Scotland's Reformation was more radical and more complete than England's. Where Henry VIII had created a Church of England that retained bishops, much of Catholic ritual and the monarch as its Supreme Head, the Scottish Reformation of 1560 produced a Presbyterian church governed by elected elders with no bishops and no royal supremacy. John Knox, the fiery minister who had studied in Geneva under John Calvin himself, was the dominant personality of the Scottish Reformation — a man of ferocious conviction who had no patience with the compromises that characterised the Elizabethan religious settlement to the south.
The Reformation transformed Scotland's political as well as its religious landscape. Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic queen who returned from France in 1561 to find her kingdom Protestant, was never able to reconcile her personal faith with the demands of governing a Reformed country and a Protestant nobility. Her marriage to the dissolute Henry Lord Darnley, the murder of her secretary David Rizzio before her eyes, Darnley's own mysterious murder in which she was widely suspected of complicity, and her subsequent marriage to the Earl of Bothwell — the prime suspect in Darnley's death — produced a crisis that ended in her forced abdication, imprisonment and eventual flight to England where Elizabeth I kept her as a captive for nineteen years before executing her in 1587.
Mary's son, James VI, had been raised as a Protestant king from infancy and proved a more successful ruler of Scotland than his mother, though not without difficulty. He had the considerable political skill to recognise that his claims to the English throne — he was Elizabeth I's closest living relative — made patience his best strategy. When Elizabeth died without an heir in March 1603, James rode south to London and became James I of England, uniting the Crowns of England and Scotland in his own person while leaving the two kingdoms legally separate with distinct laws, parliaments and churches.
The Union of Crowns in 1603 began a century of uneasy cohabitation that included the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Cromwell's forcible incorporation of Scotland into his Commonwealth, the Restoration and finally the Glorious Revolution. It took a further century — and a fiscal crisis that left Scotland unable to sustain its trade ambitions without access to the English colonial system — to produce the Acts of Union of 1707, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain with a single Parliament at Westminster and a single system of trade and customs. Scotland retained its distinctive legal system and its Presbyterian Church under the terms of Union — institutions that continue to differentiate Scottish public life from English to this day.
