D Hay Fleming
These martyrdoms in various parts of the country prove that Protestantism was spreading, in spite of Parliament and the King, in spite of provincial councils and inquisitors. These martyrdoms, with the exception of John Roger’s, were designed to warn and terrify the populace, yet the authorities did not always succeed in their object. In the sixteenth century, as in the next, heroic souls were no doubt stirred to their depths by the sight of earnest men calmly and fearlessly facing a cruel death in the strength and grace of Him whom they loved and served. The teaching of some of these men must also have helped greatly to advance the cause they had at heart. Knox relates that John Roger had fruitfully preached Christ Jesus to the comfort of many in Angus and Mearns; and in May 1543 the magistrates and town council of Aberdeen had agreed, at Regent Arran’s request, to give friar John Roger and friar Walter Thomson three shillings a day, with a respectable chamber, for preaching and teaching the true Word of God, and for praying daily for the Regent, for the realm, and for the good town of Aberdeen.
Thomas Forret, while a canon of Inchcolm, had been converted by reading one of Augustine’s books. After becoming vicar of Dollar, he preached every Sabbath and taught his flock the Ten Commandments. He penned a little catechism which is said to have led many to embrace the truth. And when pardoners2 came to his parish with their wares, he faithfully warned his people that these men were deceivers and that no pardon for sin could come from the Pope or from any other, but only by the blood of Christ. The influence of such a man, who is known to have been specially kind to poor sick people, must have been very great.
Still greater was the impression made by the teaching and death of George
1Another edited extract from Fleming’s The Reformation in Scotland. Last month’s article told of the witness of Patrick Hamilton and other Reformers, some of who gave their lives in martyrdom rather than recant.
2Those who sold indulgences.
Wishart, who was described by one of his English pupils as a man of tall stature, black-haired, long-bearded, comely, courteous, lowly, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and well-travelled. In Knox’s opinion, he was not only particularly learned in godly knowledge and all honest human science, but clearly illuminated with the spirit of prophecy, and more richly endowed with graces than anyone ever heard of before in the realm. Though he knew that Cardinal Beaton was thirsting for his blood, he preached over a large part of Scotland in 1545, and proved himself to be a son of consolation as well as a son of thunder.
Through his ministrations, the plague-stricken inhabitants of Dundee ceased to fear death. The common people always desired to hear him speak and they appear to have flocked to hear him – except in Haddington immediately before his arrest. On one occasion he preached for more than three hours to a multitude gathered around him on an Ayrshire moor. The Word was precious in those days, else the audience would not have listened so long. Some idea of the searching and practical nature of his preaching may be inferred from an incident thus recorded by Knox: “In that sermon, God wrought so wonderfully with him, that one of the most wicked men that was in that country, named Laurence Ranckin, laird of Sheill, was converted. The tears ran from his eyes in such abundance that all men wondered. His conversion was without hypocrisy, for his life and conversation witnessed it in all times to come.”
Wishart’s theological position can be ascertained from his translation of the First Helvetic Confession and from the answers he gave to the articles with which he was charged at his trial. He had taught in Cambridge and, like Patrick Hamilton, had travelled on the Continent. At his trial he incidentally mentioned that he had sailed on the Rhine.
By that trial, Cardinal Beaton and Gavin Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, who had long been at enmity, were reconciled. But barely three months after Wishart’s martyrdom, the Cardinal was slain in his own castle, from which he had gloated over the dying agonies of his victim. (Many attempts have been made to implicate Wishart in the plots against the Cardinal, but they have all been unsuccessful.) With Beaton, the Papacy lost much of its political power in Scotland, for although his successor John Hamilton could rival him in uncleanness, he was neither so unflinching nor so astute.
Walter Mill’s influence as a preacher was very much less than Wishart’s, but as a martyr it was much greater. The unsparing cruelty, which consigned to the flames for his opinions a frail old man of over 80, evoked curses on the persecuting Church, and the deepest sympathy with the steadfast and courageous victim. “You shall know”, he said to the tribunal which condemned him, “that I will not recant the truth, for I am corn; I am no chaff; I will
not be blown away with the wind, nor burst with the flail, but I will abide both.” His death, on 28 April 1558, rang the knell of the Papacy in Scotland, and out of his ashes sprang thousands of Protestants.
For most of the martyrdoms in Scotland preceding the Reformation, Cardinal Beaton was chiefly responsible, but Archbishop Hamilton took credit for bringing Adam Wallace to the stake. For Walter Mill’s death, he and Patrick Hepburn – two rotten pillars of a rotten cause – were principally blamed. Only three weeks before Mill’s martyrdom, the Archbishop was urging the Earl of Argyll to put away his heretical chaplain, John Douglas. He alleged that the Queen, the clergy and others murmured greatly against him for tolerating such persons in the realm; he regarded himself as responsible to God for the prevention of heresy, and honour and conscience forbade him to endure Douglas. However, when he wished in 1554 to get his powers extended at Rome, he spoke as if he required no queen and no clergy to hound him on against heretics:
If the Archbishop ever felt inclined to boast of his part in condemning Walter Mill, it is not at all likely that his inclination survived for long, for, as it was expressed in 1568: “From that fire rose such a commotion, which caused such trouble to their stomachs that they rued it ever after”. A work by Quintin Kennedy states that in 1558, the year of Mill’s martyrdom, men murmured against the Church, saying that it punished heresy more cruelly than transgression of the law of God, and so set its law above God’s law.
