John Tulloch · 23 of 27

IV. John Knox. · Part 1

THE Scottish Reformation, and the great central figure which it presents, remain for our consideration. The field opened to our view is comparatively limited, but it is singular in the completeness and intensity of its interest. The area over which the reforming movement is seen sweeping is but a narrow one in contrast with that of Germany or France or England, but it is more deeply moved; and the gathering impulses of the religious excitement swell into a highly expressed, definite, and powerful nationality.

As we cast our glance upon Scotland towards the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, we see a very disturbed picture,—the King, the great nobles, and the clergy sharing between them an authority which has not worked itself into any consistent and beneficent form of national order. In comparison with the well developed, massive, and richly pictured life of England at the same period, there is great rudeness and disorder, and, in a word, barbarism in Scotland. This is obviously true of all elements of political strength and stability; while in regard to the Church it is no less really true. Poor and corrupt as the clergy were in England in the earlier reign of Henry VIII., they yet retained, in some instances, a moral spirit and influence of which we can detect no trace in the sister country.

The Reformation in each is found strongly contrasted, according to these differing circumstances of the two countries. In England there were powerful forces both of political and moral resistance to it; but in Scotland, when the front of rude authority with which it was at first violently met was once broken down, there was no power left to stay nor even to guide it. The kingly influence was entirely prostrated in the untimely death of James V. after the disaster of Solway Moss; the nobles, in their savage enmities and factions, possessed no intelligent or steady power of control. The hierarchy was the single authority that remained to encounter a movement against which it was wholly incapable of effective resistance; its palsied and corrupt grandeur was no match for the rising spirit of national indignation.

While in England, accordingly, we see a balanced movement proceeding gradually and under royal sanction, in Scotland we behold an insurrectionary impulse long repressed, but at length gathering force till it breaks down and sweeps away all barriers before it. It might seem on the first glance we get of the hierarchy of Scotland, that it constituted a formidable power: externally it appeared strong; it showed the craft, the subtlety, and the swift unrelenting vengeance which at first easily mastered and crushed its enemies. But these were in reality the mere fangs of a brute strength surviving the decay of all true national life in the system. The apparent influence and barbaric splendour of such men as the Beatons covered a rottenness at the heart more extreme than could be found in any other country of the Reformation. Nowhere else had the clergy reached such a pitch of flagrant and disgraceful immorality, and the Roman Catholic religion become such an utter corruption and mockery of all that is good and holy. The bishops and archbishops lived in open concubinage, and gave their daughters in marriage to the sons of the best families in the kingdom; livings were transmitted from father to son in the most shameless manner; the monasteries were, in popular belief and in reality, to a degree beyond what we can indicate, sinks of profligacy. A darker and more hideous picture, when we think of it as the formal representative of religion to a people, we cannot conceive, than that which is suggested in the scattered but sufficiently broad hints of Knox.

And while such was the moral state of the hierarchy, it scarcely preserved even the pretence of religious service. The churches, save on festival days, were abandoned the priests were unable to understand a single word of the prayers which they mumbled over; and preaching was entirely unknown. Every element of religion was materialised to the last degree and blessings sold for so much, and cursings for so much. The clergy were the traffickers—they seem really to have been little more—in such supposed spiritual charms the people were the victims, in some cases honestly so, but in others obviously with a sufficiently clear view of the absurdity, if not impiety, of the whole affair. Knox gives a ludicrous picture of what went on in this way, drawn from the preaching of William Airth, a friar of Dundee, who distinguished himself temporarily by his keen exposure of the papistical system. “The priest,” said he, “whose duty and office it is to pray for the people, stands up on Sunday and cries, ‘Ane has tynt a spurtill; there is a flail stollen beyond the burn; the goodwife of the other side of the gait has tynt a horn-spoon: God’s malison and mine I give to those who know of this gear and restores it not.” And the appreciation the people often had of this preaching is thus shown. After sermon that the friar “had at Dunfermline,” Knox says, “he came to a house whare gossips were drinking their Sunday penny and he, being dry, asked drink. ‘Yes, father,’ said ane of the gossips, ‘ye shall have drink; but ye must first resolve a doubt which has risen among us—to wit, what servant will serve a man best on least expense.’ ‘The good angel,’ said I, ‘who is man’s keeper—who makes great service without expense.’ ‘Tush!’ said the gossip, ‘we mean no such high matters; we mean, what honest man will do greatest service for least expense?’ And while I was musing, said the friar, what that should mean, she said, ‘I see, father, that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men. Know ye not how the bishops and their officials serve us husbandmen? Will they not give us a letter of cursing for a plack to last for a year, to curse all that look over our dyke? and that keeps our corn better nor the sleepy boy that will have three shillings of fee, a sark, and a pair of shoon in the year.’”

