He was ordained priest in 1540, and in 1552 was appointed master of the grammar school of Linlithgow, from which town he was later "expellit and schott out" by the partisans of Dean Patrick Kinlochy, "preacher" there.
In July 1562, when engaged in the printing of his Last Blast, he narrowly escaped the vengeance of his opponents, who had by that time gained the upper hand in the capital, and he fled, on 3 September, with the nuncio Gouda to Leuven.
He justified his literary activity on the side of Catholicism on the double plea of conscience and the inability of the bishops and theologians to supply the necessary arguments (hies' Tractate, ed.
In his first work, Certaine Tractates (three in number), printed in 1562, he rates his fellow clergy for negligence and sin, invites replies from Knox regarding his authority as minister and his share in the new ecclesiastical constitution, and protests against the interference with Catholic burgesses by the magistrates of Edinburgh.
In his Bake of Four Scoir Thee Questions (1563), addressed to the "Calviniane Precheouris," in which he treats of church doctrine, sacraments, priesthood, obedience to rulers, free-will and other matters, he is dogmatic rather than polemical.