A Reformation Carried by Parliament

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.