“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 events from July 1558 to 1560. {87a} There are also imperfect records of the Parliament of November-December 1558, and of the last Provincial Council of the Church, in March 1559.

For July 28 {87b} four or five of the brethren were summoned to “a day of law,” in Edinburgh; their allies assembled to back them, and they were released on bail to appear, if called on, within eight days.  At this time the “idol” of St. Giles, patron of the city, was stolen, and a great riot occurred at the saint’s fete, September 3. {87c}

Knox describes the discomfiture of his foes in one of his merriest passages, frequently cited by admirers of “his vein of humour.”  The event, we know, was at once reported to him in Geneva, by letter.

Some time after October, if we rightly construe Knox, {88a} a petition was delivered to the Regent, from the Reformers, by Sandilands of Calder. {88b} They asserted that they should have defended the preachers, or testified with them.  The wisdom of the Regent herself sees the need of reform, spiritual and temporal, and has exhorted the clergy and nobles to employ care and diligence thereon, a fact corroborated by Mary of Guise herself, in a paper, soon to be quoted, of July 1559. {88c} They ask, as they have the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular, for common prayers in the same.  They wish for freedom to interpret and discuss the Bible “in our conventions,” and that Baptism and the Communion may be done in Scots, and they demand the reform of the detestable lives of the prelates. {88d}