The statue smashing of 1559
Dr Bess Rhodes looks back at a tumultuous summer in the mid 16th century, when the traditions of centuries were swept away in an anger-fuelled mass movement that heralded the country’s ‘time of reformation’
The tumultuous summer when ageold traditions were swept away in an anger-fuelled mass movement
On 11 May 1559, a religious riot broke out in Perth. At that time Scotland was still officially a Catholic country. However, a vocal minority was calling for change. For some months, Protestant preachers in the Tay Valley had been condemning Catholic practices, claiming they were ‘superstitious’ and ‘odious’ to God. Matters came to a head when a young boy shouted out in church that the mass was ‘damned idolatry’. Greatly ‘offended’, a Catholic priest ‘gave the child a great blow’.The watching crowd (already agitated by a spring of rising religious tension) responded forcefully.
Apparently ‘stirred up’ to ‘fury and madness’ the crowd tore down statues, smashed altars and made a bonfire of the furnishings of St John’s church in the centre of Perth. Nearby monasteries and friaries were treated even more harshly. According to a contemporary letter from the Protestant preacher John Knox, ‘the places of idolatry of Grey and Black Friars and of Charterhouse monks were made equal with the ground’. Meanwhile local Catholic priests were ‘commanded, under pain of death, to desist from their blasphemous mass’. It was the start of a dramatic summer of iconoclasm, intimidation and religious change.
Today, separated by several centuries from the events of 1559, it is easy to underestimate the shock of Scotland’s
‘time of reformation’.
Catholic institutions fell apart with startling speed. In November 1559 the Genevan reformer John Calvin congratulated Scottish Protestants on ‘success incredible in so short a time’. For
Today, separated by several centuries from the events of 1559, it is easy to underestimate the shock of Scotland’s ‘time of reformation’
Statues, paintings, embroideries, and books were cast onto bonfires, while catholic clergy were forced to watch
religious conservatives it was a less joyful experience, watching as the traditions of centuries were ‘plucked up by the roots’. A mere fifteen months on from the upheavals in Perth, the parliament in Edinburgh officially declared Scotland a Protestant nation.
The causes of this religious revolution, and the reasons for the reformers’ triumph, were many and varied.Yet the way in which Protestant leaders successfully exploited popular outrage and harnessed mob violence should not be overlooked. The extent to which the events in Perth were deliberately orchestrated by reformist leaders is unclear. However, over succeeding weeks anger would be carefully stoked, mass protests manufactured and violent acts encouraged by key figures in the Protestant cause. In the words of Lord Herries (who was a supporter of religious reform but wary of popular unrest) this was a period of ‘tumults upon tumults, killing of priests, sacking and pulling down of churches... ancient buildings... which for many hundred years have been a building, shall, in few months, be destroyed and razed to the ground!’
Of course, the violence was not all on one side. The head of the Scottish government, the Catholic regent Mary of Guise, was outraged by events in Perth (which had included the destruction of the Charterhouse where James I was buried). Mary reputedly gave orders for the destruction of the burgh by fire with ‘every man, woman, and child’, and quickly despatched troops to Perth under the command of her French advisor Monsieur D’Oysel. Following tense negotiations, the government forces were admitted to Perth on condition they did not restore Catholicism – a promise they almost immediately broke. It was later claimed the French troops also accidentally shot ‘a boy of ten or twelve years of age’ while entering the burgh.
In the aftermath of the broken promises at Perth, the reformers set out to build a mass movement capable of taking on the government. Protestant propagandists presented their actions as a struggle for the soul of Scotland. They claimed they were defending ‘the cause of God’, and told ordinary Scots that this was a fight for ‘their religion, and liberty, and lives, that were all in eminent danger’. The established Church was presented as ‘corrupt’, decadent, and debased by scandals. Catholic clergy were described as ‘vermin’; meanwhile the foreign birth of the regent, Mary of Guise, was used to portray her as ‘a stranger, that had no respect to the weal of Scotland’.
Inflamed by a combination of religious and xenophobic rhetoric, many supporters of religious change became ‘ready to attempt anything’. Their anger was skilfully exploited by Protestant leaders, who sent out letters and made announcements in market-places encouraging their supporters to gather in Fife ‘for reformation to be made there’. The ultimate aim was to take over the kingdom’s religious capital of St Andrews – viewed by Catholic Scots as ‘the chief and mother city of the realm’. However, the reformers worked up to this target.
