The Reformation came to Scotland long before Henry championed it in England, and north of the border it was attributable to more reputable – that is to say, theological rather than political – origins. The Lollards, fleeing persecution in England, and Hansa merchants, carrying goods to Leith and Dundee, spread the Protestant word. One self-confessed Lollard, James Resby, was executed as early as 1407, and Paul Crawar, a Hussite, was burned in 1433, but there was no coordinated attempt to purge Scotland of heresy. In 1494 thirty men were arraigned before the Archbishop of Glasgow and questioned about their deviant beliefs. They must have given convincing answers, for they were dismissed with a warning, not about their future conduct, but about the dangers of false dogma. The concerted, but by no means fanatical, campaign against heresy began in 1525 when the Scottish Parliament passed an Act which prohibited the importation of Lutheran books and pamphlets and the dissemination of Lutheran doctrine.
The first martyr to stir the Scottish conscience was Patrick Hamilton, Abbot of Ferne – a title he bore, despite not being in Holy Orders, because his father was the head of a noble house and his mother was a direct descendant of James II of Scotland. Hamilton was, by the standards of the time, an undoubted heretic, who was said by his critics to have been corrupted by too much learning. He studied in Paris and Louvain, before returning to the University of St Andrews where he began, at once, to spread Luther’s gospel. Warned that he faced arrest, Hamilton fled from Scotland. He spent six months in Germany, including a visit to Luther in Wittenberg, before returning home. James Beaton – Archbishop of St Andrews – was waiting for him. Because of Hamilton’s noble connections, Beaton chose not to arrest and charge him in the way that he would have arrested and charged a commoner. Instead, he invited Hamilton to take part in a public disputation at St Andrews University. Hamilton’s performance made a formal indictment unnecessary. He condemned himself. He was convicted of heresy and executed on the same day.
Hamilton died a particularly brutal death. And whichever version of his final minutes is true, he went bravely to meet his Maker. The fire beneath the condemned man burned slowly. So it took him six hours to die and the gunpowder, which should have exploded and ended his torment, only blew away one hand and the left side of his face. One account of his last minutes claimed that he roared defiance in the face of the Blackfriars prior who persisted in asking him to repent. Another tells a very different story. ‘The martyr never gave any sign of impatience nor anger, nor ever called upon heaven for vengeance’ upon his persecutors.1 The description of Hamilton dying in a paroxysm of fury was supplied by John Knox, who believed that Hamilton’s death had a profound effect on Scottish opinion. ‘When the cruel wolves had, as they supposed, clean devoured their pray, they find themselves in worse case than they were before … Almost throughout the whole realm (who had heard of the fact) there was not found one who began not to inquire: Wherefore was Master Patrick Hamilton burned?’2 It certainly had a profound effect on Knox, though he attributed his conversion to Protestantism to sermons preached by Thomas Gwilliam (a Blackfriars prior) in Edinburgh.
Gwilliam was a moderate, and so was Knox until he met George Wishart – a preacher with a long and chequered history of antagonism to Rome. Wishart, while a student in Louvain, had fled to England to escape prosecution for heresy. A sermon preached in Bristol resulted in him being charged again with the same offence. Examined by Cranmer, Cromwell and a selection of bishops, he had recanted, escaped the fire and returned to Scotland – where he immediately began to preach defiance of Rome and the Pope. Knox became his friend, disciple and protector. Together – Wishart carrying a Bible and Knox armed with the broadsword which his statues always feature – they visited town after town and contributed more to the turbulence of the times than to religious enlightenment. After their visit to Dundee, a mob sacked the local monasteries.
