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 shouldbe absolutely devoted to him. David Betoun offered himself. The pope created him cardinal in December 1538, and thenceforth thered—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 legatea latere, without which the other was rather an office of dignity than of power, was not granted till 1544,[42]by which time neitherthe 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 asille 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 muchcredit 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.
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 reachinga 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.
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 ofthe 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 theéliteof the younger inmates of the monasteries and of thealumniof 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 permittingthe 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.
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 frombad 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 isgret 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.
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 theinfant 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.
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 assistanceThe Balance of Parties.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.
It was about this time that a new evangelist arrived in the country, singularly fitted to impress on the hearts of men the lessons of the Holy Book to which they had now access in their native tongue. This was George Wishart, a younger son or nephew of Sir James Wishart, laird of Pittarrow in the Mearns. He appears to have been born about 1512-13, and to have received his university training in King's College, Aberdeen, then presided over by a distinguished humanist skilled both in Latin and Greek. He acquired a knowledge of Greek—at that time a very rare accomplishment in Scotland—either from the Principal of King's College, or from a Frenchman teaching languages in Montrose. From his early years he seems to have been intimate with John Erskine, laird of Dun, and at that time also provost of the neighbouring burghof Montrose. The earliest notice we have of him is as attesting a charter granted in favour of Erskine.[57]This lends confirmation to the tradition which Petrie, himself a native of the town, says he had heard from ancient men (who in their youth had seen and known the reformer) that then, or soon after, he was employed as assistant or successor of Marsillier, the Frenchman Erskine had brought from France to teach the languages, and that, like him, he read the Greek New Testament with some of his pupils. John Hepburn, then Bishop of Brechin, would not naturally have been quick-scented to detect heresy in one who stood so high with his good friend Erskine of Dun; but David Betoun, Abbot of Arbroath, often resided at the mansion-house of Ethie, half-way between Arbroath and Montrose, and he was both more lynx-eyed and more anxious to stamp out any approach to heresy, and he urged the bishop on.
Summoned for Heresy.
Wishart in consequence was summoned by Hepburn, but instead of appearing in answer to the summons, he, like many others in that year of grievous persecution, sought safety in England, and it is said that he was forthwith excommunicated and outlawed. He found shelter underBishop Latimer, whose diocese comprehended Gloucester and Bristol, as well as Worcester; but in the following year he fell into fresh trouble at Bristol—not, as was at one time supposed, by denying the merits of the Virgin Mary, but by denying the merits of Christ Himself. For this he was duly convented before Archbishop Cranmer, and, after conference with him, was persuaded to recant and bear his faggot. Soon after the enactment of the bloody statute of the six articles, he, like most of the Scottish refugees, left England and sought shelter among the reformed churches on the Continent, especially those of Zürich, Basle, and Strassburg, and brought home with him, and ultimately translated into English, the First Helvetic Confession,[58]composed and agreed on by the chief theologians of these churches.
He returned to England about the close of 1542, and soon after entered into residence in Corpus Christi or Benet College, Cambridge, with the view of studying and teaching there. In one of the windows of the common-room in that college, above the arms of archbishops and nobles, distinguishedalumniof the college, stands the name of George Wishart, with the martyr's crown over it; and it is to Emery Tilney, hisHis Appearance and Habits.pupil during the year he was in residence there, that we are indebted for our fullest description of his appearance and habits. He was, he tells us, "a man of tall stature, polled-headed, and on the same a round French cap of the best; judged to be of melancholy complexion by his physiognomy; black haired, long bearded, comely of personage, well spoken after his country of Scotland, courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e.Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,—all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, which he kept the whole year of my being with him.... His charity had never end, night, noon, nor day, ... infinitely studying how to do good unto all, and hurt to none."[59]
Such, according to his pupil, was the evangelist who—in 1543 according to some, in 1544 according to others—returned to his native land, and for two years testified of the gospel of the grace of God throughout Angus and Mearns, Ayrshire and the Lothians, but whose favourite fields oflabour were to be central Angus and Mearns, the towns of Montrose and Dundee. A portrait of him, as well as one of his great opponent, has been preserved in the Roman Catholic College of Blairs, and the expression of the face harmonises well with the description his pupil gives of him. Another portrait, deemed by Dr Laing not unworthy of Holbein, is in possession of a descendant of the Wisharts.[60]
It is supposed that for a short time after his return to Scotland he lived quietly at Pittarrow, in the parish of Fordoun, where the shrine of St Palladius was preserved; and being an accomplished artist, occupied himself with adorning the ancestral mansion with several beautiful fresco paintings, which, after being long covered over by the wainscot, were again brought to light in the present century, but unfortunately were destroyed before their value was perceived. Dr Leslie of Fordoun, who saw them, has thus described the most remarkable of them: "Above the largest fireplace in the great hall was a painting of the city of Rome, and a grand procession going to St Peter's.... The Pope, adorned with the tiara, and mounted on horseback, was attended by a large company of cardinals on foot, richly dressed, but all uncovered. At a little distance, directly in front of the procession, stood aA Protestant Pasquil.beautiful white palfrey, finely caparisoned, held by some persons who were well dressed, but uncovered. Beyond them was the Cathedral of St Peter, the doors of which appeared to be open. Below the picture were written the following lines:—
"In Papam.
