John Knox

by William M. Taylor

CHAPTER XI.

KNOX AND QUEEN MARY STUART, 1561-1563.

Beautiful in person, attractive in manner, able, acute, brilliant even, in intellect, Mary Stuart had many qualities which might have been turned to good account for the welfare of her country. But, brought up in a French court, her moral code was neither of the highest nor the purest; educated under the supervision of her uncles of Lorraine, she was taught to believe that the one great object of her life was to advance the interests of the Roman Catholic Church; and sister-in-law to him whose name is for ever blackened by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, she was not likely to be over scrupulous as to the means which she would employ to gain her end. So far as she had shaped a policy to herself, when she came to Scotland, it would seem to have been to temporize with the Protestants, until she had time either to fascinate them by the spell of her personal magnetism or to crush them by her power; then to make the throne of Scotland a stepping-stone to that of England, to which she claimed to be the lawful heir, and so to bring that realm also back to its allegiance to the Pope. This made her and Elizabeth implacable enemies. They were neighbours; they were cousins; they were queens, these two, and the struggle between them was to the death. One or other must go down. Each played a deep and deceitful game, but Elizabeth was moved by ambition for herself, while Mary was devoted to a cause, and so it is that as she lays her head upon the block at Fotheringay it is encircled with the halo of a kind of martyrdom, and the eye of the sternest judge is for the moment blinded to the guilt of her life by the tear of pity which dims it as he looks upon the manner of its close.

Knox and she from the very first seem to have singled each other out for a conflict hand to hand. He saw that everything which he counted dear depended on the manner in which she was dealt with; and she perceived that he was the moving spirit in that religious revolt which it was her mission to put down. He feared the effect of her blandishments upon others, and she recognised the magnitude of his influence upon the people. He saw that if she could be baffled in her efforts to re-establish popery in the land, the victory would be finally won; and she felt that so long as he had the opportunity of swaying the multitude by the fervour of his eloquence, there was no hope of gaining the end on which her heart was fixed. He was afraid of the effect of what his friend Campbell of Kingzeancleugh called "the sprinkling of the holy water of the court" upon the less reliable of his adherents; and she feared the fervour of his prayers to God, and the power of his appeals to his fellow-men. So there came to be for some time a kind of duel between them, and the issue was at last a victory for Knox. We need not approve unqualifiedly of everything which he did or said in the course of the struggle, yet we must rejoice in the result, for Knox "builded better than he knew," and secured, not immediately but ultimately, the triumph of a larger liberty than that which he at the time believed in; while she was the representative of absolute power, and of a feudalism which looked upon the common people as existing for her convenience and aggrandisement rather than upon herself as the servant of the state. "What are you in this commonwealth?" was her haughty question to him on one occasion. "A subject born within the same," was his ever-memorable answer, and the outcome of it has been that now in the land he loved the sovereign is for the subjects, and not the subjects for the sovereign; it is a little difference verbally, but in reality the gulf between the two is that which divides freedom from slavery.

The first collision between them occurred a few days after her landing. Naturally enough, as some may think, she gave orders for the celebration of a solemn mass in the chapel of Holyrood on the first Sabbath after her arrival. She knew of the law passed by the Parliament in 1560; she had probably heard from Lord James Stuart the warning which had been given to him when he went to France, and therefore this act on her part was a virtual throwing down of the gauge of battle at the feet of the Protestants. And thus they themselves interpreted it. Some may imagine that they attached undue importance to it; yet as Protestantism is still insisted on as a sine quâ non to succession to the British throne, those who approve the continuance of the Revolution settlement cannot consistently condemn them. Moreover, it is not to be forgotten that to the Reformers the mass was more than even an idolatrous service. It was a sign of many other things: thumbscrews, racks, galley chains, gibbets and the like, which were inseparably connected with papal supremacy, and in truth, as one has said, "A man sent to row in French galleys and such like for teaching the truth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humour." When therefore her purpose became known, great excitement was created among the Protestants, and some spoke of preventing her by force from carrying it out; but Knox used his influence in private, against such a proposal. On the following Sunday, however, from his pulpit he showed his sense of the gravity of the crisis, when, after exposing the idolatry that was in the mass, he alleged that "one mass was more fearful unto him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of our realm of purpose to suppress the whole religion." Hearing of this outburst Mary sent for him to the palace, whether of her own motive or at the suggestion of others is not known, and he had then, in the presence of Lord James Stuart, the first of those interviews which have been so harped upon by his vituperators. We must refer our readers for the details to Knox's own account in his "History," which has been little more than simply modernised by McCrie, and must content ourselves with a mere summary of what occurred. She began by attacking him for the writing of the "First Blast," and after he had vindicated himself as best he could for that, she charged him with having taught the people to receive a religion different from that which was allowed by their princes. This brought out his views as to the limits of obedience to civil rulers, and on her interpreting his words to mean that her subjects should obey him and not her, he vehemently repudiated that misapprehension, and alleged that both rulers and subjects should obey God, and that kings should be foster-fathers, and queens nursing-mothers to His Church. That elicited the question from her which is the Church of God? and for answer thereto he referred her to the Scriptures. This in its turn raised the inquiry whose interpretation of Scripture was to be accepted? which he answered by laying down the duty of private judgment and of the comparing of one part of Scripture with another. At length she very humbly remarked that she was not able to contend with him, but that if she had those present with her whom she had heard they could answer him, and he expressed his readiness to meet before her in argument "the learnedest papist in Europe." To this she somewhat tartly retorted, "You may perchance get that sooner than you believe," and he replied a little sarcastically to the effect that if he ever got it, then indeed it would be sooner than he believed. He took his leave in this courtly yet scriptural fashion, "Madame, I pray God that you may be as blessed within the commonwealth of Scotland as ever Deborah was in the commonwealth of Israel."

