CHAPTER VII.
CONFESSORS OF THE GOSPEL AND MARTYRS ARE MULTIPLIED IN SCOTLAND.
(End of 1531 to 1534.)
The bishops of Scotland appeared to triumph. Hamilton was dead, Alesius in exile, and not one evangelical voice was any longer heard in the realm. They now turned their thoughts to the destruction of that proud aristocracy which assumed that the functions of the state belonged to the nobles and not to the priests. The estates of the earl of Crawford had already been confiscated; the earls of Argyle and Bothwell and several others had been imprisoned, and insults had been offered to the earl of Murray, Lord Maxwell, Sir James Hamilton, and their friends.[160] The archbishop of Glasgow, chancellor of Scotland, went still further; he deprived the nobles of their ancient jurisdiction, and set up in its place a College of Justice, composed exclusively of ecclesiastics. The nobles thought now only of delivering Scotland from the yoke of the clergy, and determined to invite the aid of Henry VIII. Some of them were beginning even to feel interested in those humble evangelical believers who were, like themselves, the object of the priests’ hatred. This interest was one day to contribute to the triumph of the Reformation. It was resolved that the earl of Bothwell should open negotiations with Henry VIII., and this at the very time that that prince was separating from Rome. This alliance might lead a long way.
BOTHWELL AND NORTHUMBERLAND.
The earl of Northumberland was then at Newcastle, charged by the King of England to watch over affairs in the north. It was to him that Bothwell addressed himself. Northumberland having referred to Henry on the subject, it was agreed that the two earls should meet by night at Dilston, a place almost equally distant from Newcastle and from the Scottish frontier. At the mid-hour of the long night of December 21, 1531, Bothwell, accompanied by three of his friends, arrived at the appointed place, where Northumberland was awaiting him.[161] They entered immediately on the conference. The English lord was struck with the intelligence, the acquirements, and the refined manners of Bothwell. ‘Verily,’ said he to Henry VIII., ‘I have never in my life met a lord so agreeable and so handsome.’ Bothwell, angered by the pride of the priests, reported their conduct with respect to Angus, Argyle, and Murray. ‘They kept me, too, confined in Edinburgh Castle for six months,’ said he, ‘and but for the intervention of my friends they would have put me to death. I know that such a fate is still impending over me.’ Bothwell added, that if the King of England would deliver the Scottish nobles from the evils which they had reason to dread, he himself (Bothwell) was ready to join Henry VIII. with one thousand gentlemen and six thousand men-at-arms. ‘We will crown him in a little while,’ he added, ‘in the town of Edinburgh.’[162] The enraged nobles were actually giving themselves up to strange fancies: according to their view, the only remedy for the ills of their country was the union of Scotland with England under the sceptre of Henry VIII. Scotland would in that case have submitted to a reform at the king’s hand; but she was reserved for other destinies, and her reform was to proceed from the people, and to be effected by the Word of God.
The King of England was in no lack of motives for intervention in Scotland. James V. had just concluded an alliance for a hundred years with Charles V., the mortal enemy of Henry VIII., and had even asked for the hand of the emperor’s sister, the ex-queen of Hungary. This princess had rejected the match, and the emperor had proposed to James his niece Dorothea, daughter of the King of Denmark.
Bothwell was able even to tell Northumberland, in this night-conference, of matters graver still. A secret ambassador from Charles V., said he, Peter von Rosenberg, has recently been at Edinburgh and, in a long conversation which he had with the king in his private apartments, has promised him that the emperor would put him in a position, before Easter, to assume the title of prince of England and duke of York.[163] The Roman party, despairing of Henry VIII., were willing to transmit the crown to his nephew, the King of Scotland. Bothwell added that James, as he left the conference, met the chancellor of the kingdom and several nobles, and made haste to communicate to them the magnificent promise of Charles V. The chancellor contented himself with saying, ‘Pray God I may live to see the day on which the Pope will confirm it.’ The king replied, ‘Only let the emperor act; he will labor strenuously for us.’ It was not James V., but his grandson, who was to ascend the throne of the Tudors.
The project formed by the Scottish nobles of placing Scotland under the sceptre of England was not so easy to carry out as they imagined. The priests, who supposed that they had surmounted the dangers proceeding from reform, undertook to remove in like manner those with which they were threatened by the nobility. But they were mistaken when they believed that the fire kindled by the Word of God was extinguished. Flames shot up suddenly even in places where it was least of all expected to see them.
