John Knox And The Reformation E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 426

Beschreibung

This work of the well-known historian and man-of-letters, Mr. Andrew Lang, is not a biography at all; it is a controversial pamphlet of large size, the thesis of which is a quotation from ' The Diurnal' under the date of Knox's death: ' John Knox, minister, deceased, who had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late Cardinal.' From the beginning to the end of his book, Mr. Lang employs all the resources of his literary art, irony, denunciation, special pleading, to discredit the great Reformer. He attributes to him the principles of a Macchiavelli, and a prudence that led him to shun dangers to himself however ready he might be to denounce others who showed like prudence. He accuses Knox of numberless misstatements in his History, extending even to the perversion of the facts of history to justify his acts and those of his party. On nearly every page is a fling at Knox, the following being an example: ' Knox, as to the doctrine of " killing no murder," was a man of his time. But Knox, in telling the story of a murder which he approves, unhappily displays a glee unbecoming a reformer of the Church of Him who blamed St. Peter for his recourse to the sword. The very essence of Christianity is cast to the winds when Knox utters his laughter over the murders or misfortunes of his opponents, yielding " to the strong propensity which he felt to indulge his vein of humour." Other good men rejoiced in the murder of an enemy, but Knox chuckled.' This is not fair play, though it be sharp writing. It is to be admitted that Mr. Lang carries us with him in many of his attacks upon the consistency and spirit of the Reformer, but he himself ' chuckles' overmuch, and allows far too little for the spirit of the time that shapes the character and thought of even its leaders and heroes.

Leseprobe

John Knox And The Reformation

Andrew Lang

Contents:

Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

John Knox And The Reformation

Preface

Chapter I: Ancestry, Birth, Education, Environment: 1513(?)-1546

Chapter Ii: Knox, Wishart, And The Murder Of Beaton: 1545-1546

Chapter Iii: Knox In St. Andrews Castle: The Galleys: 1547-1549

Chapter Iv: Knox In England: The Black Rubric: Exile: 1549-1554

Chapter V: Exile: Appeals For A Phinehas, And A Jehu: 1554

Chapter Vi: Knox In The English Puritan Troubles At Frankfort: 1554-1555

Chapter Vii: Knox In Scotland: Lethington: Mary Of Guise: 1555-1556

Chapter Viii: Knox’s Writings From Abroad: Beginning Of The Scottish Revolution, 1556-1558

Chapter Ix: Knox On The Anabaptists: His Appeal To England: 1558-1559

Chapter X: Knox And The Scottish Revolution, 1559

Chapter Xi: Knox’s Intrigues, And His Account Of Them, 1559

Chapter Xii: Knox In The War Of The Congregation: The Regent Attacked: Her Death: Catholicism Abolished, 1559-1560

Chapter Xiii: Knox And The Book Of Discipline

Chapter Xiv: Knox And Queen Mary, 1561

Chapter Xv: Knox And Queen Mary (Continued), 1561-1564

Chapter Xvi: Knox And Queen Mary (Continued): 1563-1564

Chapter Xvii: Knox And Queen Mary (Continued), 1564-1567

Chapter Xviii: The Last Years Of Knox: 1567-1572

Appendix A: Alleged Perfidy Of Mary Of Guise

Appendix B: Forgery Procured By Mary Of Guise

Footnotes

John Knox And The Reformation, A. Lang

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

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ISBN: 9783849606947

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ANDREW LANG (1844-1912)

Biographical Sketch from "Portraits And Sketches" by Edmund Gosse

INVITED to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.

To a superficial observer in late life the genius of Andrew Lang had the characteristics which we are in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. One slender volume of verses represents all that he published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, the finest finished product of his age, with the bright armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know as yet but little; they were years of insatiable acquirement, incessant reading, and talking, and observing gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of other people's observation and talk and reading. There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and petulant Merton don. He was already flouting and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which might break the back of a pedant, and concealing under an affectation of carelessness a literary ambition which knew no definite bounds.

In those days, and when he appeared for the first time in London, the poet was paramount in him. Jowett is said to have predicted that he would be greatly famous in this line, but I know not what evidence Jowett had before him. Unless I am much mistaken, it was not until Lang left Balliol that his peculiar bent became obvious. Up to that time he had been a promiscuous browser upon books, much occupied, moreover, in the struggle with ancient Greek, and immersed in Aristotle and Homer. But in the early days of his settlement at Merton he began to concentrate his powers, and I think there were certain influences which were instant and far-reaching. Among them one was pre-eminent. When Andrew Lang came up from St. Andrews he had found Matthew Arnold occupying the ancient chair of poetry at Oxford. He was a listener at some at least of the famous lectures which, in 1865, were collected as "Essays in Criticism"; while one of his latest experiences as a Balliol undergraduate was hearing Matthew Arnold lecture on the study of Celtic literature. His conscience was profoundly stirred by "Culture and Anarchy" (1869); his sense of prose-form largely determined by "Friendship's Garland" (1871). I have no hesitation in saying that the teaching and example of Matthew Arnold prevailed over all other Oxford influences upon the intellectual nature of Lang, while, although I think that his personal acquaintance with Arnold was very slight, yet in his social manner there was, in early days, not a little imitation of Arnold's aloofness and superfine delicacy of address. It was unconscious, of course, and nothing would have enraged Lang more than to have been accused of "imitating Uncle Matt."