Thus for the first time they measured their strength, and the result was, in common speech, a draw. Mary found that Knox was made of more unyielding stuff than those whom heretofore she had been in the habit of meeting; and John formed an estimate of Mary's ability which his subsequent experience only served to confirm. It was to be no child's play between them. He could not afford to give so subtle and ready an adversary the least advantage. Writing to Cecil after this interview he says, "The Queen neither is, neither shall be of our opinion, and in very deed her whole proceedings do declare that the cardinal's lessons are so deeply printed in her heart that the substance and the quality are like to perish together. I would be glad to be deceived, but I fear I shall not. In communication with her I espied such craft as I have not found in such age."

Matters went on after this with tolerable quietness for months, and Knox kept up his stated labours as the minister of Edinburgh. What these were seem now to be surprising. He preached twice every Sunday, and thrice besides during the week on other days. He met regularly once a week with his elders for the oversight of the flock; and attended weekly the assembly of the ministers, for what was called "the exercise on the Scriptures." These stated and constant labours, with the addition of frequent journeyings by appointment of the General Assembly to perform in distant parts of the country very much the duty of a superintendent for the time, were exceedingly exhausting; and the city council, wishing to relieve him of some of his duties, came (in April, 1562) to a resolution to call the minister of the Canongate to undertake the half of his charge; but their object was not accomplished till June of the following year, when John Craig became his colleague.

Meanwhile the Reformer came again into collision with the court. In the beginning of March, 1562, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal Lorraine made that assault on a peaceable and defenceless congregation of Huguenots, which is known in French history as the Massacre of Vassy; and when the report of that was received by Mary, she was so delighted that she gave in honour of the occasion a splendid ball in the palace to her foreign servants, by whom dancing was kept up to a very late hour. This act of hers was exceedingly painful to Knox, for he had many warm friends among the Protestants of France, and his heart was saddened by the tidings of the treatment to which they had been subjected. Accordingly he gave vent to his feelings in his pulpit on the following Sunday, when he preached from the text, "Be wise now, ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth." After discoursing on the dignity of magistrates and the obedience which was due to them, he lamented and condemned the vices to which they were too commonly addicted, and made some severe strictures on their conduct, affirming, among other things, "that they were more exercised in fiddling and flinging, than in reading or hearing God's word," and that "fiddlers and flatterers" (John was evidently fond of alliteration) "were more precious in their eyes than men of wisdom and gravity." The report of his discourse was carried by some one to Mary; and though he had made no direct assault upon her, he was summoned on the next day to the palace. Introduced to a chamber in which she sat, surrounded by her maids of honour and principal courtiers, he was treated to a long "harangue," as he calls it (but it was no doubt a proper scolding), on the enormity of his conduct. Very wisely he heard that out without interruption; then, when his "innings" came, he complained that he had evidently been misreported to her, and craved leave to repeat to her precisely what he had said, thus adroitly contriving that for that time at least she should listen to a sermon. Beginning with the text, he went over the main points of his discourse, which, among other things, had in it this piece of sound sense: "And of dancing, madame, I said that albeit in Scripture I find no praise of it, and in profane writers that it is termed the gesture rather of those that are mad and in frenzy than of sober men; yet do I not utterly condemn it, providing that two vices be avoided: the former, that the principal vocation of those that use that exercise be not neglected for the pleasure of dancing; and the second, that they dance not as the Philistines their fathers, for the pleasure they take in the displeasure of God's people." The accuracy of his rehearsal of his sermon having been confirmed by those who had heard it when it was originally given, the Queen said it was bad enough, but admitted that it had not been so reported to her; and then very naively asked, that if he heard anything of her that "misliked" him, he would come to herself and speak of it to her privately. But Knox believed that publicity was one great means of securing the vigilance, and through that the safety, of the people, and therefore he declined to accede to her request, on the ostensible ground that with the multiplicity of his labours he had not the time for running about the court and his congregation individually to deal with them for what he saw amiss. On this occasion Knox was the champion of "free speech," and "scored" a victory, so that he departed "with a reasonable merry countenance;" and when some of the bystanders said, "He is not afraid," he made reply, "Why should the pleasing face of a gentle woman affray me? I have looked on the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been afraid above measure," and so he left the Queen and the court for that time.