John Tulloch · 25 of 27

IV. John Knox. · Part 3

On the very day on which the news of the Regent’s conduct came, Knox preached a sermon on the idolatry of the mass and of image-worship. At the close of the sermon, and while the people still lingered under the warm emotion of the preacher’s words, an encounter took place between a boy and a priest, who, with a singular deadness to the signs around him, had uncovered a rich altar-piece, and was making preparations to celebrate mass. The boy threw a stone, which overturned and destroyed one of the images. The act operated like a spark laid to a train. The suppressed indignation of the multitude burst forth beyond all control: the consecrated imagery was broken in pieces; the holy recesses invaded; the pictures and ornaments torn from the walls and trampled in the dust; and, rising with the agitation, the spirit of disorder spread and the “rascal multitude,” as Knox afterwards called them, having completed their work of destruction in the church, proceeded to the houses of the Grey and Black Friars, and the Charterhouse or Carthusian Monastery, and violently ransacked them and laid them in ruins.

This iconoclasm is a notable feature in the Scottish Reformation. Something of the same sort is to be found in Germany, and even in England; but in Scotland this destructive aspect of the Reformation was more general, prominent, and lawless than elsewhere,. and nothing connected with it has given rise to more invidious and severe animadversion. To our educated feelings and artistic sympathies, it can only appear as a very ugly and sad blot in a great cause. We mourn, and cannot but mourn, a mere violence of demolition, in which God was not served, while the fair work of man was dishonoured and destroyed. There is no friend of the Reformation called upon to defend such excesses, even on Knox’s plea, that the “best way to keep the rooks from returning, was to pull down their nests;” for, on the one hand, we know that the rooks. will return even if you pull down their nests; and, on the other hand, it is a poor revenge against a living evil to attack its dead symbol. The spirit of the highest reform is everywhere the reverse of this. It attacks the corrupt life, or seeks to breathe health into it. It busies itself with essentials, and lets alone accidents. The forms will by-and-by adapt themselves to the altered and higher spirit. It was not merely a misfortune, therefore—it was a mistake, this iconoclasm of the Reformation. There is nothing to say for it on any general grounds of reason.

But the explanation of it, and so far the defence of it, as a historical adjunct of the Reformation, is its very irrationality. Who were to blame for such a state of irrational and violent feeling among the people? Surely not Knox. Even if it be allowed that he did not discountenance, but rather approved of, the iconoclastic excitement, this merely shows that he did not so far rise above the rude social spirit of his country. He can in no way be held responsible for the existence and outbreak of the spirit. In point of fact, the blame of this, if it lie anywhere save with the general barbarism of the people, must lie with the very system against which it was directed: It was this system which, after centuries of unlimited rule, had left the people so untrained in orderly instinct—so coarse and undisciplined in moral feeling. This was all that its elaborate training and service, its conventual education and beneficence, had come to. It had inspired the people so little with any spirit of order, or respect even to the usages of worship, that when for the first time they heard of a living God and Saviour, and a divine righteousness and truth in the world, they could do nothing but rise up against the churches and demolish them. If this be not one of the worst condemnations of the old Catholicism of Scotland, condemnation certainly ceases to have any meaning. It is hard, certainly, to blame the Reformation for an odious inheritance of social disorder transmitted to it by the corrupt system which it displaced. A system which not only left a people unblessed with truth, but failed even to animate them with any instincts of self-control, is twice condemned, and was well hurled from its’ place of pride and power with an indignation not more than it merited, and a lawlessness which had grown up under its own shadow.

The same scenes which had occurred at Perth followed at Stirling, Lindores, Cupar, St Andrews, and elsewhere. Knox almost immediately repaired to St Andrews, rejoicing to verify his own prediction, that he would yet again glorify the name of God in that place. Here, in the very centre of the old ecclesiastical influence, and under the very eyes of Hamilton, the Reformation proceeded with an equal vehemence and completeness. The magistracy took the lead in it. The cathedral was devastated; the monasteries pulled down; and the reformed discipline began to be established.

In the meantime, and as the consequence of these movements, a civil war raged throughout the kingdom—the Regent on the one hand, assisted by French troops; and the Lords of the Congregation, as the heads of the Protestant party were called, on the other hand, backed by Elizabeth. The details of this conflict are beyond our scope. Knox not only joined in it, but was the great animating spirit of the reformed army—counselling its leaders, writing letters to Cecil, maintaining his dignity in the midst of entreaty, and, upon the whole, his fairness and uprightness in the midst of intrigue. Some unfortunate expressions indeed escaped him, in a letter to Sir James Croft, about the mode of sending English troops into Scotland, without incurring a breach of treaty with France; but the necessities of his position must excuse, if not altogether justify, any “political casuistry” to which he was driven. At length, after not a few reverses sustained by the Protestant party, the vigorous assistance rendered by Elizabeth, and the death of the Queen-Regent at the very time that the English troops had invested Edinburgh, led to a truce, and the summons of a Free Parliament to settle differences. All the triumph remained in the hands of the reformers. So soon as the withdrawal of the French troops, according to the conditions of the treaty, took place, the ecclesiastical interests which they had upheld fell prostrate. A tyranny, unnational in spirit and disreputable in character, collapsed before the free breath of the country, like an old and mouldy garment upon which the air has been let in. Scarcely anywhere else is there an instance of a national revolution at once so summary and complete; and instead of wondering that blood was shed while a corrupt system sought to maintain itself by foreign interference, the wonder really is, that so soon as this interference was withdrawn, so great a change should have taken place, upon the whole, so peacefully and well.

The Reformation, which had now triumphed in Scotland, immediately sought to establish itself by a series of important acts. At the command of Parliament, which met in August (1560), “certain barons and ministers” drew up, in the course of four days, a Confession of Faith, which, having been submitted to Parliament, and “read every article by itself over again,” was, with the exception of one or two dissentient voices, universally accepted as a dogmatic basis of the Reformed Church. Three measures of a negative character were also forthwith passed,—one for the abolition of the power and jurisdiction of the Pope; a second, for the repeal of all former statutes in favour of the Roman Catholic Church; and a third, for the infliction of severe penalties, even to the extent of death, upon all who should either say mass or be present at its celebration. The intolerance of this last enactment may fill us with pain, but can scarcely surprise us. In the Scottish Reformation, still more than in the Lutheran or Genevan, the struggle was not between mere freedom on the one hand and ecclesiastical oppression on the other; but between two positive systems of religious opinion, equally dogmatic in their presumed possession of the truth. We have seen how, from the beginning, Knox had identified the mass with idolatry; and in now interdicting its celebration under such stringent penalties, he and others conceived themselves to be merely carrying out the denunciations of the Divine Word against idolatry. Any suspicions that these denunciations could be no fair weapons in their fallible hands, and in wholly dissimilar circumstances, never crossed them. The Bible was to Knox, as it was to Calvin, and perhaps even more strongly, a modern statute-book, of which he and his brethren were the authorised interpreters. They had no perception of the hopeless confusion and difficulty involved in such a notion. They had no idea of any religious dissent from their opinions. They knew (and this is their only justification) that the re-establishment of the mass would prove ruinous both to the political and religious welfare of their country; and so they denounced against it confiscation, banishment, and finally death.

These measures, conclusive as they were so far, by no means satisfied the ministers and more zealous reformers. It was not enough to destroy the old ecclesiastical fabric, and lay the dogmatic foundation of a new one; they desired, moreover, to define’ and confirm the plan of the new Reformed Kirk. They urged upon Parliament, accordingly, the necessity of establishing a new rule of worship and discipline, and with this view prepared the well-known “Book of Policy,” or “First Book of Discipline.” The greedy barons of Scotland, however, were by no means disposed to relax their hold of the Church revenues to the extent which would have been necessary in carrying out some of the wise and enlightened provisions of this scheme of Church polity; and notwithstanding, the urgency of the clergy, it never received the sanction of Parliament. The great designs of the reformer in the arrangement of Church offices, in the maintenance of discipline, and, above all, in the reform and re-endowment of the universities and the institution of parish schools, were termed in the “mockage” of such members of Parliament as young Maitland of Lethington, “Devout imaginations.” And so Knox was made to feel thus early the difficulties which from such men were soon to spring up around the progress of Protestantism in Scotland, and plunge him anew into contention. Disappointed in his hopes so far, however, he had the satisfaction of seeing the Book of Discipline approved of by the General Assembly, and ratified by a considerable proportion of the members of the Privy Council.

We cannot pause to criticise at length the special features of the Scottish Reformation as exhibited in the Confession of Faith and Book of Discipline, whose origin has been now described. Doctrinally and ecclesiastically, it bears an analogy to the Genevan Reformation, although by no means a close and servile analogy. It presents, upon the whole, a milder type of doctrine, of which every student may satisfy himself by the study of the different articles of the “Confession,” as contained in Knox’s History. The eighth article on Election is itself decisive upon this point. Not only is the rigour of the Calvinistic tenet modified, but it can scarcely be said to come into prominence. The language has a Biblical softness and simplicity, by no means recalling the stern, logical phraseology of Geneva. The sacramental doctrine, and the views as to the duties of the “civil magistrate,” are more closely allied to those of Calvin;—there is the same strong assertion of the reality of a spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the same confusion as to the relation of the political power to the purgation and chastisement of religious error.

