Church History (Volumes 1-3)

by J. H. Kurtz

§ 139.2. Denmark and Norway.—Christian II., nephew of the Elector of Saxony and brother-in-law of the Emperor Charles V., although he had associated himself with the Romish hierarchy in Sweden for the overthrow of the national party, had in Denmark taken the side of the Reformation against the clergy, who were there supreme. In A.D. 1521 he succeeded in getting Carlstadt to come to his assistance, but he was soon forced to quit the country. In A.D. 1523 the clergy and nobles formally renounced their allegiance, and gave the crown to his uncle Frederick I., Duke of Schleswig and Holstein. Christian fled to Saxony, was there completely won over to the Reformation by Luther, converted also his wife, the emperor’s sister, and had the first Danish N.T., by Hans Michelson, printed at Leipzig and circulated in Denmark. To secure the emperor’s aid, however, he abjured the evangelical faith at Augsburg in A.D. 1530. In the following year he conquered Norway, and bound himself on his coronation to maintain the Catholic religion. But in A.D. 1532 he was obliged to surrender to Frederick, and spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in prison, where he repented his apostasy, and had the opportunity of instructing himself by the study of the Danish Bible.—Frederick I. had been previously favourable to the Reformation, yet his hands were bound by the express terms of his election. His son Christian III. unreservedly introduced the Reformation into his duchies. In this he was encouraged by his father. In A.D. 1526 he openly professed the evangelical faith, and invited the Danish reformer Hans Tausen, a disciple of Luther, who had preached the gospel amid much persecution since A.D. 1524, to settle as preacher in Copenhagen. At a diet at Odensee [Odense] in A.D. 1527 he restricted episcopal jurisdiction, proclaimed universal religious toleration, gave priests liberty to marry and to leave their cloisters, and thus laid the foundations of the Reformation. Tausen in A.D. 1530 submitted to the nobles his own confession, Confessio Hafinca, and the Reformation rapidly advanced. Frederick died in A.D. 1533. The bishops now rose in a body, and insisted that the estates should refuse to acknowledge his son Christian III. But when the burgomaster of Lübeck, taking advantage of the anarchy, plotted to subject Denmark to the proud commercial city, and in A.D. 1534 actually laid siege to Copenhagen, the Jutland nobles hastened to swear fealty to Christian. He drove out the Lübeckers, and by A.D. 1536 had possession of the whole land. He resolved now to put an end for ever to the machinations of the clergy. In August, A.D. 1536, he had all bishops imprisoned in one day, and at a diet at Copenhagen had them formally deposed. Their property fell into the royal exchequer, all monasteries were secularized, some presented to the nobles, some converted into hospitals and schools. In order to complete the organization of the church Bugenhagen was called in in A.D. 1537. He crowned the king and queen, sketched a directory of worship, which was adopted at the Diet of Odensee [Odense] in A.D. 1539, and returned to Wittenberg in A.D. 1542. In place of bishops Lutheran superintendents were appointed, to whom subsequently the title of bishop was given, and the Augsburg Confession accepted as the standard. The Reformation was contemporaneously introduced into Norway, which acknowledged the king in A.D. 1536. The Archbishop of Drontheim, Olaf Engelbrechtzen, fled with the church treasures to the Netherlands.Iceland stood out longer, but yielded in A.D. 1551, when the power of the rebel bishops was broken.[375]

