so the story goes, some ruffians severed the king’s head and played a game of football with it.
For most of his reign, James had not been able to resist the temptations of incursions into England. In this, he was no better, no more disciplined, nor more responsible, than the reckless, hooligan nobility of the Borders. Flodden was an unnecessary battle, fought for a far-off French king (who showed scant interest in helping his ally after the defeat) to no great strategic or even opportunist end. It was a misjudgement of criminal proportions. Its aftermath was devastating. Scotland, as so often before, now had an infant king. His mother Margaret was the sister of the king, Henry VIII, whose army had just inflicted this most devastating of defeats.
The feuding and anarchic squabbling began at once. The confidence and the authority drained out of the kingdom as fast as the blood had seeped from the bodies of the fallen on Flodden Field. Henry VIII received the news of Surrey’s momentous victory at his camp near Tournai, in northern France. He expressed his rejoicing in religious mode with a mass of thanksgiving. He had led his first army to victory against the French; his old general Surrey had led his second army to victory against the Scots. He had indeed much to be thankful for.
Yet, within sixty years of the dreadful disaster that was Flodden, a young and courageous English queen, Henry VIII’s daughter, newly and precariously on her throne, took the heroic and dangerous decision to send both her army and her navy north to help the Scots drive the French out of their country once and for all. In doing so, she helped the Scots to accomplish to what was in effect a revolution – a revolution that at last confirmed the Scottish Reformation and rendered Scotland a forward-looking Protestant country, just like her own.
CHAPTER 3
The State of the Pre-Reformation Church in England and Scotland
IT is far too neat, even simplistic, to say that the Reformation happened because the Church had become corrupt. For all that, it is as well to survey the condition of the Church in this period – the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – because its condition was not good. The Roman Catholic Church, for most of the fifteenth century, was recovering from the ‘great Schism’ of 1378–1417, the serious split when rival popes in Avignon and Rome contended for authority. The papacy recovered, and consolidated in Rome. Popes towards the end of the fifteenth century were undoubtedly corrupt, but the corruption was widely accepted and indeed endorsed. There was surprisingly little indignation about the many abuses of Church power.
The ‘Renaissance popes’ were in effect monarchs, competing and intriguing with the other city states and kingdoms of Italy, and trying to play their part in the power politics of Europe. Leading cardinals became courtiers. The papacy was not as wealthy as is sometimes thought; its revenue was about half of that of Venice, for example. Unlike most monarchies, the papacy was not hereditary. And tenure was generally brief; in the 100 years between 1455 and 1555, there were fifteen different popes. The lack of continuity and consistency was a major problem.
The degraded papacy reached its nadir with the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who brazenly paraded his young and frankly sexy mistress around the Vatican and was reputed to have poisoned several of his cardinals. He fathered at least nine illegitimate children by three different women. He also presided over an ever more incompetent Curia – the papacy’s great administrative office – where posts were bought and appointments were rarely made on merit. The jobs proliferated but the efficiency diminished. Alexander granted his son Cesare no fewer than four bishoprics when he reached the age of 18.
Despite the constant nepotism and occasional murderous violence, there was one considerable positive. The achievement of the Renaissance popes lay in their patronage of the arts. They began the reinvention of Rome, which had declined to a relatively undistinguished obscurity, as the epicentre of the Italian Renaissance. Today’s Rome – arguably the most splendidly adorned city in the world – is a glorious monument to their legacy. The popes’ aesthetic taste was as refined as their lives were gross, and they could certainly spot up-and-coming artists of genius. Julius II, although best known as the ‘warrior pope’, famed for leading his troops in his suit of shining silver armour, also laid the foundation stone of the new St Peter’s and persuaded Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was the patron of, among others, Raphael and Leonardo.
The most pressing challenge to the Church was intellectual, and it came from humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus in Rotterdam and John Colet in London. But, because they were eminently reasonable men, they did not represent real danger to the established order. They were scholars, not agitators. Erasmus preferred gentle satire to bitter polemics. Colet, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, studied at Oxford and then travelled widely on the continent (including Florence, where he heard a certain Girolamo Savonarola preach). When he became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral back in London, he emerged as a potential reformer. He believed – and said publicly – that heretics were not as dangerous to the Church as the corrupt and even evil lives of so many priests.
This indeed was the Church’s main problem in the early years of the sixteenth century. There was still widespread respect for the Church as an institution, for its liturgy and its doctrine. There was no obvious public desire for the Bible to be translated and made into the stupendously popular book it was shortly to become. But there was widespread disrespect – even contempt – for the clergy, from the papacy downwards. Yet the Church did not appear vulnerable. It was not so weak as to be seriously shaken by the words of men like Colet and Erasmus. Powerful monarchs like James IV in Scotland and Henry VII in England were, in their very different ways, pious and essentially conventional men. They used the Church to further their own ends, but they also had sincere personal respect for it.
There was a kind of conspiracy of mutual convenience. These two kings, like many others, were relaxed about exploiting the Church’s resources as best they could; at the same time, they were concerned about their souls. So, these were not the kind of men to lead a revolution against the Church. Heresy – serious religious dissidence – was not for them. Nor was it for most of their subjects.
The growth of Renaissance humanism had for some time been subtly undermining the papacy, but in a cerebral, unthreatening way. The Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla, who fortunately enjoyed the protection of King Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily, argued that the papacy was too concerned with temporal power and was consequently directly responsible for the widespread corruption that vitiated the Church. Valla also exposed flaws in the Latin New Testament of the Vulgate, used by the Church. But this was the stuff of recondite scholarship, far above the heads of ordinary people. Men such as Valla, while they contributed to a growing intellectual scepticism about the papacy, hardly smashed the foundations – indeed, Valla himself ended up as senior secretary to Pope Nicholas V.
One man who was more in the mould of rabble-rousing revolutionary than the likes of Valla or Erasmus or Colet was Girolamo Savonarola. This prophetic figure, whose genius flared in a brilliant spurt of fiery fury in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, blazed the trail – literally – for what was to come in the next century. A Dominican friar from Ferrara, in 1491 he started to excite Florence to an almost ecstatic fervour with his violent preaching, first at the church of San Marco, then at the cathedral. He soon held almost total sway over the city through the extraordinary power of his spoken words. Although he was kind and gentle as a confessor, when he preached, a special anger, at once divine and terrifying, overcame him. His sermons, delivered in his distinctive high-pitched tones, were long and electrifying. In some ways, the Reformation should have been his, not Luther’s.
Among those who heard him preach were John Colet passing through Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Savonarola so scared Michelangelo that the artist fled from Florence in panic after hearing one of his sermons. So, Savonarola had something of the demagogue about him. Those who listened to him were variously alarmed, horrified and inspired. Yet he managed to
