398
REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH.
[ch. 18.
a destiny. The seeds of liberty were scattered simultaneously in England and in Scotland; and the initial symptoms of growth in both countries are visible together. When the first Acts of Parliament were passed by the Lancastrian princes against the Lollards—perhaps even earlier—heretics, by the Scotch law, were consigned to the stake.[1] The Glasgow register shows that in 1422, and again in 1431, various persons suffered death for their religion; and under James IV. as many as thirty were indicted whose fate is not discoverable.
1505In the reign of the same King, in the year 1505, an event occurred of vaster consequence. In the house of a retainer of the Earl of Bothwell, in the suburbs of Haddington, there was born into the world an infant who became, perhaps, in that extraordinary age its most extraordinary man, and whose character became the mould in which the later fortunes of his country were cast. John Knox was forty years old before Scotland knew him as more than a poor priest, a plain yeoman's son: it is chiefly through his eyes, however, that the religion of the Scottish people is visible to us from his early manhood. He grew himself- ↑ 'Hæretici debent comburi,' is to be found in the Regiam Majestatem; but the date of that treatise, or the introduction into it of particular phrases, is uncertain. In the Parliament held at Perth, in 1398, 'cursed men heretics' were directed to be put forth from the kirk, and specially punished: the form of the penalty was not specified.—Acts of Parliament of Scotland, vol. i. p. 211. The word 'heretic,' which to contemporaries was the one expression fraught with the deepest associations of horror, is sought for eagerly among the Records by the modern historian as the green blade of promise bursting out of the barren soil.
