This book is about one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history. During 1559 and 1560, the kingdom of Scotland experienced what was arguably the first modern revolution. The turmoil was sparked by religious conflict, but its impact was far wider. Scotland’s political culture, social structure and international position were all profoundly affected by these events.

Like most revolutions, the Scottish Reformation was chaotic and unpredictable, in its course and in its consequences. It began unexpectedly: an attempt by the government to arrest dissident preachers provoked protest which blew up into riot and armed confrontation with frightening speed,...

After 1560, when Roman Catholics looked back on the disaster that had engulfed their Church in Scotland, they knew who to blame. There was the greed of the nobles, the lassitude of the common people and – of course – the depravity of the Protestants. Above all, however, they blamed themselves. Lord Herries, who had repented of his own former Protestantism, described the years before the crisis in a tone of lamentation:

It is certain that in these days the Church in this kingdom was in a lethargy…. Prelates and bishops, who should have governed the Church here, were turned...

The Reformation in Scotland began as it did across most of the rest of Europe: with books and universities, with merchants and friars. It began as a self-consciously foreign and a self-consciously intellectual movement. Its adherents and its opponents alike looked abroad, principally to Germany, for its origins. Many of those early adherents were drawn from the learned elite; for others, the new movement’s greatest attraction was the possibility of becoming ‘learned’, through study and discussion of the newly available vernacular Bible. The Bibles themselves were foreign imports, for whose producers the Scottish market was at best an afterthought. However,...

On 14 December 1542, James V died, unexpectedly, after a short illness. He was thirty years old. His only surviving child, who succeeded to the Crown, was a baby. It was a disaster but, for the Scots, a familiar one. Not since 1390 had an adult succeeded to the Scottish throne, although even by these standards James V cut it alarmingly fine – his heir was only six days old. The novelty of this particular disaster was that the new monarch was worse than an infant: she was a girl.

Female monarchy as such was uncontroversial in Scotland. When the...

As the young Mary, Queen of Scots reached her first birthday in December 1543, it was becoming clear that she was likely to live. She had survived a bout of smallpox in August; Ralph Sadler saw her later in the summer, and declared that ‘she is a right fair and goodly child, as any that I have seen, for her age’.¹ The question of whom she might eventually marry was becoming more urgent. The English regime of Henry VIII still favoured pledging her to her cousin Edward Tudor, the Prince of Wales. The Scottish political establishment was now clearly opposed...

In the late 1540s, the prospects for Scottish Catholicism looked bright. The war against Protestant England was being won. The damage the Church had suffered was real, but at least this meant that the long-standing call for reform was now impossible to ignore. The Church had lost its most redoubtable defender, Cardinal Beaton, but his aggressive leadership had not been to everyone’s taste. In his place was a more supple figure: John Hamilton, Governor Arran’s illegitimate half-brother, the Abbot of Paisley and (from 1549) the Archbishop of St Andrews.

Hamilton was not a bishop of any great moral stature. He...

In the early 1550s Scottish Catholics could be forgiven for believing that heresy had been defeated. In self-congratulatory mood, the general provincial council of 1552 declared that

many frightful heresies have, within the last few years, run riot in many diverse parts of this realm, but have now at last been checked by the providence of All-good and Almighty God, the singular goodwill of princes, and the vigilance and zeal of prelates for the Catholic faith, and seem almost extinguished.¹

We know, of course, that this confidence was premature, and that a few years later, the heretical infection would break...

As far as we know, no-one in 1550s Scotland was expecting a religious civil war. The revolt of May 1559 seemed to come from a clear sky. Before then, Scotland’s few radical Protestants were angry but also impotent. The religious mood of most of the country during the preceding decade had been calm and inclined to compromise. Even in the early months of 1559, few observers of Scottish affairs showed signs of suspecting that a religious revolt was imminent. The new and shaky English regime of Elizabeth I was keen to destabilise Scotland if possible, but had no great optimism...

In the course of a few days in May 1559, Scottish Protestantism went from being an underground movement in an outwardly Catholic country to an armed revolt against established authority which was implementing dramatic changes in the territory it controlled. The revolt quickly escalated into civil war, as the rebels amassed an impressively wide body of support from within the country. Scotland’s neighbours hastened to intervene. The first foreign troops arrived in August 1559, and by the early months of 1560 the war had turned into a brutal slogging match between English and French expeditionary forces. The English victory of...

The Scottish Reformation was a long time coming, but when it came it came dramatically. In early 1559 Protestants were an outlawed minority in a Catholic and pro-French state. In less than eighteen months, they won a civil war, created a new Protestant and pro-English establishment, and outlawed the practice of Catholicism in turn. The speed and decisiveness of these events were bewildering to those who lived through them, and they are scarcely less so for historians.

Traditional histories of this period – especially Protestant histories – liked to see this upheaval as inevitable: an irresistible Protestant tide breaching Catholicism’s...