The structure which his own individuality now began to build on the basis supplied by the learning of Oxford, and in particular by the study of the Greeks, and "dressed" by courses of Matthew Arnold, was from the first eclectic. Lang eschewed as completely what was not sympathetic to him as he assimilated what was attractive to him. Those who speak of his "versatility" should recollect what large tracts of the literature of the world, and even of England, existed outside the dimmest apprehension of Andrew Lang. It is, however, more useful to consider what he did apprehend; and there were two English books, published in his Oxford days, which permanently impressed him: one of these was "The Earthly Paradise," the other D. G. Rossetti's " Poems." In after years he tried to divest himself of the traces of these volumes, but he had fed upon their honey-dew and it had permeated his veins.

Not less important an element in the garnishing of a mind already prepared for it by academic and aesthetic studies was the absorption of the romantic part of French literature. Andrew Lang in this, as in everything else, was selective. He dipped into the wonderful lucky-bag of France wherever he saw the glitter of romance. Hence his approach, in the early seventies, was threefold: towards the mediaeval lais and chansons, towards the sixteenth-century Pleiade, and towards the school of which Victor Hugo was the leader in the nineteenth century. For a long time Ronsard was Lang's poet of intensest predilection; and I think that his definite ambition was to be the Ronsard of modern England, introducing a new poetical dexterity founded on a revival of pure humanism. He had in those days what he lost, or at least dispersed, in the weariness and growing melancholia of later years a splendid belief in poetry as a part of the renown of England, as a heritage to be received in reverence from our fathers, and to be passed on, if possible, in a brighter flame. This honest and beautiful ambition to shine as one of the permanent benefactors to national verse, in the attitude so nobly sustained four hundred years ago by Du Bellay and Ronsard, was unquestionably felt by Andrew Lang through his bright intellectual April, and supported him from Oxford times until 1882, when he published " Helen of Troy." The cool reception of that epic by the principal judges of poetry caused him acute disappointment, and from that time forth he became less eager and less serious as a poet, more and more petulantly expending his wonderful technical gift on fugitive subjects. And here again, when one comes to think of it, the whole history repeated itself, since in " Helen of Troy " Lang simply suffered as Ronsard had done in the "Franciade." But the fact that 1882 was his year of crisis, and the tomb of his brightest ambition, must be recognised by every one who closely followed his fortunes at that time. Lang's habit of picking out of literature and of life the plums of romance, and these alone, comes to be, to the dazzled observer of his extraordinarily vivid intellectual career, the principal guiding line. This determination to dwell, to the exclusion of all other sides of any question, on its romantic side is alone enough to rebut the charge of versatility. Lang was in a sense encyclopaedic; but the vast dictionary of his knowledge had blank pages, or pages pasted down, on which he would not, or could not, read what experience had printed. Absurd as it sounds, there was always something maidenly about his mind, and he glossed over ugly matters, sordid and dull conditions, so that they made no impression whatever upon him. He had a trick, which often exasperated his acquaintances, of declaring that he had " never heard " of things that everybody else was very well aware of. He had " never heard the name " of people he disliked, of books that he thought tiresome, of events that bored him; but, more than this, he used the formula for things and persons whom he did not wish to discuss. I remember meeting in the street a famous professor, who advanced with uplifted hands, and greeted me with " What do you think Lang says now? That he has never heard of Pascal! " This merely signified that Lang, not interested (at all events for the moment) in Pascal nor in the professor, thus closed at once all possibility of discussion.

It must not be forgotten that we have lived to see him, always wonderful indeed, and always passionately devoted to perfection and purity, but worn, tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the lifelong slinging of sentences from that inexhaustible ink-pot. In one of the most perfect of his poems, " Natural Theology," Lang speaks of Cagn, the great hunter, who once was kind and good, but who was spoiled by fighting many things. Lang was never " spoiled," but he was injured; the surface of the radiant coin was rubbed by the vast and interminable handling of journalism. He was jaded by the toil of writing many things. Hence it is not possible but that those who knew him intimately in his later youth and early middle-age should prefer to look back at those years when he was the freshest, the most exhilarating figure in living literature, when a star seemed to dance upon the crest of his already silvering hair. Baudelaire exclaimed of Theophile Gautier: " Homme heureux! homme digne d'envie! il n'a jamais aimé que le Beau!" and of Andrew Lang in those brilliant days the same might have been said. As long as he had confidence in beauty he was safe and strong; and much that, with all affection and all respect, we must admit was rasping and disappointing in his attitude to literature in his later years, seems to have been due to a decreasing sense of confidence in the intellectual sources of beauty. It is dangerous, in the end it must be fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and thought on the illusions of romance. But that was what Lang did he built his house upon the rainbow.