"Laus tua, non tua fraus, virtus non gloria rerumScandere te fecit hoc decus eximium;Pauperibus dat sua gratis nec munera curatCuria Papalis, quod more percipimus.Haec carmina potius legenda, cancros imitando."[61]
"Laus tua, non tua fraus, virtus non gloria rerumScandere te fecit hoc decus eximium;Pauperibus dat sua gratis nec munera curatCuria Papalis, quod more percipimus.Haec carmina potius legenda, cancros imitando."[61]
Wishart began his work as a preacher in Montrose, the scene of his early scholastic labours, expounding the rudiments of the Christian faith and practice as set forth in the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed. At that time Montrose was frequented by many of the landed gentry in the surrounding districts who were favourable to the Reformation and the English alliance, and their hearts could not fail to be cheered and their courage raised by the exhortations of the evangelist. Dundee, however, was the chief and favourite scene of his ministrations; and it was from the great success attending them that it gained the name of the Scottish Geneva. It was even more decidedly attached to the new opinions and the English alliance thanMontrose; and a reformation, as it was called—including the sacking of the monasteries in the town and neighbourhood—had taken place in the autumn of 1543. The governor confessed, when put to penance, that this had been done with his permission.[62]The martyr cannot with any certainty be connected with it, much less made to bear the blame of it; though another George Wishart, a citizen and bailie of Dundee, with whom the martyr has been recklessly confounded, was afterwards put on his trial for having taken a leading part in it.[63]If the martyr could, his enemies would hardly have failed to have brought it against him at his trial.
Preaches at Dundee.
He preached for a time in Dundee with great acceptance, expounding systematically that Epistle to the Romans, the full significance of which the recently published Commentary of Calvin had deeply impressed on the minds of his co-religionists in various lands where Wishart had been. At length he was charged by one of the magistrates in the queen's name and the governor's to desist from preaching, to depart from the town, and trouble it no more. This was intimated to him when he was in the pulpit, surrounded by a great congregation, and with a significant reminder that he had already been put to the horn, and that there was no intention to relax the law in his favour. Thereupon he called God to witness that he intended not their trouble but their comfort, and felt sure that to reject the Word of God, and drive away His messenger, was not the way to save themselves from trouble; adding, "God shall send unto yow messengeris who will not be effrayed of hornyng nor yitt for banishment."[64]He left the town forthwith, and with all "possible expeditioun passed to the west-land."[65]There he pursued his labours in the same kindly spirit, refusing to allow his followers to dispute possession of the churches by force of arms with the authorities, and choosing rather to preach in the open air wherever he found a convenient place and audience fit to listen to him.
Succours the Plague-stricken.
