desecration of his ancestors’ graves at Melrose Abbey, Angus united with Arran, Norman Leslie, and Buccleuch to annihilate an English force at Ancrum Moor, where Henry’s men lost 800 slain and 2000 prisoners.  The loyalty of Angus to his country was now, by innocents like Arran, thought assured.  The plot for Beaton’s murder was in 1545 negotiated between Henry and Cassilis, backed by George Douglas; and Crichton of Brunston, as before, was engaged, a godly laird in Lothian.  In August the Douglases boast that, as Henry’s friends, they have frustrated an invasion of England with a large French contingent, which they pretended to lead, while they secured its failure.  Meanwhile, after forty years, Donald Dubh, and all the great western chiefs, none of whom could write, renewed the alliance of 1463 with England, calling themselves “auld enemies of Scotland.”  Their religious predilections, however, were not Protestant.  They promised to destroy or reduce half of Scotland, and hailed Lennox as Governor, as in Angus’s offer to Henry in spring 1545.  Lennox did make an attempt against Dumbarton in November with Donald Dubh.  They failed, and Donald died, without legitimate issue, at Drogheda.  The Macleans, Macleods, and Macneils then came into the national party.

In September 1545 Hertford, with an English force, destroyed the religious houses at Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh, and Jedburgh. {96} Meanwhile the two Douglases skulked with the murderous traitor Cassilis in Ayrshire, and Henry tried to induce French deserters from the Scottish flag to murder Beaton and Arran.

Beaton could scarcely escape for ever from so many plots.  His capture, in January 1546, of George Wishart, an eminently learned and virtuous Protestant preacher, and an intimate associate of the murderous, double-dyed traitor Brunston and of other Lothian pietists of the English party; and his burning of Wishart at St Andrews, on March 1, 1546, sealed the Cardinal’s doom.  On May 29th he was surprised in his castle of St Andrews and slain by his former ally, Norman Leslie, Master of Rothes, with Kirkcaldy of Grange, and James Melville who seems to have dealt the final stab after preaching at his powerless victim.  They insulted the corpse, and held St Andrews Castle against all comers.

How gallant a fight Beaton had waged against adversaries how many and multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical, we have seen.  He maintained the independence of Scotland against the most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather bent on defending the lost cause of a Church entirely and intolerably corrupt.

The two causes were at the moment inseparable, and, whatever we may think of the Church of Rome, it was not more bloodily inclined than the Church of which Henry was Pope, while it was less illogical, not being the creature of a secular tyrant.  If Henry and his party had won their game, the Church of Scotland would have been Henry’s Church—­would have been Anglican.  Thus it was Beaton who, by defeating Henry, made Presbyterian Calvinism possible in Scotland.