to break
up society: a militant Protestant who wanted no dealings
with Catholicism at all. In practice this meant throwing
your wife or family out onto the street for receiving
the sacraments, or ceasing all trade and business
with Catholics. Most Scots, however, found this more
than a little impractical and formed a vast army of
compromisers - holding society together through tolerance.
The Confrontation
Moray and Knox came into confrontation over the issue
of Mary’s private mass. To Knox it was more dangerous
than ten thousand armed Frenchmen, and he fuelled
the anti-Catholic fire by leading a Protestant mob
to Holyrood Abbey to disrupt the Queen's mass. However,
when he arrived there he found the door barred against
him by Moray. Holyrood was his brother's monastic
precinct and he was determined no mob should disrupt
the political deal he had negotiated. Knox was forced
to withdraw and was henceforth regarded as a political
liability. The Reformation was ruled by the Lords
of the Congregation, not by the rule of Knox and the
mob.
Mary was attempting was to ride out the Reformation
crisis, hoping to bring the Kirk under royal control
in a moderate Protestant form and, for a while, it
seemed she would succeed. Then matters became very
complicated for Mary. Her second husband, and father
to King James VI, Lord Darnley, was murdered. Mary
then married one of the suspected assassins James
Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell - a man with more than
a few enemies in the kingdom. It was then that Scottish
nobility rose against her- claiming that their actions
were motivated by a desire to protect Mary from Bothwell's
malign influence.
The Deposition of Mary
In
1567 Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle after
a coup d’etat to separate her from Bothwell’s
influence. This is all that most of the Scots nobility
wanted, however, six weeks later Protestant radicals
seized their chance and mounted a second coup d'etat
which forced Mary’s abdication in favour of her
infant son, James VI. Scotland spiralled into six
years of civil war. Of the two rival factions, Mary
commanded the most support (she was after all the
legitimate queen), but after defeat at the Battle
of Langside she fled into exile in England. Here she
sought protection from her cousin, Elizabeth I of
England, who, suspicious of any provocation to a Catholic
uprising in her own realm, had Mary imprisoned. This
was her fate, until 1587, when she was beheaded on
a charge of treason.
After The Battle of Langside the Protestants had the
upper hand in Scotland's civil war. The Protestant,
William Kirkcaldy of Grange, held Edinburgh Castle
in Mary's name, enduring two years of the ‘Lang
Siege’ before the English cannon finally smashed
the castle's defences to rubble in 1573. Scotland
now had a Protestant regime, ruling over a far from
convinced population.
To convince the population of the legality of their
actions the Protestant radicals called upon the power
of the printing press and one of Scotland’s greatest
Renaissance scholars - George Buchanan.
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