Three years before Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake outside St. Andrews Castle, young David Beaton, nephew of the Archbishop James Beaton, sailed over from France to work under his uncle. David had studied at the Scottish University in Paris beside brilliant scholars such as Patrick Hamilton. Very likely they knew one another. But what different choices they made! Patrick went to be tutored by reformers such as Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Francis Lambert, whereas David pursued political intrigue and conquest under James Beaton.
How much of a role David played in those early executions we do not know. We do know that David Beaton hated Reformation thinking passionately. Patrick Hamilton forced the Reformation before the Scottish. He was Scottish, not German. More than Scottish, he was one of Scotland’s favorite sons. A few years after Hamilton’s burning, Henry Forrest was burned (1533), then David Stratton and Norman Gourlay (1534). Others followed: named Simpson, Forrester, Keillor, Beverage, Forret, Russell, and Kennedy (1539). Besides this, droves of Christians became exiles.
The reason for this persecution was obvious. James and David Beaton were prelates in the Roman Catholic church at a time when they may have owned half of the property in all Scotland. The Beatons certainly had a vested interest in stunting the grownth of any Reformation on Scottish soil, and we judge that the younger Beaton excelled as the champion of Catholicism in Scotland. On that basis, David Beaton applied for and eventually received the Cardinal’s red hat, and after his uncle’s death in 1539, also became the virtual ruler of Scotland, titled Chancellor of the Kingdom. All this came his way because he promised Rome that Lutheranism would not sink its roots in Scotland.
In John Knox’s words, Beaton was “that bloody wolf the Cardinal,” “a vitious priest and wicked monster which neither minded God nor cared for man.” Of course, Knox cannot be considered an impartial judge of Beaton’s character. But interestingly, even Beaton’s defenders do not deny his disolute, debauched lifestyle. He kept his mistress in a luxurious mansion, and he fathered several illegitimate children. Even when trying to exonerate Beaton, author John Herkless wrote,
Beaton…was a typical prelate of the pre-Reformation times, in so far as immorality and worldliness are concerned; and while in these respects he fitly represents the character of that Church, he also stands as one who, by his rank and power, was responsible for her spiritual and moral degradation. The order of prelates…was in later times but a part of the larger order of social aristocrats whose aims were worldly, and whose habits of life were morally gross and politically tyrannical; and whether the Church corrupted the world or the world corrupted the Church, the religious and social life of Scotland before the Reformation had sunk to depths of degradation.
His biographer admits, “Unchaste and worldly he was, and his reputation has paid the full penalty of his sins and vices.” This last statement I disagree with. The historian’s displeasure is only a foretaste. The full penalty of Beaton’s sins and vices will be felt in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.
The ignominy given to Beaton’s name is owing most of all to his condemnation of George Wishart (1513-1546). The meeting of these two men is a classic study in contrasts. John Knox described Wishart as, “Courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn,” yet in the pulpit he appeared like one of the Hebrew prophets who had broken the limits of the centuries and appeared in Scotland.
Living in the decadent surroundings of Beaton’s Scotland, how did Wishart become such a man? He did not begin as a preacher. He was an acedemic who taught the classics. After his fiancee Elizabeth died of the plague, he found comfort in John 14 and there the truths of Christianity came alive. Thereafter he obtained a Greek New Testament, and began teaching it to his students instead of Greek philosophy.
He was tall, slight, with dark eyes, a long black beard, and a receding hair line. Never married; his life was simple and frugal. He gave away any extra clothes to the poor, slept in a spare room with a hard bed of straw under canvas, ate two meals a day and fasted twice a week.
Threatened to desist from teaching the gospel in Montrose, where his school was, in 1839 he fled to England where he taught at Cambridge University in the classics. For a time he was able to go to Zurich, Switzerland, and there his eyes were opened to the possibilities of consecutive Bible teaching. He also went to Geneva where the Reformation was in full swing.
Returning to Britain, he was emboldened to preach in his native Scotland as he had seen it done in Europe.
In Ayr, Edinburgh, Haddington, and Montrose, he preached in church buildings and under the spreading branches of friendly trees. Dundee was especially fruitful. There he preached through the book of Romans.
James Beaton had died, and his nephew David Beaton smoothly transitioned into the place of power. Elevated to the rank of Cardinal, his Roman church had nothing to gain from a Scottish Reformation, or from men like George Wishart.
For two years, Beaton plotted and conived for Wishart’s capture. Knox claimed that Beaton forged a letter to Wishart to ambush him. The letter, supposedly from Laird Kynneir, asked Wishart to come immediately because he “was stricken with a sudden sickness.”
In the meantime the traitor had provided threescore men, with jacks and spears, to lie in wait within a mile and a half of the town of Montrose, for his dispatch. The letter coming to his hand, he made haste at the first, for the boy had brought a horse; and so with some honest men, he passed forth of the town. But suddenly he stayed and, musing a space, turned back. ‘I will not go,’ he said; ‘I am forbidden by God. I am assured there is treason. Let some of you go to yonder place, and tell me what ye find.’ Diligence made, they found the treason, as it was; and this being shown with expedition to Master George, he answered, ‘I know that I shall finish my life in that bloodthirsty man’s hands; but it will not be in this manner.’
