Jezebel's priests appeared to Elijah, so seemed Cardinal David Beton to the Protestant leaders.
In the middle of April a Scot 'named Wishart' came down to the Borders to Hertford,[1] with an offer
- ↑ The question has been debated with some eagerness whether this person was the Wishart whose death became afterwards so famous; both the friends and the enemies of the reforming preacher seeming to agree that, if the two were identical, his character would suffer some injury. Wishart was a common name in Scotland, and the evidence, therefore, can amount but to a vague probability. I see no reason to believe, however, that the Martyr of St Andrew's was so different from his Protestant countrymen as to have been unlikely to have been the messenger to Hertford, or to have sympathized cordially in the message. The progress of civilization, measured by the comparative morality of various periods, presents many perplexities; nor may we lightly compare ourselves to our own absolute advantage with the generation to which we owe the Reformation. It is a fact, however, in which we may acquiesce with no undue self-complacency, that the expedient of assassination, which the general sense of the present time disapproves under almost every condition of circumstances, was admitted and approved in the sixteenth century by the best men of all persuasions. Even when in India we still offer rewards for the capture of dangerous rebels, dead or alive, we are
trators of murder, yet defending their employment by others. His words are curious, and, as coming from a man whose conscience was punctiliously sensitive, they may explain many obscure passages in the history of the sixteenth century. 'As soon,' he says, 'as they (the Utopians) declare war, they take care to have a great many schedules sealed with their common seal affixed in the most conspicuous places of their enemies' country. In these they promise great rewards to such as shall kill the prince, and less in proportion to such as shall kill any other persons who are those on whom, next to the prince himself, they cast the chief blame of the war. The rewards which they offer are immeasurably great, and they observe the promises which they make of this kind most religiously. They very much approve of the way of corrupting their enemies, though it appears to others to be base and cruel. But they look at it as a wise course to make an end of what would be otherwise a long war without so much as hazarding a battle; they think it, likewise, an act of mercy and love to mankind to prevent the great slaughter of those that must be killed in the progress of the war by the death of a few that are most guilty.'—More's Utopia; Burnet's Translation.
