The Reformation came to Scotland in 1560 as a revolution: in one year the Reformation Parliament abolished papal authority, banned the Mass and adopted a Protestant confession, with John Knox — whose own story is told in Famous People — as its thundering voice. For Glasgow the stakes were peculiar: this was not merely a town with churches but an archbishop’s city, its whole economy and status built around the cathedral, its lord a prince of the church now abolished.
Yet Glasgow’s reformation was strikingly unbloody. Archbishop James Beaton read the weather and departed for France, taking the cathedral’s treasures and archives with him; the Mass ceased; altars, images and relics were removed from the great church — and there, by Glasgow’s good fortune, the destruction largely stopped. Where St Andrews’ cathedral was left to become a quarry, Glasgow’s survived with its roof on, an escape tradition credits to the town’s craft guilds and which the Reformation-era cathedral page examines in detail.
What replaced the old order reached deeper into daily life than the old order ever had. The parish kirk with its minister and elders — the kirk session — became the moral government of the town: enforcing Sabbath observance, hauling fornicators and slanderers to the stool of repentance, licensing the poor’s relief, and keeping the registers that are now the genealogist’s treasure. Reformed Glasgow was godly Glasgow, at least officially, for the better part of three centuries.
The town’s institutions bent but survived. The university, a papal foundation, nearly died with its patron church — until the reformer Andrew Melville arrived as principal in 1574 and rebuilt it as a powerhouse of Protestant learning, one of the Reformation’s most fruitful Glasgow legacies. The bishopric itself flickered on and off for another century as crown and kirk fought over church government — the struggle that would produce the Covenanters.
The deepest legacy was character. Reformed Glasgow’s seriousness about scripture, education and self-improvement fed directly into the literate, argumentative, commercially formidable city of the centuries that followed — and its motto still carries the mark: ‘Let Glasgow flourish’ is the surviving half of a Reformation-era prayer, by the preaching of the word.