When the Bubonic Plague struck Dundee, Wishart returned there. On earlier visits scores had been converted under his preaching. Wishart stood on a ledge at the Cow Gate of the city and preached so sufferers who were laid outside the gate could hear him as well as those within the city. With sweet appeals, Wishart took Psalm 107 as his main text, “He sent His word and healed them.” Each day, as the evangelist continued, the audiences forgot their misery long enough to think about eternal things.
One day, stepping from the ledge, he spotted a monk named James Wilwhite staring at Wishart. Spotting his awkward stare, Wishart shouted, “What will you do?” and grabbed the man’s hand, which was concealed under a cloak. A dagger dropped to the ground. The infuriated crowd would have killed the would-be-assassin if Wishart had not pled for his life.
The people knew Beaton’s character. Bodyguards came in shifts to protect Wishart, headed by a young tutor from Hampton named John Knox. He carried a conspicuous sword that he held as Wishart preached. Wishart himself disagreed with the use of violence. He knew how the Reformation in Zurich was set back when Urlich Zwingli went out on the battle field, and was slaughtered alongside Zurich’s best young men.
There was no other man so visible, so outspoken for the truth of the Word of God in all Scotland. It appears that Wishart’s emphasis was to preach the gospel. In the main, the Reformers saw the Church and State as two things intermingled and amalgamated. Wishart’s own pupil, John Knox, became a magisterial Reformer, therefore repeating the error of the Catholic Church which he protested against. But it cannot be proven that Wishart promoted or ever encouraged the state-church idea, though certain of those who flocked to him were probably more energized by their political ideologies then they were by their thirst for spiritual reality. This was especially true of the lairds, who lived in dread of the grasping Cardinal.
Convinced that Wishart was part of an assassination plot against him, the Cardinal had spies in the realm looking for Wishart. Knowing the time was short, Wishart told Knox, “Return to thy bairns, one is sufficient for a sacrifice.” (Knox’s bairns were the three young men he tutored). Wishart was at Ormiston, visiting with Cockburn, and a couple other influential friends when, at midnight, the Earl of Bothwell appeared and demanded the surrender of Cockburn’s guests. The men discovered themselves surrounded by a company of Bothwell’s soldiers. Bothwell assured Wishart that his life would be safe, and therefore he yielded himself up. He was then taken to Elphinstone where Beaton himself was waiting with 500 of the Cardinal’s own soldiers.
Taken to the castle of St. Andrews, Wishart was dropped into a bottle-shaped dungeon. The only entrance was twenty five feet up from the floor. The room was fifteen feet wide. He moldered, without light or fresh air in that cell for four weeks before he was pulled out, scrubbed, and brought to trial. He was considered a very important prisoner. One hundred soldiers escorted him to appear before Cardinal Beaton in the Church at St. Andrews. Knox wrote, “Like a lamb led they him to sacrifice. As he entered the Abbey Church door, a poor man, vexed with great infirmities, asked his alms. To him he flung his purse. When he had come before the Cardinal, the sub-prior of the Abbey, Dean John Winram, stood up in the pulpit and made a sermon…taking his matter out of the thirteen chapter of Matthew.”
Wishart stood by the pulpit to listen to a long sermon decrying heretics. Strange that Winram did not understand the obvious teaching of Matthew 13:24-30, 34-43. But in those days the state churches thought that John 15:6 gave them all they needed to know about how to handle heretics.
After the sermon, Wishart stood in the pulpit and heard John Lauder read the eighteen charges against him related to the sacraments, saints, purgatory, and the marriage of priests. “When this well-fed priest had read them all, his face running with sweat and frothing at the mouth like a boar, he spit in Master George’s face and demanded, ‘What answerest thou, thou runagate, traitor and thief, to these sayings, which we have duly proved by sufficient witness against thee?'”
Midway into his defense, Lauder objected.
“Thou hast taken the power at thine own hand, without any authority of the Church. We forethink [repent] that thou hast been a preacher so long.” In the background the prelates whispered, “If we give him license to preach, he is so crafty and in Holy Scripture so exercised that he will persuade the people to his opinion, and raise them against us.”
Two months after Wishart’s execution, Cardinal Beaton was brutally murdered and his body flung from an upper window of his home. Legend has it that it was from the same window that he had watched Master George Wishart being burned to ashes. The assassins commandeered the castle, and against his better judgment, John Knox entered the castle as the chaplain to the new landlords. But the French heard about the insurrection and sailed into the harbor with enough troops to retake the castle. Mercifully, Knox was not executed, but he did serve nineteen months as a galley slave on a French ship until the English secured his release. Emaciated, but no less determined, the wiry Scot went on to become the fierce preacher and shrewd magisterial Reformer which historians cannot ignore.
Materials for this article taken from:
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James W. Baird, Thunder Over Scotland, The Life of George Wishart, Green Leaf Press, 1982
John Knox, History of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland, presently available through Moody Press, Chicago
John Herkless, Cardinal Beaton–Priest and Politician, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh