In a historiographical survey of Scottish Reformation studies published in 2006, I lamented the lack of serious studies of the Reformation in Scottish towns. Michael Lynch's Edinburgh and the Reformation (1981) is exemplary (although it has more to satiate the urban historian than the historian of religion), but, I moaned, it was almost alone, not least because ‘a valuable 1985 doctoral thesis on Perth has, unfortunately, never been published’. I now learn that that thesis – or rather, a fully revised and updated version of it – must have been going through the press at the same time as my own piece. We are all the richer.
The original thesis, which ran to some five hundred pages, was as comprehensive a trawl through the archives of the burgh as one could hope to find, a fascinatingly detailed narrative of the ecclesiastical politics of one of Scotland's four leading towns during a critical period about which the more accessible sources often have frustratingly little to say. It was, as doctoral theses tend to be, awash with detail: a treasure trove for the researchers who plundered it (such as myself), but with the argument half-submerged.
It has now emerged from its long cocooning as a book of scarcely 160 pages, under a pointed new title which emphasizes the way an argument is shaped from it. Researchers will still, on occasion, want to order up the thesis (Verschuur helpfully indicates in her footnotes where the thesis goes into more detail than she can justify here), but the learning is worn more lightly. The result is the best local study of the Scottish Reformation since Lynch's book.
Indeed, this is an intriguing counterpoint to Lynch's study, for the parallels are surprisingly close. This is surprising, for Perth was a very different burgh from Edinburgh. Like most Scottish burghs, Perth was divided into two main economic blocks – the dominant merchants, and the more numerous and less wealthy craftsmen; but unlike in any of the other leading burghs, in Perth the craftsmen were sufficiently wealthy and the merchants sufficiently weak that a real power struggle could take place, and the leading craftsmen were able to propel themselves into the burgh's government. Mapped across this struggle was a parallel battle between the two noblemen who aspired to dominate the town, Lord Ruthven and Lord Grey.
Alongside these civic struggles was a religious one, as Perth – again unlike Edinburgh – was a stronghold of early Protestantism. This is well known, but Verschuur's achievement is to link the civic and religious stories convincingly. She refuses to be drawn into either of the obvious traps here: religion was not merely a dress uniform for political squabbles, nor was politics primarily about religion. Rather, ‘politics involved religion and religion was political’ (p. 141).
In Lynch's Edinburgh, a conservative burgh establishment mounted an effective takeover of the Reformed church after 1560. In Verschuur's Perth, an unambiguously Protestant burgh establishment does much the same, as the kirk session becomes a venue for the continuation of civic politics by other means. As Margo Todd's The culture of Protestantism in early modern Scotland (2002) would suggest, Perth's Protestantism is both very real and very civic. For example, the kirk session turns a blind eye to some saints' days and festivities, because it depends on them to generate the fines which fund poor relief. Is that politics or is it religion?
