designed to arrest.

But Cardinal Beaton's conscience was too hard to feel the crime, and his eye was too dim to see the blunder which he was committing in putting Wishart to death. He looked only at immediate results, and thought perhaps that by silencing the preacher he could arrest the influence of the words which had already gone from him. But in reality he was himself standing above a mine which before long exploded for his own destruction. His checkmating of Henry VIII. so exasperated that monarch that he entered into correspondence, through his agent Sir Robert Sadler, with certain Scotsmen whose disaffection to the cardinal was well known, and who, at his suggestion, or at least with his concurrence and approval, perhaps also with his reward, entered into a conspiracy to "take him out of the way." Accordingly on the morning of the 29th of May, just three months after the martyrdom of Wishart, Cardinal Beaton was assassinated by a company of men headed by Norman Leslie. That the wily priest had himself been guilty of attempts to get rid of his adversaries by the same unscrupulous means is not to be denied. It is equally certain that, as things then were, it would have been impossible to bring him to trial for any of his enormities. But still the manner of his "taking off" is not only utterly indefensible, but also worthy of the deepest reprobation, and it is too true, as Dr. Lorimer has said, that "the exasperation of feeling called forth by a deed so daring and criminal gave rise to proceedings against the conspirators which, being extended to all their abettors real or supposed, had the effect of retarding the progress of the Reformation for many years, and of weighing it down with a load of opprobrium from the effects of which it could only slowly recover."[1]

Foreseeing that they would be the objects of bitter attack, the conspirators, after they had done their bloody work, resolved to keep possession of the Castle of St. Andrews which they had so unexpectedly seized, and there they were speedily joined by at least one hundred and forty persons, numbering among them Kirkaldy of Grange, Melville of Raith, Balfour of Mount-quhany, and many gentlemen of Fife and the neighbouring counties. They put the castle into a state of defence, and were besieged by an army under command of the Regent Arran, against whom they held out, more perhaps from the incompetence of the besiegers than from the skill or strength of the besieged, until the end of January, 1547. At that date the siege was suspended under an agreement which stipulated that the Castle was still to remain in the hands of its defenders, on the conditions that they should hold it for the Regent and not deliver it to England; and that they should not be required to surrender it even to the Regent until he had obtained from Rome absolution for those who had been implicated in the murder of the cardinal. Upon his side the Regent agreed to withdraw his forces to the south of the Forth, and from the beginning of the year on till the following June the inmates of the Castle were permitted to go out and in at their pleasure, and to receive all that came to them.

Thus the Castle of St. Andrews became for the time a kind of sanctuary for all who were seeking relief or refuge from the oppression of the rulers in Church and State; and at the following Easter, which fell that year on the 10th of April, John Knox entered its gates under circumstances which he himself has thus described: "At the Pasch after, came to the Castle of St. Andrews John Knox, who, wearied of removing from place to place by reason of the persecution that came upon him by this Bishop of St. Andrews, was determined to have left Scotland and to have visited the schools of Germany (of England then he had no pleasure by reason that the Pope's name being suppressed, his laws and corruptions remained in full vigour). But because he had the care of some gentlemen's children, whom certain years he had nourished in godliness, their fathers solicited him to go to St. Andrews, that himself might have the benefit of the castle, and their children the benefit of his doctrine, and so (we say) came he the time foresaid, to the said place, and having in his company Francis Douglas of Longniddry, George his brother, and Alexander Cockburn, eldest son to the laird of Ormiston, began to exercise them after his accustomed manner."[2]

Knox was at this time in the prime and vigour of his manhood, being forty-two years of age. He was born in 1505 at Gifford-gate, a suburb connected with Haddington by the old stone bridge across the Tyne. His parents were not distinguished either for rank or fortune, for one of his adversaries affirms that he was "obscuris natus parentibus" (born of obscure parents), and even one of his admirers says that "he descended but of lineage small." His father was William Knox, and his mother's name was Sinclair. Both of them apparently belonged to families that were in some way feudatories to the Earls of Bothwell, for at the Reformer's first interview with that earl, whose name is so tragically coupled with Queen Mary's, he said, "Albeit that to this hour it hath not chanced me to speak to your lordship face to face, yet have I borne a good mind to your house; ... for, my lord, my grandfather, goodschir (i.e., according to Mr. Laing, maternal grandfather) and father have served your lordship's predecessors, and some of them have died under their standards." He received his earliest education at the Grammar School of Haddington, and passed when he was about sixteen years of age to the University of Glasgow, in the register of which his name appears among those of the students who were incorporated on the 25th October, 1522.

At that time and for a year later John Major, or Mair, Doctor of the Sorbonne, was Principal of the Glasgow University and Professor of Divinity in the same. He had some opinions, both ecclesiastical and political, which were considerably in advance of his age, and it has been supposed that Knox may have received from him some of those principles which he afterwards so ably advocated. But perhaps too much has been made of this by the Reformer's biographers, for Major remained only one year in Glasgow after Knox had been registered as a student at the University; and though he held some liberal notions in politics, he was in theology to the last a rigid scholastic. Moreover, he was so far from being a zealous promoter of the cause of the Reformation that his name appears as a judge on several of the tribunals at which the early Scottish confessors were condemned to banishment or death. Taking these things into consideration along with the youth of Knox when he first entered college, it will appear hardly likely that he received from Major anything more than a general impulse in the direction of liberty and liberality, which prepared him to look with favour on the efforts of those who, though they might be called innovators, were in reality only seeking to get back to the original simplicity of the gospel, and the primitive purity of the Church.

Knox left Glasgow without taking the degree of Master of Arts, and there is no evidence whatever for the statement sometimes made that he was afterwards connected with the University of St. Andrews. In fact we lose sight of him entirely for a period of eighteen years from the time of his leaving Glasgow. During that interval he was ordained a priest, though by whom, or at what precise date, it is