The charm of Andrew Lang's person and company was founded upon a certain lightness, an essential gentleness and elegance which were relieved by a sharp touch; just as a very dainty fruit may be preserved from mawkishness by something delicately acid in the rind of it. His nature was slightly inhuman; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy beyond a point which was very easily reached in social intercourse. If any simple soul showed an inclination, in eighteenth-century phrase, to " repose on the bosom " of Lang, that support was immediately withdrawn, and the confiding one fell among thorns. Lang was like an Angora cat, whose gentleness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met by the outspread paw with claws awake. This uncertain and freakish humour was the embarrassment of his friends, who, however, were preserved from despair by the fact that no malice was meant, and that the weapons were instantly sheathed again in velvet. Only, the instinct to give a sudden slap, half in play, half in fretful caprice, was incorrigible. No one among Lang's intimate friends but had suffered from this feline impulse, which did not spare even the serenity of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, tiresome as it sometimes was, this irritable humour seldom cost Lang a friend who was worth preserving. Those who really knew him recognised that he was always shy and usually tired.

His own swift spirit never brooded upon an offence, and could not conceive that any one else should mind what he himself minded so little and forgot so soon. Impressions swept over him very rapidly, and injuries passed completely out of his memory. Indeed, all his emotions were too fleeting, and in this there was something fairy-like; quick and keen and blithe as he was, he did not seem altogether like an ordinary mortal, nor could the appeal to gross human experience be made to him with much chance of success. This, doubtless, is why almost all imaginative literature which is founded upon the darker parts of life, all squalid and painful tragedy, all stories that " don't end well" all religious experiences, all that is not superficial and romantic, was irksome to him. He tried sometimes to reconcile his mind to the consideration of real life; he concentrated his matchless powers on it; but he always disliked it. He could persuade himself to be partly just to Ibsen or Hardy or Dostoieffsky, but what he really enjoyed was Dumas pêre, because that fertile romance-writer rose serene above the phenomena of actual human experience. We have seen more of this type in English literature than the Continental nations have in theirs, but even we have seen no instance of its strength and weakness so eminent as Andrew Lang. He was the fairy in our midst, the wonder-working, incorporeal, and tricksy fay of letters, who paid for all his wonderful gifts and charms by being not quite a man of like passions with the rest of us. In some verses which he scribbled to R.L.S. and threw away, twenty years ago, he acknowledged this unearthly character, and, speaking of the depredations of his kin, he said:

Faith, they might steal me, w? ma will,

And, ken'd I ony fairy hill

I#d lay me down there, snod and still,

Their land to win;

For, man, I maistly had my fill

O' this world's din

His wit had something disconcerting in its impishness. Its rapidity and sparkle were dazzling, but it was not quite human; that is to say, it conceded too little to the exigencies of flesh and blood. If we can conceive a seraph being fanny, it would be in the manner of Andrew Lang. Moreover, his wit usually danced over the surface of things, and rarely penetrated them. In verbal parry, in ironic misunderstanding, in breathless agility of topsy-turvy movement, Lang was like one of Milton's " yellow-skirted fays," sporting with the helpless, moon-bewildered traveller. His wit often had a depressing, a humiliating effect, against which one's mind presently revolted. I recollect an instance which may be thought to be apposite: I was passing through a phase of enthusiasm for Emerson, whom Lang very characteristically detested, and I was so ill-advised as to show him the famous epigram called " Brahma." Lang read it with a snort of derision (it appeared to be new to him), and immediately he improvised this parody:

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,

Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled,

They know not, poor misguided souls,

They, too, shall perish unconsoled.

I am the batsman and the bat,

I am the bowler and the ball,

The umpire, the pavilion cat,

The roller, pitch and stumps, and all

This would make a pavilion cat laugh, and I felt that Emerson was done for. But when Lang had left me, and I was once more master of my mind, I reflected that the parody was but a parody, wonderful for its neatness and quickness, and for its seizure of what was awkward in the roll of Emerson's diction, but essentially superficial. However, what would wit be if it were profound? I must leave it there, feeling that I have not explained why Lang's extraordinary drollery in conversation so often left on the memory a certain sensation of distress.

But this was not the characteristic of his humour at its best, as it was displayed throughout the happiest period of his work. If, as seems possible, it is as an essayist that he will ultimately take his place in English literature, this element will continue to delight fresh generations of enchanted readers. I cannot imagine that the preface to his translation of " Theocritus," "Letters to Dead Authors," "In the Wrong Paradise," " Old Friends," and " Essays in Little " will ever lose their charm; but future admirers will have to pick their way to them through a tangle of history and anthropology and mythology, where there may be left no perfume and no sweetness. I am impatient to see this vast mass of writing reduced to the limits of its author's delicate, true, but somewhat evasive and ephemeral. genius. However, as far as the circumstances of his temperament permitted, Andrew Lang has left with us the memory of one of our most surprising contemporaries, a man of letters who laboured without cessation from boyhood to the grave, who pursued his ideal with indomitable activity and perseverance, and who was never betrayed except by the loftiness of his own endeavour. Lang's only misfortune was not to be completely in contact with life, and his work will survive exactly where he was most faithful to his innermost illusions.

John Knox and the Reformation

PREFACE

In this brief Life of Knox I have tried, as much as I may, to get behind Tradition, which has so deeply affected even modern histories of the Scottish Reformation, and even recent Biographies of the Reformer.  The tradition is based, to a great extent, on Knox’s own “History,” which I am therefore obliged to criticise as carefully as I can.  In his valuable John Knox, a Biography, Professor Hume Brown says that in the “History” “we have convincing proof alike of the writer’s good faith, and of his perception of the conditions of historic truth.”  My reasons for dissenting from this favourable view will be found in the following pages.  If I am right, if Knox, both as a politician and an historian, resembled Charles I. in “sailing as near the wind” as he could, the circumstance (as another of his biographers remarks) “only makes him more human and interesting.”

Opinion about Knox and the religious Revolution in which he took so great a part, has passed through several variations in the last century.  In the Edinburgh Review of 1816 (No. liii. pp. 163-180), is an article with which the present biographer can agree.  Several passages from Knox’s works are cited, and the reader is expected to be “shocked at their principles.”  They are certainly shocking, but they are not, as a rule, set before the public by biographers of the Reformer.

Mr. Carlyle introduced a style of thinking about Knox which may be called platonically Puritan.  Sweet enthusiasts glide swiftly over all in the Reformer that is specially distasteful to us.  I find myself more in harmony with the outspoken Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several more recent students of Knox.

“The Reformer’s violent counsels and intemperate speech were remarkable,” writes Dr. Robertson, “even in his own ruthless age,” and he gives fourteen examples.[0a]  “Lord Hailes has shown,” he adds, “how little Knox’s statements” (in his “History”) “are to be relied on even in matters which were within the Reformer’s own knowledge.”  In Scotland there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose sentimentalism.  To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter Scott.  On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which musters under the banner of the Covenant, and sees scarcely a blemish in Knox.  A pretty sample of the sentiment of this party appears in a biography (1905) of the Reformer by a minister of the Gospel.  Knox summoned the organised brethren, in 1563, to overawe justice, when some men were to be tried on a charge of invading in arms the chapel of Holyrood.  No proceeding could be more anarchic than Knox’s, or more in accordance with the lovable customs of my dear country, at that time.  But the biographer of 1905, “a placed minister,” writes that “the doing of it” (Knox’s summons) “was only an assertion of the liberty of the Church, and of the members of the Commonwealth as a whole, to assemble for purposes which were clearly lawful”—the purposes being to overawe justice in the course of a trial!

On sentiment, Cavalier or Puritan, reason is thrown away.

I have been surprised to find how completely a study of Knox’s own works corroborates the views of Dr. Robertson and Lord Hailes.  That Knox ran so very far ahead of the Genevan pontiffs of his age in violence; and that in his “History” he needs such careful watching, was, to me, an unexpected discovery.  He may have been “an old Hebrew prophet,” as Mr. Carlyle says, but he had also been a young Scottish notary!  A Hebrew prophet is, at best, a dangerous anachronism in a delicate crisis of the Church Christian; and the notarial element is too conspicuous in some passages of Knox’s “History.”

That Knox was a great man; a disinterested man; in his regard for the poor a truly Christian man; as a shepherd of Calvinistic souls a man fervent and considerate; of pure life; in friendship loyal; by jealousy untainted; in private character genial and amiable, I am entirely convinced.  In public and political life he was much less admirable; and his “History,” vivacious as it is, must be studied as the work of an old-fashioned advocate rather than as the summing up of a judge.  His favourite adjectives are “bloody,” “beastly,” “rotten,” and “stinking.”

Any inaccuracies of my own which may have escaped my correction will be dwelt on, by enthusiasts for the Prophet, as if they are the main elements of this book, and disqualify me as a critic of Knox’s “History.”  At least any such errors on my part are involuntary and unconscious.  In Knox’s defence we must remember that he never saw his “History” in print.  But he kept it by him for many years, obviously re-reading, for he certainly retouched it, as late as 1571.

In quoting Knox and his contemporaries, I have used modern spelling: the letter from the State Papers printed on pp. 146, 147, shows what the orthography of the period was really like.  Consultation of the original MSS. on doubtful points, proves that the printed Calendars, though excellent guides, cannot be relied on as authorities.

