Glasgow Times Past: From Reformation turmoil for Mary, Queen of Scots to division over religion

The most comprehensive account is by the Great Reformer himself – John Knox. His book The History of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland is required reading for anyone studying the period, while other works such as George Buchanan’s History of Scotland published in 1690 – written in Latin, funnily enough – and Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, 1436–1565, were all written synoptically, taking the Protestant view of the Reformation.

Lindsay’s book was the first history of Scotland to be written in Scots, but its reliability as a factual account of the years around the Reformation is open to question – he hated the Hamilton and Douglas families and the bias shows.   Buchanan’s book reflects his fierce passion for the Reformation and as senior tutor to King James VI, his History was highly influential.

Reformer John Knox

Knox’s book has a good few inaccuracies but it is enlightening because it contains accounts of his dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots, at the time when she had returned as a widow and former Queen Consort in France to take up her personal rule over Scotland.

It was a reign in which Glasgow and Glaswegians would figure strongly. She knew the city from a visit before her exile to France which started with her departure from Dumbarton Castle at the age of five and ended on August 19, 1561, when she landed at Leith.

Mary was immediately thrown into the Reformation turmoil. At the French court in Paris she had the benefit of tuition of Glasgow’s Archbishop James Beaton who had gone into exile in France in 1560. He educated her on the situation in Scotland and in turn she appointed him her advisor and ambassador to the French court, a position he held until her forced abdication in 1567.

By the time of Mary’s return, the Reformation was a fait accompli. Naming himself in a third person account – always a sign of egoism – Knox tells how he addressed, rather harangued, the Scottish Parliament which met in August 1, 1560. The Three Estates were all represented, including 14 earls, six bishops and 21 abbots, and even among the clerics there was a contingent eager for Reform. 

The prescriptive Protestant Confession of Faith was laid before Parliament on August 17, and on August 24, three Acts were passed which effectively abolished Roman Catholicism in Scotland. The Acts made the Mass illegal, denied papal supremacy and annulled all previous Acts which did not comply with the Confession of Faith. But Queen Mary in France would not ratify the Acts and the legal status of the Reformation remained uncertain, Knox admitting that the country was split between Papists and Protestants.

Knox’s First Book of Discipline – co-written with five other Johns – effectively became the Kirk’s textbook for church organisation, while one of the Johns, Master John Willock was made superintendent of the reformed faith in Glasgow and he had the job of seeing that the commands of the Lords of the Congregation were carried out.

One of their orders to Glasgow was that the Protestants in the city should enter all Catholic churches and “tak doun the haill images thereof and bring them furth to the kirkyard and burn them openly, and siclyke cast doun the altars, and purge the kirk of all kinds of monuments of idolatry; and this ye fail not to do, as ye will do us singular empleasure ; and so commits to the protection of God. Fail not but ye tak good heed that neither the desks, windocks, nor doors be onyways hurt or broken, either glassin work or iron work.”

The buildings were thus preserved, but in reality several churches were ruined beyond salvation. Nor was Glasgow entirely happy with the restrictions brought in by the Calvin-inspired Presbyterianism of Knox and the Reformers, perhaps unsurprisingly given Glasgow’s long history with religion stretching back to the city’s foundation by St Kentigern/Mungo. The city’s economy was also set back considerably, and the University which was increasingly at the centre of Glaswegian life was closed from 1559 onwards. 

It is not possible to say exactly how Glasgow reacted to the Reformation, but Robert Renwick and Sir John Lindsay in their magisterial History of Glasgow published in 1921 made this conjecture: “In Glasgow more than in most towns, a city which had grown up under the influence of ecclesiastical rule and with a prominent section of its population belonging to the clerical class, the substitution of the Presbyterian system for the spacious observances of the old hierarchy must have been specially trying. 

“On the religious aspect there may have been divergent opinion, but, in the peculiar circumstances of the community, the dislocation of business and of established routine could scarcely have been regarded as otherwise than disastrous. That this was the prevailing view may readily be conceived, and though our knowledge of the common everyday occurrences in the Glasgow of that period is extremely meagre, it is learned from later records that many years elapsed before the inhabitants of the cathedral quarter of the city ceased to lament the interruption to material prosperity directly attributable to the changes introduced at the time of the Reformation.”

So Glasgow was divided over which form of Christianity its people espoused. Plus ca change…

Glasgow University

As for the University, we shall see in a future Times Past how the effect of the Reformation eventually transformed its fortunes. From 1561 onwards, Scotland was reigned over by an avowedly Catholic queen while the Protestant Reformation quickly took effect all over the land, except for some areas of the North East and the Highlands and Islands where Catholicism stubbornly refused to be killed off.

Celebrating and even just attending Mass became the main issue Knox seized upon. 

He wrote later: “John Knox, inveighing against idolatry, showed what terrible plagues God had laid upon realms and nations for this; and added that one Mass was more fearful to him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm, for the purpose of suppressing the whole religion.”

Mary’s reactions to Knox and the Reformation coloured her whole short reign, and Glasgow was there at the death of it as we shall see next week with the Battle of Langside.