A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

It was the settled policy of the Tudor kings to detach Scotland from the old French alliance, and secure it for England. The marriage of Margaret Tudor to James iv. shows what means they thought to employ, and but for Margaret’s quarrel with the Earl of Angus, her second husband, another wedding might have bound the nations firmly together. The French marriages of James V., first with Madeleine, daughter of Francis I. (1537), and on her premature death with Mary of Guise (1538), showed the recoil of Scotland from the English alliance. James’ death gave Henry VIII. an opportunity to renew his father’s schemes, and his idea was to betroth his boy Edward to the baby Mary, and get the “little Queen” brought to England for education. Many Scotsmen thought the proposal a good one for their country, and perhaps more were induced to think so by the money which Henry lavished upon them to secure their support They made the English party in Scotland. The policy of English alliance as against French alliance was complicated by the question of religion. Whatever may be thought of the character of the English Reformation at this date, Henry VIII. had broken thoroughly with the Papacy, and union with England would have dragged Scotland to revolt against the mediæval Church. The leader of the French and Romanist party in Scotland was David Beaton, certainly the ablest and perhaps the most unscrupulous man there. He had been made Archbishop of St. Andrews, coadjutor to his aged uncle, in 1538. In the same month, Pope Paul iii., who needed a Churchman of the highest rank to publish his Bull against Henry VIII. in a place as near England as was possible to find, had sent him a Cardinal’s Hat. The Cardinal, Beaton, stood in Scotland for France and Rome against England and the Reformation. The struggle for the Regency in Scotland in 1542 carried with it an international and a religious policy. The clouds heralding the storm which was to destroy Mary, gathered round the cradle of the baby Queen.

At first the English faction prevailed. The claims of the Queen Mother were scarcely considered. Beaton produced a will, said to have been fraudulently obtained from the dying King, appointing him and several of the leading nobles of Scotland, Governors of the kingdom. This arrangement was soon set aside, the Earl of Arran was appointed Governor (Jan. 3rd, 1543), and Beaton was confined in Blackness Castle.

The Governor selected John Rough for his chaplain and Thomas Williams for his preacher, both ardent Reformers. The Acts of the previous reign against heresy were modified to the extent that men suspect of heresy might enjoy office, and heretics were accorded more merciful treatment. Moreover, an Act of Parliament (March 15th, 1543) permitted the possession and reading of a good and true translation of the Old and New Testaments. But the masterful policy of Henry VIII. and the weakness of the Governor brought about a change. Beaton was released from Blackness and restored to his own Castle of St. Andrews; the Governor dismissed his Reformed preachers; the Privy Council (June 2nd, 1543) forbade on pain of death and confiscation of goods all criticism of the mediæval doctrine of the Sacraments, and forbade the possession of heretical books. In September, Arran and Beaton were reconciled; in December, the Parliament annulled the treaties with England consenting to a marriage between Edward and Mary, and the ancient league with France was renewed. This was followed by the revival of persecution, and almost all that had been gained was lost. Henry’s ruthless devastation of the Borders did not mend matters. The more enlightened policy of Lord Protector Somerset could not allay the suspicions of the Scottish nation. Their “little Queen” was sent to France to be educated by the Guises, “to the end that in hir youth she should drynk of that lycour, that should remane with hir all hir lyfetyme, for a plague to this realme, and for hir finall destructioun.”[286]

But if the Reformation movement was losing ground as a national policy, it was gaining strength as a spiritual quickening in the hearts of the people. George Wishart, one of the Wisharts of Pittarrow, who had fled from persecution in 1538 and had wandered in England, Germany, and Switzerland, returned to his native country about 1543, consumed with the desire to bear witness for the Gospel. He preached in Montrose, and Dundee during a visitation of the plague, and Ayrshire. Beaton’s party were anxious to secure him, and after a preaching tour in the Lothians he was seized in Ormiston House and handed over to the Earl of Bothwell, who, breaking pledges he had made, delivered him to the Cardinal; he lodged him in the dungeon at St. Andrews (end of Jan. 1546), and had him tried in the cathedral, when he was condemned to the stake (March 1st, 1546).

Wishart was Knox’s forerunner, and during this tour in the Lothians, Knox had been his constant companion. The Romanist party had tried to assassinate the bold preacher, and Knox carried a two-handed sword ready to cut down anyone who attempted to strike at the missionary while he was speaking. All the tenderness which lay beneath the sternness of Knox’s character appears in the account he gives of Wishart in his History. And to Wishart, Knox was the beloved disciple. When he foresaw that the end was near, he refused to allow Knox to share his danger.[287]

Assassination was a not infrequent way of getting rid of a political opponent in the sixteenth century, and Beaton’s death had long been planned, not without secret promptings from England. Three months after Wishart’s martyrdom (May 29th, 1546), Norman Lesley and Kirkcaldy of Grange at the head of a small band of men broke into the Castle of St. Andrews and slew the Cardinal. They held the stronghold, and the castle became a place of refuge for men whose lives were threatened by the Government, and who sympathised with the English alliance. The Government laid siege to the place but were unable to take it, and their troops withdrew. John Rough, who had been Arran’s Reformed chaplain, joined the company, and began to preach to the people of St. Andrews. Knox, who had become a marked man, and had thought of taking refuge in Germany, was persuaded to enter the castle, and there, sorely against his will, he was almost forced to stand forth as a preacher of the Word. His first sermon placed him at once in the foremost rank of Scottish Reformers, and men began to predict that he would share the fate of Wishart. “Master George Wishart spak never so plainelye, and yitt he was brunt: evin so will he be.”[288]

Next to nothing is known about the early history of John Knox. He came into the world at or near Haddington in the year 1515,[289] but on what day or month remains hidden. He sprang from the commons of Scotland, and his forebears were followers of the Earls of Bothwell; he was a papal notary, and in priest’s orders in 1540; he was tutor to the sons of the lairds of Ormiston and Longniddry in 1545; he accompanied Wishart in December and January 1545, 1546—these are the facts known about him before he was called to stand forward as a preacher of the Reformation in Scotland. He was then thirty-two—a silent, slow ripening man, with quite a talent for keeping himself in the background.

Knox’s work in the castle and town of St. Andrews was interrupted by the arrival of a French fleet (July 1547), which battered the walls with artillery until the castle was compelled to surrender. He and all the inmates were carried over to France. They had secured as terms of surrender that their lives should be spared; that they should be safely transported to France; and that if they could not accept the terms there offered to them by the French King, they should be allowed to depart to any country they might select for their sojourn, save Scotland. It was not the custom, however, for French kings to keep promises made to heretics, and Knox and his companions were made galley-slaves. For nineteen months he had to endure this living death, which for long drawn out torture can only be compared with what the Christians of the earliest centuries had to suffer when they were condemned to the mines. He had to sit chained with four or six others to the rowing benches, which were set at right angles to the side of the ship, without change of posture by day, and compelled to sleep, still chained, under the benches by night; exposed to the elements day and night alike; enduring the lash of the overseer, who paced up and down the gangway which ran between the two lines of benches; feeding on the insufficient meals of coarse biscuit and porridge of oil and beans; chained along with the vilest malefactors. The French Papists had invented this method of treating all who differed from them in religious matters. It could scarcely make Knox the more tolerant of French policy or of the French religion. He seldom refers to this terrible experience. He dismisses it with: