During the session of the General Assembly in December 1563, Knox was compelled to chronicle domestic enormities. The Lord Treasurer, Richardson, having, like Captain Booth, “offended the law of Dian,” had to do penance before the whole congregation, and the sermon (unfortunately it is lost, probably it never was written out) was preached by Knox. A French apothecary of the Queen’s, and his mistress, were hanged on a charge of murdering their child. [{237a}] On January 9, 1564-65, Randolph noted that one of the Queen’s Maries, Mary Livingstone, is to marry John Sempill, son of Robert, third Lord Sempill, by an English wife. Knox assures us that “it is well known that shame hastened marriage between John Sempill, called ‘the Dancer,’ and Mary Livingstone, surnamed ‘the Lusty.’” The young people appear, however, to have been in no pressing hurry, as Randolph, on January 9, did not expect their marriage till the very end of February; they wished the Earl of Bedford, who was coming on a diplomatic mission, to be present. [{237b}] Mary, on March 9, 1565, made them a grant of lands, since “it has pleased God to move their hearts to join together in the state of matrimony.” [{237c}] She had ever since January been making the bride presents of feminine finery.
These proceedings indicating no precipitate haste, we may think that Mary Livingstone, like Mary of Guise, is only a victim of the Reformer’s taste for “society journalism.” Randolph, though an egregious gossip, says of the Four Maries, “they are all good,” but Knox writes that “the ballads of that age” did witness to the “bruit” or reputation of these maidens. As is well known the old ballad of “Mary Hamilton,” which exists in more than a dozen very diverse variants, in some specimens confuses one of the Maries, an imaginary “Mary Hamilton,” with the French maid who was hanged at the end of 1563. The balladist is thus responsible for a scandal against the fair sisterhood; there was no “Mary Hamilton,” and no “Mary Carmichael,” in their number—Beaton, Seton, Fleming, and Livingstone.
An offended Deity now sent frost in January 1564, and an aurora borealis in February, Knox tells us, and “the threatenings of the preachers were fearful,” in face of these unusual meteorological phenomena. [{238}]
Vice rose to such a pitch that men doubted if the Mass really was idolatry! Knox said, from the pulpit, that if the sceptics were right, he was “miserably deceived.” “Believe me, brethren, in the bowels of Christ, it is possible that you may be mistaken,” Cromwell was to tell the Commissioners of the General Assembly, on a day that still was in the womb of the future; the dawn of common sense rose in the south.
On March 20, much to the indignation of the Queen, the banns were read twice between Knox and a lady of the Royal blood and name, Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, a girl not above sixteen, in January 1563, when Randolph first speaks of the wooing. [{239}] The good Dr. M‘Crie does not mention the age of the bride! The lady was a very near kinswoman of Chatelherault. She had plenty of time for reflection, and as nobody says that she was coerced into the marriage, while Nicol Burne attributes her passion to sorcery, we may suppose that she was in love with our Reformer. She bore him several daughters, and it is to be presumed that the marriage, though in every way bizarre, was happy. Burne says that Knox wished to marry a Lady Fleming, akin to Chatelherault, but was declined; if so, he soon consoled himself.
At this time Riccio—a valet de chambre of the Queen in 1561-62—“began to grow great in Court,” becoming French Secretary at the end of the year. By June 3, 1565, Randolph is found styling Riccio “only governor” to Darnley. His career might have rivalled that of the equally low-born Cardinal Alberoni, but for the daggers of Moray’s party.
In the General Assembly of June 1564, Moray, Morton, Glencairn, Pitarro, Lethington, and other Lords of the Congregation held aloof from the brethren, but met the Superintendents and others to discuss the recent conduct of our Reformer, who was present. He was invited, by Lethington, to “moderate himself” in his references to the Queen, as others might imitate him, “albeit not with the same modesty and foresight,” for Lethington could not help bantering Knox. Knox, of course, rushed to his doctrine of “idolatry” as provocative of the wrath of God—we have heard of the bad harvest, and the frost in January. It is not worth while to pursue in detail the discourses, in which Knox said that the Queen rebelled against God “in all the actions of her life.” Ahab and Jezebel were again brought on the scene. It profited not Lethington to say that all these old biblical “vengeances” were “singular motions of the Spirit of God, and appertain nothing to our age.” If Knox could have understood that, he would not have been Knox. The point was intelligible; Lethington perceived it, but Knox never chose to do so. He went on with his isolated texts, Lethington vainly replying “the cases are nothing alike.” Knox came to his old stand, “the idolater must die the death,” and the executioners must be “the people of God.” Lethington quoted many opinions against Knox’s, to no purpose, opinions of Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Musculus, and Calvin, but our Reformer brought out the case of “Amasiath, King of Judah,” and “The Apology of Magdeburg.” As to the opinion of Calvin and the rest he drew a distinction. They had only spoken of the godly who were suffering under oppression, not of the godly triumphant in a commonwealth. He forgot, or did not choose to remember, a previous decision of his own, as we shall see.
When the rest of the party were discussing the question, Makgill, Clerk Register, reminded them of their previous debate in November 1561, when [{240}] Knox, after secretly writing to Calvin, had proposed to write to him for his opinion about the Queen’s Mass, and Lethington had promised to do so himself. But Lethington now said that, on later reflection, as Secretary of the Queen, he had scrupled, without her consent, to ask a foreigner whether her subjects might prevent her from enjoying the rites of her own religion—for that was what the “controversies” between her Highness and her subjects really and confessedly meant. [{241a}]
Knox was now requested to consult Calvin, “and the learned in other Kirks, to know their judgment in that question.” The question, judging from Makgill’s interpellation, was “whether subjects might lawfully take her Mass from the Queen.” [{241b}] As we know, Knox had already put the question to Calvin by a letter of October 24, 1561, and so had the anonymous writer of November 18, 1561, whom I identify with Arran. Knox now refused to write to “Mr. Calvin, and the learned of other Kirks,” saying (I must quote him textually, or be accused of misrepresentation), “I myself am not only fully resolved in conscience, but also I have heard the judgments in this, and all other things that I have affirmed in this Realm, of the most godly and most learned that be known in Europe. I come not to this Realm without their resolution; and for my assurance I have the handwritings of many; and therefore if I should move the same question again, what else should I do but either show my own ignorance and forgetfulness, or else inconstancy?” [{241c}] He therefore said that his opponents might themselves “write and complain upon him,” and so learn “the plain minds” of the learned—but nobody took the trouble. Knox’s defence was worded with the skill of a notary. He said that he had “heard the judgments” of “the learned and godly”; he did not say what these judgments were. Calvin, Morel, Bullinger, and such men, we know, entirely differed from his extreme ideas. He “came not without their resolution,” or approval, to Scotland, but that was not the question at issue.
If Knox had received from Calvin favourable replies to his own letter, and Arran’s, of October 24, November 18, 1561, can any one doubt that he would now have produced them, unless he did not wish the brethren to find out that he himself had written without their knowledge? We know what manner of answers he received, in 1554, orally from Calvin, in writing from Bullinger, to his questions about resistance to the civil power. [{242a}] I am sceptical enough to suppose that, if Knox had now possessed letters from Calvin, justifying the propositions which he was maintaining, such as that “the people, yea, or ane pairt of the people, may execute God’s jugementis against their King, being ane offender,” [{242b}] he would have exhibited them. I do not believe that he had any such letters from such men as Bullinger and Calvin. Indeed, we may ask whether the question of the Queen’s Mass had arisen in any realm of Europe except Scotland. Where was there a Catholic prince ruling over a Calvinistic state? If nowhere, then the question would not be raised, except by Knox in his letter to Calvin of October 24, 1561. And where was Calvin’s answer, and to what effect?