THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSORS.
[Sidenote: Henry Forrest.]
Archbishop Betoun thought that by Patrick Hamilton's death he had
extinguished Lutheranism in Scotland. The University of Louvain
applauded his deed; and so also, I regret to say, did John Major, the
old Scottish Gallican, then resident at Paris, and preparing for the
press his Commentary on the Gospels, the first part of which was to be
dedicated to his old patron in Scotland, and was emphatically to express
his approval of what that patron had done to root out the tares of
Lutheranism.[27] But, according to the well-known saying, "the reek of
Patrick Hamilton infected all on whom it did blow."[28] His martyr death
riveted for ever in the hearts of his friends the truths he had taught
in his life. This was especially the case with the younger _alumni_ in
the colleges, and the less ignorant and dissolute inmates of the priory
and other monastic establishments in the city. As at a later period it
was felt certain that a stern Covenanter had been detected when a
suspected one refused to own that the killing of Archbishop Sharp was to
be regarded as murder, so in these earlier days it was thought a
sufficient mark of an incipient Lutheran if he could not be got to
acknowledge that Hamilton had deserved his fate. On the charge that he
had a copy of the English New Testament, and had been heard to say that
Hamilton was no heretic, Henry Forrest was subjected to a rigorous
imprisonment and a violent death. Forrest was a native of the county of
Linlithgow, and had associated with Hamilton in St Andrews, and was the
first to share his bloody baptism there. He was burned at the north
kirk-style of the Abbey Church, that the heretics of Angus might see the
fire and take warning from his fate.[29] One for simply touching in his
sermons with a firm hand on the corruptions of the clergy had to escape
for his life.[30] Another, whose history after being long forgotten has
been again brought to light in our own day, for a similar offence was
subjected to cruel imprisonment, and at last forced to flee from his
native land.
[Sidenote: Alesius and the Scriptures.]
The name of this confessor was Alexander Alane, and it is so entered in
the Registers of St Andrews University; but it is by the name of
Alexander Alesius, imposed on him by Melanchthon, that he has been
chiefly known to posterity. It may admit of some doubt whether he was
absolutely the first after the death of Hamilton to abandon his
country[31] and all he held dear, rather than renounce the faith the
martyr had taught him, or crouch before the lecherous tyrant who had
destined him to a filthy dungeon and a lingering death. But it admits of
no doubt that he was the most notable of all the band of young Scottish
exiles who had to leave their native country between the martyrdom of
Hamilton and that of Wishart, and who were honoured to do faithful
service in the cause of the Reformation in England and on the Continent.
The story of Alesius, of the shameless cruelties which drove him from
his native land, of the hardships he had to bear in the earlier years of
his exile, of the high place he gained in the affections of Melanchthon
and Beza, and the great work he was to do by his writings and
prelections for the Protestant churches of Germany, is one of the most
interesting in the great movement of the age. But to be appreciated it
must be told in detail, and as most of his work was done out of
Scotland, I have decided to reserve it for a supplementary lecture. I
must not, however, omit to mention here one special service which he was
honoured to do for the cause in his native land soon after he left it,
as it casts fresh light on the origin of the Reformation in Scotland.
His first publication, printed in 1533, was entitled 'Alexandri Alesii
Epistola contra decretum quoddam episcoporum in Scotia, quod prohibet
legere Novi Testamenti libros lingua vernacula.' It brought into bold
relief, and set high above all minor issues, what had been taught by
Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, and maintained by the Lollards of
Kyle in the fifteenth, and what had actually been urged as an additional
charge against Patrick Hamilton. Save for this epistle of Alesius, and
the controversy it occasioned, we might not have known that even in
ignorant Scotland the bishops had been so far left to themselves as to
issue such a decree.[32] It is still more melancholy to think that even
among the better informed controversialists of Germany one was found to
champion their cause, and to maintain that there was nothing at variance
with sound doctrine in the decree; that nothing but harm could come from
the practice of allowing laymen to read the Scriptures in their own
tongue; and that it could not fail to make them bad Christians and bad
subjects, as Luther's translation had done in Germany.
