Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/256

ness. The queen mother seized the opportunity which her own ambitious views, and the instigations of her family had prepared her to use, and extracted from the feeble regent a resignation of his authority into her own hands. The archbishop on his recovery felt the indignation natural to a fierce and ambitious spirit, compelled by his situation to depend on a person whose facile mind required to be kept at its purpose by the firmness of his own. According to Sir James Melville, the convalescent priest received the intelligence with a burst of rage; " he cursed, and cried out that the governor was a very beast for quitting the government to her," bestowing an epithet not very decorous on the princess who stood between his brother and the throne. But Sir James Melville mentions the intelligence as having been received by him when abroad, and from the information of captain Ninian Cockburn, " a busy meddler," and however certainly we may judge of the ambitious prospects of the archbishop, it is not likely that he would have uttered them in a situation which would have admitted their being reported to such a person. The effect of his recovery is a farther evidence of his powerful mind. The resignation not duly and formally completed was revoked, and with all the advantage of possessing the dignity, the powerful princess was compelled to submit for a time. After a protracted conference, the queen mother, aided by the influence of those whom her polished manners had secured, and of the protestant party in general, whom she affected to protect, seconded by the will of her daughter, no longer an infant, obtained her end; but the advantages stipulated for by the archbishop on the part of his brother, were the same as those which had been held out to him as a bait at the commencement of the contract, acknowledging, as a principal article, the ex-regent's right of succession, failing the young queen, which seems to have presented to the archbishop golden views of ambition which it were difficult to fathom. Hitherto the primacy of Hamilton had been marked by but one act of persecution, with which he was but indirectly connected; but just after the period of the last incident described, he appalled the nation by the perpetration of_an act, for which neither religious bigotry, opposition to the regent, nor the alleged influence of the abbot of Kil winning, are sufficient satisfactorily to account, in a man who knew so well the advantage of moderate counsels. Walter Mill, an aged protestant minister, was tried at St Andrews, before the archbishop, found guilty of heresy, and condemned to death by the flames. Men looked with such deep horror on the act, that an individual possessing the requisite powers could hardly be found to add the supplementary authority of the civil judge—no one would furnish a rope to bind him to the stake, and the archbishop had to provide with his own sacred hands the necessary implement. The people of the country marked the spot of the reputed martyr's death by rearing over it a heap of stones, and so often as these were removed, the sullen memorial was restored by the patient and unyielding people. This was one of the marked acts which either terrify, or give impulse to a slowly approaching enemy—it had the latter effect—Knox preached soon after in the pulpit of his cathedral church, and the usual destruction attended his presence. The archbishop, who, whatever he might be in politics, was no bigot in religion, strove to compromise with the arch-reformer, admitting that there were many evils in the church which should be remedied, but that "he should do wisely to retain the old policy, which had been the work of many ages, or then put a better in its place, which his new model was far from,"—but the proffer was unnoticed. He made a last and daring effort in the committee of estates in 1560, which gave the sanction of law to the doctrines and government of the protestant faith. He there objected to his own brother, the bishop of Argyle, and to the'bishop of Galloway being ad-