Is all politics really local, as the saying would have it? Or can political conflicts at the national or international level begin at the local level, with those local conflicts prefiguring their higher-level re-runs? One can draw such a link between a civic coup in St Andrews in 1593 and the ‘tumult’ (which has been called an attempted coup) in Edinburgh in December 1596. Fittingly, they both involved the controversial actions of the same two hardline presbyterian clergymen, and they both failed (although the national version did so much more quickly). In St Andrews, these clergy and their local supporters were on the cutting edge of a campaign to build on gains the Kirk seemed to have won nationally in the late 1580s and early 1590s and fundamentally reshape the relationship between the Kirk and civil authorities. Their local failure foreshadowed defeat at the national level; traditional elites (including the King) ultimately refused to cede that much independence to a Kirk whose leadership seemed to tolerate the politicisation of the pulpit.

St Andrews was one of the first Scottish towns to embrace the Reformation. The official endorsement came in June 1559, during a visit by the Lords of the Congregation (and, it should be noted, their army) featuring preaching by John Knox. Local magistrates, led by the provost Patrick Lermonth of Dairsie, agreed, in Knox’s words, ‘to remove all monumentis of idolatrie, whiche also thay did with expeditioun.’ By October, the St Andrews Kirk Session, which would prove very active in efforts to instil godly discipline there, was launched. Knox’s Geneva colleague, the Englishman Christopher Goodman, signed on as minister in the burgh kirk of Holy Trinity, and he and two members of its kirk session represented it at the first General Assembly of the Reformed Kirk in Edinburgh in December 1560. The local Reformation was well underway, and it would continue, although Goodman departed in 1565. For most of the next twenty-five years, aside from some short-lived appointments in the early to mid-1580s, the local pulpit was manned in turn by Robert Hamilton and the theology professor Robert Wilkie.