oval of the proceedings which had been taken against Hamilton, or to
pronounce an unfavourable judgment on the articles for which he had been
condemned to death.

[Sidenote: Patrick Hepburn.]

This silence brought him under the suspicion of his more bigoted
associates, and gave special offence to his superior, Prior Patrick
Hepburn (the nephew of Prior John, who had founded St Leonard's
College), a violent, coarse, immoral young noble, emulous of the
debaucheries and vices, as well as of the cultured _hauteur_, of the
young French ecclesiastics of rank among whom his youth had been passed.
Knox has given a graphic if rather coarse account of the revelries of
this young man and his gay associates, more in keeping with what we
should have expected from the sons of Tarquin in heathen Rome than from
the _elite_ of the young ecclesiastics of a primatial Christian city,
and under the eye of an aged archbishop.[288] The representation of
Alesius is only the more credible because it is the more restrained, and
the one representation corroborates the other, and proves to what a low
ebb morality had sunk among the ministers of the old church in Scotland
before it was swept away. Not only did this bold bad man set at nought
the laws of God and the canons of his church, and make a boast of doing
so among his boon companions, but even when the archbishop sought to
separate him from his unlawful connection, the prior collected his armed
retainers, and would have fought with him had not the Earl of Rothes and
the Abbot of Arbroath, the primate's hopeful nephew, come between the
two bands and patched up a sort of truce between their leaders.

The Christian lives and healthful influence of the younger canons could
not but be felt to be a standing rebuke by their superior, and doubtless
were one main cause why he bore them so deep a grudge and gave way to
such savage outbursts of temper in his intercourse with them. He is
said to have denounced them, and especially Alesius, to the aged
primate, and probably with the view of entrapping him into some
unguarded expression of approval of the new opinions, he got him
appointed to preach the sermon at the opening of a synod of bishops and
priests which was held at St Andrews probably in the Lent of the year
1529. Alesius, while carefully avoiding everything which might give
needless offence to his hearers, thought, to use his own words, that in
such presence, and speaking in the Latin langua