As part of the dedication King James III of Scotland gave 18 shillings to the kirk.

[6] In 1544 the church was used as a refuge for people displaced by the fighting when the English army attacked Leith as part of the Rough Wooing when King Henry VIII of England sent his forces to invade southern Scotland to try to compel a marriage between the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and the English prince Edward.

In the following year the Protestant martyr, George Wishart preached at the church and John Knox is thought to have been amongst those who came to listen.

[1] Mary had fortified the burgh with a wall and had her palace in Leith, guarded by the thousands of French troops garrisoned there.

[5] In the following year, 1560, the English fleet and troops arrived at the invitation of Protestant Lords of the Congregation to lay siege to Leith in order that the French might be persuaded to leave.

The form of worship at the church was also changed in from Roman Catholic to Presbyterian, as a consequence of the Reformation.

Noblemen were becoming bishops without any further qualification and positions in the church were being given to inappropriate people – including some who were still not legally adult.

[3] The meeting made resolutions but they were not fully implemented as the King, James VI of Scotland was still a minor.

[10] The new status for the South Leith kirk as Parish church was confirmed by Act of Parliament in 1609.

[8] The seal of a charter granted in 1608 to a James Hall shows the church as being not dissimilar to its present appearance.

In the middle of the 17th century the church was involved in initiating and supervising sanitary measures and relieving the distress of victims during the Plague of 1645.

In 1766 the new minister was Henry Hunter who went on to publish sermons and translate the work of leading French scientists.

[5] The layout of the old church was retained, and the nave arcade and the lower part of the aisle walls are original.

Daniel Wilson writing in 1847 wrote that the architect "with the perverse ingenuity of modern restorers, preserved only the more recent and least attractive portions of the venerable edifice.

As some slight atonement for this, the removal of the high-pitched roof of the side aisles has brought to light a range of very neat square-headed clerestory windows, which had remained concealed for upwards of two centuries, and which it is fortunately intended to retain in the restoration of the building".

[14] In 1925 William Swan, minister of the church, remarked that in 1846 "unfortunately it was determined to restore the fabric by rebuilding large portions of it.

I say deliberately unfortunately because had they left it alone for another quarter of a century, a period would have been reached when the art of church restoration had come to be historically and artistically understood.

The graveyard or kirkyard is the burial place for the playwright John Home,[1] author of Douglas, and John Pew, the man from whom the author Robert Louis Stevenson reputedly derived the character of Blind Pew in the novel Treasure Island.

The most recent Minister was the Rev Iain May BSc MBA BD who was inducted into the charge on 18 April 2012.