This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1560, the Scottish Reformation Parliament abolished papal jurisdiction in Scotland and approved the Scots Confession under the leadership of John Knox. Rejecting the pope's authority settled what kind of church Scotland would have in outline, but not in every detail: the church's own government remained unsettled between episcopal and presbyterian forms for well over a century afterward.
Presbyterian church government briefly took hold when the General Assembly at Glasgow established it in November 1638, only for the restored monarchy to overturn that settlement again in the decades that followed. Scotland's church polity swung between the two forms rather than settling permanently on either one.
The settlement finally became permanent on June 7, 1690. Following the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish Parliament's Confession of Faith Ratification Act overthrew the episcopal system for good and established Presbyterian church government as the polity of the Church of Scotland.
What the 130 years between 1560 and 1690 changed for Presbyterianism's spread in Scotland was the difference between a Reformation and a settlement. Rejecting Rome in 1560 opened the question of what would replace it; only the 1690 Act, coming after an intervening 1638 assembly that had already been overturned once, closed that question for good.