in a belated and futile attempt at
reformation of manners (and wonderfully bad manners they confessedly
were), and of education from within. The Congregation, the Protestants,
on the other hand, were preparing openly to defend themselves and their
adherents from persecution, an honest, manly, and laudable endeavour, so
long as they did not persecute other Christians. Their preachers--such
as Harlaw, Methuen, and Douglas--were publicly active. A moment of
attempted suppression must arrive, greatly against the personal wishes of
Archbishop Hamilton, who dreaded the conflict.

In March 1558, Hamilton courteously remonstrated with Argyll for
harbouring Douglas. He himself was "heavily murmured against" for his
slackness in the case of Argyll, by churchmen and other "well given
people," and by Mary of Guise, whose daughter, by April 24, 1558, was
married to the Dauphin of France. Argyll replied that he knew how the
Archbishop was urged on, but declined to abandon Douglas.

"It is a far cry to Loch Awe"; Argyll, who died soon after, was too
powerful to be attacked. But, sometime in April 1558 apparently, a poor
priest of Forfarshire, Walter Myln, who had married and got into trouble
under Cardinal Beaton, was tried for heresy, and, without sentence of a
secular judge, it is said, was burned at St. Andrews, displaying serene
courage, and hoping to be the last martyr in Scotland. Naturally there
was much indignation; if the Lords and others were to keep their Band
they must bestir themselves. They did bestir themselves in defence of
their favourite preachers--Willock, Harlaw, Methuen; a ci-devant friar,
Christison; and Douglas. Some of these men were summoned several times
throughout 1558, and Methuen and Harlaw, at least, were "at the horn"
(outlawed), but were protected--Harlaw at Dumfries, Methuen at Dundee--by
powerful laymen. At Dundee, as we saw, by 1558, Methuen had erected a
church of reformed aspect; and "reformed" means that the Kirk had already
been purged of altars and images. Attempts to bring the ringleaders of
Protestant riots to law were made in 1558, but the precise order of
events, and of the protests of the Reformers, appears to be dislocated in
Knox's narrative. He himself was not present, and he seems never to have
mastered the sequence of occurrences. Fortunately there exists a
fragment by a well-informed writer, apparently a contemporary, the
"Historie of the Estate of Scotland" covering the