Overall Abstract: When the Lords of the Congregation declared Scotland Protestant in August 1560, they did so without the assent of the Catholic queen in whose name they claimed to act - and they could not obtain it for the seven years that followed. Scotland's reformation has been read as a Protestant victory delayed by an ineffective queen whose personal rule was an interval before a foregone outcome. This thesis argues instead that those years produced a confessional settlement of a distinct type, and that it was the queen's withholding that gave the settlement its shape.
Read through the confessionalization paradigm of Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, the Lords advanced a Protestant confessionalization across all four of its mechanisms but could not complete it: ratification belonged to the crown alone. Mary Stuart neither reversed the settlement nor legitimized it, exercising within that narrow field what this thesis calls constrained but genuine agency, shaping the settlement's character through strategic restraint pursued in her own interest. Examining both parties through the same mechanisms shows a single settlement neither would have achieved alone.
The result was neither mono- nor bi-confessional: Protestantism prevailed in practice while Catholicism survived without legal standing, held in that asymmetry by an assent only the queen could give. Its provisional status was not a delay in the reformation's completion but the condition under which two confessions coexisted without either forcing a resolution.
That restraint has been read as inaction and the paradigm's confessionalizing actor is assumed to enforce and impose, so a ruler who governs by withholding registers as no actor at all. That assumption was drawn from male princes, applied ever since as though universal. Scotland's case suggests that what has looked like a delayed reformation reflects the limits of the models applied to it and frameworks that only see those who act will miss those who did by declining to.
Chapter Three: "Permission...Not Law"
Abstract: Scotland's initial reformation was distinctive among early modern confessional settlements: a Protestant establishment built by a noble coalition yet governed by a Catholic queen. This paper views this period through the confessionalization paradigm, arguing that the settlement's character was the joint work of two parties with opposed confessional aims. Though the Lords of the Congregation advanced Protestant confessionalization substantially, their settlement remained constitutively incomplete, lacking royal support and ratification. Mary Stuart, holding the authority they lacked, shaped the reformation’s character not by intervening but by withholding that assent while declining Catholic assistance from Rome, France, and Spain that she, and her contemporaries, viewed as feasible. Neither party alone produced Scotland’s confessional trajectory: a third type, neither mono- nor bi-confessional, with a devout Catholic monarch ruling a Protestant establishment under which Catholic worship persisted. That a Catholic queen shaped a reformation through restraint and accommodation exposes a blind spot in a paradigm built around male princes, whose power is assumed to be active and overt. Scotland's case, I argue, widens that paradigm to admit a figure it was never built to see: the dissenting Catholic queen who confessionalizes by what she declines to do.
Chapter Two - "The Queen's Accommodation"
Abstract: Between 1561 and 1567, Mary Stuart governed Protestant Scotland while maintaining her Catholic faith, an unprecedented situation in Reformation Europe. Historians have characterized her “inaction” during this period as evidence of weakness or indecision, but this interpretation misjudges her aim and character. Rather than pass\ively accepting Protestant dominance, Mary’s decisions reflect deliberate strategies of accommodation aimed at peace and stability in a confessionally transformed kingdom. She ultimately achieved this goal: Scotland did not experience internal religious warfare during her personal rule, contrasting with contemporary conflicts in England and France. By recentering her agency and challenging gendered interpretations, this study argues that Mary’s reign offers an alternative model of early modern religious governance – prioritizing stability over uniformity – and demonstrates that inaction can constitute action.