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]

In the consummation of the religious revolution during the next quarter
of a century, one factor was the personality of John Knox. A born
partisan, a man of one idea who could see no evil on his own side and
no good on the other, as a good fighter and a good hater he has had few
equals. His supreme devotion to the cause he embraced made him
credulous of evil in his foes, and capable of using deceit and of
applauding political murder. Of his first preaching against Romanism
it was said, "Other have sned [snipped] the branches, but this man
strikes at the root," and well nigh the latest judgment passed upon
him, that of Lord Acton, is that he differed from