[Sidenote: Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun.]
[Sidenote: Fugitives and Martyrs.]
From the time that Alesius fled from Scotland down to the death of
James V. in the end of 1542, there was almost continual inquisition made
for those who were suspected of having in their possession heretical
books, including the New Testament in the vernacular, or who otherwise
betrayed a leaning towards the new opinions. In 1532, we are told,
"there was ane greit objuratioun of the favouraris of Mertene Lutar in
the Abbay of Halyrudhous;"[33] and of course their goods were forfeited
to the crown. In 1534 a second great assize against heretics was held
in the same place. The king, as the great Justiciar of the realm, was
present in his scarlet robe, and took a prominent part in the
proceedings. Betoun was also present and taking part. About sixteen are
said to have been convicted and to have had their goods forfeited. James
Hamilton, brother of the martyr, had been ordered by the king to flee
the country, as he could not otherwise save him. His sister was
persuaded to submit to the church. Two were reserved for a fiery
death--Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun. Gourlay was a priest in
secular orders, and "a man of reassonable eruditioun,"[34] who had been
abroad, and there imbibed the new opinions. These he abjured,[35] and
was, it seems, really burned for the greater crime of having married a
wife.[36] Stratoun was the brother of the Laird of Laureston in the
Mearns, and had been reclaimed from his former godless life by his
neighbour, Erskine of Dun, but by some free speeches had incurred the
resentment of the notorious Prior Hepburn. They were burned at the Rood
of Greenside, on the northern side of the Calton Hill. In the same year,
Willock, M'Alpine, and M'Dowal had to escape into England. In 1536, when
the king and Betoun were abroad, there was comparative peace. In 1537
several were convicted at Ayr, and had their goods forfeited, among whom
was Walter Steward,[37] son of Lord Ochiltree. In 1538-39 many were
accused and convicted in various burghs in which by that time reformed
opinions were spreading, and many had to seek safety in flight. Among
these last were Gavin Logie, principal regent in St Leonard's
College,[38] who for a number of years had been exercising a marked
influence on the students under him; John Fyfe, who under the
designation of Joannes Faithus matriculated at Wittenberg in 1539, and
under that of Joannes Fidelis was incorporated into the University of
Frankfort on the Oder, and appointed Professor of Divinity there in
1547; George Buchanan, who at the king's command had exposed the
hypocrisy of the friars; and George Wishart, who had taught the Greek
New Testament in Montrose; also Andrew Charters, John Lyne, and Thomas
Cocklaw, John and Robert Richardson and Robert Logic, canons of the
Augustinian Abbey of Cambuskenneth. Nearly all of these fugitives took
refuge in England. Cocklaw, Calderwood tells us, for marrying a wife had
been mewed up within stone walls, but his brother came with crowbars and
released him. His goods, as well as those of his wife, were forfeited to
the Crown. Large numbers of the wealthy burgesses, even after they had
consented to abjure their opinions, were stripped of their possessions,
among whom the burgesses of Dundee were conspicuous. "Nor was the good
town of Stirling far behind Dundee in the same race of Christian glory.
She had less wealth to resign, ... but she brought to the altar a larger
offering of saintly blood."[39] On 1st March 1538-39, no fewer than four
of her citizens were burned at one pile on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.
On the same day with them, and in the same place, perished one of the
most sainted and interesting of Scotland's martyrs--Thomas Forret, canon
of the Augustinian Abbey of Inchcolm, and thereafter vicar of Dollar,
who was universally admired for his attractive character. He taught his
parishioners the ten commandments, penned a little catechism for their
instruction, and caused a child to commit it to memory and to repeat it
publicly, that it might be impressed on the hearts of his parishioners
who could not read. He succeeded in leading several of the younger monks
in the abbey to more evangelical views; but the old bottles, he said,
would not take in the new wine. He preached every Sunday to his people
on the epistle or gospel for the day, and showed them, in opposition to
the teaching of the friars, that pardon for sin could only be obtained
through the blood of Christ.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Betoun.]
