EDINBURGH

AND THE

REFORMATION

To Maureen

EDINBURGH

AND THE

REFORMATION

MICHAEL LYNCH

Department of Scottish History

University of Edinburgh

© MICHAEL LYNCH 1981

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means without the prior permission of the publishers, John Donald Publishers Ltd, 138 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, Scotland

ISBN 0 85976 069 3

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Scottish Arts Council in the publication of this volume.

Thanks are also owing to Twenty-Seven Foundation Awards, and to the Isobel Thornley Bequest Fund, for grants making publication of this volume possible.

Phototypesetting by Burns & Harris Limited, Dundee Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Foreword

THIS is a book which is intended to serve both as a monograph and a reference work. The ordinary reader can happily avoid or only lightly dip into the appendices. Professional historians and the sceptical may wish to examine more closely the evidence which is contained in them. The conclusions I have drawn from this evidence will not convince or please everyone. That is inevitable, even desirable, when a period like the Reformation or a figure like John Knox are involved. But judgement of them, as of any other period or historical figure, should be based on evidence rather than myth, prejudice or folk lore. Discussion of Knox or Edinburgh’s reformation or criticism of the conclusions drawn about them here will, I hope, be based on the balance of the evidence which has now come to light.

The opening chapters in the first part of the book are designed to introduce the reader to the main twists and turns in the maze which Edinburgh’s history in the Reformation period resembles. It is not until the third part that a fuller guide to the maze is offered. By then it should have become apparent that the route through it is tortuous and, at times, unexpected. Only a minority of protestants, it will have been argued, supported Knox to the hilt; more than half the town held stronger loyalties to Mary, Queen of Scots than to Knox. The definitions of ‘protestants’ and ‘catholics’ which are given in part three try to absorb these facts and to point the way towards a less black and white view of Scottish burgh society as it was affected by the Reformation.

This is a study of one city and it tries to show how closely local and national history were intertwined, but often in an unexpected way, in what is supposed to be one of the best-known periods in Scotland’s past. It and studies of other localities which will surely follow in the future should underline the fact that Scotland had not one but many reformations. What would be understood as the Scottish Reformation has been left in its conventional capitals but Edinburgh’s own reformation has been set apart by their absence.

Preface

THIS book has been a long time in the making and owes much to others. The research for it began in 1969 and later emerged as a doctoral thesis of the University of London. It has undergone considerable changes since then. Part one, which looks at the city itself as well as its reactions to the Reformation, is largely new; parts two and three have been rewritten; the appendices have been revised and recast. The idea for the book first came from Professor A. G. Dickens, who guided and encouraged an initially reluctant postgraduate student into the study of the Reformation in the Scottish burghs. It owes more to him than he would admit or even suspect. The first breakthrough in that research — in discovering the details of a protesant coup and catholic counter-coup in the town in 1559 — owed a great deal to the painstaking, expert help of Dr. Walter Makey, Edinburgh City Archivist, in deciphering what at times approached the indecipherable. His help and advice, always generously given, have continued through many hours spent in Edinburgh’s records. Any student of Edinburgh history owes much to Dr. Makey; I owe more than most. I must reserve a particular and special debt of gratitude to Professor Gordon Donaldson. He has read the whole of the text, saving me from grievous error on a number of occasions, and offered advice on many points, too many to acknowledge individually. I have benefited immeasurably from his unrivalled knowledge of this period and from exposure to his meticulous scholarship, which is a model any historian would do well to emulate. The faults which remain are indelibly my own.

I wish to thank the Company of Scottish History and the editors of the Scottish Historical Review and the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research for their permission to reproduce in appendices i and ii material which first appeared in their journals. Particular thanks go to Dr. James Kirk for his generous permission to include details from his doctoral thesis relating to the members of Edinburgh kirk sessions in the 1570s and to Dr. Marcus Merriman for a guiding hand through the difficult waters of the 1540s.

The material in the book has been gathered mostly in a series of expeditions to Edinburgh and London. These would have been impossible without, on the one hand, the assistance of the staffs of the Scottish Record Office, the National Library of Scotland, the Public Record Office and the British Library, and, on the other, the benefit of a series of grants from the University College of North Wales, Bangor. A generous grant from the British Academy allowed me to make a final expedition to Edinburgh and met the costs of typing and preparation of the typescript and maps.

I owe a considerable debt to John Tuckwell of John Donald Publishers, for his advice, guidance and, above all, his patience in seeing this book into print. He remained sanguine as the project was overtaken by the demand suddenly made on me of a move to Edinburgh and new teaching commitments. My thanks go to Mrs. Barbara Morris, Map Curator of the Department of Geography of the University of Edinburgh, who expertly prepared the maps and to Mrs. Doris Williamson, Secretary to the Department of Scottish History, who produced a long and intricate typescript with remarkable speed and accuracy. The jacket illustration is reproduced by courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries, to whom go my thanks also. My last and greatest debt is to my wife, Maureen, who has read the whole text many times over and influenced almost every page of it. Acknowledgement is not enough; I ask her to accept the dedication instead as token repayment.

