central government

Description

Cardinal David Beaton (1494?-c. 1547) Beaton studied at St Andrews and Orleans, and began his rise to prominence under the patronage of John Stewart, fourth duke of Albany and governor of Scotland between 1515 and 1524. In 1524 he helped negotiate a French marriage for James V in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Rouen (1517), and was appointed to the commendatorship of Arbroath. He made a name for himself as an administrator in Scottish central government and as a diplomatic agent to the French court between 1524 and 1543, spending four and a half of the ten years after 1533 in France. He led the negotiations relating to James V's French marriages, first to Princess Madeleine, daughter of François I (1537), and then Mary of Guise (1538). In 1537 Francis I nominated him to the French bishopric of Mirepoix, to which he acceded on 5 December. In December of the following year he was made one of five new cardinals created by the pope. On 14 February 1539 he succeded his uncle, James Hamilton, as archbishop of St Andrews. Following the death of the king in late 1542, Beaton clashed with the earl of Arran on the regency council and was initially imprisoned by him in the first half of 1543. Following Hamilton's volte-face against his own English policy Beaton eventually outmaneuevered him and led the faction that repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich in late 1543. Beaton was an active prosecutor of heresy as archbishop, and in spring 1544 he was made legate a latere, which gave him broad powers to act on behalf of the pope in the affairs of the Scottish church. Beaton was blamed for the military assaults against Scotland by Henry VIII between 1544 and 1546 following the repudiation of the English alliance, and his trial and execution of the protestant preacher George Wishart on 1 March 1546 sparked outrage among the Protestant Anglophile faction. He was assassinated by a small group of Fife lairds during a dawn raid on St Andrews Castle on 29 May, and his body preserved in a casket of salt and subjected to ritual humiliation.