John Lindsay, 5th Lord Lindsay was made an Extraordinary Senator of the College of Justice on 27 June 1532. John, an Extraordinary Lord of Session in 1541, was present at the trials of Sir John Borthwick (for heresy) and James Hamilton of Finnart (for treason). John witnessed the death of James V at Falkland Palace. In 1543, John Lindsay and seven other lords took custody of the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and conveyed her from Linlithgow Palace to Stirling Castle. 264. John was one of the commanders at the Scottish victory against England at the battle of Ancrum in 1545. During the Scottish Reformation,
Scotland in the early modern period death, he was brought news of the birth of an heir: a daughter, who would become Mary, Queen of Scots. At the beginning of the infant Mary's reign, the Scottish political nation was divided between a pro-French faction, led by Cardinal Beaton and by the Queen's mother, Mary of Guise; and a pro-English faction, headed by James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. Failure of the pro-English to deliver a marriage between the infant Mary and Edward, the son of Henry VIII of England, that had been agreed under the Treaty of Greenwich (1543), led within two years to an English invasion