nergy, and unbounded
ambition, but also of considerable scholarly attainments. He did not
belong, it is true, to the school of Pole and Contarini, who would have
made concessions to the reformers in regard to doctrine, nor to that of
the disciples of D'Ailly and Gerson, who were pressing for a reformation
within the old church in regard to morals. His associations and
sympathies were rather with the laxer Italian and French humanist
school, both in their virtues and vices, and he seems to be lightly
referred to in their gossip as _ille latinus Juvenalis_.[43] He was a
great stickler for the liberties of holy church, and for years refused
to pay the tax imposed on him for the support of the College of
Justice.[44] It was no doubt by his counsel that heretical processes
from the first were carried on under the canon law, and that that code
and French consuetudinary ecclesiastical law were more completely
naturalised in Scotland than they had been before. Most of his time from
1514 to 1524 was passed abroad--the later years in the diplomatic
service of his country; and he had acquitted himself with much credit
and success. He had been subsequently employed in the negotiations for
the marriage of the king, first with the daughter of the King of France,
and after her death with Mary of Guise, and in both missions had given
high satisfaction to his sovereign. He had no sooner returned home in
1524-25, than the same measures of cruel restraint against the reformers
began to be adopted here which had already been put in practice in
France; and he was a member of the various Parliaments in which the
rigour of these measures had been increased. Even some of the hardest
sayings of the Scottish king against heretics were but the echo of those
of his father-in-law, the King of France.

Like too many of the high dignitaries of the Scottish church of his
time, Cardinal Betoun was of notoriously incontinent habits;[45] but he
was never, so far as I know, guilty of such shameless excesses as were
the boast of his comrade, Prior Hepburn, nor did he ever allow himself
to sink into the same indolence and unredeemed sensuality. He was above
all a "hierarchical fanatic," devoted to the cause of absolutism, who
would shrink from no measures, however cruel, to preserve intact the
privileges of his order, and to stamp out more earnest and generous
thought, whether that thought was aiming at the reformation of the old
church or the building up o