David Beaton, a younger son of John Beaton of Balfour in the county of Fife, and said to have been born in 1494, had been educated at the universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow, and in his sixteenth year was sent to Paris, where he studied civil and canon law.
He began his political career at the French court.
He was from 1520 Rector and Prebendary at Cambuslang.
He became Commendator of Arbroath in 1524, bishop of Mirepoix in Languedoc in December 1537 on the recommendation of King Francis I, and in 1538, Pope Paul III appointed him a cardinal under the title of St. Stephen in the Caelian Hill.
He is the only Scotsman named to that office by an undisputed right, Cardinal Wardlaw, Bishop of Glasgow, having received his appointment from the Antipope Clement VII about 160 years earlier.
On the death in 1539 of Archbishop James Beaton, his uncle and patron who had given him the prebend of Cambuslang, the cardinal had become Archbishop of St. Andrews.
He has acted several times between 1533 and 1542 as King James's ambassador to France, taking a leading part in the negotiations connected with the King's marriages, first with Madeleine of France, and afterwards with Mary of Guise., and been naturalized a French subject.
He had served during 1542 as Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland for a matter of months.
Politically, Beaton is preoccupied with the maintenance of the Franco-Scottish alliance, and opposing Anglophile political attitudes, which are associated with the clamor for Protestant reform in Scotland ('the whole pollution and plague of Anglican impiety' as he calls it).
He has been afraid that James V might follow Henry VIII's policy of appropriating monastic revenues.
In the wake of the Scottish defeat at Solway Moss, James, mentally unbalanced by the disaster, dies at Falkland Palace in Fife on December 14, 1542, six days after the birth of his daughter—his only surviving legitimate child—Mary Stewart, who becomes the infant queen of Scots.
Scotland's rival pro-English and pro-French factions plot to gain control of Mary, whose French mother, Marie de Guise, is chosen as regent.
