A kind of truce was now proclaimed, to last till May 1, 1555; Knox aiding in the confection of a service without responses, some part taken out of the English book, and other things put to, while Calvin, Bullinger, and three others were appointed as referees. The Frankfort congregation had now a brief interval of provisional peace, till, on March 13, 1555, Richard Cox, with a band of English refugees, arrived. He had been tutor to Edward VI., the young Marcellus of Protestantism, but for Frankfort he was not puritanic enough. His company would give a large majority to the anti-Knoxian congregation. He and his at once uttered the responses, and on Sunday one of them read the Litany. This was an unruly infraction of the provisional agreement. Cox and his party (April 5) represented to Calvin that they had given up surplices, crosses, and other things, not as impure and papistical, but as indifferent, and for the sake of peace. This was after they had driven Knox from the place, as they presently did; in the beginning it was distinctly their duty to give up the Litany and responses, while the truce lasted, that is, till the end of April. In the afternoon of the Sunday Knox preached, denouncing the mornings proceedings, the impurity of the Prayer Book, of which I once had a good opinion, and the absence, in England, of discipline, that is, interference by preachers with private life. Pluralities also he denounced, and some of the exiles had been pluralists.
For all this Knox was very sharply reproved, as soon as he left the pulpit. Two days later, at a meeting, he insisted that Coxs people should have a vote in the congregation, thus making the anti-puritans a majority; Knoxs conduct was here certainly chivalrous: I fear not your judgment, he said. He had never wished to go to Frankfort; in going he merely obeyed Calvin, and probably he had no great desire to stay. He was forbidden to preach by Cox and his majority; and a later conference with Cox led to no compromise. It seems probable that Cox and the anti-puritans already cherished a grudge against Knox for his tract, the Admonition. He had a warning that they would use the pamphlet against him, and he avers that some devised how to have me cast into prison. The anti-puritans, admitting in a letter to Calvin that they brought the Admonition before the magistrates of Frankfort as a book which would supply their enemies with just ground for overturning the whole Church, and one which had added much oil to the flame of persecution in England, deny that they desired more than that Knox might be ordered to quit the place. The passages selected as treasonable in the Admonition do not include the prayer for a Jehu. They were enough, however, to secure the dismissal of Knox from Frankfort.
Cox had accepted the Order used by the French Protestant congregation, probably because it committed him and his party to nothing in England; however, Knox had no sooner departed than the anti-puritans obtained leave to use, without surplice, cross, and some other matters, the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. In September the Puritans seceded, the anti-puritans remained, squabbling with the Lutherans and among themselves.
In the whole affair Knox acted the most open and manly part; in his History he declines to name the opponents who avenged themselves, in a manner so dubious, on his Admonition. If they believed their own account of the mischief that it wrought in England, their denunciation of him to magistrates, who were not likely to do more than dismiss him, is the less inexcusable. They did not try to betray him to a body like the Inquisition, as Calvin did in the case of Servetus. But their conduct was most unworthy and unchivalrous. 58
CHAPTER VII: KNOX IN SCOTLAND: LETHINGTON: MARY OF GUISE: 1555-1556
Meanwhile the Reformer returned to Geneva (April 1555), where Calvin was now supreme. From Geneva, the den of mine own ease, the rest of quiet study, Knox was dragged, maist contrarious to mine own judgement, by a summons from Mrs. Bowes. He did not like leaving his den to rejoin his betrothed; the lover was not so fervent as the evangelist was cautious. Knox had at that time probably little correspondence with Scotland. He knew that there was no refuge for him in England under Mary Tudor, who nowise may abide the presence of Gods prophets.
In Scotland, at this moment, the Government was in the hands of Mary of Guise, a sister of the Duke of Guise and of the Cardinal. Mary was now aged forty; she was born in 1515, as Knox probably was. She was a tall and stately woman; her face was thin and refined; Henry VIII., as being himself a large man, had sought her hand, which was given to his nephew, James V. On the death of that king, Mary, with Cardinal Beaton, kept Scotland true to the French alliance, and her daughter, the fair Queen of Scots, was at this moment a child in France, betrothed to the Dauphin. As a Catholic, of the House of Lorraine, Mary could not but cleave to her faith and to the French alliance. In 1554 she had managed to oust from the Regency the Earl of Arran, the head of the all but royal Hamiltons, now gratified with the French title of Duc de Chatelherault. To crown her was as seemly a thing, says Knox, if men had but eyes, as a saddle upon the back of ane unrewly kow. She practically deposed Huntly, the most treacherous of men, from the Chancellorship, substituting, with more or less reserve, a Frenchman, de Rubay; and dOysel, the commander of the French troops in Scotland, was her chief adviser.
