Patrick Hamilton at St Andrews

A creed is rarely founded by those who live long enough to organise it. More often it is founded, against the founder's own intention, by a young man of good family who walks into a room expecting to be heard and walks out condemned, and whose six hours of dying are watched by men who will spend the rest of their lives finishing his sentence.

THE KINSMAN OF THE KING

Patrick Hamilton was born about 1504 to Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart, granddaughter of James II, which made him, by the careful reckoning of Scottish gentry, kin to the boy king James V then sitting under the regency of his Douglas stepfather. He was tonsured young, given the abbacy of Fearn in commendam at thirteen, sent to Paris where the new Latin of Erasmus was being argued in every college, and afterwards to Louvain. He came home to St Andrews in 1523, took his master's at St Leonard's, and began to teach. By the summer of 1526 the chancellor of the diocese had heard enough of what he was teaching to write to Archbishop Beaton. Hamilton went abroad again, this time to Wittenberg and to the new university at Marburg, where Francis Lambert of Avignon set him to compose the little Latin theses afterwards printed as Patrick's Places. He came back to Scotland in the autumn of 1527. He was twenty-three. He had three months to live and did not know it; or, by the testimony of his answer to his brother James who begged him to stay quiet, knew it perfectly well and considered the matter settled.

THE GATE OF ST SALVATOR'S

The twenty-eighth of February 1528, a Friday, fine cold rain off the North Sea, the wind north-east and steady. The court in the cathedral had sat from terce to sext. John Lawrence of the Black Friars had read the articles; James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, had presided; the sentence had been pronounced before noon and the secular arm informed within the hour, so that there should be no night between the verdict and the burning and no time for the king's friends at Linlithgow to send a horseman. The iron cradle was set in the cobbles at the north gate of St Salvator's College, on the Scores, in sight of the sea. The wood had been lying in the rain since dawn. A canvas bag of small powder, no bigger than a fist, was tied at his chest. Two of his old fellows from St Leonard's were permitted to stand with him on the platform. At fifty paces, under an awning that the rain went through, Beaton and his canons sat at a trestle. At a hundred paces stood the burgh, several hundred of them, in a quiet that was not the usual quiet of a Scots burning.

THE SECOND OF TIME AT THE STAKE

The first ignition failed. The powder flared yellow against the grey of his shirt and went out in the wet, and the under-faggots smoked and would not take, and the executioner, a townsman who had burnt one woman and never a man, set his torch to the wood in three places and got two of them to catch and the third refused him. The heat began to build at the ankles slowly, and there was no flame above the knee for the first hour and a half, and in this slowness, which was no part of any sentence pronounced over him, Patrick Hamilton understood that the court had handed him something it had not meant to hand him: time. He had expected the powder to take the chest off at the first ignition, as it was meant to, and to be gone in a quarter of an hour with whatever last sentence he had managed to speak. He had instead an afternoon. He could see, looking out over the cradle through the smoke that came up only to his waist, the second row of the crowd, where a thin black-haired boy of about his own age stood with his hands folded inside his sleeves and did not look away; and he understood, with the cold clarity that the rain gave him, that whatever he said in the next hours would be carried out of this gate in the heads of men who had come only to watch, and would be repeated by them in burghs he would never see, and that the executioner's bad fire was not a cruelty but an instrument. He spoke, then, at length. He recited in Latin the Athanasian Creed and the eighth of Romans and the seventeenth of John; he prayed at intervals; he made, by the testimony of the Greyfriars friar who took down what he could afterwards, the cry that ran through the burgh within the week, how long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm? How long wilt thou suffer this tyranny of men? He did not curse Beaton. He did not curse the executioner. He asked twice, courteously, that the wood at his feet be drawn nearer, so the fire should reach him faster; the executioner could not do it, the wood was wet through.

THE FRIARS WITH MORE POWDER

After the third hour the friars came down from the priory with more powder and an iron rod, and set the charge under his face and below his ribs and got the fire to take properly at the second touch. The flame stood up at last in the late afternoon. He died at about six o'clock. The whole had been six hours, by the testimony of the burgesses who counted it. The Archbishop had not stood up from his table.

THE BOY IN THE SECOND ROW

John Knox was, by his own later reckoning to which historians have given various degrees of credence, somewhere in the burgh of St Andrews on that Friday; he was a Lothian boy of about Hamilton's age, tonsured, training for the priesthood, not yet anything. Thirty-eight years later, in his History of the Reformation in Scotland, he wrote down the line that became the proverb of the Scottish Reformation, that the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. By Knox's own gloss, the line was the literal truth. The men of St Andrews who had stood through the six hours of rain went home and did not stay quiet. Beaton's spiritual court tried, within the year, to convict three more men of the same articles, and could not find a Scottish judge willing to take the bench. Alexander Alesius, who had been sent to argue Hamilton out of his opinions in the cathedral and had instead been argued into them, fled to Wittenberg and wrote against the bishops in Latin that was read across the German universities. Gavin Logie at St Leonard's quietly taught Hamilton's Places to a generation of students; the proverb in the burgh was that whoever drank of St Leonard's well had drunk of the new doctrines. The fuse that the wet wood had laid down burned slowly, in the cellars of merchants' houses and in the studies of burgh priests, for thirty-two years.

THE COBBLES AT THE GATE

The Reformation parliament sat in Edinburgh in August 1560 and abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope in Scotland by an act of three sentences. Knox, by then fifty-four, preached the opening sermon. The institutional church Hamilton had been burnt for opposing was dismantled by gentry and burgh clerks whose fathers had stood in the rain at St Salvator's gate. His widow, whose name the contemporary documents did not record and so did not survive, lived on at Kincavel; his brother James fled to England in 1534 after a similar charge and was attainted. Patrick Hamilton has no grave. The body went into the priory yard at St Andrews and the priory yard was unmade at the Reformation. In the cobbles at the north gate of St Salvator's, where the cradle had stood, an oblong flagstone is set with the initials PH in iron. The stone has been replaced twice in five centuries; the legend has not. The custom of the modern university is that you do not tread on the PH during your degree, on pain of failing your finals. The custom is four hundred years younger than the burning and the students who keep it could not, most of them, tell you exactly who Patrick Hamilton was. They step around the stone anyway. A founder's work, when it has taken, is no longer recognised as the work of any one man; it is recognised only as the shape of the ground that everyone walks around without thinking. In the rain, on the Scores, the iron letters hold the wet a moment longer than the cobbles around them, and shine.