A system whose most familiar and popular expressions had sunk into such absolute dotage, whose dishonesty and immorality were so widespread and prominent, might seem powerful, but in point of fact it had no permanent elements of strength. It was a mere repressive machinery lying on the heart of the nation, so far as there was in it any true heart and living growth of moral intelligence. And not only so,—not only had the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland become a mere incubus, but an incubus in no small degree of foreign character and pretensions. Many of the higher clergy received their education in France; they had engrafted on their natural rudeness and fierceness of character the polish of a culture formed in the most licentious and perfidious Court in Europe—a polish which not only left their native and essential savageness untamed, but sharpened it into some of its worst features of cruelty and baseness, This may serve to explain the striking alienation between the Catholicism in Scotland and the genuine and growing national feeling. There were no points of attraction, nor even of tolerance, between them; only the hardest attitude of unreasoning authority on the one hand, and of utter contempt and hatred on the other. Among the poorest classes there may have been a kind of sympathy with the clergy, and certain relations of goodwill on the one side and the other. The monasteries, in the very worst point of view, must have been centres of beneficence, whose influence stretched towards many humble cottages; and the bishops had each their numerous dependants, who, with their friends and relatives, mingled among the people. Bad as the system was, it must have possessed such points of support, and might have strengthened itself in some degree on them, had any wisdom been left to it; but ignorance and mere selfish instinct were, after all, but a poor stay for profligacy, while all the intellectual and moral interests of the country were uniting against it.

Standing between the clergy and the lowest orders, there had grown up during the preceding century or more, in Scotland, a class of traders in the towns and of gentry in the country, bound to each other by intimate ties and it was in the growing enlightenment of this class that the future of Scotland lay. These burghers and gentry constituted young Scotland in the. sixteenth century. They had the intelligence to understand to the full the corruptions of the Papacy; they had gathered to themselves such spiritual life as remained in the country, and this rose in horror at the immoralities which the Church embodied. They were a rising and vigorous class, proud of their sharp-wittedness and the influence which their position and resources gave them; they were well informed, through their connection with the Continent, with regard to the progress of the reformed doctrines; they had high character, earnest feelings, and political as well as religious aims; and they naturally ranged themselves against the hierarchy as its strong and avowed enemies.

Between these two powers the conflict of the Scottish Reformation was really waged: It was a conflict not merely in the interest of religion, although this it was eminently, but moreover, and in a higher and more remarkable degree than elsewhere, a conflict on behalf of the independence and integrity of national life. The spiritual impulse was strongly present, but inseparably bound up, with it was a political feeling, which gave characteristic impress to the general movement. Amid the decay of the old political influences in the country, and the corruption of its social and ecclesiastical bonds, there was a fresh and compact vigour in the middle orders that rendered them more capable in moral strength than any party opposed to them; and not only did the reforming ‘activity mainly proceed from them, but, in virtue of their self-consistency and hardihood of character, they retained the main guidance of it in their hands. They impressed their own character upon it; they gave to it, both as a doctrine and a discipline, a shape removed as far as possible from the hated hierarchical system which they subverted. Altogether unlike the growth of the English Church, the Scottish Reformed Kirk became an entirely new expression of religious life in Scotland. The old had passed away,—all things had become new,—when the reforming tide settled down, and the face of religious order reappeared. Scotland was not merely reformed, it was revolutionised. Catholicism had vanished into obscure corners, from which no royal nursing. could ever again evoke it, save as a poor ghost of its former self, destined to vanish again before every fresh outburst of the national feeling.

This complete change, wrought by the Reformation in Scotland, can only be explained in the light of the peculiar crisis which the national history had then reached. A new political and social influence was at the time waiting to start into vigorous development: it met the Reformation, embraced it, moulded it to its own inspirations and aims, and carried itself triumphantly forward in its advance. It is very true that some of the greater nobles soon saw reason to join themselves to the reformed cause, and in various ways to aid or hinder it; but in the beginning, and at the end, the Scottish Reformation continued essentially a middle-class movement, with all the hardy virtue belonging to its parentage, yet also with the parental defects—sturdy and uncompromising in its faith, and free in its instincts, but with no sacred inheritance of traditionary story binding it by beautiful links. to the great Catholic past; and further, as has been long sadly apparent, with no sympathetic expansiveness capable of moulding into religious unity classes widely separated in material rank and in intellectual and artistic culture.

It is sufficiently singular, and so far in corroboration of the view now presented, that the Scottish reformers, one and all of them of any note, sprung from the class of gentry to which we have referred. Patrick Hamilton, indeed, was immediately connected with the higher nobility, and, through his mother, with the royal family; but the fact of his being a younger son, and the illegitimacy that attached to the descent of both his parents, rendered his own social position certainly not higher than that of the lairds or gentry. George Wishart, again, was brother to the Laird of Pittarrow, and Knox was the son of a younger brother of the house of Ranfurly.

Patrick Hamilton is the first prominent name that meets us in the Scottish Reformation. His brief and sad, yet beautiful story, has been told anew in our day in a very interesting manner. For the first time we are able to trace, in a clear and consistent light, the course of his education, first in Paris, then in St Andrews, and lastly in Germany, in the very heart of the reforming influences; his return to his native country, and marriage (a fact not previously known); and then his preaching, and seizure and trial by the elder Beaton,—a narrative which serves to deepen the affecting story of his martyrdom in front of the gate of the old college of St Andrews on the 29th of February 1528. Hamilton no doubt caught his first reforming impulse during the years that he studied in Paris (1519-20), when the university was all astir on the subject of Luther’s doctrines. His subsequent studies in Germany confirmed the early impulse thus communicated; and the proto-reformer of Scotland was thus substantially Lutheran in the origin and character of his teaching.

This foreign influence in the rise of the Reformation in Scotland deserves to be noticed. But it would be wrong to attribute too much importance to it. An awakening, half literary, half spiritual, had already begun during the preceding ten years in St Leonard’s College, St Andrews; and Hamilton was in the very midst of this new excitement while pursuing his studies there. We get, also, in Knox’s History, one clear glimpse of an earnest Lollardism towards the end of the preceding century, in the reign of James IV. The spirit which he describes, and the articles which he gives in detail, recall strongly the spirit and doctrines which we have seen to characterise the surviving Wickliffite influence in England—the same broad and somewhat crude apprehension of Scriptural truth—the same scornful humour—the same strong, yet retiring piety—with the remarkable difference, that the “thirty persons” called “Lollards of Kylle” seem to have belonged, not to the peasantry, as in England, but to the better-classes of society. At this single point, a line of antecedent religious life in Scotland rises into brief and impressive prominency. And it no doubt continued to some extent during the next thirty years, and helped in the advance of the Reformation; but in what degree or through what connections it did this, we cannot distinctly trace, either in the case of Hamilton or of any of the chief reformers.

The zeal of Patrick Hamilton, although quenched in cruel flames, lived after him. His teaching, enhanced by the noble and pathetic courage of his death, made a deep impression on the national mind. The reforming spirit spread on all sides. “Men began,” says Knox, “very liberally to speak.” The bishops had only one weapon with which to encounter the rising spirit. They bethought themselves of burning some more heretics. “New consultation was taken that some should be burned;” but a “merrie gentleman,” a familiar of the bishop, was heard to say, “Gif ye burn more, let them be burnt in how cellars; for the reik of Mr Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it did blow upon.”

Such was the state of affairs while Knox was rising into full manhood, and beginning with his steady and long-piercing glance to look forth upon the world, and note the circumstances and signs of the times amidst which he found himself. At the time of Hamilton’s death he was twenty-three years of age, and about terminating his studies in the University of Glasgow. He was born in 1505, in Haddington or its neighbourhood, of parents whose ancestry and social position have been subjects of dispute, although the evidence seems conclusive that his father belonged to the Knoxes of Ranfurly, an old and respectable family of Renfrewshire. His own statement, that “his great-grandfather, gudeschir, and father, served under the Earls of Bothwell, and some of them have died under their standards,” is perfectly consistent with this. He received his preliminary education at the Grammar-School of Haddington, and in the year 1521 was sent to the University of Glasgow, where he had, therefore, been a considerable number of years at the time that the reforming opinions began to spread rapidly throughout the country.

It is not very clear when or under what special influences Knox first began to incline towards these opinions. He had gone to Glasgow University with the view of being trained for the Church, and there, under Major, he soon proved himself an apt and distinguished pupil of the scholastic theology. He was considered as equalling, if not excelling, his master in the subtleties of the dialectic art. To this teacher also he probably owed the first impulse to that remarkable freedom of political opinion which afterwards characterised him. He is said to have been ordained before the year 1530; but at this time, and for twelve years onward, there is a great gap in his life, which his biographers have been wholly unable to fill up. We only know that, some time after taking his degree, he removed to St Andrews, and taught there; although in what college does not clearly appear; and that, about 1535, especially by the study of the Fathers, his traditionary opinions had become thoroughly shaken. Not till eight years later, however, or in 1543, did he become an avowed and marked reformer.

This year is in every way memorable in the history of the Scottish Reformation. The death of the King, after the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, in the end of the previous year, and the consequent accession of the Earl of Arian to the regency, produced at first a change favourable to the views of the reformers. Negotiations were renewed with England; Protestant preachers were taken under special protection by the Regent, and a measure passed the Committee of Parliament, known by the name of the Lords of the Articles, and received his sanction, authorising the reading of the Scriptures in the common tongue. Everything seemed for the moment to indicate the goodwill of the Regent, and to tend to the advance of the Reformation. The favour of Arran, however, was but short-lived. The French and Papal party, with Cardinal Beaton at their head, soon regained their ascendancy. Just as under the previous interregnum, fifteen years before, all the efforts of Henry VIII. defeated to some extent by his own injustice and violence—were unsuccessful to bind any section of the Scottish nobles permanently to his interest; and the renewed connection with France laid the foundation for confusion and misery to the country for more than another half-century.

So soon as Beaton attained his object, and once more held the substantial power of the kingdom in his grasp, he resolved to crush his enemies with no sparing hand. His bloodthirsty vengeance had been baffled by the reluctant pity of the late king, who had shrunk with horror from the atrocity, suggested to him by the clergy, of exterminating by a single stroke two or three hundred of the most influential of the reformers, whose names they had presented to him in a list. There seemed no obstacle now, however, to the full gratification of his vengeance, while the instinct of self-preservation probably combined with that of his natural imperiousness and cruelty to direct him to the special object of his attack. Whatever be the credit due to Tytler’s special insinuations against Wishart—which appear to rest on very slender evidence—Beaton, no doubt, identified this courageous preacher with his political as well as religious enemies. He was the intimate associate, and, by his eloquence and activity, the most powerful support of the anti-Papal or English party. The cardinal knew this well, and aimed accordingly, by his apprehension and death, to strike the most fatal blow he could at the party.

George Wishart, as he stands depicted in the pages of Knox and Calderwood, is a singularly interesting character; of gentle, winning, and unassuming disposition, with a strange wild tinge of enthusiasm, an intense spirit of devotion, and a commanding eloquence; “a man of sic graces as before him were never heard in this realm, yea, and rare to be found yet in ony man.” Obliged to seek refuge some time before in England from the persecution of the Bishop of Brechin, he returned to Scotland in 1543, with the commissioners who had been sent to negotiate a treaty with Henry VIII. He had been dwelling for some time in the very centre of the Anglican reform movement at Cambridge, where the influence of Bilney and Latimer still lived; and he seems to have caught some share of the spirit of both—the mild rapture of the one, and the hasty denunciatory zeal of the other. On his return to Scotland he travelled from town to town, and county to county; preaching the truth which had become precious to his own soul. He made a deep impression wherever he went. His words wrought with a marvellous persuasiveness on some even of the most hardened and wicked in the land—such men, for example, as the Laird of Schein, described by Knox, who, as the preacher on a “hette and pleasant day” of summer addressed the crowd from a “dyke on a muir edge, upon the south-west side of Mauchlin,” was so affected that “the tears rane fra his eyne in sic abundance that all men wondered,” and who by his future life, moreover, showed that “his conversion then wrought was without hypocrisy.”

In his preaching excursions, Wishart gathered around him devoted followers, and was the inspiring mind of the Protestant party, now adding rapidly to its numbers. It is as one of these followers that Knox first clearly appears upon the scene of the Reformation, and in a very characteristic attitude. He tells us himself, that from the time that the zealous preacher came to Lothian, he waited carefully upon him, bearing “a twa-handed sword.” This precaution had been used since an attempt had been made to assassinate the preacher; and the bold spirit of Knox, now kindling into its full ardour, rejoiced in the attendant post of danger. At this very time, however, the machinations of the Cardinal against Wishart had reached their completion; and while he rested at Ormiston, after his last remarkable sermon at Haddington, he was made a prisoner by the Earl of Bothwell; while Beaton himself lay within a mile, at the head of 500 men, in case any attempt should be made to rescue him. There is a strange weird interest in Knox’s description of his last interview with the preacher, and his final sermon. Disappointed at not meeting with the friends he expected,—the Earl of Cassius and others,—and disheartened by the apparent decline of the popular interest in the reformed cause, he spoke to his intrepid sword-bearer of his weariness with the world, and “as he pacit up and doun behind the hie altar, mair than half an hour before sermon, his verie countenance and visage declarit the grief and alteration of his mind.” The shadow of his approaching doom had crept upon him; and when Knox wished to share his fate, and accompany him to Ormiston, he said, “Nay, return to your bairnes, and God bless you; ane is sufficient for a sacrifice.”

Knox’s “bairnes” were his pupils, the sons of the lairds of Niddrie and Ormiston. In default of any more definite occupation, he had settled as a quiet tutor to the sons of these families. From the time of his quitting St Andrews up to this time, when, in his fortieth year, he first publicly appears in connection with Wishart, we can scarcely be said to know anything further of him. As has been pointed out, there is considerable significance in this long period of silence in Knox’s history. It speaks strongly of his naturally peaceful disposition, of the patient maturity with which he formed his opinions, and of the consequent absurdity of the notion that would fix him down at once as a mere ambitious and turbulent partisan. It may serve also to explain the singular decision and completeness of his views when the outburst of his reforming zeal at length came.

Now, after the apprehension of Wishart, he seems to have remained cautiously in his retirement, mourning the dreadful fate of his friend, till the great event, perpetrated at the old castle of St Andrews, on the morning of the 29th May 1546, summoned him from his privacy, and imparted a new direction and a nobler interest to his life. This event lives nowhere so vividly and powerfully as in his own wonderful narrative, in which the horror of the circumstances is wildly relieved by a stern glee, kindling in the writer as he tells them in careful outline. It is equally needless to condemn the spirit of the historian, or to find excuses for it. If the horror of the transaction obscures in our minds all feeling of pleasantry as we look back upon it, we have to thank Knox, and such men as Knox, that there is left to us no occasion of any other feeling. To him, and to all honest and patriot hearts in Scotland in the middle of the sixteenth century, the death of Cardinal Beaton, under whatever circumstances of atrocity, could not, unfortunately, be anything else but a circumstance of gratulation. It is the divine doom of tyranny, in whatever shape, that men should rejoice at its murder, even if that murder be “foully done.” The joy is not in fault, but the cause of it. The former is a pure manifestation of human feeling, the latter an eternal blasphemy and violation of human right. Knox is gleeful, therefore, with a scornful laughter, over the assassination of Beaton, simply because he realised all the meaning of the event for his country, and could not see the downfall of a power so hateful without a natural impulse of jubilee. As we look back into the dim grey of that May morning, we only see the solitary and helpless man raised from his bed, and in the murderous grip of his assassins. Knox remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, the proud and imperious tyrant, who reclined on velvet cushions at the castle window, to feast his eyes on the torments of his martyred friend. A life of such dazzling strength as Beaton's, terminating so swiftly in an abject and miserable death, may well move us to pity—it could only move Knox to irony; and if the event be not one for irony, we may say with Mr Froude, “we do not, know what irony is for.”

Nearly a year subsequent to the death of Beaton (April 1547), Knox took refuge with his pupils in the castle of St Andrews, which continued to be held against the Regent notwithstanding his efforts to reduce it. It became the temporary stronghold of the reforming interest, and many resorted to it for protection. Here Knox began, he tells us, “to exercise his pupils after his accustomed manner. Besides their grammar and other human authors, he read unto them a Catechism, account whereof he caused them to give publickly in the parish kirk of St Andrews. He read, moreover, unto them the evangel of John, proceeding where he had left at his departing from Langniddrie, and that lecture he read in the chapel within the castle at a certain hour.” In this modest way Knox introduces us to the great epoch of his life which was approaching. Now in his forty-second. year, with his convictions fully formed, and with obvious powers of expressing and defending them beyond those of any other man of his time, he had yet remained, as we have seen, silent. The awe and responsibility of speaking to the people in God’s stead weighed heavily on his mind as on Luther’s, and the arguments of his friends failed to move him. Struck with the “manner of his doctrine,” they “began earnestly to travail with him that he would take the preaching place upon him.” John Rough, who was preacher in the castle, and who seems honestly to have felt his own weakness in comparison with the gifts of the reformer, and Henry Balnaves, a Lord of Session, and one of the most influential of the early reformers, joined in urging this request. But he tells us “he utterly refused, alleging that he would not run where God had not called him.” This refusal, however, only sharpened the desire of his friends to see him in his natural vocation, and they devised, in company with Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, equally eager with themselves, a plan by which they hoped to surprise him into compliance with their designs. The story is one of the most singular and characteristic in all the reformer’s life, and can only be told in his own language: “Upon a certain day a sermon was had of the election of ministers, what power the congregation (how small soever it was, passing the number of two or three) had above any man in whom they supposed and espied the gifts of God to be, and how dangerous it was to refuse, and not to hear the voice of such as desire to be instructed. These and other heads declared, the said John Rough, preacher, directed his words to the said John Knox, saying, ‘Brother, ye shall not be offended, albeit that I speak unto you that which I have in charge even from all those that are here present, which is this: In the name of God and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of these that presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that you refuse not this holy vocation, but as ye tender the glory of God, the increase of Christ’s kingdom, the edification of your brethren, and the comfort of me, whom ye understand well enough to be oppressed by the multitude of labours, that ye take upon you the public office and charge of preaching, even as ye look to avoid God’s heavy displeasure, and desire that He shall multiply His graces with you.’ And in the end he said to those who were present, ‘Was not this your charge to me, and do you not approve the vocation?’ They answered, ‘It was, and we approve it.’ Whereat the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears, and withdrew himself to his chamber; his countenance and behaviour from that day till the day that he was compelled to present himself to the public place of preaching, did sufficiently declare the grief and trouble of his heart; for no man saw any sign of mirth of him, neither yet had he pleasure to accompany any man many days together.”