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The Scottish Reformation
Chapter I.—The
Hamilton Period, a. d. 1515—1543.
Section 9. Sir John Borthwick and the Scottish Nobility and Gentry.
1540—1541 |
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Soon after the success of the satire of the "Three
Estates" at Linlithgow, and as if to turn to political account the good
impressions which had been made on the mind of the king, Sir Ralph
Sadler arrived at Holyrood on a special mission from Henry
VIII.
His instructions were to use his utmost efforts to
detach the Scottish monarch from the policy of the cardinal, to induce
him to imitate the example of ecclesiastical reform which Henry had set
in the Church of England, and to obtain from him a
definite promise to meet his royal uncle in a personal interview at
York. How he carried out these instructions, Sadler fully informs us in
his interesting letters to Henry, still extant; and nothing was wanting
on the part of so accomplished and experienced a negotiator to insure
success. But he failed in every point of his mission, and the cardinal
remained absolute master of the field.
"I assure your majesty," writes Sadler, "he excused
the cardinal in everything-, and seemed wondrous loath to hear ot any
thing that should sound as an untruth in him, but rather gave him great
praise." When the ambassador sought to excite James's cupidity by
pointing out the advantages which would result to his crown from the
suppression of some of the Scottish monasteries, he cut him short with
the curt reply, "By my troth, I thank God I have enough to live on, and
if we need anything that the clergy have, we may have it at our
pleasure." Sadler then began to "reprehend their idle life, their vices,
and their abuses," but even on this the most vulnerable point of the
king's defences, he was prepared to parry the ambassador's blow. "He
interrupted me," says Sadler, and laughed, saying, 'By God,' quoth he,
'they that be naught, ye shall hear that I shall redress them, and make
them live like religious men, according to their professions.' 'Sir,'
quoth I, 'it will be hard to do.' 'Well,' quoth he, 'you shall hear
tell;' and so began he to break off, as though he had no will to talk
more thereof."
A remarkable instance of the cardinal's power, and of
the boldness with which he used it, occurred during Sadler's sojourn in
Edinburgh. It was the season of Lent, and Sadler being "an evil fishman,"
as he expresses it, used a diet of eggs and whitemeats; "whereupon the
bishops and priests raised a bruit, that I and all my folks did eat
flesh during Lent, and open proclamation was made, by the commandment of
the cardinal, in all the churches within his dioceses, "that whosoever
should buy an egg, or eat an egg, within those dioceses, should forfeit
no less than his body to the fire, to be burnt as an heretick, and all
his goods confiscate to the king."
Still, the foundation of this exorbitant power was
anything but secure. The very exorbitancy of it provoked opposition, and
this opposition was nowhere more undisguised than in the court itself.
The king sent Rothsay Herald to tell Sadler, "that whatsoever
publications were made, the king's pleasure was, that he should eat what
he would, and that victuals should be appointed to him of what he would
eat;" and when Sadler "thanked humbly his Grace," and assured Rothsay
that if he thought it was any offence to a* good conscience to eat eggs
and whitemeats, he would be as loath to eat them as the holiest of the
priests who thus had belied him. "Oh!" exclaimed the king's messenger,
scouting the idea of the holiness of the priests; "Oh! know ye not our
priests? A mischief on them all. I trust,"quoth he," the world
will amend here some day." "And thus," continues Sadler, "I had liberty
to eat what I would." But these were trifling, though significant
incidents, compared with other facts which the English Envoy observed on
this occasion. He reported to a member of the Privy Council in England,
that "the king himself was of a right good inclination," and so was a
great part of the nobility and commonalty of the realm. Of the noblemen
and gentlemen at court, who were "well given to the verity of Christ's
word and doctrine, there was a great number." The only, drawback was,
that the noblemen so minded were still young, and Sadler saw "none
amongst them that had any such agility of wit, gravity, learning, or
experience, as to take in hand the direction of things; so that the king
was of force driven to use the bishops and the clergy, as his only
ministers for the direction of the realm." But this was a drawback which
time would mend. The young noblemen who sat at the king's council table,
including the Earl of Errol, the Earl of Cassilis, and the Lord Erskine,
would not be always young, nor would their high stomach always be
content to see the whole power of the court and the state monopolised by
the prelates.
