Part 1 (1/2)

John Knox.

by Wm. M. Taylor.

PREFACE.

The sources from which the following narrative has been derived are (1) the splendidly edited and complete edition of Knox's Works in six volumes, by Dr. David Laing; (2) the Memoir of the Reformer, by Dr.

Thomas McCrie, forming the first volume of the collected works of that eminent theologian; (3) the monograph by the late Professor Lorimer, D.D., ent.i.tled ”John Knox and the Church of England”; and (4) the Histories of the Period, more especially that of Scotland, by John Hill Burton, vols. iii. and iv., and that of England, by J. A. Froude, vols.

v. and vi. Some a.s.sistance also has been derived from ”The Scottish Reformation,” by Professor Lorimer; and the two sketches by Carlyle, the one in his ”Heroes and Hero Wors.h.i.+p,” and the other in his essay on the Portraits {vi} of John Knox, have been both helpful and suggestive.

Quotations have been generally indicated, but this acknowledgment must cover any accidental omission to give to each author his due; and for the rest the reader may be a.s.sured that while no material fact has been omitted, nothing has been recorded for which ample authority could not be given. The figure has been felt to be too large for the canvas to which we have been restricted, but we have sought to reproduce, as faithfully as possible the man as he was, and if we may succeed in removing any of the unreasonable prejudice, with which many still regard the Scottish Reformer, the story of his life will not be retold by us in vain.

W. M. T.

NEW YORK.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE AND CALL TO THE MINISTRY, 1505-1547.

On the sixteenth day of January, 1546, George Wishart delivered a remarkable sermon in the church of Haddington. Two things had combined to produce special depression in his heart. Shortly before he entered the pulpit a boy had put into his hands a letter informing him that his friends in Kyle would not be able to keep an appointment which they had made to meet him in Edinburgh. This news so saddened him that he expressed himself as ”weary of the world,” because he perceived that ”men began to be weary of G.o.d.” Nor was his despondency removed when he rose to preach, for instead of the crowds that used to a.s.semble to hear him in that church, there were not more than a hundred persons present. It was thus made apparent to him that the efforts of his enemies for his overthrow were now to be successful, and so instead of treating the second table of the law as he had been expected to do, he poured forth a torrent of warning and denunciation, not unlike some of the fervid {2} utterances of the old Hebrew prophets. The effect produced was all the more solemn, because he evidently felt that he was bearing his last public testimony against the evils of his times.

When he had concluded he bade his friends farewell, and to John Knox, who throughout his sojourn in Lothian had attended him, armed with a two-handed sword, as a protection against the a.s.sa.s.sination with which he had twice been threatened, and who had pressed to be allowed to accompany him to Ormiston, where he was to spend the night, he said, ”Nay, return to your bairns” (pupils), ”and G.o.d bless you! One is sufficient for one sacrifice.”

The good man's presentiment was all too surely realized. Before midnight the house in which he slept was surrounded by a band of which the Earl of Bothwell was the head, and he was given up by his host to that n.o.bleman, only however on the receipt of a pledge, over which ”hands” were ”struck,” to the effect that his personal safety should be secured, and he should not be delivered into his enemies' power. But promises in these days were not of much account, and Bothwell was easily prevailed upon to give him up to Cardinal Beaton, who took him first to Edinburgh Castle, and afterwards to St. Andrews. There, in defiance of the protest of the Regent, he was hurriedly subjected to the form of a trial by the cardinal, and being, of course, found guilty, he was executed at the stake on the first of March.

{3}

Thus it is, as the body-guard of Wishart, that we get our first glimpse of John Knox in history; and very characteristic of the man this first appearance was. He comes upon the scene as unheralded as Elijah, and, like him too, he is seen from the first to be set for the defence of the truth. He was a sword-bearer all through; only when he laid aside the two-handed brand which he carried before Wishart, he took in its stead ”the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of G.o.d.”

Before proceeding to tell the stirring story of his life, however, it may be well to take a brief survey of the condition of Scotland at the moment when he stepped into the arena of its national strife.

Little more than three years before the date of Wishart's execution, the Queen of Scotland had given birth to that Mary Stuart, whose character has been the puzzle of historians, and whose chequered career has been the theme of poets almost ever since. Her father, James V., broken-hearted by the utter defeat of his army by the English at the battle of Solway Moss, died only a few days after his daughter's birth.

Thus it came about, that in a critical time which tested the statesmans.h.i.+p of the world's strongest rulers, alike in England, France, Germany, and Spain, Scotland had a baby sovereign, and the controlling of its affairs became an object of keen compet.i.tion between contending parties. The queen-mother, Mary of Guise, a woman of marked ability, of much cunning, and of little principle, was, both from national and religious leanings, on {4} the side of the Catholic party.

Of that party the head at this time was David Beaton, Archbishop of St.

Andrews, and a Cardinal of the Church. This artful prelate, ”the nephew of his uncle,” was possessed of eminent talents, but was characterized by cruelty, licentiousness, and unscrupulousness. He had prevailed on James V. to violate the promise which he had made to his uncle, Henry VIII., to meet him at Newcastle. The haughty Tudor had now broken with the Romish see, and was anxious, if possible, to induce his nephew to follow his example. But the cardinal, as great a master of intrigue as was the English king himself, had succeeded in keeping the Scottish monarch from putting himself under the spell of his uncle's influence, and Henry, exasperated at his defeat, sent into Scotland an army, whose success at Solway Moss led indirectly, as we have seen, to the death of James. When that event occurred, Beaton produced a forged will, purporting to be the last testament of the king, and nominating him as Regent with three of the n.o.bles as his a.s.sistants. On the strength of that doc.u.ment he had himself proclaimed as Regent at the Cross of Edinburgh. But the validity of the instrument was annulled by the Scottish Parliament; and in the spring of 1543, James, Earl of Arran, heir presumptive of the crown, was appointed to the dignity which the cardinal had so eagerly, and so unrighteously sought to make his own.

This n.o.bleman, ”notorious,” as Burton says, ”for fickleness,” had been at first on the side of the Reformation, {5} and was then a.s.siduously courted by Henry VIII. He had even consented to the marriage of the baby queen to the young English Prince Edward. But the influence of the queen-mother and the cardinal, backed by that of his own natural brother, the Abbot of Paisley, together with the unjust and impolitic demands of the English monarch himself, combined to turn him from his original leanings. He publicly abjured the Protestant faith, and was received into the bosom of the Catholic Church. He broke off all negotiations for a matrimonial alliance between the royal houses of England and Scotland, and ultimately consented to the betrothal of Mary to the Dauphin of France. The result of these proceedings was a protracted war with England, during which Scotland was repeatedly invaded, and portions of it devastated by the southern forces.

But while these political and international intrigues, in which it must be confessed that there was little scrupulousness on either side, were going on, a great spiritual movement was making quiet progress among the people. The Reformation from Popery had begun in Scotland also.

Patrick Hamilton, its protomartyr, had been put to death in 1528; but the smoke of his burning, to borrow the well-known words of one of the elder Beaton's own servants, ”had infected all on whom it blew”; and the books of the German Reformers, together with the English Testaments of William Tyndale, had wrought like hidden leaven, especially among the more intelligent of the community. {6} Thus we account for the fact that, in spite of legal prohibitions and public executions, the knowledge of evangelical truth was diffused, even when there was no living voice to proclaim it publicly in the hearing of the mult.i.tudes; so that when a man like Wishart did make his appearance, he found crowds to listen to him appreciatively both in Dundee and Ayr. The Lollards of Kyle had still worthy descendants in that historic district; and the merchants in towns like that of Leith, whose commerce brought them into contact with men from Hamburg, Antwerp, and the cities of the Rhine, were disposed to welcome the new doctrines. Among the n.o.bles, men like Glencairn and Errol and Ruthven ranged themselves on the side of the Reformers; while the influence of a satirist like Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, and a scholar like Henry Balnaves of Halhill, was given heartily to their cause.

But next only to the diffusion of the Scriptures among the people, the greatest factor in the production of the Reformation in Scotland was the degraded condition into which in that country the Church of Rome itself had sunk. ”That which decayeth is ready to vanish away.” There were no longer in it the elements of vitality. It was past purifying, and had to be swept clean out. Its corruptions were too open to be denied, and too gross to be defended. The grasping selfishness and shameless licentiousness of the upper clergy were equalled only by the ignorance and general incompetence of the lower, so that there had sprung up among the people generally a {7} hatred of the order to which both belonged. This was deepened and intensified by the spirit in which the first efforts of the Reformers had been met, for in Scotland as elsewhere the prison and the stake were the short and easy answers made by papal intolerance to all the arguments which the preachers brought against the errors of Romanism. But these were answers which only turned more general attention to the statements of the Reformers, and gave wider circulation to their words. The storm of contrary wind unfurls the banner, and makes thereby its inscription the more legible, and in the same way the persecution of those who proclaimed the truth only fell out to the furtherance of that which it was designed to arrest.

But Cardinal Beaton's conscience was too hard to feel the crime, and his eye was too dim to see the blunder which he was committing in putting Wishart to death. He looked only at immediate results, and thought perhaps that by silencing the preacher he could arrest the influence of the words which had already gone from him. But in reality he was himself standing above a mine which before long exploded for his own destruction. His checkmating of Henry VIII. so exasperated that monarch that he entered into correspondence, through his agent Sir Robert Sadler, with certain Scotsmen whose disaffection to the cardinal was well known, and who, at his suggestion, or at least with his concurrence and approval, perhaps also with his reward, entered into a conspiracy to ”take him out of the way.” {8} Accordingly on the morning of the 29th of May, just three months after the martyrdom of Wishart, Cardinal Beaton was a.s.sa.s.sinated by a company of men headed by Norman Leslie. That the wily priest had himself been guilty of attempts to get rid of his adversaries by the same unscrupulous means is not to be denied. It is equally certain that, as things then were, it would have been impossible to bring him to trial for any of his enormities. But still the manner of his ”taking off” is not only utterly indefensible, but also worthy of the deepest reprobation, and it is too true, as Dr.

Lorimer has said, that ”the exasperation of feeling called forth by a deed so daring and criminal gave rise to proceedings against the conspirators which, being extended to all their abettors real or supposed, had the effect of r.e.t.a.r.ding the progress of the Reformation for many years, and of weighing it down with a load of opprobrium from the effects of which it could only slowly recover.”[1]

Foreseeing that they would be the objects of bitter attack, the conspirators, after they had done their b.l.o.o.d.y work, resolved to keep possession of the Castle of St. Andrews which they had so unexpectedly seized, and there they were speedily joined by at least one hundred and forty persons, numbering among them Kirkaldy of Grange, Melville of Raith, Balfour of Mount-quhany, and many gentlemen of Fife and the neighbouring {9} counties. They put the castle into a state of defence, and were besieged by an army under command of the Regent Arran, against whom they held out, more perhaps from the incompetence of the besiegers than from the skill or strength of the besieged, until the end of January, 1547. At that date the siege was suspended under an agreement which stipulated that the Castle was still to remain in the hands of its defenders, on the conditions that they should hold it for the Regent and not deliver it to England; and that they should not be required to surrender it even to the Regent until he had obtained from Rome absolution for those who had been implicated in the murder of the cardinal. Upon his side the Regent agreed to withdraw his forces to the south of the Forth, and from the beginning of the year on till the following June the inmates of the Castle were permitted to go out and in at their pleasure, and to receive all that came to them.