The Scottish Reformation

John Knox had preached in England under Edward VI and then lived at Geneva; at the bidding of John Calvin he served for a time as preacher to the English exiles at Frankfurt (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 1, pp. 231–232). He landed in Scotland on 2 May 1559. On 11 May, after a sermon against idolatry at Perth, a crowd broke the images in the church and sacked the houses of the Grey and Black Friars; Knox calls those who did it “the raschall multitude” (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 1, pp. 318–322).

Parliament met at Edinburgh in the summer of 1560 (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland A1560/8/4–6). Asked to set down the doctrine they wished established, the Protestant barons and ministers presented a confession within four days (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, p. 92). It was read article by article, and Knox reports that of the lay lords only three voted against it and that the bishops said nothing (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 121–122). The record of Parliament notes its ratification on 17 August 1560 (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland A1560/8/3). The Confession names three marks of the true church: the true preaching of the word of God, the right administration of the sacraments, and church discipline uprightly administered (Scots Confession article 18). It rejects transubstantiation, and it also condemns those who call the sacraments nothing but bare signs (Scots Confession article 21).

On 24 August Parliament declared that the bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction in Scotland, annulled earlier acts contrary to the Confession, and forbade anyone to say or hear mass, on pain of confiscation and bodily punishment for a first offence, banishment for a second and death for a third (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland A1560/8/4–6). The queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, was in France with her husband the French king. The acts were sent to them there, and Knox writes that no ratification came back (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 125–127).

Knox writes that after the Parliament he and five other ministers were charged to draw up a plan for the church’s government, the Book of Discipline (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 128–129); the book’s own preface dates the charge to 29 April 1560 (First Book of Discipline, preface, in Knox, Works, vol. 2, pp. 183–184). It gave each congregation the election of its minister and asked for a schoolmaster in every church (First Book of Discipline, in Knox, Works, vol. 2, pp. 189, 209–210). Part of the nobility signed it, but Knox says that others who held church property grudged it, and it was refused ratification (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 128–129) (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 297–298).

Mary, by then a widow, landed on 19 August 1561. Mass was said in her chapel the following Sunday, and on the next day a proclamation forbade anyone, on pain of death, to alter the state of religion she had found standing at her arrival (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 267–273). Knox preached that one mass was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies, and he records an interview in which the queen accused him of raising her subjects against her (Knox, History of the Reformation vol. 2, pp. 276–278). In July 1567 Mary gave up the crown to her son, James VI and I, and the Parliament held in his name that December ratified the acts of 1560 (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland 1567/12/104) (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland A1567/12/1–4).