In the system of Church government presented in the Book of Discipline, there is at least equal evidence of a free and independent spirit. Instead of the mere pastors, doctors, and elders of the Genevan polity, there are superintendents and pastors and readers, and then elders and deacons. The superintendents were certainly not bishops in the old and Catholic sense of the word. Knox, we have already seen, was hostile to the pretensions of the episcopal order from the beginning, and neither now nor at any time did he regard with the slightest feelings of complacency its institution in the Protestant Church of Scotland. Still, apart from such priestly usurpations as had become strongly identified with the episcopal office in his mind, he evidently recognised, in the appointment of superintendents, the right of a semi-episcopal function of supervision and arrangement throughout the Church. If no believer in the divine right of Episcopacy, he was no more a believer in the divine right of Presbyterian parity; but he, and those who acted with him, “thought it a thing most expedient at this time, that from the whole number of godly and learned men, now presently in this realme, should be selected ten or twelve (for in so many provinces we have divided the whole), to whom charge and commandment should be given to plant and erect kirks, to set order, and appoint ministers as the former order prescribes, to the countries that shall be appointed to their care where none are now.” Against the recognition of this semi-episcopal function in the early Reformed Kirk of Scotland, it is not of the least importance to urge, as Dr M‘Crie has done, that it was a mere temporary expedient—for, in point of fact, the ground of Christian expediency is distinctly laid down in the twentieth article of the Confession of Faith, as the main guide of Church order and policy altogether. “In the Church, as in the house of God,” it bears, “it becometh all things to be done decently and in order—not that we think that one policy and one order in ceremonies can be appointed for all ages, times, and places; for as ceremonies such as men have devised are but temporal, so may and ought they to be changed when they rather foster superstition than edify the Church using the same.”

In the more special arrangements of public worship there is the same flexible and adaptive freedom within certain limits. Certain things are stated to be utterly necessary, “as that the Word be truly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, common prayers publickly made, that children and rude persons be instructed in the chief points of religion, and that offences be corrected and punished.” Without these things, “there is no face of a visible kirk.” But as to further details of service, the singing of psalms, the reading of certain places of Scripture when there was no sermon “this day or that, or how many days in the week the kirk should assemble,” there is no certain order laid down, except that “in every notable town it is required that one day beside Sunday be appointed to the sermon, which, during the time of sermon and prayer, must be kept free from all exercise of labour.” Baptism was allowed to be ministered “wheresoever the Word was preached.” The administration of the Lord’s Supper was to take place four times in the year; the Scriptures were to be read in order; and both in public and private worship the “common prayers” were to be used.

It becomes a question what was meant by the expression “common prayers,” so frequently used in the Book of Discipline. Does it refer to the service-book of Edward VI., the Book of Common Prayer? This view has been vigorously defended, and is supported by the language used in the resolution of the heads of the Congregation in 1557, that “the common prayer be read weekly on Sunday, and on other festival days, in the churches, with the lessons of the Old and New Testament, conform to the order of the Book of Common Prayer.” According to this view, the English service-book is supposed to have been used by the Scottish Protestants during a period of seven years—viz., from 1557 to 1564, when it was superseded by the “Order of Geneva,” or what is called John Knox’s Liturgy, which he had prepared for the use of the Church at Frankfort, and subsequently employed in his congregation in Geneva. In any case there can be doubt that the early Presbyterian service of Scotland, as in the case of every other Reformed Church, was in the main liturgical,—that certain “common prayers,” carefully prepared and stamped with the sanction of the reformers, were generally used throughout the Church. The idea of extemporaneous prayer as an appropriate vehicle of public devotion was one quite unknown to the Reformation. In the reformed Discipline which sprang from Geneva, a certain latitude was permitted to the minister; but in no Church of the Reformation was public religious service entirely liberated from authorised forms of devotional expression. Freedom carried to this extent was a growth of later Puritanism, already beginning to corrupt in its arbitrary excesses; and in Scotland the general tendency was hardened into a fierce and defiant negativism by the insane prelatical despotism of Laud and his associates.

(But we must how hasten onwards in our sketch. On the 19th of August 1561, Queen Mary arrived in Scotland. French in education and Popish in religion—accustomed to the refinements of a luxurious court, the polish of artificial manners, and the admiration and flatteries which her youthful beauty had everywhere excited—Mary certainly entered on a task of unusual difficulty when she assumed the reins of government in her native country. The sorrow that darkened her heart as she watched, from the vessel that conveyed her, the receding shores of her beloved France, was only too sure a presage of the perils and calamities of her new career. Scarcely had she settled in her palace at Holyrood when difficulties arose. Was she to be permitted to celebrate mass, against which the punishment of death had been denounced? “Shall that idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?" The difficulty was not a new one. It had presented itself to Knox from the first; and when the invitation was sent her to return to Scotland, he had strongly urged upon her brother, the prior of St Andrews, that she should be required to discontinue the offensive rite. Neither the prior nor the rest of the council, however, entered into Knox’s views, anti he predicted that “her liberty would prove their thraldom.” On the Sunday after her arrival she gave orders for a solemn mass to be performed in the chapel of Holyrood. Some of the more violent of the Protestants threatened to interfere by force to prevent it; but the discretion of her brother in stationing himself at the entrance to the chapel door was successful in preserving peace. Knox discountenanced all violence; but in his sermon on the following Sunday he entered upon the subject, and vehemently inveighed against the evils of idolatry.

Mary was no doubt well informed of the influence of the bold reformer, and she sent for him to the palace, and held a long interview with him in the presence of her brother, “the Lord James.” His famous book, ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,’ which had no less provoked Elizabeth, was the first subject of her animadversion. It was a delicate topic, beyond doubt, for the reformer; but he defended himself with great skill and sense. “Please your Majesty,” said he, “learned men in all ages have had their judgments free, and most commonly disagreeing from the common judgments of the world. Such also have they published, both with pen and tongue; and yet, notwithstanding, they themselves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne patiently with the errors and imperfections which they could not amend. . . . Even so, madam, am I content to do in uprightness of heart and with a testimony of a good conscience.” He enforced this by a not very happy allusion to Paul’s living under Nero, and then explained that his book was written especially “against that wicked Jezebel of England.” “But ye speak of women in general,” retorted the Queen. “Most true it is, madam,” was his reply; “and yet it appeareth to me that wisdom should persuade your Grace never to raise trouble for that which to this day has not troubled your Majesty neither in person nor in authority.” The topic was then changed to the more pressing one of the rights of subjects towards their princes in the matter of religion. Knox firmly expressed his well-known sentiments, and referred to the case of the Hebrews in Babylon and the early Christians under the Roman Emperors. The Queen could not deny the force of the representation; but she urged, “Yea, but none of these men raised the sword against their princes.” “Yet, madam,” said he, “ye cannot deny but that they resisted, for those that obey not the commandments given them do in some sort resist.” “But yet,” she replied, “they resisted not by the sword.” “God had not given them the power,” said the reformer. “Think you,” asked Mary, “that subjects having the power may resist their princes?" “If princes exceed their bounds, madam,” unhesitatingly answered the reformer, “no doubt they may be resisted even by power.”

The whole of this interview, as well as the others that took place between Knox and Mary, are very interesting, and serve to bring into strong relief the characters of the two speakers. They clearly enough show Knox’s suspicions of the Queen from the first, but they do not at all warrant the picture that has been sometimes drawn from them to the prejudice and disadvantage of the reformer. A beautiful and accomplished woman, and that woman a queen, confronted in her hereditary palace by a gloomy and frowning preacher, is an interesting and exciting picture of the imagination; but it is in reality nothing more. The mind that cannot see deeper below the surface than the mere grace and beauty and queenly majesty of Mary on the one side, and the rigour and uncourtly rudeness of Knox on the other, proves itself so little capable of historical penetration, that it must be allowed simply to please itself with its own delusions. The slightest glimpse below the’ surface reveals to us in Mary and in Knox respectively the impersonation of two great principles then fighting for mastery not only in Scotland, but throughout Europe. Mary was not merely herself a Romanist by education, by sympathy, by that intense and unreasoning instinct with which a certain kind of nature always clings to traditionary beliefs and associations—she might have been all this, and been, if not a happy and beneficent, yet a tolerated governor of Scotland; and in such a view Knox’s molestation of her for her own opinions, and the private observances of. her own religion, would have excited our indignation and pity. But Mary was far more than this, and no man knew it better than John Knox. She was the niece of the Guises, and the daughter-in-law of Catherine de Medicis; and she was. not only sympathetic with their aims, but. It is impossible to doubt she was privy to their most deeply laid schemes. She knew the great and crafty game they were then playing, and she was prepared, with profound skill and persevering energy, to aid it.

It requires us, in order rightly to appreciate the position of either, thus to look below their immediate circumstances, and bring into view the principles they represented, and. especially the character of that great Catholic reaction which had now set in so strongly against the Reformation. There is nothing more certain, and few things more terrible in history, than this movement, in the deliberate villany with which it was planned, and the secret, powerful, and elaborate perfidy and cold-blooded massacre with which it was so far prosecuted. Its centre was in Paris, although its inspiration was from Rome; and Italian craft and subtlety in the Guises were its leaders. Scotland possessed a peculiar and unexampled interest to it, not only or chiefly from its old relations to France, but especially as a basis and means of operation against England. The stock of Henry VIII. seemed likely to die out; Elizabeth alone, in her solitary majesty, stood between Mary. and the throne of England; and with Mary as sovereign head of England and Scotland, the triumph of Rome was again secure over all the West. Mary’s position, then, was in reality the key to the whole movement,—the full combination, treachery, and strength of which Knox saw and Calvin saw, as but few men of their time did. It is no great wonder, then, that the reformer was suspicious from the first, and that he tried to animate the milder Murray with a persuasion of the danger which he himself understood and felt. He knew that the only security of Scotland was in its complete exemption from papal influence, and that the mass, once re-established by the Court, would certainly prove an opening for the reascendancy of this influence. This was the secret of his strong protestations to Murray, and of his saying, in the clear knowledge of all that it meant, and towards which it pointed, that “one mass was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies.”

It must be observed that it is not here a question of toleration between man and man, or party and party, but a question of urgent national expediency. Scotland could then be only peaceably governed. as a Protestant country, and Mary of Guise had virtually admitted this as with her last breath. She deplored the fatal advice of her brothers which she had followed, and counselled the removal of the French troops from the kingdom. A free and lawful Parliament had since then established the new religion, and interdicted the old; and whatever may be the intolerance of this interdiction in our modern point of view—and neither this nor any intolerance is to be defended, however it may be explained—yet practically, so far as the head of the Government was concerned, it was impossible to set it aside, or even infringe or show disrespect to it, without utter confusion and disorder, as the events proved, and everything showed at the time to those who had any eyes to see. Apart from all ideas of modern constitutionalism, it was yet only possible to be a sovereign even in Mary’s time, at the expense of some personal liberty, and as representing a predominant national feeling. War was the only alternative of the disturbance of the practical representative relations of sovereign and people. But Mary had no perception of this, and notwithstanding her pretences, showed no honest desire to govern the country in the spirit of its own will declared through Parliament, and set before her in the counsels of her brother. How could she, when her movements were secretly dictated from Paris, and her whole aim was to advance Catholicism through the subversion of the existing ecclesiastical order of the country? Had she been less crafty and more wise—had she recognised her position and accepted it with its restraints, and sought to rule according to them—Knox’s interferences might have continued to annoy, but could not have imperilled her. No Stewart, however, was capable of this; and that Mary acted as she did, and embroiled the country in worse confusion than before her mother’s death, simply proved that there was no possible, not to say no rightful, place for her at that time in Scotland. A “divine power to govern ill” had become even then intolerable to the Scottish people; and surely we are not to blame but to commend Knox and others, that they saw thus early through so false and miserable a fiction as the divine right of kings. In Mary’s question and Knox’s reply as to the mutual relations of power between subjects and princes, we see the essential contrast presented by the two, and the principles which they professed. “Power is mine,” Mary meant: “God has given it to me, and I can use it as I will. It is divine simply according to my best judgment and opinion of its mode of exercise.” “Not in the least,” urged Knox; “first right and then might, national interest and then royal pleasure; and there is no other way of governing the world.”

In all we have six interviews recorded by Knox himself as occurring between the Queen and him. And in all his own accounts of these interviews, or of Randolph the English ambassador’s allusions, there is no evidence of incivility or rudeness on the part of the reformer. There is harshness in his tone afterwards, and in the way in which he speaks of her “owling,” but—in so far as his own speech and action in her presence are concerned—there appears a dignified courtesy in the manners of the reformer, and a sincere and respectful regard to her lawful authority. The violence of debate and passion of speech are more on her side than on his, as she tried in vain to move his calm resoluteness. “But what have you to do with my marriage?” she angrily urged in their fifth interview, after he had preached a sermon reflecting on her proposed marriage, “or what are you in this commonwealth?” “A subject born within the same, madam,” calmly replied the reformer; “and albeit I be neither, earl, lord, nor baron in it, yet has God made me (how abject that ever I be in your eyes) a profitable member within the same.” If this be not courtesy combined with dignity under all the circumstances, we are at a loss to understand what the qualities mean.