The process of the Reformation in Scotland clearly follows the economic law. So late as 1535 Scotland was so Catholic in belief, despite the usual grievances against priestly rapacity and luxury, that the parliament passed a law forbidding all importation of the writings of Luther, and all discussion of his "damnable opinions." But as soon as the English king by his confiscation of the rich monastery lands (1536-39) showed the Scots nobles how they might enrich themselves by turning Protestant, they began to favour heresy; and from the death (1542) of the last Catholic king, James V, throughout the minority of his daughter Mary, they protected the reforming preachers. In 1543 began the wrecking of monasteries by mobs; in 1546 was assassinated Cardinal Beaton, who had taken active steps to destroy heresy; and though the ferocious war with England delayed developments, as did the regency of the Queen's French mother, the preaching of Calvinism by John Knox and others carried enough of the townspeople to make easy the passing, in 1560, of an Act which made Protestantism the established religion of the country. As usual, by far the greater part of the plunder went to the landowning class, who brazenly broke all their promises of endowment to the preachers. But the latter had perforce to submit, indignant as they were; and when the young Catholic queen Mary arrived in 1561 she found a Protestant kingdom, in which the most powerful class was rich with church spoils. Again the political and the economic forces had been the obviously determining factors in the change. Scandinavian Protestantism, in turn, moved on the same line of economic opportunity and pressure. A popular movement seems to have begun in Denmark, but it was favoured by the throne; and the nobles, seeing the possibilities of the case, soon followed; whereupon King Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, suppressed Catholicism with the nobles' help, and confiscated the rich possessions of the bishops. In Sweden, on the other hand, Gustavus Vasa took the initiative against the clergy, who had supported the Danish rule which he succeeded in throwing off; and he naturally had with him the mass of the laity, especially when he gave the nobles leave to reclaim the lands that had been granted by their ancestors to the monasteries. Doctrinal Protestantism followed in the wake of confiscation.