Many others did much to spread the faith for which the martyrs died. Some circulated books; some spoke to their friends; some boldly preached. Next to the Bible, preaching was the most effective cause of the Reformation. To those who had been nurtured in darkness, the message of the new preachers came as light from heaven, as life to the dead. It was not a mere set of new or long-forgotten doctrines that they preached, but a personal reformation to begin at the heart, kindled and carried on by the free grace of God. Patrick Hamilton was charged with having taught “that all Christians, worthy to be called Christians, do know that they are in the state of grace”. This must have been rather a startling doctrine to those who had been brought up in what was afterwards denounced, in the National Covenant, as the Roman Antichrist’s “general and doubtsome faith.”3
Before the middle of February 1543, Regent Arran, in the first flush of his temporary Protestant zeal, had appointed a Black Friar to preach. He based his sermon on the abuses of the Church and the need to set forth Christ’s doctrine and to circulate “the Bible and Testament” in English for the better instruction of the ignorant. This friar – who preached daily under the
3Rome denies the possibility of assurance of salvation.
protection of Arran, sometimes in Holyrood Abbey, sometimes in the great church of St Giles’ – was doubtless Thomas Guillaume. He and John Rough, both Black Friars, were for a short time preachers or chaplains to Arran. Knox describes Guillaume as a man of solid judgment, of reasonable education for that age, a prompt and good speaker, whose doctrine was wholesome, but without great vehemence against superstition; while Rough, less learned and more simple, was more vehement against all impiety.
Knox wrote, “The doctrine of these two provoked against them, and against the governor also, the hatred of all such as more favoured darkness than light, and their own bellies more than God. The Grey Friars . . . croaked as [if] they had been ravens, yea rather they yelled and roared as devils in hell, ‘Heresy, heresy! Guillaume and Rough will carry the governor to the devil.'” The strenuous opposition to the preaching of these two friars is proof of its power and success, and both of them had a direct influence on Knox. Guillaume was the first man from whom he received any taste of the truth, and it was Rough who called him to the ministry.
Cardinal Beaton had been seized in the end of January 1543 and was imprisoned finally in his own castle in St Andrews. In consequence of this, the diocese of St Andrews, if not the whole of Scotland, had been laid under interdict; and so the mass and other services of the Church ceased for the time being, save in those cases where Arran as regent compelled the priests to act. To those who still had faith in the sacraments and ceremonies of the old Church, it must have been a crushing punishment to be deprived of the mass, of “all the divine offices”, of baptism for their children and of “Christian burial” for their dead. It was doubtless the resentment caused by this, and the outcries of the Grey Friars, that rendered it necessary for Arran and the Earl of Angus to accompany Guillaume when he preached in Holyrood or St Giles’, as he was in some danger of being torn in pieces.
Early in April Beaton regained his liberty. Soon the superficial Arran was said to be ruled by his illegitimate brother, John Hamilton (afterwards Archbishop of St Andrews), who had just returned from France; and shortly afterwards he dismissed his Protestant preachers. Guillaume went to England, but Rough went to Ayrshire, where he no doubt continued to sow the good seed of the Word among his fellow countrymen.
At his trial, Wishart declared that the glory of God was made manifest through the preaching of the Word. When he had preached in Lothian, Knox, his enthusiastic disciple, carried a two-handed sword for his protection. Some 10 months after Beaton’s death, Knox took refuge in what had been the arch-persecutor’s stronghold; and in St Andrews, which had been the scene of Craw’s, Hamilton’s, Forrest’s and Wishart’s martyrdom, he was
called to the ministry. There, in his first sermon, he sounded the keynote of the Scottish Reformation with a boldness which amazed his hearers. Others had “sned [trimmed] the branches of the Papistrie”, but he struck at the root to destroy the whole.
That Knox was already an out-and-out Protestant is apparent, not only from the summary he has preserved of his first sermon, but also from the points drawn from his discourses, which formed the subject of discussion between him on the one hand, and John Wynram and Friar Arbuckle on the other. These articles strike indeed at the very roots of Romanism.
“1. No mortal man can be the head of the Church.
“2. The Pope is an antichrist, and so no member of Christ’s mystical body.”
“5. The mass is abominable idolatry, blasphemous to the death of Christ, and a profanation of the Lord’s Supper.
“6. There is no purgatory in which the souls of men can either suffer or be purged after this life; but heaven remains for the faithful, and hell for the reprobate and unthankful.
“7. Praying for the dead is vain, and to the dead is idolatry.
“8. Those are not bishops who do not preach personally, without substitutes.
“9. By the law of God, tithes do not necessarily appertain to the clergy.”
Two of the articles not only strike at the errors of the Papacy, but contain the essence of the fundamental principle of Puritanism:
“3. Man may neither make nor devise a religion that is acceptable to God, but is bound to observe the religion received from God, without chopping or changing thereof.
“4. The sacraments of the New Testament ought to be ministered as they were instituted by Christ Jesus and practised by His apostles; nothing ought to be added unto them; nothing ought to be diminished from them.”
Thus, in the summer of 1547, Knox had clearly laid down the definite and far-reaching lines on which the Reformation was to be carried out in Scotland. And that Reformation might have been achieved much sooner than it was, had St Andrews Castle been able to hold out against the French for a few months longer. Not until the autumn of 1555 did Knox again preach in Scotland. He had been preceded by William Harlaw and John Willock. By the preaching of these three for a time, the Protestants were stirred up and strengthened. In 1556 those in the Mearns bound themselves to maintain, to the utmost of their power, the true preaching of the gospel, as God should give them preachers and opportunity.
In 1558, Harlaw exhorted publicly in Edinburgh, John Douglas preached both in Leith and Edinburgh, and Paul Methven in Dundee. Willock returned in the same year and, when dangerously ill, exhorted from his bed those
nobles, barons and gentlemen who came to him. Others laboured in Angus and Mearns, one of them being John Borthwick. It was said of them: “This John was a vehement man, inculcating the law [of God] and pain thereof; but Paul Methven was a more mild man, preaching the gospel of grace, and remission of sins in the blood of Christ”.