At the same time the Romish party was endeavoring to embroil Scotland with England, and James was already engaging in several skirmishes. One day, under the pretext of the hunt, he threw himself, with ‘a small company’ of _three hundred persons_, on the estates the possession of which was disputed by his uncle.[173] Shortly afterwards, four hundred Scots invaded the Marches (frontier districts) at sunrise, and were carrying off what they found there. Northumberland repulsed them, and put to death the prisoners which fell into his hands. The Scots took and burnt some English towns; the English invaded Scotland, and ravaged its towns and country districts. The King of Scotland, intimidated, applied to the pope and the King of France, and cried out for aid with all his might. And then, in order to please at the same time the priests, the pope, and Francis I., he took the advice of Cochlæus; with the exception, that in Scotland the fire at the stake was substituted for the waters of the Rhine. [Sidenote: HENRY FORREST.] A young monk, named Henry Forrest, who was in the Benedictine monastery at Linlithgow, a man equally quick in his sympathies and his antipathies, had been touched by Hamilton’s words, and uttered everywhere aloud his regret for the death of that young kinsman of the king, calling him a martyr. This monk was presently convicted of a crime more enormous still: he was a reader of the New Testament. The archbishop had him imprisoned at St. Andrews. One day a friar (sent by the prelate) came to him for the purpose, he said, of administering consolation; and offering to confess him, he succeeded by crafty questions in leading the young Benedictine to tell him all he thought about Hamilton’s doctrines. Forrest was immediately condemned to be delivered over to the secular authorities to be put to death, and a clerical assembly was called together for the purpose of degrading him. The young friend of the Gospel had hardly passed the door where the assembly was sitting, when, discovering the archbishop and the priests drawn up in a circle before him, he became aware of what awaited him, and cried out with a voice full of contempt, ‘Fie on falsehood! fie on false friars, revealers of confession!’[174] When one of the clerks came up to him to degrade him, the Benedictine, weary of so much perfidy, exclaimed, ‘Take from me not only your own orders but also your own baptism.’ He meant by that, says an historian, the superstitious practices which Rome has added to the institutions of the Lord. These words provoked the assembly still more. ‘We must burn him,’ said the primate, ‘in order to terrify the others.’ A simple-minded and candid man who was by the side of Beatoun said to him in a tone of irony, ‘My lord, if you burn him, take care that it be done in a cave, for the smoke of Hamilton’s pile infected with heresy all who caught the scent of it.’