John Black (martyr)
John Black OP (early 16th century – 9 March 1566) was a Roman Catholic Dominican serving as a recently named post-Tridentine special preacher, and confessor, to Mary, Queen of Scots when he was murdered on the same night as David Rizzio in Edinburgh.
[3] In 1559, with the Queen Regent Mary of Guise at a mass in the Palace of Holyrood House, Archbishop Hamilton, the most senior cleric in Scotland, was in attendance.
He deferred to Black when giving the sermon asking that he be excused because he "had not been weill exercised in that profession... [and] ... shewed unto them that there was a lerned man, meaning Fryer Blake, who wes to come immediately after him into the pulpit, who would declare unto them the trueth.
"[4] Black attended the Queen Regent on 7 May 1560 at Edinburgh Castle, shortly before her death on 10 June, according to John Knox's description of the Mass that followed celebration of the English defeat at the Siege of Leith by combined French and Scottish forces.
Raymund Devas, OP, writing a history with an imprimatur, observes only that the burgh records for Edinburgh show that in "the spring of the year 1562, Fr.
[10] John Durkan described the case in overview, "The Edinburgh town council arrest him in the chapel royal in the act of delivering letters for posting abroad, apparently to Katherine Ewart or Ewing.
As such, the event was described both by a contemporary in Edinburgh, the Senator of the College of Justice, David Chalmers, Lord Ormond, and near-contemporary Scottish Roman Catholic historian Thomas Dempster.
Four craftsmen from Edinburgh were accused of attacking him; Andrew Armstrong, James Young, a cutler, William Johnston, a bower, Thomas Broune, a cordiner or shoemaker.
[20] As Lynch explains, "the full flavour of the first assault on Friar Black is not caught unless it is realised that the 'murder gang' included man who had been Burgh commissioner to the General Assembly and was the most influential Protestant craftsmen in Edinburgh in the 1560s".
The security of the convictions were difficult: "it must either speak volumes for the fear of Armstrong's 'Protestant murder gang' or testify to a general desire of most conservatives in the 1560s to lie low".
[27] The Spanish court was informed by the ambassador in London Diego Guzmán de Silva that Rizzio, her secretary, and Black, her confessor, had been murdered.
The first disputation is recorded as occurring in Holyrood Abbey, between 16 June and 20 July 1560, during William Cecil's visit to Edinburgh, corroborated by the later report of the English diplomat Thomas Randolph.
[31] The questions posed at this disputation were described by John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, as, "Quhether the naturall body of Christ was really in the sacrament of the altar, be vertue of the wordis spokin be the priest or no?
The Earl of Bedford, an English diplomat stationed at Berwick reported the murders to William Cecil, writing, "at the same tyme was also slayne by like order, one Frier Blacke, a ranke Papiste, and a man of evill life, whose death was attempted by another before, and he stricken and sore hurte".
[37] The Catholic writer Thomas Dempster, followed Lesley, but gave a more generous notice of Black as an eloquent speaker against Protestant heresies.
[38] A manuscript of David Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland mentions the incident in the chapel of Edinburgh Castle, but places it a few years earlier, during the Regency of Mary of Guise.
Raymund Devas, OP, writing a history with an imprimatur, has placed Black amongst a number of Dominicans who have been venerated, and even proceeded through a cause for Sainthood, or canonisation.
