John Knox

by A. Taylor Innes

'If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth me.'

Induration of heart was not a charitable judgment to pass against a young woman brought up in the worst school of morals in Europe, but whom the speaker held never to have met 'God and his truth' till that forenoon. Yet, as usual, Knox's judgment was by no means wholly wrong. There is a certain brilliant hardness about the charm of Mary Queen of Scots, even with posterity; and as to religion, whatever may have been the case in the later years of her sad imprisonment, there is no evidence in her early days in Scotland of personal or earnest interest in the religion even of her own church.[107] And a tender and serious interest in religion was held by the whole Protestantism of that day to be the one gate for the individual into 'God's truth.' Had his Queen shown anything of this spirit of earnest enquiry, our rough Reformer might have been precipitate to help her steps, though they should be as yet on the wrong side of the dividing line. But Mary made no pretences on the subject, and it was her misfortune, and that of all around, that her opinion on religion—a matter in which she took no more interest than was natural to her years—should have been all important to her subjects. They at least were, or professed to be, in earnest about it; and the man who in her presence now represented that earnestness made no pretences either. But we may be sure that Knox's judgment on a 'proud mind' as to the more central and personal truths of religion, would not be mitigated by that keen 'wit' which played so freely round its external parts, and transfixed so easily his own theory of Church and State. We know from himself that Mary, having found the weak point of the intolerant legislation, took care to press upon it. She was 'ever crying conscience, conscience! it is a sore thing to constrain the conscience;'[108] and she selected for her 'flattering words' the best of the men around her, till from the question, 'Why may not the Queen have her own Mass, and the form of her religion? what can that hurt us or our religion?' there came a formal discussion and a vote of the Lords that they were not entitled to constrain her. This state of matters continued during the year 1562. But the real danger, of course, was from abroad, and Knox had intelligence of all that was going on there. In December 1562 a victory of the Guises in France had been followed by dancing at Holyrood; and Knox preached against 'taking pleasure for the displeasure of God's people.' The Queen sent for him, and suggested his speaking to herself privately rather than haranguing publicly upon her domestic proceedings: a proposal which he so promptly rejected that she at once turned her back on him. It was on this occasion that, hearing the whisper as he went out, 'He is not afraid,' he replied, with a 'reasonably merry' countenance, 'Wherefore should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman affray me? I have looked into the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been affrayed above measure.' But the effect of that pleasing face upon others around may be measured by a letter written next day to Cecil by Randolph, who had for some time been Queen Elizabeth's envoy in Edinburgh. He was an intelligent and well-meaning man; but Mary was far more than a match for him, as she had been in France for an abler diplomatist, Throckmorton. Randolph tells the English minister that Knox is still full of 'good zeal and affection' to England. 'I know also that his travail and care is great to unite the hearts of the princes and people of these two realms in perpetual love and hearty kindness.' In the previous year Randolph had heard an incident of Knox's first interview with Mary, which we only know from his letter. Even then Knox 'knocked so hastily upon her heart that he made her weep, as well you know there be of that sex that will do that as well for anger as for grief.' But since that date the Queen of Scots had turned her caressing courtesy directly upon this Englishman, and even the golden cup which she presented to him at Lord James Stewart's marriage had perhaps less influence with Randolph than the bright eyes of one of her 'four Maries' whom he was now pursuing. So he adds now that Knox 'is so full of mistrust in all the Queen's doings, words, and sayings, as though he were either of God's privy counsel, that know how He had determined of her from the beginning, or that he knew the secrets of her heart so well, that neither she did nor could have for ever one good thought of God or of His true religion.' No criticism could be more acute. And yet the research of later times has shown that Knox's judgment, or information, as to what Mary of Scots was now doing, was superior to that of all around him. This was the very close of 1562, and in the next month of January she extended her Catholic correspondence, which had hitherto been chiefly with the Guises and her Cardinal uncle, by letters to the Pope.[109] On the 31st she writes Pius IV. assuring him of her devotion to the Church, and that for it and for the restoration to it of her kingdom she is ready to sacrifice her life.[110] The bearer, too, of this secret missive was Cardinal Granvelle, from Madrid, and deep at this moment in the persecuting plans of Alva and his master Philip. For a new and greater danger was now rising for Scotland. Hitherto the chief pretenders for the hand of the Queen of Scots had been the Archduke Charles, and the Duke of Anjou. (The new King of France was also supposed to be in love with her.) But now the project was pressed of a marriage between her and Don Carlos, the oldest son of Philip and the heir of the mighty monarchy of Spain. And it was with this full in her mind, and with the determination to take a step forward in her own kingdom, that Mary again sent for Knox—this time to Lochleven, where she was hawking. The occasion was well chosen. The Queen's mass was now tolerated: why should not private subjects also be allowed to have it, provided they worshipped privately? 'Who can stop the Queen's subjects to be of the Queen's religion?' Already many Catholics had acted upon this reasoning at Easter of 1563; but in the West the Protestant barons and magistrates, instead of complaining to the Queen and her Council, had apprehended the wrong-doers and proposed to punish them. 'For two hours' the Queen urged him to persuade the gentlemen of the West 'not to put hands to punish any man for the using of themselves in their religion as pleased them.' Nothing could be more clearly right. But nothing could be more clearly against the law; and Knox assured her that if she would enforce that law herself her subjects would be quiet. But 'Will ye,' said she, 'that they shall take my sword into their hand?'

'The sword of justice, Madam,' he answered, 'is God's; and if the magistrate will not use it the people must do so. And therefore it shall be profitable to your Majesty to consider what is the thing your Grace's subjects look to receive of your Majesty, and what it is that ye ought to do unto them by mutual contract. They are bound to obey you, and that not but in God. You are bound to keep laws unto them. You crave of them service: they crave of you protection and defence against wicked doers.'

The Queen, 'somewhat offended, passed to her supper,' and Knox prepared to return to Edinburgh. But her brother, afterwards the Regent, had heard the result of the conference, and Mary learned that matters could not safely be left in this condition. Next morning the Queen sent for Knox as she was going out hawking. She had apparently forgotten all the keen dispute of the evening before; and her manner was caressing and confidential. What did Mr Knox think of Lord Ruthven's offering her a ring? 'I cannot love him,' she added, 'for I know him to use enchantment.' Was Mr Knox not going to Dumfries, to make the Bishop of Athens the superintendent of the Kirk in that county? He was, Knox answered; the proposed superintendent being a man in whom he had confidence. 'If you knew him,' said Mary, 'as well as I do, ye would never promote him to that office, nor yet to any other within the Kirk.' In yet another matter, and one more private and delicate, she required his help. Her half-sister, Lady Argyll, and the Earl, her husband, were, she was afraid, not on good terms. Knox had once reconciled them before, but, 'do this much for my sake, as once again to put them at unity.' And so she dismissed him with promises to enforce the laws against the mass.

Knox for once fell under the spell. He seems to have believed that this most charming of women was at last leaning to the side of her native land. And so he sat down and wrote a long letter to Argyll. He went to Dumfries, and on making enquiry, he found that the Queen was right in her shrewd estimate of the proposed superintendent, and took means to prevent the election. It turned out, too, that she had kept her promise about citing offenders, and no fewer than forty-eight persons, one of them an Archbishop, had been indicted. The first Parliament since her landing had been summoned for June, and Moray and Lethington seem to have suggested to Knox that the Queen would be glad then to ratify the Acts of 1560, in exchange for the approval by the estates of some suitable marriage. Even now, it was these two heads of the Protestant party whom Knox trusted rather than Mary. But the young Queen had outwitted all of them together. The prosecutions throughout the country had pacified the Protestants, and they did not come up to the Parliament. When it met, it did not even ask that the 'state of religion' should be ratified. Meantime the Cardinal of Lorraine had carried to the Council of Trent the adhesion of the Queen of Scots, and a special congregation was held by it for the private reception of her letter. Worse still, the plan for a Spanish marriage, and for setting a Scoto-Spanish queen upon the throne of the Bloody Mary, was now actively prosecuted. All this spring, while professing to carry out her promises to Knox, Mary was negotiating with Madrid, and 'already, in imagination, Queen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Flanders, Naples, and the Indies,' she was but little interested in the plans which her Scottish nobility were proposing for her to England. Knox had hoped that if not a Protestant noble like Leicester or Arran, at least a royal Protestant like the King of Denmark or the King of Sweden, would, with Elizabeth's help, be a successful suitor. But Queen Elizabeth, whom Knox pithily describes as 'neither good Protestant nor yet resolute Papist,' was not disposed to help any one to marry before herself, least of all her lovely cousin. And the Scottish statesmen, Moray and Maitland, like her own English advisers often, were now so driven to desperation by Elizabeth's vacillations that they had actually—possibly with the hope of frightening her—pressed both at home and abroad the project of marrying the Queen of Scots to the heir of Spain! This apparently came to the knowledge of Knox along with the refusal to meet his hopes on the part of the Scots Parliament; and now his cup was full. Lord James Stewart, by this time the Earl of Moray, son-in-law of the Earl Marischal, and gifted with great estates of the forfeited Earl of Huntly, had been his chief friend. But 'familiarly after that time they spake not together more than a year and a half; for the said John, by his letter, gave a discharge to the said Earl of all farther intromission or care with his affairs.' In this stately letter Knox recalled all their past career in common, and added that, seeing his hopes had been disappointed,

'I commit you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those who better please you. I praise my God, I this day leave you victor of your enemies, promoted to great honours, and in credit and authority with your sovereign. If so ye long continue, none within the realm shall be more glad than I shall be; but if that after this ye shall decay (as I fear that ye shall) then call to mind by what means God exalted you.'

But the pulpit remained to him, and the pulpit in those days had sometimes to combine the functions of free Parliament and free press. Knox went into St Giles', and in a great sermon before the assembled Lords, from whose retrospective eloquence we have already quoted,[111] he drove right at the heart of the situation.

'And now, my Lords, to put end to all, I hear of the Queen's marriage; dukes, brethren to emperors, and kings, all strive for the best game. But this, my Lords, will I say—note the day, and bear witness after—whensoever the nobility of Scotland, professing the Lord Jesus, consent that an infidel (and all Papists are infidels) shall be head to your Sovereign, ye do as far as in you lieth to banish Christ Jesus from this realm; ye bring God's vengeance upon the country, a plague upon yourselves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your Sovereign.'

That sovereign could scarcely be expected to take the same view, and for the last time the Queen sent for Knox. No one knew so well as she that he had laid his finger on the true hinge of the political question, and that her opponent would have a far stronger case now than at any of their previous interviews. She burst into tears the moment he entered. 'I have borne with you,' she said most truly, 'in all your rigorous manner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means.' 'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the pulpit, where he had to speak to the nobility and to think of the good of the whole commonwealth.

'What have you to do,' she persisted, 'with my marriage? or what are you within this commonwealth?'