Writing after the death of Mary of Guise, Knox avers that she only waited her chance to cut the throats of all those in whom she suspected the knowledge of God to be, within the realm of Scotland. 59 As a matter of fact, the Regent later refused a French suggestion that she should peacefully call Protestants together, and then order a massacre after the manner of the Bartholomew: itself still in the womb of the future. Mary of Guise, says Knoxs biographer, Professor Hume Brown, had the instincts of a good ruler the love of order and justice, and the desire to stand well with the people.
Knox, however, believed, or chose to say, that she wanted to cut all Protestant throats, just as he believed that a Protestant king should cut all Catholic throats. He attributed to her, quite erroneously and uncharitably, his own unsparing fervour. As he held this view of her character and purposes, it is not strange that a journey to Scotland was contrairious to his judgement.
He did not understand the situation. Ferocious as had been the English invasion of Scotland in 1547, the English party in Scotland, many of them paid traitors, did not resent these rebukes of a friend, so much as both the nobles and the people now began to detest their French allies, and were jealous of the Queen Mothers promotion of Frenchmen.
There were not, to be sure, many Scots whom she, or any one, could trust. Some were honestly Protestant: some held pensions from England: others would sacrifice national interests to their personal revenges and clan feuds. The Rev. the Lord James Stewart, Marys bastard brother, Prior of St. Andrews and of Pittenweem, was still very young. He had no interest in his clerical profession beyond drawing his revenues as prior of two abbeys; and his nearness to the Crown caused him to be suspected of ambition: moreover, he tended towards the new ideas in religion. He had met Knox in London, apparently in 1552. Morton was a mere wavering youth; Argyll was very old: Chatelherault was a rival of the Regent, a competitor for the Crown and quite incompetent. The Regent, in short, could scarcely have discovered a Scottish adviser worthy of employment, and when she did trust one, he was the brilliant chamaeleon, young Maitland of Lethington, who would rather betray his master cleverly than run a straight course, and did betray the Regent. Thus Mary, a Frenchwoman and a Catholic, governing Scotland for her Catholic daughter, the Dauphiness, with the aid of a few French troops who had just saved the independence of the country, naturally employed French advisers. This made her unpopular; her attempts to bring justice into Scottish courts were odious, and she would not increase the odium by persecuting the Protestants. The Dukes bastard brother, again, the Archbishop, sharing his family ambition, was in no mood for burning heretics. The Queen Mother herself carried conciliation so far as to pardon and reinstate such trebly dyed traitors as the notorious Crichton of Brunston, and she employed Kirkcaldy of Grange, who intrigued against her while in her employment. An Edinburgh tailor, Harlaw, who seems to have been a deacon in English orders, was allowed to return to Scotland in 1554. He became a very notable preacher. 60
Going from Mrs. Bowess house to Edinburgh, Knox found that the fervency of the godly did ravish him. At the house of one Syme the trumpet blew the auld sound three days thegither, he informed Mrs. Bowes, and Knox himself was the trumpeter. He found another lady, who, by reason that she had a troubled conscience, delighted much in the company of the said John. There were pleasant sisters in Edinburgh, who later consulted Knox on the delicate subject of dress. He was more tolerant in answering them than when he denounced the stinking pride of women at Mary Stuarts Court; admitting that in clothes, silks, velvets, gold, and other such, there is no uncleanness, yet I cannot praise the common superfluity which women now use in their apparel. He was quite opposed, however, to what he pleasingly calls correcting natural beauty (as by dyeing the hair), and held that farthingales cannot be justified.
On the whole, he left the sisters fairly free to dress as they pleased. His curious phrase, 61 in a letter to a pair of sisters, the prophets of God are often impeded to pray for such as carnally they love unfeignedly, is difficult to understand. We leave it to the learned to explain this singular limitation of the prophet, which Knox says that he had not as yet experienced. He must have heard about it from other prophets.
Knox found at this time a patron remarkable, says Dr. MCrie, for great respectability of character, Erskine of Dun. Born in 1508, about 1530 he slew a priest named Thomas Froster, in a curiously selected place, the belfry tower of Montrose. Nobody seems to have thought anything of it, nor should we know the fact, if the record of the blood-price paid by Mr. Erskine to the priests father did not testify to the fervent act. Six years later, according to Knox, God had marvellously illuminated Erskine, and the mildness of his nature is frequently applauded. He was, for Scotland, a man of learning, and our first amateur of Greek. Why did he kill a priest in a bell tower!