Cupar, the home of Fife’s sheriff court and a significant trading centre, was among the first places to feel the protestants’ anger. There the parish church’s ‘images, altars and other instruments of idolatry’ were ‘defaced’ by local residents inspired by the events in Perth. For the parish curate the vandalising of his church was apparently so traumatic he went home and killed himself.
Attention soon turned to the coastal burghs, and increasing numbers of Protestant activists advanced through Fife. As they passed through the countryside ‘where they found in their way any kirks or chapels... they purged them, breaking down the altars and idols... And so praising God continually, in singing of psalms and spiritual songs, they rejoiced that the Lord had wrought thus happily with them’. Around
6 June 1559, John Knox preached in Crail, and the reformers ‘ransacked and spoiled’ the collegiate church there – a place which inventories reveal was adorned with silver crosses and candlesticks, gilded chalices, and altar coverings made from velvet, satin and damask. The next day Protestant activists targeted Anstruther. Then, with momentum building, they descended on St Andrews.
Entry into St Andrews
When the reformers entered St Andrews, this coastal burgh was a Catholic metropolis. It was the base for the kingdom’s oldest archbishopric, home to the
country’s first university and held the shrine of the nation’s patron saint. The city was dominated by the vast cathedral of St Andrew, the largest single roofed space constructed in Scotland before the 19th century. For generations this building had been a focal point for national events, including celebrations for the marriage of James V to Mary of Guise. However, the cathedral also had a darker side – being the scene of the kingdom’s most notorious heresy trials. Only a year earlier, the octogenarian priest Walter Mylne had been burnt beside the cathedral for questioning Catholic doctrine. In the eyes of some Scots, St Andrews cathedral had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with Catholicism.
On Sunday 11 June 1559, a crowd gathered in one of St Andrews’ other places of worship, the parish church of Holy Trinity, where John Knox delivered an incendiary sermon. His preaching aroused controversy before it even began, the archbishop having declared that if Knox spoke in St Andrews he would be shot in the face. Notwithstanding these threats, Knox occupied the pulpit. He took as his text the expulsion of the money-changers from the temple. Knox later recalled that he ‘applied the corruption that was there to the corruption that is in the Papistry’. Others had more lurid memories of his words, claiming Knox advised that ‘the Papists and Idolators should be whipped and driven forth of the Kirk of God’.
Inspired by Knox’s preaching, his followers ‘purged’ St Andrews’ religious buildings. According to an English intelligence report, the Protestants ‘put down’ the cathedral by ‘burning of images and mass books and breaking of altars’. It was an understated description of the destruction of one of the greatest collections of Scottish medieval art. Statues, paintings, embroideries and books were cast onto bonfires, while Catholic clergy were forced to watch. In a letter written less than a fortnight later, Knox commented on the nervous response of the St Andrews academics, noting that ‘the doctors... are dumb, even as dumb as their idols who were burnt in their presence’. Destroying Catholic religious objects in front of churchmen seems to have been standard practice for the Scottish reformers. For instance, when Lindores Abbey was reformed (shortly after St Andrews) ‘their idols, vestments of idolatry, and mass books were burnt’ in the monks ‘own presence, and they commanded to cast away their monkish [habits]’.
A brutal pattern for reform was being established – one which proved astonishingly effective. Faced with large crowds (sometimes carrying weapons) attacking their churches, many Catholic clerics either fled or joined the Protestant cause. Those who did not conform were liable to have their property taken, be driven from their homes and on occasions were imprisoned or physically attacked. Both crown and Church struggled to find an effective response to the rapidly evolving situation: meanwhile the revolution gathered pace.
On 25 June, the Protestants retook Perth, with shots being fired and ‘ordnance’ brought from the city of Dundee. Three days later, Knox conceded in a letter to William Cecil that ‘the Reformation is somewhat violent, because the adversaries be stubborn’. While Knox wrote, the Protestants were gathering ‘men of war’ in ‘Fife, Angus, Strathearn, and Westland’. A few weeks afterwards the reformers were consulting the English on the possibility of military aid. Religious protest had slipped into religious war.