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

by Thomas M. Lindsay

This conduct evidently alarmed the Queen Mother, who had been made Regent in 1554 (April 12th), and she attempted to stir the Primate to exercise his powers for the repression of heresy. The Archbishop wrote to Argyle urging him to dismiss Douglas, apologising at the same time for his interference by saying that the Queen wondered that he could “thole” persons with perverted doctrine within his diocese.

Another step in advance was taken some time in 1558, when it was resolved to give the Congregation, the whole company of those in Scotland who sincerely accepted the Evangelical Reformation, “the face of a Church,” by the creation and recognition of an authority which could exercise discipline. A number of elders were chosen “by common election,” to whom the whole of the brethren promised obedience. The lack of a publicly recognised ministry was supplied by laymen, who gave themselves to the work of exhortation; and at the head of them was to be found Erskine of Dun. The first regularly constituted Reformed church in Scotland was in the town of Dundee.[300]

The organisation gave the Protestant leaders boldness, and, through Sir James Sandilands, they petitioned the Regent to permit them to worship publicly according to the Reformed fashion, and to reform the wicked lives of the clergy. This led to the offer of a compromise, which was at once rejected, as it would have compelled the Reformed to reverence the Mass, and to approve of prayers to the saints. The Queen Mother then permitted public worship, save in Leith and Edinburgh. The Lords of the Congregation next demanded a suspension of the laws which gave the clergy power to try and punish heresy, until a General Council, lawfully assembled, should decide upon points then debated in religion; and that all suspected of heresy should have a fair trial before “temporal judges.”[301] When the Regent, who gave them “amyable lookis and good wordes in aboundance,” refused to allow their petition to come before the Estates, and kept it “close in hir pocket,” the Reformers resolved to go to Parliament directly with another petition, in which they declared that since they had not been able to secure a reformation, they had resolved to follow their own consciences in matters of religion; that they would defend themselves and all of their way of thinking if attacked; that if tumults arose in consequence, the blame was with those who refused a just reformation; and that in forwarding this petition they had nothing in view but the reformation of abuses in religion.[302]

Knox had been invited by the Earl of Glencairn, the Lords Erskine and Lorn, and James Stewart (afterwards the Earl of Moray), to return to Scotland in 1557.[303] He reached Dieppe in October, and found letters awaiting him which told him that the times were not ripe. The answer he sent spurred the Reforming lords to constitute the Band of December 1557. It was while he was at Dieppe, chafing at the news he had received, that he composed the violent treatise, entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women[304]—a book which did more to hamper his future than anything else. The state of things was exasperating to a man who longed to be at work in Scotland or England. “Bloody” Mary in England was hounding on her officials to burn Knox’s co-religionists, and the Reformation, which had made so much progress under Edward VI., seemed to be entirely overthrown; while Mary of Guise, the Queen Mother and Regent in Scotland, was inciting the unwilling Archbishop of St. Andrews to make use of his legatine and episcopal powers to repress the believers of his native land. But as chance would have it, Mary Tudor was dead before the pamphlet was widely known, and the Queen whom of all others he desired to conciliate was seated on the throne of England, and had made William Cecil, the staunchest of Protestants, her Secretary of State. She could scarcely avoid believing that the Blast was meant for her; and, even if not, it was based on such general principles that it might prove dangerous to one whose throne was still insecure. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the Queen never forgave the vehement writer, and that the Blast was a continual obstacle to a complete understanding between the Scottish Reformer and his English allies.[305] If Knox would never confess publicly to queens, whether to Elizabeth Tudor or to Mary Stuart; that he had done wrong, he was ready to say to a friend whom he loved:

“My rude vehemencie and inconsidered affirmations, which may rather appear to procead from coler then of zeal and reason, I do not excuse.”[306]

It was the worse for Knox and for Scotland, for the reign of women had begun. Charles V., Francis I., and Henry VIII. had passed away, and the destinies of Europe were to be in the hands of Elizabeth, Catherine de’ Medici, Mary Stuart, and Philip of Spain, the most felinely feminine of the four.

Events marched fast in Scotland after Knox returned in the early summer of 1559. The Queen Regent and the Lords of the Congregation were facing each other, determined on a trial of strength. Knox reached Edinburgh on May 2nd, 1559, and hurried on to Dundee, where the Reformed had gathered in some force. They had resolved to support their brethren in maintaining public worship according to the usages of the Reformed Church, and in repressing “idolatrie” in all towns where a majority of the inhabitants had declared for the Reformed religion. The Regent threw down the gauntlet by summoning the preachers to appear before her, and by inhibiting their preaching. The Lords took it up by resolving that they would answer the summons and appear along with their preachers. A letter was addressed to the Regent (May 6th, 1559) by “The professouris of Christis Evangell in the realme of Scotland.” It was an admirable statement of the principles of the Scottish Reformation, and may be thus summarised:

“It records the hope, once entertained by the writers, that God would make her the instrument of setting up and maintaining his Word and true worship, of defending his congregation, and of downputting all idolatry, abomination, and superstition in the realm; it expresses their grief on learning that she was determined to do the very opposite; it warns her against crossing the bounds of her own office, and usurping a power in Christ’s kingdom which did not belong to her; it distinguishes clearly between the civil jurisdiction and the spiritual; it asks her to recall her letters inhibiting God’s messengers; it insists that His message ought to be received even though the speaker should lack the ordinary vocation; it claims that the ministers who had been inhibited were sent by God, and were also called according to Scriptural order; it points out that her commands must be disobeyed if contrary to God’s, and that the enemies were craftily inducing her to command unjust things so that the professors, when they disobeyed, might be condemned for sedition and rebellion; it pled with her to have pity on those who were seeking the glory of God and her true obedience; it declared that, by God’s help, they would go forward in the way they had begun, that they would receive and assist His ministers and Word, and that they would never join themselves again to the abominations they had forsaken, though all the powers on earth should command them to do so; it conveyed their humble submission to her, in all obedience due to her in peace, in war, in body, in goods and in lands; and it closed with the prayer that the eternal God would instruct, strengthen, and lead her by His Spirit in the way that was acceptable to Him.”[307]

Then began a series of trials of strength in which the Regent had generally the better, because she was supplied with disciplined troops from France, which were more than a match for the feudal levies of the Lords of the Congregation. The uprising of the people against the Regent and the Prelates was characterised, as in France and the Low Countries, with an outbreak of iconoclasm which did no good to the Protestant cause. In the three countries the “raschall multitude” could not be restrained by the exhortation of the preachers nor by the commandment of the magistrates from destroying “the places of idolatrie.”[308]