In the winter or autumn of 1555, Erskine gave a supper, where Knox was to argue against crypto-protestantism. When once the Truth, whether Anglican or Presbyterian, was firmly established, Catholics were compelled, under very heavy fines, to attend services and sermons which they believed to be at least erroneous, if not blasphemous. I am not aware that, in 1555, the Catholic Church, in Scotland, thus vigorously forced people of Protestant opinions to present themselves at Mass, punishing nonconformity with ruin. I have not found any complaints to this effect, at that time. But no doubt an appearance of conformity might save much trouble, even in the lenient conditions produced by the character of the Regent and by the political situation. Knox, then, discovered that divers who had a zeal to godliness made small scruple to go to the Mass, or to communicate with the abused sacraments in the Papistical manner. He himself, therefore, began to show the impiety of the Mass, and how dangerous a thing it was to communicate in any sort with idolatry.
Now to many of his hearers this essential article of his faith that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and form of celebration were idolatry may have been quite a new idea. It was already, however, a commonplace with Anglican Protestants. Nothing of the sort was to be found in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the ideas of Knoxs Scottish disciples. Indeed, their consciences appear to have been at rest, for it was after Knoxs declaration about the idolatrous character of the Mass that the matter began to be agitated from man to man, the conscience of some being afraid.
To us it may seem that the sudden denunciation of a Christian ceremony, even what may be deemed a perverted Christian ceremony, as sheer idolatry, equivalent to the worship of serpents, bulls, or of a foreign Baal in ancient Israel was a step calculated to confuse the real issues and to provoke a religious war of massacre. Knox, we know, regarded extermination of idolaters as a counsel of perfection, though in the Christian scriptures not one word could be found to justify his position. He relied on texts about massacring Amalekites and about Elijahs slaughter of the prophets of Baal. The Mass was idolatry, was Baal worship; and Baal worshippers, if recalcitrant, must die.
These extreme unchristian ideas, then, were new in Scotland, even to divers who had a zeal to godliness. For their discussion, at Erskine of Duns party, were present, among others, Willock, a Scots preacher returned from England, and young Maitland of Lethington. We are not told what part Willock took in the conversation. The arguments turned on biblical analogies, never really coincident with the actual modern circumstances. The analogy produced in discussion by those who did not go to all extremes with Knox did not, however, lack appropriateness. Christianity, in fact, as they seem to have argued, did arise out of Judaism; retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but, in virtue of the sacrifice of its Founder, abstaining from the sacrifices and ceremonial of the law. In the same way Protestantism arose out of mediæval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but rejecting the mediæval ceremonial and the mediæval theory of the sacrifice of the Mass. It did not follow that the Mass was sheer idolatry, at which no friend of the new ideas could be present.
As a proof that such presence or participation was not unlawful, was not idolatry, in the existing state of affairs, was adduced the conduct of St. Paul and the advice given to him by St. James and the Church in Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 18-36). Paul was informed that many thousands of Jews believed, yet remained zealous for the law, the old order. They had learned that Paul advised the Jews in Greece and elsewhere not to walk after the customs. Paul should prove that he also kept the law. For this purpose he, with four Christian Jews under a vow, was to purify himself, and he went into the Temple, until that an offering should be offered for every one of them.
Offerings, of course, is the term in our version for sacrifices, whether of animals or of unleavened wafers anointed with oil. The argument from analogy was, I infer, that the Mass, with its wafer, was precisely such an offering, such a survival in Catholic ritual, as in Jewish ritual St. Paul consented to, by the advice of the Church of Jerusalem; consequently Protestants in a Catholic country, under the existing circumstances, might attend the Mass. The Mass was not idolatry. The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course, and to fatal results, does Knoxs analogy between the foreign worships of Israel and the Mass. She thinks not that idolatry, but good religion, said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Marys Mass. So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch, retorted the reformer. Manifestly the Mass is, of the two, much more on a level with the offering of St. Paul than with human sacrifices to Moloch! 62
In his reply Knox, as he states his own argument, altogether overlooked the offering of St. Paul, which, as far as we understand, was the essence of his opponents contention. He said that to pay vows was never idolatry, but the Mass from the original was and remained odious idolatry, therefore the facts were most unlike. Secondly, I greatly doubt whether either Jamess commandment or Pauls obedience proceeded from the Holy Ghost, about which Knox was, apparently, better informed than these Apostles and the Church of Jerusalem. Next, Paul was presently in danger from a mob, which had been falsely told that he took Greeks into the Temple. Hence it was manifest that God approved not that means of reconciliation. Obviously the danger of an Apostle from a misinformed mob is no sort of evidence to divine approval or disapproval of his behaviour. 63 We shall later find that when Knox was urging on some English nonconformists the beauty of conformity (1568), he employed the very precedent of St. Pauls conduct at Jerusalem, which he rejected when it was urged at Erskines supper party!