The triumph of the truth at St Andrews was followed by the victorious
establishment, from that day thenceforward, of the Reformation in
Scotland. The precautions taken by the deep forecasting mind of the Lord
James Stuart, through the instrumentality of my grandfather and others,
were of inexpressible benefit to the righteous cause. It was foreseen
that the Queen Regent, who had come to Falkland, would be prompt to
avenge the discomfiture of her sect, the papists; but the zealous
friends of the Gospel, seconding the resolution of the Lords of the
Congregation, enabled them to set all her power at defiance.
With an attendance of few more than a hundred horse, and about as many
foot, the Earl of Argyle and the Lord James set out from St Andrews to
frustrate, as far as the means they had concerted might, the wrathful
measures which they well knew her Highness would take. But this small
force was by the next morning increased to full three thousand fighting
men; and so ardently did the spirit of enmity and resistance against the
papacy spread, that the Queen Regent, when she came with her French
troops and her Scottish levies, under the command of the Duke of
Chatelherault, to Cupar, found that she durst not encounter in battle
the growing strength of the Congregation, so she consented to a truce,
and, as usual in her dissimulating policy, promised many things which
she never intended to perform. But the protestants, by this time knowing
that the papists never meant to keep their pactions with them,
discovering the policy of her Highness, silently moved onward. They
proceeded to Perth, and having expelled the garrison, took the town, and
fired the abbey of Scone. But as my grandfather was not with them in
those raids, being sent on the night of the great demolition at St
Andrews to apprise the Earl of Glencairn, his patron, of the extremities
to which matters had come there, it belongs not to the scope of my story
to tell what ensued, farther than that from Perth the Congregation
proceeded to Stirling, where they demolished the monasteries;--then they
went to Lithgow, and herret the nests of the locusts there; and
proceeding bravely on, purging the realm as they went forward, they
arrived at Edinburgh, and constrained the Queen Regent, who was before
them with her forces there, to pack up her ends and her awls, and make
what speed she could with them to Dunbar. But foul as the capital then
was, and covered with the leprosy of idolatry, they were not long in
possession till they so medicated her with the searching medicaments of
the Reformation, that she was soon scrapit of all the scurf and kell of
her abominations. There was not an idol or an image within her bounds
that, in less than three days, was not beheaded like a traitor and
trundled to the dogs, even with vehemence, as a thing that could be
sensible of contempt. But as all these things are set forth at large in
the chronicles of the kingdom, let suffice it to say that my grandfather
continued for nearly two years after this time a trusted emissary among
the Lords of the Congregation in their many arduous labours and perilous
correspondencies, till the Earl of Glencairn was appointed to see
idolatry banished and extirpated from the West Country; in which
expedition his Lordship, being minded to reward my grandfather's
services in the cause of the Reformation, invited him to be of his
force; to which my grandfather, not jealousing the secularities of his
patron's intents, joyfully agreed, hoping to see the corner-stone placed
on the great edifice of the Reformation, which all good and pious men
began then to think near completion.
Having joined the Earl's force at Glasgow, my grandfather went forward
with it to Paisley. Before reaching that town, however, they were met by
a numerous multitude of the people, half way between it and the castle
of Cruikstone, and at their head my grandfather was blithened to see his
old friend, the gentle monk Dominick Callender, in a soldier's garb, and
with a ruddy and emboldened countenance, and by his side, with a sword
manfully girded on his thigh, the worthy Bailie Pollock, whose nocturnal
revels at the abbey had brought such dule to the winsome Maggy Napier.
For some reason, which my grandfather never well understood, there was
more lenity shown to the abbey here than usual; but the monks were
rooted out, the images given over to destruction, and the old bones and
miraculous crucifixes were either burnt or interred. Less damage,
however, was done to the buildings than many expected, partly through
the exhortations of the magistrates, who were desirous to preserve so
noble a building for a protestant church, but chiefly out of some
paction or covenant secretly entered into anent the distribution of the
domains and property, wherein the house of Hamilton was concerned, the
Duke of Chatelherault, the head thereof, notwithstanding the papistical
nature of his blood and kin, having some time before gone over to the
cause of the Congregation.
The work of the Reformation being thus abridged at Paisley, the Earl of
Glencairn went forward to Kilwinning, where he was less scrupulous; for
having himself obtained a grant of the lands of the abbacy, he was fain
to make a clean hand o't, though at the time my grandfather knew not of
this.
As soon as the army reached the town, the soldiers went straight on to
the abbey, and entering the great church, even while the monks were
chanting their paternosters, they began to show the errand they had come
on. Dreadful was the yell that ensued, when my grandfather, going up to
the priest at the high altar, and pulling him by the scarlet and fine
linen of his pageantry, bade him decamp, and flung the toys and trumpery
of the mass after him as he fled away in fear.
This resolute act was the signal for the general demolition, and it
began on all sides; my grandfather giving a leap, caught hold of a fine
effigy of the Virgin Mary by the leg to pull it down; but it proved to
be the one which James Coom the smith had mended, for the leg came off,
and my grandfather fell backwards, and was for a moment stunned by his
fall. A band of the monks, who were standing trembling spectators, made
an attempt, at seeing this, to raise a shout of a miracle; but my
grandfather, in the same moment recovering himself, seized the Virgin's
timber leg, and flung it with violence at them, and it happened to
strike one of the fattest of the flock with such a bir, that it was said
the life was driven out of him. This, however, was not the case; for,
although the monk was sorely hurt, he lived many a day after, and was
obligated, in his auld years, when he was feckless, to be carried from
door to door on a hand-barrow begging his bread. The wives, I have heard
tell, were kindly to him, for he was a jocose carl; but the weans little
respected his grey hairs, and used to jeer him as auld Father
Paternoster, for even to the last he adhered to his beads. It was
thought, however, by a certain pious protestant gentlewoman of Irvine,
that before his death he got a cast of grace; for one day, when he had
been carried over to beg in that town, she gave him a luggie of kail
ower het, which he stirred with the end of the ebony crucifix at his
girdle, thereby showing, as she said, a symptom that it held a lower
place in his spiritual affections than if he had been as sincere in his
errors as he let wot.