Michael Lynch

Abbreviations and Conventions

ALL sums of money are given in £s Scots unless otherwise stated. With dates the year is deemed to have begun on 1 January. Names have generally been modernised. A square bracket in any list or appendix, usually referring to occupation, indicates that this was found in another source; a rounded bracket, usually a variant of a name, indicates the version found in the original. The following abbreviations have been used in the text and appendices:

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations and Conventions

PART ONE    Edinburgh Society

  1.The Burgh Community: Pressures and Responses

  2.Government and Society

  3.The Burgh Church

  4.Merchants and Craftsmen

PART TWO    Burgh Politics and National Crisis

  5.Politics and Protestantism in the 1550s

  6.The Politics of Conciliation: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Burgh

  7.The Wars between Leith and Edinburgh

  8.The Reigns of Morton, Lennox and Arran, 1572–85

PART THREE    Parties and Party Men

  9.The Old Establishment and the New

10.Protestantism and the Protestant Party

11.Catholicism and the Catholic Party

12.King’s Men and Queen’s Men

13.Conclusion

Appendices:

    i.Edinburgh Town Councils and Deacons of Crafts, 1551–1584, with Index to Members of the Council

   ii.The Subscription List of. ‘Faithful Brethren’ of November 1562

  iii.Edinburgh Kirk Sessions, 1573–6 and 1584–5

  iv.Edinburgh and Leith Heretics, c.1534–c.1557

   v.The Protestant Party, 1560–1571

  vi.Catholic Recusants and Sympathisers from Edinburgh and the Canongate, 1560–1575

 vii.King’s Men

viii.Queen’s Men

  ix.Edinburgh Inhabitants whose Houses were Demolished, February-June 1572

   x.Edinburgh Radicals, 1582–1584

  xi.Tax Roll of September 1565

 xii.Tax Roll of June 1583

List of Events in Scotland etc. and Edinburgh, 1542–1585

Bibliography

Index

Maps:

1.Edinburgh, Leith and Surrounds. Edinburgh’s port lay two miles away at Leith. The Canongate, immediately to the east, was a quite separate burgh, with its own council, guilds and parish church. St. Cuthbert’s formed a separate parish to the west, and the suburbs of Bristo and Portsburgh lay outside Edinburgh’s jurisdiction.

2.Edinburgh from the West Port to the Lawnmarket. The burgh had for long been divided into four quarters. By the 1570s each quarter worshipped separately and had its own elders. The city was not, however, subdivided into separate parishes until 1598. Two new churches, Greyfriars and the Tron, were built in the early seventeenth century to hold the swelling congregations of the two southern parishes.

3.Edinburgh from St. Giles’ to the Netherbow. Edinburgh’s population within its walls was about 12,500 in 1560. By 1635 it was close to 25,000 but accommodated largely by building upwards rather than outwards, making Edinburgh one of the most densely populated cities in Northern Europe as well as the second or third largest in the British Isles. There were over a hundred closes and wynds running off the High Street. Stewart’s Close, the boundary between the two northern quarters, ran under the present City Chambers.

4.The Canongate. Edinburgh’s jurisdiction ran some way beyond the port — or gate — at the Netherbow, allowing the king’s lords to hold their famous ‘creeping parliament’ of 1571 within the capital but outside its walls. The Canongate, with gardens at the backs of its houses and a population of less than 2,000, stood in sharp contrast to its overcrowded neighbour. The Abbey Church remained in use as its parish church after the Reformation but catholics had occasional access to the mass in the chapel royal until 1567.

The maps have been compiled from Gordon of Rothiemay’s map of 1647 and Kerr’s composite plan of 1918, together with other evidence drawn from Hollar’s view of 1670 and the Map of the Siege of Leith of 1560. The exact property boundaries and the extent of the built-up area in 1560 are often uncertain but there are good grounds for believing that they were much the same as in 1647 and that the doubling of the burgh’s population between these dates was dealt with mostly by building upwards on the same sites.

Part One

Edinburgh Society

1

The Burgh Community: Pressures and Responses

EDINBURGH was by the middle of the sixteenth century a city which was threatening to burst its narrow seams. The town ran for a thousand yards from west to east along the spine of a ridge gently sloping down from the Castle to the great port, or gate, at the Netherbow, reconstructed in the course of the civil wars in 1571. On each side of the High Street, which was first paved in 1532, the ridge sloped steeply away, covered by a series of narrow closes and close-packed timber-fronted houses. A natural boundary was formed to the north by the Nor’ Loch, which was increasingly becoming an open sewer, while to the south the town had already spilled over the old city wall built in the 1420s and beyond what had in past times been the wealthier, more spacious suburb of the Cowgate up to the line of a new wall. This was the so-called Flodden wall which was still not completed in 1560. Even so, the burgh was hardly four hundred yards wide from north to south and the total area within its walls comprised only one hundred and forty acres. It was largely within these limited bounds that there was contained the bulk of a population which was large enough for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for Edinburgh to lay claim to being one of the two largest cities in the British Isles outside London.

