John Knox and the Reformation

Transcribed from the 1905 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
To Maurice Hewlett
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.
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.”