Ch. 19: The Great Pillage

The revolution was now under weigh, and as it had begun so it continued. There was practically no resistance by the Catholic nobility and gentry: in the Lowlands, apparently, almost all were of the new persuasion. The Duc de Chatelherault might hesitate while his son, the Protestant Earl of Arran, who had been in France as Captain of the Scots Guard, was escaping into Switzerland, and thence to England; but, on Arran's arrival there, the Hamiltons saw their chance of succeeding to the crown in place of the Catholic Mary. The Regent had but a small body of professional French soldiers. But the other side could not keep their feudal levies in the field, and they could not coin the supplies of church plate which must have fallen into their hands, until they had seized the Mint at Edinburgh, so money was scarce with them. It was plain to Knox and Kirkcaldy of Grange, and it soon became obvious to Maitland of Lethington, who, of course, forsook the Regent, that aid from England must be sought,--aid in money, and if possible in men and ships.

Meanwhile the reformers dealt with the ecclesiastical buildings of St Andrews as they had done at Perth, Knox urging them on by his sermons. We may presume that the boys broke the windows and images with a sanctified joy. A mutilated head of the Redeemer has been found in a latrine of the monastic buildings. As Commendator, or lay Prior, James Stewart may have secured the golden sheath of the arm-bone of the Apostle, presented by Edward I., and the other precious things, the sacred plate of the Church in a fane which had been the Delphi of Scotland. Lethington appears to have obtained most of the portable property of St Salvator's College except that beautiful monument of idolatry, the great silver mace presented by Kennedy, the Founder, work of a Parisian silversmith, in 1461: this, with maces of rude native work, escaped the spoilers. The monastery of the Franciscans is now levelled with the earth; of the Dominicans' chapel a small fragment remains. Of the residential part of the abbey a house was left: when the lead had been stripped from the roof of the church it became a quarry.

"All churchmen's goods were spoiled and reft from them . . . for every man for the most part that could get anything pertaining to any churchmen thought the same well-won gear," says a contemporary Diary. Arran himself, when he arrived in Scotland, robbed a priest of all that he had, for which Chatelherault made compensation.

By the middle of June the Regent was compelled to remove almost all her French soldiers out of Fife. Perth was evacuated. The abbey of Scone and the palace were sacked. The Congregation entered Edinburgh: they seem to have found the monasteries already swept bare, but they seized Holyrood, and the stamps at the Mint. The Regent proclaimed that this was flat rebellion, and that the rebels were intriguing with England.

Knox denied it, in the first part of his