THE summer of 1579 saw the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland lamenting how little the Scottish Reformation had achieved. According to a petition despatched by the ministers of the Assembly to James VI, recent ‘cruel and unnatural murders’, the widespread ‘contempt of the poor’, a prevailing ‘corruption of justice’, and ‘many other evils which overflow this commonwealth’ all indicated ‘how slender and small success hitherto followed the reformation of religion within this realm’. Such a pessimistic outlook on the nature and legacy of the Scottish Reformation formed a notable departure from the attitudes of Protestant leaders 20 years earlier. The decade or so between the Reformation rising of the summer of 1559 and the murder of Regent Moray in January 1570 was characterised by a remarkable optimism in Protestant circles about the progress of religious reform in Scotland. In November 1559 the Genevan reformer John Calvin wrote to John Knox and his Scottish supporters congratulating them on ‘success incredible in so short a time’ and remarking on the ‘abundant matter for confidence in [the] future’. Protestant pronouncements became even more assured following the Reformation Parliament's rejection of papal authority and the Mass in August 1560. Indeed, by May 1564 it was possible for the elders of the St Andrews Kirk Session to boast that ‘the face of a perfect reformed kirk has been seen within this city [for] the space of five years’.

During the final decades of the sixteenth century a significant change emerged in how Protestants depicted the Scottish Reformation. Texts written in the immediate aftermath of the events of 1559 and 1560 typically present Scotland's shift from Catholicism to Protestantism as a successful moment of conversion – an extraordinary achievement which took place within a short space of time. In contrast, Protestants writing in the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s tended to be more negative, often portraying reform as a protracted and problematic process. This pattern can be seen across a range of genres including memoirs, sermons, and administrative records. The exact nature of the criticisms varied depending on the agenda of the author.