ALEXANDER SEATON.
A monk of the Dominican order, the order so devoted to the Inquisition, Alexander Seaton, confessor to the king—a man of lofty stature, downright, ready-witted and bold even to audacity[164]—was held in great esteem at the court. The state of the Church profoundly grieved him, and therefore, having been appointed to preach in Lent (1532) in the cathedral of St. Andrews, he resolved courageously to avow in that Scottish Rome the heavenly doctrine which was making exiles and martyrs. Preaching before a large congregation, he said—‘Jesus Christ is the end of the law, and no one is able by his works to satisfy divine justice. A living faith which lays hold of the mercy of God in Christ, can alone obtain for the sinner the remission of sins. But for how many years has God’s law, instead of being faithfully taught, been darkened by the tradition of men?’ People were astonished at this discourse: some wondered why he did not say a word about pilgrimages and other meritorious works; but the priests themselves were afraid to lay a complaint against him. ‘He is confessor to the king,’ they said, ‘and enjoys the favor both of prince and people.’[165]
In the absence of Seaton, after Lent, the archbishop and the clergy took courage, condemned the doctrine which he had preached, and appointed another Dominican to refute him. Seaton immediately returned from Dundee, whither he had gone, had the cathedral bells rung, and, ascending the pulpit, repeated with more energy and clearness still what he had previously said. Then, recalling to mind all that a bishop ought to be according to St. Paul, he asked, where are such bishops to be found in Scotland? The primate, when informed of this discourse, summoned him before him, and rebuked him for having asserted that the bishops were only dumb dogs. Seaton replied that it was an unfounded accusation. ‘Your answer pleases me well,’ exclaimed Beatoun. But the witnesses confirmed their deposition. ‘These are liars,’ said again the king’s confessor to the archbishop; ‘consider what ears these asses have, who cannot decern Paul, Isaiah, Zechariah and Malachi, and friar Alexander Seaton. In very deed, my lord, I said that Paul says it behoves a bishop to be a teacher. Isaiah said that they that fed not the flock are dumb dogs. And Zechariah says, they are idle pastors. I of my own head affirmed nothing, but declared what the Spirit of God before had pronounced.’
SEATON’S FLIGHT.
Beatoun did not hesitate: this bold preacher was evidently putting to his mouth the trumpet of Hamilton and Alesius. The primate undertook to obtain authority from the king to proceed against his confessor, and it was an easier task than he imagined. Seaton, like John the Baptist, had no dread of incurring the king’s displeasure, and had rebuked him for his licentiousness. James had said nothing at the time, thinking that the confessor was only doing his duty. But when he saw the archbishop denouncing Seaton, ‘Ah,’ said this young prince, who was given up to a loose life,[166] ‘I know more than you do of his audacity;’ and from that time he showed great coolness towards Seaton. The latter perceiving what fate awaited him, quitted the kingdom, and took refuge at Berwick. It was about two years after the Lent sermon preached by him in 1532.
He did not remain idle. He had a last duty to discharge to his master the king. ‘The bishops of your kingdom,’ he wrote to him, ‘oppose our teaching the Gospel of Christ. I offer to present myself before your majesty, and to convince the priests of error.’[167] As the king made him no answer, Seaton went to London, where he became chaplain to the duke of Suffolk, brother-in-law of Henry VIII., and preached eloquently to large audiences.
The King of England liked well enough to receive the friends of the Gospel who were banished from Scotland. One priest, more enlightened than the rest, Andrew Charteris, had called his colleagues children of the devil; and he said aloud—‘If anyone observes their cunning and their falsehood, and accuses them of impurity, they immediately accuse him of heresy. If Christ himself were in Scotland, our priestly fathers would heap on him more ignominy than the Jews themselves in old time did.’ Henry desired to see the man, talked with him at great length, and was much pleased with him. ‘Verily,’ said the king to him, ‘it is a great pity that you were ever made a priest.’[168]
The clergy had now got rid of Hamilton, Seaton, and Alesius; but they were nevertheless disquieted because they knew that the Holy Scriptures were in Scotland. Notice was therefore given in every parish that ‘it is forbidden to sell or to read the New Testament.’ All copies found in the shops were ordered to be burnt.[169] Alesius, who was in Germany at that time, was greatly afflicted, and resolved to speak.
