When the infant James was crowned in the parish church of Stirling, on the 29th of July, 1567, the sermon on the occasion was preached by Knox, though he objected to perform the ceremony of anointing, which accordingly was done by another. In the month of December following he preached at the opening of Parliament, and had the satisfaction of seeing an Act passed which ratified all that had been done in the way of Reformation by the Parliament of 1560; while an additional statute was now made providing that no prince should afterwards be admitted to exercise authority in the kingdom without taking an oath to maintain the Protestant religion.
During the regency of Murray everything went well, but his assassination (what terrible times these were!) at Linlithgow, by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, on the 23rd of January, 1569, was a terrible blow to Knox. Indeed, it may be said that he was never quite the same man afterwards. Knox and Murray loved and trusted each other thoroughly—perhaps all the more from the additional insight into each other's hearts which their temporary estrangement gave them, and when the Regent was stricken down the Reformer felt as if his chief human helper had been taken from him. Murray was a genuine patriot, and in the main a sincere and noble man. He had his faults, and on exceptional occasions like that described by Froude,[[1]] when he was made the tool of Elizabeth, he was constrained to be, at least by his silence, a party to deceit which in his heart he abhorred; but that historian has not hesitated to call him "a noble gentleman of stainless honour,"[[2]] and to affirm that "his noble nature had no taint of self in it";[[3]] and though Robertson has done his best to belittle him, the verdict of history we think will settle in the acceptance of Spottiswood's eulogy: "a man truly good, and worthy to be ranked among the best governors that this kingdom hath enjoyed, and therefore to this day honoured with the title of 'the good Regent.'" On the Sunday after this irreparable loss, Knox poured out his heart to God before the congregation in a prayer which showed how deeply the bereavement had depressed his spirit, and on the day of the funeral he preached a sermon from the text, "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord," in which he sketched the character and career of his friend with such effect that three thousand persons were moved to tears by his words. The blow fell sorely on the country; and it nearly crushed the Reformer. The loss preyed upon his spirit and enfeebled his strength, so that in the month of October following he was stricken with paralysis or apoplexy, which laid him aside altogether for a season from his work, and gave warning of the approaching end. His enemies exulted over his illness, and could not refrain from congratulating themselves on the prospect that he would never preach again; but after some weeks he so far regained his vigour as to resume, in part at least, those labours in which he had found so much of his joy. Throughout the winter and the spring he continued to bear testimony from his pulpit to the principles which he had so long proclaimed, and to expose and rebuke the evil-doers who were once more at work in the land. For though the murder of Murray brought no permanent advantage to the party of reaction, it brought back again, for a while at least, the chaos and contentions out of which he had begun to bring order and peace. Lennox, as the grandfather of the infant king, was put into the place of Murray, but within a comparatively brief period he was mortally wounded in an assault made upon the adherents of the king at Stirling, by a force led by Huntly in the interests of Mary, and Erskine of Mar was chosen as his successor. This was in September, 1571. Meanwhile Kirkaldy, of Grange, who had been appointed governor of the Castle of Edinburgh by Murray, had turned his back upon the professions and promise of his life, by avowing himself a partisan of the Queen. He held that fortress for her behoof, and gave its protection to Secretary Maitland, who was working earnestly in her cause. By Maitland's influence Kirkaldy was encouraged in a course which was exceedingly painful to Knox. The Laird of Grange and he had been fellow-sufferers in the French galleys, and to the last the heart of the Reformer yearned after him. Yet he could not permit his conduct as governor of the Castle to go unreproved. On two occasions, in particular, he was constrained to take public notice of his doings. The first was briefly this. There had been a scuffle in Dunfermline between a cousin of Kirkaldy and his relatives, and some of the Duries, a family with whom the Kirkaldys had a feud; and one of the latter having been seen shortly afterwards in the streets of Edinburgh, was by Kirkaldy's orders followed to Leith by some of his tools, that they might chastise him with a cudgel. But they took the sword instead and left him dead. In the attempt to escape, one of the assailants was arrested and committed to the Tolbooth, but Grange and his men attacked the building, violently forced it open, and marched off with their liberated comrade to the Castle, the guns of which they fired, either in token of triumph or for the purpose of striking terror into the citizens. In his sermon on the following Sunday Knox protested against this interference with the course of justice, using language which seems to us both temperate and kindly: "Had it been done," he said, "by the authority of a bloodthirsty man, or one who had no fear of God, he would not have been so much moved; but he was affected to think that one, of whom all good men had formed so great expectations, should have fallen so low as to act such a part, one too who, when formerly in prison, had refused to purchase his own liberty by the shedding of blood." An utter misrepresentation of this statement was carried to Kirkaldy, who complained to John Craig, the Reformer's colleague, by whom he was referred to the elders of the Church of which Kirkaldy still professed to be a member. Knox himself, as soon as he had the matter brought before him, denied that he had used the words imputed to him, and took the first opportunity of correcting the false report, by repeating and vindicating what he had really said.
The other occasion was that of the appearance shortly after, in the church, of Kirkaldy, accompanied by a strong armed escort, composed of those who had been most conspicuous in the recent outrages. He had not attended the public services for nearly a year, and Knox looked upon his presence so surrounded as an attempt to overawe him. But he was not the man to be thus intimidated, and so, as his good servant Ballantyne tells us, he took occasion then and there to inveigh "against all such as forget God's benefits received, and in treating of God's great mercies bestowed upon penitents, according to his common manner, he forewarned proud contemners that God's mercy appertained not to such as with knowledge proudly transgressed, and after, more proudly maintained the same." Kirkaldy was greatly enraged at these words, and even in the church he gave vent to his anger so loudly as to be heard by a great part of the congregation. The report went out in consequence that he meant to kill the preacher; but Knox held on his way, dealing defiantly with the anonymous libels that were sent him, and publicly declaring in words that have become proverbial, that "from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other inspired writers, he had learned to call a fig a fig, and a spade a spade."
But when, in 1571, Kirkaldy received the Hamiltons and their forces into the Castle, the friends of Knox became seriously alarmed for his safety. They proposed to form a guard who should constantly accompany him for his protection; but he would not accept the offer, and even if he had accepted it Kirkaldy would not have permitted it to be carried out. It was according to military etiquette that he should suppress or prevent all such outrages, and he expressed his willingness to provide a guard for Knox from the soldiers of his garrison. He even tried to get the Hamiltons to guarantee the safety of the Reformer, but they declared that they could not enter into any such engagement, "because there were many rascals and others among them who loved him not, who might do him harm without their knowledge." One evening a musket was fired into his window, and had he not been sitting in a place different from that which he usually occupied, the ball must have struck him, and would in all probability have mortally wounded him. After that he was importuned by his friends to seek a place of safety elsewhere, but he refused to leave his post until they told him that they had made up their minds to defend him, if need be, with their lives, and that if blood was shed they would leave it on his head. This argument prevailed, and he consented to remove to St. Andrews, whither he went by easy stages, and where he arrived in the month of May, 1571. In his absence his pulpit in St. Giles was filled for a while by Alexander Gordon, Bishop of Galloway, who pleased the Queen's party but displeased the vast majority of the Protestants, so that the Church of Edinburgh was for a time dissolved, while disorder reigned in the city, and what was virtually a civil war was raging in the country.
[[1]] "History," vol. vii. pp. 345-7.
[[2]] Vol. vii. p. 340.
[[3]] Vol. iii. p. 355.