Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/200

180 kissed his cheek and said, 'Lo, here is a token that I forgive thee. Do thy office.' And then he was put upon a gibbet and hanged, and then burnt to powder.'

Life for life. If Wishart was an instrument of the conspiracy against Beton, in the eyes of his friends, he was still a martyr, and Beton was a murderer. Law, in its pure and proper sense, there was none in Scotland; the partition lines between evil and good were obliterated in the general anarchy; and right struggled against wrong with such ambiguous weapons as the 'wild justice' of nature suggested.

With a misgiving that danger was in the air, the Cardinal strengthened his faction by marrying one of his bastard daughters to the Earl of Crawford. The secret overtures of the Laird of Grange and Norman Leslie to the English Government, it is likely, had been betrayed to him; and another Leslie, the brother of the Earl of Rothes, on Wishart's death, had been heard to mutter that 'his hand and dagger should be priests to the Cardinal.' Throughout the spring, in the lengthening days, a hundred workmen were busy, from sunrise to sunset, converting the episcopal palace of St Andrew's into an impregnable fortress, where dungeons were already destined for the custody of perilous conspirators.

The night of the 28th of May the great churchman passed with his mistress; she was seen in the dawn of the morning to leave the postern which led to his private apartments; and about the