The Scottish Reformation

The Scottish Reformation was completed in a matter of weeks. In August 1560 the Scottish parliament abolished papal jurisdiction, forbade the mass, and adopted a Reformed confession of faith drawn up by a small group of ministers including John Knox. The monarch did not consent, since Mary was in France and would return a Catholic, and the settlement was therefore carried against the crown rather than by it, which is the opposite of the English sequence. That origin left a permanent mark.

A church established without royal initiative had no reason to treat the crown as its head, and the argument about whether the monarch had authority over the church became the central Scottish religious question for the next hundred and fifty years. The First Book of Discipline set out a programme far beyond doctrine, including a school in every parish and provision for the poor from church revenues, most of which was not funded because the old church's wealth had already been claimed elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that the Scottish settlement was among the more thorough in Europe in its treatment of ceremony and imagery, and that the speed of it owed a great deal to the political crisis it arrived in.

What distinguishes the Scottish settlement from the English one is not chiefly doctrine, since both are Reformed in their formularies, but government. Scotland developed a presbyterian polity in which authority rests in a graded series of courts, the kirk session in the parish, the presbytery over a district, the synod and the general assembly, each composed of ministers and of elders who are not clergy. No individual holds the authority a bishop holds, and the assembly can be addressed by a parish elder. That structure was contested for generations, since successive monarchs preferred bishops as instruments they could appoint, and the conflict ran through the covenanting period and the civil wars before a presbyterian settlement was fixed at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Church of Scotland remains the national church and is established, but the crown is not its governor and the sovereign attends its assembly as a guest rather than presiding. That difference is one reason the atlas catalogues England and Scotland as distinct religious regions rather than as parts of a single British settlement, since the two established churches have different doctrine, different worship and different government within one state.