The Scottish Reformation in Glasgow

In 1560, in the space of a single revolutionary year, Scotland overthrew the Church that had shaped it for a thousand years. The authority of the Pope was abolished, the Mass was forbidden, and a new Protestant faith was proclaimed in its place. In Glasgow — the seat of an archbishop, a city built and ruled by the medieval Church — the change might well have brought violence and destruction. Instead, remarkably, Glasgow changed its religion with barely a riot, and its great cathedral, almost alone among the cathedrals of Scotland, came through the storm all but unharmed.

This page tells that story: the revolution of 1560, the flight of the last archbishop, the saving of the cathedral, its stripping and division, the new church order, the reformer who revived the university, and the making of a Protestant city.

The year of revolution

The Scottish Reformation reached its climax in 1560. In that year the Scottish Parliament, swept along by the reforming nobles known as the Lords of the Congregation and the preaching of John Knox, abolished the authority of the Pope in Scotland, outlawed the celebration of the Mass, and adopted a Protestant confession of faith. At a stroke, the old Catholic Church — with its bishops, monasteries, saints and ceremonies — was cast down, and a new, austere, Calvinist religion set in its place. It was one of the most complete and rapid religious revolutions in Europe, and it unfolded while the young Catholic queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, was still in France; she would return the following year to find her realm already Protestant. Nowhere was the change more profound than in a city like Glasgow, whose very existence had been bound up with the medieval Church.

The archbishop flees

Glasgow was the seat of an archbishop, and the head of its church chose exile over apostasy. James Beaton, the last Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, refused to abandon the old faith and, as the Reformation triumphed, fled to France. He did not go empty-handed: he carried away with him the cathedral’s treasures, its holy relics and, most valuable of all to historians, its records and archives, which he lodged for safekeeping in Paris. His departure removed the last great figure of the medieval church in Glasgow, and left the city’s ancient cathedral without the archbishop it had been built to serve.

The cathedral saved

Across Scotland the Reformation fell heavily on the great churches: altars were smashed, images destroyed, and many a cathedral and abbey left a ruin. Glasgow’s cathedral, almost uniquely, was spared. It is one of only two medieval cathedrals on the Scottish mainland to have survived the Reformation essentially complete, and tradition gives the credit to the ordinary people of the city. When reforming zeal threatened to tear the building down, the story goes, the craftsmen and trades of Glasgow rallied to its defence, insisting that their great church be preserved — and preserved it was. Whatever the exact truth, the survival of this magnificent medieval building, when so many others fell, is one of the happier legacies of the Scottish Reformation.

Stripped & divided

Saved it may have been, but the cathedral did not escape unchanged. Its interior was stripped of everything associated with the old religion — the altars, images, rich furnishings and the shrine of St Mungo were all swept away, leaving the great bare stone shell that visitors see today. The building was then put to new use in the Protestant manner: it was divided internally into separate preaching churches, so that a single medieval cathedral came to house several distinct Reformed congregations at once, each with its own minister. For centuries the choir, the nave and the crypt served as different parish churches under one roof, a striking chapter in the building’s long history — a very Scottish afterlife for a great Catholic cathedral.

The new order

With the old Church gone, a wholly new religious order took shape. In place of bishops and priests came the discipline of Presbyterianism and the reformed Church of Scotland, the national Kirk: each parish was governed by its kirk session, a body of the minister and elders charged with overseeing worship, morals and the life of the congregation. This reformed structure, stern and locally rooted, would shape the character of Glasgow for generations to come, binding religion tightly to daily life and giving the city its enduring reputation for godliness and sober industry. The kirk session, not the bishop’s court, was now the authority that ordinary Glaswegians answered to.

Melville & the university

The Reformation reached the city’s intellectual life as well as its churches. In 1574 the great reformer Andrew Melville became Principal of the University of Glasgow, which had fallen on hard times, and set about reviving and remodelling it along new lines. A formidable scholar and a leading architect of the Presbyterian Kirk, Melville reinvigorated the university’s teaching and helped make it a nursery of the reformed faith and learning. Under his hand the medieval university founded by a bishop was renewed as an institution of Protestant Scotland — carrying the life of learning forward across the great divide of the Reformation.

A reformed city

The Reformation drew a line across Glasgow’s history. On one side lay the medieval city of the bishops — wealthy, Catholic, dominated by its cathedral and its clergy; on the other, the Protestant burgh that was to come, its faith reformed, its old church stripped and shared out, its life governed by kirk sessions and shaped by a stern new piety. The transformation was as complete as it was swift. The city that emerged from 1560 was recognisably the ancestor of modern Glasgow — and when, in the century that followed, it began its climb towards commercial greatness, it did so as a firmly Protestant town, its medieval, Catholic past already fading into memory.

The essentials