The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 6 (of 7)

by Arthur Thomas Malkin

Engraved by B. Holl.
JOHN KNOX.
From a Picture in the possession of Lord Somerville.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

Having cut himself off from the emoluments of the Established Church, Knox engaged as tutor in the family of Douglas of Langniddrie, a gentleman of East Lothian. As a man of known ability, and as a priest, he was especially obnoxious to the hierarchy; and it is said that Archbishop Beatoun sought his life by private assassination, as well as openly under colour of the law. At Easter, 1547, Knox, with many other Protestants, took refuge in the castle of St. Andrew’s, which was seized and held, after the archbishop’s murder, by the band of conspirators who had done the deed. He here continued his usual course of instruction to his pupils, combined with public reading and explanation of the scriptures to those who sought his assistance. His talents pointed him out as a fitting person for the ministry; but he was very reluctant to devote himself to that important charge, and was only induced to do so, after a severe internal struggle, by a solemn call from the minister and the assembled congregation. He distinguished himself during his short abode at St. Andrew’s by zeal, boldness, and success in preaching. But in the following July the castle surrendered; and, by a scandalous violation of the articles of capitulation, the garrison were made prisoners of war, and subjected to great and unusual ill-treatment. Knox, with many others, was placed in a French galley, and compelled to labour like a slave at the oar. His health was greatly injured by the hardships which he underwent in that worst of prisons; but his spirit rose triumphant over suffering. During this period he committed to writing an abstract of the doctrines which he had preached, which he found means to convey to his friends in Scotland, with an earnest exhortation to persevere in the faith through persecution and trial. He obtained liberty in February, 1549, but by what means is not precisely known.

At that time, under the direction of Cranmer, and with the zealous concurrence of the young King Edward VI., the Reformation in England was advancing with rapid pace. Knox repaired thither, as to the safest harbour; and in the dearth of able and earnest preachers which then existed, he found at once a welcome and active employment. The north was appointed to be the scene of his usefulness, and he continued to preach there, living chiefly at Berwick and Newcastle, till the end of 1552. He was then summoned to London, to appear before the Privy Council on a frivolous charge, of which he was honourably acquitted. The King was anxious to secure his services to the English Church, and caused the living of All Hallows, in London, and even a bishopric, to be offered him. But Knox had conscientious scruples to some points of the English establishment. He continued, however, to preach, itinerating through the country, until, after the accession of Mary, the exercise of the Protestant religion was forbidden by act of parliament, December 20, 1553. Shortly afterwards he yielded to the importunity of his friends, and consulted his own safety by retiring to France. Previous to his departure, he solemnised his marriage with Miss Bowes, a Yorkshire lady of good family, to whom he had been some time engaged.

Knox took up his abode in the first instance at Dieppe, but he soon went to Geneva, and there made acquaintance with Calvin, whom he loved and venerated, and followed more closely than any others of the fathers of the Reformation in his views both of doctrine and ecclesiastical discipline. Towards the close of 1554 he was invited by a congregation of English exiles resident at Frankfort to become one of their pastors. Internal discords, chiefly concerning the ritual and matters of ceremonial observance, in which, notwithstanding the severe and uncomplying temper usually ascribed to him, no blame seems justly due to Knox, soon forced him to quit this charge, and he returned to Geneva; where he spent more than a year in a learned leisure, peculiarly grateful to him after the troubled life which he had led so long. But in August, 1555, moved by the favourable aspect of the time, and by the entreaties of his family, from whom he had now been separated near two years, he returned to Scotland, and was surprised and rejoiced at the extraordinary avidity with which his preaching was attended. He visited various districts, both north and south, and won over two noblemen, who became eminent supporters of the Reformation, the heir-apparent of the earldom of Argyle, and Lord James Stuart, afterwards Earl of Murray. But in the middle of these successful labours he received a call from an English congregation at Geneva to become their pastor; and he appears to have felt it a duty to comply with their request. It would seem more consonant to his character to have remained in Scotland, to watch over the seed which he had sown, and that his own country had the most pressing claim upon his services. But the whole tenor of his life warrants the belief that he was actuated by no unworthy or selfish motives; and in the absence of definite information, some insight into the nature of his feelings may probably be gained from a letter addressed to some friends in Edinburgh, in March, 1557. “Assure of that, that whenever a greater number among you shall call upon me than now hath bound me to serve them, by His grace it shall not be the fear of punishment, neither yet of the death temporal, that shall impede my coming to you.” He quitted Scotland in July, 1556.