§ 139.3. Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia.—Livonia had seceded from the dominion of the Teutonic knights in A.D. 1521, and under the grand-master Walter of Plattenburg assumed the position of an independent principality. In that same year a Lutheran archdeacon, Andr. Knöpken, expelled from Pomerania, came to Riga, and preached the gospel with moderation. Soon after Tegetmaier came from Rostock, and so vigorously denounced image worship that excited mobs entered the churches and tore down the images; yet he was protected by the council and the grand-master. The third reformer Briesmann was the immediate scholar of Luther. The able town clerk of Riga, Lohmüller, heartily wrought with them, and the Reformation spread through city and country. At Wolmar and Dorpat, in A.D. 1524, the work was carried on by Melchior Hoffmann, whose Lutheranism was seriously tinged with Anabaptist extravagances (§ [147, 1]). The diocese of Oesel adopted the reformed doctrines, and at the same time a Lutheran church was formed in Reval. After strong opposition had been offered, at last, in A.D. 1538, Riga accepted the evangelical confession, joined the Schmalcald League, and in a short time all Livonia and Esthonia accepted the Augsburg Confession. Political troubles, occasioned mainly by Russia, obliged the last grand-master, Kettler, in A.D. 1561 to surrender Livonia to Sigismund Augustus of Poland, but with the formal assurance that the rights of the evangelicals should be preserved. He himself retained Courland as an hereditary duchy under the suzerainty of Poland, and gave himself unweariedly to the evangelical organization of his country, powerfully assisted by Bülau, first superintendent of Courland.—The Lutheran church of Livonia had in consequence to pass through severe trials. Under Polish protection a Jesuit college was established in Riga in A.D. 1584. Two city churches had to be given over to the Catholics, and Possevin conducted an active Catholic propaganda, which was ended only when Livonia, in A.D. 1629, as also Esthonia somewhat earlier, came under the rule of Sweden. In consequence of the Norse war both countries were incorporated into the Russian empire, and by the Peace of Nystadt, of A.D. 1721, its Lutheran church retained all its privileges, on condition that it did not interfere in any way with the Greek Orthodox Church in the province. In A.D. 1795 Courland also came under Russian sway, and all these are now known as the Baltic Provinces.

§ 139.4. England.[376]—Henry VIII., A.D. 1509-1547, after the literary feud with Luther (§ [125, 3]), sought to justify his title, “Defender of the Faith,” by the use of sword and gibbet. Luther’s writings were eagerly read in England, where in many circles Wiclif’s movements were regarded with favour, and two noble Englishmen, John Fryth and William Tyndal, gave to their native land a translation of the N.T. in A.D. 1526.Fryth was rewarded with the stake in A.D. 1533, and Tyndal was beheaded in the Netherlands in A.D. 1535.[377] But meanwhile the king quarrelled with the pope. On assuming the government he had married Catharine of Arragon, daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella, six years older than himself, the widow of his brother Arthur, who had died in his 16th year, for which he got a papal dispensation on the ground that the former marriage had not been consummated. His adulterous love for Anne Boleyn, the fair maid of honour to his queen, and Cranmer’s biblical opinion (Lev. xviii. 16; xx. 21) convinced him in A.D. 1527 of the sinfulness of his uncanonical marriage. Clement VII., at first not indisposed to grant his request for a divorce, refused after he had been reconciled to the emperor, Catharine’s nephew (§ [132, 2]). Thoroughly roused, the king now threw off the authority of the pope. Convocation was forced to recognise him in A.D. 1531 as head of the English Church, and in 1532 Parliament forbade the paying of annats to the pope. In the same year Henry married Anne, and had a formal divorce from Catharine granted by a spiritual court. Parliament in A.D. 1534 formally abolished papal jurisdiction in the land, and transferred all ecclesiastical rights and revenues to the king. The venerable Bishop Fisher of Rochester and the resolute chancellor, Sir Thomas More (§ [120, 7]), in A.D. 1535 paid the price of their opposition on the scaffold.Now came the long threatened ban. Under pretext of a highly necessary reform no less than 376 monasteries were closed during the years 1536-1538, their occupiers, monks and nuns, expelled, and their rich property confiscated.[378] Nevertheless in doctrine the king wished to remain a good Catholic, and for this end passed in the Parliament of A.D. 1539 the law of the Six Articles, which made any contradiction of the doctrines of transubstantiation, the withholding of the cup, celibacy of the clergy, the mass, and auricular confession, a capital offence. Persecution raged equally against Lutherans and Papists, sometimes more against the one, sometimes more against the other, according as he was moved by his own caprice, or the influence of his wives and favourites of the day. On the one side, at the head of the Papists, stood Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Bonner, Bishop of London; and on the other, Thomas Cranmer, whom the king had raised in A.D. 1533 to the see of Canterbury, in order to carry out his reforms in the ecclesiastical constitution. But Cranmer, who as the king’s agent in the divorce negotiations had often treated with foreign Protestant theologians, and at Nuremberg had secretly married Osiander’s niece, was in heart a zealous adherent of the Swiss Reformation, and furthered as far as he could with safety its introduction into England. Among other things, he secured the introduction in A.D. 1539, into all the churches of England, of an English translation of the Bible, revised by himself. He was supported in his efforts by the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn; but she, having fallen under suspicion of unfaithfulness, was executed in A.D. 1536. The third wife, Jane Seymour, died in A.D. 1537 on the death of a son. The fourth, Anne of Cleves, was after six months, in A.D. 1540, cast aside, and the promoter of the marriage, the chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, was brought to the scaffold. The king now in the same year married Catharine Howard, with whom the Catholic party got to the helm again, and had the Act of the Six Articles rigorously enforced. But she, too, in A.D. 1543, was charged with repeated adulteries, and fell, together with her friends and those reputed as guilty with her, under the executioner’s axe.The sixth wife, Catharine Parr, who again favoured the Protestants, escaped a like fate by the death of the tyrant.[379]

