John Knox and the Reformation / Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912

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Title: John Knox and the Reformation

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: November 10, 2004  [eBook #14016]

Language: English

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN KNOX AND THE REFORMATION***




Transcribed from the 1905 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





John Knox and the Reformation


[John Knox.  From a Posthumous Portrait.  Beza's Icones, 1850: knox1.jpg]

To Maurice Hewlett




PREFACE


In this brief Life of Knox I have tried, as much as I may, to get behind
Tradition, which has so deeply affected even modern histories of the
Scottish Reformation, and even recent Biographies of the Reformer.  The
tradition is based, to a great extent, on Knox's own "History," which I
am therefore obliged to criticise as carefully as I can.  In his valuable
John Knox, a Biography, Professor Hume Brown says that in the "History"
"we have convincing proof alike of the writer's good faith, and of his
perception of the conditions of historic truth."  My reasons for
dissenting from this favourable view will be found in the following
pages.  If I am right, if Knox, both as a politician and an historian,
resembled Charles I. in "sailing as near the wind" as he could, the
circumstance (as another of his biographers remarks) "only makes him more
human and interesting."

Opinion about Knox and the religious Revolution in which he took so great
a part, has passed through several variations in the last century.  In
the Edinburgh Review of 1816 (No. liii. pp. 163-180), is an article with
which the present biographer can agree.  Several passages from Knox's
works are cited, and the reader is expected to be "shocked at their
principles."  They are certainly shocking, but they are not, as a rule,
set before the public by biographers of the Reformer.

Mr. Carlyle introduced a style of thinking about Knox which may be called
platonically Puritan.  Sweet enthusiasts glide swiftly over all in the
Reformer that is specially distasteful to us.  I find myself more in
harmony with the outspoken Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and
the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several more recent students of
Knox.

"The Reformer's violent counsels and intemperate speech were remarkable,"
writes Dr. Robertson, "even in his own ruthless age," and he gives
fourteen examples. {0a}  "Lord Hailes has shown," he adds, "how little
Knox's statements" (in his "History") "are to be relied on even in
matters which were within the Reformer's own knowledge."  In Scotland
there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose
sentimentalism.  To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their
admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter
Scott.  On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which
musters under the banner of the Covenant, and sees scarcely a blemish in
Knox.  A pretty sample of the sentiment of this party appears in a
biography (1905) of the Reformer by a minister of the Gospel.  Knox
summoned the organised brethren, in 1563, to overawe justice, when some
men were to be tried on a charge of invading in arms the chapel of
Holyrood.  No proceeding could be more anarchic than Knox's, or more in
accordance with the lovable customs of my dear country, at that time.  But
the biographer of 1905, "a placed minister," writes that "the doing of
it" (Knox's summons) "was only an assertion of the liberty of the Church,
and of the members of the Commonwealth as a whole, to assemble for
purposes which were clearly lawful"--the purposes being to overawe
justice in the course of a trial!

On sentiment, Cavalier or Puritan, reason is thrown away.

I have been surprised to find how completely a study of Knox's own works
corroborates the views of Dr. Robertson and Lord Hailes.  That Knox ran
so very far ahead of the Genevan pontiffs of his age in violence; and
that in his "History" he needs such careful watching, was, to me, an
unexpected discovery.  He may have been "an old Hebrew prophet," as Mr.
Carlyle says, but he had also been a young Scottish notary!  A Hebrew
prophet is, at best, a dangerous anachronism in a delicate crisis of the
Church Christian; and the notarial element is too conspicuous in some
passages of Knox's "History."

That Knox was a great man; a disinterested man; in his regard for the
poor a truly Christian man; as a shepherd of Calvinistic souls a man
fervent and considerate; of pure life; in friendship loyal; by jealousy
untainted; in private character genial and amiable, I am entirely
convinced.  In public and political life he was much less admirable; and
his "History," vivacious as it is, must be studied as the work of an old-
fashioned advocate rather than as the summing up of a judge.  His
favourite adjectives are "bloody," "beastly," "rotten," and "stinking."

Any inaccuracies of my own which may have escaped my correction will be
dwelt on, by enthusiasts for the Prophet, as if they are the main
elements of this book, and disqualify me as a critic of Knox's "History."
At least any such errors on my part are involuntary and unconscious.  In
Knox's defence we must remember that he never saw his "History" in print.
But he kept it by him for many years, obviously re-reading, for he
certainly retouched it, as late as 1571.

In quoting Knox and his contemporaries, I have used modern spelling: the
letter from the State Papers printed on pp. 146, 147, shows what the
orthography of the period was really like.  Consultation of the original
MSS. on doubtful points, proves that the printed Calendars, though
excellent guides, cannot be relied on as authorities.

The portrait of Knox, from Beza's book of portraits of Reformers, is
posthumous, but is probably a good likeness drawn from memory, after a
description by Peter Young, who knew him, and a design, presumably by
"Adrianc Vaensoun," a Fleming, resident in Edinburgh. {0b}

There is an interesting portrait, possibly of Knox, in the National
Gallery of Portraits, but the work has no known authentic history.

The portrait of Queen Mary, at the age of thirty-six, and a prisoner, is
from the Earl of Morton's original; it is greatly superior to the
"Sheffield" type of likenesses, of about 1578; and, with Janet's and
other drawings (1558-1561), the Bridal medal of 1558, and (in my opinion)
the Earl of Leven and Melville's portrait, of about 1560-1565, is the
best extant representation of the Queen.

The Leven and Melville portrait of Mary, young and charming, and wearing
jewels which are found recorded in her Inventories, has hitherto been
overlooked.  An admirable photogravure is given in Mr. J. J. Foster's
"True Portraiture of Mary, Queen of Scots" (1905), and I understand that
a photograph was done in 1866 for the South Kensington Museum.

A. LANG.

8 Gibson Place, St. Andrews.




CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY, BIRTH, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT: 1513(?)-1546


"November 24, 1572.

"John Knox, minister, deceased, who had, as was alleged, the most part of
the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late
Cardinal."

It is thus that the decent burgess who, in 1572, kept The Diurnal of such
daily events as he deemed important, cautiously records the death of the
great Scottish Reformer.  The sorrows, the "cumber" of which Knox was
"alleged" to bear the blame, did not end with his death.  They persisted
in the conspiracies and rebellions of the earlier years of James VI.;
they smouldered through the later part of his time; they broke into far
spreading flame at the touch of the Covenant; they blazed at "dark
Worcester and bloody Dunbar"; at Preston fight, and the sack of Dundee by
Monk; they included the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland, and the shame
and misery of the Restoration; to trace them down to our own age would be
invidious.

It is with the "alleged" author of the Sorrows, with his life, works, and
ideas that we are concerned.

John Knox, son of William Knox and of --- Sinclair, his wife, {2a} unlike
most Scotsmen, unlike even Mr. Carlyle, had not "an ell of pedigree."  The
common scoff was that each Scot styled himself "the King's poor cousin."
But John Knox declared, "I am a man of base estate and condition." {2b}
The genealogy of Mr. Carlyle has been traced to a date behind the Norman
Conquest, but of Knox's ancestors nothing is known.  He himself, in 1562,
when he "ruled the roast" in Scotland, told the ruffian Earl of Bothwell,
"my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father, have served your
Lordship's predecessors, and some of them have died under their
standards; and this" (namely goodwill to the house of the feudal
superior) "is a part of the obligation of our Scottish kindness."  Knox,
indeed, never writes very harshly of Bothwell, partly for the reason he
gives; partly, perhaps, because Bothwell, though an infamous character,
and a political opponent, was not in 1562-67 "an idolater," that is, a
Catholic: if ever he had been one; partly because his "History" ends
before Bothwell's murder of Darnley in 1567.

Knox's ancestors were, we may suppose, peasant farmers, like the
ancestors of Burns and Hogg; and Knox, though he married a maid of the
Queen's kin, bore traces of his descent.  "A man ungrateful and
unpleasable," Northumberland styled him: he was one who could not
"smiling, put a question by"; if he had to remonstrate even with a person
whom it was desirable to conciliate, he stated his case in the plainest
and least flattering terms.  "Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions
different from many," he wrote; but this side of his character he kept
mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and indifferent
or hostile to his aims.  To others, especially to women whom he liked, he
was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social superiority
aroused his wakeful independence.  His countrymen of his own order had
long displayed these peculiarities of humour.

The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even
before his age, in two strangely different lights.  If they were not
technically "kindly tenants," in which case their conditions of existence
and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable
to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their
condition written in 1549, "were in more servitude than the children of
Israel in Egypt."  Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted,
hopes that the agricultural class may yet live "as substantial commoners,
not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours _at
their own expense_," as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House.
This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the
Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and
England, in place of the old and romantic league with France.  That
alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their
national independence.  But, with the great revolution in religion, the
interest of Scotland was a permanent political league with England, which
Knox did as much as any man to forward, while, by resisting a religious
union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.

If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly
oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners.  In 1515 the
chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam
Williamson: "You know the use of this country.  Every man speaks what he
will without blame.  The man hath more words than the master, and will
not be content unless he knows the master's counsel.  There is no order
among us."

Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was
minded that "A man's a man for a' that!"  Knox was the true flower of
this vigorous Lowland thistle.  Throughout life he not only "spoke what
he would," but uttered "the Truth" in such a tone as to make it unlikely
that his "message" should be accepted by opponents.  Like Carlyle,
however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he
says, ever began on his side; while, as "a good hater," Dr. Johnson might
have admired him.  He carried into political and theological conflicts
the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden
under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns.  So far Knox was an example
of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn in
detail about his ancestors.

The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of Haddington, in
a district on the path of English invasion.  The year of his birth has
long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as 1505. {4}
Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely,
Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza that Knox died
in his fifty-ninth year.  Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal
year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see,
appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.

If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priest's orders, and
adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which
the canonical law permitted.  No man ought to be in priest's orders
before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five in
1540, when he is styled "Sir John Knox" (one of "The Pope's Knights") in
legal documents, and appears as a notary. {5}  He certainly continued in
orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543.  The law of
the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but in an age
when "notaires" were often professional forgers, the additional security
for character yielded by Holy Orders must have been welcome to clients,
and Bishops permitted priests to practise this branch of the law.

Of Knox's near kin no more is known than of his ancestors.  He had a
brother, William, for whom, in 1552, he procured a licence to trade in
England as owner of a ship of 100 tons.  Even as late as 1656, there were
not a dozen ships of this burden in Scotland, so William Knox must have
been relatively a prosperous man.  In 1544-45, there was a William Knox,
a fowler or gamekeeper to the Earl of Westmoreland, who acted as a secret
agent between the Scots in English pay and their paymasters.  We much
later (1559) find the Reformer's brother, William, engaged with him in a
secret political mission to the Governor of Berwick; probably this
William knew shy Border paths, and he may have learned them as the Lord
Westmoreland's fowler in earlier years.

About John Knox's early years and education nothing is known.  He
certainly acquired such Latin (satis humilis, says a German critic) as
Scotland then had to teach; probably at the Burgh School of Haddington.  A
certain John Knox matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1522, but
he cannot have been the Reformer, if the Reformer was not born till 1513-
15.  Beza, on the other hand (1580), had learned, probably from the
Reformer, whom he knew well, that Knox was a St. Andrews man, and though
his name does not occur in the University Register, the Register was very
ill kept.  Supposing Knox, then, to have been born in 1513-15, and to
have been educated at St. Andrews, we can see how he comes to know so
much about the progress of the new religious ideas at that University,
between 1529 and 1535.  "The Well of St. Leonard's College" was a
notorious fountain of heresies, under Gawain Logie, the Principal.  Knox
very probably heard the sermons of the Dominicans and Franciscans
"against the pride and idle life of bishops," and other abuses.  He
speaks of a private conversation between Friar Airth and Major (about
1534), and names some of the persons present at a sermon in the parish
church of St. Andrews, as if he had himself been in the congregation.  He
gives the text and heads of the discourse, including "merry tales" told
by the Friar. {6}  If Knox heard the sermons and stories of clerical
scandals at St. Andrews, they did not prevent him from taking orders.  His
Greek and Hebrew, what there was of them, Knox must have acquired in
later life, at least we never learn that he was taught by the famous
George Wishart, who, about that time, gave Greek lectures at Montrose.

The Catholic opponents of Knox naturally told scandalous anecdotes
concerning his youth.  These are destitute of evidence: about his youth
we know nothing.  It is a characteristic trait in him, and a fact much to
his credit, that, though he is fond of expatiating about himself, he
never makes confessions as to his earlier adventures.  On his own years
of the wild oat St. Augustine dilates in a style which still has charm:
but Knox, if he sowed wild oats, is silent as the tomb.  If he has
anything to repent, it is not to the world that he confesses.  About the
days when he was "one of Baal's shaven sort," in his own phrase; when he
was himself an "idolater," and a priest of the altar: about the details
of his conversion, Knox is mute.  It is probable that, as a priest, he
examined Lutheran books which were brought in with other merchandise from
Holland; read the Bible for himself; and failed to find Purgatory, the
Mass, the intercession of Saints, pardons, pilgrimages, and other
accessories of mediaeval religion in the Scriptures. {7}  Knox had only
to keep his eyes and ears open, to observe the clerical ignorance and
corruption which resulted in great part from the Scottish habit of
securing wealthy Church offices for ignorant, brutal, and licentious
younger sons and bastards of noble families.  This practice in Scotland
was as odious to good Catholics, like Quentin Kennedy, Ninian Winzet,
and, rather earlier, to Ferrerius, as to Knox himself.  The prevalent
anarchy caused by the long minorities of the Stuart kings, and by the
interminable wars with England, and the difficulty of communications with
Rome, had enabled the nobles thus to rob and deprave the Church, and so
to provide themselves with moral reasons good for robbing her again; as a
punishment for the iniquities which they had themselves introduced!

