The Old Pretender & the "15"
The Act of Union was meant to settle differences between Scotland and England - but the ink was hardly dry on the treaty before the old tensions and bitterness started to resurface.
Scots immediately suspected that the union between the two countries was more of a takeover than a merger, and that they were ending up as the losers.
Their anger at the way they were treated by the new British government helped to once again fan the flames of Jacobitism and led to a remarkable attempt to snatch the British throne which could very easily have succeeded.
The Treaty of Union was breached almost as soon as it had been signed. One of its most important provisions was the payment of an Equivalent - a cash sum of nearly £400,000 to be paid to Scotland for taking its share of England's £14 million national debt.
However, the money was paid three months late and caused huge antagonism on both sides of the border. The English were furious that Scots were getting their gold, while the Scots were convinced that the wily English weren't going to give them the money at all.
Other moves, too, served to reinforce the suspicion between the two newly merged countries. In 1708 - again, against the spirit of the treaty - the Scottish Privy Council was abolished, and a year later the harsh English Treason Act came into effect north of the border.
The tensions were also evident at the new British parliament at Westminster. Scottish MPs were often ignored and mocked because of their accents by the vastly superior army of English MPs, many of whom had no experience of their new partner country to the north and regarded their own culture as vastly superior. Unsurprisingly, the Scots politicians quickly became fed up.
As the problems continued to grow, so the strains on the new relationship mounted. The use of English liturgy in Scots Episcopalian services, the quashing of measures to boost the Scottish linen industry and the decision to apply an English malt tax to the Scots all caused anger in Scotland. For a time, the new union seemed to be in very real danger of collapse.
Across the water in France, the exiled Stewarts saw their chance. The ousted James VII and II died in 1701 and his successor to the throne, William of Orange, was killed in an accident the following year. William's sister-in-law Anne became Queen, while James' son, also James, became the new Stewart pretender.
If the new Stewart heir, who would have been James VIII and III, had been well organised, he could have seized his chance when William died as - despite the fact James was only 14 - his claim to be the legitimate monarch might have been accepted. But he did not move quickly enough, and the chance was lost.
An attempt by the French to put James back on the throne by invading Scotland was launched in 1708, but he suffered badly on the sea voyage and caught measles and - despite his pleas to be landed - the French naval forces were chased away.
James was to wait six years - until the death of Queen Anne - for his next chance. With the throne set to pass to the House of Hanover and with a German King, George I, who couldn't even speak English, plenty of support for the exiled Stewart cause could be found.
In August 1715, the rebel 6th Earl of Mar drew up secretly plans for an uprising in favour of James. The following month, the standard of King James VIII was raised at Mar's castle in Braemar and an army began to march south.
The rebellion struck a national mood in England as well as Scotland. Within days, Mar's 10,000 strong force had seized Perth and he decided to base his headquarters there. Another force was raised in Northumberland by an English MP, Thomas Forster, who was a Jacobite sympathiser. Yet another rising had taken place in the south of Scotland.
Mar's problem was one of communication. Despite having perhaps double the number of men of the Duke of Argyll, who controlled government troops in Scotland, Mar did not know that other Jacobite risings were breaking out. He ignored the advice of his own soldiers and refused to move on.
The delay provided Argyll with a chance to assess his strategy. It also meant the rebels failed to unite. Instead of coming north, Forster's troops marched south into Lancashire, where they hoped to win more support but ended up being defeated at Preston. Another force was ordered to attack Argyll from the south but wasted time trying to take a fiercely resistant Edinburgh.
Mar knew that he had to move against Argyll or run the risk of losing everything. He still had massively superior numbers to the government forces, but was badly hampered by his own inability to come to sound military judgment and by the fact that the Jacobite leaders disliked each other almost as much as they hated the Hanoverians.
The clash finally came at Sheriffmuir, not far outside Perth, on 13 November 1715. It was a messy, indecisive battle which neither side won. But Argyll had faced a force four times bigger than his own, and had not decisively lost. That, in effect, meant it was a huge psychological victory for him, and a defeat for the Jacobites.
