Times Past: Understanding Glasgow's fervour of the Reformation

For reasons that will become clear shortly in this series it is instructive to look at how Glasgow was prospering in the 1550s. The trade guilds were now well established and while the city was still much smaller than Edinburgh in terms of population, Glasgow was punching above its weight.

Herring fisheries on the west coast and the city’s own well-developed tanning and fleshing (leather) industries brought in wealth, and the University and Cathedral were still major economic assets in their own rights.

Crucially, the importance of the River Clyde to Glasgow’s trade was being increasingly recognised and there are records of people being paid to establish huts at Dumbuck near Dumbarton for workers whose job was to deepen the Clyde and keep sandbanks from forming that would block the shipping going up and down the river.

Yet it was the religious upheaval that dominated life in the city. After John Knox’s famous fire-and-brimstone preaching at Perth, no church property could be considered safe from the Reformers.

As we saw last week, most of the Protestant Lords of Congregation, including the former Regent James Hamilton, now the Duke of Chatelherault,  as well as the Earls of Argyll and Glencairn plus Lords Boyd and Ochiltree took up residence in Glasgow Castle in November of 1559, while Knox and his Reforming clergy posted themselves in St Andrews along with Chatelherault’s son, the Earl of Arran.   

Glasgow was now one of the main centres of the reformation in Scotland and paid for it with the loss of buildings and treasures.

The Protestant Lords either ordered or encouraged the raiding and sometimes the razing of monasteries and abbeys, including those of the Blackfriars (Dominicans) and Greyfriars (Franciscans) who were the two main preaching orders located in Glasgow. 

Across the land, no Catholic church or establishment was safe and as historians and archaeologists have proven, the Reformers did immeasurable damage to the many treasures accumulated by the Catholic Church over centuries.

These included art in the renaissance style and church records which, because only clerics kept them, were the written history of Scotland in the centuries between King David I and the Reformation. What an incalculable loss, one which is mourned by historians to this day as there are whole periods of Scottish history that we know nothing about because of the zeal of the Reformers in torching any writings found in the libraries of cloisters and chapels. 

Even Knox himself could see the Reformers were going too far – he personally intervened to save Dundee’s Bishop’s Palace, but could do nothing about Scone Abbey.

He wrote in his History of the Reformation: “On the morrow, some of the poor, in hope of spoil, and some of the men of Dundee, to see what had been done, went up to the Abbey of Scone.

"The Bishop’s servants were offended, and began to threaten and speak proudly, and, as it was constantly affirmed, one of the Bishop’s sons stogged through with a rapier a man of Dundee, for looking in at the girnell door.... The multitude, easily inflamed, gave the alarm, and the Abbey and Palace were appointed to sackage. They took no long deliberation in carrying out their purpose, but committed the whole to the merciment of fire...”    

Perhaps because of his family’s close attachment to it, the Duke of Chatelherault personally spared Glasgow Cathedral from destruction, but Archbishop James Beaton could see what was coming and prepared to evacuate his lodgings and the Cathedral. 

Disaster for him and the Catholic Church in Scotland was now inevitable. In the first months of 1560, Regent Mary was growing sick and her reliance on French troops made her hugely unpopular. The Lords in Glasgow, however, were only too happy to get English support for their cause and in Queen Elizabeth they found a willing ally.

The Lords now had an army of 8000 skilled and motivated fighters who were inspired to fight for Protestantism as well as the plunder they hoped to make from Catholic institutions. 

In January, 1560, they also had massive naval support as Elizabeth sent a large contingent of her fleet to the Firth of Forth. The French retreated to Leith but the following month the Lords signed the Treaty of Berwick which saw an English army come north to help in the Siege of Leith.

On June 10, 1560, Regent Mary succumbed to her long illness. Knox could not help but gloat: “She had formerly avowed that, in despite of all Scotland, the preachers of Jesus Christ should either die or be banished the realm, she was compelled not only to hear that Christ Jesus was preached, and all idolatry openly rebuked, and in many places suppressed, but also she was constrained to hear one of the principal ministers within the realm (Knox himself?).

Shortly thereafter she finished her unhappy life; unhappy, we say, for Scotland, from the first day she entered into it, to the day she departed this life.”

With Regent Mary gone, the counter-Reformation collapsed. The French soldiers went home. They took with them a most unhappy man, Archbishop James Beaton of Glasgow.

He had been well warned as to the fate that awaited him and all the churches of the Glasgow diocese, and now he acted, taking all the archives and riches that he had removed from Glasgow Cathedral and other churches in the city on a ship to France where Catholicism was still, and would remain, the dominant religion. 
Beaton took up residence in Paris, and gifted many of the items he had preserved from Glasgow at first to the Carthusian Monastery in the French capital, and afterwards he handed over the archives of his diocese to the Scots College in Paris which had been founded with King Robert the Bruce’s blessing in 1326 as the Collegium Scoticum.  

Beaton should have sent them to the Scots College in Rome where they could have been saved in the Vatican archives, for after the French Revolution, most of those Glasgow documents were burned when the College was sacked in 1792.

Next week we’ll see how Glasgow played an important role at the moment of Reformation and during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots.