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The Scottish Reformation and the Theatre of Martyrdom*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Poor John Knox felt a distinct sense of inferiority when he sat down to write the first book of his History of the Reformation in Scotland. Unlike his English friend John Foxe, he could not draw upon the stories of hundreds of martyrs and fit them into the complete history of the persecuted Church from its beginning until the present day. To make matters worse, Foxe would duplicate Knox’s labours by incorporating the stories of most of the Scottish martyrs into his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments. In his ambition to be both the historian and the martyrologist of the Scottish Reformation, Knox thought he faced an immediate and apparently overwhelming problem: that of a distinct shortage of martyrs. Yet he was quickly reassured once he began assembling the details of those who had vigorously opposed the ‘manifest abuses, superstition and idolatry’, which characterized the Catholic Church in Scodand before the Reformation. Martyrs soon began to appear before his eyes, and Knox consoled himself, ‘Albeit there be no great number, yet are they more than the Collector would have looked for at the beginning.’
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1993
Footnotes
*
I am mosr grateful to Dr John Durkan for his helpful comments upon an earlier draft of this article.
References
1 W. C. Dickinson, ed., Dr John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, vols (Edinburgh, 1949) [hereafter Knox, Hist.].
2 Scottish material in vols 4 and 5 of Foxe. 1 am grateful to Thomas Freeman for this information.
3 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 6.
4 D. Nicholls, ‘The theatre of martyrdom in the French Reformation’, PaP, 121 (1988), pp. 49–73. The English evidence is discussed in S. Byman, ‘Ritualistic acts and compulsive behavior: the pattern of Tudor martyrdom’, AHR, 83 (1978), pp. 625–43.
5 The small overall population of Scotland made a simple comparison of numbers of martyrs throughout Europe a very rough guide indeed. The near complete loss of Scottish episcopal records undoubtedly reduced the total of martyrs, but the names of the known Scottish martyrs and their dates and places of execution were as follows:
| 1528 | Patrick Hamilton (St Andrews) |
| c.1533 | Henry Forrest (St Andrews) |
| 1534 | Norman Gourlay (Greenside, Edinburgh) |
| David Stratoun (ditto) | |
| c.1538 | Andrew Alexanderson(?) |
| 1539 | William Keillour (Castle Hill, Edinburgh) |
| John Beveridge (ditto) | |
| Duncan Simpson (dito) | |
| Robert Forster (ditto) | |
| Thomas Forret (ditto) | |
| 1539 | Jerome Russell (Glasgow) |
| N. Kennedy (ditto) | |
| 1539 | Anonymous man (Cupar) |
| 1544 | James Hunter (Perth) |
| James Ronaldson (ditto) | |
| Helen Stirk (ditto) | |
| Robert Lamb (ditto) | |
| William Anderson (ditto) | |
| 1546 | George Wishart (St Andrews) |
| 1550 | Adam Wallace (Castle Hill, Edinburgh) |
| 1558 | Walter Miln (St Andrews) |
6 A useful history of early Protestants (to 1546) and their respective fates is provided in M. Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1986), app. 3, pp. 270–84 [hereafter Sanderson). Their beliefs are discussed in J. Kirk, ‘The religion of early Scottish Protestants’, SCH.S, 8 (1991), pp. 361–411 [hereafter Kirk).
7 Knox, Hist., 1, pp. 24–5; Foxe, 4, pp. 579–80.
8 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 26, n. 3; R. K. Hannay, ed., Rentale Sancti Andree, Scottish History Society, ser. 2, 4 (Edinburgh, 1913), pp. 64, 93.
9 Knox, Hiit., 1, pp. 114–16; Foxe, 5, pp. 636–41.
10 D. McRoberts, ed., The Medieval Church of St Andrews (Glasgow, 1976), pp. 108–9.
11 Knox, Hist., 1, pp. 27–8.
12 Ibid., pp. 21–2; Foxe, 4, pp. 578–9. To see the fire, the people of Forfar would have had to go to the coast or climb the Sidlaw Hills.
13 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 55; Foxe, 5, pp. 623–5. All the Perth victims were craftspeople and their executions were possibly as much a punishment for a previous insurrection as for heresy: see Verschuur, M., ‘Merchants and craftsmen in sixteenth-century Perth’, in Lynch, M., ed., The Early Modem Town in Scotland (London, 1987), p. 42 Google Scholar.
14 Kirk, p. 381.
15 Foxe, 5, pp. 627, 634–5. For Beaton’s murder, Knox, , Hist., 1, pp. 76–8 Google Scholar; Sanderson, , pp. 214–30 Google Scholar.
16 Knox, Hist., 2, p. 234; Foxe, 5, pp. 628–9. These Protestant accounts obviously gave very biased descriptions of the trials and especially of Lauder’s alleged behaviour.
17 A. Mackay, ed., R. Lindsay of Pitscottie Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, 2 vols, Scottish Text Society (1899-1911), 1, p. 308 [hereafter Pitscotrie],
18 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 14.
19 Foxe, 4, p. 563.
20 Knox, His!., I, pp. 13–14, 15, 23; Kirk, pp. 371–2.
21 Foxe, 4, pp. 561–2.
22 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 18.
23 Simon Renard to Philip II, 5 Feb. 1555, R. Tyler et al., eds, Calendar of State Papers, Spanish (London, 1862–1954), 13, p. 138.
24 Spierenburg, P., The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge, 1984 Google Scholar).
25 Brown, K., Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573–1625 (Edinburgh, 1986 Google Scholar).
26 Knox, , Hist., 1, pp. 18–19 Google Scholar.
27 Ibid., pp. 74, 77–8; Pitscottie, , 2, p. 81 Google Scholar.
28 Knox, , Hist., 1, pp. 27–8 Google Scholar.
29 Knox, , Hist., 2, pp. 233–4 Google Scholar; Foxe, , 5, pp. 627–8 Google Scholar.
30 Foxe, 5, p. 623; Sanderson, app. 3.
31 Knox, , Hist., 1, p. 26 Google Scholar; Kirk, p. 386.
32 Knox, , Hist., 1, pp. 122 n. 2, 124, 181 Google Scholar. Knox appealed against his sentence in his tract the ‘Appellation’, ed. Laing, D., The Works of John Knox, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1846-64), 4, pp. 465–520 Google Scholar.
33 Pitscottie, 2, p. 130.
34 Foxe, 5, p. 645.
35 Ibid., p. 646.
36 Knox, Hist., 1, p. 153.
37 Foxe, 5, p. 647; for the ‘Day of Reformation’, see Dawson, J., ‘“The face of Ane Perfyt Reformed Kirk”: St Andrews and the early Scottish Reformation’, SCH.S, 8 (1991), pp. 415—18 Google Scholar.