HAMILTON’S DEATH.
While the martyr’s heart was thus overflowing with love, several of the wretches who stood round him aggravated his sufferings. A baker took an armful of straw and threw it into the fire to increase its intensity; at the same moment a gust of wind from the sea quickened the flames, which rose above the stake. The chain round Patrick’s body was red-hot, and had by this time almost burnt him in two.[124] One of the bystanders, probably a friend of the Gospel, cried to him, ‘If thou still holdest true the doctrine for which thou diest, make us a sign.’ Two fingers of his hand were consumed; stretching out his arm, he raised the other three, and held them motionless in sign of his faith.[125] The torment had lasted from noon, and it was now nearly six o’clock. Hamilton was burnt over a slow fire.[126] In the midst of the tumult he was heard uttering this cry, ‘O God, how long shall darkness cover this realm, how long wilt thou permit the tyranny of men to triumph?’ The end was drawing nigh. The martyr’s arm began to fail: his three fingers fell. He said, ‘Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.’ His head drooped, his body sank down, and the flames completed their ravage and reduced it to ashes.
The crowd dispersed, thrilled by this grand and mournful sight, and never was the memory of this young reformer’s death effaced in the hearts of those who had been eyewitnesses of it. It was deeply engraven in the soul of Alesius. ‘I saw,’ said he, several years afterwards in some town in Germany, ‘I saw in my native land the execution of a high-born man, Patrick Hamilton.’[127] And he told the story in brief and penetrating words. ‘How singular was the fate of the two Hamiltons! Father and son both died a violent death: the former died the death of a hero; the latter, that of a martyr. The father had been in Scotland the last of the knights of the Middle Ages; the son was in the same land the first of the soldiers of Christ in the new time. The father brought honor to his family by winning many times the palm of victory in tournaments and combats; the son,’ says an illustrious man, Théodore Beza, ‘ennobled the royal race of the Hamiltons, sullied afterwards by some of its members, and adorned it with that martyr’s crown which is infinitely more precious than all kingly crowns.’[128]
CHAPTER VI.
ALESIUS.
(End of February 1528 to the end of 1531.)
EFFECTS OF HAMILTON’S DEATH.
That saying of Christian antiquity, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,’ was perhaps never verified in a more striking manner than in the case of Hamilton. The rumor of his death, reverberating in loud echoes from the Highlands, ran over the whole land. It was much the same as if the famous big cannon of Edinburgh Castle, Mons Meg, had been fired and the report had been re-echoed from the Borders to Pentland Frith. Nothing was more likely to win feudal Scotland to the Reformation than the end, at once so holy and so cruel, of a member of a family so illustrious. Nobles, citizens, and the common people, nay, even priests and monks, were on the point of being aroused by this martyrdom. Hamilton, who by his ministry was reformer of Scotland, became still more so by his death. For God’s work, a life long and laborious would have been of less service than were his trial, condemnation, and execution, all accomplished on one day. By giving up his earthly life for a life imperishable, he announced the end of the religion of the senses, and began the worship in spirit and in truth. The pile to which the priests had sent him became a throne, his torture was a triumph, and when the Crowns of the Martyrs were celebrated in Scotland, voices were heard exclaiming:—
E cœlo alluxit primam Germania lucem,
Qua Lanus et vitreis qua fluit Albis aquis.
Intulit huic lucem nostræ Dux prævius oræ.