the tyrant; Wolsey would have been, had he not managed to die first. Cranmer, on the other hand, outlasted the old rogue. Indeed, he ministered to the bloated monster as he lay dying; and this deathbed scene has an unlikely poignancy. Henry’s great achievement was to father Elizabeth, who was to become a splendid and glorious monarch.
James IV, King of Scots
Bumptious, puffed up, grandiose, he had an ambition to strut the wider European stage – and, unusually for a Scottish monarch, he almost succeeded. He could not read his times; he wanted to lead a new crusade, and he created an impressive navy, but then he led his country to its worst-ever military debacle (and there were quite a few over the years) in an inland battle. A persistent, serial womaniser, his relations with his wife Margaret Tudor were never of the best; but their marriage paved the way for the eventual Union of the Crowns.
James was dashing, generous and clever. He maintained a splendid court. Physically strong and resilient, he ruled his unruly kingdom energetically, but he was inconsistent. His relations with England were ill-judged; despite his marriage, he generally leaned towards France. In religion, he was orthodox; and, like his father-in-law Henry Tudor, he evinced no anticipation whatsoever of the tumult that was about to sweep across Europe.
He is sometimes regarded as the greatest of Scots monarchs; if that is the case, it merely shows the poverty of the general standard of Scottish kingship.
James VI, King of Scots – and King James I of England
He was desperate to become king of England from an early age, and this is perhaps why he evinced little public anger or even disapproval when Queen Elizabeth had his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, executed.
Henry VIII tried to effect the Union of the Crowns by vicious force; James, to his credit, accomplished the union peacefully, in 1603. Thereafter, he mostly ignored his northern kingdom. He was clever, and all too aware of it; he loved lecturing clerics, and he particularly liked showing off before his English Parliament, which responded by becoming ever more truculent and disputatious. He deserves credit for commissioning the Authorised Version of the Bible. He deserves less credit for the disgraceful tract he wrote against witches, which gave royal imprimatur to a frenzy of witch-hunting in Scotland.
John Knox
The guiding genius of the Scottish Reformation was a self-styled prophet, a fiery preacher, a genuine democrat and a consistent Anglophile. Indeed, he was offered an English bishopric long before he returned to his native country to mastermind what was, to some extent, a social and political as well as a religious revolution.
He learned much from Calvin during his time in Geneva, yet he was never a zealous follower of the Frenchman; for example, he was much more radical in his belief in the legitimacy of revolt against tyrants.
Knox was emphatically not the killjoy of popular caricature. Despite his ill-advised ‘blast of the trumpet’ against rule by women, he was always something of a ladies’ man. He appreciated wine and good fellowship. His own account of the Scottish Reformation, while self-serving, is at times great fun. He was a social as well as a religious visionary, and the blueprint that he and five colleagues drew up for the new Scotland was centuries ahead of its time in its democratic integrity and its emphasis on education and social welfare.
Saint Ignatius Loyola
This Basque nobleman started as a soldier, and it was during his long agony as he recovered from a terrible wound received while defending Pamplona against the French – and two subsequent botched operations – that he discovered his inner spirituality and his need to serve Christ. His idea of service was based on supreme obedience.
Like so many of the outstanding figures of the sixteenth century, he was complex and contradictory. A tough man with an iron will, he was also highly sensitive and something of a mystic. He possessed a potent imagination. His celebrated Spiritual Exercises, still much used, rely above all on the intensive exercise of imagination.
Central to his teaching was the need for total obedience to the Church, the bride of Christ. The great order he founded, the Jesuits, were to be the shock troops of the huge fightback that is generally called the Counter-Reformation. Himself diamond-hard and ascetic, he nonetheless allowed the elite order he founded to be sinewy and subtle, to keep adjusting to the times.
Martin Luther
A stubborn man of peasant stock, and also a spiritual genius, Luther was very clever but had little subtlety and less sophistication. He was both the most influential evangelical and the most effective revolutionary in European history. A writer of superhuman productivity and a communicator of genius, he could not always control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vicious and vile. He was guilty of anti-Semitism, and at times he wrote savagely and violently in defence of the status quo. This makes his colossal contribution to the cause of change and the development of individual liberty all the more astounding. He could be boorish and foul-mouthed. He was excessively contentious and constantly divisive.
One of the multiple paradoxes of the sixteenth century was that this conservative man should have inspired momentous, continuing revolution; the movement he started in 1517 led to unimagined upheaval and the transfer of power and property on an enormous scale.
Although he resiled somewhat in his later years, the implication of his early teaching, with its supreme emphasis on faith and his notion of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, was that the Church was in effect redundant. All Christians were to be subject to each other, not some vast hierarchical structure. Supremely, he persuaded people to think for themselves. He ended the dark ages of the mind. He unleashed an enormous surge of popular education. He was arguably not just the greatest German, but also the greatest European.
Mary of Guise
Many people tried to rule Scotland, a turbulent and contrary nation, in the sixteenth century; Mary of Guise, a beautiful and charming French noblewoman, succeeded better than most. She was married to James V, King of Scots, from 1538 to 1542. A few years later, she came into her own. Unlike her ill-starred daughter Mary Queen of Scots, she showed sensitivity to the Scots and their affairs, and she steered a careful and skilful political course until the Scottish Reformation finally got under way. At this point, she started to panic and lost control.
She was a devout Catholic – but, unlike her namesake and contemporary in England, Mary Tudor, she did not make martyrs of Protestants. On the contrary, she actually allowed English Protestant refugees to find shelter and sanctuary in Scotland.
Mary Queen of Scots
Quite simply, the wrong queen at the wrong time. Bewitching and ardent, she sadly left the sophisticated French court; and, after a most difficult, stormy sea journey, she arrived in the bleak northern country she was to rule so disastrously – just when the weather was at its worst. John Knox, who was to harangue her with insolent but splendidly democratic confidence, noted with relish that the portents were bad from the very start.
At first, like her distinguished mother Mary of Guise, she managed to rule with some tact and sensitivity; but she simply could not understand that she had arrived in the midst of religious and social revolution.
Her taste in men was degraded; she indulged the frivolous Italian plotter David Rizzio, her so-called secretary, who was murdered by the loutish pals of her second husband, the bisexual wastrel Henry Darnley (by whom she produced the boy who was to become James VI and I). Then, when Darnley had been literally blown up (an atrocious crime in which she was surely complicit), she married the rapist, thug and sociopath Bothwell.
After unsuccessfully defying her own people, she threw herself on the mercy of Queen Elizabeth
