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.