The following month, the Pretender, James VIII and III, finally arrived in Scotland, landing at Peterhead after his long awaited journey from France. He had come too late. If he had been even a matter of weeks earlier he might have provided the leadership and morale necessary to beat the poorly resourced government forces, but they now had the initiative.
James' troops, already depressed by their failure to beat Argyll, were further demoralised by the news that 6000 crack troops were on their way from Holland to reinforce the government army.
Only six weeks after he arrived, James, who had never got any further than Perth, decided to cut and run. He left for France from Montrose with the leaders of his army, including the Earl of Mar, never to see Scotland again.
The whole affair had been a disaster. If Mar had been more decisive, and if James had arrived in Scotland earlier, then the rebellion might well have succeeded, as many people in both Scotland and England had no real love for George or the Hanoverians and there was still plenty of disenchantment with the Act of Union.
With the rebellion over, the government moved quickly to stop further problems. The ringleaders who had not fled the country were taken to London and imprisoned, although some escaped and at the end of the day only two, the Earl of Derwentwater and Viscount Kenmure, were executed.
Others who were involved in the campaign were taken to Carlisle. A large number were sentenced to death, though most were pardoned the following year. The British government had decided by then that most of its sanctions against the rebellious Scots were to be economic, rather than judicial. The estates of those who were involved in the uprising were confiscated and sold.
The collapse of the campaign did not quell Jacobite anger: if anything, it was only fuelled by it. In 1719 another rebellion, this time with the help of Spain, was organised, and two fleets sailed for Scotland.
Only one made it - the first was driven back by storms - and the campaign was immediately hampered by the fact that its two leaders, the Earl Marischal of Scotland George Keith and the commander of the forces lord Tullibardine, hated each other so much that they would not even pitch camp together.
Once again, the rebellion was a disaster, though this time it never had even the faintest hope of success. In a battle at Glenshiel, the government forces pounded James's troops, and the uprising quickly collapsed.
At last, the government was waking up to the very real threat Jacobitism was causing. It was determined to quell the movement once and for all. It banned Highlanders from carrying arms, and started to make plans to fortify the Highlands, the natural stronghold of the Jacobites, and show that the Hanoverian government meant business.
All these moves did, however, was to reinforce English arrogance over the Scots and start a chain of events which led to the biggest Jacobite rising of all the legendary '45.
Meanwhile...
- 1708 The first Russian prisoners are sent to Siberia
- 1715 Vaudeville musical comedies begin in France
- 1716 John Law founds the joint-stock bank of Paris which later becomes the Royal Bank of France
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A Scottish Parliament at Last
Many Scots still see the 1980s and much of the 1990s as one of the darkest periods in modern history.
They regard the Conservative years as a wilderness era during which industries were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people thrown onto the dole and the entire country used as an experimental zone for unpopular policies such as the poll tax.
Margaret Thatcher's time in Downing Street caused Scots to slip into a deep depression as the country found itself having to adjust to a massively painful economic upheaval.
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The Plantation of Ulster
It was the first great Scottish venture overseas - and its effects were so powerful and far reaching that they continue to influence British and European history right up to the present day.
The plantation of Ulster was one of the most important policy objectives of James VI's reign. It was also one of the very first initiatives he embarked on after he became the monarch of both England and Scotland following the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
James' aim was a relatively simple one - to subdue the Catholic Irish and by taking the Protestant faith across the Irish Sea and rebuilding the local economy for the benefit of Great Britain through the use of Scottish settlers.
His plan turned out to be one of the most successful movements of population in European history - and at the same time, one of the most tragic.
It effectively created two different tribes in Ireland - Protestant Unionist and Irish Catholic - and led directly to the troubles which still plague the island today.
James may have been the first British monarch, but he was not the first ruler on this side of the Irish Sea to have found his neighbours to the west troublesome.
Incursions into Ireland had taken place for hundreds of years, and James' predecessor on the throne of England, Queen Elizabeth, had found herself having to deal with various small scale rebellions against her rule.