The portrait of Knox, from Beza’s book of portraits of Reformers, is posthumous, but is probably a good likeness drawn from memory, after a description by Peter Young, who knew him, and a design, presumably by “Adrianc Vaensoun,” a Fleming, resident in Edinburgh.[0b]

There is an interesting portrait, possibly of Knox, in the National Gallery of Portraits, but the work has no known authentic history.

The portrait of Queen Mary, at the age of thirty-six, and a prisoner, is from the Earl of Morton’s original; it is greatly superior to the “Sheffield” type of likenesses, of about 1578; and, with Janet’s and other drawings (1558-1561), the Bridal medal of 1558, and (in my opinion) the Earl of Leven and Melville’s portrait, of about 1560-1565, is the best extant representation of the Queen.

The Leven and Melville portrait of Mary, young and charming, and wearing jewels which are found recorded in her Inventories, has hitherto been overlooked.  An admirable photogravure is given in Mr. J. J. Foster’s “True Portraiture of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1905), and I understand that a photograph was done in 1866 for the South Kensington Museum.

A. LANG.

CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY, BIRTH, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT: 1513(?)-1546

“November 24, 1572.

“John Knox, minister, deceased, who had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late Cardinal.”

It is thus that the decent burgess who, in 1572, kept The Diurnal of such daily events as he deemed important, cautiously records the death of the great Scottish Reformer.  The sorrows, the “cumber” of which Knox was “alleged” to bear the blame, did not end with his death.  They persisted in the conspiracies and rebellions of the earlier years of James VI.; they smouldered through the later part of his time; they broke into far spreading flame at the touch of the Covenant; they blazed at “dark Worcester and bloody Dunbar”; at Preston fight, and the sack of Dundee by Monk; they included the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland, and the shame and misery of the Restoration; to trace them down to our own age would be invidious.

It is with the “alleged” author of the Sorrows, with his life, works, and ideas that we are concerned.

John Knox, son of William Knox and of --- Sinclair, his wife,[2a]unlike most Scotsmen, unlike even Mr. Carlyle, had not “an ell of pedigree.”  The common scoff was that each Scot styled himself “the King’s poor cousin.”  But John Knox declared, “I am a man of base estate and condition.”[2b]  The genealogy of Mr. Carlyle has been traced to a date behind the Norman Conquest, but of Knox’s ancestors nothing is known.  He himself, in 1562, when he “ruled the roast” in Scotland, told the ruffian Earl of Bothwell, “my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father, have served your Lordship’s predecessors, and some of them have died under their standards; and this” (namely goodwill to the house of the feudal superior) “is a part of the obligation of our Scottish kindness.”  Knox, indeed, never writes very harshly of Bothwell, partly for the reason he gives; partly, perhaps, because Bothwell, though an infamous character, and a political opponent, was not in 1562-67 “an idolater,” that is, a Catholic: if ever he had been one; partly because his “History” ends before Bothwell’s murder of Darnley in 1567.

Knox’s ancestors were, we may suppose, peasant farmers, like the ancestors of Burns and Hogg; and Knox, though he married a maid of the Queen’s kin, bore traces of his descent.  “A man ungrateful and unpleasable,” Northumberland styled him: he was one who could not “smiling, put a question by”; if he had to remonstrate even with a person whom it was desirable to conciliate, he stated his case in the plainest and least flattering terms.  “Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions different from many,” he wrote; but this side of his character he kept mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and indifferent or hostile to his aims.  To others, especially to women whom he liked, he was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social superiority aroused his wakeful independence.  His countrymen of his own order had long displayed these peculiarities of humour.

The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even before his age, in two strangely different lights.  If they were not technically “kindly tenants,” in which case their conditions of existence and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their condition written in 1549, “were in more servitude than the children of Israel in Egypt.”  Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted, hopes that the agricultural class may yet live “as substantial commoners, not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours at their own expense,” as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House.  This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and England, in place of the old and romantic league with France.  That alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their national independence.  But, with the great revolution in religion, the interest of Scotland was a permanent political league with England, which Knox did as much as any man to forward, while, by resisting a religious union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.

If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners.  In 1515 the chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam Williamson: “You know the use of this country.  Every man speaks what he will without blame.  The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content unless he knows the master’s counsel.  There is no order among us.”

Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was minded that “A man’s a man for a’ that!”  Knox was the true flower of this vigorous Lowland thistle.  Throughout life he not only “spoke what he would,” but uttered “the Truth” in such a tone as to make it unlikely that his “message” should be accepted by opponents.  Like Carlyle, however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he says, ever began on his side; while, as “a good hater,” Dr. Johnson might have admired him.  He carried into political and theological conflicts the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns.  So far Knox was an example of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn in detail about his ancestors.

The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of Haddington, in a district on the path of English invasion.  The year of his birth has long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as 1505.[4]  Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely, Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza that Knox died in his fifty-ninth year.  Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see, appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.

If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priest’s orders, and adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which the canonical law permitted.  No man ought to be in priest’s orders before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five in 1540, when he is styled “Sir John Knox” (one of “The Pope’s Knights”) in legal documents, and appears as a notary.[5]  He certainly continued in orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543.  The law of the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but in an age when “notaires” were often professional forgers, the additional security for character yielded by Holy Orders must have been welcome to clients, and Bishops permitted priests to practise this branch of the law.

Of Knox’s near kin no more is known than of his ancestors.  He had a brother, William, for whom, in 1552, he procured a licence to trade in England as owner of a ship of 100 tons.  Even as late as 1656, there were not a dozen ships of this burden in Scotland, so William Knox must have been relatively a prosperous man.  In 1544-45, there was a William Knox, a fowler or gamekeeper to the Earl of Westmoreland, who acted as a secret agent between the Scots in English pay and their paymasters.  We much later (1559) find the Reformer’s brother, William, engaged with him in a secret political mission to the Governor of Berwick; probably this William knew shy Border paths, and he may have learned them as the Lord Westmoreland’s fowler in earlier years.

About John Knox’s early years and education nothing is known.  He certainly acquired such Latin (satis humilis, says a German critic) as Scotland then had to teach; probably at the Burgh School of Haddington.  A certain John Knox matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1522, but he cannot have been the Reformer, if the Reformer was not born till 1513-15.  Beza, on the other hand (1580), had learned, probably from the Reformer, whom he knew well, that Knox was a St. Andrews man, and though his name does not occur in the University Register, the Register was very ill kept.  Supposing Knox, then, to have been born in 1513-15, and to have been educated at St. Andrews, we can see how he comes to know so much about the progress of the new religious ideas at that University, between 1529 and 1535.  “The Well of St. Leonard’s College” was a notorious fountain of heresies, under Gawain Logie, the Principal.  Knox very probably heard the sermons of the Dominicans and Franciscans “against the pride and idle life of bishops,” and other abuses.  He speaks of a private conversation between Friar Airth and Major (about 1534), and names some of the persons present at a sermon in the parish church of St. Andrews, as if he had himself been in the congregation.  He gives the text and heads of the discourse, including “merry tales” told by the Friar.[6]  If Knox heard the sermons and stories of clerical scandals at St. Andrews, they did not prevent him from taking orders.  His Greek and Hebrew, what there was of them, Knox must have acquired in later life, at least we never learn that he was taught by the famous George Wishart, who, about that time, gave Greek lectures at Montrose.

The Catholic opponents of Knox naturally told scandalous anecdotes concerning his youth.  These are destitute of evidence: about his youth we know nothing.  It is a characteristic trait in him, and a fact much to his credit, that, though he is fond of expatiating about himself, he never makes confessions as to his earlier adventures.  On his own years of the wild oat St. Augustine dilates in a style which still has charm: but Knox, if he sowed wild oats, is silent as the tomb.  If he has anything to repent, it is not to the world that he confesses.  About the days when he was “one of Baal’s shaven sort,” in his own phrase; when he was himself an “idolater,” and a priest of the altar: about the details of his conversion, Knox is mute.  It is probable that, as a priest, he examined Lutheran books which were brought in with other merchandise from Holland; read the Bible for himself; and failed to find Purgatory, the Mass, the intercession of Saints, pardons, pilgrimages, and other accessories of mediæval religion in the Scriptures.[7]  Knox had only to keep his eyes and ears open, to observe the clerical ignorance and corruption which resulted in great part from the Scottish habit of securing wealthy Church offices for ignorant, brutal, and licentious younger sons and bastards of noble families.  This practice in Scotland was as odious to good Catholics, like Quentin Kennedy, Ninian Winzet, and, rather earlier, to Ferrerius, as to Knox himself.  The prevalent anarchy caused by the long minorities of the Stuart kings, and by the interminable wars with England, and the difficulty of communications with Rome, had enabled the nobles thus to rob and deprave the Church, and so to provide themselves with moral reasons good for robbing her again; as a punishment for the iniquities which they had themselves introduced!

The almost incredible ignorance and profligacy of the higher Scottish clergy (with notable exceptions) in Knox’s youth, are not matter of controversy.  They are as frankly recognised by contemporary Catholic as by Protestant authors.  In the very year of the destruction of the monasteries (1559) the abuses are officially stated, as will be told later, by the last Scottish Provincial Council.  Though three of the four Scottish universities were founded by Catholics, and the fourth, Edinburgh, had an endowment bequeathed by a Catholic, the clerical ignorance, in Knox’s time, was such that many priests could hardly read.

