Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/482

466 general attention was not much directed to them. It was otherwise when a more distinguished victim was selected in the person of George Wishart-. This preacher, whose ecclesiastical opinions resembled those of Patrick Hamilton and Hamilton s teacher, Francis Lambert, returned to Scotland after an absence of several years about the end of 1544. His sermons produced a great effect, and he was protected by several of the barons who were leading men in the English faction. These barons, with the knowledge and approbation of King Henry, were engaged in a plot against the cardinal, in which his assassination was con templated as the speediest mode of removing the chief obstacle to the influence of England. Of the reality of the plot and the intentions of the conspirators there can be no doubt : whether Wishart was aware of these has been a matter of controversy during the present century. There are strong suspicions against him but no sufficient evidence ; and all the presumptions which may be drawn from his personal character are entirely in his favour. The cardinal, though ignorant of the details of the plot, perhaps sus pecting Wishart s knowledge of it, and in any event desirous to seize one of the most eloquent supporters of the new opinions, endeavoured, with the aid of the regent, to apprehend him, but was baffled in his efforts for some time. He was at last successful in seizing the preacher, and bringing him a prisoner to his castle of St Andrews. On the 28th of February 1546 Wishart was brought to trial within the cathedral church, before the cardinal and other ecclesiastical judges, the regent declining to take any. active part. He defended his opinions with temper and moderation ; but as he admitted certain of them which were held by his judges to be heretical, he was condemned to death and burnt. The persecution of Wishart, and the meekness with which he bore his sufferings, produced a deep effect on the mind of the Scottish people, and the cardinal became an object of general dislike. Those who hated him on other grounds were encouraged to proceed with the design they had formed against him. Naturally resolute and fearless, he seems to have undervalued the strength and character of his enemies, and even to have relied on the friendship of some of the conspirators. He crossed over to Angus, and took part in the magnificent ceremonials of the marriage of his illegitimate daughter with the heir of the Earl of Crawford. On his return to St Andrews he took up his residence in the castle. The conspirators, the chief of whom were Norman Leslie, Master of Rothes, and William Kirkaldy of Grange, contrived to obtain admission at daybreak of the 29th of May 1546, and murdered the cardinal under circumstances of horrible mockery and atrocity. The assassination excited very different feelings among the partisans on either side. The zealous adherents of the Church of Rome, as a matter of course, viewed it as a cruel murder aggravated by sacrilege ; the most violent of the Protestant party justified and even applauded it. Those who, without any strong feelings either way. disliked the cardinal on account of his arrogance and cruelty, spoke of the deed as a wicked one, but hardly professed to regret the victim. Ignorant of the treasonable designs of his enemies, viewing him as the champion of ecclesiastical supremacy, and attributing to him all the evils of the unsuccessful war with England, they looked upon his death as an advantage to the Scottish kingdom. The men of that age were too much accustomed to such violent deeds to entertain a great abhorrence of assassination, and such feelings and crimes were not confined to the adherents of the Reformation. A few years afterwards Martinuzzi, the cardinal archbishop of Gran, was murdered by the express command of a Roman Catholic prince, Ferdinand, king of the Ilomans, brother of the Emperor Charles V. The character of Beaton has already been indicated. As a statesman he was able, resolute, and in his general policy patriotic. As an ecclesiastic he maintained the privileges of the hierarchy and the dominant system of belief conscientiously, but always with harshness and some times with cruelty. The immoralities of the cardinal, like his acts of persecution, were exaggerated by his oppo nents ; but his private life was undoubtedly a scandal to religion and the church, and has only the poor excuse that it was not worse than that of most of his order at the time. The authorship of the writings ascribed to him in several biographical notices rests on no better authority than the apocryphal statements of Dempster.  BEATTIE,, a Scottish poet and writer on philosophy, was born at laurencekirk on the 25th October 1735. His father, a small farmer and shopkeeper, died when he was very young; but an elder brother took charge of the boy, and observing his aptitude for learning sent him to Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he gained a bursary. In 1753 he was appointed schoolmaster of Fordoun, at the foot of the Grampian hills, amongst splendid scenery, which impressed itself deeply on Beattie s somewhat poetical mind. In 1758 he obtained a situation as under- master in the grammar school, Aberdeen, and two years later he was made professor of moral philosophy at Mari- sehal College. Here he became closely acquainted with Reid, Campbell, Gerard, and others, who formed a kind of literary or philosophical society, in which speculative questions, above all the views of Hume, were canvassed and criticized. In 1770 Beattie published his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in which he attacked Helvetius and Hume, and advocated the doctrine after wards familiarly known as that of Common Sense. The work had an astonishing success, and its author, when on a visit to London in 1773, was received with the greatest honour by the king himself. About the same time he received a pension of 200 a year. In 1773 and 1774 he published the first and second parts of The Minstrel, which were received with great favour, and gained for the author a fresh accession of popularity. His later writings are partly literary, such as the Essays, 1766 ; Dissertations, 1783, partly philosophical; Evidences of Christianity, 1781; Elements of Moral Science, 1790-93. Beattie was unfor tunate in his domestic life. His wife, whom he married in 1767, was afflicted with insanity, a disease which she appears to have inherited from her mother. Two sons, all his family, died just as they were attaining manhood. The elder, James Hay Beattie, a young man of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had been associated with his father in the professorship, died in 1790. The younger brother died in 1796. Beattie never recovered his second blow. His mind was nearly overthrown by it ; his spirit was completely broken, and although he still lectured, he neither wrote nor studied. In 1799 he was attacked with palsy, and continued to suffer from that disease for three years. He died on the 18th August 1803. Beattie s fame rests now solely on his poems. The much celebrated Essay on Truth is a work of no philoso phic ability, and is disfigured by the violent and intem perate language of the author. His other writings on philosophical subjects, such as the Elements of Moral Science, are excessively weak, and have fallen into well- deserved oblivion. The Minstrel, however, is a work which will always retain a considerable share of popular favour. The ground-plan is simple and well conceived, to trace the development of poetic genius in a youth from his earliest years up to the time when he becomes able to take his place as a minstrel. There runs through the poem a fine vein of quiet reflection, interspersed with animated de scriptions of natural scenery. The versification is smooth

