The Reformation in Scotland

Next year will be the 450th anniversary of the Protestant reformation in Scotland, a fact to which Kevin McKenna has drawn our attention here.

England and Scotland were under separate crowns in 1560 of course, with the Tudors south of the border and the Stuarts to the north. Scotland had been spared the long drama of England's Reformation -- the drama of Henry VIII's contentious break with Katherine of Aragorn, and as a consequence with the Church of Rome, or for that matter the shifting ecclesiastical politics of his subsequent marriages. Scotland had been spared, too, the brief reign of Edward, who encouraged Calvinist tendencies in the newly established Church, then the retrograde movement under bloody Mary, who sought to return to the Roman fold, while inventing a cocktail named for hersef.

No, in 1560 Elizabeth was new to the crown, and she would over time reverse her sister's reversal of her father's revolution, but give Protestantism a distinctive non-Genevan twist in the process. And it was in 1560 that the Scottish Parliament set up a "Committee of the Articles" that after three weeks of deliberation recommended the condemnation of the doctrines of transubstantiation, justification by works, indulgences, purgatory, and papal authority. The full Parliament agreed, on August 17th of that year -- 449 years ago tomorow.

McKenna, then, is getting a jump on the 450th celebration with his own essay, which starts out with his own (Catholic) childhood and youth, and rather oddly focuses not on any of ther issues the old Scottish Parliament found decisively offensive, but on the controversy over graven images. In his case, his tendency to venerate a particular image appears to have been mingled with Mariolatry as well.

I'll reproduce his touching first two paragraphs here, allowing you to follow the above link for the rest:

Our Lady of Maryhill was three feet tall with a beatific countenance, her head encircled by a halo of golden stars. Under her dainty feet, which were supported by a grey plinth, lay a crushed serpent. She had been with me from childhood and had seen action in various north Glasgow dwellings as well as the Protestant stronghold of Kilwinning in Ayrshire.

On those occasions when I returned home for the weekend, my student flatmate would ask politely if he could commandeer my room for the purposes of entertaining women. As he was an incorrigible atheist and thus knew no better, I readily assented to his fell requests. There was only one condition. That he gently place my madonna inside the top drawer of my dresser during his assignations. Thus she would be spared the regrettable scenes of prenuptial houghmagandy taking place before her.

Houghmagandy? the word is new to me, although its meaning in context is not mysterious.