30.3 Europe: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 24/29)

In the middle of the century young scholars who had been educated in Germany and Scandinavia returned home, rejecting the Church of Rome. Among these was George Wishart, a zealous dogmatist and religious politician. Eventually he preached to large congregations, sometimes protected by an ecclesiastical notary, John Knox, carrying a great two-handed sword. With a charge of heresy, Wishart was strangled and then burned in 1546. Knox took up his reforms and preaching and was one of a band that killed Cardinal Beaton. After a long sojourn in Switzerland, where he had been strongly influenced by the Calvinists, Knox got a reformation parliament to repudiate the supremacy of the pope, forbid the celebration of the Latin mass and approve a Confession of Faith. He stated that soon the English would send an army to help. Instead came a French fleet, which took Knox prisoner for 8 years, during which time he was a galley slave. When he was finally released, he returned as a noisy rabble-rouser, advocating war and murder, drunk with a self -righteous passion and responsible for much of the blood and bigotry that was to follow. He glorified the Old Testament, claimed prophetic powers, rebelled against women rulers and felt that all should be killed who did not hold his beliefs.

Meanwhile war erupted again in 1548 when the Duke of Somerset took an army into Scotland, ravaging the countryside with the announced purpose of arranging a future marriage for the little Queen Mary with the Prince of Wales. The Scots resisted, with the help of the French army which came with a promise of Mary's betrothal to the dauphin of France. When the English withdrew in 1549, the French army stayed for another 8 years to protect Catholicism and finally the queen did marry the French heir, while she still ruled Scotland from France, under the regency of her mother, Mary of Guise. The new Protestantism was tolerated for awhile, but in 1559 the queen mother decided to crush the new faith. In 1561 the real queen of Scots came home from France, a widow at 18 years of age, tall, beautiful, Catholic and claiming not only the Scots but the English throne as well, thus becoming a thorn in the life of her cousin, Elizabeth. Either through a French variation or actual misspelling, her surname became changed from Stewart to Stuart. In 1656 she married again, this time to 19 year old Lord Darnley, a great grand- child of Henry VII. Not long after fathering Mary's child, the future James VI, the young groom was strangled. Subsequently the queen was made a captive for a year but ended up marrying her captor, the Earl of Bothwell. Captured again by Protestants she was held in Edinbrough, called a whore and declared ripe for a burning. Forced to abdicate her throne, she named the Earl of Moray as regent for her small son while she escaped into England. Freedom was short-lived, however, as the Elizabethan court imprisoned her again and eventually executed her in 1587.

In the meantime John Knox had died in 1572 and his place at the head of the Protestant movement in Scotland had been taken by Andrew Melville, who came from exile in Geneva to be principal of Glasgow University. An unbelievably strict, rigid Protestant morality doctrine descended on the Scottish people. In keeping with Scotland's long history of treachery and deceit and violence, the young King James VI was abducted in 1582 and confined for about a year. Subsequently he did rule for the remainder of the century, marrying a Danish princess and arranging to be the successor of Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England in the next century. (Ref. 170 , 291 )