John Tulloch · 26 of 27

IV. John Knox. · Part 4

It is not to be denied that Knox was stern and uncomplying, and to some extent unfeeling, in his dealings with the Queen. There was much that was really beautiful and interesting in Mary and her position that the reformer did not and could not comprehend. The gay festivities of her life, the grace of her exquisite manners, the charms of her queenly womanhood, and the social elegancies of her Court, were unintelligible to him. He could see nothing in the gay gear, the garnishing, targetting, and pearls of the Court ladies, as he stood in Mary’s ante-chamber, but the fleshly vanity destined to be consumed by “that knave death, that will come whether we will or not.” It was the same narrow spirit that kept him from pitying her fallen beauty and forlorn helplessness when her day of adversity came—when her fair name lay sullied in the dust, and her beauty was no more a power to steal men’s hearts away. Then, beyond doubt, his judgments were unpityingly severe. But to condemn him for this harsh sternness, and to forget all the genuine feeling and heartiness and patriotism of the man, is to be guilty at once of a crying injustice, and a weak, unhistorical judgment. Knox was not, indeed, a man in gay clothing, to be found in kings’ palaces, nor fitted for them; but he was a true man,—he saw the reality of life, although not all that reality. Mary saw something in it that he did not see; but she missed the living fact, which was clear and open to his honest vision. With her higher tastes, she was false,—false to herself and her position; with his narrower sympathies, he was faithful to his country, to his God, to his own dignity and self-respect.

So long as Mary committed herself to the advice of her brother, her affairs prospered upon the whole; and there is every reason to conjecture that if she had persevered in this course of conduct, she might have averted the disasters of her reign. But then such a course would have implied totally different views and intentions from those we have ascribed to her. It would have required her to break with her uncles and their schemes, and to lay aside, if not her religion, yet her blind devotion to its ascendancy. It would have required, in fact, a quite different spirit and character from what she really possessed. So long as it seemed to serve her purposes, she maintained her cordiality with her brother and the Protestant nobles; she could even condescend, as in her fourth interview with him at Kinross, to flatter Knox, and try to put to sleep his vigilance—an effort in which she was partially successful. To take the most favourable view of her motives and conduct during the first eighteen months of her reign, she may as yet have been somewhat unfixed as to her plans. Her claims to the crown of England, and the necessities of her position in Scotland, made it necessary for her to temporise; but there is no evidence that she had ever really made up her mind to accept her position in good faith—to sanction the establishment of the Protestant religion, and to govern in the spirit suggested by this legislation. On the contrary, the Parliament of 1563 conclusively showed that she desired to evade the ratification of all that had passed in 1560, and to leave things in the state of suspense that might ultimately form a pretext for the reversal of the whole religious policy of the country.

What took place at this Parliament fully opened the eyes of Knox, if they had ever been shut, to the real meaning of the course of events. He saw at once “that nothing was meant but deceit”; and so strongly did he resent the temporising conduct of Murray and the Protestant nobles, that he had a hot altercation with him and “others of the Court,” which estranged him from them for more than a year and a half. Not only in private but in public he denounced what he considered their vacillation and weakness; and in the fervent excess of his mournful feeling, never was he more wildly eloquent than in the sermon which he preached before the dissolution of the Parliament, in presence of “the most part of the nobility.”

A circumstance which occurred in the summer of the same year brought the Queen and the reformer into open collision. She had gone to Stirling, and in her absence the Popish service had been performed at the palace with more openness and extravagance than before. A riot had ensued; and the Queen, expressing great indignation when she. heard what had occurred, refused to return to Edinburgh unless the chief rioters were punished. Two burgesses of Edinburgh were accordingly summoned to take their trial for “felony, hamesucken, and violent invasion of the Queen’s palace.” The “Brethren” consulted with Knox on the subject, and at their advice he addressed a circular letter to the chief Protestant noblemen and gentlemen throughout the country, giving information how the matter stood, and requiring their assistance. This was, beyond doubt, a bold step on the part of the reformer. Mary resented it as a treasonable interference with her prerogative, and prepared to make the most of it to his prejudice. He was indicted for the offence, and a meeting of council convened in Edinburgh for his trial. Every formality was given to the meeting. The Queen took her seat at the head of the council-table with no “little worldly pomp”; the reformer stood at the other end of the table, with his head uncovered; while Maitland conducted the prosecution. The Queen plainly thought that she had secured her tormentor, and could not conceal her satisfaction. But whether it was that her undue eagerness to have him condemned excited the suspicions of the Lords; or that the distinctions urged by the reformer in his defence between “lawful” and “unlawful” convocations really impressed them; or that the excitement of the “Brethren of the Kirk,” who had followed Knox to the palace, and crowded the inner close and “all the stairs,” was somewhat alarming; or probably all the three causes combined,—the council refused unanimously to condemn him. Lethington was enraged, and tried to overawe them by the presence of the Queen; but this only strengthened them in their resolution. “That night,” concludes Knox, “was neither dancing nor fiddling in the Court; for Madam was disappointed of her purpose.”

Notwithstanding this deliverance, Knox’s alienation from Murray and many of his old friends continued. He had taken up an attitude of unyielding opposition the Queen, and in his sermons and prayers indulged freely in the expression of his feelings. They could not approve his conduct, and he would not abandon the freedom of preaching as he considered it. The consequence was that, during the next few years, he retired comparatively from the scene of affairs. Maitland, along with others, evidently aimed for some time to construct a Protestant party in connection with the Court—a party opposed to the extreme views of the ministers; and in the Assembly of 1564 he attended, and vigorously and ingeniously defended his course of policy. If we look at the matter with a merely speculative eye, it was no doubt an instinct of larger freedom that animated Maitland than that which governed Knox and the ministers; but scarcely any doubt can exist that the latter far more clearly appreciated the character of Mary, and discerned the real necessities of the times.

During the crowning series of events which followed Mary’s marriage with Darnley (July 1565)—the revolt of the dissatisfied nobles, with Murray at their head—Mary’s brief dream of happy wedlock; and then the rapid turns of the gloomy tragedy—the murder of Rizzio the murder of Darnley (Feb. 1567)—the marriage of the Queen with Bothwell—her defeat at Carberry Hill and imprisonment at Lochleven Castle—our reformer nowhere appeared prominent. He had become reconciled to Murray on the eve of his revolt, the necessity for which he would feel to be a vindication of his conduct during the preceding years. He was no doubt privy to the schemes of the revolted nobles, and their negotiations with the English Court. Suspicions even attach to his name and Craig’s in regard to the murder of Rizzio, which, it must be confessed, are not without foundation, countenanced as they are by his subsequent’ absence from Edinburgh. Throughout this dreadful period, however, he was by no means an active or notable figure. Characters far more fierce and turbulent than him occupy the scene, and bring to a close the dark procession of events which terminated in Mary’s flight to England and the establishment of a regency under Murray.

The two years that followed (Aug. 1567–Jan. 1570) were the happiest that the reformer knew in Scotland. Murray and he were perfectly reconciled, and their policy at one. The kingdom enjoyed comparative quietness, and the work of reform proceeded with regularity. At a Parliament held on the 18th of December 1567, the power and jurisdiction of the Pope were finally abolished; all the enactments of the reformed Parliament of 1560 were for the first time ratified, and an important Act added, to the effect that every future sovereign of the realm should swear to maintain the Protestant religion in its purity. Favourable, although still imperfect, arrangements were made as to the endowment of the clergy, and regulations passed as to their induction. The General Assembly followed up the work of the Parliament, and rectified divers social and ecclesiastical abuses which had been long subjects of complaint with the reformers. Knox felt for a time as if his work was accomplished, and the idea crossed him of returning to Geneva and ending his days in peace.

