The triumph of the truth at St Andrews was followed by the victorious establishment, from that day thenceforward, of the Reformation in Scotland. The precautions taken by the deep forecasting mind of the Lord James Stuart, through the instrumentality of my grandfather and others, were of inexpressible benefit to the righteous cause. It was foreseen that the Queen Regent, who had come to Falkland, would be prompt to avenge the discomfiture of her sect, the papists; but the zealous friends of the Gospel, seconding the resolution of the Lords of the Congregation, enabled them to set all her power at defiance.

With an attendance of few more than a hundred horse, and about as many foot, the Earl of Argyle and the Lord James set out from St Andrews to frustrate, as far as the means they had concerted might, the wrathful measures which they well knew her Highness would take. But this small force was by the next morning increased to full three thousand fighting men; and so ardently did the spirit of enmity and resistance against the papacy spread, that the Queen Regent, when she came with her French troops and her Scottish levies, under the command of the Duke of Chatelherault, to Cupar, found that she durst not encounter in battle the growing strength of the Congregation, so she consented to a truce, and, as usual in her dissimulating policy, promised many things which she never intended to perform. But the protestants, by this time knowing that the papists never meant to keep their pactions with them, discovering the policy of her Highness, silently moved onward. They proceeded to Perth, and having expelled the garrison, took the town, and fired the abbey of Scone. But as my grandfather was not with them in those raids, being sent on the night of the great demolition at St Andrews to apprise the Earl of Glencairn, his patron, of the extremities to which matters had come there, it belongs not to the scope of my story to tell what ensued, farther than that from Perth the Congregation proceeded to Stirling, where they demolished the monasteries;—then they went to Lithgow, and herret the nests of the locusts there; and proceeding bravely on, purging the realm as they went forward, they arrived at Edinburgh, and constrained the Queen Regent, who was before them with her forces there, to pack up her ends and her awls, and make what speed she could with them to Dunbar. But foul as the capital then was, and covered with the leprosy of idolatry, they were not long in possession till they so medicated her with the searching medicaments of the Reformation, that she was soon scrapit of all the scurf and kell of her abominations. There was not an idol or an image within her bounds that, in less than three days, was not beheaded like a traitor and trundled to the dogs, even with vehemence, as a thing that could be sensible of contempt. But as all these things are set forth at large in the chronicles of the kingdom, let suffice it to say that my grandfather continued for nearly two years after this time a trusted emissary among the Lords of the Congregation in their many arduous labours and perilous correspondencies, till the Earl of Glencairn was appointed to see idolatry banished and extirpated from the West Country; in which expedition his Lordship, being minded to reward my grandfather's services in the cause of the Reformation, invited him to be of his force; to which my grandfather, not jealousing the secularities of his patron's intents, joyfully agreed, hoping to see the corner-stone placed on the great edifice of the Reformation, which all good and pious men began then to think near completion.

Having joined the Earl's force at Glasgow, my grandfather went forward with it to Paisley. Before reaching that town, however, they were met by a numerous multitude of the people, half way between it and the castle of Cruikstone, and at their head my grandfather was blithened to see his old friend, the gentle monk Dominick Callender, in a soldier's garb, and with a ruddy and emboldened countenance, and by his side, with a sword manfully girded on his thigh, the worthy Bailie Pollock, whose nocturnal revels at the abbey had brought such dule to the winsome Maggy Napier.

For some reason, which my grandfather never well understood, there was more lenity shown to the abbey here than usual; but the monks were rooted out, the images given over to destruction, and the old bones and miraculous crucifixes were either burnt or interred. Less damage, however, was done to the buildings than many expected, partly through the exhortations of the magistrates, who were desirous to preserve so noble a building for a protestant church, but chiefly out of some paction or covenant secretly entered into anent the distribution of the domains and property, wherein the house of Hamilton was concerned, the Duke of Chatelherault, the head thereof, notwithstanding the papistical nature of his blood and kin, having some time before gone over to the cause of the Congregation.

The work of the Reformation being thus abridged at Paisley, the Earl of Glencairn went forward to Kilwinning, where he was less scrupulous; for having himself obtained a grant of the lands of the abbacy, he was fain to make a clean hand o't, though at the time my grandfather knew not of this.

As soon as the army reached the town, the soldiers went straight on to the abbey, and entering the great church, even while the monks were chanting their paternosters, they began to show the errand they had come on. Dreadful was the yell that ensued, when my grandfather, going up to the priest at the high altar, and pulling him by the scarlet and fine linen of his pageantry, bade him decamp, and flung the toys and trumpery of the mass after him as he fled away in fear.

This resolute act was the signal for the general demolition, and it began on all sides; my grandfather giving a leap, caught hold of a fine effigy of the Virgin Mary by the leg to pull it down; but it proved to be the one which James Coom the smith had mended, for the leg came off, and my grandfather fell backwards, and was for a moment stunned by his fall. A band of the monks, who were standing trembling spectators, made an attempt, at seeing this, to raise a shout of a miracle; but my grandfather, in the same moment recovering himself, seized the Virgin's timber leg, and flung it with violence at them, and it happened to strike one of the fattest of the flock with such a bir, that it was said the life was driven out of him. This, however, was not the case; for, although the monk was sorely hurt, he lived many a day after, and was obligated, in his auld years, when he was feckless, to be carried from door to door on a hand-barrow begging his bread. The wives, I have heard tell, were kindly to him, for he was a jocose carl; but the weans little respected his grey hairs, and used to jeer him as auld Father Paternoster, for even to the last he adhered to his beads. It was thought, however, by a certain pious protestant gentlewoman of Irvine, that before his death he got a cast of grace; for one day, when he had been carried over to beg in that town, she gave him a luggie of kail ower het, which he stirred with the end of the ebony crucifix at his girdle, thereby showing, as she said, a symptom that it held a lower place in his spiritual affections than if he had been as sincere in his errors as he let wot.