Clan Hamilton · 1528
Patrick Hamilton at St Andrews
Patrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: *the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon*. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.
It is the early afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1528, at the gate of St Salvator's College on the north side of the Scores, St Andrews, with a fine cold rain off the North Sea soaking the wood that has been laid in the iron cradle and the canvas bag of small powder that has been tied to his chest. He is twenty-four years old. He is Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel, kinsman of the king, abbot in commendam of Fearn (a benefice he holds without serving, like every well-born clerk of his generation), titulary student of theology at Marburg, husband of three weeks, condemned this morning by the spiritual court of John Lawrence, Father in God James Beaton presiding, and turned over to the secular arm to be burnt for heresy at the present hour.
His wife, whose name has not survived in any contemporary document, is at his father's house at Kincavel in West Lothian, where he sent her a fortnight ago with the household when he understood the indictment was being drawn. He has not seen her since.
He has, on the platform, two of his old fellow-students from St Leonard's College who have been allowed to stand by him. He has the executioner, a townsman of St Andrews who has burnt one woman and never a man. He has, at fifty yards, the Archbishop's table set up under an awning, where Beaton and his canons are sitting through the rain. He has, at a hundred yards, the merchants and townspeople of St Andrews, several hundred of them, in a silence that is unusual for a Scots burning.
He thinks: the powder bag is small. It is meant to take the chest off in the first ignition. The wood is wet and the executioner has not laid it well.
He thinks: the wind off the sea will keep the fire from taking. I will be a long time at this.
He thinks: Knox is in the audience. I have seen him in the second row. Knox is twenty-four years old. Knox has not yet decided. Knox will decide today.
He thinks: whatever I say in the next half hour will be repeated.
The first ignition fails. The powder bag flares once, a flash of yellow against the grey of his shirt, and goes out in the rain. The wood at his feet smokes but does not catch. The executioner steps up with a torch and tries to set the under-faggots in three places. Two take, one does not. The fire begins to make heat, but it makes the heat slowly, and there is no flame that reaches above his knees for the next hour and a half.
He speaks at length, in Latin and in Scots, to the crowd. He recites, by the testimony of the unnamed friar of the Greyfriars who took down what he could of the words afterwards, parts of the Athanasian Creed, the eighth chapter of Romans, the seventeenth of John. He prays at intervals. He makes one statement that became, within the week, the rallying cry of the Scottish Reformation: how long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm? How long wilt thou suffer this tyranny of men? He does not curse the Archbishop. He does not curse the executioner. He asks the executioner, twice, for the wood at his feet to be drawn up nearer to him so that the fire shall reach him faster. The executioner cannot do it because the wood is wet through.
After the third hour the friars from the priory come down with more powder and an iron rod, and set the powder under his face and below his ribs at the second touch. The fire takes properly at last in the late afternoon. He dies at about six o'clock. The whole event has been six hours, by the testimony of the merchants who were there. The Archbishop, Beaton, has not stood up from his table.
John Knox in 1566, writing his History of the Reformation in Scotland, would record the burning at length and add the line that became the proverb of the Scottish Reformation, that the reek (the smoke) of Master Patrick Hamilton had infected as many as it blew upon. The phrase was, by his own retrospective gloss, the literal truth: the men of in St Andrews who had sat through the six hours had every one of them, by his note, turned in the next two years to the new doctrines. Beaton's spiritual court tried to convict three more men by the autumn of 1528 and was unable to find a Scottish judge who would sit on the bench. The proto-Reformation in Scotland made converts at gentry and burgh-clerical level steadily through the 1530s and 1540s and was the institutional backbone of the Reformation parliament of 1560. Patrick Hamilton has no grave; the body went into the ground in the priory yard at St Andrews. The flagstone in the cobbles at the gate of St Salvator's, an oblong with the initials PH inscribed in iron, marks the place. Tradition holds that the patch of cobbles never grows lichen and is dry on the wettest day. Modern St Andrews students treat it accordingly: the custom is that you do not step on the PH during your degree, on the grounds that to do so will guarantee you a fail at finals. The custom postdates the burning by some four hundred years; the stone has been replaced twice. The legend on the stone is what people stand around in the rain to look at.
More stories of Clan Hamilton
- Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, YorktownOn the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.
- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at WeehawkenBy the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.
- Ian Hamilton and the Stone of SconeJust before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.