By the time James came to the throne, Ireland was effectively a vassal state of England. It had its own parliament meeting in Dublin, but this was told what it could and could not do by London. Historically Ireland had been ruled by its own lords, but since 1541, when Henry VIII was on the throne, the monarch of England had also called himself king of Ireland.
Almost as soon as James VI came to the English throne, he decided that the best way to deal with the Irish was to colonise them.
One of his main worries was that the Spanish, who were one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in Europe and England's historic enemies, would use Ireland as an attempt to conquer Britain by the back door.
When Spanish troops teamed up with Irish rebels in a rebellion at Kinsale in 1603, it appeared to give weight to this argument. The rebellion was quickly put down but two of its main instigators, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, were dealt with benevolently and allowed to keep most of their lands.
However, the English officials who ruled Ulster at the time saw an opportunity to create friction and spread a rumour that the two Earls were planning another rebellion. The result was that O'Neill and O'Donnell were summoned to London for questioning.
The pair feared for their safety and decided that the best course of action was to flee both Britain and Ireland. So, in a move now known as the Flight of the Earls, they left for continental Europe, abandoning their lands behind them.
The exile of the two men afforded James a major opportunity. He was able to seize their lands in six of the counties of Ulster - Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone - and make them available for his plantation plan.
In colonising Ulster with Scots settlers, James had one principal aim in mind. Ireland had escaped the influence of the Reformation and remained stubbornly Catholic. As a Protestant monarch, James had a near-evangelical zeal to see that changed.
Since the Irish clearly could not be relied on to convert to the Protestant faith by themselves, James thought the best thing to do was to press them into it by importing staunch Reformers from Scotland - where the movement against Catholicism had been strongest - who would then spread the word.
James also hoped that, by persuading Scots to cross the Irish Sea and giving them the opportunity to make money by working hard on the land , he would boost the economies of both Britain and Ireland.
Ted Cowan, Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, explains: "In essence, James wanted to replace the Catholics of Ireland with Scottish Protestants. The idea was to offer land there to lowland Scots, mainly from Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Galloway. Basically, as he saw it, civilised people would spread out and improved the uncivilised who were around them."
It was not the first time the idea of settlement had been attempted in Ireland - Elizabeth had tried it without a great deal of success - but it was by far the most carefully planned and well organised.
Land was offered to settlers through Scottish nobles and landowners, who persuaded local people of good character to make the journey and try to forge a new life for themselves.
They probably didn't take much persuading. Scotland was almost an impoverished nation at this time, and it would have been hard to eke out a living in what was effectively a peasant economy. Another problem was that there were too many people living in the lowlands for the Scottish economy to sustain them.
Ireland was, of course no wealthier, but at least it offered opportunities. The land was probably considered more fertile and better for farming and the low rents on offer would have been a major attraction.
Scottish settlers were not allowed to have Irish tenants, and were expected to build fortified houses to keep the natives out. Estates were divided into three sizes - 810 hectares, 607 hectares and 405 hectares.
Settlement was slow but steady, with many Scots building new lives for themselves on lands close to the Galloway coast in areas such as Upper Clanaboye in present day North Down.
This land was not part of the forfeiture resulting from the flights of the Earls, but had been gifted by a prominent Irish chieftain, Con O'Neill, to the Scot regarded as the main player in the plantation, Hugh Montgomery. Montgomery had helped O'Neill escape from jail in Carrickfergus and received the land in return.
The early settlers from Scotland took to the hard work needed to make a living. They showed enormous energy and determination and soon produced so much in terms of crops and livestock that they soon began to export back to the British mainland.
Economically, then, the plantation could probably be measured as a success. Where it utterly failed, however, was in converting the native Irish to Protestantism.
Part of the problem was that the Scots settlers stayed well clear of locals, refusing to admit to any Irish customs or to intermarry. The Irish, in turn were driven off their land and forced to starve or emigrate. The seeds of bitterness which would characterise the history of the area for hundreds of years were being sown.
During the first few decades of the plantation, trouble involving the two sides was only sporadic, since the Irish found it difficult to co-ordinate any attacks. However, everything changed dramatically in 1641,when the resentment and bitterness boiled over and a full-scale rebellion finally took place.
