Martyrs, Murder and Martin Luther
Or: A German in Scotland
I flinched a little on the inside as my lame attempt at bantering the ticket lady at St Andrews Castle failed completely. I’d come to the famous Scottish university town of St Andrews to talk about WEIMAR rather than for sightseeing. But the journey up here had been arduous and disrupted. The next morning, I needed a break. And who doesn’t like a castle?
As I strolled through the historic town centre, learnt more about St Andrews’s place in the long and bloody history of conflict between England and Scotland. I also found a striking memorial to both World Wars, dedicated to “the men of St Andrews who with courage and faith at their country’s call laid down their lives that we who remain might live in freedom and peace.”
Over the centuries, people here had fought tooth and nail to defend this place against the English and the Germans. And here was the current-day gatekeeper at St Andrews Castle admitting a modern-day German on the strength of her holding an English Heritage membership card. I couldn’t help myself. I made a silly joke and regretted it instantly.
I daresay, the ticket lady had heard it all before. She just gave me a look and informed me that English Heritage and Historic Environment Scotland had a reciprocal relationship, with members free to visit each other’s sites. Well, if that isn’t a wonderful symbol of how times have changed…
Nonetheless, it’s impossible to forget history when standing among the ruins of St Andrews Castle and looking out across the North Sea… towards Germany. You can’t quite see my birth country from here, but the shadow of a certain German monk still hangs over everything.
People were burnt, imprisoned, murdered and martyred here because of a battle over belief systems that the ideas of Martin Luther had unleashed. The story of the Scottish Reformation cannot be told without understanding the German Reformation.
That story takes us to a place over 1,000 kilometres and half a millennium away. In October 1517, Martin Luther, then a professor and Augustinian friar in the German town of Wittenberg, challenged the sale of indulgences and other practices within the Catholic Church. Whether or not he physically nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door, the effect was incendiary.
Fuelled by the application of the then still relatively new invention of the printing press, Luther’s ideas spread like wildfire across central Europe and beyond. They launched a movement that transformed religion, politics, education and society throughout the continent and also here in Britain. The North Sea served as a link rather than a barrier in this process.
Scotland was one of the places where Luther’s ideas found an audience, and now I found myself right in the heart of that story. I pressed a button in the castle museum to watch a short film explaining that St Andrews was once the centre of religious authority in Scotland. “Ah, c’est la capitale religieuse!” whispered the older French lady who was sitting next to me to her husband.
I must admit that until I came here and learnt more about it, I hadn’t fully realised what a crucial role St Andrews played in the Scottish Reformation. That’s one of the things I love about travelling: all the little “ahhh” moments when you learn something that is new to you, but common knowledge for the locals and a lot of other people. It’s like being a child again, discovering an aspect of the world that others take for granted.
I learnt that the castle was used to defend Scottish Catholicism against the onslaught of Luther’s revolutionary ideas arriving from the continent. Naturally, what was happening in the German-speaking world hadn’t bypassed the authorities here. Luther’s writings were considered dangerous, and brutal censorial efforts were made to prevent their circulation.
One of the most important figures in this story was Patrick Hamilton. Born into a Scottish noble family, he spent a fair bit of time abroad, where he encountered the new religious ideas emerging from continental Europe. When he returned to Scotland, he was still a pretty isolated voice as he began preaching Lutheran doctrines that church authorities regarded as heretical.
Unlike Luther in the German lands, Hamilton had no powerful allies to protect him. In 1528, he was tried and condemned in St Andrews, where he’d originally been invited by Archbishop James Beaton. It was also Beaton who presided over the tribunal that sentenced Hamilton to death. He was burned at the stake right here in the town.
If Hamilton’s execution was intended to quell the flood of Lutheran ideas into Scotland, it had the opposite effect. He is said to have stood his ground during the trial with a calm and determined demeanour that impressed onlookers. The word of this spread quickly through the printing press, and he became a martyr. There are still traces of him everywhere in St Andrews, including a set of cobbles with his initials marking the spot where he was executed. Apparently, students of the university avoid stepping on them to this day.
The Reformation was about power, authority and competing visions of society as much as it was about theology. Much was at stake. That was true on the continent, and it was equally true here in Scotland, where St Andrews Castle became one of the central stages of these conflicts.
