Ringan Gilhaize, or, The Covenanters

by John Galt

  CHAPTER XXV

  The triumph of the truth at St Andrews was followed by the victoriousestablishment, from that day thenceforward, of the Reformation inScotland. The precautions taken by the deep forecasting mind of the LordJames Stuart, through the instrumentality of my grandfather and others,were of inexpressible benefit to the righteous cause. It was foreseenthat the Queen Regent, who had come to Falkland, would be prompt toavenge the discomfiture of her sect, the papists; but the zealousfriends of the Gospel, seconding the resolution of the Lords of theCongregation, enabled them to set all her power at defiance.

  With an attendance of few more than a hundred horse, and about as manyfoot, the Earl of Argyle and the Lord James set out from St Andrews tofrustrate, as far as the means they had concerted might, the wrathfulmeasures which they well knew her Highness would take. But this smallforce was by the next morning increased to full three thousand fightingmen; and so ardently did the spirit of enmity and resistance against thepapacy spread, that the Queen Regent, when she came with her Frenchtroops and her Scottish levies, under the command of the Duke ofChatelherault, to Cupar, found that she durst not encounter in battlethe growing strength of the Congregation, so she consented to a truce,and, as usual in her dissimulating policy, promised many things whichshe never intended to perform. But the protestants, by this time knowingthat the papists never meant to keep their pactions with them,discovering the policy of her Highness, silently moved onward. Theyproceeded to Perth, and having expelled the garrison, took the town, andfired the abbey of Scone. But as my grandfather was not with them inthose raids, being sent on the night of the great demolition at StAndrews to apprise the Earl of Glencairn, his patron, of the extremitiesto which matters had come there, it belongs not to the scope of my storyto tell what ensued, farther than that from Perth the Congregationproceeded to Stirling, where they demolished the monasteries;--then theywent to Lithgow, and herret the nests of the locusts there; andproceeding bravely on, purging the realm as they went forward, theyarrived at Edinburgh, and constrained the Queen Regent, who was beforethem with her forces there, to pack up her ends and her awls, and makewhat speed she could with them to Dunbar. But foul as the capital thenwas, and covered with the leprosy of idolatry, they were not long inpossession till they so medicated her with the searching medicaments ofthe Reformation, that she was soon scrapit of all the scurf and kell ofher abominations. There was not an idol or an image within her boundsthat, in less than three days, was not beheaded like a traitor andtrundled to the dogs, even with vehemence, as a thing that could besensible of contempt. But as all these things are set forth at large inthe chronicles of the kingdom, let suffice it to say that my grandfathercontinued for nearly two years after this time a trusted emissary amongthe Lords of the Congregation in their many arduous labours and perilouscorrespondencies, till the Earl of Glencairn was appointed to seeidolatry banished and extirpated from the West Country; in whichexpedition his Lordship, being minded to reward my grandfather'sservices in the cause of the Reformation, invited him to be of hisforce; to which my grandfather, not jealousing the secularities of hispatron's intents, joyfully agreed, hoping to see the corner-stone placedon the great edifice of the Reformation, which all good and pious menbegan then to think near completion.

  Having joined the Earl's force at Glasgow, my grandfather went forwardwith it to Paisley. Before reaching that town, however, they were met bya numerous multitude of the people, half way between it and the castleof Cruikstone, and at their head my grandfather was blithened to see hisold friend, the gentle monk Dominick Callender, in a soldier's garb, andwith a ruddy and emboldened countenance, and by his side, with a swordmanfully girded on his thigh, the worthy Bailie Pollock, whose nocturnalrevels at the abbey had brought such dule to the winsome Maggy Napier.

  For some reason, which my grandfather never well understood, there wasmore lenity shown to the abbey here than usual; but the monks wererooted out, the images given over to destruction, and the old bones andmiraculous crucifixes were either burnt or interred. Less damage,however, was done to the buildings than many expected, partly throughthe exhortations of the magistrates, who were desirous to preserve sonoble a building for a protestant church, but chiefly out of somepaction or covenant secretly entered into anent the distribution of thedomains and property, wherein the house of Hamilton was concerned, theDuke of Chatelherault, the head thereof, notwithstanding the papisticalnature of his blood and kin, having some time before gone over to thecause of the Congregation.

  The work of the Reformation being thus abridged at Paisley, the Earl ofGlencairn went forward to Kilwinning, where he was less scrupulous; forhaving himself obtained a grant of the lands of the abbacy, he was fainto make a clean hand o't, though at the time my grandfather knew not ofthis.

  As soon as the army reached the town, the soldiers went straight on tothe abbey, and entering the great church, even while the monks werechanting their paternosters, they began to show the errand they had comeon. Dreadful was the yell that ensued, when my grandfather, going up tothe priest at the high altar, and pulling him by the scarlet and finelinen of his pageantry, bade him decamp, and flung the toys and trumperyof the mass after him as he fled away in fear.

  This resolute act was the signal for the general demolition, and itbegan on all sides; my grandfather giving a leap, caught hold of a fineeffigy of the Virgin Mary by the leg to pull it down; but it proved tobe the one which James Coom the smith had mended, for the leg came off,and my grandfather fell backwards, and was for a moment stunned by hisfall. A band of the monks, who were standing trembling spectators, madean attempt, at seeing this, to raise a shout of a miracle; but mygrandfather, in the same moment recovering himself, seized the Virgin'stimber leg, and flung it with violence at them, and it happened tostrike one of the fattest of the flock with such a bir, that it was saidthe life was driven out of him. This, however, was not the case; for,although the monk was sorely hurt, he lived many a day after, and wasobligated, in his auld years, when he was feckless, to be carried fromdoor to door on a hand-barrow begging his bread. The wives, I have heardtell, were kindly to him, for he was a jocose carl; but the weans littlerespected his grey hairs, and used to jeer him as auld FatherPaternoster, for even to the last he adhered to his beads. It wasthought, however, by a certain pious protestant gentlewoman of Irvine,that before his death he got a cast of grace; for one day, when he hadbeen carried over to beg in that town, she gave him a luggie of kailower het, which he stirred with the end of the ebony crucifix at hisgirdle, thereby showing, as she said, a symptom that it held a lowerplace in his spiritual affections than if he had been as sincere in hiserrors as he let wot.