There is a paradox here. The tendency has almost always been for historians, and particularly recent Scottish historians, to stress the smallness and intimacy of all the Scottish burgh communities in this period, and Edinburgh among them. It is true that a number of contemporary observers did compare Edinburgh’s size unfavourably: Froissart at the end of the fourteenth century thought the town had fewer than four hundred houses; a French visitor in the early 1550s likened Edinburgh in size to the small provincial city of Pontoise. Yet others pointed out the remarkable density of the burgh’s population; the due de Rohan in 1600 and David Buchanan half a century later claimed that there was no other town of its size so populous. Certainly by the standards of recent historians of the early modern town Edinburgh’s population was large; it rivalled that of Norwich, the largest city in England outside London, and was akin to a city the size of Bremen.¹

Precisely how large it was is difficult to quantify exactly but Edinburgh’s population within the walls was certainly very close to twelve thousand in 1560. The figure, as we shall see, would rise to somewhere between fifteen and eighteen thousand if greater Edinburgh was taken account of, by including the separate jurisdiction of the burgh of the Canongate and other nearby baronies just outside the walls, like Bristo. The significant point is that Edinburgh’s population more than doubled in the century after 1540. The bulk of that increase probably came after the last serious outbreak of the plague in 1584. Because the burgh was engaged until the 1630s in a long series of jurisdictional disputes with a number of its near-neighbours, which prevented significant growth into the surrounding hinterland, the only way to accommodate this dramatic rise in population was to expand not outwards but upwards. The soaring tenements in the Lawnmarket at the head of the High Street of four, five and six storeys, and eventually of fourteen and more, belong to the period after 1580. Edinburgh was fast in process of becoming a prosperous, thriving and bustling metropolis while yet retaining many of the restrictive habits and most of the dimensions of the old medieval burgh. The town’s walls serve as a reminder that the reformation took place within the context of the closeted thinking of a medieval burgh.

This was a society which, nevertheless, continued to cherish the old idea of itself as a small and close-knit community. It was an idea, of course, which had a religious dimension to it as well as a social or economic one. The burgh was seen as a corpus christianum; its council had responsibilities towards the spiritual as well as the secular welfare of its inhabitants. Most of the organisations within burgh society had the same double aspect to them. The craft guilds were religious societies as well as privileged groups monopolising their skills. The reformation did little or nothing to alter either of these aspects; the craft altars in St. Giles’ disappeared but not the religious ethos of the guild. Edinburgh society throughout the sixteenth century and beyond remained paternalistic and deeply conservative.

At the same time, however, the religious changes which took place did so within the context of developments which were increasingly putting many of the old assumptions about the organisation of burgh life under strain. The town’s swelling population made some of the arrangements laid down in the Statuta Gildae of the twelfth century increasingly impractical. The old practice of the town, or at least of the free burgesses in it, meeting together in an annual head court had probably been abandoned for the better part of a century. The council’s fears of craft insurrections after the riots of 1560 and 1561 resulted in the curtailing of the old right of an offender to appear before it accompanied by all the brethren of his craft.² The increasing sophistication and prosperity of certain crafts had led to large numbers of leading craftsmen being admitted to the prestigious and formerly exclusive merchant guildry, and as a result the line between merchant and craftsman was having to be redrawn in a process completed by the revision of the town’s constitution in the decreet-arbitral of 1583. Price inflation, kindled by the harvest failures of the late 1560s, set alight by the economic blockade of the town during the civil wars and kept smouldering by Morton’s debasement of the coinage in the 1570s, induced the council to cling desperately to the traditional but increasingly ineffectual practice of fixing food prices. In addition, a series of externally imposed political crises, ranging from the invasion of the town on three separate occasions by the Lords of the Congregation in 1559 and 1560 to the traumatic siege of the burgh in the wars of the early 1570s, helped to intensify the natural conservatism of the burgh establishment.

Map 1

Yet while the town expanded its population and became increasingly diverse in character, as it flourished in its roles as a centre for the royal court and the law with the development of a central court for civil justice in the fifteenth century, it clung to the old but necessary myth of seeing itself as a corporate society. The town’s existing institutions were stretched to meet the growing pressures on them just as its buildings were stretched to accommodate a growing population. The changes which took place were cosmetic rather than fundamental and this applied as much to the celebrated decreet-arbitral, often seen as the hallmark of a hard-won democracy for the crafts, as to anything else. Power remained in much the same hands in the 1580s as it had in the 1540s. There was just one real difference — there was more of it. Edinburgh is a good illustration of the cardinal principle that the larger a town was or became in the sixteenth century, the more oligarchic its government was likely to be.³