When the Irish attacked, they did so in force and with terrible violence. In the struggles that followed, a large number of settler families were slaughtered in battles at places such as Portadown, and the final death toll among the settlers is reckoned to have been more than 10,000.
The Scots Protestant settlers of Ireland were kept subdued by the Irish until the arrival of Oliver Cromwell in 1649, whose savagery towards the Catholic population amounted to a policy of wholesale ethnic cleansing and allowed the settlers to begin expanding again.
However, religious animosity was not just a problem in Ireland. Back in Scotland, the seeds of discontent were being sown and would finally lead to a struggle which would tear the whole of Britain apart?
Meanwhile...
- 1541 Ignatius Loyola is elected General of the Jesuits
- 1608 The Dutch use the first cheques or "cash letters"
- 1641 Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, writes his, "Meditations metaphysiques"
- 1649 The Holy Roman Empire esablishes a standing army in Austria
- 1649 The first British naval frigate, Constant Warwick, is constructed
- 1650 The first coffee house opens in London
- 1650 The population of the world is estimated at 500 milion. By 1850, it is 1.1 billion.
- 1690 French engineer, Denis Papin, devises a pump with a piston powered by steam
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The story of Glasgow after 1918 and especially the Red Clydeside movement. The Red Clydeside remains an iconic moment in Scottish political history and a cornerstone of Scottish labour psychology.
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Reign of Charles I & Signing of National Covenant
By the time James VI died in 1625, the union of Scotland and England was probably unstoppable. James had brought the two ancient crowns together, and the idea of a new Great Britain was well and truly formed.
Before the union was to happen, however, his successor as monarch was to unite both countries in a bloody civil war which would divide families and eventually claim the king himself as one of its victims.
James's son Charles I was never originally in the running to be king. He only became the heir to the throne when his older brother, Prince Henry, died of typhoid at the age of 12.
Charles had been born in Scotland, but went to London as a toddler when his father ascended to the English throne in 1603. His rule turned out to be one of the most disastrous and tragic in the history of the monarchy.
Almost from the moment Charles took over the throne, he seemed to offend everyone. Like his father, he was a devout Anglican, and was determined from the beginning to bring the Presbyterian Scots Kirk into line with his own beliefs.
Although this task proved to eventually be his undoing, he set about it with vigour. One of his very first actions was to pass the Act of Revocation, aimed at bringing former church lands under the control of the Crown, As most of that land was by owned by the nobles, this caused immediate hostility among some of the most influential men in Scotland.
However, far worse was to come. Charles infuriated the Scots when he finally got round to being crowned as King of Scots at St Giles in Edinburgh in 1633. He made the mistake of demanding the service be held with full Anglican rites, complete with candles, music, choirs and surplices. The horrified Scots thought it was only a short step away from the return of Popery.
It didn't stop there. Charles, egged on by his religious mentor William Laud, the ritualist Archbishop of Canterbury, demanded that the Scottish clergy wore gowns and surplices. The General Assembly of the Kirk - banned since the days of James - was still not allowed to meet and Charles also abolished Presbyteries, which were the only remaining element of church government.
To add insult to injury, he decided to introduce a Revised Prayer Book for Scotland, based on the English Book of Common Prayer. When the new liturgy was used for the first time in St Giles in July 1637, Scots toleration finally snapped.
As soon as the service began, all hell broke out. A riot started in the church, abuse was shouted and at least one stool was thrown. Armed guards had to be called in to quell the demonstrators as the Dean of the Cathedral fled to the safety of the steeple. The Bishop of Edinburgh was stoned as he raced away. Within a week, the new prayer book was dead.
Unsurprisingly, by this time opposition to Charles among the nobility was starting to galvanise. A committee called The Tables was organised from the ranks of the Estates - the Scottish parliament - led by the sixth earl of Rothes, John Leslie, and the fifth Earl of Montrose, James Graham.
Charles did not have the resources to take the Scots on militarily - after falling out with the English parliament, he had no armed forces to assert his authority north of the border. Instead, he tried to remind the Scots that a refusal to accept the new liturgy amounted to treason.
