He next travelled in Germany, where a Jew, on a Rhine boat, inspired or increased his aversion to works of sacred art, as being “idolatrous.”  About 1542-43 he was reading with pupils at Cambridge, and was remarked for the severity of his ascetic virtue, and for his great charity.  At some uncertain date he translated the Helvetic Confession of Faith, and he was more of a Calvinist than a Lutheran.  In July 1543 he returned to Scotland; at least he returned with some “commissioners to England,” who certainly came home in July 1543, as Knox mentions, though later he gives the date of Wishart’s return in 1544, probably by a slip of the pen.

Coming home in July 1543, Wishart would expect a fair chance of preaching his novel ideas, as peace between Scotland and Protestant England now seemed secure, and Arran, the Scottish Regent, the chief of the almost Royal House of Hamilton, was, for the moment, himself a Protestant.  For five days (August 28-September 3, 1543) the great Cardinal Beaton, the head of the party of the Church, was outlawed, and Wishart’s preaching at Dundee, about that date, is supposed by some {15b} to have stimulated an attack then made on the monasteries in the town.  But Arran suddenly recanted, deserted the Protestants and the faction attached to England, and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton, who, in November 1543, visited Dundee, and imprisoned the ringleaders in the riots.  They are called “the honestest men in the town,” by the treble traitor and rascal, Crichton, laird of Brunston in Lothian, at this time a secret agent of Sadleir, the envoy of Henry VIII. (November 25, 1543).

By April 1544, Henry was preparing to invade Scotland, and the “earnest professors” of Protestant doctrines in Scotland sent to him “a Scottish man called Wysshert,” with a proposal for the kidnapping or murder of Cardinal Beaton.  Brunston and other Scottish lairds of Wishart’s circle were agents of the plot, and in 1545-46 our George Wishart is found companioning with them.  When Cassilis took up the threads of the plot against Beaton, it was to Cassilis’s country in Ayrshire that Wishart went and there preached.  Thence he returned to Dundee, to fight the plague and comfort the citizens, and, towards the end of 1545, moved to Lothian, expecting to be joined there by his westland supporters, led by Cassilis—­but entertaining dark forebodings of his doom.

There were, however, other Wisharts, Protestants, in Scotland.  It is not possible to prove that this reformer, though the associate, was the agent of the murderers, or was even conscious of their schemes.  Yet if he had been, there was no matter for marvel.  Knox himself approved of and applauded the murders of Cardinal Beaton and of Riccio, and, in that age, too many men of all creeds and parties believed that to kill an opponent of their religious cause was to imitate Phinehas, Jael, Jehu, and other patriots of Hebrew history.  Dr. M’Crie remarks that