The almost incredible ignorance and profligacy of the higher Scottish
clergy (with notable exceptions) in Knox's youth, are not matter of
controversy.  They are as frankly recognised by contemporary Catholic as
by Protestant authors.  In the very year of the destruction of the
monasteries (1559) the abuses are officially stated, as will be told
later, by the last Scottish Provincial Council.  Though three of the four
Scottish universities were founded by Catholics, and the fourth,
Edinburgh, had an endowment bequeathed by a Catholic, the clerical
ignorance, in Knox's time, was such that many priests could hardly read.

If more evidence is needed as to the debauched estate of the Scottish
clergy, we obtain it from Mary of Guise, widow of James V., the Regent
then governing Scotland for her child, Mary Stuart.  The Queen, in
December 1555, begged Pius IV. to permit her to levy a tax on her clergy,
and to listen to what Cardinal Sermoneta would tell him about their need
of reformation.  The Cardinal drew a terrible sketch of the nefarious
lives of "every kind of religious women" in Scotland.  They go about with
their illegal families and dower their daughters out of the revenues of
the Church.  The monks, too, have bloated wealth, while churches are
allowed to fall into decay.  "The only hope is in the Holy Father," who
should appoint an episcopal commission of visitation.  For about forty
years prelates have been alienating Church lands illegally, and churches
and monasteries, by the avarice of those placed in charge, are crumbling
to decay.  Bishops are the chief dealers in cattle, fish, and hides,
though we have, in fact, good evidence that their dealings were very
limited, "sma' sums."

Not only the clergy, but the nobles and people were lawless.  "They are
more difficult to manage than ever," writes Mary of Guise (Jan. 13,
1557).  They are recalcitrant against law and order; every attempt at
introducing these is denounced as an attack on their old laws: not that
their laws are bad, but that they are badly administered. {9}  Scotland,
in brief, had always been lawless, and for centuries had never been
godly.  She was untouched by the first fervour of the Franciscan and
other religious revivals.  Knox could not fail to see what was so patent:
many books of the German reformers may have come in his way; no more was
wanted than the preaching of George Wishart in 1543-45, to make him an
irreconcilable foe of the doctrine as well as the discipline of his
Church.

Knox had a sincerely religious nature, and a conviction that he was, more
than most men, though a sinner, in close touch with Him "in whom we live
and move and have our being."  We ask ourselves, had Knox, as "a priest
of the altar," never known the deep emotions, which tongue may not utter,
that the ceremonies and services of his Church so naturally awaken in the
soul of the believer?  These emotions, if they were in his experience, he
never remembered tenderly, he flung them from him without regret; not
regarding them even as dreams, beautiful and dear, but misleading, that
came through the Ivory Gate.  To Knox's opponent in controversy, Quentin
Kennedy, the mass was "the blessed Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is
one of the chief Sacraments whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of
mankind, has appointed the fruit of His death and passion to be daily
renewed and applied."  In this traditional view there is nothing
unedifying, nothing injurious to the Christian life.  But to Knox the
wafer is an idol, a god "of water and meal," "but a feeble and miserable
god," that can be destroyed "by a bold and puissant mouse."  "Rats and
mice will desire no better dinner than white round gods enough." {10}

The Reformer and the Catholic take up the question "by different
handles"; and the Catholic grounds his defence on a text about
Melchizedek!  To Knox the mass is the symbol of all that he justly
detested in the degraded Church as she then was in Scotland, "that
horrible harlot with her filthiness."  To Kennedy it was what we have
seen.

Knox speaks of having been in "the puddle of papistry."  He loathes what
he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first
years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest
and notary merely that he "might eat a morsel of bread"; and that real
"conviction" never was his till his studies of Protestant
controversialists, and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the
teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life.  Then he awoke to a
passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of "mumbled masses," of
"rites of human invention," whereof he had never known the poetry and the
mystic charm.  Had he known them, he could not have so denied and
detested them.  On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new
ideas, Knox's faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the
round world, made so fast that it cannot be moved.  He had now a pou sto,
whence he could, and did, move the world of human affairs.  A faith not
to be shaken, and enormous energy were the essential attributes of the
Reformer.  It is almost impossible to find an instance in which Knox
allows that he may have been mistaken: d'avoir toujours raison was his
claim.  If he admits an error in details, it is usually an error of
insufficient severity.  He did not attack Northumberland or Mary Stuart
with adequate violence; he did not disapprove enough of our prayer book;
he did not hand a heretic over to the magistrates.

While acting as a priest and notary, between 1540, at latest, and 1543,
Knox was engaged as private tutor to a boy named Brounefield, son of
Brounefield of Greenlaw, and to other lads, spoken of as his "bairns."  In
this profession of tutor he continued till 1547.

Knox's personal aspect did not give signs of the uncommon strength which
his unceasing labours demanded, but, like many men of energy, he had a
perpetual youth of character and vigour.  After his death, Peter Young
described him as he appeared in his later years.  He was somewhat below
the "just" standard of height; his limbs were well and elegantly shaped;
his shoulders broad, his fingers rather long, his head small, his hair
black, his face somewhat swarthy, and not unpleasant to behold.  There
was a certain geniality in a countenance serious and stern, with a
natural dignity and air of command; his eyebrows, when he was in anger,
were expressive.  His forehead was rather narrow, depressed above the
eyebrows; his cheeks were full and ruddy, so that the eyes seemed to
retreat into their hollows: they were dark grey, keen, and lively.  The
face was long, the nose also; the mouth was large, the upper lip being
the thicker.  The beard was long, rather thick and black, with a few grey
hairs in his later years. {12}  The nearest approach to an authentic
portrait of Knox is a woodcut, engraved after a sketch from memory by
Peter Young, and after another sketch of the same kind by an artist in
Edinburgh.  Compared with the peevish face of Calvin, also in Beza's
Icones, Knox looks a broad-minded and genial character.

Despite the uncommon length to which Knox carried the contemporary
approval of persecution, then almost universal, except among the
Anabaptists (and any party out of power), he was not personally rancorous
where religion was not concerned.  But concerned it usually was!  He was
the subject of many anonymous pasquils and libels, we know, but he
entirely disregarded them.  If he hated any mortal personally, and beyond
what true religion demands of a Christian, that mortal was the mother of
Mary Stuart, an amiable lady in an impossible position.  Of jealousy
towards his brethren there is not a trace in Knox, and he told Queen Mary
that he could ill bear to correct his own boys, though the age was as
cruel to schoolboys as that of St. Augustine.

The faults of Knox arose not in his heart, but in his head; they sprung
from intellectual errors, and from the belief that he was always right.
He applied to his fellow-Christians--Catholics--the commands which early
Israel supposed to be divinely directed against foreign worshippers of
Chemosh and Moloch.  He endeavoured to force his own theory of what the
discipline of the Primitive Apostolic Church had been upon a modern
nation, following the example of the little city state of Geneva, under
Calvin.  He claimed for preachers chosen by local congregations the
privileges and powers of the apostolic companions of Christ, and in place
of "sweet reasonableness," he applied the methods, quite alien to the
Founder of Christianity, of the "Sons of Thunder."  All controversialists
then relied on isolated and inappropriate scriptural texts, and Biblical
analogies which were not analogous; but Knox employed these things, with
perhaps unusual inconsistency, in varying circumstances.  His "History"
is not more scrupulous than that of other partisans in an exciting
contest, and examples of his taste for personal scandal are not scarce.




CHAPTER II: KNOX, WISHART, AND THE MURDER OF BEATON: 1545-1546


Our earliest knowledge of Knox, apart from mention of him in notarial
documents, is derived from his own History of the Reformation.  The
portion of that work in which he first mentions himself was written about
1561-66, some twenty years after the events recorded, and in reading all
this part of his Memoirs, and his account of the religious struggle,
allowance must be made for errors of memory, or for erroneous
information.  We meet him first towards the end of "the holy days of
Yule"--Christmas, 1545.  Knox had then for some weeks been the constant
companion and armed bodyguard of George Wishart, who was calling himself
"the messenger of the Eternal God," and preaching the new ideas in
Haddington to very small congregations.  This Wishart, Knox's master in
the faith, was a Forfarshire man; he is said to have taught Greek at
Montrose, to have been driven thence in 1538 by the Bishop of Brechin,
and to have recanted certain heresies in 1539.  He had denied the merits
of Christ as the Redeemer, but afterwards dropped that error, when
persistence meant death at the stake.  It was in Bristol that he "burned
his faggot," in place of being burned himself.  There was really nothing
humiliating in this recantation, for, after his release, he did not
resume his heresy; clearly he yielded, not to fear, but to conviction of
theological error. {15a}

He next travelled in Germany, where a Jew, on a Rhine boat, inspired or
increased his aversion to works of sacred art, as being "idolatrous."
About 1542-43 he was reading with pupils at Cambridge, and was remarked
for the severity of his ascetic virtue, and for his great charity.  At
some uncertain date he translated the Helvetic Confession of Faith, and
he was more of a Calvinist than a Lutheran.  In July 1543 he returned to
Scotland; at least he returned with some "commissioners to England," who
certainly came home in July 1543, as Knox mentions, though later he gives
the date of Wishart's return in 1544, probably by a slip of the pen.

Coming home in July 1543, Wishart would expect a fair chance of preaching
his novel ideas, as peace between Scotland and Protestant England now
seemed secure, and Arran, the Scottish Regent, the chief of the almost
Royal House of Hamilton, was, for the moment, himself a Protestant.  For
five days (August 28-September 3, 1543) the great Cardinal Beaton, the
head of the party of the Church, was outlawed, and Wishart's preaching at
Dundee, about that date, is supposed by some {15b} to have stimulated an
attack then made on the monasteries in the town.  But Arran suddenly
recanted, deserted the Protestants and the faction attached to England,
and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton, who, in November 1543, visited
Dundee, and imprisoned the ringleaders in the riots.  They are called
"the honestest men in the town," by the treble traitor and rascal,
Crichton, laird of Brunston in Lothian, at this time a secret agent of
Sadleir, the envoy of Henry VIII. (November 25, 1543).

By April 1544, Henry was preparing to invade Scotland, and the "earnest
professors" of Protestant doctrines in Scotland sent to him "a Scottish
man called Wysshert," with a proposal for the kidnapping or murder of
Cardinal Beaton.  Brunston and other Scottish lairds of Wishart's circle
were agents of the plot, and in 1545-46 our George Wishart is found
companioning with them.  When Cassilis took up the threads of the plot
against Beaton, it was to Cassilis's country in Ayrshire that Wishart
went and there preached.  Thence he returned to Dundee, to fight the
plague and comfort the citizens, and, towards the end of 1545, moved to
Lothian, expecting to be joined there by his westland supporters, led by
Cassilis--but entertaining dark forebodings of his doom.

There were, however, other Wisharts, Protestants, in Scotland.  It is not
possible to prove that this reformer, though the associate, was the agent
of the murderers, or was even conscious of their schemes.  Yet if he had
been, there was no matter for marvel.  Knox himself approved of and
applauded the murders of Cardinal Beaton and of Riccio, and, in that age,
too many men of all creeds and parties believed that to kill an opponent
of their religious cause was to imitate Phinehas, Jael, Jehu, and other
patriots of Hebrew history.  Dr. M'Crie remarks that Knox "held the
opinion, that persons who, according to the law of God and the just laws
of society, have forfeited their lives by the commission of flagrant
crimes, such as notorious murderers and tyrants, may warrantably be put
to death by private individuals, provided all redress in the ordinary
course of justice is rendered impossible, in consequence of the offenders
having usurped the executive authority, or being systematically protected
by oppressive rulers."  The ideas of Knox, in fact, varied in varying
circumstances and moods, and, as we shall show, at times he preached
notions far more truculent than those attributed to him by his
biographer; at times was all for saint-like submission and mere "passive
resistance." {17}

The current ideas of both parties on "killing no murder" were little
better than those of modern anarchists.  It was a prevalent opinion that
a king might have a subject assassinated, if to try him publicly entailed
political inconveniences.  The Inquisition, in Spain, vigorously
repudiated this theory, but the Inquisition was in advance of the age.
Knox, as to the doctrine of "killing no murder," was, and Wishart may
have been, a man of his time.  But Knox, in telling the story of a murder
which he approves, unhappily displays a glee unbecoming a reformer of the
Church of Him who blamed St. Peter for his recourse to the sword.  The
very essence of Christianity is cast to the winds when Knox utters his
laughter over the murders or misfortunes of his opponents, yielding, as
Dr. M'Crie says, "to the strong propensity which he felt to indulge his
vein of humour."  Other good men rejoiced in the murder of an enemy, but
Knox chuckled.

Nothing has injured Knox more in the eyes of posterity (when they happen
to be aware of the facts) than this "humour" of his.

Knox might be pardoned had he merely excused the murder of "the devil's
own son," Cardinal Beaton, who executed the law on his friend and master,
George Wishart.  To Wishart Knox bore a tender and enthusiastic
affection, crediting him not only with the virtues of charity and courage
which he possessed, but also with supernormal premonitions; "he was so
clearly illuminated with the spirit of prophecy."  These premonitions
appear to have come to Wishart by way of vision.  Knox asserted some
prophetic gift for himself, but never hints anything as to the method,
whether by dream, vision, or the hearing of voices.  He often alludes to
himself as "the prophet," and claims certain privileges in that capacity.
For example the prophet may blamelessly preach what men call "treason,"
as we shall see.  As to his actual predictions of events, he occasionally
writes as if they were mere deductions from Scripture.  God will punish
the idolater; A or B is an idolater; therefore it is safe to predict that
God will punish him or her.  "What man then can cease to prophesy?" he
asks; and there is, if we thus consider the matter, no reason why anybody
should ever leave off prophesying. {18a}

But if the art of prophecy is common to all Bible-reading mankind, all
mankind, being prophets, may promulgate treason, which Knox perhaps would
not have admitted.  He thought himself more specially a seer, and in his
prayer after the failure of his friends, the murderers of Riccio, he
congratulates himself on being favoured above the common sort of his
brethren, and privileged to "forespeak" things, in an unique degree.

"I dare not deny . . . but that God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown
to the world," he writes {18b}; and these claims soar high above mere
deductions from Scripture.  His biographer, Dr. M'Crie, doubts whether we
can dismiss, as necessarily baseless, all stories of "extraordinary
premonitions since the completion of the canon of inspiration." {19}
Indeed, there appears to be no reason why we should draw the line at a
given date, and "limit the operations of divine Providence."  I would be
the last to do so, but then Knox's premonitions are sometimes, or
usually, without documentary and contemporary corroboration; once he
certainly prophesied after the event (as we shall see), and he never
troubles himself about his predictions which were unfulfilled, as against
Queen Elizabeth.

He supplied the Kirk with the tradition of supernormal premonitions in
preachers--second-sight and clairvoyance--as in the case of Mr. Peden and
other saints of the Covenant.  But just as good cases of clairvoyance as
any of Mr. Peden's are attributed to Catherine de Medici, who was not a
saint, by her daughter, La Reine Margot, and others.  In Knox, at all
events, there is no trace of visual or auditory hallucinations, so common
in religious experiences, whatever the creed of the percipient.  He was
not a visionary.  More than this we cannot safely say about his prophetic
vein.

The enthusiasm which induced a priest, notary, and teacher like Knox to
carry a claymore in defence of a beloved teacher, Wishart, seems more
appropriate to a man of about thirty than a man of forty, and, so far,
supports the opinion that, in 1545, Knox was only thirty years of age.  In
that case, his study of the debates between the Church and the new
opinions must have been relatively brief.  Yet, in 1547, he already
reckoned himself, not incorrectly, as a skilled disputant in favour of
ideas with which he cannot have been very long familiar.

Wishart was taken, was tried, was condemned; was strangled, and his dead
body was burned at St. Andrews on March 1, 1546.  It is highly improbable
that Knox could venture, as a marked man, to be present at the trial.  He
cites the account of it in his "History" from the contemporary Scottish
narrative used by Foxe in his "Martyrs," and Laing, Knox's editor, thinks
that Foxe "may possibly have been indebted for some" of the Scottish
accounts "to the Scottish Reformer."  It seems, if there be anything in
evidence of tone and style, that what Knox quotes from Foxe in 1561-66 is
what Knox himself actually wrote about 1547-48.  Mr. Hill Burton observes
in the tract "the mark of Knox's vehement colouring," and adds, "it is
needless to seek in the account for precise accuracy."  In "precise
accuracy" many historians are as sadly to seek as Knox himself, but his
peculiar "colouring" is all his own, and is as marked in the pamphlet on
Wishart's trial, which he cites, as in the "History" which he
acknowledged.

There are said to be but few copies of the first edition of the black
letter tract on Wishart's trial, published in London, with Lindsay's
"Tragedy of the Cardinal," by Day and Seres.  I regard it as the earliest
printed work of John Knox. {20}  The author, when he describes Lauder,
Wishart's official accuser, as "a fed sow . . . his face running down
with sweat, and frothing at the mouth like ane bear," who "spat at
Maister George's face, . . . " shows every mark of Knox's vehement and
pictorial style.  His editor, Laing, bids us observe "that all these
opprobrious terms are copied from Foxe, or rather from the black letter
tract."  But the black letter tract, I conceive, must be Knox's own.  Its
author, like Knox, "indulges his vein of humour" by speaking of friars as
"fiends"; like Knox he calls Wishart "Maister George," and "that servand
of God."

The peculiarities of the tract, good and bad, the vivid familiar manner,
the vehemence, the pictorial quality, the violent invective, are the
notes of Knox's "History."  Already, by 1547, or not much later, he was
the perfect master of his style; his tone no more resembles that of his
contemporary and fellow-historian, Lesley, than the style of Mr. J. R.
Green resembles that of Mr. S. R. Gardiner.




CHAPTER III: KNOX IN ST. ANDREWS CASTLE: THE GALLEYS: 1547-1549


We now take up Knox where we left him: namely when Wishart was arrested
in January 1546.  He was then tutor to the sons of the lairds of
Langniddrie and Ormiston, Protestants and of the English party.  Of his
adventures we know nothing, till, on Beaton's murder (May 29, 1546), the
Cardinal's successor, Archbishop Hamilton, drove him "from place to
place," and, at Easter, 1547, he with his pupils entered the Castle of
St. Andrews, then held, with some English aid, against the Regent Arran,
by the murderers of Beaton and their adherents. {22}  Knox was not
present, of course, at Beaton's murder, about which he writes so
"merrily," in his manner of mirth; nor at the events of Arran's siege of
the castle, prior to April 1547.  He probably, as regards these matters,
writes from recollection of what Kirkcaldy of Grange, James Balfour,
Balnaves, and the other murderers or associates of the murderers of the
Cardinal told him in 1547, or later communicated to him as he wrote,
about 1565-66.  With his unfortunate love of imputing personal motives,
he attributes the attacks by the rulers on the murderers mainly to the
revengeful nature of Mary of Guise; the Cardinal having been "the comfort
to all gentlewomen, and _especially to wanton widows_.  His death must be
revenged." {23a}

Knox avers that the besiegers of St. Andrews Castle, despairing of their
task, near the end of January 1547 made a fraudulent truce with the
assassins, hoping for the betrayal of the castle, or of some of the
leaders. {23b}  In his narrative we find partisanship or very erroneous
information.  The conditions were, he says, that (1) the murderers should
hold the castle till Arran could obtain for them, from the Pope, a
sufficient absolution; (2) that they should give hostages, as soon as the
absolution was delivered to them; (3) that they and their friends should
not be prosecuted, nor undergo any legal penalties for the murder of the
Cardinal; (4) that they should meanwhile keep the eldest son of Arran as
hostage, so long as their own hostages were kept.  The Government,
however, says Knox, "never minded to keep word of them" (of these
conditions), "as the issue did declare."

There is no proof of this accusation of treachery on the part of Arran,
or none known to me.  The constant aim of Knox, his fixed idea, as an
historian, is to accuse his adversaries of the treachery which often
marked the negotiations of his friends.

From this point, the truce, dated by Knox late in January 1547, he
devotes eighteen pages to his own call to the ministry by the castle
people, and to his controversies and sermons in St. Andrews.  He then
returns to history, and avers that, about June 21, 1547, the papal
absolution was presented to the garrison merely as a veil for a
treasonable attack, but was rejected, as it included the dubious phrase,
Remittimus irremissibile--"We remit the crime that cannot be remitted."
Nine days later, June 29, he says, by "the treasonable mean" of Arran,
Archbishop Hamilton, and Mary of Guise, twenty-one French galleys, and
such an army as the Firth had never seen, hove into view, and on June 30
summoned the castle to surrender.  The siege of St Andrews Castle, from
the sea, by the French then began, but the garrison and castle were
unharmed, and many of the galley slaves and some French soldiers were
slain, and a ship was driven out of action.  The French "shot two days"
only.  On July 19 the siege was renewed by land, guns were mounted on the
spires of St. Salvator's College chapel and on the Cathedral, and did
much scathe, though, during the first three weeks of the siege, the
garrison "had many prosperous chances."  Meanwhile Knox prophesied the
defeat of his associates, because of "their corrupt life."  They had
robbed and ravished, and were probably demoralised by Knox's prophecies.
On the last day of July the castle surrendered. {24}  Knox adds that his
friends would deal with France alone, as "Scottish men had all
traitorously betrayed them."

Now much of this narrative is wrong; wrong in detail, in suggestion, in
omission.  That a man of fifty, or sixty, could attribute the attacks on
Beaton's murderers to mere revenge, specially to that of a "wanton
widow," Mary of Guise (who had, we are to believe, so much of the
Cardinal's attentions as his mistress, Mariotte Ogilvy, could spare), is
significant of the spirit in which Knox wrote history.  He had a strong
taste for such scandals as this about the "wanton widow."

Wherever he touches on Mary of Guise (who once treated him in a spirit of
banter), he deals a stab at her name and fame.  On all that concerns her
personal character and political conduct, he is unworthy of credit when
uncorroborated by better authority.  Indeed Knox's spirit is so unworthy
that for this, among other reasons, Archbishop Spottiswoode declined to
believe in his authorship of the "History."  The actual facts were not
those recorded by Knox.

As regards the "Appointment" or arrangement of the Scottish Government
with the Castilians, it was not made late in January 1547, but was at
least begun by December 17-19, 1546. {25a}  On January 11, 1547, a spy of
England, Stewart of Cardonald, reports that the garrison have given
pledges and await their absolution from Rome. {25b}  With regard to
Knox's other statements in this place, it was not _after_ this truce,
first, but before it, on November 26, that Arran invited French
assistance, if England would not include Scotland in a treaty of peace
with France.  An English invasion was expected in February 1547, and
Arran's object in the "Appointment" with the garrison was to prevent the
English from becoming possessed of the Castle of St. Andrews.  Far from
desiring a papal pardon--a mere pretext to gain time for English
relief--the garrison actually asked Henry VIII. to request the Emperor,
to implore the Pope, "to stop and hinder their absolution." {25c}  Knox
very probably knew nothing of all this, but his efforts to throw the
blame of treachery on his opponents are obviously futile.

As to the honesty of his associates--before the death of Henry VIII.
(January 28, 1547), the Castilians had promised him not to surrender the
place without his consent, and to put Arran's son in his hands, promises
which they also made, on Henry's death, to the English Government; in
February they repeated these promises, quite incompatible with their vow
to surrender if absolved.  Knox represents them as merely promising to
Henry that they would return Arran's son, and support the plan of
marrying Mary Stuart to Prince Edward of Wales! {26a}  In March 1547,
English ships gathered at Holy Island, to relieve the castle.  Not on
June 21, 1547, as Knox alleges, but before April 2, the papal absolution
for the murderers arrived.  They mocked at it; and the spy who reports
the facts is told that they "would rather have a boll of wheat than all
the Pope's remissions." {26b}  Whatever the terms of the papal remission,
they had already, before it arrived, bound themselves to England not to
accept it save with English concurrence; and England, then preparing to
invade Scotland, could not possibly concur.  Such was the honesty of
Knox's party, and we already see how far his "History" deserves to be
accepted as historical.

Next, what is most surprising, Knox's account of the month of ineffectual
siege by the French, while he was actually in the castle, rests on a
strange error of his memory.  The contemporary diary, Diurnal of
Occurrences dates the _sending_ (the arrival must be meant) of the French
galleys, not on June 29, as Knox dates their arrival, but on July 24.
Professor Hume Brown says that the Diurnal gives the date as _June_ 24 (a
slip of the pen), "but Knox had surely the best opportunity of knowing
both facts" {27a}--that is, the number of the galleys, and the date of
their coming.  Despite his unrivalled opportunities of knowledge, Knox
did not know.  It is not quite correct to say that "Knox in his 'History'
shows throughout a conscientious regard to accuracy of statement."
Whatever the number of the galleys (Knox says twenty-one; the Diurnal
says sixteen), on July 13-14, they are reported by Lord Eure, at Berwick,
as passing or having just passed Eyemouth. {27b}  They did not therefore
suffer for three weeks at the garrison's hands, or for three weeks desert
the siege, but probably reached the scene of action before the date in
the Diurnal (July 24), as, on July 23, the French Ambassador in England
heard that they were investing the castle. {27c}  Allowing five or six
days for transmission of news, they probably began the attack from the
sea about July 16 or 17, not, as Knox says, on June 30.  Perhaps he is
right in saying that the French galleys only fired for two days and
retreated, rather battered, to Dundee.  Land forces next attacked the
hold, which surrendered on July 29 (as was known in London on August 5),
that is, on the first day that the _land_ battery was erected.

Knox gives a much more full account of his own controversies, in April-
June 1547, than of political events.  He first, on arrival at the castle,
drew up a catechism for his pupils, and publicly catechised them on its
tenets, in the parish kirk in South Street.  It is unfortunate that we do
not possess this catechism.  At the time when he wrote, Knox was possibly
more of "Martin's" mind, as he familiarly terms Luther, both as to the
Sacrament and as to the Order of Bishops, than he was after his residence
in Geneva.  Wishart, however, was well acquainted with Helvetic doctrine;
he had, as we saw, translated a Helvetic Confession of Faith, perhaps
with the view of introducing it into Scotland, and Knox may already have
imbibed Calvinism from him.  He was not yet--he never was--a full-blown
Presbyterian, and, while thinking nothing of "orders," would not have
rejected a bishop, if the bishop _preached_ and was of godly and frugal
life.  Already sermons were the most important part of public worship in
the mind of Knox.

In addition to public catechising he publicly expounded, and lectured on
the Fourth Gospel, in the chapel of the castle.  He doubted if he had "a
lawful vocation" to _preach_.  The castle pulpit was then occupied by an
ex-friar named Rough.  This divine, later burned in England, preached a
sermon declaring a doctrine accepted by Knox, namely, that any
congregation could call on any man in whom they "espied the gifts of God"
to be their preacher; he offered Knox the post, and all present agreed.
Knox wept, and for days his gloom declared his sense of his
responsibility: such was "his holy vocation."  The garrison was,
confessedly, brutal, licentious, and rapacious, but they "all" partook of
the holy Communion. {28}

In controversy, Knox declared the Church to be "the synagogue of Satan,"
and in the Pope he detected and denounced "the Man of Sin."  On the
following Sunday he proved, from Daniel, that the Roman Church is "that
last Beast."  The Church is also anti-Christ, and "the Hoore of Babylon,"
and Knox dilated on the personal misconduct of Popes and "all shavelings
for the most part."  He contrasted Justification by Faith with the
customs of pardons and pilgrimages.

After these remarks, a controversy was held between Knox and the
sub-prior, Wynram, the Scottish Vicar of Bray, Knox being understood to
maintain that no bishop who did not preach was really a bishop; that the
Mass is "abominable idolatry"; that Purgatory does not exist; and that
the tithes are not necessarily the property of churchmen--a doctrine very
welcome to the hungry nobles of Scotland.  Knox, of course, easily
overcame an ignorant opponent, a friar, who joined in the fray.  His own
arguments he later found time to write out fully in the French galleys,
in which he was a prisoner, after the fall of the castle.  If he "wrate
in the galleys," as he says, they cannot have been always such floating
hells as they are usually reckoned.

That Knox, and other captives from the castle, were placed in the galleys
after their surrender, was an abominable stretch of French power.  They
were not subjects of France.  The terms on which they surrendered are not
exactly known.  Knox avers that they were to be free to live in France,
and that, if they wished to leave, they were to be conveyed, at French
expense, to any country except Scotland.  Buchanan declares that only the
lives of the garrison and their friends were secured by the terms of
surrender.  Lesley supports Knox, {30a} who is probably accurate.

To account for the French severity, Knox tells us that the Pope insisted
on it, appealing to both the Scottish and French Governments; and
Scotland sent an envoy to France to beg "that those of the castle should
be sharply handled."  Men of birth were imprisoned, the rest went to the
galleys.  Knox's life cannot have been so bad as that of the Huguenot
galley slaves under Louis XIV.  He was allowed to receive letters; he
read and commented on a treatise written in prison by Balnaves; and he
even wrote a theological work, unless this work was his commentary on
Balnaves.  These things can only have been possible when the galleys were
not on active service.  In a very manly spirit, he never dilated on his
sufferings, and merely alludes to "the torment I sustained in the
galleys."  He kept up his heart, always prophesying deliverance; and once
(June, 1548?), when in view of St. Andrews, declared that he should
preach again in the kirk where his career began.  Unluckily, the person
to whom he spoke, at a moment when he himself was dangerously ill, denied
that he had ever been in the galleys at all! {30b}  He was Sir James
Balfour, a notorious scoundrel, quite untrustworthy; according to Knox,
he had spoken of the prophecy, in Scotland, long before its fulfilment.

Knox's health was more or less undermined, while his spiritual temper was
not mollified by nineteen months of the galleys, mitigated as they
obviously were.

It is, doubtless, to his "torment" in the galleys that Knox refers when
he writes: "I know how hard the battle is between the spirit and the
flesh, under the heavy cross of affliction, where no worldly defence, but
present death, does appear. . . .  Rests only Faith, provoking us to call
earnestly, and pray for assistance of God's spirit, wherein if we
continue, our most desperate calamities shall turn to gladness, and to a
prosperous end. . . .  With experience I write this."

In February or March, 1549, Knox was released; by April he was in
England, and, while Edward VI. lived, was in comparative safety.




CHAPTER IV: KNOX IN ENGLAND: THE BLACK RUBRIC: EXILE: 1549-1554


Knox at once appeared in England in a character revolting to the later
Presbyterian conscience, which he helped to educate.  The State permitted
no cleric to preach without a Royal license, and Knox was now a State
licensed preacher at Berwick, one of many "State officials with a
specified mission."  He was an agent of the English administration, then
engaged in forcing a detested religion on the majority of the English
people.  But he candidly took his own line, indifferent to the
compromises of the rulers in that chaos of shifting opinions.  For
example, the Prayer Book of Edward VI. at that time took for granted
kneeling as the appropriate attitude for communicants.  Knox, at Berwick,
on the other hand, bade his congregation sit, as he conceived that to
have been the usage at the first institution of the rite.  Possibly the
Apostles, in fact, supped in a recumbent attitude, as Cranmer justly
remarked later (John xiii. 25), but Knox supposed them to have sat.  In a
letter to his Berwick flock, he reminds them of his practice on this
point; but he would not dissent from kneeling if "magistrates make known,
as that they" (would?) "have done if ministers were willing to do their
duties, that kneeling is not retained in the Lord's Supper for
maintenance of any superstition," much less as "adoration of the Lord's
Supper."  This, "for a time," would content him: and this he obtained.
{33a}  Here Knox appears to make the civil authority--"the
magistrates"--governors of the Church, while at the same time he does not
in practice obey them unless they accept his conditions.

This letter to the Berwick flock must be prior to the autumn of 1552, in
which, as we shall see, Knox obtained his terms as to kneeling.  He went
on, in his epistle to the Berwickians, to speak in "a tone of moderation
and modesty," for which, says Dr. Lorimer, not many readers will be
prepared. {33b}  In this modest passage, Knox says that, as to "the chief
points of religion," he, with God's help, "will give place to neither man
nor angel teaching the contrary" of his preaching.  Yet an angel might be
supposed to be well informed on points of doctrine!  "But as to
ceremonies or rites, things of smaller weight, I was not minded to move
contention. . . ."  The one point which--"because I am but one, having in
my contrary magistrates, common order, and judgments, and many
learned"--he is prepared to yield, and that for a time, is the practice
of kneeling, but only on three conditions.  These being granted, "with
patience will I bear that one thing, daily thirsting and calling unto God
for reformation of that and others." {33c}  But he did not bear that one
thing; he would _not_ kneel even after his terms were granted!  This is
the sum of Knox's "moderation and modesty"!

Though he is not averse from talking about himself, Knox, in his
"History," spares but three lines to his five years' residence in England
(1549-54).  His first charge was Berwick (1549-51), where we have seen he
celebrated holy Communion by the Swiss rite, all meekly sitting.  The
Second Prayer Book, of 1552, when Knox ministered in Newcastle, bears
marks of his hand.  He opposed, as has been said, the rubric bidding the
communicants kneel; the attitude savoured of "idolatry."

The circumstances in which Knox carried his point on this question are
most curious.  Just before October 12, 1552, a foreign Protestant,
Johannes Utenhovius, wrote to the Zurich Protestant, Bullinger, to the
effect that a certain vir bonus, Scotus natione (a good man and a Scot),
a preacher (concionator), of the Duke of Northumberland, had delivered a
sermon before the King and Council, "in which he freely inveighed against
the Anglican custom of kneeling at the Lord's Supper."  Many listeners
were greatly moved, and Utenhovius prayed that the sermon might be of
blessed effect.  Knox was certainly in London at this date, and was
almost certainly the excellent Scot referred to by Utenhovius.  The
Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was then in such forwardness that
Parliament had appointed it to be used in churches, beginning on November
1.  The book included the command to kneel at the Lord's Supper, and any
agitation against the practice might seem to be too late.  Cranmer, the
Primate, was in favour of the rubric as it stood, and on October 7, 1552,
addressed the Privy Council in a letter which, without naming Knox,
clearly shows his opinion of our Reformer.  The book, _as it stood_, said
Cranmer, had the assent of King and Parliament--now it was to be altered,
apparently, "without Parliament."  The Council ought not to be thus
influenced by "glorious and unquiet spirits."  Cranmer calls Knox, as
Throckmorton later called Queen Mary's Bothwell, "glorious" in the sense
of the Latin gloriosus, "swaggering," or "arrogant."

Cranmer goes on to denounce the "glorious and unquiet spirits, which can
like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make
trouble and disquietude when things be most quiet and in good order."
{35}  Their argument (Knox's favourite), that whatever is not commanded
in Scripture is unlawful and ungodly, "is a subversion of all order as
well in religion as in common policy."

Cranmer ends with the amazing challenge: "I will set my foot by his to be
tried in the fire, that his doctrine is untrue, and not only untrue but
seditious, and perilous to be heard of any subjects, as a thing breaking
the bridle of obedience and loosing them from the bond of all princes'
laws."

Cranmer had a premonition of the troubled years of James VI. and of the
Covenant, when this question of kneeling was the first cause of the
Bishops' wars.  But Knox did not accept, as far as we know, the mediaeval
ordeal by fire.

Other questions about practices enjoined in the Articles arose.  A
"Confession," in which Knox's style may be traced, was drawn up, and
consequently that "Declaration on Kneeling" was intercalated into the
Prayer Book, wherein it is asserted that the attitude does not imply
adoration of the elements, or belief in the Real Presence, "for that were
idolatry."  Elizabeth dropped, and Charles II. restored, this "Black
Rubric" which Anglicanism owes to the Scottish Reformer. {36a}  He "once
had a good opinion," he says, of the Liturgy as it now stood, but he soon
found that it was full of idolatries.

The most important event in the private life of Knox, during his stay at
Berwick, was his acquaintance with a devout lady of tormented conscience,
Mrs. Bowes, wife of the Governor of Norham Castle on Tweed.  Mrs. Bowes's
tendency to the new ideas in religion was not shared by her husband and
his family; the results will presently be conspicuous.  In April 1550,
Knox preached at Newcastle a sermon on his favourite doctrine that the
Mass is "Idolatry," because it is "of man's invention," an opinion not
shared by Tunstall, then Bishop of Durham.  Knox used "idolatry" in a
constructive sense, as when we talk of "constructive treason."  But, in
practice, he regarded Catholics as "idolaters," in the same sense as
Elijah regarded Hebrew worshippers of alien deities, Chemosh or Moloch,
and he later drew the inference that idolaters, as in the Old Testament,
must be put to death.  Thus his was logically a persecuting religion.

Knox was made a King's chaplain and transferred to Newcastle.  He saw
that the country was, by preference, Catholic; that the life of Edward
VI. hung on a thread; and that with the accession of his sister, Mary
Tudor, Protestant principles would be as unsafe as under "umquhile the
Cardinal."  Knox therefore, "from the foresight of troubles to come" (so
he writes to Mrs. Bowes, February 28, 1554), {36b} declined any post, a
bishopric, or a living, which would in honour oblige him to face the fire
of persecution.  At the same time he was even then far at odds with the
Church of England that he had sound reasons for refusing benefices.

On Christmas day, 1552, {37a} he preached at Newcastle against Papists,
as "thirsting nothing more than the King's death, which their iniquity
would procure."  In two brief years Knox was himself publicly expressing
his own thirst for the Queen's death, and praying for a Jehu or a
Phinehas, slayers of idolaters, such as Mary Tudor.  If any fanatic had
taken this hint, and the life of Mary Tudor, Catholics would have said
that Knox's "iniquity procured" the murder, and they would have had fair
excuse for the assertion.

Meanwhile charges were brought against the Reformer, on the ground of his
Christmas sermon of peace and goodwill.  Northumberland (January 9, 1552-
53) sends to Cecil "a letter of poor Knox, by the which you may perceive
what perplexity the poor soul remaineth in at this present."  We have not
Knox's interesting letter, but Northumberland pled his cause against a
charge of treason.  In fact, however, the Court highly approved of his
sermon.  He was presently again in what he believed to be imminent danger
of life: "I fear that I be not yet ripe, nor able to glorify Christ by my
faith," he wrote to Mrs. Bowes, "but what lacketh now, God shall perform
in His own time." {37b}  We do not know what peril threatened the
Reformer now (probably in March 1553), but he frequently, later, seems to
have doubted his own "ripeness" for martyrdom.  His reluctance to suffer
did not prevent him from constant attendance to the tedious
self-tormentings of Mrs. Bowes, and of "three honest poor women" in
London.

Knox, at all events, was not so "perplexed" that he feared to speak his
mind in the pulpit.  In Lent, 1553, preaching before the boy king, he
denounced his ministers in trenchant historical parallels between them
and Achitophel, Shebna, and Judas.  Later, young Mr. Mackail, applying
the same method to the ministers of Charles II., was hanged.  "What
wonder is it then," said Knox, "that a young and innocent king be
deceived by crafty, covetous, wicked, and ungodly councillors?  I am
greatly afraid that Achitophel be councillor, that Judas bear the purse,
and that Shebna be scribe, comptroller, and treasurer." {38a}

This appears the extreme of audacity.  Yet nothing worse came to Knox
than questions, by the Council, as to his refusal of a benefice, and his
declining, as he still did, to kneel at the Communion (April 14, 1553).
His answers prove that he was out of harmony with the fluctuating
Anglicanism of the hour.  Northumberland could not then resent the
audacities of pulpiteers, because the Protestants were the only party who
might stand by him in his approaching effort to crown Lady Jane Grey.  Now
all the King's preachers, obviously by concerted action, "thundered"
against Edward's Council, in the Lent or Easter of 1553.  Manifestly, in
the old Scots phrase, "the Kirk had a back"; had some secular support,
namely that of their party, which Northumberland could not slight.
Meanwhile Knox was sent on a preaching tour in Buckinghamshire, and there
he was when Edward VI. died, in the first week of July 1553. {38b}

Knox's official attachment to England expired with his preaching license,
on the death of Edward VI. and the accession of Mary Tudor.  He did not
at once leave the country, but preached both in London and on the English
border, while the new queen was settling herself on the throne.  While
within Mary's reach, Knox did not encourage resistance against that
idolatress; he did not do so till he was safe in France.  Indeed, in his
prayer used after the death of Edward VI., before the fires of Oxford and
Smithfield were lit, Knox wrote: "Illuminate the heart of our Sovereign
Lady, Queen Mary, with pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost. . . .  Repress
thou the pride of those that would rebel. . . .  Mitigate the hearts of
those that persecute us."

In the autumn of 1553, Knox's health was very bad; he had gravel, and
felt his bodily strength broken.  Moreover, he was in the disagreeable
position of being betrothed to a very young lady, Marjorie Bowes, with
the approval of her devout mother, the wife of Richard Bowes, commander
of Norham Castle, near Berwick, but to the anger and disgust of the Bowes
family in general.  They by no means shared Knox's ideas of religion,
rather regarding him as a penniless unfrocked "Scot runagate," whose
alliance was discreditable and distasteful, and might be dangerous.
"Maist unpleasing words" passed, and it is no marvel that Knox, being
persecuted in one city, fled to another, leaving England for Dieppe early
in March 1554. {39}

His conscience was not entirely at ease as to his flight.  "Why did I
flee?  Assuredly I cannot tell, but of one thing I am sure, the fear of
death was not the chief cause of my fleeing," he wrote to Mrs. Bowes from
Dieppe.  "Albeit that I have, in the beginning of this battle, appeared
to play the faint-hearted and feeble soldier (the cause I remit to God),
yet my prayer is that I may be restored to the battle again." {40a}  Knox
was, in fact, most valiant when he had armed men at his back; he had no
enthusiasm for taking part in the battle when unaided by the arm of
flesh.  On later occasions this was very apparent, and he has confessed,
as we saw, that he did not choose to face "the trouble to come" without
means of retreat.  His valour was rather that of the general than of the
lonely martyr.  The popular idea of Knox's personal courage, said to have
been expressed by the Regent Morton in the words spoken at his funeral,
"here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man," is
entirely erroneous.  His learned and sympathetic editor, David Laing,
truly writes: "Knox cannot be said to have possessed the impetuous and
heroic boldness of a Luther when surrounded with danger. . . .  On more
than one occasion Knox displayed a timidity or shrinking from danger,
scarcely to have been expected from one who boasted of his willingness to
endure the utmost torture, or suffer death in his Master's cause.  Happily
he was not put to the test. . . ." {40b}

Dr. Laing puts the case more strongly than I feel justified in doing, for
Knox, far from "boasting of his willingness to face the utmost torture,"
more than once doubts his own readiness for martyrdom.  We must remember
that even Blessed Edmund Campion, who went gaily to torture and death,
had doubts as to the necessity of that journey. {40c}

Nor was there any reason why Knox should stay in England to be burned, if
he could escape--with less than ten groats in his pocket--as he did.  It
is not for us moderns to throw the first stone at a reluctant martyr,
still less to applaud useless self-sacrifice, but we do take leave to
think that, having fled early, himself, from the martyr's crown, Knox
showed bad taste in his harsh invectives against Protestants who, staying
in England, conformed to the State religion under Mary Tudor.

It is not impossible that his very difficult position as the lover of
Marjorie Bowes--a position of which, while he remained in England, the
burden fell on the poor girl--may have been one reason for Knox's flight,
while the entreaties of his friends that he would seek safety must have
had their influence.

On the whole it seems more probable that when he committed himself to
matrimony with a young girl, the fifth daughter of Mrs. Bowes, he was
approaching his fortieth rather than his fiftieth year.  Older than he
are happy husbands made, sometimes, though Marjorie Bowes's choice may
have been directed by her pious mother, whose soul could find no rest in
the old faith, and not much in the new.

At thirty-eight the Reformer, we must remember, must have been no
uncomely wooer.  His conversation must have been remarkably vivid: he had
adventures enough to tell, by land and sea; while such a voice as he
raised withal in the pulpit, like Edward Irving, has always been potent
with women, as Sir Walter Scott remarks in Irving's own case.  His
expression, says Young, had a certain geniality; on the whole we need not
doubt that Knox could please when he chose, especially when he was looked
up to as a supreme authority.  He despised women in politics, but had
many friends of the sex, and his letters to them display a manly
tenderness of affection without sentimentality.

Writing to Mrs. Bowes from London in 1553, Knox mentions, as one of the
sorrows of life, that "such as would most gladly remain together, for
mutual comfort, cannot be suffered so to do.  Since the first day that it
pleased the providence of God to bring you and me in familiarity, I have
always delighted in your company."  He then wanders into religious
reflections, but we see that he liked Mrs. Bowes, and Marjorie Bowes too,
no doubt: he is careful to style the elderly lady "Mother."  Knox's
letters to Mrs. Bowes show the patience and courtesy with which the
Reformer could comfort and counsel a middle-aged lady in trouble about
her innocent soul.  As she recited her infirmities, he reminds her, he
"started back, and that is my common consuetude when anything pierces or
touches my heart.  Call to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard
at Alnwick; in very deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I
was"--not by the charms of Mrs. Bowes, of course: he found that Satan
troubled the lady with "the very same words that he troubles me with."
Mrs. Bowes, in truth, with premature scepticism, was tempted to think
that "the Scriptures of God are but a tale, and no credit to be given to
them."  The Devil, she is reminded by Knox, has induced "some
philosophers to affirm that the world never had a beginning," which he
refutes by showing that God predicted the pains of childbearing; and Mrs.
Bowes, as the mother of twelve, knows how true _this_ is.

The circular argument may or may not have satisfied Mrs. Bowes. {43}

The young object of Knox's passion, Marjorie Bowes, is only alluded to as
"she whom God hath offered unto me, and commanded me to love as my own
flesh,"--after her, Mrs. Bowes is the dearest of mankind to Knox.  No
mortal was ever more long-suffering with a spiritual hypochondriac, who
avers that "the sins that reigned in Sodom and Gomore reign in me, and I
have small power or none to resist!"  Knox replies, with common sense,
that Mrs. Bowes is obviously ignorant of the nature of these offences.

Writing to his betrothed he says nothing personal: merely reiterates his
lessons of comfort to her mother.  Meanwhile the lovers were parted, Knox
going abroad; and it is to be confessed that he was not eager to come
back.




CHAPTER V: EXILE: APPEALS FOR A PHINEHAS, AND A JEHU: 1554


No change of circumstances could be much more bitter than that which
exile brought to Knox.  He had been a decently endowed official of State,
engaged in bringing a reluctant country into the ecclesiastical fold
which the State, for the hour, happened to prefer.  His task had been
grateful, and his congregations, at least at Berwick and Newcastle, had,
as a rule, been heartily with him.  Wherever he preached, affectionate
women had welcomed him and hung upon his words.  The King and his
ministers had hearkened unto him--young Edward with approval,
Northumberland with such emotions as we may imagine--while the Primate of
England had challenged him to a competitive ordeal by fire, and had been
defeated, apparently without recourse to the fire-test.

But now all was changed; Knox was a lonely rover in a strange land,
supported probably by collections made among his English friends, and by
the hospitality of the learned.  In his wanderings his heart burned
within him many a time, and he abruptly departed from his theory of
passive resistance.  Now he eagerly desired to obtain, from Protestant
doctors and pontiffs, support for the utterly opposite doctrine of armed
resistance.  Such support he did not get, or not in a satisfactory
measure, so he commenced prophet on his own lines, and on his own
responsibility.

When Knox's heart burned within him, he sometimes seized the pen and
dashed off fiery tracts which occasionally caused inconvenience to the
brethren, and trouble to himself in later years.  In cooler moments, and
when dubious or prosperous, he now and again displayed a calm opportunism
much at odds with the inspirations of his grief and anger.

After his flight to Dieppe in March 1554, Knox was engaged, then, with a
problem of difficulty, one of the central problems of his career and of
the distracted age.  In modern phrase, he wished to know how far, and in
what fashion, persons of one religion might resist another religion,
imposed upon them by the State of which they were subjects.  On this
point we have now no doubt, but in the sixteenth century "Authority" was
held sacred, and martyrdom, according to Calvin, was to be preferred to
civil war.  If men were Catholics, and if the State was Protestant, they
were liable, later, under Knox, to fines, exile, and death; but power was
not yet given to him.  If they were Protestants under a Catholic ruler,
or Puritans under Anglican authority, Knox himself had laid down the rule
of their conduct in his letter to his Berwick congregation. {45}
"Remembering always, beloved brethren, that due obedience be given to
magistrates, rulers, and princes, without tumult, grudge, or sedition.
For, howsoever wicked themselves be in life, or howsoever ungodly their
precepts or commandments be, ye must obey them for conscience' sake;
except in chief points of religion, and then ye ought rather to obey God
than man: _not to pretend to defend God's truth or religion, ye being
subjects, by violence or sword, but patiently suffering what God shall
please be laid upon you for constant confession of your faith and
belief_."  Man or angel who teaches contrary doctrine is corrupt of
judgment, sent by God to blind the unworthy.  And Knox proceeded to teach
contrary doctrine!

His truly Christian ideas are of date 1552, with occasional revivals as
opportunity suggested.  In exile he was now asking (1554), how was a
Protestant minority or majority to oppose the old faith, backed by kings
and princes, fire and sword?  He answered the question in direct
contradiction of his Berwick programme: he was now all for active
resistance.  Later, in addressing Mary of Guise, and on another occasion,
he recurred to his Berwick theory, and he always found biblical texts to
support his contradictory messages.

At this moment resistance seemed hopeless enough.  In England the
Protestants of all shades were decidedly in a minority.  They had no
chance if they openly rose in arms; their only hope was in the death of
Mary Tudor and the succession of Elizabeth--itself a poor hope in the
eyes of Knox, who detested the idea of a female monarch.  Might they "bow
down in the House of Rimmon" by a feigned conformity?  Knox, in a letter
to the Faithful, printed in 1554, entirely rejected this compromise, to
which Cecil stooped, thereby deserving hell, as the relentless Knox (who
had fled) later assured him.

In the end of March 1554, probably, Knox left Dieppe for Geneva, where he
could consult Calvin, not yet secure in his despotism, though he had
recently burned Servetus.  Next he went to Zurich, and laid certain
questions before Bullinger, who gave answers in writing as to Knox's
problems.

Could a woman rule a kingdom by divine right, and transfer the same to
her husband?--Mary Tudor to Philip of Spain, is, of course, to be
understood.  Bullinger replied that it was a hazardous thing for the
godly to resist the laws of a country.  Philip the eunuch, though
converted, did not drive Queen Candace out of Ethiopia.  If a tyrannous
and ungodly Queen reign, godly persons "have example and consolation in
the case of Athaliah."  The transfer of power to a husband is an affair
of the laws of the country.

Again, must a ruler who enforces "idolatry" be obeyed?  May true
believers, in command of garrisons, repel "this ungodly violence"?
Bullinger answered, in effect, that "it is very difficult to pronounce
upon every particular case."  He had not the details before him.  In
short, nothing definite was to be drawn out of Bullinger. {47a}

Dr. M'Crie observes, indeed, that Knox submitted to the learned of
Switzerland "certain difficult questions, which were suggested by the
present condition of affairs in England, and about which his mind had
been greatly occupied.  Their views with respect to these coinciding with
his own, he was confirmed in the judgment which he had already formed for
himself." {47b}

In fact, Knox himself merely says that he had "reasoned with" pastors and
the learned; he does not say that they agreed with him, and they
certainly did not.  Despite the reserve of Bullinger and of Calvin, Knox
was of his new opinions still.  These divines never backed his views.

By May, Knox had returned to Dieppe, and published an epistle to the
Faithful.  The rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt had been put down, a blow to
true religion.  We have no evidence that Knox stimulated the rising, but
he alludes once to his exertions in favour of the Princess Elizabeth.  The
details are unknown.

In July, apparently, Knox printed his "Faithful Admonition to the
Professors of God's Truth in England," and two editions of the tract were
published in that country.  The pamphlet is full of violent language
about "the bloody, butcherly brood" of persecutors, and Knox spoke of
what might have occurred had the Queen "been sent to hell before these
days."  The piece presents nothing, perhaps, so plain spoken about the
prophet's right to preach treason as a passage in the manuscript of an
earlier Knoxian epistle of May 1554 to the Faithful.  "The prophets of
God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he, nor
such as obey the word spoken in the Lord's name by him, offends God."
{48}  That sentence contains doctrine not submitted to Bullinger by Knox.
He could not very well announce himself to Bullinger as a "prophet of
God."  But the sentence, which occurs in manuscript copies of the letter
of May 1554, does not appear in the black letter printed edition.  Either
Knox or the publisher thought it too risky.

In the published "Admonition," however, of July 1554, we find Knox
exclaiming: "God, for His great mercy's sake, stir up some Phineas,
Helias, or Jehu, that the blood of abominable idolaters may pacify God's
wrath, that it consume not the whole multitude.  Amen." {49a}  This is a
direct appeal to the assassin.  If anybody will play the part of Phinehas
against "idolaters"--that is the Queen of England and Philip of
Spain--God's anger will be pacified.  "Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord,
but let death devour them in haste . . .  For there is no hope of their
amendment, . . . He shall send Jehu to execute his just judgments against
idolaters.  Jezebel herself shall not escape the vengeance and plagues
that are prepared for her portion." {49b}  These passages are essential.
Professor Hume Brown expresses our own sentiments when he remarks: "In
casting such a pamphlet into England at the time he did, Knox indulged
his indignation, in itself so natural under the circumstances, at no
personal risk, while he seriously compromised those who had the strongest
claims on his most generous consideration."  This is plain truth, and
when some of Knox's English brethren later behaved to him in a manner
which we must wholly condemn, their conduct, they said, had for a motive
the mischief done to Protestants in England by his fiery "Admonition,"
and their desire to separate themselves from the author of such a
pamphlet.

Knox did not, it will be observed, here call all or any of the faithful
to a general massacre of their Catholic fellow-subjects.  He went to that
length later, as we shall show.  In an epistle of 1554 he only writes:
"Some shall demand, 'What then, shall we go and slay all idolaters?'
_That_ were the office, dear brethren, of every civil magistrate within
his realm. . . .  The slaying of idolaters appertains not to every
particular man." {49c}

This means that every Protestant king should massacre all his
inconvertible Catholic subjects!  This was indeed a counsel of
perfection; but it could never be executed, owing to the carnal policy of
worldly men.

In writing about "the office of the civil magistrate," Knox, a Border
Scot of the age of the blood feud, seems to have forgotten, first, that
the Old Testament prophets of the period were not unanimous in their
applause of Jehu's massacre of the royal family; next, that between the
sixteenth century A.D. and Jehu, had intervened the Christian revelation.
Our Lord had given no word of warrant to murder or massacre!  No
persecuted apostle had dealt in appeals to the dagger.  As for Jehu, a
prophet had condemned _his_ conduct.  Hosea writes that the Lord said
unto him, "Yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel
upon the house of Jehu," but doubtless Knox would have argued that Hosea
was temporarily uninspired, as he argued about St. Paul and St. James
later.

However this delicate point may be settled, the appeal for a Phinehas is
certainly unchristian.  The idolaters, the unreformed, might rejoice,
with the Nuncio of 1583, that the Duc de Guise had a plan for murdering
Elizabeth, though it was not to be communicated to the Vicar of God, who
should have no such dealings against "that wicked woman."  To some
Catholics, Elizabeth: to Knox, Mary was as Jezebel, and might laudably be
assassinated.  In idolaters nothing can surprise us; when persecuted
they, in their unchristian fashion, may retort with the dagger or the
bowl.  But that Knox should have frequently maintained the doctrine of
death to religious opponents is a strange and deplorable circumstance.  In
reforming the Church of Christ he omitted some elements of Christianity.

Suppose, for a moment, that in deference to the teaching of the Gospel,
Knox had never called for a Jehu, but had ever denounced, by voice and
pen, those murderous deeds of his own party which he celebrates as "godly
facts," he would have raised Protestantism to a moral pre-eminence.  Dark
pages of Scottish history might never have been written: the consciences
of men might have been touched, and the cruelties of the religious
conflict might have been abated.  Many of them sprang from the fear of
assassination.

But Knox in some of his writings identified his cause with the palace
revolutions of an ancient Oriental people.  Not that he was a man of
blood; when in France he dissuaded Kirkcaldy of Grange and others from
stabbing the gaolers in making their escape from prison.  Where idolaters
in official position were concerned, and with a pen in his hand, he had
no such scruples.  He was a child of the old pre-Christian scriptures; of
the earlier, not of the later prophets.




CHAPTER VI: KNOX IN THE ENGLISH PURITAN TROUBLES AT FRANKFORT: 1554-1555


The consequences of the "Admonition" came home to Knox when English
refugees in Frankfort, impeded by him and others in the use of their
Liturgy, accused him of high treason against Philip and Mary, and the
Emperor, whom he had compared to Nero as an enemy of Christ.

The affair of "The Troubles at Frankfort" brought into view the great
gulf for ever fixed between Puritanism and the Church of England.  It was
made plain that Knox and the Anglican community were of incompatible
temperaments, ideas, and, we may almost say, instincts.  To Anglicans
like Cranmer, Knox, from the first, was as antipathetic as they were to
him.  "We can assure you," wrote some English exiles for religion's sake
to Calvin, "that that outrageous pamphlet of Knox's" (his "Admonition")
"added much oil to the flame of persecution in England.  For before the
publication of that book not one of our brethren had suffered death; but
as soon as it came forth we doubt not but you are well aware of the
number of excellent men who have perished in the flames; to say nothing
of how many other godly men have been exposed to the risk of all their
property, and even life itself, on the sole ground of either having had
this book in their possession or having read it."

Such were the charges brought against Knox by these English Protestant
exiles, fleeing from the persecution that followed the "Admonition," and,
they say, took fresh ferocity from that tract.

The quarrel between Knox and them definitely marks the beginning of the
rupture between the fathers of the Church of England and the fathers of
Puritanism, Scottish Presbyterianism, and Dissent.  The representatives
of Puritans and of Anglicans were now alike exiled, poor, homeless,
without any abiding city.  That they should instantly quarrel with each
other over their prayer book (that which Knox had helped to correct) was,
as Calvin told them, "extremely absurd."  Each faction probably
foresaw--certainly Knox's party foresaw--that, in the English
congregation at Frankfort, a little flock barely tolerated, was to be
settled the character of Protestantism in England, if ever England
returned to Protestantism.  "This evil" (the acceptance of the English
Second Book of Prayer of Edward VI.) "shall in time be established . . .
and never be redressed, neither shall there for ever be an end of this
controversy in England," wrote Knox's party to the Senate of Frankfort.
The religious disruption in England was, in fact, incurable, but so it
would have been had the Knoxians prevailed in Frankfort.  The difference
between the Churchman and the Dissenter goes to the root of the English
character; no temporary triumph of either side could have brought Peace
and union.  While the world stands they will not be peaceful and united.

The trouble arose thus.  At the end of June 1554, some English exiles of
the Puritan sort, men who objected to surplices, responses, kneeling at
the Communion, and other matters of equal moment, came to Frankfort.  They
obtained leave to use the French Protestant Chapel, provided that they
"should not dissent from the Frenchmen in doctrine or ceremonies, lest
they should thereby minister occasions of offence."  They had then to
settle what Order of services they should use; "anything they pleased,"
said the magistrates of Frankfort, "as long as they and the French kept
the peace."  They decided to adopt the English Order, barring responses,
the Litany, the surplice, "and many other things." {54}  The Litany was
regarded by Knox as rather of the nature of magic than of prayer, the
surplice was a Romish rag, and there was some other objection to the
congregation's taking part in the prayers by responses, though they were
not forbidden to mingle their voices in psalmody.  Dissidium valde
absurdum--"a very absurd quarrel," among exiled fellow-countrymen, said
Calvin, was the dispute which arose on these points.  The Puritans,
however, decided to alter the service to their taste, and enjoyed the use
of the chapel.  They had obtained a service which they were not likely to
have been allowed to enforce in England had Edward VI. lived; but on this
point they were of another opinion.

This success was providential.  They next invited English exiles abroad
to join them at Frankfort, saying nothing about their mutilations of the
service book.  If these brethren came in, when they were all restored to
England, if ever they were restored, their example, that of sufferers,
would carry the day, and their service would for ever be that of the
Anglican Church.  The other exiled brethren, on receiving this
invitation, had enough of the wisdom of the serpent to ask, "Are we to be
allowed to use our own prayer book?"  The answer of the godly of
Frankfort evaded the question.  At last the Frankfort Puritans showed
their hand: they disapproved of various things in the Prayer Book.  Knox,
summoned from Geneva, a reluctant visitor, was already one of their
preachers.  In November 1554 came Grindal, later Archbishop of
Canterbury, from Zurich, ready to omit some ceremonies, so that he and
his faction might have "the substance" of the Prayer Book.  Negotiations
went on, and it was proposed by the Puritans to use the Geneva service.
But Knox declined to do that, without the knowledge of the non-Puritan
exiles at Zurich and elsewhere, or to use the English book, and offered
his resignation.  Nothing could be more fair and above-board.

There was an inchoate plan for a new Order.  That failed; and Knox, with
others, consulted Calvin, giving him a sketch of the nature of the
English service.  They drew his attention to the surplice; the Litany,
"devised by Pope Gregory," whereby "we use a certain conjuring of God";
the kneeling at the Communion; the use of the cross in baptism, and of
the ring in marriage, clearly a thing of human, if not of diabolical
invention, and the "imposition of hands" in confirmation.  The churching
of women, they said, is both Pagan and Jewish.  "Other things not so much
shame itself as a certain kind of pity compelleth us to keep close."

"The tone of the letter throughout was expressly calculated to prejudice
Calvin on the point submitted to him," says Professor Hume Brown. {56}
Calvin replied that the quarrel might be all very well if the exiles were
happy and at ease in their circumstances, though in the Liturgy, as
described, there were "tolerable (endurable) follies."  On the whole he
sided with the Knoxian party.  The English Liturgy is not pure enough;
and the English exiles, not at Frankfort, merely like it because they are
accustomed to it.  Some are partial to "popish dregs."

To the extreme Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and
precipitous: the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the
principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded
what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest
English speech.  To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in
England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were
attached.  They were Englishmen; their service, they said, should bear
"an English face": so Knox avers, who could as yet have no patriotic love
of any religious form as exclusively and essentially Scottish.

A kind of truce was now proclaimed, to last till May 1, 1555; Knox aiding
in the confection of a service without responses, "some part taken out of
the English book, and other things put to," while Calvin, Bullinger, and
three others were appointed as referees.  The Frankfort congregation had
now a brief interval of provisional peace, till, on March 13, 1555,
Richard Cox, with a band of English refugees, arrived.  He had been tutor
to Edward VI., the young Marcellus of Protestantism, but for Frankfort he
was not puritanic enough.  His company would give a large majority to the
anti-Knoxian congregation.  He and his at once uttered the responses, and
on Sunday one of them read the Litany.  This was an unruly infraction of
the provisional agreement.  Cox and his party (April 5) represented to
Calvin that they had given up surplices, crosses, and other things, "not
as impure and papistical," but as indifferent, and for the sake of peace.
This was after they had driven Knox from the place, as they presently
did; in the beginning it was distinctly their duty to give up the Litany
and responses, while the truce lasted, that is, till the end of April.  In
the afternoon of the Sunday Knox preached, denouncing the morning's
proceedings, the "impurity" of the Prayer Book, of which "I once had a
good opinion," and the absence, in England, of "discipline," that is,
interference by preachers with private life.  Pluralities also he
denounced, and some of the exiles had been pluralists.

For all this Knox was "very sharply reproved," as soon as he left the
pulpit.  Two days later, at a meeting, he insisted that Cox's people
should have a vote in the congregation, thus making the anti-puritans a
majority; Knox's conduct was here certainly chivalrous: "I fear not your
judgment," he said.  He had never wished to go to Frankfort; in going he
merely obeyed Calvin, and probably he had no great desire to stay.  He
was forbidden to preach by Cox and his majority; and a later conference
with Cox led to no compromise.  It seems probable that Cox and the anti-
puritans already cherished a grudge against Knox for his tract, the
"Admonition."  He had a warning that they would use the pamphlet against
him, and he avers that "some devised how to have me cast into prison."
The anti-puritans, admitting in a letter to Calvin that they brought the
"Admonition" before the magistrates of Frankfort as "a book which would
supply their enemies with just ground for overturning the whole Church,
and one which had added much oil to the flame of persecution in England,"
deny that they desired more than that Knox might be ordered to quit the
place.  The passages selected as treasonable in the "Admonition" do not
include the prayer for a Jehu.  They were enough, however, to secure the
dismissal of Knox from Frankfort.

Cox had accepted the Order used by the French Protestant congregation,
probably because it committed him and his party to nothing in England;
however, Knox had no sooner departed than the anti-puritans obtained
leave to use, without surplice, cross, and some other matters, the Second
Prayer Book of Edward VI.  In September the Puritans seceded, the anti-
puritans remained, squabbling with the Lutherans and among themselves.

In the whole affair Knox acted the most open and manly part; in his
"History" he declines to name the opponents who avenged themselves, in a
manner so dubious, on his "Admonition."  If they believed their own
account of the mischief that it wrought in England, their denunciation of
him to magistrates, who were not likely to do more than dismiss him, is
the less inexcusable.  They did not try to betray him to a body like the
Inquisition, as Calvin did in the case of Servetus.  But their conduct
was most unworthy and unchivalrous. {58}




CHAPTER VII: KNOX IN SCOTLAND: LETHINGTON: MARY OF GUISE: 1555-1556


Meanwhile the Reformer returned to Geneva (April 1555), where Calvin was
now supreme.  From Geneva, "the den of mine own ease, the rest of quiet
study," Knox was dragged, "maist contrarious to mine own judgement," by a
summons from Mrs. Bowes.  He did not like leaving his "den" to rejoin his
betrothed; the lover was not so fervent as the evangelist was cautious.
Knox had at that time probably little correspondence with Scotland.  He
knew that there was no refuge for him in England under Mary Tudor, "who
nowise may abide the presence of God's prophets."

In Scotland, at this moment, the Government was in the hands of Mary of
Guise, a sister of the Duke of Guise and of the Cardinal.  Mary was now
aged forty; she was born in 1515, as Knox probably was.  She was a tall
and stately woman; her face was thin and refined; Henry VIII., as being
himself a large man, had sought her hand, which was given to his nephew,
James V.  On the death of that king, Mary, with Cardinal Beaton, kept
Scotland true to the French alliance, and her daughter, the fair Queen of
Scots, was at this moment a child in France, betrothed to the Dauphin.  As
a Catholic, of the House of Lorraine, Mary could not but cleave to her
faith and to the French alliance.  In 1554 she had managed to oust from
the Regency the Earl of Arran, the head of the all but royal Hamiltons,
now gratified with the French title of Duc de Chatelherault.  To crown
her was as seemly a thing, says Knox, "if men had but eyes, as a saddle
upon the back of ane unrewly kow."  She practically deposed Huntly, the
most treacherous of men, from the Chancellorship, substituting, with more
or less reserve, a Frenchman, de Rubay; and d'Oysel, the commander of the
French troops in Scotland, was her chief adviser.

[Picture of King James V and Mary of Guise: knox2.jpg]

Writing after the death of Mary of Guise, Knox avers that she only waited
her chance "to cut the throats of all those in whom she suspected the
knowledge of God to be, within the realm of Scotland." {60}  As a matter
of fact, the Regent later refused a French suggestion that she should
peacefully call Protestants together, and then order a massacre after the
manner of the Bartholomew: itself still in the womb of the future.  "Mary
of Guise," says Knox's biographer, Professor Hume Brown, "had the
instincts of a good ruler--the love of order and justice, and the desire
to stand well with the people."

Knox, however, believed, or chose to say, that she wanted to cut all
Protestant throats, just as he believed that a Protestant king should cut
all Catholic throats.  He attributed to her, quite erroneously and
uncharitably, his own unsparing fervour.  As he held this view of her
character and purposes, it is not strange that a journey to Scotland was
"contrairious to his judgement."

He did not understand the situation.  Ferocious as had been the English
invasion of Scotland in 1547, the English party in Scotland, many of them
paid traitors, did not resent these "rebukes of a friend," so much as
both the nobles and the people now began to detest their French allies,
and were jealous of the Queen Mother's promotion of Frenchmen.

There were not, to be sure, many Scots whom she, or any one, could trust.
Some were honestly Protestant: some held pensions from England: others
would sacrifice national interests to their personal revenges and clan
feuds.  The Rev. the Lord James Stewart, Mary's bastard brother, Prior of
St. Andrews and of Pittenweem, was still very young.  He had no interest
in his clerical profession beyond drawing his revenues as prior of two
abbeys; and his nearness to the Crown caused him to be suspected of
ambition: moreover, he tended towards the new ideas in religion.  He had
met Knox in London, apparently in 1552.  Morton was a mere wavering
youth; Argyll was very old: Chatelherault was a rival of the Regent, a
competitor for the Crown and quite incompetent.  The Regent, in short,
could scarcely have discovered a Scottish adviser worthy of employment,
and when she did trust one, he was the brilliant "chamaeleon," young
Maitland of Lethington, who would rather betray his master cleverly than
run a straight course, and did betray the Regent.  Thus Mary, a
Frenchwoman and a Catholic, governing Scotland for her Catholic daughter,
the Dauphiness, with the aid of a few French troops who had just saved
the independence of the country, naturally employed French advisers.  This
made her unpopular; her attempts to bring justice into Scottish courts
were odious, and she would not increase the odium by persecuting the
Protestants.  The Duke's bastard brother, again, the Archbishop, sharing
his family ambition, was in no mood for burning heretics.  The Queen
Mother herself carried conciliation so far as to pardon and reinstate
such trebly dyed traitors as the notorious Crichton of Brunston, and she
employed Kirkcaldy of Grange, who intrigued against her while in her
employment.  An Edinburgh tailor, Harlaw, who seems to have been a deacon
in English orders, was allowed to return to Scotland in 1554.  He became
a very notable preacher. {62a}

Going from Mrs. Bowes's house to Edinburgh, Knox found that "the
fervency" of the godly "did ravish him."  At the house of one Syme "the
trumpet blew the auld sound three days thegither," he informed Mrs.
Bowes, and Knox himself was the trumpeter.  He found another lady, "who,
by reason that she had a troubled conscience, delighted much in the
company of the said John."  There were pleasant sisters in Edinburgh, who
later consulted Knox on the delicate subject of dress.  He was more
tolerant in answering them than when he denounced "the stinking pride of
women" at Mary Stuart's Court; admitting that "in clothes, silks,
velvets, gold, and other such, there is no uncleanness," yet "I cannot
praise the common superfluity which women now use in their apparel."  He
was quite opposed, however, to what he pleasingly calls "correcting
natural beauty" (as by dyeing the hair), and held that "farthingales
cannot be justified."

On the whole, he left the sisters fairly free to dress as they pleased.
His curious phrase, {62b} in a letter to a pair of sisters, "the prophets
of God are often impeded to pray for such as carnally they love
unfeignedly," is difficult to understand.  We leave it to the learned to
explain this singular limitation of the prophet, which Knox says that he
had not as yet experienced.  He must have heard about it from other
prophets.

Knox found at this time a patron remarkable, says Dr. M'Crie, "for great
respectability of character," Erskine of Dun.  Born in 1508, about 1530
he slew a priest named Thomas Froster, in a curiously selected place, the
belfry tower of Montrose.  Nobody seems to have thought anything of it,
nor should we know the fact, if the record of the blood-price paid by Mr.
Erskine to the priest's father did not testify to the fervent act.  Six
years later, according to Knox, "God had marvellously illuminated"
Erskine, and the mildness of his nature is frequently applauded.  He was,
for Scotland, a man of learning, and our first amateur of Greek.  Why did
he kill a priest in a bell tower!

In the winter or autumn of 1555, Erskine gave a supper, where Knox was to
argue against crypto-protestantism.  When once the Truth, whether
Anglican or Presbyterian, was firmly established, Catholics were
compelled, under very heavy fines, to attend services and sermons which
they believed to be at least erroneous, if not blasphemous.  I am not
aware that, in 1555, the Catholic Church, in Scotland, thus vigorously
forced people of Protestant opinions to present themselves at Mass,
punishing nonconformity with ruin.  I have not found any complaints to
this effect, at that time.  But no doubt an appearance of conformity
might save much trouble, even in the lenient conditions produced by the
character of the Regent and by the political situation.  Knox, then,
discovered that "divers who had a zeal to godliness made small scruple to
go to the Mass, or to communicate with the abused sacraments in the
Papistical manner."  He himself, therefore, "began to show the impiety of
the Mass, and how dangerous a thing it was to communicate in any sort
with idolatry."

Now to many of his hearers this essential article of his faith--that the
Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and form of celebration were
"idolatry"--may have been quite a new idea.  It was already, however, a
commonplace with Anglican Protestants.  Nothing of the sort was to be
found in the _first_ Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various
ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the
ideas of Knox's Scottish disciples.  Indeed, their consciences appear to
have been at rest, for it was _after_ Knox's declaration about the
"idolatrous" character of the Mass that "the matter began to be agitated
from man to man, the conscience of some being afraid."

To us it may seem that the sudden denunciation of a Christian ceremony,
even what may be deemed a perverted Christian ceremony, as sheer
"idolatry," equivalent to the worship of serpents, bulls, or of a foreign
Baal in ancient Israel--was a step calculated to confuse the real issues
and to provoke a religious war of massacre.  Knox, we know, regarded
extermination of idolaters as a counsel of perfection, though in the
Christian scriptures not one word could be found to justify his position.
He relied on texts about massacring Amalekites and about Elijah's
slaughter of the prophets of Baal.  The Mass was idolatry, was Baal
worship; and Baal worshippers, if recalcitrant, must die.

These extreme unchristian ideas, then, were new in Scotland, even to
"divers who had a zeal to godliness."  For their discussion, at Erskine
of Dun's party, were present, among others, Willock, a Scots preacher
returned from England, and young Maitland of Lethington.  We are not told
what part Willock took in the conversation.  The arguments turned on
biblical analogies, never really coincident with the actual modern
circumstances.  The analogy produced in discussion by those who did not
go to all extremes with Knox did not, however, lack appropriateness.
Christianity, in fact, as they seem to have argued, did arise out of
Judaism; retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but, in virtue
of the sacrifice of its Founder, abstaining from the sacrifices and
ceremonial of the law.  In the same way Protestantism arose out of
mediaeval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures,
but rejecting the mediaeval ceremonial and the mediaeval theory of the
sacrifice of the Mass.  It did not follow that the Mass was sheer
"idolatry," at which no friend of the new ideas could be present.

As a proof that such presence or participation was not unlawful, was not
idolatry, in the existing state of affairs, was adduced the conduct of
St. Paul and the advice given to him by St. James and the Church in
Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 18-36).  Paul was informed that many thousands of
Jews "believed," yet remained zealous for the law, the old order.  They
had learned that Paul advised the Jews in Greece and elsewhere not to
"walk after the customs."  Paul should prove that "he also kept the law."
For this purpose he, with four Christian Jews under a vow, was to purify
himself, and he went into the Temple, "until that an offering should be
offered for every one of them."

"Offerings," of course, is the term in our version for sacrifices,
whether of animals or of "unleavened wafers anointed with oil."  The
argument from analogy was, I infer, that the Mass, with its wafer, was
precisely such an "offering," such a survival in Catholic ritual, as in
Jewish ritual St. Paul consented to, by the advice of the Church of
Jerusalem; consequently Protestants in a Catholic country, under the
existing circumstances, might attend the Mass.  The Mass was not
"idolatry."  The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course,
and to fatal results, does Knox's analogy between the foreign worships of
Israel and the Mass.  "She thinks not _that_ idolatry, but good
religion," said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Mary's Mass.
"So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch," retorted the
reformer.  Manifestly the Mass is, of the two, much more on a level with
the "offering" of St. Paul than with human sacrifices to Moloch! {66}

In his reply Knox, as he states his own argument, altogether overlooked
the _offering_ of St. Paul, which, as far as we understand, was the
essence of his opponents' contention.  He said that "to pay _vows_ was
never idolatry," but "the Mass from the original was and remained odious
idolatry, therefore the facts were most unlike.  Secondly, I greatly
doubt whether either James's commandment or Paul's obedience proceeded
from the Holy Ghost," about which Knox was, apparently, better informed
than these Apostles and the Church of Jerusalem.  Next, Paul was
presently in danger from a mob, which had been falsely told that he took
Greeks into the Temple.  Hence it was manifest "that God approved not
that means of reconciliation."  Obviously the danger of an Apostle from a
misinformed mob is no sort of evidence to divine approval or disapproval
of his behaviour. {67}  We shall later find that when Knox was urging on
some English nonconformists the beauty of conformity (1568), he employed
the very precedent of St. Paul's conduct at Jerusalem, which he rejected
when it was urged at Erskine's supper party!

We have dwelt on this example of Knox's logic, because it is crucial.  The
reform of the Church of Christ could not be achieved without cruel
persecution on both parts, while Knox was informing Scotland that all
members of the old Faith were as much idolaters as Israelites who
sacrificed their children to a foreign God, while to extirpate idolaters
was the duty of a Christian prince.  Lethington, as he soon showed, was
as clear-sighted in regard to Knox's logical methods as any man of to-
day, but he "concluded, saying, I see perfectly that our shifts will
serve nothing before God, seeing that they stand us in so small stead
before man."  But either Lethington conformed and went to Mass, or Mary
of Guise expected nothing of the sort from him, for he remained high in
her favour, till he betrayed her in 1559.

Knox's opinion being accepted--it obviously was a novelty to many of his
hearers--the Reformers must either convert or persecute the Catholics
even to extermination.  Circumstances of mere worldly policy forbade the
execution of this counsel of perfection, but persistent "idolaters,"
legally, lay after 1560 under sentence of death.  There was to come a
moment, we shall see, when even Knox shrank from the consequences of a
theory ("a murderous syllogism," writes one of his recent biographers,
Mr. Taylor Innes), which divided his countrymen into the godly, on one
hand, and idolaters doomed to death by divine law, on the other.  But he
put his hesitation behind him as a suggestion of Satan.