If Edinburgh’s physical smallness was one of its most surprising features in this period, the other was the fact that it did not control a contado around itself. Its port, the vital artery for its trade both with the east coast and overseas, with France, Flanders and the Baltic, lay two miles away at Leith. The burgh’s jurisdiction over its own port was complicated, uncertain and acrimonious. It formed the basis of what John Knox in his History called the ‘auld hatrent’ between Leith and Edinburgh and brought the burgh into a series of disputes with a number of influential figures who held rival interests or saw an opportunity for profit. This increasingly expensive and worrying legal tangle was not firmly resolved to Edinburgh’s satisfaction until 1639.⁴ Predictably, the burgh also had its difficulties with the Canongate, a separate ecclesiastical burgh of regality which stretched eastwards from the port at the Netherbow down to the abbey and royal palace at Holyrood. These lasted until Edinburgh finally gained the superiority in 1636. With its more spacious lay-out and relaxed atmosphere the Canongate increasingly became a residential suburb for courtiers and members of the central administration. There were continual minor disputes over the rights of the Canongate’s skilled craftsmen to sell their wares on the High Street. Edinburgh took the Canongate to court in 1573 and, to its dismay, lost.⁵ The Canongate also acted as an annoying safe haven, tantalisingly just outside Edinburgh’s jurisdiction, for burgesses seeking to evade their civic duties and also for catholics. There were further minor irritations caused by clusters of craftsmen and brewers who were not burgesses living outside the West Port and two of the other gates on the south side until the town acquired the superiority of Portsburgh by purchase in 1648.⁶ All these nagging jurisdictional worries helped to keep the burgh an inward-looking society, clinging to the letter of the law wherever its economic privileges and monopolies were involved.

A third feature, but one much more difficult to assess in its effect, was the large number of noble houses within half a day’s ride of the burgh. Two contemporary observers claimed that there were as many as a hundred.⁷ A number of local lairds, like the Napiers of Merchiston, were burgesses but their influence in the political affairs of Edinburgh was surprisingly small. A number did sit on the town council from time to time but there were no ruling cliques in the sixteenth century like the Menzies family in Aberdeen, which virtually monopolised the office of provost until the 1590s.⁸ The progress of the Reformation probably had a good deal to do with the influence of local lairds in many burghs but far less so in Edinburgh where the stakes were higher and the players more formidable.⁹ The key factor in Edinburgh politics was often the intervention of the crown itself or of a faction within the court. The two most powerful outside influences came from the two rival noble houses of Morton at Dalkeith and the staunchly catholic Setons.¹⁰ Crown or court managed to impose a nominee as provost of the burgh for fully twenty-five years after 1553 but interference with the lower levels of the ruling establishment was much rarer, occurring only a handful of times in the period. Each of these occasions, however, is noteworthy — Mary of Guise’s imposition of bailies on the town in 1559, countered by the Congregation’s wholesale replacement of the council two weeks later; the three interventions by her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, in burgh politics between 1561 and 1566; the forcing into exile of the council by the queen’s lords in 1571; and the purge of radical supporters of the short-lived Ruthven regime forced upon the council by James Stewart, earl of Arran, in 1583. Between these low-points the council had to put up with a fairly consistent barrage of threats, bullying and noble violence on its streets. External threats and externally imposed crises were things the burgh simply had to live with in the middle quarters of the sixteenth century.

It would be easy enough to go one stage further in describing reformation Edinburgh by sketching a picture of a city divided within itself, of merchant against craftsman, catholic against protestant, magistrates against unruly mob. All of these patterns did occur but only sporadically and they seldom linked up, one with the other. Burgh life had to go on and the town was too small in its size and its thinking to admit permanent divisions within it, whether of an economic or a religious complexion. It was not the internal tensions within burgh society which set the tone of Edinburgh’s reformation. There is little trace in the 1550’s of the pattern which had been common in most of the German cities of protestant ideas being fostered by the craft guilds, partly as a policital lever against the town establishment.¹¹ Certain of the crafts remained catholic strongholds for most of the 1560s but the tension which existed between merchants and crafts did not take on the mirror image of a struggle by catholic craftsmen against a protestant-dominated merchant oligarchy. The key to understanding the burgh’s complicated and shifting reactions during the reformation period lies rather in coming to grips with the recurrent but unpredictable pressures put upon it from outside. The court and the labyrinth of factions within it — and, at times of crisis, outside it — together with the open door of the resident English agent, Thomas Randolph, a classic example of an ambassador of ‘ill-will’,¹² brought a quite unique set of pressures to bear in the first half of the 1560s on what was by instinct an inward-looking society. Edinburgh reluctantly but inexorably became the cockpit for the shifting factionalism of Scottish politics. Hard-line protestant and catholic factions pursuing a definite party line did exist in the burgh but they remained distinctly minority parties throughout the 1560s. The reaction of the majority of the burgh’s inhabitants to the succession of political crises thrust upon them was understandably confused. It may well be objected that this judgement is still, in the last resort, a subjective one, despite the new evidence which has come to light throwing doubt on many of the old black and white assumptions about the inevitable progress of protestantism in John Knox’s own ‘school of Christ’. Two lines of defence could be erected against this charge. It is clearly time that we knew a good deal more about Edinburgh and its reformation to balance what we already know about Knox. If the resulting conclusions do not confirm that Edinburgh’s reformation can continue to be written as a biography of its first protestant minister, they are, it might well be said, less likely to surprise students of the patchy spread of Calvinism in other European societies, such as in the Netherlands. Neither Knox nor reformed protestantism should be thought of as some kind of irresistible force unless one is equally prepared to conceive of an immovable object — not catholicism but localism. The form which localism took was a formidable combination of passivity and what the presbyterian historian, David Calderwood, liked to call Edinburgh’s ‘religion’, the love of its burgesses for ‘their particular’.¹³ In reality and in history dramatised irreconcilables usually have a way of working out some kind of compromise but not without doing some damage to the original postures. The more one discovers about the equivocal reactions of the burgh’s inhabitants, both rich and poor, influential and insignificant, to the external pressures put on the town and the internal pressures which they produced, the more plausible this conclusion seems to become. Edinburgh’s protestantism was largely the product of outside forces. It is hardly surprising that the result was that burgh protestantism was as fickle a creature as burgh politics. Edinburgh’s reformation was not a story of triumphant and uncompromising progress; it was a stop-go affair for most of the 1560s, shot through with ambiguities and compromises.

NOTES

1.  P. H. Brown, Scotland in the Time of Queen Mary (1904), 45; P. H. Brown (ed.), Early Travellers in Scotland (1891), 75, 93; P. H. Brown (ed.), Scotland before 1700 from Contemporary Documents (1893), 314; R. Mols, Introduction à la demographie historique des villes d’Europe du XlVe au XVIIIe siècle (Louvain, 1954–6), ii, 510.

2.  Edin. Recs., iii, 95.

3.  See W. G. Hoskins, The Elizabethan merchants of Exeter’, in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield & C. H. Williams (eds.), Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays presented to Sir John Neale (London, 1961), 165.

4.  Knox, History, 1, 239; J. C. Irons, Leith and its Antiquities (1898), i, 245–8, 390, 408; ii, 80, 82, 91; M. Wood, ‘Survey of the development of Edinburgh’, BOEC, xxiv (1974), 28.

5.  RPC, ii, 220, 260ff; Wood, ‘Survey of the development of Edinburgh’, 29; A. H. Anderson, The regality and barony of Broughton, 1592–1600’, BOEC, xxiv (1974), 2–3.

6.  Wood, ‘Survey of the development of Edinburgh’ 29.

7.  Brown, Early Travellers, 83, 93.

8.  D. Macniven, ‘Merchant and Trader in Aberdeen in the Early Seventeenth Century’ (Aberdeen M. Litt., 1977), 105.

9.  See I. B. Cowan, Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation (Hist. Assoc. pamp., 1978), 28–9. This short but important pamphlet has added a new dimension to the historiography of the Scottish Reformation.

10.  See Early Travellers, 82, 136.

11.  See, for example, B. Moeller, Villes d’Empire et Rèformation (Geneva, 1966), 21, 32–7; M. U. Chrisman, Strasbourg and the Reform (London, 1967), 113, 292–4; A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther (London, 1974), 150, 156–7, 187–8.

12.  G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London, 1955), 198–208.

13.  Calderwood, History, v, 177–8.

2

Government and Society

ESTIMATES of Edinburgh’s population in the sixteenth century vary almost as much as the processes of guesswork by which they have been arrived at. For the late 1550s they range from a low figure of 9,000 souls to an eyebrow-raising one of 30,000.¹ The majority, however, opt for the area between 9,000 and 15,000.² These disparities can probably be traced to the different Edinburghs which these estimates try to encompass. The permanently resident population within the walls could, given conservative assumptions about the size of households, be calculated as falling just above or below the five-figure mark. The figure, however, expands with the lens used on the microscope. Account should be taken of the town’s floating population of greater and minor nobility, most of whom did not have their own town houses — according to a tax roll of 1635 their lodgings accounted for as many as 4% of Edinburgh households;³ of the growing army of lawyers, administrators and professional men, most of whom were not taxed and are always a hidden surplus to be added on to the evidence of any tax roll; and the swelling colonies of artisans who lived just outside the town walls who also, having no burgess status, would tend not to appear on a tax roll. If a figure for greater Edinburgh is looked for, then the Canongate, which had 1,250 adult communicants in 1567, should be included along with South Leith, where the only help available is an estimate that it had a population in excess of 4,000 by the middle of the seventeeth century.⁴

It is not possible to obtain either a reasonably precise figure for Edinburgh’s population or a statistically satisfactory one since all of the chains of evidence and deduction break down at some point which can only be bridged by guesswork. Most historians’ estimates have been based on a muster roll of 1558, which had on it 717 craft masters and servants and 736 merchants and their servants.⁵ This was not a total muster, however, of all able-bodied men in the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty which would permit the use of a multiplier to calculate the total population.⁶ Its purpose was to defend the town against a prospective English invasion, and responsibility for this fell only on burgesses and their servants or apprentices. It is not even a reliable list of burgesses. Some had been granted exemptions from muster by the crown. More significantly, the point has rather been missed in previous estimates that the muster unaccountably covered only three of the four quarters of the burgh. The missing north-east quarter was the smallest in the town but it did account for about 16% of its population.⁷ Three of the fourteen incorporated crafts were also not included.⁸ Even if fairly accurate guesses were made to compensate for these gaps in the roll,⁹ the resulting total would remain a slippery base on which to reconstruct an estimate of total population. A surer but still unsatisfactory method would be to vet the muster roll to find the total number of burgesses, both merchants and craftsmen, in the town. If the same allowances are made for gaps in the roll, it seems likely that there were about 768 burgesses in 1558, made up of about 367 merchants and 401 craft masters.¹⁰ The break in the chain of evidence comes in trying to estimate the proportion of inhabitants who were burgesses. The best evidence available is that of an annuity tax of 1635 which indicates that some 30% of householders were burgesses.¹¹ This may seem a high figure, particularly if compared with the number of freemen in a contemporary English town,¹² but is to be expected in a Scottish burgh. The difficulty lies in the fact that there was no fixed quota of privilege. Entry to burgess-ship and to burgess-ship and guildry was controlled by the council through the dean of guild and, as one of the major sources of burgh revenue, was liable to fluctuate considerably. About 337 new burgesses were admitted in the course of the 1550s — and this in itself would lend evidence to a total number of burgesses a little over double that — but the new protestant regime, desperately short of funds for its reformed programme, admitted as many in the first four years after 1560. From the continuing but often incomplete evidence of the 1570s and 1580s,¹³ it is obvious that more burgesses were being admitted than twenty or thirty years earlier but it is in a process of peaks and troughs, which suggests that the main consideration remained the pressures of finance rather than of a rising population. It is likely that the qualifications tend to cancel each other out and leave fairly safe the original assumption that much the same proportion of householders to burgesses existed in 1558 as in 1635. This would mean that there were a little more than 2,500 households or a population of about 12,000 in the town in the mid-sixteenth century.¹⁴

This convoluted calculation is, however, reasonably dose to the 2,239 households which were counted by the kirk session in a census made in 1592 for a voluntary contribution to augment the stipends of the town’s ministers,¹⁵ particularly if it is remembered that ‘gentlemen’ and their lodgings, who were excluded from the census, accounted for 4% of Edinburgh’s households in 1635. The session also tantalisingly added its estimate of the burgh’s population but it is an estimate which is again an artificial one for demographic purposes. There were, it solemnly concluded, exactly eight thousand and three ‘persones of discretion’ in the town, divided almost exactly between the north and south sides of the High Street. There are two difficulties in this. Part of the population within the walls on the south side and a good deal outside it belonged in the separate parish of St. Cuthbert’s so that it does not even give a figure for the adult population within the walls, still less for one outside. The other problem lies in deciding precisely what the phrase means and how many of the lower layers of burgh society — remembering it was drawn up for a collection — it might exclude. Yet even if the further reaches beyond the Cowgate are ignored and the estimate is taken at face value to mean the total number of adult communicants within the walls, it can be deduced that Edinburgh proper, despite the body-blow of 1,400 deaths¹⁶ from the plague in the outbreak of 1584, must have had a population approaching 15,000 by the 1590s.¹⁷ This would seem to be a realistic figure if compared with the recent soundly based estimate of 20,000 to 25,000 as Edinburgh’s population within its own jurisdictions in 1635.¹⁸

The significance of a town of this size is not particularly revealed by comparing it with the other Scottish burghs of the period. Their populations are often even more difficult to assess with any accuracy; estimates of Aberdeen’s population in the 1590s range from 4,000 to well over 7,000. The firmest comparison of burgh populations — though once again unsafe for calculating the actual size of populations — often comes from tax or stent rolls. The first detailed Edinburgh stent roll is that for 1583, which lists 1,245 taxpayers, residents paying over £100 Scots in rent or owning more than 2,000 merks of moveable property. The first of a series of seventeenth-century Aberdeen rolls lists 460.¹⁹ So Aberdeen’s taxable population amounted to less than 38% of Edinburgh’s. It is easier to conceive of Edinburgh’s importance by comparing it with other early modern towns in England and abroad than by trying to think of its wealth, population and influence in terms of multiples of other Scottish burghs. Its wealth and political significance were of a different dimension. Equally, a number of its institutions, although they bore a superficial resemblance to burghal practice elsewhere in Scotland, in fact went their own distinctive way.

Edinburgh in the sixteenth century was certainly larger than the important provincial towns of Bristol, York and Exeter. There is a striking parallel between its size and that of Norwich, the second city in England after London until it was overtaken by Bristol in the second half of the seventeenth century. Norwich’s population rose from about 8,500 in 1524 to 13,000 in 1569, 17,000 in 1579 after substantial immigration of refugees from the Low Countries, and 25,000 by 1625.²⁰ Norwich’s increase in population was also absorbed largely within the same walls, and both towns suffered severely from recurrent outbreaks of the plague. The comparison tilts considerably in Edinburgh’s favour if the suburbs of greater Edinburgh are taken into account. In European terms, although the burgh could not rival an Augsburg or Cologne, still less the giants of the sixteenth century like Amsterdam, Venice or Milan, it was much the same size as Erfurt or Bremen in the Holy Roman Empire, Delft or Dordrecht in the Netherlands, or Geneva before its influx of refugees, and a good deal larger than Zurich.²¹

