The Regent, according to Knox, amused Erskine of Dun with promises of “taking some better order” till the day of May 10 arrived, when, the preachers and their backers having been deluded into remaining at Perth instead of “demonstrating” at Stirling, she outlawed the preachers and fined their sureties ("assisters").  She did not outlaw the sureties.  Her treachery (alleged only by Knox and others who follow him) is examined in Appendix A. Meanwhile it is certain that the preachers were put to the horn in absence, and that the brethren, believing themselves (according to Knox) to have been disgracefully betrayed, proceeded to revolutionary extremes, such as Calvin energetically denounced.

If we ask who executed the task of wrecking the monasteries at Perth, Knox provides two different answers.

In the “History” Knox says that after the news came of the Regent’s perfidy, and after a sermon “vehement against idolatry,” a priest began to celebrate, and “opened a glorious tabernacle” on the high altar.  “Certain godly men and a young boy” were standing near; they all, or the boy alone (the sentence may be read either way), cried that this was intolerable.  The priest struck the boy, who “took up a stone” and hit the tabernacle, and “the whole multitude” wrecked the monuments of idolatry.  Neither the exhortation of the preacher nor the command of the magistrate could stay them in their work of destruction. {111} Presently “the rascal multitude” convened, without the gentry and “earnest professors,” and broke into the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries.  They wrecked as usual, and the “common people” robbed, but the godly allowed Forman, Prior of the Charter House, to bear away about as much gold and silver as he was able to carry.  We learn from Mary of Guise and Lesley’s “History” that the very orchards were cut down.

If, thanks to the preachers, “no honest man was enriched the value of a groat,” apparently dishonest men must have sacked the gold and silver plate of the monasteries; nothing is said by Knox on this head, except as to the Charter House.

Writing to Mrs. Locke, on the other hand, on June 23, Knox tells her that “the brethren,” after “complaint and appeal made” against the Regent, levelled with the ground the three monasteries, burned all “monuments of idolatry” accessible, “and priests were commanded under pain of death, to desist from their blasphemous mass.” {112} Nothing is said about a spontaneous and uncontrollable popular movement.  The professional “brethren,” earnest professors of course, reap the glory.  Which is the true version?