(Or Bethune)<\/p>\n
A Scottish Archbishop; b. c. 1473; d. at St. Andrews, 1539, was the sixth and youngest son of John Beaton of Balfour, in Fife. He graduated as Master of Arts at St. Andrews University in 1493, four years later was Precentor of Dornoch Cathedral (Diocese of Caithness), and in 1503 Provost of the Collegiate Church of Bothwell. Next year he became Prior of Whithorn and Abbot of Dunfermline, and in 1505 was made Treasurer of the Kingdom. In 1508 he as elected to the See of Galloway, in succession to George Vaus, but before his consecration he was chosen to succeed Robert Blackader (who had died, whilst on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in July, 1508) as Archbishop of Glasgow, and was consecrated at Stirling, 15 April, 1509. With the archbishopric he held the commendatory Abbeys of Arbroath and Kilwinning, and in 1515 he became Chancellor of Scotland. King James V, whose father had fallen at Flodden in 1513, was at this time a child of three, and Beaton, as one of the Council of Regency, without whose consent the queen-mother could not act, was one of the most important personages in the realm during the minority of the young king. The country was at this time distracted by the feuds between two of the regents, Angus and Arran, and Beaton, who was connected with the latter (for Arran had married as his third wife a daughter of Sir James Beaton of Creich), naturally espoused his kinsman’s side. A well-known story tells how Bishop Gavin Douglas of Dunkeld came to Glasgow to urge the archbishop to allay the strife within the council, and how Beaton, striking his breast as he declared upon his conscience that he was powerless in the matter, caused the coat of mail which he wore under his ecclesiastical habit to rattle. “Alas, my Lord”, said his brother bishop at this strange sound, “I fear your conscience clatters!” In 1522 Beaton was translated to St. Andrews, vacant by the death of Archbishop Foreman. As primate he threw all his powerful influence into the scale against the intrigues of Henry VIII to obtain predominance in Scotland; and it was greatly owing to his statesmanship that the old league with France was maintained, and that the young king chose for his bride Magdalen of France instead of Mary of England. Albany’s jealousy had deprived Beaton of the chancellorship some years previously, and he was never reappointed, though he enjoyed the full favour of the king. A few months after the second marriage of James (to Mary of Guise) the primate got his nephew, David Cardinal Beaton, appointed his coadjutor with right of succession and he died in the autumn of 1539 in his castle at St. Andrews.<\/p>\n
The stormy period in which Beaton’s public life was cast, with France and England both intriguing for the alliance of Scotland, and the independence of the kingdom trembling in the balance, has made him, perhaps inevitably, appear to posterity more prominent as a statesman (in which quality there is no room for doubt as to his ability or his patriotism) than as a churchman and a prelate. There is, however, evidence that during both his thirteen years’ tenure of the See of Glasgow and the seventeen years during which he held the primacy, he concerned himself closely with both the material and spiritual interests of the two dioceses, and in particular with the advancement of learning. In Glasgow he added and endowed altars in his cathedral, made additions also to the episcopal palace, which he encircled with a wall, and he erected stone bridges in various parts of the diocese. He was, moreover, as sedulous as his predecessors had been in safeguarding the ancient privileges of the archiepiscopal see. On his translation to St. Andrews he proved himself a constant benefactor to the university of that city, and he founded there a new college (St. Mary’s) for the study of divinity, civil and canon law, medicine, and other subjects. The new college was confirmed by Pope Paul III in February, 1538, and was extended and completed by Beaton’s successor, Archbishop Hamilton, sixteen years later. It still exists as the divinity college of the university. Finally, Beaton showed himself ever zealous for the preservation of the unity of the Faith in Scotland. Under the direct orders of the pope (Clement VII) and unhesitatingly supported by the king, he caused many of those engaged in propagating the new doctrines to be arrested, prosecuted, and in some cases put to death. Modern humanity condemns the cruel manner of their execution; but such severities were the result of the spirit of the age, for which Archbishop Beaton cannot be held responsible. There is no reason to doubt that his motive in sanctioning the capital punishment of notorious heretics were simply to avert the miseries which religious schism could not but entail on a hitherto united people.<\/p>\n
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Regist. Episcop. Glasg., II, 547 sqq.; Theiner, Monumenta, 553, 594, 597; Acts Parl. Scotl., II; Keith, Hist. Cat. Of Scott. Bishops (1755); Walcott, Ancient Church of Scotland, 190, 191; Teulet, Papiers d’etat, III.<\/p>\n
D.O. HUNTER-BLAIR Transcribed by Susan Birkenseer <\/p>\n
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IICopyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightImprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York<\/p>\n
(Or Bethune)<\/p>\n