Map 2

Map 3

The most dramatic rise in population probably coincided with the period of most intensive building and rebuilding in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. By 1635 the number of households within the burgh had risen to just over 3,900. Between 1592 and 1635 the number of households in the south-east and south-west quarters, the area between the High Street and the Hodden Wall, which had the greatest room for expansion, almost doubled. The soaring tenements of the north side of the Lawnmarket, originally called the ‘land mercat’, above St. Giles’, allowed the north-west quarter to expand by almost 60%, but in the north-east quarter, between St. Giles’ and the Netherbow, the increase was only half that.²² This rapid expansion was a controlled chaos; building regulations were strict and remained in the hands of the Neighbourhood Court presided over by the dean of guild. The wealthiest parts of the burgh lay on the north-west side of the High Street down to and just beyond St. Giles’ and on the south-east side, once far enough removed from the stench of the fish market, which lay just below St. Giles’, for most of the way down to the Netherbow. The poorest areas lay near the walls on the south-west side lodged between the competing smells of the candlemakers near the Greyfriars Port and the maltmen around the West Port and the foot of the Castlehill.²³ Yet the strains of a growing population had not particularly altered the city’s shape or character. A burgess born in 1500 would have had little difficulty in finding his bearings in 1650. Some of the markets had been moved to the lower part of the High Street; a new tolbooth had been constructed inside the west end of St. Giles’ but the old one in front of the church remained; the herringbone layout of the town remained, of the High Street flanked by a series of narrow closes and alleys which were certainly no cleaner by the second half of the seventeenth century when an English visitor compared the town with a comb ‘whose teeth on both sides are very foul, though the space between them is clean and sightly’.²⁴ Apart from the more fashionable parts of the High Street, rich and poor, merchants and craftsmen continued to live cheek by jowl with one another, hemmed in by the same walls and the same introverted thinking which went with them.

The same burgess would have had even less difficulty in fitting into the conventions of life and work in the town. The old distinctions between merchants and craftsmen, although redrawn by the revised constitution imposed on the town by the crown in 1583 in the decreet-arbitral, for the most part remained. Both groups remained dedicated to the mission of preserving the burgh as a fortress of economic privilege open only to those who inherited their freedom or paid dearly for it. The town council was expanded in size by the decreet but not in substance or attitude. It remained a paternalistic and privileged body with exclusive control over all aspects of burgh life, still concerning itself with the minutest details of trade and craft regulations and policing the burgh. The details might range from solemnly adjudicating on the virginity of the daughter of a burgess, on which turned her right to pass on her burgess rights to a prospective husband, to forcing the fleshers to remove carcasses and offal to the convenient waters of the Nor’ Loch.

Although a great deal has been written about the duties and concerns of the council in the sixteenth century,²⁵ very little is known about its internal workings or its membership. It had met twice a week, on a Wednesday and Friday, since at least the mid-1550s. After 1560 the meetings were held in the mornings after the sermon. By 1584, because of the increasing demands on its time, it also began sitting on a Tuesday afternoon.²⁶ Its meetings in the council chamber of the tolbooth were confidential and its minutes seldom better than laconic. The body which controlled burgh politics was a fairly small and select oligarchy controlled by the merchants. About a quarter of the 357 merchants listed on a tax roll of 1565 sat on the council at some time in their lives. The number actively involved in burgh affairs at any one point, however, was much lower; it probably was not much more than thirty-five or forty, about double the available seats on the council. Only a little more than fifty merchants served on the council in the course of the 1550s. This was also, to a large extent, a self-perpetuating oligarchy. A complicated process of cross- and self-election had been established by various acts of parliament since 1469 and this almost invariably ensured considerable continuity between one council and the next. It is difficult to describe a normal pattern in Edinburgh since almost every annual election had its own peculiarities, encouraged by growing irregularities in procedure, especially during the 1560s, but the pattern should have taken the following course. Each Michaelmas the old and new councils met together to elect the provost, four bailies, treasurer and dean of guild. To be more precise, these seven office-holders were elected from the body of ten retiring and two new merchant councillors. The same meeting selected two craftsmen to sit on the council from a leet of six drawn up by the deacons of the incorporated crafts. The old office-holders continued as ordinary members of the new council. The provost should have been elected but seldom was, and for twenty-five years after 1553 he was not only a nominee imposed from outside, but not even a merchant burgess. Often, to the dismay of the crafts, the elections were weighted still more heavily against them by the presence of assessors, usually burgh-based lawyers, who should not have been entitled to vote but did on occasion. The most influential of these shadowy figures was Alexander Guthrie, town clerk of the burgh from 1558 until his death in 1582 and the first of a long family oligarchy of Edinburgh town clerks. To his catholic enemies the town clerk of the new protestant regime came to be known as ‘King Guthrie’.²⁷