LETTER OF ALESIUS.
‘I hear, sire,’ he wrote to the king, ‘that the bishops are driving souls away from the oracles of Christ. Could the Turks do anything worse? Would morality exist in independence of the Holy Scriptures?[170] Would religion itself be anything else than a certain discipline of public manners? That is the doctrine of Epicurus; but what will become of the Church if the bishops propagate Epicurean dogmas? God ordains that we should hear the Son, not as a doctor who philosophizes on the theory of morals, but as a prophet who reveals holy things unknown to the world. If the bishops promote the infliction of the severest penalties on those who hear his word, the knowledge of Jesus Christ will become extinct, and the people will take up pagan opinions.[171]
‘Most serene king, resist these impious counsels! Those who are in the fulness of age, infancy, and the generation to come, unite in imploring you to do so. We are punished, we are put to death.... Eurybiades of Sparta, commander-in-chief, having in the course of a debate raised his staff against Themistocles while forbidding him to speak, the Athenian replied, “Strike, but hear!” We shall say the same. We shall speak, for the Gospel alone can strengthen souls amidst the infinite perils of the present time.’
Neither king nor priests replied to the Letter of Alesius; but a famous German, Cochlæus, the opponent of Luther, undertook to induce James V. to pay no attention to that discourse. ‘Sire,’ he wrote to him, ‘the calamities which the New Testaments disseminated by Luther have brought down upon Germany are so great, that the bishops, in turning their sheep away from that deadly pasture, have shown themselves to be faithful shepherds. Incalculable sums have been thrown away on the printing of a hundred thousand copies of that book. Now, what advantage have its readers drawn from it, unless it be an advantage to be cast into prison, to be banished, and made to suffer other tribulations? A decree is not enough, sire; it is necessary to act. The bishop of Treves has had the New Testaments thrown into the Rhine, and with them the booksellers who sold them. This example has frightened others, and happily so, for that book is the Gospel of Satan, and not of Jesus Christ.’[172] This was the model proposed to King James.
At the same time the Romish party was endeavoring to embroil Scotland with England, and James was already engaging in several skirmishes. One day, under the pretext of the hunt, he threw himself, with ‘a small company’ of three hundred persons, on the estates the possession of which was disputed by his uncle.[173] Shortly afterwards, four hundred Scots invaded the Marches (frontier districts) at sunrise, and were carrying off what they found there. Northumberland repulsed them, and put to death the prisoners which fell into his hands. The Scots took and burnt some English towns; the English invaded Scotland, and ravaged its towns and country districts. The King of Scotland, intimidated, applied to the pope and the King of France, and cried out for aid with all his might. And then, in order to please at the same time the priests, the pope, and Francis I., he took the advice of Cochlæus; with the exception, that in Scotland the fire at the stake was substituted for the waters of the Rhine.
HENRY FORREST.
A young monk, named Henry Forrest, who was in the Benedictine monastery at Linlithgow, a man equally quick in his sympathies and his antipathies, had been touched by Hamilton’s words, and uttered everywhere aloud his regret for the death of that young kinsman of the king, calling him a martyr. This monk was presently convicted of a crime more enormous still: he was a reader of the New Testament. The archbishop had him imprisoned at St. Andrews. One day a friar (sent by the prelate) came to him for the purpose, he said, of administering consolation; and offering to confess him, he succeeded by crafty questions in leading the young Benedictine to tell him all he thought about Hamilton’s doctrines. Forrest was immediately condemned to be delivered over to the secular authorities to be put to death, and a clerical assembly was called together for the purpose of degrading him. The young friend of the Gospel had hardly passed the door where the assembly was sitting, when, discovering the archbishop and the priests drawn up in a circle before him, he became aware of what awaited him, and cried out with a voice full of contempt, ‘Fie on falsehood! fie on false friars, revealers of confession!’[174] When one of the clerks came up to him to degrade him, the Benedictine, weary of so much perfidy, exclaimed, ‘Take from me not only your own orders but also your own baptism.’ He meant by that, says an historian, the superstitious practices which Rome has added to the institutions of the Lord. These words provoked the assembly still more. ‘We must burn him,’ said the primate, ‘in order to terrify the others.’ A simple-minded and candid man who was by the side of Beatoun said to him in a tone of irony, ‘My lord, if you burn him, take care that it be done in a cave, for the smoke of Hamilton’s pile infected with heresy all who caught the scent of it.’
