In the days before newspapers tidings were carried from place to place by wandering merchants and itinerant scholars. Far more than today propaganda was dependent on personal intercourse. One of the first preachers of Lutheranism in Scotland was a Frenchman named La Tour, who was martyred on his return to his own country. The noble Patrick Hamilton made a pilgrimage to the newly founded University of Marburg, and possibly to Wittenberg. Filled, as his Catholic countryman, Bishop John Leslie put it, "with venom very poisonable and deadly . . . soaked out of Luther and other archheretics," he returned to find the martyr's crown in his native land. [Sidenote: February 29, 1528] "The reek of Patrick Hamilton" infected all upon whom it blew. Other young men visited Germany. Some, like Alexander Alesius and John MacAlpine, found positions in {355} foreign universities. Others visited Wittenberg for a short time to carry thence the new gospel. A Scotch David[1] appears at Wittenberg in January 1528. Another Scot, "honorably born and well seen in scholastic theology, exiled from his land on account of the Word," made Luther's acquaintance in May, 1529. Another of the Reformer's visitors was James Wedderburn whose brother, John, [Sidenote: 1540-2] translated some of the German's hymns, and published them as "Ane compendious Booke of Godly and spiritual Songs."
While men like these were bringing tidings of the new faith back to their countrymen, others were busy importing and distributing Lutheran books. The Parliament prohibited [Sidenote: July 17, 1525] all works of "the heretic Luther and his disciples," but it could not enforce this law. The English agent at Antwerp reported to Wolsey that New Testaments and other English works were bought by Scottish merchants [Sidenote: February 20, 1527] and sent to Edinburgh and St. Andrews. The popularity and influence of Tyndale's and Coverdale's Bible is proved by the rapid anglicizing, from this date onward, of the Scots dialect. The circulation of the Scriptures in English is further proved by the repetition of the injunctions against using them. But the first Bible printed in Scotland was that of Alexander Arbuthnot in 1579, based on the Geneva Bible in 1561.
[Sidenote: March 14, 1531]
Another indication of the growth of Lutheranism is the request of King James V to Consistory for permission to tax his clergy one-third of their revenues in order to raise an army against the swarm of his Lutheran subjects. As these Protestants met in private houses, Parliament passed a law, [Sidenote: 1540] "That none hold nor let be holden in their houses nor other ways, congregations or conventicles to commune or dispute of {356} the Holy Scripture, without they be theologians approved by famous universities."
As the new party grew the battle was joined. At least twelve martyrs perished in the years 1539-40. [Sidenote: Pamphlets] The field was taken on either side by an army of pamphlets, ballads and broadsides, of which the best known, perhaps, is David Lyndsay's Ane Satire of the thrie Estatis. In this the clergy are mercilessly attacked for greed and wantonness. [Sidenote: 1540] The New Testament is highly praised by some of the characters introduced into the poem, but a pardoner complains that his credit has been entirely destroyed by it and wishes the devil may take him who made that book. He further wishes that "Martin Luther, that false loon, Black Bullinger and Melanchthon" had been smothered in their chrisom-cloths and that St. Paul had never been born.
[Sidenote: Mary Stuart, born Dec. 8, 1542]
When James V died, he left the crown to his infant daughter of six days old, that Mary whose beauty, crimes and tragic end fixed the attention of her contemporaries and of posterity alike. For the first three years of her reign the most powerful man in the kingdom was David Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop of St. Andrews. His policy, of course, was to maintain the Catholic religion, and this implied the defence of Scotch independence against England. Henry VIII, with characteristic lack of scruple, plotted to kidnap the infant queen and either to kidnap or to assassinate the cardinal. Failing in both, he sent an army north with orders to put man, woman and child to the sword wherever resistance was made. Edinburgh castle remained untaken, but Holyrood was burned and the country devastated as far as Sterling.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Beaton]
Defeated by England, Beaton was destined to {357} perish in conflict with his other enemy, Protestantism. During this time of transition from Lutheranism to Calvinism, the demands of the Scotch reformers would have been more moderate than they later became. They would doubtless have been content with a free Bible, free preaching and the sequestration of the goods of the religious orders. Under George Wishart, who translated the First Helvetic Confession, [Sidenote: 1536 or 1537] the Kirk began to assume its Calvinistic garb and to take the aspect of a party with a definite political program. The place of newspapers, both as purveyors of information and as organs of public opinion, was taken by the sermons of the ministers, most of them political and all of them controversial. Of this party Beaton was the scourge. He himself believed that in 1545 heresy was almost extinct, and doubtless his belief was confirmed when he was able to put Wishart to death. [Sidenote: March 1, 1546] In revenge for this a few fanatics murdered him. [Sidenote: May 29]
[Sidenote: John Knox]