Knox now associated with Lord Erskine, then Governor of Edinburgh Castle,
the central strength of Scotland; with Lord Lorne, soon to be Earl of
Argyll (a "Christian," but not a remarkably consistent walker), with
"Lord James," the natural brother of Queen Mary (whose conscience, as we
saw, permitted him to draw the benefices of the Abbacy of St. Andrews, of
Pittenweem, and of an abbey in France, without doing any duties), and
with many redoubtable lairds of the Lothians, Ayrshire, and Forfarshire.
He also preached for ten days in the town house, at Edinburgh, of the
Bishop of Dunkeld.  On May 15, 1556, he was summoned to appear in the
church of the Black Friars.  As he was backed by Erskine of Dun, and
other gentlemen, according to the Scottish custom when legal proceedings
were afoot, no steps were taken against him, the clergy probably dreading
Knox's defenders, as Bothwell later, in similar circumstances, dreaded
the assemblage under the Earl of Moray; as Lennox shrank from facing the
supporters of Bothwell, and Moray from encountering the spears of
Lethington's allies.  It was usual to overawe the administrators of
justice by these gatherings of supporters, perhaps a survival of the old
"compurgators."  This, in fact, was "part of the obligation of our
Scottish kyndness," and the divided ecclesiastical and civil powers
shrank from a conflict.

Glencairn and the Earl Marischal, in the circumstances, advised Knox to
write a letter to Mary of Guise, "something that might move her to hear
the Word of God," that is, to hear Knox preach.  This letter, as it then
stood, was printed in a little black-letter volume, probably of 1556.
Knox addresses the Regent and Queen Mother as "her humble subject."  The
document has an interest almost pathetic, and throws light on the whole
character of the great Reformer.  It appears that Knox had been reported
to the Regent by some of the clergy, or by rumour, as a heretic and
seducer of the people.  But Knox had learned that the "dew of the
heavenly grace" had quenched her displeasure, and he hoped that the
Regent would be as clement to others in his case as to him.  Therefore he
returns to his attitude in the letter to his Berwick congregation (1552).
He calls for no Jehu, he advises no armed opposition to the sovereign,
but says of "God's chosen children" (the Protestants), that "their
victory standeth not in resisting but in suffering," "in quietness,
silence, and hope," as the Prophet Isaiah recommends.  The Isaiahs
(however numerous modern criticism may reckon them) were late prophets,
not of the school of Elijah, whom Knox followed in 1554 and 1558-59, not
in 1552 or 1555, or on one occasion in 1558-59.  "The Elect of God" do
not "shed blood and murder," Knox remarks, though he approves of the
Elect, of the brethren at all events, when they _do_ murder and shed
blood.

Meanwhile Knox is more than willing to run the risks of the preacher of
the truth, "partly because I would, with St. Paul, wish myself accursed
from Christ, as touching earthly pleasures" (whatever that may mean),
"for the salvation of my brethren and illumination of your Grace."  He
confesses that the Regent is probably not "so free as a public
reformation perhaps would require," for that required the downcasting of
altars and images, and prohibition to celebrate or attend Catholic rites.
Thus Knox would, apparently, be satisfied for the moment with toleration
and immunity for his fellow-religionists.  Nothing of the sort really
contented him, of course, but at present he asked for no more.

Yet, a few days later, he writes, the Regent handed his letter to the
Archbishop of Glasgow, saying, "Please you, my Lord, to read a pasquil,"
an offence which Knox never forgave and bitterly avenged in his
"History."

It is possible that the Regent merely glanced at his letter.  She would
find herself alluded to in a biblical parallel with "the Egyptian
midwives," with Nebuchadnezzar, and Rahab the harlot.  Her acquaintance
with these amiable idolaters may have been slight, but the comparison was
odious, and far from tactful.  Knox also reviled the creed in which she
had been bred as "a poisoned cup," and threatened her, if she did not act
on his counsel, with "torment and pain everlasting."  Those who drink of
the cup of her Church "drink therewith damnation and death."  As for her
clergy, "proud prelates do Kings maintain to murder the souls for which
the blood of Christ Jesus was shed."

These statements were dogmatic, and the reverse of conciliatory.  One
should not, in attempting to convert any person, begin by reviling his
religion.  Knox adopted the same method with Mary Stuart: the method is
impossible.  It is not to be marvelled at if the Regent did style the
letter a "pasquil."

Knox took his revenge in his "History" by repeating a foolish report that
Mary of Guise had designed to poison her late husband, James V.  "Many
whisper that of old his part was in the pot, and that the suspicion
thereof caused him to be inhibited the Queen's company, while the
Cardinal got his secret business sped of that gracious lady either by day
or night." {71a}  He styled her, as we saw, "a wanton widow"; he hinted
that she was the mistress of Cardinal Beaton; he made similar
insinuations about her relations with d'Oysel (who was "a secretis
mulierum"); he said, as we have seen, that she only waited her chance to
cut the throats of all suspected Protestants; he threw doubt on the
legitimacy of her daughter, Mary Stuart; and he constantly accuses her of
treachery, as will appear, when the charge is either doubtful, or, as far
as I can ascertain, absolutely false.

These are unfortunately examples of Knox's Christianity. {71b}  It is
very easy for modern historians and biographers to speak with genial
applause of the prophet's manly bluffness.  But if we put ourselves in
the position of opponents whom he was trying to convert, of the two Marys
for example, we cannot but perceive that his method was hopelessly
mistaken.  In attempting to evangelise an Euahlayi black fellow, we
should not begin by threats of damnation, and by railing accusations
against his god, Baiame.




CHAPTER VIII: KNOX'S WRITINGS FROM ABROAD: BEGINNING OF THE SCOTTISH
REVOLUTION, 1556-1558


Knox was about this time summoned to be one of the preachers to the
English at Geneva.  He sent in advance Mrs. Bowes and his wife, visited
Argyll and Glenorchy (now Breadalbane), wrote (July 7) an epistle bidding
the brethren be diligent in reading and discussing the Bible, and went
abroad.  His effigy was presently burned by the clergy, as he had not
appeared in answer to a second summons, and he was outlawed in absence.

It is not apparent that Knox took any part in the English translation of
the Bible, then being executed at Geneva.  Greek and Hebrew were not his
forte, though he had now some knowledge of both tongues, but he preached
to the men who did the work.  The perfections of Genevan Church
discipline delighted him.  "Manners and religion so sincerely reformed I
have not yet seen in any other place."  The genius of Calvin had made
Geneva a kind of Protestant city state [Greek text]; a Calvinistic
Utopia--everywhere the vigilant eyes of the preachers and magistrates
were upon every detail of daily life.  Monthly and weekly the magistrates
and ministers met to point out each other's little failings.  Knox felt
as if he were indeed in the City of God, and later he introduced into
Scotland, and vehemently abjured England to adopt, the Genevan
"discipline."  England would none of it, and would not, even in the days
of the Solemn League and Covenant, suffer the excommunication by
preachers to pass without lay control.

It is unfortunate that the ecclesiastical polity and discipline of a
small city state, like a Greek [Greek word polis], feasible in such a
community as Geneva at a moment of spiritual excitement, was brought by
Knox and his brethren into a nation like Scotland.  The results were a
hundred and twenty-nine years of unrest, civil war, and persecution.

Though happy in the affection of his wife and Mrs. Bowes, Knox, at this
time, needed more of feminine society.  On November 19, 1556, he wrote to
his friend, Mrs. Locke, wife of a Cheapside merchant: "You write that
your desire is earnest to see me.  Dear sister, if I should express the
thirst and languor which I have had for your presence, I should appear to
pass measure. . . .  Your presence is so dear to me that if the charge of
this little flock . . . did not impede me, my presence should anticipate
my letter."  Thus Knox was ready to brave the fires of Smithfield, or,
perhaps, forgot them for the moment in his affection for Mrs. Locke.  He
writes to no other woman in this fervid strain.  On May 8, 1557, Mrs.
Locke with her son and daughter (who died after her journey), joined Knox
at Geneva. {73}

He was soon to be involved in Scottish affairs.  After his departure from
his country, omens and prodigies had ensued.  A comet appeared in
November-December 1556.  Next year some corn-stacks were destroyed by
lightning.  Worse, a calf with two heads was born, and was exhibited as a
warning to Mary of Guise by Robert Ormistoun.  The idolatress merely
sneered, and said "it was but a common thing."  Such a woman was
incorrigible.  Mary of Guise is always blamed for endangering Scotland in
the interests of her family, the Guises of the House of Lorraine.  In
fact, so far as she tried to make Scotland a province of France, she was
serving the ambition of Henri II.  It could not be foreseen, in 1555,
that Henri II. would be slain in 1559, leaving the two kingdoms in the
hands of Francis II. and Mary Stuart, who were so young, that they would
inevitably be ruled by the Queen's uncles of the House of Lorraine.
Shortly before Knox arrived in Scotland in 1555, the Duc de Guise had
advised the Regent to "use sweetness and moderation," as better than
"extremity and rigour"; advice which she acted on gladly.

Unluckily the war between France and Spain, in 1557, brought English
troops into collision with French forces in the Low Countries (Philip II.
being king of England); this led to complications between Scotland, as
ally of France, and the English on the Borders.  Border raids began;
d'Oysel fortified Eyemouth, as a counterpoise to Berwick, war was
declared in November, and the discontented Scots, such as Chatelherault,
Huntly, Cassilis, and Argyll, mutinied and refused to cross Tweed. {74}
Thus arose a breach between the Regent and some of her nobles, who at
last, in 1559, rebelled against her on the ground of religion.  While the
weak war languished on, in 1557-58, "the Evangel of Jesus Christ began
wondrously to flourish," says Knox.  Other evangelists of his pattern,
Harlaw, Douglas, Willock, and a baker, Methuen (later a victim of the
intolerably cruel "discipline" of the Kirk Triumphant), preached at
Dundee, and Methuen started a reformed Kirk (though not without being
declared rebels at the horn).  When these persons preached, their hearers
were apt to raise riots, wreck churches, and destroy works of sacred art.
No Government could for ever wink at such lawless actions, and it was
because the pulpiteers, Methuen, Willock, Douglas, and the rest, were
again "put at," after being often suffered to go free, that the final
crash came, and the Reformation began in the wrack and ruin of
monasteries and churches.

There was drawing on another thunder-cloud.  The policy of Mary of Guise
certainly tended to make Scotland a mere province of France, a province
infested by French forces, slender, but ill-paid and predacious.  Before
marrying the Dauphin, in April 1558, Mary Stuart, urged it is said by the
Guises, signed away the independence of her country, to which her
husband, by these deeds, was to succeed if she died without issue.  Young
as she was, Mary was perfectly able to understand the infamy of the
transaction, and probably was not so careless as to sign the deeds
unread.

Even before this secret treaty was drafted, on March 10, 1557, Glencairn,
Lorne, Erskine, and the Prior of St. Andrews--best known to us in after
years as James Stewart, Earl of Moray--informed Knox that no "cruelty" by
way of persecution was being practised; that his presence was desired,
and that they were ready to jeopard their lives and goods for the cause.
The rest would be told to Knox by the bearer of the letter.  Knox
received the letter in May 1557, with verbal reports by the bearers, but
was so far from hasty that he did not leave Geneva till the end of
September, and did not reach Dieppe on his way to Scotland till October
24.  Three days later he wrote to the nobles who had summoned him seven
months earlier.  He had received, he said, at Dieppe two private letters
of a discouraging sort; one correspondent said that the enterprise was to
be reconsidered, the other that the boldness and constancy required "for
such an enterprise" were lacking among the nobles.  Meanwhile Knox had
spent his time, or some of it, in asking the most godly and the most
learned of Europe, including Calvin, for opinions of such an adventure,
for the assurance of his own conscience and the consciences of the Lord
James, Erskine, Lorne, and the rest. {76a}  This indicates that Knox
himself was not quite sure of the lawfulness of an armed rising, and
perhaps explains his long delay.  Knox assures us that Calvin and other
godly ministers insisted on his going to Scotland.  But it is quite
certain that of an armed rising Calvin absolutely disapproved.  On April
16, 1561, writing to Coligny, Calvin says that he was consulted several
months before the tumult of Amboise (March 1560) and absolutely
discouraged the appeal to arms.  "Better that we all perish a hundred
times than that the name of Christianity and the Gospel should come under
such disgrace." {76b}  If Calvin bade Knox go to Scotland, he must have
supposed that no rebellion was intended.  Knox tells his correspondents
that they have betrayed themselves and their posterity ("in conscience I
can except none that bear the name of nobility"), they have made him and
their own enterprise ridiculous, and they have put him to great trouble.
What is he to say when he returns to Geneva, and is asked why he did not
carry out his purpose?  He then encourages them to be resolute.

Knox "certainly made the most," says Professor Hume Brown, "of the two
letters from correspondents unknown to us."  He at once represented them
as the cause of his failure to keep tryst; but, in April 1558, writing
from Geneva to "the sisters," he said, "the cause of my stop to this day
I do not clearly understand."  He did not know why he left England before
the Marian persecutions; and he did not know why he had not crossed over
to Scotland in 1557.  "It may be that God justly permitted Sathan to put
in my mind such cogitations as these: I heard such troubles as appeared
in that realm;"--troubles presently to be described.

Hearing, at Dieppe, then, in October 1557, of the troubles, and of the
faint war with England, and moved, pe