During all these anxious years the severe measures against the
reformers had really been directed by the man who comes more prominently
into public view toward their close. This was David Betoun, the nephew
of the primate, and, like him, a younger scion of the house of Balfour
in Fife, who by this time was not only Abbot of Arbroath and Bishop of
Mirepoix in France, but also coadjutor to his aged uncle in the
Archbishopric of St Andrews, and cardinal, with the title of St Stephen
on the Cœlian Mount. "Paul III.," says D'Aubigné, "alarmed at seeing
the separation of England from Rome, and fearing lest Scotland--as she
had a nephew of Henry VIII. for her king--should follow her example, was
anxious to have in that country one man who should be absolutely
devoted to him. David Betoun offered himself. The pope created him
cardinal in December 1538, and thenceforth the _red_--a colour
thoroughly congenial with him--became his own, and, as it were, his
symbol. Not that he was by any means a religious fanatic: he was versed
neither in theology nor in moral philosophy. He was a hierarchical
fanatic. Two points, above all, were offensive to him in evangelical
Christians: one, that they were not submissive to the pope; the other,
that they censured immorality in the clergy, for his own licentiousness
drew on himself similar rebukes. He aimed at being in Scotland a kind of
Wolsey, only with more violence and bloodshed. The one thing of moment
in his eyes was that everything in church and state should bend under a
twofold despotism. Endowed with large intelligence, consummate ability,
and indomitable energy, he had all the qualities needed to ensure
success in the aim on which his mind was perpetually bent without ever
being diverted from it. Passionately eager for his projects, he was
insensible to the ills which must result from them. One matter alone
preoccupied him, the destruction of all liberty. _The papacy divined his
character and created him cardinal!_"[40]
This is one of the few attempts made fairly to estimate the character of
the man whom one party seemed to have thought they must make out to be a
very monster of iniquity, and of whom the other party seemed to have
felt that the less they said the better; and to a certain extent
D'Aubigné's estimate is correct, but it requires to be supplemented. The
cardinalate was rather eagerly sought by him and his friends on the
ground of what he had already done, and was expected yet to do, for pope
and king, than voluntarily offered by the pope. Two, if not three,
letters, extremely urgent, were written regarding it by the king to the
pope, to the King of France, and to Cardinal Farnese, in the favour of
all of whom he stood high.[41] The pope consented to bestow on him the
cardinalate he so much coveted; but the office of legate _a latere_,
without which the other was rather an office of dignity than of power,
was not granted till 1544,[42] by which time neither the papacy nor any
others needed to divine his character. Betoun was a man not only of
large intelligence, high ability, unremitting energy, and unbounded
ambition, but also of considerable scholarly attainments. He did not
belong, it is true, to the school of Pole and Contarini, who would have
made concessions to the reformers in regard to doctrine, nor to that of
the disciples of D'Ailly and Gerson, who were pressing for a reformation
within the old church in regard to morals. His associations and
sympathies were rather with the laxer Italian and French humanist
school, both in their virtues and vices, and he seems to be lightly
referred to in their gossip as _ille latinus Juvenalis_.[43] He was a
great stickler for the liberties of holy church, and for years refused
to pay the tax imposed on him for the support of the College of
Justice.[44] It was no doubt by his counsel that heretical processes
from the first were carried on under the canon law, and that that code
and French consuetudinary ecclesiastical law were more completely
naturalised in Scotland than they had been before. Most of his time from
1514 to 1524 was passed abroad--the later years in the diplomatic
service of his country; and he had acquitted himself with much credit
and success. He had been subsequently employed in the negotiations for
the marriage of the king, first with the daughter of the King of France,
and after her death with Mary of Guise, and in both missions had given
high satisfaction to his sovereign. He had no sooner returned home in
1524-25, than the same measures of cruel restraint against the reformers
began to be adopted here which had already been put in practice in
France; and he was a member of the various Parliaments in which the
rigour of these measures had been increased. Even some of the hardest
sayings of the Scottish king against heretics were but the echo of those
of his father-in-law, the King of France.
Like too many of the high dignitaries of the Scottish church of his
time, Cardinal Betoun was of notoriously incontinent habits;[45] but he
was never, so far as I know, guilty of such shameless excesses as were
the boast of his comrade, Prior Hepburn, nor did he ever allow himself
to sink into the same indolence and unredeemed sensuality. He was above
all a "hierarchical fanatic," devoted to the cause of absolutism, who
would shrink from no measures, however cruel, to preserve intact the
privileges of his order, and to stamp out more earnest and generous
thought, whether that thought was aiming at the reformation of the old
church or the building up of another on her ruins. If we may not say
that he had sold himself to France--which had pensioned him with a rich
bishopric and helped him to his honours--we must say he had lived so
long in it, and had got so enamoured of it, that he was at any rate
three parts French, and all popish. He had mingled not only with her
scholars but with her nobles, loved and determined to imitate their ways
even down to their scandalous laxity of morals and merciless treatment
of so-called heretics. He made no earnest effort to reform the old
church, and so help her to weather the gathering storm; and it was not
till towards the close of his life that he laid out on the building of
St Mary's College part of the money which his uncle had carefully
hoarded for that purpose.
[Sidenote: The Cardinal and James V.]
For the forcible suppression of the new opinions the cardinal needed the
unflinching support of his sovereign, and he spared no efforts to gain
him over completely to his side, and to detach him from his
nobility,--turbulent and self-willed, but fondly clinging to what
remnants of liberty were still left to them,--and to alienate him from
his uncle, not unfrequently well-meaning but always over-impetuous, and
often in his later years selfish and untrustworthy. There was much in
the king's character to encourage such efforts. With good natural
abilities and a frank and amiable disposition, he had for their own
selfish ends been encouraged by his early guardians in sensual
pleasures, and never to the last freed himself from his evil habits.
"Dissolute as a man, prodigal as a king, and superstitious as a
Catholic, he could not but easily fall under the sway of superior
minds,"[46] who undertook to free him from the worries of business, to
provide him with money, and to regard his failings with indulgence, and
on easy terms to absolve him from those grosser excesses which could not
fail at times to trouble his conscience. These things Betoun and his
clerical party endeavoured to do; and, lest he should be tempted to
follow the example of his uncle, and appropriate the property of the
monasteries and other religious institutions, or set the church lands to
feu, as he had threatened, they once and again presented lists to him of
those who were suspected of heresy, urging that they should be
prosecuted without delay, and their goods, on conviction, be escheated
to the Crown. They made large contributions from their own revenues to
aid him in the wars with England, which obedience to their counsels had
brought on him. They procured dispensations from the papal court to
enable his sons, though illegitimate and infants, to hold any
ecclesiastical benefices inferior to bishoprics, and on reaching a
certain age to hold even the highest offices in the church. In this way
they largely added to his revenues during the minority of his sons, and
buoyed him up with the hope that when these sons came to years, and were
formally invested with their dignities, he would have wealthy allies on
whom he could thoroughly depend in his contests with his nobles.
[Sidenote: James the Fifth.]