This further goading led to the signing of the National Covenant at the Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh in 1638. The covenant spelled out the fact that the Calvinist faith and the freedom of the Kirk had been enshrined in Scottish acts of parliament. It professed loyalty to Charles but also made it clear that there would be no sellout of the Reformed Protestant faith.
Montrose was the first of more than 150 nobles to sign up on the first day of the Covenant. It was to be the beginning of a fightback which over the next few weeks became a great national movement, uniting the Scots against the antics of their king.
Yet still Charles failed to heed the message. He decided he would have to use force against "this small cloud in the north" and take on "this beggarly nation." However, the King was clever. Without an army to call on, he played for time by finally allowing the General Assembly of the Kirk to meet in Glasgow cathedral.
The Assembly immediately started to flex its muscles. It abolished all the bishops, banned the new prayer book and set up a commission to look at the ecclesiastical abuses under the Stewart Kings. In addition, it also established a committee to ensure there was no deviation from the Reformed faith. It was nothing less than an invitation to war.
The Coventantors knew when it if came to a fight, they would have a good chance of winning. They had tough soldiers, hardened in the battles of the Thirty Years' War, and plenty of money from the pockets of Kirk congregations.
The Royalists, under the loyalist Marquis of Hamilton, fared disastrously. Their first army caught smallpox after sailing to Aberdeen and it was then routed at the Battle of the Brig O'Dee in 1639.
Shortly afterwards, the two sides declared a truce. The Covenantors said they would disband and surrender Edinburgh, Dumbarton and Stirling castles, which they had seized. At the same time, the King agreed that the General Assembly and Estates could meet.
Needless to say, as soon as the two bodies met, they simply ratified the legislation passed at the Glasgow General Assembly. Charles responded by adjourning the Estates again and putting together another army. The Scots then marched into England, taking Newcastle and forcing Charles to yet another truce at Ripon in Yorkshire.
However, the Covenantors had their own troubles. They began to fall out among themselves, with the fiercely Calvinist Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, making it plain that he wanted to use the struggle to expand his own personal power and influence.
Argyll's talk of deposing the king was too much for the more moderate Montrose, who felt all that should be done was to persuade Charles to change his policies. Montrose then decided to act in support of, rather than against, the monarch.
The split between Argyll and Montrose ended up with the latter finding himself in prison. Charles came to Edinburgh and managed to secure Montrose's release, but little else. Nothing had been solved. The Scots remained as staunchly Calvinist, and the king as obdurate, as ever.
But by now, Charles also had his troubles south of the border. His arrogant and high handed treatment of the English parliament and the nobility - many of whom were turning towards Puritanism, which was much more extreme than Calvinism - had caused simmering resentment for years.
In England, as in Scotland, Charles was suspected of being a near-Papist, and the tensions grew. His fights against the Scots had drained him of money, but when he was finally forced to summon parliament to try and raise some taxes, it voted to give assistance to the Scots instead.
Armed conflict between the king and parliament finally broke out in 1642. In early fighting, at battles such as Edgehill and Newbury, the Royalist forces managed to hold their own.
The English parliamentary forces alone were not able to break Charles: that required the involvement of the Scots. Scotland came to the English parliament's aid by sending 20,000 troops in support of its cause.
Of course, the involvement of the Scots soldiers came at a price. In 1643, a Solemn League and Covenant was signed. In return for their expenses, the Scots agreed to strike the royalists from the north. But the deal also involved the English agreeing to bring their own church and worship into line with that of the Kirk.
The Scots' involvement in the civil war appeared to seal Charles's fate: their part in the fighting helped win the decisive Battle of Marston Moor for the parliamentarians in 1644.
In fact, there was still a remarkable twist to come. The Earl of Montrose was about to mount an astonishing defence of the King which would tear Scotland, too, apart in civil war.
Meanwhile...