Soon after he left Dundee, the plague, which that year was raging in several of the towns of Scotland, extended its ravages to that place. This naturally led the citizens to bethink themselves of the treatment they had allowed the evangelist, who had laboured so devotedly among them, to suffer at the hands of his enemies, as the news of what they were suffering led him tothink compassionately of his friends who were now in trouble, and stood in need of comfort. He returned to the afflicted town, and its inhabitants received him with joy. He announced without delay that he would preach to them; but it was impossible he could do so in a church. Numbers were sick of the plague; others in attendance on them were regarded as infected, and must not be brought into contact with those who were free from infection. The sick were crowded in and about the lazar-houses near St Roque's Chapel, outside the East or Cowgate Port of the town. Wishart chose as his pulpit the top of that port, which, in memory of the martyr-preacher, has been, it is said, carefully preserved, though—like Temple Bar, so long tolerated in London—it is now in the heart of the town, and an obstruction to its traffic.[66]The sick and suspected were assembled outside the port, and the healthy inside. The preacher took for the text of his first sermon the words of Psalm cvii. 20: "He sent His word and healed them;" and,starting on the key-note that it was neither herb nor plaster, but God's Word which healeth all, "He maist comfortablie did intreat [i.e.treat of] the dignitie and utilitie of Goddis Woord; the punishment that cumis for the contempt of the same; the promptitude of Goddis mercy to such as trewlye turne to Him; yea, the great happynes of thame whome God tackis from this miserie evin in His awin gentill visitatioun, which the malice of man cane neyther eak nor paire."[67]By this sermon, Knox tells us, he so raised up the hearts of all who heard him, that they regarded not death, but judged those more happy that should depart than those that should remain behind, considering that they knew not whether they should have such a comforter with them at all times.
No doubt John Wedderburn, as well as the others who had been suspected of heresy and had fled from the town in the persecution of 1539, had before this time returned, and were co-operating with Wishart in his work; and then, in all probability, was prepared that beautiful funeral hymn which passed from the Bohemians to the Germans, and from the Germans to the Scotch; and which, in addition to the original stanzas, contains in the Scottish version certain new verses having unmistakable reference to the circumstances in which they originated—in a plague-stricken town which had just before been occupied by the soldiers of the cardinal and the regent, and might well dread a similar visitation for its determined adherence to the new evangelist.
"Thochtpest or swordwald vs preuene,Befoir our hour, to slay vs clene,Thay can nocht pluk ane lytill hairFurth of our heid, nor do vs deir.Quhen fra this warld to Christ we wend,Our wratchit schort lyfe man haif endChangeit fra paine, and miserie,To lestand gloir Eternallie.End sall our dayis schort, and vaine,And sin, quhilk we culd nocht refraine,Endit salbe our pilgremage,And brocht hame to our heritage."[68]
"Thochtpest or swordwald vs preuene,Befoir our hour, to slay vs clene,Thay can nocht pluk ane lytill hairFurth of our heid, nor do vs deir.
Quhen fra this warld to Christ we wend,Our wratchit schort lyfe man haif endChangeit fra paine, and miserie,To lestand gloir Eternallie.
End sall our dayis schort, and vaine,And sin, quhilk we culd nocht refraine,Endit salbe our pilgremage,And brocht hame to our heritage."[68]
His Fearless Devotedness.
Wishart concerned himself not only about the souls but also about the bodies of his hearers in that sad time, fearlessly, like Luther on a similar occasion, exposing himself to the risk of infection, that he might minister to the diseased and the dying, and taking care that the public funds for the relief of the destitute should be properly administered. He forgot himself only too much, and the terrible risks to which, as an excommunicated and outlawed man, he was exposedin so near proximity to the cardinal, who was so eager to get him out of the way.
One day as the people were departing from the sermon, utterly unconscious of the peril menacing their favourite preacher, Knox tells us that a priest, bribed by the cardinal, stood waiting—with his whinger drawn in his hand under his gown—at the foot of the steps by which the preacher was descending from the top of the port. Wishart, most sharp of eye and swift of judgment, at once noticed him, and, as he came near, said, "My friend, what wald ye do?" and at the same moment seized the hand in which he held the dagger, and took it from him. The priest fell down at his feet and confessed the whole truth. Immediately the rumour spread that a priest had attempted to assassinate their favourite preacher, the sick outside burst open the gate, crying, "Deliver the tratour to us, or ellis we will tack him by forse." But the preacher put his arms around his would-be assassin, exclaiming, "Whosoevir trubles him shall truble me, for he has hurte me in nothing, bot ... hes lattin us understand what we may feare in tymes to come"; and so, says Knox, he saved the life of him that sought his.[69]
His Innocence.
