Over the coming months, the Digital Splitleaf Blog will be recounting examples of metrical psalm singing in Scotland over the centuries. We will explore how Scots transformed these texts, originally written centuries earlier for Israelite worship, into songs of Christian worship. Scots sang psalms in various contexts, from private devotional life to public worship and national pride and solidarity. In this example, we turn to one of the earliest illustrations of the impact and importance of the metrical psalms in the lives of Scots.
The first story centres on a woman called Elisabeth Adamsoun, who does not appear in the grand narratives of the Scottish Reformation. She held no political office, wrote no treatises, and played no formal role in the upheaval that would reshape her country’s religious life over the years that followed. But her story offers something that the formal histories rarely do: a glimpse into the interior life of an ordinary believer, and the role that a single psalm played in anchoring her through suffering and into death.
On the surface, Scotland in the 1550s was Catholic, governed by the regent Mary of Guise in the name of her young daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. The old church still held sway in its cathedrals, monasteries, and parish kirks. Yet there was growing unrest and disapproval within this apparently settled religious landscape. The ideas of Martin Luther and fellow continental reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli had been percolating through Scottish ports and universities for a generation, carried by merchants, scholars, and returning travellers. Those who embraced the new evangelical faith did so at considerable personal risk: the burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1528 and George Wishart in 1546 cast long shadows. Small, determined communities of Protestant believers were quietly gathering in private homes across the country’s burghs and estates, reading scripture together, debating theology, and wondering when, or whether, the old order might finally give way. Within these communities, a new reformer was beginning to exercise influence: the psalm-singing John Calvin.
It was into this charged and uncertain world that John Knox returned in the summer of 1555. Arriving near Berwick, he set foot on Scottish soil for the first time since the fall of St Andrews Castle in 1547, an event that had set his life on a remarkable and at times harrowing course. He had been captured by French forces and had spent nearly two years chained to an oar aboard French galley ships. Released in 1549, he had made his way to England, where he served for around four years as a Protestant minister under the reforming church of Edward VI, preaching in Berwick and Newcastle before being appointed a royal chaplain. When Edward died in 1553 and his half-sister Mary I, determined to restore England to Rome, came to the throne, Knox was among the many Protestant clergy who fled across the Channel. He spent approximately two years on the European mainland, moving between Frankfurt and Geneva, deepening his Reformed theology under the influence of Calvin himself, before resolving to return north and see what had become of the reformation cause in his native land.
In Edinburgh, Knox was welcomed into the home of David Forres, Laird of Dun, a man whose household had become something of a quiet sanctuary for the city’s evangelical community. There, in conditions of relative privacy, Edinburgh’s Protestant-leaning elites gathered to worship, hear the scriptures expounded, and encourage one another in their faith. It was an intimate, almost clandestine world, and it was here that Knox’s preaching would lay the foundations of a reformation that would come less than five years later.
Among those who came to hear Knox speak was Elisabeth Adamsoun, wife of James Barroun, burgess of Edinburgh who himself was a committed supporter of the Reformation. Like many who encountered Knox for the first time, Elisabeth found herself profoundly unsettled by what she heard. His preaching was not gentle or reassuring in the way she might have expected from religious discourse. It was searching, precise, and unsparing, the kind of preaching that holds up a mirror to the soul. As Knox spoke, Elisabeth became greatly troubled, seeing her own sin more clearly than she ever had before. Yet Knox’s message was not one of despair. Woven through his preaching and discussions were divine mercy and redemption, and with each meeting Elisabeth found herself not crushed but gradually drawn forward: troubled, yes, but also strangely hopeful. She was present every time Knox spoke, eager and attentive, hungry to understand more of the gospel he proclaimed.
Some time after Knox’s ministry among them, Elisabeth fell gravely ill. The nature of her ailment is not recorded, but it was serious, attended by great torment and physical pain. What struck those who cared for her, however, was the manner in which she bore it. Despite her suffering, she praised God without ceasing and expressed grief only for the trouble her condition caused those who looked after her. Far from becoming a source of complaint, her sickbed became a place of quiet witness.
Her sisters, who were among her closest companions and carers, were curious. They had known Elisabeth through her earlier spiritual crisis and now watched her endure physical suffering with extraordinary composure. At some point they asked her directly: “What do you think of this pain that you are enduring? How does it compare with the troubles that have plagued your spirit since Knox came?”
Her answer was immediate and striking. “A thousand years of this torment, and ten times more joined to it, is nothing compared to the 15 minutes that I suffered in my spirit. I thank my God, through Jesus Christ, that he has delivered me from that most fearful pain. I welcome this, as long as it pleases God’s majesty.”
It is a remarkable statement, and a deeply revealing one. For Elisabeth, the anguish of spiritual conviction, of seeing her sin clearly and fearing God’s judgment, had been a more acute suffering than anything her body was now enduring. The physical pain was real, but it was, in her accounting, almost trivial by comparison with what had preceded her peace with God.
As her condition worsened and it became clear that she was approaching death, Elisabeth made one final request. She asked her sisters and those gathered around her to sing. And the psalm she chose was no arbitrary selection. It was Psalm 103, the very psalm through which, under Knox’s ministry, her troubled soul had first tasted the mercy of God. We are unsure of the particular verses that were important to her, but surely the following were particularly influential:
8. The Lord is kind and merciful,
when sinners do him grieve:
The slowest to conceive a wrath,
and readiest to forgive.
9. He chideth not us continually,
though we be full of strife:
Nor keepeth our faults in memory,
for all our sinful life.
10. Nor yet according to our sins
the Lord doth us regard:
Nor after our iniquities
he doth not us reward.
11. But as the space is wondrous great,
'twixt earth and heaven above:
So is his goodness much more large
to them that do him love.
-1564 Forme of Prayers
view the full verse
When the singing was done, Elisabeth spoke once more: “At the teaching of this psalm, my troubled soul first began to taste of my God’s mercy, which now is more sweet and precious than if I ruled over the whole earth for a millenium.”
Shortly after, she “slept in the Lord Jesus, to no small comfort of those that saw her blessed departing.”
Narrative from John Knox, The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (Vol. 1, Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1848), pp. 246-47. Knox’s account has been enlarged here and the quotations have been modernised.
