The sixteenth century: John the Commonweill

Abstract

When the Renaissance came to Scotland it came as a spirit from abroad gradually making itself felt in the harsher climate of a Northern country. The spirit flowered until Flodden left the crown on the head of a two-year-old boy. Then, within only fifteen years, a new factor was added to the perennially shifting balance of power between king and barons. The scale was tipped in 1528 when Patrick Hamilton, a pupil of Erasmus and of Luther, was burned as a heretic at St Andrew’s for preaching that man stands alone before God and is justified only by his faith. Hamilton argued that this faith is God’s gift only and cannot be earned by good works, or interpreted or ameliorated by the hierarchy of any church. Soon this bare philosophical light, with all the hard clarity of the North, quite outshone the Mediterranean sunshine of that late spring at the court of King James IV. Nor was it simply a matter of religious belief, for kings, too, are only men before their maker, and soon the new church was reminding them of that fact and resisting all attempts at royal control. By the end of the century Andrew Melville was speaking for the very spirit of Scottish Pres-byterianism when he reminded his ruler that ‘there is twa kings and twa kingdomes in Scotland.