The story that lit a nation

HAMILTON: The First Flame journeys into 16th-century Scotland to tell the remarkable true story of the Hamilton family and the events that would help ignite the Scottish Reformation.

After the king's death at Flodden in 1513, the crown passed to a child. Power belonged to the great families and to the church, and the Hamiltons, a powerful Scottish family whose lives intersected with royalty, politics, faith and a rapidly changing Europe, stood near the centre of both.

Patrick Hamilton was born in 1504 to Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavil and Catherine Stewart. Through his mother he was kin to the royal house; through his father he inherited the loyalties of one of the kingdom's most influential families.

Named titular abbot of Fearn as a boy, he was sent abroad to study. At the heart of the story is a family whose legacy would cross generations through love, loyalty, political upheaval, faith, and ultimately extraordinary sacrifice.

In Paris Patrick met the new learning of the humanists. Back in St Andrews he found a university alert to the ideas coming out of Germany, and a church determined to keep them out.

In 1527 he went to see the Reformation for himself, travelling to Wittenberg and then to Marburg, where he wrote the theses later known as Patrick's Places.

Patrick returned to Kincavil, preached openly and married. Early in 1528 he was summoned to St Andrews by Archbishop James Beaton, tried, and condemned.

Patrick Hamilton would become Scotland's first martyr of the Protestant Reformation. His death was intended to extinguish his message. Instead, it helped light a flame that would spread across a nation.

Within a generation the ideas Patrick carried had spread across Scotland, and in 1560 the nation broke with Rome. A contemporary observer put it simply: the reek of Patrick Hamilton infected as many as it blew upon.

Today, Jaymes Hamilton, a direct descendant of the Hamilton lineage, portrays the young Patrick, with his father Michael Hamilton joining the cast. Two generations of the family bring this chapter of their ancestral history to the screen.