David Beaton was James V’s ambassador to France and by 1528 was the Keeper of the Privy Seal. It was he who helped to arrange the king’s French matches, first to Madelaine of France and then, following her death in 1537, to Mary of Guise. His rise in the church had been just as rapid thanks to his kinship to the Archbishop of Glasgow but in 1358 he was creed a cardinal and following his uncle’s death in 1538 he became the Archbishop of St Andrews. By 1542 he was one of the king’s most trusted advisors, encouraging the king to affiliate himself ever more closely to the French. St Andrew’s Castle, Beaton’s principal residence, reflected his wealth and status.
When James died leaving his infant daughter, Mary, the crown. Beaton was swift to produce a document purporting to be the king’s will and making the cardinal the Regent of Scotland along with a group of his own supporters. Instead of getting what he wanted the Earl of Arran, who was Mary’s heir, became regent but in a gesture of good will, or at least of political expediency, Beaton became Chancellor. Beaton and the queen’s mother, Mary of Guise, wanted to keep Scottish foreign policy tied to the French but across the border, in England, Henry VIII wanted his son, Edward, to marry the young queen and unify the two nations. The Protestant lords of Scotland also looked more favourably on that match than one that might be made with Catholic France.
When Henry VIII gave orders for the Rough Wooing, some of Scotland’s nobility felt that it was the French faction who provoked it. Beaton was not popular with his peer group. he’d risen to power through nepotism and had more than 20 illegitimate children. He personified all that was wrong with the catholic church. To make matters worse, Beaton began to arrest reformers and imprison them in St Andrew’s Castle bottle dungeon at the bottom of the Sea Tower. He regarded them not only as a threat to his religious beliefs but also dangerous to his political power.
In 1545 Beaton arrested George Wishart, a Protestant preacher, and then had him burned at the stake for heresy. His initials mark the spot outside St Andrew’s Castle where he died. Scotland’s protestant Lords decided enough was enough and on 29 May 1546 Beaton was captured by a group of men pretending to be stone masons. They killed the cardinal and displayed his naked body from the parapet before throwing it in the castle’s bottle dungeon.
Mary of Guise sent troop to regain control of the castle from the protestants. The siege was commanded by the Earl of Arran who ordered a mine be dug beneath one the castle’s towers to undermine it. The garrison, after a couple of false starts, dug a countermine. They also hoped that assistance would be sent by the English – but instead, in July 1547, the French navy arrived and bombarded the castle causing the castle’s garrison to surrender. The men that were captured, including John Knox (who was doing a spot of light tutoring in St Andrews, was an admirer of Wishart, and had somehow ended up as the Protestant chaplain in the castle), ended up as prisoners in France or forced to row in French galleys. Knox, who spent 19 months chained to an oar, returned to St Andrews in 1559 following his return from a decade of exile. After he preached a particularly fiery sermon St Andrew’s Cathedral was stripped of its wealth in the aftermath of an orgy of destruction.