Beaton, in truth, was
uneasy, in the midst of all his apparent security. He felt the fabric of
his dominion tremble to its foundations. These English embassies alarmed
him. He dreaded the influence of Henry over his nephew, and he could not
but feel what a formidable antagonist he had in the English king. Could
he hope to be always able to thwart the wishes of Henry for a personal
interview with James'? Especially could he expect to do so, when Henry
had an increasing number of men to abet his wishes and aims in James's
own court and council No! with all his seemingly immense power, the
cardinal felt that he was not yet powerful enough. Hence his anxiety to
be armed with the full faculties of a legation a latere, which would
virtually make him a pope in the realm. And hence, too, a maxim of
persecuting policy which he was now preparing to lay down, for the
direction of his future action—that the church must not only strike
heavily, but strike high.
It was soon after the
departure of Sadler from Holyrood, that Beaton conceived the daring
design of singling out for persecution the heretics of the king's own
court. It was now plain to him that to burn obscure evangelical friars,
and to banish crowds of humble scholars addicted to the new learning,
was not enough. To save the church, her lightnings must fall upon the
tall pines and the lofty towers. To make sure of the king, he must find
means to deprive him of all his reforming courtiers and councillors. As
early as May, 1540, his plan of action was matured.
Among the king's
favourite attendants, Beaton had for some time regarded with an evil eye
the accomplished knight, Sir John Borthwick. A younger son of William,
third Lord Borthwick, Sir John had served with distinction in the army
of France, where he had risen to be lieutenant of the French king's
guard. At the Scottish court he was styled Captain Borthwick, and at the
time of Sadler's visit, he was in close attendance upon the person of
the king. He was a man of varied accomplishments; a scholar as well as a
soldier, a theologian as well as a courtier. He had a library well
replenished with the new books of the time, and it was imputed to him as
a crime, that among these were the English New Testament and divers
treatises of Erasmus, (Ecolampa-dius, and Melancthon. These books " he
read and studied, as well openly as privately," and, being zealous for
the truth, he was accused, no doubt quite justly, " of presenting and
communicating his books to others, and of instructing and teaching many
christians in the same, to divert and turn them away" from what seemed
to the clergy, "the true christian and catholic faith." Nor was this all
Sir John was guilty of a still heavier crime. He laboured hard to make a
convert to Lutheranism of the king himself. He not only held and
affirmed that the king should appropriate to himself all the
possessions, lands, and rents of the church, "but for this end and
purpose, he many times wrote unto the king, and with his whole endeavour
persuaded him thereto." In a word, Sir John was a holder of what were
then called, "the heresies of England," and had persuaded many persons
to embrace the same; "willing and desiring, and with his whole heart
praying, that the Church of Scotland might be brought to the same spirit
and state, and to like ruin, as the Church of England was already come
to."
That Beaton should have been anxious to rid himself
of such an enemy at court is not surprising. Borthwick was too
formidable an ally of Henry to be allowed to remain unchallenged and
unmolested in a position jso near the ear of the king. He was formally
accused of heresy, and summoned to appear at the primate's tribunal on
the 28th of May. Would the king protect his own servant, and one of the
chief ornaments Of his court If Borthwick reckoned upon the king's
support he was disappointed. It was probably by the monarch's advice
that he fled to England, and allowed judgment to pass against him by
default The tribunal sat with great pomp and solemnity on the appointed
day at St Andrews, and Sir John was not only condemned, and forfeited,
and banished from the kingdom, but his effigy was
ignominiously burnt at the market crosses of St Andrews and Edinburgh,
"in token of malediction and curse, and for a perpetual remembrance of
his obstinacy and condemnation." His "articles" were twelve in number,
to all of which he afterwards wrote and published answers, distinguished
by eminent learning and ability. The piece constitutes indeed, one of
the most interesting literary monuments of the early period of the
Reformation. Borthwick lived to return to Scotland after the Reformation
was accomplished; was rehabilitated in his estates in 1561, and "ended
his age with fulness of days about the year 1570, at St Andrews, where,
thirty years before, he had been burnt in effigy."
