Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/329

Rh they were by the pope and all his terrors, showed surprising fortitude and perseverance.

In 1189, Richard Cœur de Lion, having acceded to the throne, and considering that William of Scotland had forfeited his independence in consequence of an attachment to his own interest, restored it to him, along with the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh. Perhaps it was not altogether from a generous or conscientious motive that the king performed this act of justice. He was about to commence his celebrated crusade, and it might be apparent to him that the king of Scots was not a neighbour to be left dissatisfied: he also stipulated for ten thousand merks as the price of the favour he was granting to his brother monarch. The treaty, however, which these mingled notions had dictated, was the blessed means of preserving peace between the two countries for upwards of a century. When Richard was afterwards so unfortunate as to become a captive in a foreign land, William contributed two thousand merks towards his ransom. Such transactions afford a pleasing relief to the general strain of our early history.

After a long reign, of which the last thirty years appear to have been spent in tranquillity, and without the occurrence of any remarkable event, William died at Stirling, December 4, 1214, in the seventy-second year of his age, and the forty-ninth of his reign, leaving, by his wife, Ermingarde de Beaumont, one son, who succeeded him under the title of Alexander II. William also had six illegitimate children. He is allowed by historians to have been a vigorous and judicious prince, not exempt of course from the vices of his age, among which must be reckoned a rash valour, but adorned also by some of its virtues. William was the first Scottish sovereign who bore a coat armorial. He assumed the lion rampant upon his shield, and from this cause, it is supposed, he obtained the designation of William the Lion. A curious portrait of William has been preserved from time immemorial in the Trinity hospital at Aberdeen, and was lately engraved and published in the Transactions of the Antiquarian society of Scotland.

WILLOCK,, one of the earliest Scottish reformers, is supposed to have been a native of Ayrshire, and to have been educated at the university of Glasgow. He entered one of the monastic orders (that of the Franciscans, according to Spotswood, and of the Dominicans, according to Lesley) in the town of Ayr, and remained in it probably for several years; but the history of this period of his life is almost entirely unknown. Previously to 1541, he had become a convert to the protestant faith, and retired from his native country into England. There, however, he did not receive the protection which he seems to have expected; for, during the persecution for the Six Articles, he was thrown into the Fleet prison. After his liberation, he became one of the chaplains to the duke of Suffolk, the father of the lady Jane Grey; and during the reign of king Edward, appears to have lived in tranquillity. But the hopes of the protestants were soon blasted by the early death of that monarch; and Willock, with many others, was obliged once more to flee, on the accession of Mary to the throne. The town of Embden, in Friesland, was selected as the place of his retirement Here he was enabled to turn his knowledge to account in the practice of medicine, which brought him into contact with persons of distintion, and, among others, with Anne, duchess of Friesland. The Acquaintance uhich was thus formed, was strengthened by subsequent intercourse, and Willock was sent by the duchess on several missions into Scotland. His visits to his native country, where he preached, whether in health or sickness, to all that came to his house, must have had a powerful effect in hastening the establish-