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seemed for the moment to indicate the goodwill of the Regent, and to tend to the advance of the Reformation. The favour of Arran, however, was but shortlived. The French and papal party, with Cardinal Beaton at their head, soon regained their ascendancy. Just as under the previous interregnum, fifteen years before, all the efforts of Henry VIII.-defeated to some extent by his own injustice and violence—were unsuccessful to bind any section of the Scottish nobles permanently to his interest; and the renewed connection with France laid the foundation for confusion and misery to the country for more than another halfcentury.

So soon as Beaton attained his object, and once more held the substantial power of the kingdom in his grasp, he resolved to crush his enemies with no sparing hand. His bloodthirsty vengeance had been baffled by the reluctant pity of the late King, who had shrunk with horror from the atrocity, suggested to him by the clergy, of exterminating by a single stroke two or three hundred of the most influential of the reformers whose names they had presented to him in a list.* There seemed no obstacle now, however, to the full gratification of his vengeance, while the instinct of self-preservation probably combined with that of his natural imperiousness and cruelty to direct him to the special object of his attack. Whatever be the credit due to Tytler's special insinuations against Wishart-which appear to rest on very slender evidence-Beaton, no doubt,

KNOX, Book I.; PITSCOTTIE, p. 164. The numbers vary; Knox speaks of "a hundred land men, besides others of meaner degree;" Pitscottie says seventeen score."

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identified this courageous preacher with his political as well as religious enemies. He was the intimate associate, and, by his eloquence and activity, the most powerful support of the anti-papal or English party. The cardinal knew this well, and aimed accordingly, by his apprehension and death, to strike the most fatal blow he could at the party.

George Wishart, as he stands depicted in the pages of Knox and Calderwood, is a singularly interesting character; of gentle, winning, and unassuming disposition, with a strange wild tinge of enthusiasm, an intense spirit of devotion, and a commanding eloquence;

a man of sic graces as before him were never heard in this realm, yea, and rare to be found yet in ony man." Obliged to seek refuge some time before in England from the persecution of the Bishop of Brechin, he returned to Scotland in 1543,* with the commissioners who had been sent to negotiate a treaty with Henry VIII. He had been dwelling for some time in the very centre of the Anglican reform movement at Cambridge, where the influence of Bilney and Latimer still lived; and he seems to have caught some share of the spirit of both the mild rapture of the one, and the stern denunciatory zeal of the other. On his return to Scotland he travelled from town to town, and county to county, preaching the truth which had become precious to his own soul. He made a deep impression wherever he went; his words wrought with a marvellous persuasiveness on some even of the most hardened and wicked in the land-such men, for example, as

* Knox says 1544.

the Laird of Scheill, described by Knox, who, as the preacher on a "hette and pleasant day" of summer, addressed the crowd from a "dyke on a muir edge, upon the south-west side of Mauchlin," was so affected that "the tears rane fra his eyne in sic abundance that all men wondered," and who by his future life, moreover, showed that "his conversion then wrought was without hypocrisy."*

In his preaching excursions, Wishart gathered around him devoted followers, and was the inspiring mind of the Protestant party, now adding rapidly to its numbers. It is as one of these followers that Knox first clearly appears upon the scene of the Reformation, and in a very characteristic attitude. He tells us himself, that from the time that the zealous preacher came to Lothian, he waited carefully upon him, bearing "a twahanded sword." This precaution had been used since an attempt had been made to assassinate the preacher; and the bold spirit of Knox, now kindling into its full ardour, rejoiced in the attendant post of danger. At this very time, however, the machinations of the Cardinal against Wishart had reached their completion; and while he rested at Ormiston, after his last remarkable sermon at Haddington, he was made a prisoner by the Earl of Bothwell; while Beaton himself lay within a mile, at the head of 500 men, in case any attempt should be made to rescue him. There is a strange weird interest in Knox's description of his last interview with the preacher, and his final sermon. appointed at not meeting with the friends he expected, -the Earl of Cassillis and others, and disheartened

* History, Book I.

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by the apparent decline of the popular interest in the reformed cause, he spoke to his intrepid sword-bearer of his weariness with the world, and "as he spacit up and doun behind the hie altar, mair than half an hour before sermon, his verie countenance and visage declarit the grief and alteration of his mind." The shadow of his approaching doom had crept upon him; and when Knox wished to share his fate, and accompany him to Ormiston, he said, "Nay, return to your bairnes, and God bless you; ane is sufficient for a sacrifice."

Knox's "bairnes" were his pupils, the sons of the lairds of Niddrie and Ormiston. In default of any more definite occupation, he had settled as a quiet tutor to the sons of these families. From the time of his quitting St Andrews up to this time, when, in his fortieth year, he first publicly appears in connection with Wishart, we can scarcely be said to know anything further of him. As has been pointed out, there is considerable significance in this long period of silence in Knox's history. It speaks strongly of his naturally peaceful disposition, of the patient maturity with which he formed his opinions, and of the consequent absurdity of the notion that would fix him down at once as a mere ambitious and turbulent partisan. It may serve also to explain the singular decision and completeness of his views when the outburst of his reforming zeal at length came.

. Now, after the apprehension of Wishart, he seems to have remained cautiously in his retirement, mourning the dreadful fate of his friend, till the great event, * History, Book I.

perpetrated at the old castle of St Andrews, on the morning of the 29th May 1546, summoned him from his privacy, and imparted a new direction and a nobler interest to his life. This event lives nowhere so vividly and powerfully as in his own wonderful narrative, in which the horror of the circumstances is wildly relieved by a stern glee, kindling in the writer as he tells them in careful outline. It is equally needless to condemn the spirit of the historian, or to find excuses for it. If the horror of the transaction obscures in our minds all feeling of pleasantry as we look back upon it, we have to thank Knox, and such men as Knox, that there is left to us no occasion of any other feeling. To him, and to all honest and patriot hearts in Scotland in the middle of the sixteenth century, the death of Cardinal Beaton, under whatever circumstances of atrocity, could not, unfortunately, be anything else but a circumstance of gratulation. It is the divine doom of tyranny, in whatever shape, that men should rejoice at its murder, even if that murder be "foully done." The joy is not in fault, but the cause of it. The former is a pure manifestation of human feeling, the latter an eternal blasphemy and violation of human right. Knox is gleeful, therefore, with a scornful laughter, over the assassination of Beaton, simply because he realised all the meaning of the event for his country, and could not see the downfall of a power so hateful without a natural impulse of jubilee. As we look back into the dim grey of that May morning, we only see the solitary and helpless man raised from his bed, and in the mur* History, Book I.

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