During this absence Knox maintained a frequent correspondence with his brethren in Scotland, and both by exhortation and by his advice upon difficult questions submitted to his judgment, was still of material service in keeping alive their spirit. Two of his works composed during this period require mention; his share in the English translation of the Scriptures, commonly called the ‘Geneva Bible,’ and the ‘Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regimen of Women,’ a treatise expressly directed against the government of Mary of England, but containing a bold and unqualified enunciation of the principle, that to admit a woman to sovereignty is contrary to nature, justice, and the revealed will of God. In January, 1559, at the invitation of the leading persons of the Protestant congregation, he again returned to Scotland. Matters at this time were drawing to a crisis. The Queen Regent, after temporising while the support of a large and powerful party was essential to her, had thrown off disguise, and openly avowed her determination to use force for the suppression of heresy: while the leading Protestants avowed as plainly their resolution of protecting their preachers; and becoming more and more sensible of their own increasing strength, resolved to abolish the Roman, and set up the Reformed method of worship in those places to which their influence or feudal power extended. St. Andrew’s was fixed on for the commencement of the experiment; and under the protection of the Earl of Argyle and Lord James Stuart, Prior of St. Andrew’s, Knox, who on his landing had been proclaimed a rebel and outlaw, undertook to preach publicly in the cathedral of that city. The archbishop sent word that he should be fired upon if he ventured to appear in the pulpit, and as that prelate was supported by a stronger force than the retinue of the Protestant noblemen, they thought it best that he should abstain at this time from thus exposing his life. Knox remained firm to his purpose. After reminding them that he had first preached the Gospel in that church, of the sufferings of his captivity, and of the confident hope which he had expressed to many that he should again perform his high mission in that same church, he besought them not to stand in the way when Providence had brought him to the spot. The archbishop’s proved to be an empty threat. Knox preached for four successive days without interruption, and with such effect, that the magistrates and the inhabitants agreed to set up the reformed worship in their town; the monasteries were destroyed, and the churches stripped of images and pictures. Both parties now rose in arms. During the contest which ensued, Knox was a chief agent in conducting the correspondence between Elizabeth and the Lords of the Congregation. The task suited neither his profession nor his character, and he rejoiced when he was relieved from it. In July, 1560, a treaty was concluded with the King and Queen of France, by which the administration of the Queen Regent was terminated; and in August a parliament was convoked, which abolished the papal jurisdiction, prohibited the celebration of mass, and rescinded the laws enacted against Protestant worship.

From the persecuted and endangered teacher of a proscribed religion, Knox had now become, not indeed the head, but a leader and venerated father of an Established Church. He was at once appointed the Protestant minister of Edinburgh, and his influence ceased not to be felt from this time forward in all things connected with the Church, and in many particulars of civil policy. Still his anxieties were far from an end. Many things threatened and impeded the infant Church. Far from acquiescing in the recent acts of the parliament, the young King and Queen of France were bent on putting down the rebellion, as they termed it, in Scotland by force of arms. The death of Francis put an end to that danger; but another, no less serious, was opened by the arrival of Mary in August, 1561, to assume her paternal sovereignty, with a fixed determination of reviving the supremacy of the religion in which she had been brought up, and to which she was devotedly attached. There were also two subjects upon which Knox felt peculiarly anxious, and in which he was thwarted by the lukewarmness, as he considered it, of the legislature,—the establishment of a strict and efficacious system of church discipline, and the entire devotion of the wealth of the Catholic priesthood to the promotion of education, and the maintenance of the true religion. In both these points he was thwarted by the indifference or interestedness of the nobility, who had possessed themselves, to a large amount, of the lands and tithes formerly enjoyed by monasteries.

It soon became evident that the Queen disliked and feared Knox. She regarded his ‘Blast against the Regimen of Women’ as an attack upon her own right to the throne; and this is not surprising, though Knox always declared that book to be levelled solely against the late Queen of England, and professed his perfect readiness to submit to Mary’s authority in all things lawful, and to wave all discussion or allusion to the obnoxious tenet. His freedom of speech in the pulpit was another constant source of offence; and it is not to be denied that, although the feelings of that age warranted a greater latitude than would now be tolerated in a teacher of religion, his energetic and severe temper led him to use violent and indiscreet language in speaking of public men and public things. For Mary herself he prayed in terms which, however fitting for a minister to employ towards one of his flock whom he regarded to be in deadly and pernicious error, a queen could hardly be expected to endure from a subject without anger. Accordingly, he was several times summoned to her presence, to apologise or answer for his conduct. The narrations of these interviews are very interesting: they show the ascendancy which he had gained over the haughty spirit of the Queen, and at the same time exonerate him from the charge urged by her apologists of having treated her with personal disrespect, and even brutality. He expressed uncourtly opinions in plain and severe language; farther than this he neither violated the courtesy due from man to woman, nor the respect due from a subject to a superior. In addition to the causes of offence already specified, he had remonstrated, from her first landing, against the toleration of the mass in her own chapel. And at a later time, he spoke so freely concerning the probable consequence to the Reformed Church from her marrying a Papist, that in reprimanding and remonstrating with him she burst into a passion of tears. He remained unmoved, protesting that he saw her Majesty’s tears with reluctance, but was constrained, since he had given her no just ground of offence, rather to sustain her tears than to hurt his conscience, and betray the commonwealth through his silence. This interview is one of the things upon which Mr. Hume has sought to raise a prejudice against the reformer in his partial account of this period.

Many of the nobility who had aided in the establishment of the Reformation, gained over either by the fascination of Mary’s beauty and manners, or by the still more cogent appeal of personal interest, were far from seconding Knox’s efforts, or partaking in his apprehensions. The Earl of Murray was so far won over to adopt a temporising and conciliatory policy, that a quarrel ensued in 1563 between him and Knox, which lasted for two years, until quenched, as Knox expresses it, by the water of affliction. Maitland of Lethington, once an active Reformer, a man of powerful and versatile talents, who was now made Secretary of State, openly espoused the Queen’s wishes. In the summer of 1563, Knox was involved in a charge of high treason, for having addressed a circular to the chief Protestant gentlemen, requesting them to attend the trial of two persons accused of having created a riot at the Queen’s chapel. It appears that he held an especial commission from the General Assembly to summon such meetings, when occasion seemed to him to require them. Upon this charge of treasonably convoking the lieges, he was brought before the privy council. Murray and Maitland were earnest to persuade him into submission and acknowledgment of error. Knox, however, with his usual firmness and uprightness, refused positively to confess a fault when he was conscious of none, and defended himself with so much power, that by the voice of a majority of the council he was declared free of all blame.

In March, 1564, more than three years after the death of his first wife, Knox was again married to a daughter of Lord Ochiltree, a zealous Protestant. Throughout that year and the following, he continued to preach as usual. Meanwhile, the Protestant establishment, though confirmed by the parliament, remained still unrecognised by the Queen, whose hasty marriage to Lord Henry Darnley in July, 1565, increased the alarm with which her conduct had already inspired the Reformers. But early in the following year, when Mary, in conjunction with her uncles of the House of Lorrain, had planned the formal re-establishment of Catholicism, her dissensions with her husband led to the assassination of Rizzio, and in rapid succession to the murder of Darnley, her marriage with Bothwell, and the train of events which ended in her formal deposition and the coronation of her infant son James VI. It is denied that Knox was privy to the assassination of Rizzio, and the tenor of his actions warrants us in disbelieving that he would have been an accomplice in any deed of blood; but after that event, he spoke of it in terms of satisfaction, indiscreet, liable to perversion, and unbecoming a Christian preacher. The Queen’s resentment for this and other reasons became so warm against him, that it was judged proper for him to retire from Edinburgh. He preached at the coronation of James VI. After Mary was made prisoner and confined at Lochleven, he, in common with most of the ministers and the great body of the people, insisted strongly on the duty of bringing her to trial for the crimes of murder and adultery, and of inflicting capital punishment if her guilt were proved.