David Beaton – who had inherited the See of St Andrews from his uncle, James, and been appointed Cardinal – led the Catholic Church in Scotland during a bizarre episode in the story of the Scottish Reformation. Half of the Scottish nobility had become temporary converts to Protestantism. They demonstrated the zeal with which they held their new beliefs by imprisoning the Cardinal as punishment for crimes that he had committed with their approval. It was a brief incarceration. As soon as it was over, Beaton embarked on a campaign of trial and execution which cast the avenging net widely. In 1544, he had burned seven Protestants for offences which ranged from insulting the Virgin Mary to eating goose on a Friday, and it seemed likely that he would resume his hunt for heretics with equal fervour. Wishart, if caught, was doomed. His friends urged him to lie low. But he refused to ‘lurk as a man that wee shamed and durst not show himself before men’.3 Inevitably – after a month of peripatetic preaching – it became obvious that he could not escape the Cardinal’s wrath for much longer. According to his own account, Knox did not want to leave him, but Wishart insisted: ‘Nay, return to your bairns. One is sufficient for sacrifice.’4
Wishart surrendered after receiving assurances that he and his party would not be handed over to Cardinal David Beaton. The promise was not kept. Wishart recanted, as he had recanted in England. Two apostasies were more than his conscience could bear for long. So he recanted his recantation and was charged with heresy. However Wishart had behaved, the public trial that followed could have had only one possible outcome. The defendant made certainty more certain by denouncing the sacrament of confession and rejecting the belief (as he described transubstantiation) that God ‘could be comprehended [between] the priest’s hands’. On March 1st 1546, George Wishart was hanged and his body was ceremoniously burned. David Beaton became a hero to Scottish Catholics of a nationalist disposition. The Scottish historian Compton Mackenzie wrote that he ‘stands with Bruce and Wallace … among the great patriots’ of Scotland and excused his brutality with an argument which was more ingenious than convincing. ‘Of the people who suffered death under his administration … none was tortured and even his personal enemy Wishart suffered less on the scaffold than the Jacobite martyrs.’5
Wishart, like his mentor Martin Luther, denounced the corruption of the Church with as much venom as he employed in his denunciation of its doctrine. There were many good Scottish Catholics who knew the evidence that supported his complaints to be irrefutable and deeply regretted the damage that was done to the Catholic cause by conduct that was indisputably disreputable. One of them was Mary of Guise – widow of James V, and Regent of Scotland during the minority of her daughter. The Dowager Queen Mary complained to Pope Pius IV about the debauchery which she said was rife in Scottish religious houses and cited, in support of her accusation, Cardinal Niccolo Caetani di Sermoneta, who confirmed that Scottish nuns gave birth to children, Scottish monks lived in luxury and Scottish bishops misappropriated Church lands. It is not clear how the Cardinal, who was Archbishop of Capua, became an authority on the Scottish clergy. Nor is it obvious how Mary’s proposed remedy, a clerical tax, would have improved the situation. When the Vatican did not even respond to the idea of a fiscal corrective, the Queen Dowager announced that ‘the only hope lies in the Holy Father’ and begged Pius to set up an episcopal commission to root out the offenders That ‘solution’ was also ignored by Rome.
Cardinal David Beaton bears some responsibility for the low esteem in which the Catholic Church in Scotland was held. He had, and was publicly known to have, a permanent mistress or partner, one Marion Ogilvy. They lived together openly and produced eight children in what would have been an irreproachable union, had the eleventh-century Gregorian reforms not reaffirmed that the clergy must remain celibate. Legally the Cardinal was guilty of concubinage – an offence so common within the Church that the consistory courts could not possibly have acted against each case. The relationship between David Beaton and Marion Ogilvy is put into proper domestic perspective by a poignant fact about his death. When the assassins arrived at St Andrews Castle – where the couple were lodging – she was out shopping.
Beaton’s death was the consequence of a combination of factors. Norman Leslie – the Sheriff of Fife with whom Beaton had been in legal dispute – struck the first, and probably fatal, blow. As Beaton died, one of Leslie’s accomplices preached a little sermon which described the victim as a ‘vile papist’.6 But the main motive was greed, jealousy and the wish – for good reasons or bad – to eliminate a friend of France and, in consequence, an enemy of England. Beaton was too rich and too powerful both for his Scottish rivals and for the English agents who were preparing for the union of the two nations. His assassins were paid by the English Ambassador to Edinburgh.7
After Beaton was dead, one of his killers – a man called Guthrie – urinated into the corpse’s mouth.8 The naked body was first hung from the castle battlements. Then it was taken to the castle dungeon, where it was left as a memorial to the men who had been imprisoned there. Knox was later to describe the Cardinal’s death with a concluding comment that confirmed the brutal character of the Man of God who became the most famous figure in the Scottish Reformation: ‘These things we write merrily’.9 It was not the only proof of his bestial nature which Knox provided. When Mary of Guise called for the capture and execution of the assassins, he attributed her demands to personal grief. The Cardinal, he said, had been the ‘comfort to all gentlewomen and especially to wanton widows’.
It was not only the death of Cardinal David Beaton which confirmed the savagery of the sixteen Protestants who took and held St Andrews Castle. They were reinforced by men of similar disposition, held their ground against half-hearted attempts at recapture and made occasional forays into the town. According to a contemporary observer, they ‘used their bodies in lechering with fair women, serving their appetites as they thought fit’.10 That, naturally enough, alienated the local inhabitants, both Catholic and Protestant, and made the recapture of the castle only a matter of time – unless English troops came to the rescue of the Protestant and anti-French garrison.
