Andrew Lang
John Knox and the Reformation
PREFACEIn this brief Life of Knox I have tried, as much as I may, to get behind Tradition, which has so deeply affected even modern histories of the Scottish Reformation, and even recent Biographies of the Reformer. The tradition is based, to a great extent, on Knoxs own History, which I am therefore obliged to criticise as carefully as I can. In his valuable John Knox, a Biography, Professor Hume Brown says that in the History we have convincing proof alike of the writers good faith, and of his perception of the conditions of historic truth. My reasons for dissenting from this favourable view will be found in the following pages. If I am right, if Knox, both as a politician and an historian, resembled Charles I. in sailing as near the wind as he could, the circumstance (as another of his biographers remarks) only makes him more human and interesting.
Opinion about Knox and the religious Revolution in which he took so great a part, has passed through several variations in the last century. In the Edinburgh Review of 1816 (No. liii. pp. 163-180), is an article with which the present biographer can agree. Several passages from Knoxs works are cited, and the reader is expected to be shocked at their principles. They are certainly shocking, but they are not, as a rule, set before the public by biographers of the Reformer.
Mr. Carlyle introduced a style of thinking about Knox which may be called platonically Puritan. Sweet enthusiasts glide swiftly over all in the Reformer that is specially distasteful to us. I find myself more in harmony with the outspoken Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several more recent students of Knox.
The Reformers violent counsels and intemperate speech were remarkable, writes Dr. Robertson, even in his own ruthless age, and he gives fourteen examples. 1 Lord Hailes has shown, he adds, how little Knoxs statements (in his History) are to be relied on even in matters which were within the Reformers own knowledge. In Scotland there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose sentimentalism. To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter Scott. On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which musters under the banner of the Covenant, and sees scarcely a blemish in Knox. A pretty sample of the sentiment of this party appears in a biography (1905) of the Reformer by a minister of the Gospel. Knox summoned the organised brethren, in 1563, to overawe justice, when some men were to be tried on a charge of invading in arms the chapel of Holyrood. No proceeding could be more anarchic than Knoxs, or more in accordance with the lovable customs of my dear country, at that time. But the biographer of 1905, a placed minister, writes that the doing of it (Knoxs summons) was only an assertion of the liberty of the Church, and of the members of the Commonwealth as a whole, to assemble for purposes which were clearly lawful the purposes being to overawe justice in the course of a trial!
On sentiment, Cavalier or Puritan, reason is thrown away.
I have been surprised to find how completely a study of Knoxs own works corroborates the views of Dr. Robertson and Lord Hailes. That Knox ran so very far ahead of the Genevan pontiffs of his age in violence; and that in his History he needs such careful watching, was, to me, an unexpected discovery. He may have been an old Hebrew prophet, as Mr. Carlyle says, but he had also been a young Scottish notary! A Hebrew prophet is, at best, a dangerous anachronism in a delicate crisis of the Church Christian; and the notarial element is too conspicuous in some passages of Knoxs History.
That Knox was a great man; a disinterested man; in his regard for the poor a truly Christian man; as a shepherd of Calvinistic souls a man fervent and considerate; of pure life; in friendship loyal; by jealousy untainted; in private character genial and amiable, I am entirely convinced. In public and political life he was much less admirable; and his History, vivacious as it is, must be studied as the work of an old-fashioned advocate rather than as the summing up of a judge. His favourite adjectives are bloody, beastly, rotten, and stinking.
Any inaccuracies of my own which may have escaped my correction will be dwelt on, by enthusiasts for the Prophet, as if they are the main elements of this book, and disqualify me as a critic of Knoxs History. At least any such errors on my part are involuntary and unconscious. In Knoxs defence we must remember that he never saw his History in print. But he kept it by him for many years, obviously re-reading, for he certainly retouched it, as late as 1571.
In quoting Knox and his contemporaries, I have used modern spelling: the letter from the State Papers printed on pp. 146, 147, shows what the orthography of the period was really like. Consultation of the original MSS. on doubtful points, proves that the printed Calendars, though excellent guides, cannot be relied on as authorities.
The portrait of Knox, from Bezas book of portraits of Reformers, is posthumous, but is probably a good likeness drawn from memory, after a description by Peter Young, who knew him, and a design, presumably by Adrianc Vaensoun, a Fleming, resident in Edinburgh. 2
There is an interesting portrait, possibly of Knox, in the National Gallery of Portraits, but the work has no known authentic history.
The portrait of Queen Mary, at the age of thirty-six, and a prisoner, is from the Earl of Mortons original; it is greatly superior to the Sheffield type of likenesses, of about 1578; and, with Janets and other drawings (1558-1561), the Bridal medal of 1558, and (in my opinion) the Earl of Leven and Melvilles portrait, of about 1560-1565, is the best extant representation of the Queen.
The Leven and Melville portrait of Mary, young and charming, and wearing jewels which are found recorded in her Inventories, has hitherto been overlooked. An admirable photogravure is given in Mr. J. J. Fosters True Portraiture of Mary, Queen of Scots (1905), and I understand that a photograph was done in 1866 for the South Kensington Museum.
A. LANG.
8 Gibson Place, St. Andrews.
CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY, BIRTH, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT: 1513(?) -1546
November 24, 1572.
John Knox, minister, deceased, who had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late Cardinal.