- 1633 Public advertising begins in Paris
- 1633 Samuel Pepys, the English diarist, is born
- 1637 Harvard College is established in Cambridge, Massachussetts
- 1638 Torture is abolished in England
- 1640 Venice opens its first European cafe
- 1642 Income and property tax are introduced into England
- 1642 Isaac Newton - mathematician and natural philosopher - is born
- 1642 Rembrandt paints, "The Night Watch"
- 1643 Moliere founds Illustre Theatre - later knowns as Theatre de la Comedie Francaise
- 1643 Coffee drinking becomes popular in Paris
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The Start of the Reformation
Throughout the Middle Ages, Scotland had always been run by not one, but two rulers - the reigning monarch and the church.
It was the King who collected the taxes, called men to battle and laid down the law. But most ordinary people owed their true allegiance not to him, but to the Catholic faith.
Clerics such as bishops, abbots and even the Pope himself had always been a key part of Scottish society. They were often close to the king, and no monarch could rule without at least coming to an accommodation with his religious leaders.
By the end of the 15th century, the church had become massively influential and hugely wealthy. It had vast tracts of land, huge abbeys, and fine cathedrals. But it was also bloated and corrupt, and it had started to sew the seeds of its own destruction.
Despite its power and its influence, many ordinary Scottish people had simply stopped going to church by the year 1500. They were becoming fed up with some of its less reputable practices, such as the custom where indulgences promising someone a better life in the next world were sold for cash which then went to pay for the upkeep of the Pope and his cohorts in Rome.
All over Europe, dissatisfaction with the state of the Catholic church was breaking out. But there were particular grievances in Scotland. Parish churches, for instance, were having their wealth seized by the great abbeys and cathedrals.
The situation had become so bad that the bishops were living in splendour and Scottish cathedrals were some of the most glorious buildings in the country, while ordinary priests - often ill-trained and illiterate - were on the edge of poverty, and their churches were literally falling down through neglect.
There were other scandals, too. The rules of celibacy which clerics were supposed to adhere to were often not just ignored, but made a mockery of. Archbishop Beaton of St Andrews, for instance, had no less than eight illegitimate children, while Bishop Hepburn of Moray had nine. Monks kept women in their monasteries, and on Iona - the sacred isle which was the cradle of Christianity in Scotland - one of the nuns was the daughter of one of the monks.
Many ordinary priests did their best in difficult circumstances, but they were swimming against an impossible tide. By the 16th century, nearly half of all illegitimate children in Scotland were born to the clergy. King James V, who had come to the throne when his father James IV had been slain at the disastrous Battle of Flodden in 1513, ordered the church to reform itself, but he had nine illegitimate children of his own, so he was hardly in a position to set an example.
There was no doubt that things had to change. The historian and author Father Mark Dilworth, a former Keeper of the Scottish Catholic Archives and an authority on the Scottish Reformation, says that the Catholic church itself recognised this.
"They realised that it needed reforming and things needed to be straightened out", Dilworth adds. "But they wanted to leave the basic structures of the church intact. The reformers felt that everything needed to be tidied up. They wanted the whole basis of religious observance to be altered."
No-one at the time saw just how dramatic and important to Scotland's future history the coming Reformation would be. Disillusion with the Catholic church brought Protestantism to Europe, and when it arrived in Scotland, it changed the character of the country forever.
There are still many myths surrounding the Reformation north of the border. Many people believe, for instance, that Scotland was one of the earliest countries to be converted to the Protestant cause, and that the shake-up was particularly violent here.
Neither of these things are true. Scotland was actually one of the last countries in Europe to swing wholeheartedly away from Catholicism and behind the reformed church, and when the change came, it was much milder here than in many other countries.
The Reformation started in Europe with the teachings of the German monk and theologian Martin Luther, who in 1517 published his Ninety Five Theses attacking the sale of indulgences by the church. This sparked off protests against Catholicism right across Europe.
However, Luther's revolution occurred in the early days of printing, and Scotland did not have its own press at that time. As a result, his thoughts and writings had to be brought in from other countries, such as England and Holland.
As staunch Catholics, many of Scotland's nobility saw the threat that Protestantism caused, and they attempted to nip it in the bud. In 1525, the Scots parliament passed an act which banned the import of Lutheran books, but there was little they could do to stem a growing tide.
