It must always be remembered that the threat of the death penalty often meant, in practice, very little. It was denounced, under Mary of Guise (February 9, 1559), against men who bullied priests, disturbed services, and ate meat in Lent. It was denounced against shooters of wild fowl, and against those, of either religious party, who broke the Proclamation of October 1561. Yet “nobody seemed one penny the worse” as regards their lives, though the punishments of fining and banishing were, on occasions, enforced against Catholics.
We may marvel that, in the beginning, Catholic martyrs did not present themselves in crowds to the executioner. But even under the rule of Rome it would not be easy to find thirty cases of martyrs burned at the stake by “the bloudie Bishops,” between the fifteenth century and the martyrdom of Myln. By 1560 the old Church was in such a hideous decline—with ruffianly men of quality in high spiritual places; with priests who did not attend Mass, and in many cases could not read; with churches left to go to ruin; with license so notable that, in one foundation, the priest is only forbidden to keep a constant concubine—that faith had waxed cold, and no Catholic felt “ripe” for martyrdom. The elements of a League, as in France, did not exist. There was no fervently Catholic town population like that of Paris; no popular noble warriors, like the Ducs de Guise, to act as leaders. Thus Scotland, in this age, ran little risk of a religious civil war. No organised and armed faction existed to face the Congregation. When the counter-Reformation set in, many Catholics endured fines and exile with constancy.
The theology of the Confession of Faith is, of course, Calvinistic. No “works” are, technically, “good” which are not the work of the Spirit of our Lord, dwelling in our hearts by faith. “Idolaters,” and wicked people, not having that spirit, can do no good works. The blasphemy that “men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion soever they have professed,” is to be abhorred. “The Kirk is invisible,” consisting of the Elect, “who are known only to God.” This gave much cause of controversy to Knox’s Catholic opponents. “The notes of the true Church” are those of Calvin’s. As to the Sacrament, though the elements be not the natural body of Christ, yet “the faithful, in the right use of the Lord’s Table, so do eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord Jesus that He remains in them and they in Him . . . in such conjunction with Christ Jesus as the natural man cannot comprehend.”
This is a highly sacramental and confessedly mystical doctrine, not less unintelligible to “the natural man” than the Catholic theory which Knox so strongly reprobated. Alas, that men called Christian have shed seas of blood over the precise sense of that touching command of our Lord, which, though admitted to be incomprehensible, they have yet endeavoured to comprehend and define!
A serious task for Knox was to draw up, with others, a “Book of the Policy and Discipline of the Kirk,” a task entrusted to them in April 1560. In politics, till January 1561, the Lords hoped that they might induce Elizabeth (then entangled with Leicester, as Knox knew) to marry Arran, but whether “Glycerium” (as Bishop Jewel calls her) had already detected in “the saucy youth” “a half crazy fool,” as Mr. Froude says, or not, she firmly refused. She much preferred Lord Robert Dudley, whose wife had just then broken her neck. The unfortunate Arran had fought resolutely, Knox tells us, by the side of Lord James, in the winter of 1559, but he already, in 1560, showed strange moods, and later fell into sheer lunacy. In December died “the young King of France, husband to our Jezebel—unhappy Francis . . . he suddenly perished of a rotten ear . . . in that deaf ear that never would hear the truth of God” (December 5, 1560). We have little of Knox’s poetry, but he probably composed a translation, in verse, of a Latin poem indited by one of “the godly in France,” whence he borrowed his phrase “a rotten ear” (aure putrefacta corruit).
“Last Francis, that unhappy child,
His father’s footsteps following plain,
To Christ’s crying deaf ears did yield,
A rotten ear was then his bane.”
The version is wonderfully close to the original Latin.
Meanwhile, Francis was hardly cold before Arran wooed his idolatrous widow, Queen Mary, “with a gay gold ring.” She did not respond favourably, and “the Earl bare it heavily in his heart, and more heavily than many would have wissed,” says Knox, with whom Arran was on very confidential terms. Knox does not rebuke his passion for Jezebel. He himself “was in no small heaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bedfellow, Marjorie Bowes,” of whom we know very little, except that she worked hard to lighten the labours of Knox’s vast correspondence. He had, as he says, “great intelligence both with the churches and some of the Court of France,” and was the first to receive news of the perilous illness of the young King. He carried the tidings to the Duke and Lord James, at the Hamilton house near Kirk o’ Field, but would not name his informant. Then came the news of the King’s death from Lord Grey de Wilton, at Berwick, and a Convention of the Nobles was proclaimed for January 15, 1561, to “peruse newly over again” the Book of Discipline.
CHAPTER XIII: KNOX AND THE BOOK OF DISCIPLINE
This Book of Discipline, containing the model of the Kirk, had been seen by Randolph in August 1560, and he observed that its framers would not come into ecclesiastical conformity with England. They were “severe in that they profess, and loth to remit anything of that they have received.” As the difference between the Genevan and Anglican models contributed so greatly to the Civil War under Charles I., the results may be regretted; Anglicans, by 1643, were looked on as “Baal worshippers” by the precise Scots.