Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

It seems strange to us of to-day to think that any one in colonial America should ever have had a fear of sharing a fate like that of John Knox in the French galleys; yet from the time of the first colonies of French Huguenots in Florida, down to the assertion, by Jacob Leisler, of the people’s rights in New York, there were tens of thousands among the several nationalities that made up the American people who felt this danger, from the Bourbons of France or Spain, as a quite possible reality. History makes strange somersaults. In seeking our American freedom in the Revolution, we were militarily aided by the former country and were in alliance with the latter.

Knox, the one man able to stand up against Queen Mary, was no amateur statesman or ecclesiastic. Besides his education in the University of Glasgow and the regular training in the priesthood, he had spent five years as preacher, pastor, and pioneer of English Puritanism in England,—at Berwick, at Newcastle, and in London,—where he married Marjorie Bowes and by her had two sons. He was elected one of the six chaplains of Edward VI and was consulted about the Anglican Articles of Religion, and the Revision of the Liturgy. The king offered him the bishopric of Rochester, but he declined for reasons of conscience, not only because he was opposed to the secular business of such offices, but chiefly because in his heart he believed, like the Independents, in what our own Rufus Choate called “a church without a bishop and a state without a king.”

When the English Queen called “Bloody Mary” came to the throne and the Reformation seemed like a sinking ship, Knox was the last to leave the deck, yielding only to the urgency of his friends. Except more than half a year in Scotland, he spent five years on the Continent. In Geneva, while sitting at the feet of John Calvin,—that great champion of democracy and of republican government, and the real father of the public school system,—he became pastor of a church of English exiles there, and had a hand in making the Geneva version of the Bible.

He who, whether of the old faith or the new, or an adherent of any church or religion, whether Jewish, Mahometan, Buddhist, or Christian, looks only on that side which agrees or disagrees with his own opinions and cannot see beyond, misses most of the lessons of history. Whether we love or hate John Knox, we cannot shut our eyes to what he did, both for popular education and to give Great Britain linguistic unity. He made English the language of literary and scholarly Scotland. It was his thorough knowledge of the English language and his choice and use of it that regulated Scottish speech and paved the way for the oblivion of the Gaelic. In both the written and the spoken form of the English language, he followed the best standards.

When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, she refused Knox passage through her dominions. He had already published his “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” which was aimed at the misgovernment of two females, Bloody Mary of England and Mary Queen of Scots. For this, Elizabeth never forgave him. Those who insist, according to notions that have been set forth in literary form, that Elizabeth was only a male creature, a mere man in disguise, may perhaps find their contention weakened by the treatment of Knox by Queen Bess.

Knox is even less likely to be forgiven in an era of suffragettes and agitation of votes for women. Yet it must be remembered that while Knox was too manly to retract, because he believed what he wrote and retained his opinions on this subject to the last, yet he never published his intended second or third “Blast,” nor ever wished, in any way, to obstruct the path of Elizabeth. Yet at this time he was in possible danger of the headsman’s axe.

In Scotland he married Margaret Stewart, of a noble family, and by her had three daughters. In his native land he spent twelve years devoted to the fierce struggle and triumph of the Reformation. On his deathbed he could say before God and his holy angels that he had never made merchandise of religion, never studied to please men, never indulged his private passions, but faithfully used his talents to build up the Church over which he was called to watch.

Dr. Philip Schaff, the greatest Church historian whom America has yet produced and possibly its most cosmopolitan scholar, declares that Knox “was the incarnation of all the noble and rugged energies of his nation and age, and devoted them to the single aim of a thorough reformation in doctrine, worship, and discipline, on the basis of the Word of God. In genius, learning, wealth of ideas, and extent of influence, he was inferior to Luther and Calvin, but in boldness, strength, and purity of character, fully their equal. He was the most heroic man of a heroic race. His fear of God made him fearless of man. Endowed with a fearless and original intellect, he was eminently a man of action, with the pulpit for a throne and the word for his sword.”

Carlyle wrote a monograph on the portraits of John Knox. He severely characterizes that patriarchal, long-bearded, but stolid picture of Knox, which has been reproduced in many books from the Geneva edition of Beza’s “Icones.” In truth, we have often wondered why most of the pictures of the old divines, handed down to us from the days of cheap and rude wood-cutting and black-letter books, were not used to frighten naughty children or placed as scarecrows in cornfields. Some readers will recall what Hawthorne has said about some of these worthy predecessors of ours, who lived during what another son of New England has called “the Glacial Age.”

Carlyle believed that the Somerville portrait, “with a sharp, stern face, high forehead, pointed beard, and large white collar was the only probable likeness of the great reformer,” who had “a beautiful and simple, but complete incompatibility with whatever is false, in word or conduct, inexorable contempt and detestation of what in modern speech is called humbug.”... He was “a most clear-cut, hardy, distinct, and effective man; fearing God and without any other fear.”