This advice was not taken. To the northward of St. Andrews, in the counties of Forfar and Angus, there were a good many people who loved the New Testament which was come from Germany. There still exist in that district a village named Luthermoor, Luther’s torrent, which falls into the North Esk, Luther’s Bridge, and Luther’s Mill.[175] Forrest’s persecutors determined to erect his funeral pile in such a situation that the population of Forfar and Angus might see the flames,[176] and thus learn the danger which threatened them if they should fall into Protestantism. The pile was therefore placed to the north of the abbey church of St. Andrews, and the fire was visible in those districts of the north which were afterwards to bear Luther’s name. Henry Forrest was Scotland’s second martyr.
DAVID STRAITON.
In the same neighborhood there soon after appeared one who was to be the third to lay down his life for the Reformation in Scotland. A small country seat, situated on the sea-coast near the mouth of the North Esk, was inhabited by one of the Straitons of Lauriston, a family which had held the estate of that name from the sixth century. The members of this family were for the most part distinguished for their tall stature, their bodily strength, and their energy of character. David, a younger son (the eldest resided in Lauriston Castle), a man worthy of his ancestors, was of rude manners and obstinate temper. He displayed great contempt for books, especially for religious books, and found his chief pleasure in launching his boat on the sea, giving the sails to the wind, casting his nets, and struggling hand to hand with the winds and the waves. He had soon to engage in struggles of another kind. The prior of St. Andrews, Patrick Hepburn, afterwards bishop of Murray, a very avaricious man, hearing that David had great success in his fishing, demanded tithe of his fish. ‘Tell your master,’ said the proud gentleman, ‘that if he wants to have it, he may come and take it on the spot.’ From that time, every day as he drew up his nets, he exclaimed to the fishermen, ‘Pay the prior of St. Andrews his tithe,’ and the men would straightway throw every tenth fish into the sea.
When the prior of St. Andrews heard of this strange method of satisfying his claim, he ordered the vicar of Eglesgreg to go to take the fish. The vicar went; but as soon as the rough gentleman saw the priest and his men set to work without ceremony on their part, he cast the fish to him, and so sharply that some of them fell into the sea.[177]
The prior then instituted proceedings against Straiton for the crime of heresy. Never had a council applied that name to a man’s method of paying his tithe. No matter; the word heretic at that time inspired such terror that the stout-hearted gentleman began to give way; his pride was humbled, and, confessing his sins, he felt the need of a forgiving God. He sought out therefore all those who could tell him of the Gospel or could read it to him, for he could not read himself.
Not far from his abode was Dun Castle, whose lord, John Erskine, provost of Montrose, a descendant of the earls of Mar, had attended several universities in Scotland and abroad, and had been converted to the evangelical faith.
‘God,’ says Knox, ‘had miraculously enlightened him.’ His castle, in which the words of prophets and apostles were heard, was ever open to those who were athirst for truth; and thus the evangelical Christians of the neighborhood had frequent meetings there. Erskine detected the change which was taking place in the soul of his rude neighbor; he went to see him, conversed with him, and exhorted him to change his life. Straiton soon became a regular attendant at the meetings in the castle, ‘and he was,’ says Knox, ‘transformed as by a miracle.’[178]
His nephew, the young baron of Lauriston, possessed a New Testament. Straiton frequently went to the castle to hear portions of the Gospels read. One day the uncle and his nephew went out together, wandered about in the neighborhood, and then retired into a lonely place to read the Gospels. The young laird chose the tenth chapter of St. Matthew. Straiton listened as attentively as if it were to himself that the Lord addressed the discourse which is there reported. When they came to this declaration of Jesus Christ, ‘Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven,’ Straiton, affected and startled, fell on his knees, stretched his hands upwards, and turned for a long time a humble and earnest gaze towards heaven, but without speaking the while; he appeared to be in an ecstasy.[179] At last, no longer able to restrain the feelings which crowded on him, he exclaimed—‘I have been sinful, O Lord, and thou wouldst be only just wert thou to withhold thy grace from me! Nevertheless, for the sake of thy mercy, suffer not the dread of pain or of death to lead me ever to deny thee or thy truth.’[180] Thenceforward he set himself to serve zealously the master whose mighty love he had felt. The world appeared to him like a vast sea, full of movement, on which men are ever rudely tossed until they have entered into the haven of the Gospel. The fisherman became a fisher of men. He exhorted his friends and acquaintances to seek God, and he replied to the priests with firmness. On one occasion, when they urged him to do some pious works which deliver from purgatory, he answered, ‘I know of no other purgatory than Christ’s passion and the tribulations of this life.’ Straiton was carried off to Edinburgh, and cast into prison.
