Walter Milne

For rugby league footballer of the 1910s for New Zealand, see Walter Milne (rugby league).
For Australian rules footballer, see Wally Milne.
Woodcut of Milne's martyrdom

Walter Milne (died April 1558), also recorded as Mill or Myln, was the last Protestant martyr to be burned in Scotland before the Scottish Reformation changed the country from Catholic to Presbyterian.

Milne was a married man, and had at one point been a Roman Catholic priest from the Parish of Lunan near Montrose.[1] He was burned at the stake for heresy outside Deans Court, St Andrews, in April 1558 at the age of 82, at the behest of the Roman Catholic Archbishop John Hamilton. When he was sentenced to death, Milne replied "I will not recant the truth. I am corn, not chaff; I will not be blown away with the wind or burst by the flail. I will survive both."[2]

After John Knox preached in June 1559 in St. Andrews his famous sermon on "cleansing of the temple" that began the Scottish reformation, "by order of the magistrates the churches were stripped of the monuments of 'idolatry' which were ceremoniously burned on the spot where Myln had suffered."[3]

Milne is commemorated on the Martyrs' Monument at St Andrews.

References

  1. ↑ "Clan Milne". Electric Scotland. Retrieved 23 March 2009.
  2. ↑ John Howie - Scots Worthies pub 1775
  3. ↑ J. H. S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (Glasgow: Oxford University Press, 1960), 144.
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