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Reform without Frontiers in the Last Years of Catholic ScotlandThe summer of 1549 was a good time to be a Scottish Catholic. During the political turmoil and devastating warfare of the previous seven years, heresy had made alarming progress.Even in the last years of James V, the old kirk's position had been less than secure. The king's conspicuous loyalty to Rome was perhaps as much a technique to prise taxes out of the kirk as it was a statement of religious loyalties. 1 After James' death in late 1542, the earl of Arran, as regent, flirted briefly but openly with evangelical ideas. Within months he had changed direction, as the failure of his pro-English diplomacy made a pro-English religious policy untenable. However, during the war which followed, the English openly attempted to With hindsight, this reforming effort lies under the shadow of the religious revolution of 1559-60 which terminated it. To study the reform movement of the 1550s, therefore, is in one sense to study a failure. There are two common, and not wholly incompatible, explanations given for that failure. These are, first, that reform ran out of time, and second, that it was insufficiently radical. The first argument is that Catholic reform was the tortoise to Protestantism's hare, but that the race was a sprint rather than a marathon. The late CardinalWinning suggested, optimistically, that another ten years would have been enough. 5 The second argument is a little more profound, and suggests that the reform effort was doomed from the beginning because it did not bite deep enough. James Kirk dismisses the programme as one of 'half-hearted tinkering' which did not begin to address the kirk's 'fundamental problems'. Others have made similar points, albeit with less scorn. 6 Little was done, they