By CHE, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Image: Edinburgh Castle, where five reformers were burned in 1538 on Castle Hill.
‘One day, as the Lord of Lauriston [John Erskine]… was reading the New Testament to David Straton in a certain quiet place in the fields, as God had appointed, he chanced to read these sentences of our Master, Jesus Christ: ‘He that denieth Me before men, or is ashamed of Me in the midst of this wicked generation, I will deny him in the presence of My Father, and before his angels.’’ All of a sudden, as John Knox records in his History of the Reformation in Scotland, David Straton who had been listening intently, was so distraught by this Scripture, that he fell to his knees, with his head and arms raised to heaven, and cried out to God: ‘O Lord, I have been wicked… for your mercy’s sake, let me never deny you, nor your truth, for fear of death or bodily pain.’ This prayer would be tested in the flames of martyrdom soon.
David Straton and Norman Gourlay were summoned before the church council in the Abbey of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Before the king ‘all clad in red’, great efforts were attempted by the bishops to force them to recant and deny their reformed faith. ‘The King’s hands were bound’ because of Scottish law, so he could not help these godly men who were condemned as heretics. ‘So was he [David Straton] with Master Norman, after dinner, on the twenty-seventh day of August, the year of God 1534, led to a place beside the Rood [Cross] of Greenside [at Calton Hill in Edinburgh]; and there the two of them were hanged and burned, according to the mercy of the Papistical Kirk!’
Almost four years later on 28th February 1538, another five Christians were burned at the stake outside Edinburgh Castle. Their crime? ‘A Black Friar [Dominican], called Friar Kyllour, set forth the history of Christ’s Passion in the form of a Play, which he both preached and practised openly in Stirling, the King himself being present on a Good Friday in the morning.’ Friar Kyllour and his team cleverly used their Easter Passion Play to share the gospel and expose the corrupt bishops of their time, as the Gospels had exposed the corrupt Pharisees at the time of Christ. ‘This plain speaking so enflamed the hearts of all that bare the Beast’s Mark,’ relates John Knox, ‘that they ceased not, till Friar Kyllour, and with him Friar Beveridge, Sir Duncan Symson, Robert Forrester, a Gentleman, and Dean Thomas Forrest, Canon Regular [in the Monastery of St Colm’s Inch] and Vicar of Dollar, a man of upright life, all together were cruelly murdered in one fire.’
‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints’ (Psalm 116:15, NKJV).