In 1546, reformers assassinated Cardinal David Beaton, nephew and successor of the aforementioned James Beaton, and one of the leading defenders of Catholicism in Scotland, inside the castle. Beaton had himself imprisoned and executed people here, like the Protestant preacher George Wishart, who was burnt at the stake in front of the outer walls. When Beaton was murdered in turn, his body was hung from a castle window.
Luther was aware that his preachings had the potential to set Europe ablaze with violence. He had written around 25 years earlier, in 1520: “If you think properly of the Gospel, please don’t imagine that its cause can be advanced without tumult, offence and sedition... The word of God is a sword, it’s war, ruin, offence, perdition and poison.”
At St Andrews, the story didn’t end with the murder of Beaton. The Protestants took over and were in turn besieged the following year, a time that left remarkable mine (dug by the attackers) and countermine (dug by the defenders) tunnels beneath the walls that remain today.
Scottish reformers soon also looked not only to Luther but also to other Protestant thinkers. John Knox, perhaps the most famous leader of the Scottish Reformation, spent time in continental Europe and was strongly influenced by John Calvin’s ideas. As a result, the Church of Scotland ended up developing along a more Calvinist path.
Knox also left his traces at St Andrews Castle, which he entered during an armistice period while the siege was still underway. He was particularly appalled by the infamous “bottle dungeon”, which, having stared down this dark, terrible rock-cut pit in claustrophobic horror, I can entirely understand. It’s incredibly narrow and, as the name suggests, bottle-shaped. Apparently, Beaton’s body was kept down there during the siege, pickled in a box of salt to keep it from smelling. “Many of God’s Children were imprisoned here,” wrote Knox.
As a German visitor, I found this connection fascinating. We often study the Reformation through a national lens. While where I grew up in Germany is now majority atheist due to four decades of East German socialism, it was in the former Protestant heartlands of Prussia. Reformation Day (31 October) is a public holiday in 9 of 16 German states (obviously not in the majority-Catholic ones). And Luther is considered a seminal figure in the long process of German unification due to the impact of his work, particularly his translation of the Bible into German. Even the GDR celebrated this legacy.
In Germany, we focus on Luther as a German figure. But standing in St Andrews, I’m reminded that the Reformation was an international phenomenon, crossing linguistic, physical and political boundaries. It drove people who had never met Luther and would never visit Germany. St Andrews is a perfect example of how interconnected Europe has been for centuries.
Perhaps, then, I should not have been surprised that so many people turned up for my talk about Weimar and the German interwar period, and that they felt it was worth waiting for when I was delayed by almost an hour. Ultimately, history affects us all, and it rarely sticks to national boundaries.
Very good, enjoyed that TY.
For Scotland the Reformation induced miserable Puritanism…….we were slightly luckier in England. The ‘old religion’ took many decades to die. Indeed Queen Elizabeth was famously relaxed bout resistance - “I will not make windows into mens’ souls”. It was only when Catholicism became associated with Spanish invasion that the English turned fully against it.
The Reformation actually began after the Black Death - the good priests died in droves helping their parishioners.
They were replaced by knaves whose behaviour was appalling. In the 1360s and 1370s, the anti-papist and anti-corruption ideas of Oxford professor John Wycliffe came to the fore. Wycliffe insisted on a simple liturgy that was based on the Bible NOT the command of Rome. He started the movement that produced the first English Bible.
Wycliffe was encouraged in this by John of Gaunt, de facto ruler of England for 20yrs, who bitterly resented the taxes - tithes - levied by Rome on English citizens (he wanted them for his own campaigns).
England’s frostiness with Rome was underlined by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales in the 1390s, which mocked the church and its parasites and in effect challenged the authority of Rome. He was fully encouraged in this by his patron and great friend…….John of Gaunt.
It was only in the reign of Henry V that peace between England and Rome was reconstructed…….until the future of Tudor dynasty became questionable.
Thanks for this travel note. In your understanding, what happened to Luther's thinking between that 1520 quote on "the Word of God is a sword" and Luther's dismissing of the German Peasant Rebellion? Was he taking a more political path to win over German nobles to have top-cover for the Reformation?