John Knox

by William M. Taylor

Before this turn was given to matters, and at midnight between the 10th and 11th of June, the Queen Regent, Mary of Lorraine, the mother of the Queen of Scots, had passed away from the earth, and thus the stage was as it were cleared for the important things which were so soon to be achieved. The one Mary had gone to her account; the other had not yet come from France to take personal possession of the throne of her native land, and in the interval many things otherwise—humanly speaking at least—unattainable were obtained. "The stars in their courses" were fighting for the Reformation; the providence of God was on its side, and blind indeed must the historian be who sees no indication of that fact. But because we fully recognise His hand, it is the more important that we distinctly note also the obliquities which characterized the conduct of many of the human actors in these transactions; and it is with a sense of something like mortification that we confess that even Knox did not stand the ordeal without deterioration. He was, as Laing remarks, "a chief instigator and agent" in the negotiations with England; and, for the most part, he manifested the strictest integrity. But there is one letter extant which prevents us from being able to say that he never lent his countenance to deceit. He is writing to Sir James Croft requesting that men should be sent by him to the help of the Reformers; and in answer to the objection that the league between England and France made it impossible to do that without offending France, he says,[[3]] "If ye list to craft with them, the sending of a thousand men to us can break no league nor point of peace contracted between you and France; for it is free for your subjects to serve in war any prince or nation for their wages; and if you fear that such excuses shall not prevail, you may declare them rebels to your realm, when ye shall be assured that they are in our company." We mention it that we may not be accused of concealing any portion of the truth concerning him. We do not extenuate it; we cannot vindicate it. We say only that it is, so far as we know, the solitary instance of the kind in the extensive correspondence of our Reformer; that it is a clear exception to the general outspoken, and in some cases even indiscreet, frankness by which he was characterized; and that, perhaps, he caught the infection from those with whom he was treating, for Froude says of Elizabeth at this time, "It is certain only that on the one hand she was distinctly doing, what as distinctly she said she was not doing; and on the other, that she was holding out hopes which, if she could help it, she never meant to fulfil;"[[4]] and even Cecil, as the same author proves, was a master in the same kind of craft, so that his indignant reference to Knox's proposal reads to us now like an illustration of "Satan reproving sin." It was in truth, as Laing has said, "an age of dissimulation;" but Knox knew better; he was before his age in other things, and should have been above it in this.

But enough, we gladly turn from censure to praise, and wish to direct attention at this point to Knox's views concerning civil government. There was an assembly of nobles, barons, and representatives of burghs held at Edinburgh on the 21st of October, 1559, at which the propriety or lawfulness of depriving the Queen Regent of her authority (which was afterwards resolved upon) was debated; and before which John Willock and Knox were asked to give their opinion on the question. Willock alleged that the power of rulers is limited, that they might be deprived of it on valid grounds; and that the fortification of Leith, and the introduction of foreign troops into the kingdom, was a good reason why the Regent should be divested of her authority. Knox, while agreeing with what he had said, added that the assembly might safely proceed on these principles, provided only that they did not suffer the misconduct of the Regent to alienate them from their allegiance to their own proper sovereigns, Francis and Mary; that they were not actuated by any private hatred of the Regent herself; and that any sentence which they should now pronounce should not preclude her re-admission to office if she afterwards acknowledged her error, and agreed to submit to the estates of the realm. These sentiments, considering the circumstances in which the Reformers were then placed, were moderate and wise. They show how very far from revolutionary Knox and his associates were; and it is no small praise to him to say that in a struggle which strained everything to the utmost, he sought to maintain law while striving after liberty, and was careful to discriminate between condemnation of the manner in which an office was filled, and repudiation of the office itself. The relation of the Reformation from popery to civil liberty is a theme which might furnish materials for a goodly volume, and space will not allow us to enlarge upon it here; but it might be well in these days if more attention were directed to the opinions of the Reformers regarding political government, and the share which these have had in laying the foundation of freedom, as it is now enjoyed in Great Britain and the United States. So far as Knox is concerned, we could have no better summary of his views on the subject than that which is given by his great biographer, from which we quote the following sentence,[[5]] each clause of which is amply confirmed by McCrie in the learned and elaborate note which he has appended to his statement:—"He held that rulers, supreme as well as subordinate, were invested with authority for the public good; that obedience was not due to them in anything contrary to the Divine law, natural or revealed; that in every free and well-constituted government, the law of the land was superior to the will of the prince; that inferior magistrates and subjects might restrain the supreme magistrate from particular illegal acts, without throwing off their allegiance, or being guilty of rebellion; that no class of men have an original, inherent, and indefeasible right to rule over a people, independently of their will and consent; that every nation is entitled to provide and require that they shall be ruled by laws which are agreeable to the Divine law, and calculated to promote their welfare; that there is a mutual compact, tacit and implied, if not formal and explicit, between rulers and their subjects; and if the former shall flagrantly violate this, employ that power for the destruction of the commonwealth which was committed to them for its preservation and benefit, or, in one word, if they shall become habitual tyrants and notorious oppressors, that the people are absolved from allegiance, and have a right to resist them, formally to depose them from their place, and to elect others in their room." It may surprise some of our readers to discover how fully Knox in these particulars was abreast of many of the views of the most enlightened Liberals of our generation; but even Major, the principal of the Glasgow University when Knox became a student, had struck out in the same direction, and in one of his works[[6]] has declared that "a free people first gives strength to a king, whose power depends on the whole people;" and that "a people can discard or depose a king and his children for misconduct just as it appointed him at first;" and similar sentiments might be cited from the pages of Buchanan. Major taught them in the class, and Buchanan wrote them in his works; but Knox gave them utterance, and that too with such force, that they were widely diffused among the people, so that in due season the divine-right nonsense of the Stuarts was exploded, and the beginning of a new order of things introduced.