But though James showed little indulgence to the reformers, and little
favour for their doctrines, he seems to the last to have had less real
liking for the priests of the old faith. No bribery, no flattery, no
solicitations could reconcile him permanently to those who for their own
selfish ends dragged him into courses from which his own better impulses
at times made him revolt. "He incited Buchanan to lash the mendicant
friars in the vigorous verse of the 'Franciscanus.' He encouraged by his
presence the public performance of a play" which, by its exposure of the
vices of the clergy, contributed greatly to weaken their influence. "He
enforced the object of that remarkable drama by exhorting the bishops to
reform their lives, under a threat if they neglected his warning that he
would deal with them after the fashion of his uncle of England" or his
cousin of Denmark. "He repeated the exhortation in his last Parliament,
declaring that the negligence, the ignorance, the scandalous and
disorderly lives of the clergy, were the causes why church and
churchmen were scorned and despised."[47]
So, notwithstanding all measures of repression, the desire for a
reformation quietly grew and spread throughout the nation, especially
among the smaller landed proprietors in Angus and Mearns, in Perthshire
and Fife, in Kyle and Cunningham, as also among the more intelligent
burgesses in the various burghs, and, above all, among the _élite_ of
the younger inmates of the monasteries and of the _alumni_ of the
University. When the poor monarch, as much sinned against as sinning, at
last died of a broken heart,[48] and the Earl of Arran, who claimed the
regency, looked about for trusty supporters to defend his claims against
the machinations of the cardinal and the queen dowager, he deemed it
politic to show not a little countenance to the friends of the
Reformation and of the English alliance. We are not warranted to assert
that he meant to declare himself a Protestant; but he chose as his
chaplains preachers who showed themselves favourably inclined to the new
faith. He encouraged the chief men among the Protestants to frequent his
court, and he ventured to lay hands on the unscrupulous cardinal, who
had striven to exclude him from the regency. He consented to pass
through Parliament an Act expressly permitting the people to have and
to read the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments in the vulgar
tongue, and despatched messengers to all the chief towns to make public
proclamation of the Act. The little treatises of Alesius had thus done
their work, and he himself thought of returning and completing what he
had so well begun.
[Sidenote: Arran's Deceit.]
The friends of the Reformation imagined that the hour of their triumph
was at hand. They did not know on what a treacherous prop they were
leaning, or what sore trials were yet in store for them ere that triumph
should be gained. They knew the regent to be weak and timid; they did
not know him to be deceitful--so deceitful that, within six weeks after
the last of the messengers were despatched with the above-named
proclamation, immediately on the return from France of his brother, the
Abbot of Paisley, others were secretly sent off to inform the holy
father of his accession to the regency, to put himself and the kingdom
under his protection, and to ask permission to have under his control
the income of the benefices of the king's sons till they should come of
age.[49] The love of money was with him the root of this evil; as the
fear of man was of others which soon followed, and were fraught with
dire calamities to the nation. And so he went from bad to worse, till
in the dim light of the Franciscan chapel at Stirling,[50] "that weak
man, to whom people had been looking for the triumph of the Reformation
in Scotland, fondly fancying that he was performing a secret action,
knelt down before the altar, humbly confessed his errors, trampled under
foot the oaths which he had taken to his own country and to England,
renounced the evangelical profession of Jesus Christ, submitted to the
pope, and received absolution of the cardinal."[51]
Even in June he had entered in the books of the Privy Council an Act
against Sacramentaries holding opinions on the effect and essence of the
Sacraments tending to the enervation of the faith catholic, in which
they were threatened with "tinsale of lif, landis, and gudis."[52] He
had not dared to proclaim this openly, though perhaps his ally, Henry
VIII., would not have blamed him greatly for doing so. But no sooner was
he in league with, and under the power of, the cardinal, than he showed
in open Parliament "how thair is gret murmure that heretikis mair and
mair risis and spredis within this realme, sawand dampnable opinionis
incontrar the fayth and lawis of Haly Kirk, actis and constitutionis of
this realm"; and exhorted all prelates and ordinaries "to inquir upon
all sic maner of personis and proceid aganis thame according to the
lawis of Haly Kirk"; promising to be ready himself to do therein at all
times what belonged to his office.[53] This promise he was soon obliged
cruelly to fulfil.
[Sidenote: The Perth Martyrs.]
On the 20th January 1543-44 he set out in company of the cardinal, the
Lord Justice and his deputy, with a band of armed men and artillery, to
Perth, where a great assize was held. Several were convicted of heresy,
and their goods forfeited. Several were condemned to die. The governor
himself was inclined to spare their lives, but the cardinal and the
nobles who were with him threatened to leave him if he did this. So on
St Paul's day (25th January) 1543-44, Robert Lamb, James Hunter, William
Anderson, and James Ranaldson were hanged; and the wife of this last,
who had refused when in labour to pray to the Virgin Mary, was denied
the consolation of being suspended from the same beam with her husband,
and put to death by drowning, after she had consigned to the care of a
neighbour the infant she carried in her arms. Dundee was next visited,
but it was found that the suspected citizens--who in the previous autumn
had sacked and destroyed the Grey Friars and the Dominican
monasteries--had taken the alarm and fled from their homes.
[Sidenote: The Balance of Parties.]
The weak and inconstant man continued to be regent in name, but from
that hour he was dominated by the imperious cardinal almost as
completely as King James had been. He wrote to the pope that the
cardinal's devotion to the holy see and to the interests of his native
country was so great that he deserved the praise, or at least no small
part of the praise, of preserving its liberty and extinguishing
heresy.[54] That last work, however, was by no means so nearly
accomplished as the regent in his letter to the pope had boasted. In
fact, within two months after we find the cardinal himself confessing in
a letter to the pope that he was still in the thick of the fight, and
all but worn out--"_vigiliis, laboribus, atque sumptibus_"--not only in
contending with foes without, but also with traitors within, the
camp.[55] The regent himself was obliged to confess, in a subsequent
letter, that they were then in a miserable plight; and that, unless
material assistance came to them from abroad,--and in particular from
his holiness, when almost all their other friends were growing cold,--it
would be hard for them to maintain the struggle against the English
king. The balance of parties at this critical juncture was more nearly
equal than is generally supposed. "An active minority of the nobles and
gentry saw in the government of Beaton not only their own personal ruin,
but the giving away of the country to a power more dangerous to its
liberties than England itself.... With those who favoured England were
naturally associated those who desired a reformation of religion,--a
body now so numerous in the opinion of a papal legate [Grimani] who
visited the country in 1543, that, but for the interposition of God,
Scotland would soon be in as bad a case as England itself."[56] These
appeals for foreign help, and the hopes raised by them, intensified the
struggle, and retarded for years the triumph of a really national party
resolved to set the interests of Scotland above those of France and Rome
as well as of England.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] _Supra_, p. 18, n.
[28] [The saying in slightly different forms may be found in Laing's
Knox, i. 42; Calderwood's History, i. 86; Spottiswoode's History, i.
130.]
[29] [Various dates, ranging between 1529 and 1533, have been assigned
for Forrest's martyrdom.]
[30] [William Arth.]
[31] [It was probably in 1530 that he left Scotland.]
[32] [Howard and Barlo, in writing from Edinburgh on the 13th of May
1536, say, that to the Scots the reading of God's Word "in theyr vulgare
tonge is lately prohybitede by open proclamation" (Lemon's State Papers,
v. 48). Norfolk, writing to Crumwell from Berwick on the 29th of March
1539, says: "Dayly commeth unto me some gentlemen and some clerkes,
wiche do flee owte of Scotland as they saie for redyng of Scripture in
Inglishe; saying; that, if they were taken, they sholde be put to
execution" (Ibid. v. 154). In the Epistle to James VI. prefixed to the
Bassandyne Bible, it is said: "The false namit clergie of this realme,
abusing the gentle nature of your Hienes maist noble gudschir of worthie
memorie, made it an cappital crime to be punishit with the fyre to have
or rede the New Testament in the vulgare language." One of the charges
on which Sir John Borthwick was condemned, on the 28th of May 1540, was
that he possessed a copy of the New Testament in the vernacular
('Register of St Andrews Kirk Session,' Scot. Hist. Soc., i. 98).]
[33] Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 15.