Encouraged by the king's unworthy connivance on this
occasion, the cardinal proceeded with all his wonted energy to follow up
his advantage. While every Lutheran in the court trembled to see the
king's indifference to the fate of his most faithful servants, Beaton
was emboldened by it to open up to James the whole extent of his design.
Having associated with himself several of the other prelates, they
presented to the king a scroll containing the names of more than a
hundred of the nobility of the kingdom, and other landed proprietors of
inferior rank, who were all suspected or known to be favourers of
heresy. It was their desire, they said, that proceedings should be taken
against the whole of these men, with a view to the complete extirpation
of heresy from the realm; and they represented to the king the immense
profits that would accrue to the crown from the forfeiture of so large a
proportion of the landholders of the country. But with all his ability
and knowledge of princes, Beaton had miscalculated the effect of this
atrocious proposal. His anti-Lutheran zeal far outran the king's. James
was shocked at the suggestion of such a wholesale scheme of execution
and confiscation. His better nature revolted from it with horror, and
broke forth in high indignation against his ruthless prelates. "
Pack you, get you to your charges, reform your own lives, and be not
instruments of discord between my nobility and me, or else, I avow to
God, I will reform you, if ever I hear such motion of you again." It was
an answer, as Knox remarked, worthy of a prince. The bishops were
"dashed and confounded by it, and ceased for a season to tempt him any
further to consent to their wicked design."
That such a scroll of noble and wealthy proscripts
should have been exhibited to the king, is a fact which throws a flood
of light upon the progress which the Reformation had made at this early
period among the upper classes of the kingdom; and it is one which ought
to be borne in mind when we sit in judgment, as we are often summoned by
unfriendly critics to do, upon the sincerity of the attachment of the
Scottish nobility to reformation principles. The truth is, that the
Scottish Reformation, even when viewed as a strictly religious movement,
owed more to the aristocracy of the kingdom than to any other class. It
was not a democratic movement in the sense of having originated in the
lower ranks of the people, or of having been chiefly sustained by their
zeal and endurance. It began with Patrick Hamilton, a nobleman; at the
close of the Hamilton period, it numbered its adherents, among the
nobility and gentry, by hundreds; and down to the hour of its final
triumph, almost all its leaders were men of superior family, as well as
of superior culture. - The Scottish Reformation has often been called an
ascending movement, and so it was, in the sense that it did not commence
with, or receive any aid or direction from the heads of the Church and
the State. But it was a descending movement as well, because, beginning
in the ranks of the aristocracy it penetrated downwards among the
popular masses. In this respect the Reformation of the Scottish Church
seemed to obey the law of Feudality, which was then so prominent a
characteristic of all Scottish social life. The government of the
kingdom was an aristocracy almost as much as it was a monarchy. The
episcopacy of the Church being almost exclusively in the hands of the
sons of the lesser barons, was only the ecclesiastical branch of the
power and prerogative of the nobles. The temporal lords and the
spiritual lords reduced to very narrow limits, between them, the power
and prerogatives of the crown, and wielded an almost unrestricted
dominion over the rights and liberties of the people. Scotland remained
in the sixteenth century as feudal, in the spirit of her institutions
and life, as she had been in the middle ages. It was perfectly natural
then that her aristocracy should have been the prime movers in the great
work of her Reformation, as in all her other important national affairs.
The upper classes were still the chief seat and organ of the national
life and energies. The lower classes were still content to follow in all
things, in the wake of their liege lords. How natural then, that when
the heart of the nation began to be stirred with a new religious life,
it should have been the upper classes who furnished both the foremost
champions, and the foremost persecutors of reform—both the Hamiltons and
Borthwicks, who suffered death or banishment in its defence, and the
Beatons and Dunbars who sought to stifle it in flames and blood! |
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