But even in this matter, advanced as he was, Knox was not entirely above the narrowness of his age. In common with all the Reformers, and the most of the Puritans, he held that the theocracy of the Jews was the ideal state, and as a consequence, that it was the duty of the civil government to punish idolatry with death, to set up and maintain the true religion by all the means at its disposal, and to put down heresy as rebellion. Neither the statesmen nor the divines of that age seem to have perceived that the true analogue to the Jewish theocracy is the spiritual Church of Christ, and so we account for the fact that they continually referred to the Old Testament as their warrant for seeking to advance what they believed to be the truth, and to put down what they considered to be error by force. They did not remember that in the Jewish state God was in no mere figurative sense, but really and absolutely the King, so that in it to fear God and to honour the king was virtually the same thing, and sin in every form was also ipso facto crime, was indeed treason, as committed against the head of the government, and so was punishable by civil pains and penalties. Forgetting or not perceiving that, the Reformers took the Jewish for the model constitution. In all the states which they sought to remodel, they lost sight of the distinction between a theocracy and an ordinary government, and confounded crime with sin, and sin with crime. More especially they made the crime of crimes to be, the resisting or not conforming to what they themselves believed to be the true religion as revealed by God, and as such they punished that with all severity. There is no instance indeed on record of Knox himself being in any way mixed up with persecution, understanding by that word merely the putting of one to death for religious practices or opinions. No such controversy can be raised over him as that which has been held regarding Calvin and the prosecution of Servetus. But they all alike held that it was the duty of the government to establish and maintain, as a government, and that means by enactments enforced by penalties, the true religion; and from that persecution follows; rather let us say, in that persecution is involved. To this error, which, however, was the common opinion of their times, may be traced most of the difficulties in which they were involved in the prosecution of their work. The world has been slow to come to it, but no perfect liberty either in Church or in state is possible save through the separation of the one from the other, and the restriction of each to its own proper domain. When this shall be attained in Scotland and England, then shall be the beginning of another era, as strongly marked as that which began in the overthrow of the Papal Church three hundred years ago. The course of our narrative takes us now into parliamentary debates, and royal closets, fully as often as into assemblies of the Church, and therefore before we enter upon this section of the history, we deem it right to indicate once for all the views which we ourselves hold upon the subject. It is the province of the biographer to narrate, and he must not be held as endorsing everything which he records.

[[1]] "History of Scotland," vol. iii. p. 354.

[[2]] "An Essay on the Portraits of John Knox," pp. 139-140. "Works," vol. xii.

[[3]] "Works," vol. vi. p. 90.

[[4]] Froude's "History of England," vol. vi. p. 273.

[[5]] McCrie's "Works," vol. i. p. 149.

[[6]] "De Historia Gentis Scotorum," book iv. chap. 22. I am indebted for these citations to my late friend, Dr. J. M. Ross, whose researches into the literature of Scotland have been recently published, and whose early death is mourned by all who knew his worth. His work on the Pre-reformation Literature of Scotland is a perfect thesaurus of precious things, and has attracted the widest attention.