It is thus that the decent burgess who, in 1572, kept The Diurnal of such daily events as he deemed important, cautiously records the death of the great Scottish Reformer. The sorrows, the cumber of which Knox was alleged to bear the blame, did not end with his death. They persisted in the conspiracies and rebellions of the earlier years of James VI.; they smouldered through the later part of his time; they broke into far spreading flame at the touch of the Covenant; they blazed at dark Worcester and bloody Dunbar; at Preston fight, and the sack of Dundee by Monk; they included the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland, and the shame and misery of the Restoration; to trace them down to our own age would be invidious.
It is with the alleged author of the Sorrows, with his life, works, and ideas that we are concerned.
John Knox, son of William Knox and of Sinclair, his wife, 3 unlike most Scotsmen, unlike even Mr. Carlyle, had not an ell of pedigree. The common scoff was that each Scot styled himself the Kings poor cousin. But John Knox declared, I am a man of base estate and condition. 4 The genealogy of Mr. Carlyle has been traced to a date behind the Norman Conquest, but of Knoxs ancestors nothing is known. He himself, in 1562, when he ruled the roast in Scotland, told the ruffian Earl of Bothwell, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father, have served your Lordships predecessors, and some of them have died under their standards; and this (namely goodwill to the house of the feudal superior) is a part of the obligation of our Scottish kindness. Knox, indeed, never writes very harshly of Bothwell, partly for the reason he gives; partly, perhaps, because Bothwell, though an infamous character, and a political opponent, was not in 1562-67 an idolater, that is, a Catholic: if ever he had been one; partly because his History ends before Bothwells murder of Darnley in 1567.
Knoxs ancestors were, we may suppose, peasant farmers, like the ancestors of Burns and Hogg; and Knox, though he married a maid of the Queens kin, bore traces of his descent. A man ungrateful and unpleasable, Northumberland styled him: he was one who could not smiling, put a question by; if he had to remonstrate even with a person whom it was desirable to conciliate, he stated his case in the plainest and least flattering terms. Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions different from many, he wrote; but this side of his character he kept mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and indifferent or hostile to his aims. To others, especially to women whom he liked, he was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social superiority aroused his wakeful independence. His countrymen of his own order had long displayed these peculiarities of humour.
The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even before his age, in two strangely different lights. If they were not technically kindly tenants, in which case their conditions of existence and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their condition written in 1549, were in more servitude than the children of Israel in Egypt. Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted, hopes that the agricultural class may yet live as substantial commoners, not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours at their own expense, as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House. This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and England, in place of the old and romantic league with France. That alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their national independence. But, with the great revolution in religion, the interest of Scotland was a permanent political league with England, which Knox did as much as any man to forward, while, by resisting a religious union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.
If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners. In 1515 the chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam Williamson: You know the use of this country. Every man speaks what he will without blame. The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content unless he knows the masters counsel. There is no order among us.
Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was minded that A mans a man for a that! Knox was the true flower of this vigorous Lowland thistle. Throughout life he not only spoke what he would, but uttered the Truth in such a tone as to make it unlikely that his message should be accepted by opponents. Like Carlyle, however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he says, ever began on his side; while, as a good hater, Dr. Johnson might have admired him. He carried into political and theological conflicts the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns. So far Knox was an example of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn in detail about his ancestors.
The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of Haddington, in a district on the path of English invasion. The year of his birth has long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as 1505. 5 Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely, Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza that Knox died in his fifty-ninth year. Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see, appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.
If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priests orders, and adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which the canonical law permitted. No man ought to be in priests orders before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five in 1540, when he is styled Sir John Knox (one of The Popes Knights) in legal documents, and appears as a notary. 6 He certainly continued in orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543. The law of the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but in an age when notaires were often professional forgers, the additional security for character yielded by Holy Orders must have been welcome to clients, and Bishops permitted priests to practise this branch of the law.
Of Knoxs near kin no more is known than of his ancestors. He had a brother, William, for whom, in 1552, he procured a licence to trade in England as owner of a ship of 100 tons. Even as late as 1656, there were not a dozen ships of this burden in Scotland, so William Knox must have been relatively a prosperous man. In 1544-45, there was a William Knox, a fowler or gamekeeper to the Earl of Westmoreland, who acted as a secret agent between the Scots in English pay and their paymasters. We much later (1559) find the Reformers brother, William, engaged with him in a secret political mission to the Governor of Berwick; probably this William knew shy Border paths, and he may have learned them as the Lord Westmorelands fowler in earlier years.
About John Knoxs early years and education nothing is known. He certainly acquired such Latin (satis humilis, says a German critic) as Scotland then had to teach; probably at the Burgh School of Haddington. A certain John Knox matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1522, but he cannot have been the Reformer, if the Reformer was not born till 1513-15. Beza, on the other hand (1580), had learned, probably from the Reformer, whom he knew well, that Knox was a St. Andrews man, and though his name does not occur in the University Register, the Register was very ill kept. Supposing Knox, then, to have been born in 1513-15, and to have been educated at St. Andrews, we can see how he comes to know so much about the progress of the new religious ideas at that University, between 1529 and 1535. The Well of St. Leonards College was a notorious fountain of heresies, under Gawain Logie, the Principal. Knox very probably heard the sermons of the Dominicans and Franciscans against the pride and idle life of bishops, and other abuses. He speaks of a private conversation between Friar Airth and Major (about 1534), and names some of the persons present at a sermon in the parish church of St. Andrews, as if he had himself been in the congregation. He gives the text and heads of the discourse, including merry tales told by the Friar. 7 If Knox heard the sermons and stories of clerical scandals at St. Andrews, they did not prevent him from taking orders. His Greek and Hebrew, what there was of them, Knox must have acquired in later life, at least we never learn that he was taught by the famous George Wishart, who, about that time, gave Greek lectures at Montrose.