§ 139.5. Edward VI., A.D. 1547-1553, son of Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour, succeeded his father in his tenth year. At the head of the regency stood his mother’s brother, the Duke of Somerset. Cranmer had now a free hand. Private masses and image worship were forbidden, the supper was administered in both kinds, marriage of priests was made legitimate, and a general church visitation appointed for the introduction of the Reformation. Gardiner and Bonner, who opposed these changes, were sent to the Tower. Somerset corresponded with Calvin, and invited at Cranmer’s request distinguished foreign theologians to help in the visitation of the churches.Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius from Strassburg came to Cambridge, and Peter Martyr to Oxford.[380] Bernardino Ochino was preacher to a congregation of Italian refugees in London. A commission under Cranmer’s presidency drew up for reading in the churches a collection of Homilies, for the instruction of the young a Catechism, and for the service a liturgy mediate between the Catholic and Protestant form, the so-called Book of Common Prayer of A.D. 1549; but from the second edition of which were left out chrism and exorcism, auricular confession, anointing the sick, and prayer for the dead. Then followed, in A.D. 1553, a confession of faith, consisting of forty-two articles, drawn up by Cranmer and Bishop Ridley of Rochester, which was distinctly of the reformed type, and set forward the ecclesiastical supremacy of the king as an article of faith. The young king, who supported the Reformation with all his heart, died in A.D. 1553, after nominating as his successor Jane Grey, the grand-daughter of a sister of his father. Not she, however, but a fanatical Catholic, Mary, A.D. 1553-1558, daughter of Henry VIII. and Catharine of Spain, actually ascended the throne. The compliant Parliament now abrogated all the ecclesiastical laws of Edward VI., which it had itself sanctioned, reverted to Henry’s law of the Six Articles, and entrusted Gardiner as chancellor with its execution. The Protestant leaders were thrown into the Tower, the bones of Bucer and Fagius were publicly burnt, married priests with wives and children were driven in thousands from the land.In the following year, A.D. 1554, Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had fled during Henry’s reign, returned as papal legate, absolved the repentant Parliament, and received all England back again into the fold of the Romish church.[381] The noble and innocent Lady Jane Grey, only in her sixteenth year, though she had voluntarily and cheerfully resigned the crown, was put to death with her husband and father.In the course of the next year, A.D. 1555, Bishops Ridley, Latimer, Ferrar, and Hooper with noble constancy endured death at the stake.[382] In prison, Cranmer had renounced his evangelical faith, but abundantly atoned for this weakness by the heroic firmness with which he retracted his retractation, and held the hand which had subscribed it in the flames, that it might be first consumed. He suffered in A.D. 1556.—The queen had married in A.D. 1554 Philip II. of Spain, eleven years her junior, and when in A.D. 1555 he returned to Spain, she fell into deep melancholy, and under its pressure her hatred of Protestantism was shown in the most bloody and cruel deeds. A heretic tribunal, after the fashion of the Spanish Inquisition, was created, which under the presidency of the “Bloody Bonner,” consigned to the flames crowds of confessors of the gospel, clergymen and laymen, men and women, old and young.After the persecution had raged for five years, “Bloody Mary” died of heart-break and dropsy.[383]

§ 139.6. Elizabeth, A.D. 1558-1603, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, though previously branded by the Parliament as a bastard, now ascended the throne unopposed as the last living member of the family of Henry VIII. Educated under the supervision of Cranmer in the Protestant faith of her mother, she had been obliged during the reign of her sister outwardly to conform to the Romish church. She proceeded with great prudence and moderation; but when Paul IV. pronounced her illegitimate, and the Scottish princess Mary Stuart, grand-daughter of Henry’s sister, assumed the title of queen of England, Elizabeth more heartily espoused the cause of Protestantism. In A.D. 1559 the Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity, which reasserted the royal supremacy over the national church, prescribed a revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which set aside the prayer for deliverance from the “detestable enormities” of the papacy, etc., and practically reproduced the earlier, less perfect of the Prayer Books of Edward VI., while every perversion to papacy was threatened with confiscation of goods, imprisonment, banishment, and in cases of repetition with death, as an act of treason. At the head of the clergy was Matthew Parker, consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by some bishops exiled under Mary. He had formerly been chaplain to Anne Boleyn. Under his direction Cranmer’s forty-two articles were reduced to thirty-nine, giving a type of doctrine midway between Lutheranism and Calvinism; these were confirmed by convocation in A.D. 1562, and were adopted as a fundamental statute of England by Act of Parliament in A.D. 1571.This brings to a close the first stage in the history of the English Reformation,—the setting up by law of the Anglican State Church with episcopal constitution, with apostolical succession, under royal supremacy, as the Established Church.[384] (For the Puritan opposition to it see § [143, 3].) The somewhat indulgent manner in which the Act of Uniformity was at first enforced against the Catholics encouraged them more and more in attempts to secure a restoration. Even in A.D. 1568 William Allen founded at Douay a seminary to train Catholic Englishmen for a mission at home, and Gregory XIII. some years later, for a similar purpose, founded in Rome the “English College.” His predecessor, Pius V., had in A.D. 1570 deposed and issued the ban against the queen, and threatened all with the greater excommunication who should yield her obedience. Parliament now punished every withdrawal from the State church as high treason.Day and night houses were searched, and suspected persons inquisitorially examined by torture, and if found guilty they were not infrequently put to death as traitors.[385]—Continuation, §§ [153, 6]; [154, 3].

§ 139.7. Ireland.—Hadrian IV., himself an Englishman (§ [96, 14]), on the plea that the donation of Constantine (§ [87, 4]) embraced also the “islands,” gave over Ireland to King Henry II. as a papal fief in A.D. 1154. Yet the king only managed to conquer the eastern border, the Pale, during the years 1171-1175. Henry VIII. introduced the Reformation into this province in A.D. 1535, by the help of his Archbishop of Dublin, George Brown. The ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown was proclaimed, monasteries closed and their property impropriated, partly divided among Irish and English peers. But in matters of faith there was little change. More opposition was shown to the sweeping reformation of faith and worship of Edward VI. The bishops, Brown included, resisted, and the inferior clergy, who now were required to read the Book of Common Prayer in a language to most of them strange, diligently fostered the popular attachment to the old faith. The ascension of Queen Mary therefore was welcomed in Ireland, while Elizabeth’s attempt to reintroduce the Reformation met with opposition. Repeated outbreaks, in which also the people of the western districts took part, ended in A.D. 1601 in the complete subjugation of the whole island.By wholesale confiscation of estates the entire nobility was impoverished and the church property was made over to the Anglican clergy; but the masses of the Irish people continued Catholic, and willingly supported their priests out of their own scanty resources.[386]—Continuation, § [153, 6].

§ 139.8. Scotland.—Patrick Hamilton, who had studied in Wittenberg and Marburg, first preached the gospel in Scotland, and died at the stake in his twenty-fourth year in A.D. 1528.[387] Amid the political confusions of the regency during the minority of James V., A.D. 1513-1542, a sister’s son of Henry VIII. of England, the Reformation obtained firm root among the nobles, who hated the clergy, and among the oppressed people, notwithstanding that the bishops, with David Beaton, Archbishop of St. Andrew’s at their head, sought to crush it by the most violent persecution. When Henry VIII. called on his nephew to assist him in his Reformation work, James refused, and yielding to Beaton’s advice formed an alliance with France and married Mary of Guise. This occasioned a war in A.D. 1540, the disastrous issue of which led to the king’s death of a broken heart. According to the king’s will Beaton was to undertake the regency, for Mary Stuart was only seven days old. But the nobles transferred it to the Protestant Earl of Arran, who imprisoned Beaton and had the royal child affianced to Henry’s son Edward. Beaton escaped, by connivance of the queen-mother got possession of the child, and compelled the weak regent, in A.D. 1543, to abjure the English alliance. The persecution of the Protestants by fire and sword now began afresh. After many others had fallen victims to his persecuting rage, Beaton had a famous Protestant preacher, George Wishart, burnt before his eyes; but was soon after, in A.D. 1546, surprised in his castle and slain. When in A.D. 1548 Somerset, the English regent after Henry’s death, sought to renew negotiations about the marriage of Mary, now five years old, with Edward VI., her mother had her taken for safety to France, where she was educated in a convent and affianced to the dauphin, afterwards Francis II. By hypocritical acts she contrived to have the regency transferred in A.D. 1554 from Arran to herself. For two years the Reformation progressed without much opposition. In December, A.D. 1557, its most devoted promoters made a “covenant,” pledging themselves in life and death to advance the word of God and uproot the idolatry of the Romish church. The queen-regent, however, after the marriage of her daughter with the dauphin in A.D. 1558, felt herself strong enough to defy the Protestant nobles. The old strict laws against heretics were renewed, and a tribunal established for the punishment of apostatizing priests.The last victim of the persecution was Walter Mill, a priest eighty-two years old, who died at the stake at Perth (?) in A.D. 1559.[388] The country now rose in open revolt. The regent was thus obliged to make proclamation of universal religious toleration. But instead of keeping her promise to have all French troops withdrawn, their number was actually increased after Francis II. ascended the French throne. Elizabeth, too, was indignant at the assumption by the French king and queen of the English royal title, so that she aided the insurgents with an army and a fleet. During the victorious progress of the English the regent died, in A.D. 1560. The French were obliged to withdraw, and the victory of the Scotch Protestants was decisive.

§ 139.9. There was one man, whose unbending opposition to the constitution, worship, doctrine, and discipline of the Church of Rome, manifested with a rigid determination that has scarcely ever been equalled, left its indelible impress upon the Scottish Reformation. John Knox, born in A.D. 1505, was by the study of Augustine and the Bible led to adopt evangelical views, which in A.D. 1542 he preached in the south of Scotland. Persecuted in consequence by Archbishop Beaton, he joined the conspirators after that prelate’s assassination, in A.D. 1546, was taken prisoner, and in A.D. 1547 served as slave in the French galleys. The ill treatment he thus endured developed his naturally strong and resolute character and that fearlessness which so characterized all his subsequent life. By English mediation he was set free in A.D. 1549, and became in A.D. 1551 chaplain to Edward VI., but took offence at the popish leaven allowed to remain in the English Reformation, and consequently declined an offered bishopric. When the Catholic Mary ascended the throne in A.D. 1553, he fled to Geneva, where he enjoyed the closest intimacy with Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination, rigid presbyterianism, and rigorous discipline he thoroughly approved. After presiding for some time over a congregation of English refugees at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, he returned in A.D. 1555 to Scotland, but in the following year accepted a call to the church of English refugees at Geneva that had meanwhile been formed. The Scottish bishops, who had not ventured to touch him while present, condemned him to death after his departure, and burned him in effigy. But Knox kept up a lively correspondence with his native land by letters, proclamations, and controversial tracts, and with the help of several friends translated the Scriptures into English. In A.D. 1558 he published with the title, “The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” the most violent of all his controversial works, directed mainly against the English Queen Mary, who was now dead. It roused against him the unconquerable dislike of her successor, and increased the hatred of the other two Maries against him to the utmost pitch. Yet he accepted the call of the Protestant lords, and returned next year to Scotland, and was the heart and soul of the revolution that soon thereafter broke out. Images and mass-books were burnt, altars in churches broken in pieces, and 150 monasteries were destroyed; for said Knox, “If the nests be pulled down, the crows will not come back.” After the death of the regent in A.D. 1560, the Parliament proclaimed the abolition of the papacy, ratified the strictly Calvinistic Confessio Scotica, and forbade celebrating the mass on pain of death. Then in December, the first General Assembly prescribed, in the “First Book of Discipline,” a strictly presbyterial constitution under Christ as only head, with a rigidly puritan order of worship (§ [163, 3]).