[34] Laing's Knox, i. 58.
[35] [Foxe alleges that Gourlay and Stratoun were condemned and burned,
"because, after great solicitation made by the king, they refused to
abjure and recant" (Cattley's Foxe, iv. 579); but, on the other hand,
the writer of the Diurnal of Occurrents (p. 18) and Bishop Lesley
(History, 1830, p. 149) assert that Gourlay did abjure.]
[36] Such was the punishment meted out to him for endeavouring to do in
a scriptural way what rulers of the church were doing in disregard of
the laws of Scripture as well as the laws of their church. Pitscottie
knew no other cause why he was burned save that "he was in the
East-land, and came home, and married a wife contrary to the form of the
pope's institution because he was a priest; for they would thole no
priest to marry, but they would punish and burn him to the dead; but if
he had used ten thousand whores he had not been burnt" (Pitscottie's
History, 1778, p. 236).
[37] [In the letter, dated 29th December 1537, granting his escheat to
his father, he is described as "_umquhill_ Walter Stewart" (M'Crie's
Knox, 1855, p. 316). Calderwood places his recantation and accidental
death in 1533 (History, Wodrow Society, i. 104).]
[38] [Gavin Logie is usually spoken of as Principal of St Leonard's
(Laing's Knox, i. 36, n.).]
[39] Lorimer's Scottish Reformation, 1860, p. 51.
[40] D'Aubigné's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 131.--Like his
predecessor Archbishop Forman, who--thirty years before, in the
interests of France, which had richly rewarded him with the
Archbishopric of Bourges--had so cruelly embroiled Scotland with England
and almost courted the disaster of Flodden, Betoun never ceased either
during the life or after the death of James V. to sow the seeds of
discord between the two realms, and so to court reverses to the Scottish
arms, and destruction to the Scottish monasteries near the southern
border. He shunned no risk, shrank from no cruelty, to remove out of the
way those who thwarted his schemes or favoured the better policy which
in the end was to carry the day.
[41] Theiner's Vetera Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum, 1864, pp.
608-612.
[42] [Betoun's Commission as Legate is dated 30th January 1543-44
(Lemon's State Papers, v. 443; Thorpe's Calendar, i. 46).]
[43] [There is such a reference to him in Theiner's Vetera Monumenta, p.
608.]
[44] Robertson's Concilia Scotiæ, vol. i. p. cxxxvi, n.
[45] See Appendix C.
[46] D'Aubigné's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 132.
[47] Concilia Scotiæ, vol. i. pp. cxxxix, cxl.
[48] [14th Dec. 1542.]
[49] [His letter to the Pope is dated 10th May 1543 (Theiner's Monumenta
Hibernorum et Scotorum, pp. 614, 615).]
[50] [On the 8th of September "he was enjoyned to passe to the Freres in
Stirling, ... and there received open pennance and a solempne othe, in
the presence and hereing of all men that was there, that he shulde never
doo the same againe, but supporte and defende the professon and habit of
mounkes, freres, and such other; and therupon, being absolved by the
Cardinall and the Busshoppes, herde masse and received the sacramente"
(Hamilton Papers, ii. 38).]
[51] D'Aubigné's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi, 206.
[52] Concilia Scotiæ, ii. 294.
[53] Acts of Parliament, ii. 443. [This was on the 15th of December
1543.]
[54] [This letter is dated 20th May 1545 (Theiner's Monumenta, p. 616).]
[55] Theiner's Monumenta, p. 617. [This letter is dated 6th July 1545.]
[56] Hume Brown's Knox, i. 64, 65. Grimani's opinion, as sent from
Stirling, is thus summarised by Father Stevenson: "The realm is in such
confusion, so divided, so full of heresy that, but for the interposition
of God, it will soon become as bad as England. The queen and the
cardinal have spent all their money in the common cause; and the clergy
are unable to assist, for the fruits of their benefices have been seized
by the Lutherans" (Mary Stuart, 1886, p. 51).