Like Drs Laing, Lorimer, and Weir, I cannot persuade myself that the man who spoke and acted thus is the same as "a Scottish man called Wysshert," who is mentioned in a letter of the Earl of Hertford in April 1544, as privy to a conspiracy to apprehend or assassinate Cardinal Betoun, and as employed to carry letters between the conspirators and the English court.[70]There were other Wisharts in Scotland. Yea, as Dr Laing has shown, another George Wishart in Dundee, who was a zealous friend of the English alliance—not only after the conspirators got possession of St Andrews castle, but from the earlier date when the monasteries in Dundee were destroyed and sacked.[71]There was probably another about St Andrews who, while the martyr was yet a boy, was called in to attest a charter by the notorious friar Campbell in 1526. I will not venture to affirm that, with all his gentleness,Wishart might not have been tempted to maintain that violence and murderous intent—such as Betoun had twice shown to get rid of him privately—might be lawfully met and restrained by force, though even that is hardly in keeping with all we know of his gentle ways; but we may be sure that had such thoughts been cherished by him, he, like Knox, would have said this openly, and not have engaged in any secret reprisals. As an outlawed man he came down to Scotland under protection, and never seems to have travelled in it save under protection; and so he was one of the last men likely to be chosen for a secret mission to England. If anything more than the able essay of the late Professor Weir in the 'North British Review' for 1868 were needed to prove that the "pure lustre of the martyr's fame is still unsullied," it seems to me to be supplied by himself in his affecting address at the stake. "I beseech Thee, Father of heaven! to forgive them that have of any ignorance, or else have of any evil mind,forged any liesupon me. I forgive them with all my heart."[72]The cardinal was not ignorant of the volcano on which he was sitting or of the plots that had been hatched against him; and he may have suspected Wishart of being in the conspiracy. That may have been the reason why he sent two friars to him to get his lastconfession, and, when they failed to do so, allowed Wynram to go, as the reformer had requested. Wynram, after hearing it, returned to the cardinal and his abettors, and assured them that Wishart was innocent. This can only refer to such a suspicion of conspiracy, not to the charge of heresy which was confessed and acknowledged; and Mr Andrew Lang has failed as completely as the cardinal in his laboured attempt to produce a tittle of evidence against him.
His Constancy.
From the time of Wighton's attempt the reformer had a clearer view of the perils which beset him, and a mournful conviction of the issue which awaited him if he would not flinch or flee. By his success in Dundee the rage of his adversaries was lashed into a fury which appalled his friends in various districts; but none of these things moved him that he might finish his course with joy, and make full proof of his ministry. As soon as the plague abated in the city, heedless of the new proofs he then had of the cardinal's relentless determination to capture or trepan him, and the earnest warnings of his northern friends that they could not be answerable for his safety, he took his last farewell of his kirks in Montrose and Dundee. At all hazards he was determined to fulfil his engagement to meet his western friends in Edinburgh, to prosecute his work there under their promised protection, and to seek a publicdisputation with some of the popish clergy who about that time were to meet in Synod in the capital. Disappointed of the presence and protection of the western men, he laboured for a brief season in Leith, Inveresk, and East Lothian without much success. At last, forsaken by many of those who should have stood by him, he was seized at Ormiston, under cover of night and promise of safe keeping, by the Earl of Bothwell, Sheriff Principal of the county. The Earl pledged his honour not to give him up to his enemies, but was soon persuaded to deliver him to the governor, as was the governor to hand him over to the cardinal, though he finally protested against his being tried or condemned by the churchmen in his own absence. A full account of his labours during these days of despondency has been given by Knox, who got from him, it is said, the first rudiments of Greek, and who—having rendered his first service to the cause of the Reformation by bearing the two-handed sword for his protection—was dismissed on the night of his betrayal with the significant words, "One is sufficient for one sacrifice," showing what fate he now anticipated for himself.
