Scottish Reformation
The Scottish parliament abolished papal authority in August 1560 without the crown's consent, which is what makes the Scottish reformation different from the English one. England's had been made by a king through parliament. Scotland's was made against a monarchy that was Catholic, French by marriage, and largely absent — Mary Queen of Scots was in France, and her mother Mary of Guise governed as regent with French troops. The preaching had been going on for a generation and had produced martyrs, including George Wishart, burned in 1546, and Patrick Hamilton before him. John Knox, who had been a galley slave in France and a preacher in England and Geneva, came home in 1559 and preached a sermon at Perth that set off image-breaking through the burgh churches. The Lords of the Congregation, a group of Protestant nobles, took up arms, and the decisive intervention was Elizabeth's: an English fleet and army came north in 1560 to expel the French, which they did, and the Treaty of Edinburgh sent both foreign armies home. The parliament that met that August, without royal authority, adopted a Calvinist confession of faith, abolished the mass and denied the pope's jurisdiction. The First Book of Discipline set out a plan for a school in every parish and universities funded from church lands, which the nobles who had taken those lands declined to pay for. Mary returned in 1561 to a country whose official religion she did not share. The kirk's presbyterian government was settled only after another century of argument and two civil wars.
- Year: 1560 CE
- Category: Political