The merchant oligarchy which dominated Edinburgh politics was a fairly small but not a closed one. Son tended to succeed father but it was rare for two brothers to sit side by side on the same council. Council meetings in Edinburgh were never quite the intimate family meetings enjoyed by the Strasbourg council in the eighteenth century.²⁸ Nor was there a formally defined patriciate of ruling families, although there were half a dozen who were consistently prominent in burgh government. Its doors were not locked and bolted against outsiders. Indeed the two most influential men in burgh politics in the quarter of a century after 1560 were both newcomers. Adam Fullarton, who emerged as the leader of the protestant party in 1559 and commanded the king’s men exiled from the burgh a dozen years later, had originally secured his entry into the burgh establishment by marrying into an old influential family; Alexander Clark, a confidante of the English ambassador, Thomas Randolph, in the 1560s and provost of the burgh for six successive years after 1578, had secured burgess-ship and guildry by being a client of James Stewart, earl of Moray.²⁹ All offices were, in theory, open to all merchants. No distinction was made, as in English towns, between those eligible to sit on the council and those eligible for major office. In practice a distinction was drawn; the wealthier a merchant was, the more likely he was both to sit on the council and to hold office. Only six of the twenty-four richest merchants in the burgh in the 1560s did not serve on the council at some time in their lives. The scale of political influence steadily recedes the lower down the merchant community one goes; forty-nine of the first eighty merchants were elected, sixty of the first one hundred and thirteen, seventy-three of the first one hundred and seventy-six. The poorer half of the merchants, the one hundred and eighty-one assessed below £10 in the tax roll of 1565, yield only fourteen who ever reached the council chamber. It is striking, however, that a number of these small men became bailies, and they included a number of important men in the protestant regime of the 1560s — Edward Hope, Archibald Graham and David Somer. By the 1580s this general pattern of a council dominated by wealthy merchants was becoming even more pronounced. The actual numbers of wealthy men reaching the council did not increase — twenty of the first twenty-seven on a tax roll of 1583 — but it is noticeable that rather fewer middle-ranking merchants and distinctly fewer smaller merchants were coming on to the council by the 1580s.³⁰ The reason for this was that the wealthier merchants were tending to cling to power longer. In the 1560s it was unusual to serve for much longer than ten years; those whose service stretched for more than fifteen were few and far between. Yet by the late 1570s this practice was becoming much more common. A number of men who came on to the council in the second half of the 1560s were still there in 1585 — and an older and more short-tempered set of burgh rulers may explain a good deal in the tempestuous 1580s. What is certain is that the lines of power and privilege were drawn a good deal more starkly by then than they had been in the 1550s or 1560s.

It is clear from the point at which the regular series of council minute books begins in 1551 that two craftsmen sat on the council. The craft deacons could also be called in for any matters which impinged on the common good of the burgh. It was the deacons who drew up a leet of craft candidates for the council but their selections were not always accepted. The council resisted all their efforts to widen the range of craftsmen eligible for election. Half of the fourteen incorporated crafts were excluded in practice. Craft councillors were drawn largely from the six wealthiest and most respectable guilds, the hammermen, skinners, furriers, goldsmiths, tailors and barbers.³¹ The decreet of 1583 did not drastically alter or widen this circle of privileged crafts. The six new deacon councillors were drawn invariably from these same six crafts plus the cordiners, who were the only craft to rise in status as a result of the revised burgh constitution.

The craftsmen who were admitted to the council were not very typical men. They were carefully vetted for their respectability and, in the early stages after 1560, for their protestant convictions, which had a scarcity value. Only thirty craftsmen had put their names to a subscription list of ‘faithful brethren’ in 1562 but more than two-thirds of the men who became craft councillors in the 1560s came from that list. But protestantism and respectability had to go hand in hand; one was not enough without the other. The prominent protestant baker, David Kinloch, was rejected in 1569, and one of the loudest of the voices raised against him was the wealthy and highly influential protestant merchant, James Baron. Crafts which dealt with ‘mennis sustentation’ would not have fitted well into a council which had a clear interest in keeping food prices artificially low.³² The craft councillors were part of a small but influential and wealthy craft aristocracy which was clearly emerging in the thirty years before the decreet of 1583. Most of them were not craftsmen but craft employers and members of the merchant guildry. Increasingly the distinction drawn between them and their merchant colleagues on the council became an artificial one. A number, like the ever-present protestant activist, James Young, who was deacon of the hammermen ten times over as well, made a useful sideline in their taverns. In 1575 the regent Morton imprisoned a number of the richest merchants in the town for exporting bullion. Among their number was a skinner, Thomas Aikenhead. He had gained his guildry in 1567 but remained deacon of his craft until 1571 and was twice a craft councillor between then and the decreet. For a man like this, the transition from craft aristocracy to merchant, as redefined in 1583, was a smooth and natural one. He, like a number of other ex-craftsmen, became a bailie after the decreet.³³ All of the councils for the rest of the 1580s had an ex-craftsman as one of the bailies.³⁴ The merchant oligarchy which dominated Edinburgh’s government was widened in 1583 but not changed either in its interests or character. The decreet did not give power to the craftsmen but to a craft aristocracy. There was no sudden democratisation of burgh government as a result.

It is not surprising to find that the political establishment took on an almost exclusively protestant complexion after the Reformation of 1559–60 but the dominance of radical protestantism was neither as sweeping nor as wholesale as many historians — of different religious persuasions³⁵ — have assumed. The town came to be governed not only by a protestant oligarchy in the sense of a radical, self-elected minority party, able, because of its inherited powers as councillors, to impose its will on a largely conservative or acquiescent majority, but by a fairly broad-based protestant establishment which remained for the better part of the 1560s a loose coalition of interests. The religious changes did not involve a change in the kind of men who habitually sat on the council except for a brief period in the crisis of the autumn of 1559 and spring and summer of 1560 when a makeshift caretaker council took charge. The reformation did not mark any political revolution in burgh politics.

A number of protestants had infiltrated the council chamber by the 1550s