The ruling authorities of both church and state faced a new dilemma when the Abbot of Fearn in Ross-shire, Patrick Hamilton, who had been studying under Luther on the continent, arrived home in Scotland in 1527. Hamilton - a distant relation of the Scottish royal family - immediately began to preach the new faith, causing fury in the higher reaches of the Catholic church.
Hamilton was considered particularly dangerous because he wasn't just preaching against church scandals - he was challenging its very teachings. Archbishop Beaton decided to make an example of him. He arrested him and ordered him to recant.
Hamilton refused and, as a result, went the way of all heretics at the time - he was burned at the stake. Because it was raining when the execution took place and the bonfire wasn't set properly, it took him six agonising hours to die. He had become Scotland's first Reformation martyr.
While Protestantism was slowly gaining a foothold in Scotland, its most famous figure was still growing up. John Knox was born in Haddington in 1513. He was educated at university - possibly at Glasgow or St Andrews - and then ordained as a Catholic priest.
Knox fell into the company of George Wishart, another Lutheran reformer who was preaching in Scotland at the time. He fell strongly under Wishart's influence and by 1545 had become converted to the Reformation cause.
By this time, however, Henry VIII was on the throne in England, and had already snubbed Rome by establishing the Church of England as a Protestant church in order to dissolve his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
In Scotland, Cardinal Beaton, the nephew of Archbishop Beaton who had burned Hamilton, had become Chancellor of Scotland and was becoming decidedly jumpy at the prospect of Protestantism - which was now the officially established religion south of the border - gaining a further hold here.
Beaton reacted to Wishart's teachings as his uncle had done with Thomas Hamilton. He had him arrested and burned at the stake in his home diocese of St Andrews while he looked on.
Just three months later, though, it was Beaton who was dead. Scotland's most enthusiastic and bloodthirsty defender of the Catholic faith was assassinated in a plot hatched by Henry VIII, who was tiring not just of Beaton's Catholicism, but of his attempts to strike a deal with France, England's traditional enemy.
The actual murder was carried out in St Andrews by a group of 16 Fife Protestants who stormed his castle in St Andrews and killed him. They knew they could not get away, so they fortified their position and appealed to the English to come and get them out.
The Earl of Arran, who was Governor of Scotland at the time, hit back by surrounding the castle and asking the French to send troops to help. Among those who arrived in St Andrews to give support to the rebels inside the castle was John Knox.
The Protestants hoped that the English would come and save them but, unfortunately for them, the French arrived first. Along with the others, Knox was captured and, as a punishment, sent to France to work as a galley slave.
Catholic Scotland was jubilant. The Protestant revolution, it seemed, had been crushed and thanks to the intervention of the French, the faith was secure once more.
They knew they had won the battle. What they did not realise, however, was that the war was about to be lost. John Knox was coming back. And this time, it would be personal?. Follow the stort of John Knox & Queen Mary
Meanwhile...
- 1517 Coffee first arrives in Europe
- 1525 Hops are introduced to England from Artois
- 1545 The first European botanical garden is founded in Padua
- 1546 The first book in Welsh is printed; Yny Lhyvyr Mwnn
- 1546 Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer, is born
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The Attempted Renewal of Lewis & Harris
Massive changes took place in British society during Queen Victoria's long reign on the throne - but they made the gap between rich and poor wider than ever.
While many industrialists from south of the border made an absolute fortune in their mills and factories and treated Scotland as a holiday playground, Highlanders continued to suffer from centuries-old problems of poverty and deprivation.
However, at least some of the Highlanders' difficulties were of their own making. They were a proud but stubborn people who were sometimes resistant to change, and whose desire for land on occasions blinded them as to the best way of making progress.
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Like any other famous city , Glasgow's earliest history is masked in a twirl of myth. It was William the Lionheart who gave the town an official charter in 1175. The Victorian age transformed the city beyond recognition.
Read on to learn how this city with humble beginnings continued to grow in importance over the years to evolve into what it is today.
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