Scotland Under the Stuarts
For more than 150 years, Scotland, although independent and for the most part free of English aggression, was torn by clan feuds and stormy resistance to the authority of the Stewart (or Stuart, as the name eventually came to be spelled) rulers. James I (reigned 1406–37) was murdered by a resentful baron. James III (1460–88) met his death fighting rebellious subjects. His son James IV (1488–1513) was a gallant and popular king who brought order to much of Scotland, although the Highlands were not altogether subdued. In 1503 James married the English princess Margaret Tudor. When Margaret's brother, Henry VIII, went to war against Scotland's ally France, James invaded England and was killed at the battle of Flodden Field.
Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, was reared in France, married the dauphin (the heir to the French throne), became queen of France in 1559, and was widowed the next year. Catholics considered her—rather than her Protestant cousin Elizabeth I—the rightful claimant to the English throne, through her grandmother Margaret Tudor.
In 1561 Mary returned to Scotland, where under the leadership of John Knox Catholicism had been rejected and Calvinism made the official religion. Mary did not oppose the new kirk (church), but lost the support of the Scots in 1567 when she was suspected of being involved in the mysterious death of her second husband, Lord Darnley. Upon her marriage to Darnley's presumed murderer, the Earl of Bothwell, the Scots rose against her and proclaimed her infant son, James (VI), king. Mary fled to England, where she was held prisoner until put to death in 1587 for plots against Elizabeth.
James, godson of Queen Elizabeth and next in line (after the death of his mother) to the English throne, was brought up a Protestant and succeeded Elizabeth in 1603 (as James I), uniting Scotland and England under a single monarch, although they remained separate countries.
The Scottish Parliament established a presbyterian form of church government in 1592. Parliament's enactments, however, left the king with a great deal of power over the church, which he used in 1598–99 to reintroduce bishops into Parliament and then to superimpose them on the kirk government. In 1638, during the reign of Charles I, the Scots expressed their discontent with royal policy in a document, the National Covenant. The issuing of this document was the beginning of a movement that eventually overthrew the bishops (the Bishops' Wars of 1639–40) and restored the presbyterian form of government to the Scottish church.
After the Great Rebellion against Charles broke out in 1642, the English Parliament and the Scots signed the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), by which England would become Presbyterian and Scotland would support the rebellion. Oliver Cromwell and the Independents (Congregationalists) opposed the Scots and prevented the implementation of the covenant. The beheading of Charles in 1649 horrified the Scots, who proclaimed his son Charles (II) to be their king. Thereafter the Covenanters were allied with the royalists against the Puritans, who conquered Scotland, 1650–52.
When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II reestablished episcopacy in Scotland. His brother James, a Catholic, was made commissioner for Scotland in 1680, and persecution of Convenanters became intense. After his succession to the throne in 1685, James (VII of Scotland and II of England) quickly antagonized his subjects in both countries and was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Under his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, Presbyterianism was reestablished in Scotland (1690). Mary's sister Anne came to the throne in 1702 and recommended the union of England and Scotland under a single Parliament. The Act of Union in 1707 joined the countries into the nation of Great Britain.