If more evidence is needed as to the debauched estate of the Scottish clergy, we obtain it from Mary of Guise, widow of James V., the Regent then governing Scotland for her child, Mary Stuart.  The Queen, in December 1555, begged Pius IV. to permit her to levy a tax on her clergy, and to listen to what Cardinal Sermoneta would tell him about their need of reformation.  The Cardinal drew a terrible sketch of the nefarious lives of “every kind of religious women” in Scotland.  They go about with their illegal families and dower their daughters out of the revenues of the Church.  The monks, too, have bloated wealth, while churches are allowed to fall into decay.  “The only hope is in the Holy Father,” who should appoint an episcopal commission of visitation.  For about forty years prelates have been alienating Church lands illegally, and churches and monasteries, by the avarice of those placed in charge, are crumbling to decay.  Bishops are the chief dealers in cattle, fish, and hides, though we have, in fact, good evidence that their dealings were very limited, “sma’ sums.”

Not only the clergy, but the nobles and people were lawless.  “They are more difficult to manage than ever,” writes Mary of Guise (Jan. 13, 1557).  They are recalcitrant against law and order; every attempt at introducing these is denounced as an attack on their old laws: not that their laws are bad, but that they are badly administered.[9]  Scotland, in brief, had always been lawless, and for centuries had never been godly.  She was untouched by the first fervour of the Franciscan and other religious revivals.  Knox could not fail to see what was so patent: many books of the German reformers may have come in his way; no more was wanted than the preaching of George Wishart in 1543-45, to make him an irreconcilable foe of the doctrine as well as the discipline of his Church.

Knox had a sincerely religious nature, and a conviction that he was, more than most men, though a sinner, in close touch with Him “in whom we live and move and have our being.”  We ask ourselves, had Knox, as “a priest of the altar,” never known the deep emotions, which tongue may not utter, that the ceremonies and services of his Church so naturally awaken in the soul of the believer?  These emotions, if they were in his experience, he never remembered tenderly, he flung them from him without regret; not regarding them even as dreams, beautiful and dear, but misleading, that came through the Ivory Gate.  To Knox’s opponent in controversy, Quentin Kennedy, the mass was “the blessed Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is one of the chief Sacraments whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of mankind, has appointed the fruit of His death and passion to be daily renewed and applied.”  In this traditional view there is nothing unedifying, nothing injurious to the Christian life.  But to Knox the wafer is an idol, a god “of water and meal,” “but a feeble and miserable god,” that can be destroyed “by a bold and puissant mouse.”  “Rats and mice will desire no better dinner than white round gods enough.”[10]

The Reformer and the Catholic take up the question “by different handles”; and the Catholic grounds his defence on a text about Melchizedek!  To Knox the mass is the symbol of all that he justly detested in the degraded Church as she then was in Scotland, “that horrible harlot with her filthiness.”  To Kennedy it was what we have seen.

Knox speaks of having been in “the puddle of papistry.”  He loathes what he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest and notary merely that he “might eat a morsel of bread”; and that real “conviction” never was his till his studies of Protestant controversialists, and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life.  Then he awoke to a passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of “mumbled masses,” of “rites of human invention,” whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic charm.  Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested them.  On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas, Knox’s faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round world, made so fast that it cannot be moved.  He had now a pou sto, whence he could, and did, move the world of human affairs.  A faith not to be shaken, and enormous energy were the essential attributes of the Reformer.  It is almost impossible to find an instance in which Knox allows that he may have been mistaken: d’avoir toujours raison was his claim.  If he admits an error in details, it is usually an error of insufficient severity.  He did not attack Northumberland or Mary Stuart with adequate violence; he did not disapprove enough of our prayer book; he did not hand a heretic over to the magistrates.

While acting as a priest and notary, between 1540, at latest, and 1543, Knox was engaged as private tutor to a boy named Brounefield, son of Brounefield of Greenlaw, and to other lads, spoken of as his “bairns.”  In this profession of tutor he continued till 1547.

Knox’s personal aspect did not give signs of the uncommon strength which his unceasing labours demanded, but, like many men of energy, he had a perpetual youth of character and vigour.  After his death, Peter Young described him as he appeared in his later years.  He was somewhat below the “just” standard of height; his limbs were well and elegantly shaped; his shoulders broad, his fingers rather long, his head small, his hair black, his face somewhat swarthy, and not unpleasant to behold.  There was a certain geniality in a countenance serious and stern, with a natural dignity and air of command; his eyebrows, when he was in anger, were expressive.  His forehead was rather narrow, depressed above the eyebrows; his cheeks were full and ruddy, so that the eyes seemed to retreat into their hollows: they were dark grey, keen, and lively.  The face was long, the nose also; the mouth was large, the upper lip being the thicker.  The beard was long, rather thick and black, with a few grey hairs in his later years.[12]  The nearest approach to an authentic portrait of Knox is a woodcut, engraved after a sketch from memory by Peter Young, and after another sketch of the same kind by an artist in Edinburgh.  Compared with the peevish face of Calvin, also in Beza’s Icones, Knox looks a broad-minded and genial character.

Despite the uncommon length to which Knox carried the contemporary approval of persecution, then almost universal, except among the Anabaptists (and any party out of power), he was not personally rancorous where religion was not concerned.  But concerned it usually was!  He was the subject of many anonymous pasquils and libels, we know, but he entirely disregarded them.  If he hated any mortal personally, and beyond what true religion demands of a Christian, that mortal was the mother of Mary Stuart, an amiable lady in an impossible position.  Of jealousy towards his brethren there is not a trace in Knox, and he told Queen Mary that he could ill bear to correct his own boys, though the age was as cruel to schoolboys as that of St. Augustine.

The faults of Knox arose not in his heart, but in his head; they sprung from intellectual errors, and from the belief that he was always right.  He applied to his fellow-Christians—Catholics—the commands which early Israel supposed to be divinely directed against foreign worshippers of Chemosh and Moloch.  He endeavoured to force his own theory of what the discipline of the Primitive Apostolic Church had been upon a modern nation, following the example of the little city state of Geneva, under Calvin.  He claimed for preachers chosen by local congregations the privileges and powers of the apostolic companions of Christ, and in place of “sweet reasonableness,” he applied the methods, quite alien to the Founder of Christianity, of the “Sons of Thunder.”  All controversialists then relied on isolated and inappropriate scriptural texts, and Biblical analogies which were not analogous; but Knox employed these things, with perhaps unusual inconsistency, in varying circumstances.  His “History” is not more scrupulous than that of other partisans in an exciting contest, and examples of his taste for personal scandal are not scarce.

CHAPTER II: KNOX, WISHART, AND THE MURDER OF BEATON: 1545-1546

Our earliest knowledge of Knox, apart from mention of him in notarial documents, is derived from his own History of the Reformation.  The portion of that work in which he first mentions himself was written about 1561-66, some twenty years after the events recorded, and in reading all this part of his Memoirs, and his account of the religious struggle, allowance must be made for errors of memory, or for erroneous information.  We meet him first towards the end of “the holy days of Yule”—Christmas, 1545.  Knox had then for some weeks been the constant companion and armed bodyguard of George Wishart, who was calling himself “the messenger of the Eternal God,” and preaching the new ideas in Haddington to very small congregations.  This Wishart, Knox’s master in the faith, was a Forfarshire man; he is said to have taught Greek at Montrose, to have been driven thence in 1538 by the Bishop of Brechin, and to have recanted certain heresies in 1539.  He had denied the merits of Christ as the Redeemer, but afterwards dropped that error, when persistence meant death at the stake.  It was in Bristol that he “burned his faggot,” in place of being burned himself.  There was really nothing humiliating in this recantation, for, after his release, he did not resume his heresy; clearly he yielded, not to fear, but to conviction of theological error.[15a]

He next travelled in Germany, where a Jew, on a Rhine boat, inspired or increased his aversion to works of sacred art, as being “idolatrous.”  About 1542-43 he was reading with pupils at Cambridge, and was remarked for the severity of his ascetic virtue, and for his great charity.  At some uncertain date he translated the Helvetic Confession of Faith, and he was more of a Calvinist than a Lutheran.  In July 1543 he returned to Scotland; at least he returned with some “commissioners to England,” who certainly came home in July 1543, as Knox mentions, though later he gives the date of Wishart’s return in 1544, probably by a slip of the pen.

Coming home in July 1543, Wishart would expect a fair chance of preaching his novel ideas, as peace between Scotland and Protestant England now seemed secure, and Arran, the Scottish Regent, the chief of the almost Royal House of Hamilton, was, for the moment, himself a Protestant.  For five days (August 28-September 3, 1543) the great Cardinal Beaton, the head of the party of the Church, was outlawed, and Wishart’s preaching at Dundee, about that date, is supposed by some[15b]to have stimulated an attack then made on the monasteries in the town.  But Arran suddenly recanted, deserted the Protestants and the faction attached to England, and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton, who, in November 1543, visited Dundee, and imprisoned the ringleaders in the riots.  They are called “the honestest men in the town,” by the treble traitor and rascal, Crichton, laird of Brunston in Lothian, at this time a secret agent of Sadleir, the envoy of Henry VIII. (November 25, 1543).

By April 1544, Henry was preparing to invade Scotland, and the “earnest professors” of Protestant doctrines in Scotland sent to him “a Scottish man called Wysshert,” with a proposal for the kidnapping or murder of Cardinal Beaton.  Brunston and other Scottish lairds of Wishart’s circle were agents of the plot, and in 1545-46 our George Wishart is found companioning with them.  When Cassilis took up the threads of the plot against Beaton, it was to Cassilis’s country in Ayrshire that Wishart went and there preached.  Thence he returned to Dundee, to fight the plague and comfort the citizens, and, towards the end of 1545, moved to Lothian, expecting to be joined there by his westland supporters, led by Cassilis—but entertaining dark forebodings of his doom.