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Other early Scottish Protestants who were much influenced by Patrick Hamilton included Alexander Seton , a Dominican prior and confessor to James V , who fled to England after denouncing the failings of the Catholic bishops and the immoralities of the king , and Alexander Alesius , another graduate of St Leonard ’ s College , who implored James V to reform the Scottish church and sponsor a vernacular version of the Bible . John Gau and Henry Balnaves , both graduates of St Salvator ’ s College in St Andrews , were also enthusiastic propagandists for Luther ’ s ideas on justification by faith . Walter Milne , a former priest at Lunan in Angus who was burned to death at the age of 82 in St Andrews in 1558 for holding the mass as idolatrous and supporting clerical marriage and private preaching , was another figure strongly influenced by Luther ’ s teaching . He was the last Protestant martyr in Scotland , dying just two years before the Scottish Parliament repudiated the Pope ’ s authority and Roman Catholicism ’ s status as the country ’ s established faith , so initiating the Scottish Reformation . The Church of Scotland established in 1560 was very much a Reformed kirk modelled on the principles that Calvin had put into practice in Geneva , as was the case with the Protestant churches of France and the Netherlands . Across Europe , Protestant churches shared a new emphasis of worshipping in the vernacular , the language of the people , rather than in Latin as through the Middle Ages . Congregational hymn singing was an important aspect of this new approach Although the first significant Scottish collection of material for this purpose , in fact , owed more to Lutheran than Calvinist principles . James and John Wedderburn ’ s Ane Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs ( also known as The Gude and Godlie Ballads ), owed more to Lutheran than Calvinist principles , the subsequent history of Scottish psalmody and hymnody was to be very different in influence and orientation . Calvin ’ s insistence that the only material that could be properly sung in churches were the Psalms of David , put into metrical form and sung to dedicated tunes which would never be heard in the street or the public house , became normative and dictated what congregations sang for almost 300 years . It was not just in worship that Scotland followed the Calvinist rather than the Lutheran strand of Protestantism . In his excellent book The Origins of the Scottish Reformation ( Manchester University Press , 2006 ), Alec Ryrie writes that ‘ Scottish Protestantism began as a broadly Lutheran movement during the reign of James V but had unmistakably become a Reformed ( or ‘ Calvinist ’) one by 1560 ’. He points out that there was nothing automatic or inevitable about this and attributes much importance to the Scots ’ preference for Calvin ’ s teaching about the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist as