John Tulloch · 24 of 27

IV. John Knox. · Part 2

A special necessity soon occurred to him to enter upon his vocation. Dean John Arran, “a rotten Papist, had long troubled John Rough in his preaching,” and Knox was roused to vindicate the doctrine of his friend “in open audience in the parish church of St Andrews.” The people heard him gladly, and called upon him with one consent to give them by his preaching “probation of what he had affirmed; for if it was true, they had been miserably deceived.” And so the next Sunday Knox preached the parish church, and expounded at length his views of the Papacy. He at once urged the most decided opinions, and supported his assertions under the different heads of life, doctrine, laws, and subjects. The sermon made a great noise, as may be imagined; and on the remonstrance of Hamilton, the bishop-elect (not yet “execrated”—“consecrated,” they call it, bitterly remarks Knox), with Winram, the sub-prior and vicar-general during the vacancy of the see, Knox and Rough were summoned to give an account of their doctrine in a convention of grey-friars and black-friars appointed in St Leonard’s Yards. Certain articles were read to them, and are admitted by Knox to contain a fair representation of his views. They are preserved in his History, and enable us to understand very clearly, in connection with the dispute which followed, the position which he now occupied. The Pope is asserted to be Antichrist, the mass abominable idolatry, purgatory a falsehood, and bishops, except as ordinary preachers, to have no function, When we contrast such views with those of Luther or Latimer at the outset, we perceive at once what comparatively clear and determinate ground, as opposed to the old Catholic system, was taken up by our reformer. He offered no points of mere advance and improvement upon that system; he showed no regretful dealing nor sympathetic connection with it—but a complete and decisive reaction against it. It was not merely corrupt, but absolutely abandoned to evil—the Church not of God, but of the devil. “Ye will leave us no kirk,” said the grey-friar (Arbugkill) who rashly entered the lists with the reformer on the occasion, and, driven to shifts by his arguments, had nothing to reply but that “the apostles had not receaved the Holy Ghost when they did write their Epistles”—“Ye will leave us no kirk,” urged the friar. “Indeed,” said Knox, “in David I read that there is a Church of the malignants; for he says, ‘Odi Ecclesiam Malignantium.’” It was clear that there was no room for compromise here. Knox could recognise no authority, no sanctity, no respectability in the Papacy of his country. The, very order of bishops, as identified with it, had already become undivine to his mind. He was a Presbyterian, all at once, by the mere force of antipathy to Catholicism as it presented itself to his view. The absence of positive doctrinal sentiments in these articles is observable; but too much is not to be made of this. The points of definite negation to the papal system were necessarily those which came into most prominence; and in the sermon which was the occasion of them, he tells us that he spoke also of the “doctrine of justification expressed in Scripture, which teach that man is justified by faith alone—that the blood of Jesus Christ purges us from all our sins.”

Knox’s activity at this period was but shortlived. A French squadron appeared before the Castle of St Andrews in the end of June of the same year; and the brave garrison who had held out so long, being now pressed both by sea and land, were forced to capitulate. The honourable terms on which they had surrendered were speedily violated; and Knox, who had shared the fate of his comrades, was transported along with them to France, and then confined as a prisoner on board the French galleys.

This may be said to close the first great period in Knox’s life—the period of his preparation for, and commencement of, his reforming work. The second period, which embraces his more or less complete exile from Scotland for a space of twelve years, or on to 1559, shows the working of his reforming zeal on an extended field, and amid the most strange vicissitudes. We can only here indicate its various points of interest.

His imprisonment in the French galleys for two years, and the sufferings he there endured, served to deepen, and render still more dear to him, his religious convictions, and also to give some tinge of sadness and asperity to his character. Then his residence in England for four years, from 1549 to the beginning of 1554, was a time fruitful to him in work and experience. He was brought, as one of Edward VI.’s chaplains, into immediate contact with the great agents of the Anglican Reformation—with Cranmer—probably (nay, certainly, we may say) with Latimer, who during this period was a regular inmate of Cranmer’s house at Lambeth. If they did meet, the two bold preachers, they must have talked, and talked with a heartiness and a vehemence that doubtless did the archbishop, among his court movements, some good to hear. It is understood that Knox had considerable influence in producing the liberal changes in the service and prayer-book of the Church of England which characterised the last years of Edward’s reign. Unquestionably, any influence he did exert must have been in this direction, and indeed in a still more radical direction for he leaves us in no doubt as to his views of the partial and imperfect character of the English Reformation. Both he himself and Beza lead us to suppose that he was offered a bishopric; but his conscientious doubts as to the divine authority of the Episcopal order, and his general dissatisfaction with the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England, led him to reject this as well as another offer which was shortly afterwards made to him. It was proposed to present him to the “vicarage or parsonage of All-hallows,” vacant by “the preferment of Thomas. Sampson to the deanery of Chichester.” Knox’s refusal to accept this latter promotion was made a subject of inquiry before the Privy Council, when he urged his scruples as to the existing order of the Church of England, and after “some gentle speeches” was dismissed. He had no such scruples as to preaching. In Berwick—where we first hear of him after his liberation—in Newcastle, in London before the King and Council, in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have spent a considerable part of the summer of 1553, he preached with incessant activity, awakening a wide interest everywhere, as we may gather from his future letters and admonition to the faithful in England. Long afterwards he especially congratulated himself on the review of his labours in Berwick, and the success which attended his efforts to maintain order among the lawless garrisons of the Border.

At Berwick our reformer fell in love, and entered into an engagement which, some years after, notwithstanding the strong opposition of certain relatives of the lady, terminated in marriage. The lady was a Miss Marjory Bowes, daughter of Richard Bowes, the youngest son of Sir Ralph Bowes of Streatham. Her mother was the daughter and one of the co-heirs of Sir Richard Aske of Aske, and Knox’s connection with the family seeing to have arisen through this lady. It is to Mrs Bowes that his letters, which have been recently published in full in the edition of Dr Laing, are chiefly written. She is addressed as his mother, and in the most confidential and intimate terms. The letters as a whole are remarkable. They prove the deep sincerity of Knox’s piety,—his intense absorption in the realities of the spiritual life, while yet mingling with so busy and apparently combative an activity in the affairs of the world around him. They are, in truth, rather the communings of one earnest and strongly moved soul with another, than letters in any ordinary sense. We certainly miss in them some mixture of mere human interest with the uniform and intense cast of the religious phraseology in which they abound. The world is out of sight altogether, save as the stern battle-ground of certain shadowy forms of good and evil; at least the forms have become shadowy to us, although no doubt they were more real and living than anything else to Knox. In vain we try to catch any sunlight of happy feeling—any lively trace of the affection associated with them, if not originating them—any glimpse of her to whom his heart was bound. The mother appears in a sufficiently distinct aspect, a timid, self-conscious, and despairing soul, ever seeking strength and counsel from the more assured spirit of the reformer. The unyielding insolence of the uncle (Sir Robert Bowes) also comes into light: his “disdainful, yea, despiteful words,” Knox writes to his “dear mother,” “have so pierced my heart, that my life is bitter unto me. I bear a good countenance with a sore troubled heart; while he that ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a despiser, but also a taunter of God’s messengers. (God be merciful unto him!) Among other his most unpleasing words, while that I was about to have declared my part in the whole matter, he said, ‘Away with your rhetorical reasons, for I will not be persuaded with them.’ God knows I did use no rhetoric or coloured speech, but would have spoken the truth, and that in most simple manner. It is supposed that all the matter comes by you and me.” There would almost seem some ground for this suspicion of the uncle, in the comparative obscurity which surrounds the daughter throughout the correspondence. She scarcely comes into faint outline—scarcely moves even in shadow across the scene; and we nowhere learn anything of her. There are no surviving traits in his letters or elsewhere that enable us to start any picture of her. Calvin, indeed, talks of her as “suavissima,” in a letter to Christopher Goodman after her death; and the manner in which he deplores to Knox himself her loss, indicates his very high opinion of her worth and amiability; but still we do not get any living likeness of her anywhere. Their marriage is supposed to have taken place in 1553, just before he was driven abroad by the Marian persecution.

On the accession of Queen Mary, Knot was driven from England. He was reluctant to take flight—for “never could he die,” he said, “in a more honest quarrel;” but some of his friends impelled him, “partly by advice and partly by tears,” to consult his own safety. He took refuge in Dieppe, where we find him at frequent intervals during the next four years of his life. Many of his letters, and his “Admonition to the Professors of God’s Faith in England,” bear the date of Dieppe. It served to him as a convenient post of observation, as well as a secure place of shelter: he could hear of his friends in England and Scotland, and hold intercourse with them from this place more readily than from any other point of the Continent. After his arrival he wrote to his mother-in-law, anxious to hear of her steadfastness in the faith—her “continuance with Christ Jesus, in the day of this His battle,” and to vindicate himself from the charge of cowardice in flying from the scene of danger. “Some will ask,” he says, “then 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.”

After making a brief journey through Switzerland, visiting the different churches, and conferring with “all the pastors and many other excellently learned men,” he returned to his place of refuge, with some intention of hazarding a visit to his friends in Berwick; but he was dissuaded from this, and appears to have settled for some months in Dieppe, from which we find him sending forth in July (1554) his “Admonition.” This famous tract is written with great vehemence, rising here and there into fierce objurgation, called forth by the threatening aspect of affairs in England. Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer had been imprisoned; the Queen was on the eve of her marriage with Philip of Spain. Knox deeply felt for the sufferings of the faithful; he groaned to think of the trials to which their constancy would be exposed; he saw no less all the calamities and dangers of the Spanish alliance; and he gives full vent to his feelings on both subjects. He spares no language that may awaken and impress his friends, or convey his sense of the wickedness of the royal combination against their liberties and religion. A tone of wild sadness mingles with his violence, under the influence of which he judges himself as well as others. There is a grave severity in his personal strictures that may at least convince us of his honesty. If he was harsh to others, he was no less so to himself: “Alas! this day,” he says, “my conscience accuseth me that I spake not so plainly as my duty was to have done. . . . The blind love that I did bear to this my wicked carcass was the chief cause that I was not fervent and faithful enough in that behalf. Remaining in one place, I was not so diligent as my office required; but sometime, by counsel of carnal friends, I spared the body; some time I spent in worldly business; and some time in taking recreation and pastime by exercise of the body. And besides,” he adds, “I was assaulted, yea infected with more gross sins—that is, my wicked nature desired the favours, the estimation, and praise of men; and so privily and craftily did they enter into my breast, that I could not perceive myself to be wounded till vainglory almost got the upper hand.” These are surely clear and honest words, if ever there were such, Speaking of the unselfish simplicity and stern conscientiousness of the man!

Returning to Switzerland in the end of summer, he remained there only a short time when he set out for Frankfort-on-the-Main, on an invitation from a party of English Protestant exiles who had settled in this city, to become one of their ministers. Having formed themselves into a congregation, these exiles had obtained from the magistrates the joint use of the French Protestant church for their worship, on the condition that it should conform as nearly as possible to that of the French Church. This arrangement was displeasing to many of the exiles in other places, and became the source of a very painful and perplexing series of “troubles.” Knox would seem to have had apprehensions of the difficulty of the position, and to have manifested accordingly some reluctance to embrace the invitation addressed to him; but his assent was secured through the intervention of Calvin, and in October 1554 he arrived in Frankfort. The seeds of discord had been already sown before his arrival; but he had, through the timely and sensible representations ‘of Calvin, wellnigh succeeded in arranging the matter satisfactorily, when all his efforts were interrupted and brought to an end. A new party of exiles among the most conspicuous of whom was Dr Cox, who had been preceptor to Edward VI., arrived in Frankfort in March. They were violently determined to uphold the order of service as it had been “set forth by King Edward.” On the very first Sunday after their arrival they made the responses aloud, contrary to what had been agreed upon; and on the following Sunday one of their number intruded into the pulpit and read the Litany, to which Cox and his companions responded audibly. The result, as may be imagined, was a violent contention between the parties. It was nothing less than the Puritan quarrel, already begun in King Edward’s reign, carried abroad; and Knox did not hesitate, in his sermon in the afternoon of the same-day, to characterise it as such, and to condemn the whole spirit and manner of the English Reformation as inadequate. Cox and his friends, finding themselves unable to contend with the reformer, supported as he was by the chief body of the congregation, had recourse to a somewhat disgraceful act to get rid of them. They represented to the magistrates that in his “Admonition,” published the year before, he had used treasonable language regarding the Queen of England and her husband, Philip of Spain. The magistrates, after some perplexity, requested Whittingham to advise Knox to take his departure; and he accordingly returned to Geneva again for a brief interval.

These “Frankfort Troubles,” it must be confessed, form a somewhat melancholy illustration of the pettiness as well as violence of religious feeling which marked some of the English reformers; and whatever may have been the unjustifiable vehemence of Knox’s language in the “Admonition,” and in some of his other writings, his conduct certainly appears with advantage on the present occasion in contrast with that of his opponents. He was far more magnanimous in his defeat than they were in their equivocal victory. The only excuse that can be urged for them is the feeling of just resentment which they may have had towards Knox for his unwarrantable language in the “Admonition,” which, so far from proving of service to the cause of the Reformation in England, there is reason to believe had excited the Government to more violent persecution, and helped to kindle the fires of martyrdom that consumed Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley.

Knox had scarcely once more settled in Geneva when he received information which led him to undertake a visit to his native country. Amid all his journeyings and troubles he had, never forgotten the interests of religion in Scotland. The thought which had sustained him amidst his captivity in the galleys, as he saw in the distance the spires of St Andrews, where God had first opened his mouth in public to His glory—“And I am fully persuaded that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godly name in the same place”—this thought, no doubt, often recurred to him; and circumstances seemed now to point towards its fulfilment. The accession of the Queen-Dowager to the regency in 1554 had proved partially favourable to Protestantism. The persecutions of Mary in England, and her alliance with Spain in opposition to France, and the natural interests of the Queen-Dowager, had contributed in some degree to the same end. A spirit of inquiry, for the time unrestrained, was spreading among many of the nobles and burgesses. These favourable signs drew Knox to the scene of movement. He arrived in Scotland in the end of autumn 1555, and soon after repaired to Edinburgh, where he held many private conferences with Erskine of Dun, young Maitland of Lethington, and others. His reception was very warm, and the desire to hear the truth from his lips very encouraging, according to his own statement in his letters to his mother-in-law. “The fervency here doth far exceed all others that I have seen. If I had not seen it with my eyes in my own country, I could not have believed it.” He held a remarkable debate with Maitland on the subject of the mass, in which he disputed the opinion ingeniously held by the latter that it was warrantable for the Protestants to continue their attendance upon it. He succeeded in convincing his hearers, and even Maitland acknowledged himself refuted; but we may trace already in their respective positions, and the arguments used by each, the strong contrasts of character which separated the subtle and accommodating politician from the outspoken and unbending reformer.

Knox continued throughout the winter in Scotland, and earnestly prosecuted the work on which he had entered. He came into contact with all or most of the men who were afterwards associated with the progress of the Scottish Reformation,—Lord Lorn (Argyll), the Prior of St Andrews (Murray), the Earl of Glencairn, and others. Under the protection of the latter, he preached in Kyle and Cunningham, where the still unspent spirit of Lollardism must have proved a receptive soil for the new doctrines. Erskine carried him to Angus, where the feeling of dislike and opposition to the corrupt prelacy, which was lording it over the country, was of a peculiarly strong and intelligent character. His preaching in Angus especially appears to have aroused the clergy. He was summoned before a convention of them appointed to meet in Edinburgh in May, and so strongly did he feel himself supported for the time, that he made up his mind to obey the summons. This was more than they anticipated, and setting aside the summons, they deserted the diet. His success for a while seemed to carry everything before it, and his heart was lifted up at the prospect with more joy than he could express. “O sweet were the death,” he writes to his mother-in-law, “that should follow such forty days in Edinburgh as here I have had three! Rejoice, mother: the time of our deliverance approacheth.”

Calmer reflection, however, convinced Knox that this “time of deliverance” was not so closely at hand. He had ventured to address a letter to the Queen-Regent, urging the necessity of a reform of religion, and representing the hopelessness of any improvement in the existing prelacy. The Earl Marischal, along with Glencairn, had urged this duty upon him, and the latter delivered it into her hand. Glancing carelessly over it, she handed it to the Archbishop of Glasgow beside her, with the remark, “Please you, my lord, to read a pasquil.” Knox was very indignant when this remark was reported to him, and afterwards, in publishing the letter, he made some additions to it in a less courtly and specious style than had characterised the original. In, the meantime, an invitation from the English exiles at Geneva had reached him, to undertake the pastoral charge among them; and he does not appear to have hesitated in accepting the offer. Doubtless he felt the expediency of it, not merely in reference to his own comfort, but to the progress of the Reformation in Scotland. He felt that the spirit which he had kindled would live on, and less provoke interference in his absence, till the time for a more effective movement came. The imputation of anything like cowardice on Knox’s part is ridiculous. He was the last man to shrink from a struggle where it was necessary and likely to prove useful. Accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law, and “a pupil named Patrick,” he accordingly set out from Scotland, and arrived in Geneva on the 13th September 1556. With a true instinct of cowardly vengeance, the clergy renewed their summons against him when he had left the country, and passed sentence on him, adjudging his body to the flames, and his soul to damnation.

The years that our reformer now spent at Geneva, were probably among the happiest of his life. Calvin had just then attained to the summit of his power after the expulsion of the Libertines. He and Beza exercised virtual rule in all things civil and ecclesiastical; and the city, under their control, had assumed an order and apparent purity of manners that rejoiced the heart of Knox. He wrote to a friend that it was “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion, to be so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place beside.”

In Calvin and Beza, and his colleague Christopher Goodman, Knox found a thoroughly congenial society, and they found in him an earnest and devoted fellow-labourer. It would be interesting to contemplate their relation more narrowly, and to speculate on the influence, they may have exerted on one another. Especially it would be important as well as interesting to trace the connection between the two great reformers—to what extent the Scottish reformer may have been influenced by the Genevan, and a Calvinistic impress stamped upon him in the home of Calvinism. It cannot be said that we have any adequate means of reaching clear and definite conclusions an this subject. We have already seen that Knox’s Presbyterianism was in some degree at least of native growth. He did not need to go to Geneva to learn to doubt the divine authority of Episcopacy. A certain hostility to the episcopal office mingled itself with his very first views of reform, and so far from being moderated, seems rather to have been increased by his English experience. Probably, however, he had formed no definite and well-conceived plan of Church polity, as opposed to Episcopacy, before his residence in Geneva; and there is every reason to believe that the system he beheld in operation there with so much admiration, served to give consistency and plan to his own previously vague conceptions. As to the doctrinal influence of Calvinism upon him, we can appreciate this, perhaps, still less accurately. It met in him a kindred soil—the same bent of religious thought, and especially that deep feeling of sin, out of which its most distinctive doctrines grew; and here too, therefore, we may suppose a certain clearness and coherence to have been given to his views. Yet Knox’s mind was not characteristically doctrinal. Theological controversy could never absorb him as it did Calvin. Subtle as he may have once been as a scholastic teacher, dialectics was a play in which he had little delight, and his writings discover few traces of it. A healthy reality and honest sense, and living practical interest, are everywhere conspicuous, and banish out of view the mere controversialist and logician.

It is to be remembered, too, in estimating the relation between Knox and Calvin, that Knox was really the older man of the two (a fact somehow apt to be forgotten), and that he had at this time reached an age—upwards of fifty—when men are not easily moulded by influences that may be even akin to them. We must certainly hold, therefore, that there is no sense in which Geneva can be said to have made Knox, although it found him of kindred material, and fashioned him more completely into its own likeness. Especially, we are inclined to think, it strengthened in him a certain sternness of moral spirit, and its own strong theocratic confidence, so that he went forth from it more fully equipped for the great work before him in Scotland. Calvin and Knox suggest not so much the relation of disciple and master as of brother disciples in the same school, with the same severe type of character, and many of the same religious tendencies; but the one more intellectual, the other more passionate—the one more consistent and powerful in argument, the other more intrepid and masterly in action—the one the greater mind, the other the larger heart.

Knox returned to Scotland in the beginning of May 1559. During his absence the Reformation had been making silent but sure progress. The war with England required the Queen-Regent to temporise with its leaders, and to allow a certain liberty of opinion and worship. A letter which Knox had addressed to the Protestant Lords in 1557, from Dieppe (whither he had proceeded so far with the intention of returning to his native country), had exercised a happy influence in uniting them more firmly, and inspiring them with a more courageous resolution in defence of the truth. At a meeting which they held in Edinburgh, in December 1557, they mutually bound themselves to uphold the common cause, and at the same time renewed the invitation which they had formerly given to the reformer to return to his native country. It was in compliance with this invitation, which did not reach Geneva till the following year, that Knox now reappeared finally in Scotland. Nothing could be more opportune than his arrival. The course of events seemed prepared as if to give to it the greatest importance. A crisis was at hand; a leader was needed. It was the very turning-point in the balance of parties which had been swaying to and fro during the last four years, and Knox’s strong hand was the only one which could have carried aloft the cause of reform, and give to it the triumph which, through all temporary reverses, it has ever since maintained.

The Queen-Regent, relieved from the political pressure which had induced her to temporise, had at length thrown off all disguise. United cordially with the Hamiltons, she appeared in her true colours as a determined opponent of the Reformation, and at this very moment had, with the well-dissembled craft of her race, laid her plans for its forcible overthrow. Certain preachers who, during the previous year, had become objects of marked hostility to the clergy, were summoned to take their trial at Stirling for usurping the ministerial office, and seducing the people by erroneous doctrines. A convention of the nobility and clergy was held in Edinburgh, where the very moderate demands of the Protestants were not only refused, but all the main abuses of the Popish system were confirmed, and an inquisition appointed to be made of all who absented themselves from mass, or were in any way privy to the new worship. It was obvious that a struggle could no longer be delayed. Parties were taking their sides, and resolutely awaiting its outbreak. Knox congratulated himself that he had come at the ‘very hour of need. “I see the battle shall be great,” he wrote to his wife, who remained behind at Geneva, “but I am come, I thank my God, even in the brunt of the battle.”

He resolved to appear at Stirling on the 10th of May, along with the reforming preachers. He hastened to Dundee, where the chiefs of the party were assembled in great numbers, Erskine of Dun at their head—a wise and moderate as well as intrepid counsellor in this great exigency. From Dundee the reformers proceeded to Perth, and instead of advancing directly to Stirling, paused here, apparently at the suggestion of Erskine, who went forward by himself to intimate to the Queen-Regent the peaceable intentions of the party, formidable as they might seem in numbers and combination. Alarmed at the prospect of such an invasion, she had recourse to her usual tactics of dissimulation, persuaded Erskine to write to his friends in Perth to check their advance, and promised to put a stop to the trial. On the day of trial, however, the accused ministers were summoned, and outlawed for not appearing, and all who should harbour them denounced as rebels. The national excitement, which had continued to gather force, was greatly strengthened by this flagrant act of perfidy; and an event which now occurred in Perth served to kindle it into a flame.