On the 20th January 1543-44 he set out in company of the cardinal, the Lord Justice and his deputy, with a band of armed men and artillery, to Perth, where a great assize was held. Several were convicted of heresy, and their goods forfeited. Several were condemned to die. The governor himself was inclined to spare their lives, but the cardinal and the nobles who were with him threatened to leave him if he did this. So on St Paul's day (25th January) 1543-44, Robert Lamb, James Hunter, William Anderson, and James Ranaldson were hanged; and the wife of this last, who had refused when in labour to pray to the Virgin Mary, was denied the consolation of being suspended from the same beam with her husband, and put to death by drowning, after she had consigned to the care of a neighbour the infant she carried in her arms. Dundee was next visited, but it was found that the suspected citizens--who in the previous autumn had sacked and destroyed the Grey Friars and the Dominican monasteries--had taken the alarm and fled from their homes. [Sidenote: The Balance of Parties.] The weak and inconstant man continued to be regent in name, but from that hour he was dominated by the imperious cardinal almost as completely as King James had been. He wrote to the pope that the cardinal's devotion to the holy see and to the interests of his native country was so great that he deserved the praise, or at least no small part of the praise, of preserving its liberty and extinguishing heresy.[54] That last work, however, was by no means so nearly accomplished as the regent in his letter to the pope had boasted. In fact, within two months after we find the cardinal himself confessing in a letter to the pope that he was still in the thick of the fight, and all but worn out--"_vigiliis, laboribus, atque sumptibus_"--not only in contending with foes without, but also with traitors within, the camp.[55] The regent himself was obliged to confess, in a subsequent letter, that they were then in a miserable plight; and that, unless material assistance came to them from abroad,--and in particular from his holiness, when almost all their other friends were growing cold,--it would be hard for them to maintain the struggle against the English king. The balance of parties at this critical juncture was more nearly equal than is generally supposed. "An active minority of the nobles and gentry saw in the government of Beaton not only their own personal ruin, but the giving away of the country to a power more dangerous to its liberties than England itself.... With those who favoured England were naturally associated those who desired a reformation of religion,--a body now so numerous in the opinion of a papal legate [Grimani] who visited the country in 1543, that, but for the interposition of God, Scotland would soon be in as bad a case as England itself."[56] These appeals for foreign help, and the hopes raised by them, intensified the