Most backward of all was Scotland's political development. No king arose strong enough to be at once {351} the tyrant and the saviour of his country; under the weak rule of a series of minors, regents and wanton women a feudal baronage with a lush growth of intestine war and crime, flourished mightily to curse the poor people. When Sir David Lyndsay asked, [Sidenote: 1528] Why are the Scots so poor? he gave the correct answer:
Wanting of justice, policy and peace,
Are cause of their unhappiness, alas!
Something may also be attributed to the poverty of the soil and the lack of important commerce or industries.
[Sidenote: Relations with England]
The policy of any small nation situated in dangerous proximity to a larger one is almost necessarily determined by this fact. In order to assert her independence Scotland was forced to make common cause with England's enemies. Guerrilla warfare was endemic on the borders, breaking out, in each generation, into some fiercer crisis. England, on the other hand, was driven to seek her own safety in the annexation of her small enemy, or, failing that, by keeping her as impotent as possible. True to the maxims of the immoral political science that has commonly passed for statesmanship, the Tudors consistently sought by every form of deliberate perfidy to foster factions in North Britain, to purchase traitors, to hire stabbers, to subsidize rebels, to breed mischief, and to waste the country, at opportune intervals, with armies and fleets. Simply to protect the independence that England denied and attacked, Scotch rulers became fast allies of France, to be counted on, in every war between the great powers, to stir up trouble in England's rear.
On neither side was the policy one of sheer hatred. North and south the purpose increased throughout the century to unite the two countries and thus put an end to the perennial and noxious war. If the early Tudors {351} were mistaken in thinking they could assert a suzerainty by force of arms, they also must be credited with laying the foundations of the future dynastic union. Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, was married to James IV of Scotland. Somerset hoped to effect the union more directly by the marriage of Edward VI and Mary Queen of Scots. That a party of enlightened statesmen in England should constantly keep the union in mind, is less remarkable under the circumstances than that there should have been built up a considerable body of Scotchmen aiming at the same goal. Notwithstanding the vitality of patriotism and the tenacity with which small nations usually refuse to merge their own identity in a larger whole, very strong motives called forth the existence of an English party. One favorable condition was the feudal disorganization of society. Faction was so common and so bitter that it was able to call in the national enemy without utterly discrediting itself. A second element was jealousy of France. For a time, with the French marriages of James V with Mary of Lorraine, a sister of the Duke of Guise, and of Mary Queen of Scots with Francis II, there seemed more danger that the little kingdom should become an appanage of France than a satellite of her southern neighbor. The licentiousness of French officers and French soldiers on Scotch soil made their nation least loved when it was most seen. [Sidenote: Influence of religion] But the great influence overcoming national sentiment was religion. The Reformation that brought not peace but a sword to so much of Europe in this case united instead of divided the nations.
It is sometimes said that national character reveals itself in the national religion. This is true to some extent, but it is still more important to say that a nation's history reveals itself in its forms of faith. From religious statistics of the present day one could {353} deduce with considerable accuracy much of the history of any people.
The contrast between the churches of England and Scotland is the more remarkable when it is considered that the North of England was the stronghold of Catholicism, and that the Lowland Scot, next door to the counties of the Northern Earls who rose against Elizabeth, flew to the opposite extreme and embraced Protestantism in its most pronounced form. To say that Calvinism, uncompromising and bare of adornment, appealed particularly to the dour, dry, rationalistic Scot, is at best but a half truth and at worst a begging of the question. The reasons why England became Anglican and Scotland Presbyterian are found immediately not in the diversity of national character but in the circumstances of their respective polities and history. England cast loose from Rome at a time when the conservative influence of Luther was predominant; Scotland was swept into the current of revolution under the fiercer star of Calvin. The English reformation was started by the crown and supported by the new noblesse of commerce. The Scotch revolution was markedly baronial in tone. It began with the humanists, continued and flourished in the junior branches of great families, among the burgesses of the towns and among the more vigorous of the clergy, both regular and secular. The crown was consistently against the new movement, but the Scottish monarch was too weak to impose his will, or even to have a will of his own. Neither James V nor his daughter could afford to break with Rome and with France. James V, especially, was thrown into the arms of his clergy by the hostility of his nobles. Moreover, after the death of many nobles at the battle of Flodden, the clergy became, for a time, [Sidenote: 1513] the strongest estate in the kingdom.
{354} Like the other estates the clergy were still in the Middle Ages when the Reformation [Sidenote: Reformation] came on them like a thief in the night. In no country was the corruption greater. The bishops and priests took concubines and ate and drank and were drunken and buffeted their fellow men. They exacted their fees to the last farthing, an especially odious one being the claim of the priest to the best cow on the death of a parishioner. As a consequence the parsons and monks were hated by the laity.
Humanism shed a few bright beams on the hyperborean regions of Dundee and Glasgow. Some Erasmians, like Hector Boece, prepared others for the Reformation without joining it themselves; some, like George Buchanan, threw genius and learning into the scales of the new faith. The unlearned, too, were touched with reforming zeal. Lollardy sowed a few seeds of heresy. About 1520 Wyclif's version of the New Testament was turned into Scots by one John Nesbit, but it remained in manuscript.