A Scottish Inquisition?

Alright, so lately I've been contemplating an interesting scenario, and I'm curious as to the plausibility, so, bear with me...

The first major POD will be in 1537, with Madeleine of Valois, wife of King James V of Scotland, managing to live long enough to give birth to a healthy son in 1538, who we'll call "James, Duke of Rothesay" (ITTL she doesn't contract consumption, but considering her delicate health before, she dies of puerperal fever soon after). As in OTL, in order to secure the Auld Alliance, the king takes another French bride after his wife's death, Mary of Guise.

Second, the Battle of Solway Moss occurs on schedule as in OTL, but this time with an overwhelming Scottish victory, allowing King James V (who does not become ill with fever ITTL) to conclude a favorable peace with his uncle King Henry VIII.

Now, peace temporarily established, the Scots are still threatened in the south by the English, who have just implemented a Reformation. Further, there is a rising protestant movement at home, as well. So, King James V decides to stop heresy in its tracks and protect the Church (both as a loyal Catholic, and also out of patriotism). Thus, he institutes a Scottish Inquisition with Papal encouragement, setting up a Holy Office along the same lines as that in Spain (i.e. under the authority of the Crown).

Is this possible, and what are some of the affects of such a scenario occurring? I imagine it would at least have a great deal of positive impact on the Scottish Crown's struggle to centralize the realm...
 
Given his French connections he might be influenced by his wives to emulate the style of the French monarchs in quashing the growing reformation, banning books, the creation of a body not unlike the 'Burning Chamber' to work with any Inquisitional Tribunal?
 
Interesting idea, and not dissimilar to one I'm thinking of developing. Presumably James V's son would eventually have become James VI. If his father was around to raise him, he would have been brought up in Scotland, not France.

Also, even if his marriages turned out as unfortunately as those of Mary, Queen of Scots, since he was male it wouldn't have mattered so much (unless he got hitched to a reincarnated Lady MacBeth). Unless he was a complete total degenerate or a tyrannical monster, he would undoubtedly have been a much more popular monarch than poor Mary, and would have retained the throne until his death.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth I (presumably childless unless you're changing that too) would have had the problem of a Scottish King with just as much claim to her throne as Mary had, and what's more, a strong, capable King ruling a Scotland that was a credible military threat, and given your Fundamentalist Catholic plotline, regarded all her subjects as heretics, and her dad as pretty close to (or perhaps even literally?) being the Antichrist! And of course there would be the Scottish alliances with Catholic countries that didn't like Scotland too well... Problems, problems!

Bonnie Prince Charlie later attempted a two-pronged assault on England with a Scottish attack from the North accompanied by a French cross-channel invasion that didn't happen, though recent research suggests that if he hadn't turned back at Carlisle, mainly because of clever English propaganda which convinced him the French weren't coming, they would very likely have kept their word.

Would Elizabeth have been quite so willing to trust Sir Francis Drake to beat the Spanish Armada at sea if she'd had no army as a second line of defense because they were hundreds of miles away fighting the Scots?

And then there's that stuff about heretic-hunting, book-burning, etc. to consider. Having dealt with Protestantism, the Inquisition would have had to find new targets to justify their ongoing fanaticism. I don't know if there were any Jews at all in Scotland then, but if so, there can't have been many, and the number of Muslims must have been somewhere between several and zero.

They would undoubtedly have begun hunting witches with even more ferocity than the real James VI did after the North Berwick witch trial of 1590 revealed an alleged Satanic conspiracy to murder him by witchcraft.

The evidence at witch-trials was always highly suspect due to the use of torture (more so in Scotland than in England), but there does seem to be a possibility that at least some of accused, while not actually being witches in the religious sense, may have been anti-monarchists who really did perform a rather silly bit of half-assed magic to get rid of the king because they'd heard such things worked for witches so they might as well give it a whirl.

Anyway, assuming that Elizabeth still ruled England after the failure of the Armada in 1588, a magical assassination attempt (real or imagined) by any kind of heretic whatsoever a couple of years later would be an excellent excuse for your James VI, who would be about 50 (or if he'd died, perhaps his son James VII) to blame the heretical monarch next door for Satanism along with everything else. With backing from the still-fuming Spaniards and/or the French, might the Pope have been persuaded to declare the invasion of England a Crusade?

By the way, James VI (the real one) did indeed burn at least one book - Reginald Scot's The Discoverie Of Witchcraft (1584), which explained in a very rational way exactly why it wasn't really very Christian to burn confused old ladies for doing things they couldn't possibly have done because they were physically impossible, as well as being utterly pointless and totally absurd.

This didn't tally too well with the contents of the king's own book Daemonologie (1597). Presumably in your timeline, Reginald Scot wouldn't have had a chance to die of natural causes in 1599.

Anyway, these are few ideas to consider.
 
Would Elizabeth have been quite so willing to trust Sir Francis Drake to beat the Spanish Armada at sea if she'd had no army as a second line of defense because they were hundreds of miles away fighting the Scots?

VT

I think that would make her even more desperate to rely on the navy as there's no hope of the country surviving a joint attack from north and south if the Spanish land.

Otherwise as you say a fairly nightmare scenario. Provided the Catholics don't start squabbling amongst themselves - which fortunately happened a lot - the Reformation could be greatly reduced in impact and a markedly more reactionary culture established over most of western and central Europe.

I'm not saying that Protestant Christianity was any better per-say but it did have the big advantage of being smaller and split into factions. Which allowed the development of many aspects of modern Europe which was have been vastly more difficult with a single monolithic religious bloc.

Steve
 
AFAIK, there were only 2 inquisitions - the Papal one, and the Spanish one. Given that Spain was a MAJOR RC power, and that it faced particular problems due to the Reconquista, the establishment of a special national Inquisition makes sense. Setting up a separate one for little Scotland? I doubt it.
 
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