But dark and stormy days yet awaited the reformer. After somewhat more than two years’ firm and peaceable possession of the government, Murray was assassinated. No event perhaps in all the reformer’s life filled him with deeper and more painful sorrow. His heart was crushed by the suddenness of the blow, and he poured forth the anguish that he felt in a wild and pathetic prayer that has been preserved.

Things returned to their old confusion under the regency of Lennox (who, too, was soon murdered), and then of Mar. Friends who had been dear to him—Kirkcaldy of Grange, and others—forsook the cause of the Reformation altogether, and sought to re-establish a Marian party in Edinburgh. He had the misfortune, also, to differ from his brethren in the Assembly about praying for the Queen. Maitland tried to improve this difference to his own advantage: dark charges were uttered against the reformer, as to his having wished to betray his country to the English; an attempt was even made to assassinate him, by firing a ball in at the window of the room where he usually sat. The heart of the old man, weakened as he was by paralysis, was deeply wounded. He felt bitterly the cowardice of the accusations made against him, and answered in the proud and noble words"—What I have been to my country albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the age to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth; and thus I cease, requiring all men that have anything to oppose against me, that they will do it so plainly as I make myself and all my doings so manifest to the world; for to me it seems a thing most unreasonable that in this, my decrepid age, I shall be compelled to fight against shadows and howlettes that dare not abide the light.”

In May (5th) 1571 he left Edinburgh for St Andrews reluctantly, urged by his-friends to take some-means for his safety. James Melville was then a student in. St Leonard’s College, and we are indebted to his gossipy pen for a very graphic and interesting account of Knox’s appearance and preaching. The picture—of the old man in the College Yards of St Leonard’s calling the students about him, and blessing them; his weakness, needing the support of his servant on his way to preach; his vigour and warmth when once in the pulpit and kindled with his theme—is very striking and memorable. “He lodged down in the Abbey beside our college,” says Melville, “and would some time come in and repose him in our college yard, and call us scholars unto him, and bless us, and exhort us to know God and His work in our country, and stand by the good cause. Our whole college was sound and zealous for the good cause; the other two colleges not so. . . . I heard him preach the prophecies of Daniel that summer and the winter following. I had my pen and my little book, and took away such things as I could comprehend. In the opening of the text he was moderate the space of half-an-hour; but when he entered to application, he made me so to grew and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write. . . . He was very weak. I saw him every day of his doctrine go hulie and fear [slowly and warily], with a furring of martriks about his neck, a staff in the one hand, and good godly Richard Ballanden, his servant, holding up the other oxter, from the Abbey to the parish kirk, and by the said Richard and another servant lifted up to the pulpit, where he behoved to lean at his first entry; but ere he has done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he was lyke to ding the pulpit in blads and.flie out of it.”

Such is the living glimpse we get of the reformer in these last days. Weak and ill, his last energies were expended in the cause so dear to him. He flinched not then from the battle that he had waged so long; and yet at heart he was sick, and “wearie of the world.” He subscribed himself to a book which he now published against a Scottish Jesuit of the name of Tyrie, “John Knox, the servant of Jesus Christ, now wearie of the world, and daily looking for the resolution of this my earthly tabernacle,” and asked his brethren to pray for him, “that God would put an end to his long and painful battle; for now being unable to fight as God some time gave strength, I thirst an end.”

In August 1572, he was enabled, by a truce between the contending parties, to return to Edinburgh. He was no longer able to preach in his old church, and the Tolbooth was fitted up for him. Here, in the course of September, he thundered his dying denunciations against the perpetrators of the massacre of St Bartholomew. This crowning stroke of the great reactionary party in France touched him to the quick, verifying all his predictions, and plunging him in the deepest sadness for his many martyred friends. He imprecated, with his last breath, the vengeance of Heaven upon the accursed murderers; and his cry, with that of others, went up before the throne with an “Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints.”

In the second week of November he was seized with a severe cough, and his end visibly drew near. He arranged his affairs, paid his servants’ wages, with twenty shillings over, as the last they would ever receive from him; and so set his house in order. There was no darkness in these last moments: although the sadness of the time touched him, his own spirit was cheerful, as the eternal day began to break, and the shadows to flee away. Two friends, not knowing of his illness, came to dine with him, and he insisted upon being present at table, and piercing for them a hogshead of wine which was in the cellar, and which might as well be drunk by his friends, now that he was going the way when he would no more need it. “He willed them to send for the same so long as it lasted, for that he would not tarry till it was drunken”;—as beautiful a picture of generous friendliness and “cheery social” disposition, as one can anywhere contemplate. On the 17th, and some of the following days, he received his friends, his colleague, his brethren in the ministry, and among others the Earl of Morton, whom he charged to be faithful to God and the Evangel in the elevation to the regency which he saw was awaiting him. On the evening before his death he was tempted to think of himself and of what he had done. But he repelled the temptation with the sentence, Quid habes, quod non accepisti? The next day, the 24th, he got up and partially dressed himself—put on his hose and doublet: but the effort was too much; weakness overcame him, and he was forced to lie down again. His wife and faithful servant sat beside him reading the Bible. He asked his wife to read the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians, and said when it was finished, “Is not that a beautiful chapter? What sweet consolation the Lord hath given me!” Later he said, “Go, read where I first cast anchor”; and she read the 17th chapter of St John’s Gospel. He fell into a trance at the time of evening prayer, and when the physician inquired if he had heard their prayers, he replied, “Would God that you and all men had heard them as I have heard them. I praise God for that heavenly sound.” About eleven o’clock he gave a deep sigh, and said, “Now it is come.” Then Richard Bannatyne, sitting down before him, said, “Now, sir, the time that you have long called for—to wit, an end of your battle—is come; and seeing all natural power now fails, remember the comfortable promise which ofttime ye have shown to us of our Saviour Christ: and that we may understand and know that ye hear us, make us some sign;” and so he lifted up his hand, and incontinent thereafter rendered up the spirit, and slept away without any pain.

A stern reality, a vivid and strong and somewhat harsh sense, lies at the basis of Knox’s character. He saw life equally in its individual and national aspects as a great fact before God—a fact which could only be falsified or trifled away and abused in blasphemy of Him who gave it, and who would require an account of it. It was this feeling of the awful reality and responsibility of life as a divine trust and discipline which, growing up in that long time of quietness and obscurity from about his twentieth to his fortieth year, served more than anything else to kindle his undying zeal against the. Papacy of his country. Strong religious convictions no doubt animated him in his reforming career. It is impossible. to read the ac- count he himself has given of his early sermons in St Andrews, as well as his subsequent letters to his mother-in-law, and not see that the fresh and living study of Scripture had led him to very definite conclusions as to the unchristian character of Romanism, and the perversion of doctrinal truth that its teaching and practices presented. Still he did not, like Luther, primarily attack Romanism from a dogmatic point of view, nor perhaps were its doctrinal perversions ever the main’ cause of his intense and growing hatred of it. It was rather its utter immorality and godlessness as a practical governing institution—its contradictions to the truth of life and the plainest instincts of duty at every point—that provoked his indignation and nerved his destructive energy. He felt that in his own time and country it had become a great embodied lie, dead in trespasses and sins, out of which no good could come, and that therefore it could only be trodden down and buried out of sight.

This was no doubt a stern view of life and of the world around him. It is a view with which we may have some difficulty in sympathising, as we look back upon it from the free and tolerant atmosphere of this nineteenth century. It covers an element of iconoclasm which could only justify itself in the face of the most obvious and unquestionable facts. But the facts are beyond question. The view was one sternly demanded by the necessities of Scotland in the sixteenth century. Nothing but its absolute truthfulness forced it upon Knox. Other men, of less power and penetration than he was—of a less open and piercing glance, searching not only the manifest but the hidden things of dishonesty amidst which he stood—might have been deceived by certain fair appearances in the aspects of Scottish Romanism; but no varnishings and no artifices could beguile him. No social pretensions, no conventional dignities, could impose upon him, or blind his strong, clear vision. He had learned plainly and boldly, as he himself says, to “call wickedness by its own terms, a fig a fig, and a spade a spade.” The Roman hierarchy, therefore, was Antichrist, and the mass idolatry, simply because, in Scotland et least, they had in his time become absolutely unmoral. All divine good they had ever possessed had gone out of them, and left only a noxious carcass—a mere tyranny in the one case, a mere falsehood in the other.

This spirit of severe reality animated him alike in his political as in his religious views. It gave a hardness, some will say a harshness, to his personal demeanour. No form of civil polity was anything to him, save in so far as it conserved the true dignity and earnest and pious uses of life. Mary was only Queen in so far as her government was good for the country. He recognised no divine right in her or any one to govern, save in so far as they were fit for it. The mere trappings of rule, its artificial splendours, its proud adornments, had no interest, and certainly no awe for him. He stood unmoved before them, and his stern simplicity remained imperturbable alike under the blandishments and the tears of royalty. As on one occasion he left the room where he had been holding interview with the Queen, and passed out with a “reasonable merry countenance,” some of them whispered, “He is not afraid.” “What! should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman affray me?” was his reply. “I have looked in the face of many angry men, and yet have not been afraid above measure.” He did not know, indeed, what fear meant, and his heart leapt up at the sound of danger. Never were truer words than those of the Earl of Morton, as they laid him in the old churchyard of St Giles, “He never feared the face of man.” Even Luther was not more courageous in the midst of actual conflict and in the boldness of consistent self-respect, and of undeviating adhesion to what he considered principle, Knox was the superior of Luther. Knox would never have written such letters as Luther did, both to the Pope and Henry VIII. and he never would have acted as the German reformer did in the affair of the Landgrave of Hesse. No consideration ever moved him to servility, and no power on earth would have extorted from him unchristian submission.

Out of this fundamental feature of strong truthfulness sprang alike his humour and his bitterness—different manifestations of the same spirit. That Knox possessed a thoroughly hearty humour, it is impossible for any one to doubt who has ever read his History. Its narrative is touched everywhere by a humorous presence, giving life and colour and movement to it—lighting up, in picturesque and vivid gleams, the very image of the times. It is not indeed a simple humour, whose expressions you can detach, and look at, and feel their laughing charm by themselves, as are the manifold utterances of Luther’s rare and fertile power, or of Latimer’s narrower sympathy. It is rather, as we have said, a presence—a way in general of looking at things and telling about them, which shows you the deep nature of the man, and how keenly all the real aspects of life, its comedy as well as its tragedy, its familiarities as well as its grandeurs, touched him. There is but little geniality, and scarcely any tenderness in it. It is grotesque and scornful rather than smiling and kindly—passing, by an easy transition, into frequent bursts of bitter, and what we would now call violent and abusive invective. Still, even the bitterness is hearty, and not cold and merely mocking. It springs from the same full fountain of sympathy with all that is real in life; and where he scorns, and is wild with a kind of savage glee, it is in the main only against things that really deserved scorn, and were dead to all milder or more tolerant treatment. His soul was wearied with falsehoods; and if the sacred association was not spared in the fierce denunciation, it was simply because it had lost utterly for him all truth or beauty of holiness. Mr Carlyle’s version of his throwing an image of the Virgin into the Loire exactly illustrates this. “Mother! Mother of God, did you say? This is no mother of God, but a painted bredd—a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it;” and suiting the action to the language, he dashed the consecrated symbol into the water.

It must at once be admitted that there are aspects of life beautiful and really good that had little or no interest for Knox. The sweetness and grace and cultured refinement and charm of social politeness, that so mingle in our modern existence, and. which, from the polished capital where she had spent her youth, Mary sought to transplant into the harsher clime of her native land—those festive exuberances and “unconfined joys” and decorated gaieties, that, amid all their frivolity, speak of a right-hearted human gladness—and of which Mary, in her mere womanly perfections, may be said to remain the ideal and type—were unfelt and unacknowledged by him. Mere beauty in nature or in life had few attractions for him. Calvin is scarcely more insensible to such attractions, although Knox has a wider sympathy with the varied interests of humanity, and a far deeper and more appreciative feeling. There is a comparatively keen though rugged sensibility in the heart of the Scottish reformer, as passages in his sermons, and many facts of his life, show; and if he could be stern and even cruel as Calvin, he is yet never so cold and self-sustained in his polemical rigour. His harshness and narrowness were as much the misfortune of his time as his fault as a man; and while they cast a shade into his portrait, they yet ought not to destroy the noble and impressive lines that mark it.

His eloquence partook of the same stern, powerful, and scornful character: it must have been a grand thing to hear in those days, when great national interests hung upon his single utterances. His preaching, the English ambassador said, “put more life into him than six hundred trumpets,”—a headlong, vehement, swelling energy, ringing like a slogan cry, bursting in explosive shouts, and moving with passionate convictions thousands of hearts. A single brief passage from his famous sermon before the dissolution of the Parliament of 1563, when the arts of Mary were so successful in deluding the Protestant nobles, may give some idea of it. He is appealing to old associations, and his close union with the nobles in past times when he had shared their risks and dangers; and his wounded feelings swell into an impassioned sublimity, in which there mingles a wild yet softening touch of pathos. “I have been with you,” he says, “in your most desperate temptations in your most extreme dangers I have been with you. St Johnstone, Cupar Moor, and the Crags of Edinburgh are yet recent in my heart—yea, and that dark and dolorous night, wherein all ye, my lords, with shame and fear, left this town, is yet in my mind, and God forbid that I ever forget it. What was, I say, my exhortation to you, and what has fallen in vain of all that ever God promised unto you by my mouth, ye yourselves live to testify. . . . Shall this be the thankfulness that ye shall render unto God, to betray His cause, when ye have it in your hands to establish it?” There is something of the same pathetic sublimity in his prayer after the assassination of the Regent Murray.

Altogether, if we estimate him, as we are bound to do, in his historical position and circumstances, Knox appears a very great and heroic man—no violent demagogue, or mere stern dogmatist—although violence and sternness and dogmatism were all parts of his character. These coarser elements mingled with but did not obscure the fresh, living, and keenly sympathetic humanity beneath. Inferior to Luther in tenderness and breadth and lovableness, he is greatly superior to Calvin in the same qualities. You feel that he had a strong and loving heart under all his harshness, and that you can get near to it, and could have spent a cheery social evening with him in his house at the head of the Canongate, over. that good old wine that he had stored in his cellar, and which he was glad and proud to dispense to his friends. It might not have been a very pleasant thing to differ with him eyen in such circumstances; but, upon the whole, it would have been a pleasanter and safer audacity than to have disputed some favourite tenet with Calvin. There was in Knox far more of human feeling and of shrewd worldly sense, always tolerant of differences; and you could have fallen back upon these, and felt yourself comparatively safe in the utterance of some daring sentiment. And in this point of view it deserves to be noticed that Knox alone of the reformers, along with Luther, is free from all stain of violent persecution. Intolerant he was towards the mass, towards Mary, and towards the old Catholic clergy; yet he was no persecutor. He was never cruel in act, cruel as his language sometimes is, and severe as were some of his judgments. Modern enlightenment and scientific indifference we have no right to look for in him. His superstitions about the weather and witches were common to him with all men of his time. Nature was not to these men an elevated and beneficent idea, but a capricious manifestation of arbitrary supernatural forces. This was part of the intellectual furniture of the time, of which they could no more get rid than they could get rid of their social dress or usages. And Knox was here, as in other things, only a man of his time.