There was another Scotchman, Norman Gourlay, who after taking holy orders had travelled on the continent, and had there been enlightened by the word of the Gospel. Convinced that ‘marriage is honorable in all,’ Gourlay had married on his return to Scotland; and when a priest reminded him of the prohibition by Rome, ‘The pope,’ replied he, ‘is no bishop, but an Antichrist, and he has no jurisdiction in Scotland.’
On August 26, 1534, these two servants of God were led into a hall of Holyrood Abbey. The judges were seated, and with them the king, who, appareled in red from head to foot, seemed to be there for the purpose of assisting them. James V. pressed these two confirmed Christians to abjure their doctrines. ‘Recant; burn your bill,’[181] he said to them; but Straiton and Gourlay chose rather to be burnt themselves. The king, affected and giving way, would fain have pardoned them; but the priests declared that he had no authority to do so, since these people were condemned by the Church. In the afternoon of August 27 a huge pile was lit on the summit of Calton Hill, in order that the flames might be visible to a great distance; and the fire devoured these two noble Christians. If the Reform was afterwards so strong in Scotland it was because the seed was holy.
Enough however was not done yet. All these heresies, it was thought, proceed from Hamilton; his family must therefore be extirpated from the Scottish soil. But Sir James, a good-natured man, an upright magistrate and a lover of the Gospel, was for all that not in the humor to let himself be burnt like his brother. So, having received one day an order to appear before the tribunal, he addressed himself immediately to the king, who had him privately told not to appear. Sir James therefore quitted the kingdom; he was then condemned, excommunicated, banished, and deprived of his estates, and he lived for nearly ten years in London in the utmost distress.
TRIAL OF CATHERINE HAMILTON.
His sister Catherine was both a warm-hearted Scotchwoman and a decided Huguenot. She would not make her escape, but appeared at Holyrood in the presence of the ecclesiastical tribunal and of the king himself. ‘By what means,’ they said to her, ‘do you expect to be saved?’—‘By faith in the Saviour,’ she replied, ‘and not by works.’ Then one of the canonists, Master John Spence, said at great length—‘It is necessary to distinguish between various kinds of works. In the first place, there are works of congruity, secondly, there are works of condignity. The works of the just are of this latter category, and they merit life ex condigno. There are also pious works; then works of supererogation;’ and he explained in scholastic terms what all these expressions meant. These strange words sounded in Catherine’s ears like the noise of a false-bass (faux-bourdon). Wearied with this theological babbling, she got excited, and exclaimed—‘Works here, works there.... What signify all the works?... There is one thing alone which I know with certainty, and that is that no work can save me, except the work of Christ my Saviour.’ The doctor sat amazed and made no answer, while the king strove in vain to hide a fit of laughter. He was anxious to save Catherine, and made a sign for her to come to him; he then entreated her to declare to the tribunal that she respected the Church. Catherine, who had never had a thought of setting herself in rebellion against the higher powers, gave the king leave to say what he wished, and withdrew first into England, then to France. She probably entered the family of her husband,[182] who, during his lifetime, was a French officer in the suite of the duke of Albany.
But these punishments and banishments did not put an end to the storm. Several other evangelical Christians were also obliged at that time to leave Scotland. Gawin Logie, a canon of St. Andrews, and principal regent of St. Leonard’s College, at which Patrick Hamilton had exercised so powerful an influence, had diffused scriptural principles among the students to such an extent that people were accustomed to say, when they would make you understand that anyone was an evangelical Christian, ‘He has drunk at the well of St. Leonard’s.’ Logie quitted Scotland in 1534. Johnston, an Edinburgh advocate, Fife, a friend of Alesius, M’Alpine, and several others had to go into exile at the same time. The last-named, known on the continent by the name of Maccabæus, won the favor of the King of Denmark, and became a professor at the university of Copenhagen.