§ 139.10. In Aug., A.D. 1561, Queen Mary Stuart, highly cultured and high-spirited, returned from France to Scotland, a young widow in her 19th year. Brought up in a French convent in fanatical attachment to the Romish Church, and at the French court, with absolutist ideas as well as easy-going morals, the severe Calvinism and moral strictness of Scottish Puritanism were to her as distasteful as its assertion of political independence. At the instigation of her half-brother James Stuart, whom she raised to the earldom of Moray, and who was head of the ministry as one of the leaders of the reformed party, she promised on her arrival not to interfere with the ecclesiastical arrangements of the country, but refused to give royal sanction to the proceedings of A.D. 1560, held Catholic service in her court chapel, and on all hands favoured the Romanists. By her marriage, in A.D. 1565, with the young Catholic Lord Darnley, grandson by a second marriage of her grandmother Margaret of England, who now assumed the title of king, Moray was driven from his position, and the restoration of Catholicism was vigorously and openly prosecuted by negotiations with Spain, France, and the pope. The director of all those intrigues was the Italian musician David Rizzio, who came to the country as papal agent, and had become Mary’s favourite and private secretary. The rudeness and profligacy of the young king had soon estranged from him the heart of the queen. He therefore took part in a conspiracy of the Protestant lords, promising to go over to their faith. Their first victim was the hated Rizzio. He was fallen upon and slain on 9th March, A.D. 1566, while he sat beside the queen, already far advanced in pregnancy. Darnley soon repented his deed, was reconciled to the queen, fled with her to the Castle of Dunbar, and an army gathered by the Protestant Earl of Bothwell soon suppressed the rising. The rebels and assassins were at Mary’s entreaty almost all pardoned. Darnley, now living in mortal enmity with the heads of the Protestant nobility, and again on bad terms with the queen, fell sick in Dec., A.D. 1566, at Glasgow. On his sick-bed a reconciliation with his wife was effected, and apparently in order that she might the better nurse him, he was brought to a villa near Edinburgh. But on the night of 9th Feb., A.D. 1567, while Mary was present at the marriage of a servant, the house with its inhabitants was blown up by an explosion of gunpowder. Public opinion charged Bothwell and the queen with contriving the horrible crime. Bothwell was tried, but acquitted by the lords. Suspicion increased when soon after Bothwell carried off the queen to his castle, and married her on 15th May. In the civil war that now broke out Mary was taken prisoner, and on 24th July obliged to abdicate in favour of her one-year old son James VI., for whom Mary undertook the regency. Bothwell fled to Denmark, where he died in misery and want; but Mary was allowed to escape from prison by the young George Douglas. He also raised on her behalf a small army, which, however, in May, A.D. 1568, was completely destroyed by Moray at the village of Langside. The unhappy queen could now only seek protection with her deadly enemy Elizabeth of England, who, after twenty years’ imprisonment, sent her to the scaffold in A.D. 1587, on the plea that she was guilty of murdering her own husband and of high treason in plotting the death of the English queen.—Mary’s guilt would be conclusively established, if a correspondence with Bothwell, said to have been found in her desk, should be accepted as genuine. But all her apologists, with apparently strong conviction, have sought to prove that these letters are fabrications of her enemies.The thorough investigation given to original documents, however, by Bresslau [Breslau], has resulted in recognising only the second of these as a forgery, and so proving, not indeed Mary’s complicity in the murder of her husband, but her adulterous love for Bothwell, and showing too that her apparent reconciliation with Darnley on his sick-bed was only hypocritical.[389]

§ 139.11. The young queen had at first sought to win by her fair speeches the bold and influential reformer John Knox, who was then preacher in Edinburgh. But his heart was cased in sevenfold armour against all her flatteries, as afterwards against her threats; even her tears found him as stern and cold as her wrath. When he called an assembly of nobles to put a stop to the Catholic worship introduced by her at court, he was charged with high treason, but acquitted by the lords. The marriage with Darnley and all that followed from this unhappy union only increased his boldness. He publicly preached without reserve against the papacy and the light carriage of the queen, on the outbreak of the civil war urged her deposition, and demanded her execution for adultery and the murder of her husband. The assassination of Regent Moray in A.D. 1570 threw the country into further confusion, which was only overcome by his third successor, Morton. The fugitive Knox now returned to Edinburgh, and soon after died, on 24th Nov., A.D. 1572. Of his extant writings the most important is his “History of the Reformation,” reaching down to A.D. 1567. Morton’s vigorous government completely destroyed Mary’s party, but also restricted the pretensions of Presbyterianism. After his overthrow in A.D. 1578, James VI., now in his 12th year, himself undertook the government at the head of a council of state. His weakness of character showed itself in his vacillating between an alliance with Catholic Spain and one with Protestant England, as well as between secret favouring of Catholicism and open endeavouring to supersede puritan Presbyterianism by Anglican-Protestant episcopacy. In A.D. 1584 the parliament, enlarged by the introduction of the lower orders of the nobility, so defined the royal supremacy as to deprive the Presbyterian church of several of her rights and privileges. But in A.D. 1592 the king was obliged absolutely to restore these.After Elizabeth’s death in A.D. 1603, as the great-grandson of Henry VII., he united the kingdoms of England and Scotland under the title of James I.[390]—Continuation, § [153, 6].