Cornerstone No. 184, page 18
Scotland and Luther
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the event generally taken to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’ s action in nailing up 95 theses attacking some of the practices and doctrines of the late Medieval Catholic church on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Scotland, and the Church of Scotland in particular, ultimately drew more in terms of theology, doctrines and forms of church government and polity from the other great founding father of the European Reformation, Jean Calvin, than it did from the more conservative figure of Luther. However, the influence of Luther was also important here, especially in the early years of the spread of Protestant ideas from the continent. Luther’ s critique of Medieval Catholicism and his strong assertion of the doctrine of justification by personal faith alone, without recourse to works, the accumulation of merit or the activities of the church, first came into Scotland in the form of literature which circulated particularly in the east coast burghs. The first agent of Lutheranism to appear in Scotland seems to have been a Frenchman, Monsieur de la Tour, who arrived in 1523 to work for the Duke of Albany and suffered martyrdom when he subsequently returned to France. An Act of Parliament in 1525 banned the importation of any literature by or about‘ that heretic Luther’ into Scotland but this did not stop several eminent Scots taking up and promulgating his main ideas. The most prominent of them was undoubtedly Patrick Hamilton( right, painting by John Scougal( 1645- 1730)), who was probably born near Glasgow around 1504 became a priest in 1526. His open support for the teachings of Luther, notably the idea of justification by faith alone, brought him into direct conflict with James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. In 1528 Hamilton was summoned before Beaton on charges of heresy, found guilty and slowly burnt to death at the stake on February 29. The courage of Hamilton in facing his agonising death as the first Protestant martyr in Scotland had a considerable effect on promoting Lutheranism here. It made particular inroads in St Leonard’ s College at St Andrews where both students and staff became outspoken critics of ecclesiastical corruption. Scotland’ s second Protestant martyr, Henry Forrest, a Benedictine friar from Linlithgow and graduate of St Leonard’ s College who had become Dean of the Abbey on the Isle of May, was burned to death near St Andrews Cathedral in 1533 for possessing a New Testament in English and affirming that Hamilton, whose death he had witnessed, was no heretic but a preacher of God’ s truth.