Henry’s campaign against the Scots had, itself, strange religious overtones. It had begun as the ‘Rough Wooing’ – a bitter epitaph on the causes of the English invasion. The Lords of Congregation (Protestant nobility) had concluded a treaty with Henry which included the promise to marry the infant Queen Mary Stewart to the adolescent Prince Edward, the heir to the throne of England. The promise had been broken and Henry had decided that conquest was the next best thing to matrimony. At one point Henry’s generals in Darlington suggested that the morale of the Earl Arran’s regiments could be undermined by sending English translations of the Bible to Edinburgh. The King rejected the idea because he feared that the extremism which Bible-reading promoted would spread south of the border. The campaign ended on September 10th 1547, nine months after King Edward’s accession, when the Duke of Somerset – Lord Protector of England and of its boy king – routed the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie, a village outside Musselburgh, north of Edinburgh. It was – Flodden notwithstanding – the greatest disaster in the history of Scottish arms. The English army, 16,000 strong, had defeated 25,000 Scots. Scotland lost 14,000 dead, England a few hundred. But, despite the size of the victory, Somerset was unwilling or unable to push on and relieve the siege of St Andrews.
There had been brief truces during the year-long siege and strange negotiated agreements – typical of the Scottish Reformation – during which Protestant and Roman Catholics preached in the parish church on alternate Sundays. During one lull in the fighting, John Knox had taken refuge in the castle and there he remained for several months. Three years earlier he had been appointed religious tutor to the son of a local laird, Brounefield of Greenlaw, and immediately on his arrival he prepared a new catechism on which he examined the young man and his friends when he met them each Sunday in the St Andrews parish kirk in South Street. After a week or two he began to preach in the castle chapel during the daily services.
Knox had affected some doubt about his right to preach. But the apostate friar, who was the chapel’s incumbent, told him that the only necessary qualification was to have ‘espied the gifts of God’. And that convinced him that preaching was his ‘holy vocation’. The castle garrison – despite being largely composed of men who were crude of thought and brutal of habit – began to attend Sunday services. That may well have been because Knox’s sermons were crude and brutal, too. He described the Catholic Church as ‘the synagogue of Satan, the last beast and the Hoore of Babylon’ and ‘that horrible harlot in her filthiness’. The Pope was ‘the man of sin’ and the Mass was the manifestation of all that was wrong with the Church of Rome. His calculated abuse of the sacraments must have offended many Protestants. The wafer was ‘a god of water and meal’. It could be destroyed by ‘a bold and puissant mouse’ which could ‘desire no better dinner’. Knox preached with the self-confidence of a man who knew and respected God’s will. His sermons – abuse of Catholic dogma and liturgy aside – reasserted the principles of Protestantism one by one and (as was the habit of the populists among Protestant preachers) associated the demands for Church reform with the remedying of social grievances. The violence of his pulpit language more than matched his reaction to the Beaton murder and revealed his belief in an unforgiving Providence. ‘These are the works of God, whereby he would admonish the tyrants of the earth, that in the end He will be revenged of their cruelty, what strength so ever they made to the contrary.’11
Knox was still at St Andrews when the French – encouraged by Mary of Guise – intervened. Taking advantage of Somerset’s slow progress north, they first renewed the siege and then bombarded the castle from the sea. The garrison surrendered and the men who survived – Knox among them – were made galley slaves. According to his own account of his two years in chains, the prisoners were treated with exceptional brutality at the request of the Scottish Catholic establishment. By agreeing to the request that the prisoners be ‘sharply handled’, the French captors provoked Knox into a rare moment of introspection:
I know how hard the battle is between the spirit and the flesh, under the heavy cross of affliction, where no worldly defence except present death does appear … Rests only Faith, provoking us to call earnestly and call for the assistance of God’s spirit, wherein, if we continue, our most desperate calamities shall turn to gladness and to prosperity.12
During his enslavement in the galleys, Knox refused to attend Mass and rallied his fellow prisoners to the Protestant cause. But although his spirit was strong, his body began to weaken and his health deteriorated to a point at which he was of no further use to the French navy. When he was released he made his way to England – there to add an abrasive voice to the liturgical and doctrinal changes for which young King Edward is given credit. A Reformation, more comprehensive and complete than Henry had thought either possible or right, was about to begin.