John Knox and the Reformation

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. [15 - “Letter to the Faithful,” cf. M‘Crie, Life of John Knox, 292.]

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 [16 - Knox, vi. 229.]; 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.” [17 - M‘Crie, 292.] 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. [18 - Dr. Hay Fleming has impugned this opinion, but I am convinced by the internal evidence of tone and style in the tract; indeed, an earlier student has anticipated my idea. The tract is described by Dr. M‘Crie in his Life of Knox, 326-327 (1855).] 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. [19 - Most of the gentry of Fife were in the murder or approved of it, and the castle seems to have contained quite a pleasant country-house party. They were cheered by the smiles of beauty, and in the treasurer’s accounts we learn that Janet Monypenny of Pitmilly (an estate still in the possession of her family), was “summoned for remaining in the castle, and assisting” the murderers. Dr. M‘Crie cites Janet in his list of “Scottish Martyrs and Prosecutions for Heresy” (Life of Knox, 315). This martyr was a cousin, once removed, of the murdered ecclesiastic.] 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.” [20 - Knox, Laing’s edition, i. 180.]

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. [21 - Knox, i. 182. “The siege continued to near the end of January.” “The truce was of treacherous purpose,” i. 183.] 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. [22 - Knox, i. 203-205.] 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. [23 - Thorpe’s Calendar, i. 60; Register Privy Council, i. 57, 58; Tytler, vi. 8 (1837).] On January 11, 1547, a spy of England, Stewart of Cardonald, reports that the garrison have given pledges and await their absolution from Rome. [24 - State Papers, Scotland, Thorpe, i. 61.] 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.” [25 - Bain, Calendar of Scottish Papers, 1547-69, i. I; Tytler, iii. 51 (1864).] 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! [26 - Bain i. 2; Knox, i. 182, 183.] 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.” [27 - For the offering of the papal remission to the garrison of the castle before April 2, 1547, see Stewart of Cardonald’s letter of that date to Wharton, in Bain’s Calendar of Scottish Papers, 1547-69, i. 4-5.] 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” [28 - John Knox, i. 80.]– 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. [29 - State Papers, Domestic. Addenda, Edward VI., p. 327. Lord Eure says there were twenty galleys.] 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. [30 - Odet De Selve, Correspondence Politique, pp. 170-178.] 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. [31 - Knox, i. 201.]

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, [32 - Leonti Strozzio, incolumitatem modo pacti, se dediderunt, writes Buchanan. Professor Hume Brown says that Buchanan evidently confirms Knox; but incolumitas means security for bare life, and nothing more. Lesley says that the terms asked were life and fortune, salvi cum fortunis, but the terms granted were but safety in life and limb, and, it seems, freedom to depart, ut soli homines integri discederent. If Lesley, a Catholic historian, is right, and if by discederent he means “go freely away,” the French broke the terms of surrender.] 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! [33 - Knox, i. 206, 228.] 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. [34 - Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England, 261.] 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. [35 - Ibid., 158.] 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.” [36 - Ibid., 156, 157.] 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.” [37 - Compare the preface, under the Restoration, to our existing prayer book.] 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 mediæval 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. [38 - Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England, 98-136.] 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), [39 - Knox, iii. 122.] 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, [40 - Knox, iii. 297.] 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.” [41 - Ibid., iii. 122.] 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.” [42 - Knox, iii. 280-282.]

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. [43 - Lorimer, i. 162-176.]

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. [44 - But, for the date, cf. Hume Brown, John Knox, i. 148; and M‘Crie, 65, note 5; Knox, iii. 156.]

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.” [45 - Knox, iii. 120.] 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..” [46 - Laing, Knox, vi. pp. lxxx., lxxxi.]

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. [47 - Pollen, The Month, September 1897.]

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.