I cannot enlarge on these things, nor on the sad scenes which took place at St Andrews on the last day of February and 1st of March 1545-46, when the cardinal, regardless of the remonstrancesHis Martyrdom.of the regent and the murmurs of the people, but with the assent of the Council which he had adjourned from Edinburgh to St Andrews, condemned him to the stake. Throughout all these trying scenes he comported himself as nobly as Patrick Hamilton had done; and not less plentifully did his blood prove the seed of the church, verifying his words, that few would suffer after him before the glory of God evidently appeared. No doubt his cruel martyrdom hastened the removal of that tyrant who set himself above all restraint of civil law, and breathed forth threatenings against the saints of God,—though that removal had not been plotted by him, nor would have been approved by him. The words attributed to him at the stake by Buchanan and Lindsay of Pitscottie, foreshadowing his persecutor's approaching fate, are not generally regarded as authentic. Knox says nothing of them, nor Foxe, nor Spottiswoode; nor does Sir David Lindsay, in his 'Tragedy of the Cardinal,' make any reference to them. It seems better authenticated that he made the following general statement: "I beseech you, brethren and sisters, to exhort your prelates to the learning of the Word of God, that they at the last may be ashamed to do evil and learn to do good, and if they will not convert themselves from their wicked error, there shall hastily come upon them the wrath of God,which they shall not eschew."[73]It is easy to see—especially after the events which so speedily occurred—how a statement which referred to the prelates generally should come to be applied specifically to their imperious chief, just as the example of Eli had, in a well-known ballad, been similarly used for warning by the Reformation poet to the aged James Betoun for his weak indulgence to his nephew and the younger Prior Hepburn, notwithstanding their scandalous excesses.[74]
Such was the end of the life and ministry of George Wishart, one of the most zealous and winning evangelists, and one of the most heroic and steadfast confessors, that our country has ever produced. The remembrance of him was fondly cherished, especially in that district where he chiefly laboured, and where he wrought a work not less memorable than that which M'Cheyne and Burns were honoured to do in our own day. His influence was but deepened by his cruel fate, and he "lived again," as Dr Lorimer has eloquently said, "in John Knox.... The zealous disciple, who had counted it an honour to be allowed to carry a sword before his master, stoodforth immediately to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master's grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution superior even to his."[75]
Church Organisation.
It may not be inappropriate to state how far the organisation of the Reformed Church had by this time advanced in Scotland. Patrick Hamilton seems to me to have laboured to the last for the revival of Scriptural teaching and Christian living within the old church rather than apart from her. Alesius, and some others of his disciples, were for a time reluctant to separate from her, if her rulers could have been persuaded seriously to set about repairing acknowledged evils and defects. But Wishart, and those who came under his influence, seem to have abandoned this struggle, and to have striven for the formation of a new organisation apart from the old one. He formed kirks or congregations—at least in Montrose and Dundee; the former consisting probably mainly of the lesser gentry in the adjacent districts of Angus and Mearns, and the latter chiefly of the substantial burghers of the town of Dundee. I suppose that some forms of discipline began to be put in practice in the Dundee congregation, and that it was on that account, as well as from the remarkable revival which had taken place under his ministrations, that the town came tobe spoken of as "the Scottish Geneva." The New Testament of Tyndale's translation had been introduced both there and in Montrose as early as 1526; and by this time the subsequent editions had been largely imported, and since 1543 might be openly read.[76]John Wedderburn was then in his native city, and I suppose by that date had published, in its most rudimentary form, his 'Psalms and Spiritual Songs,' largely translated from the German. John Scott, the printer, was also there, and under suspicion of the authorities in Edinburgh. Of the psalms and hymns, one, as I have already mentioned, bears unmistakable reference to thepestthen infesting the town of Dundee; another was sung by Wishart that evening on which he was apprehended in East Lothian; a third is certainly referred to in the 'Complaynt of Scotland,' which, being published as early as 1549, is a guarantee for the earlier existence of the hymn.[77]This rudimentary collection of 'Psalms and Spiritual Songs' was the book of praise in family and social gatherings of the reformed until the 'Genevan Psalter' came into use.[78]The earliest editions of it have perished. A nearly complete copy of the edition of 1567 has, however, been preserved, and now at last reprinted.[79]