Archbishop of Glasgow, b. 1517; d. 24 April, 1603; the son of James Beaton of Balfarg (a younger son of John Beaton of Balfour) and nephew to Cardinal David Beaton. He was elected to the archbishopric in 1551, on the resignation of the archbishop-elect Andrew Gordon, and not being yet in priests’s orders was ordained in Rome, and consecrated there on the 28th of August, 1552. For eight troublous years he administered the affairs of his diocese and stood faithfully by the queen-regent, Mary of Guise, in her dealings with the disaffected Scottish nobles, who were plotting the destruction of the ancient Church in order to enrich themselves with the spoils. In March, 1539, we find him assisting at the provincial council at Edinburgh summoned by the primate, Archbishop Hamilton — the last assembly of the kind which was to meet in Scotland for three hundred and twenty-six years. The events of 1560, the treaty of alliance with England against France, the commencement of the work of destruction of cathedrals and monasteries, and, finally, the death of the queen-regent, no doubt actuated Beaton in his resolve to quit the distracted kingdom. He repaired to Paris, taking with a great mass of the muniments and registers of his diocese, and much church plate and other treasures, which he deposited in the Scots College.<\/p>\n
Queen Mary immediately appointed him her ambassador at the French Court, and he remained both up to her forced abdication in 1567, and during the rest of her life, her most faithful friend and adviser. He did not hesitate, after the murder of Darnley, to inform her frankly of the dark suspicions attaching to her, and the necessity of the assassins being punished. On the 15th of February, 1574, Beaton’s name appears at the head of the list of the Catholic prelates and clergy declared outlaws and rebels by the Scottish Privy Council; but he nevertheless continued to enjoy in his exile the favour of the young king (James VI) who, about 1586, appointed him, as the late sovereign had done, ambassador at Paris. Beaton held several benefices in France, including the income of the Abbey De la Sie, in Poitou, and the treasurership of St. Hilary of Poitiers. His intimate association with the House of Guise had naturally led him to join with the League against Henry IV, and on its dissolution he was threatened with banishment; but by the intervention of Cardinals Bourbon and Sully and of the king himself, he was allowed to remain in France, where he was regarded with the greatest esteem. Perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the respect felt for his character in Scotland is to be found in the fact that in 1598, nearly forty years after the overthrow of the ancient Church, the archbishop was formally restored, by an act of the Scottish Parliament, to all his “heritages, honours, dignities, and benefices, notwithstanding that he has never acknowledged the religion professed within the realm”. He survived to witness, a month before his death, the union of the English and Scottish crowns under King James. On the 24th of April, 1603, when James was actually on his way to London to take possession of hew new kingdom, the archbishop died in Paris, on the eighty-sixth year of his age, and half a century after his episcopal consecration.<\/p>\n
Beaton had lived in Paris for forty-three years, and had been Scottish ambassador to five successive kings of France. He was buried in the church of St. John Lateran at Paris, his funeral being attended by a great gathering of prelates, nobles, and common people. The poetical inscription on his tomb eulogizes him, in the exaggerated language of the times, as the greatest bishop and preacher of his age in the whole world. A sounder estimate of his worth is that of his Protestant successor in the See of Glasgow, Spottiswoode, who describes him as “a man honourably disposed, faithful to his queen while she lived and to the king her son; a lover of his country, and liberal to all his countrymen”. No breath of scandal, in a scandalous age, ever attached to the honour of his name or the purity of his private life. Beaton left his property, including the archives of the Diocese of Glasgow, and a great mass of important correspondence, to the Scots College in Paris. Some of these documents had already been deposited by him in the Carthusian monastery in the same city. In the stress of the French Revolution many of these valuable manuscripts were packed in barrels and sent to St. Omers. These have unfortunately disappeared, but the papers left in the college were afterwards brought safely to Scotland, and are now preserved at Blairs College, the Catholic seminary near Aberdeen.<\/p>\n
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Regist. Episc. Glasg., pp. i-ix, liii; Grub, Eccles. Hist. of Scotl., II, 31, 155, 279; Chambers, Biogr. Dict. Of Eminent Scotsmen, I, 108, 109; Acts of Parl. of Scotl., IV, 169, 170; Reg. Priv. Coun. Scotl., II, 334; Keith, Cat. of Scott. Bishops, 153, 154.<\/p>\n
D.O. HUNTER-BLAIR Transcribed by Susan Birkenseer <\/p>\n
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IICopyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightImprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York<\/p>\n
Beaton, James (Or Bethune) A Scottish Archbishop; b. c. 1473; d. at St. Andrews, 1539, was the sixth and youngest son of John Beaton of Balfour, in Fife. He graduated as Master of Arts at St. Andrews University in 1493, four years later was Precentor of Dornoch Cathedral (Diocese of Caithness), and in 1503 Provost … Continue reading “Beaton, James (1)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedic-dictionary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}