John Knox and the Reformation

Not that natural indignation was dead, but it ended in words. People said, “The Queen’s Mass and her priests will we maintain; this hand and this rapier will fight in their defence.” So men bragged, as Knox reports, 214 but when after Mary’s arrival priests were beaten or pilloried, not a hand stirred to defend them, not a rapier was drawn. The Queen might be as safely as she was deeply insulted through her faith. She was not at this time devoutly ardent in her creed, though she often professed her resolution to abide in it. Gentleness might conceivably have led her even to adopt the Anglican faith, or so it was deemed by some observers, but insolence and outrage had another effect on her temper.

Mary landed at Leith in a thick fog on August 19, 1561. She was now in a country where she lay under sentence of death as an idolater. Her continued existence was illegal. With her came Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingstone, and Mary Fleming, the comrades of her childhood; and her uncles, the Duc d’Aumale, Francis de Lorraine, and the noisy Marquis d’Elboeuf. She was not very welcome. As late as August 9, Randolph reports that her brother, Lord James, Lethington, and Morton “wish, as you do, she might be stayed yet for a space, and if it were not for their obedience sake, some of them care not though they never see her face.” 215 None the less, on June 8 Lord James tells Mary that he had given orders for her palace to be prepared by the end of July. He informs her that “many” hope that she will never come home. Nothing is “so necessary.. as your Majesty’s own presence”; and he hopes she will arrive punctually. If she cannot come she should send her commission to some of her Protestant advisers, by no means including the Archbishop of St. Andrews (Hamilton), with whom he will never work. It is not easy to see why Lord James should have wished that Mary “might be stayed,” unless he merely dreaded her arrival while Elizabeth was in a bad temper. His letter to Elizabeth of August 6 is incompatible with treachery on his part. “Mr. Knox is determined to abide the uttermost, and others will not leave him till God have taken his life and theirs together.” Of what were these heroes afraid? A “familiar,” a witch, of Lady Huntly’s predicted that the Queen would never arrive. “If false, I would she were burned for a witch,” adds honest Randolph. Lethington deemed his “own danger not least.” Two galleys full of ladies are not so alarming; did these men, practically hinting that English ships should stop their Queen, think that the Catholics in Scotland were too strong for them?

Not a noble was present to meet Mary when in the fog and filth of Leith she touched Scottish soil, except her natural brother, Lord Robert. 216 The rest soon gathered with faces of welcome. She met some Robin Hood rioters who lay under the law, and pardoned these roisterers (with their excommunication could she interfere?), because, says Knox, she was instructed that they had acted “in despite of the religion.” Their festival had been forbidden under the older religion, as it happens, in 1555, and was again forbidden later by Mary herself.

All was mirth till Sunday, when the Queen’s French priest celebrated Mass in her own chapel before herself, her three uncles, and Montrose. The godly called for the priest’s blood, but Lord James kept the door, and his brothers protected the priest. Disappointed of blood, “the godly departed with great grief of heart,” collecting in crowds round Holyrood in the afternoon. Next day the Council proclaimed that, till the Estates assembled and deliberated, no innovation should be made in the religion “publicly and universally standing.” The Queen’s servants and others from France must not be molested – on pain of death, the usual empty threat. They were assaulted, and nobody was punished for the offence. Arran alone made a protest, probably written by Knox. Who but Knox could have written that the Mass is “much more abominable and odious in the sight of God” than murder! Many an honest brother was conspicuously of the opinion which Arran’s protest assigned to Omnipotence. Next Sunday Knox “thundered,” and later regretted that “I did not that I might have done” (caused an armed struggle?)… “for God had given unto me credit with many, who would have put into execution God’s judgments if I would only have consented thereto.” Mary might have gone the way of Jezebel and Athaliah but for the mistaken lenity of Knox, who later “asked God’s mercy” for not being more vehement. In fact, he rather worked “to slokin that fervency.” 217 Let us hope that he is forgiven, especially as Randolph reports him extremely vehement in the pulpit. His repentance was publicly expressed shortly before the murder of Riccio. (In December 1565, probably, when the Kirk ordered the week’s fast that, as it chanced, heralded Riccio’s doom.) Privately to Cecil, on October 7, 1561, he uttered his regret that he had been so deficient in zeal. Cecil had been recommending moderation. 218

On August 26, Randolph, after describing the intimidation of the priest, says “John Knox thundereth out of the pulpit, so that I fear nothing so much as that one day he will mar all. He ruleth the roast, and of him all men stand in fear.” In public at least he did not allay the wrath of the brethren.

On August 26, or on September 2, Knox had an interview with the Queen, and made her weep. Randolph doubted whether this was from anger or from grief. Knox gives Mary’s observations in the briefest summary; his own at great length, so that it is not easy to know how their reasoning really sped. Her charges were his authorship of the “Monstrous Regiment of Women”; that he caused great sedition and slaughter in England; and that he was accused of doing what he did by necromancy. The rest is summed up in “&c.”

He stood to his guns about the “Monstrous Regiment,” and generally took the line that he merely preached against “the vanity of the papistical religion” and the deceit, pride, and tyranny of “that Roman Antichrist.” If one wishes to convert a young princess, bred in the Catholic faith, it is not judicious to begin by abusing the Pope. This too much resembles the arbitrary and violent method of Peter in The Tale of a Tub (by Dr. Jonathan Swift); such, however, was the method of Knox.

Mary asking if he denied her “just authority,” Knox said that he was as well content to live under her as Paul under Nero. This, again, can hardly be called an agreeable historical parallel! Knox hoped that he would not hurt her or her authority “so long as ye defile not your hands with the blood of the saints of God,” as if Mary was panting to distinguish herself in that way. His hope was unfulfilled. No “saints” suffered, but he ceased not to trouble.

Knox also said that if he had wanted “to trouble your estate because you are a woman, I might have chosen a time more convenient for that purpose than I can do now, when your own presence is in the realm.” He had, in fact, chosen the convenient time in his letter to Cecil, already quoted (July 19, 1559), but he had not succeeded in his plan. He said that nobody could prove that the question of discarding Mary, on the ground of her sex, “was at any time moved in public or in secret.” Nobody could prove it, for nobody could publish his letter to Cecil. Probably he had this in his mind. He did not say that the thing had not happened, only that “he was assured that neither Protestant nor papist shall be able to prove that any such question was at any time moved, either in public or in secret.” 219

He denied that he had caused sedition in England, nor do we know what Mary meant by this charge. His appeals, from abroad, to a Phinehas or Jehu had not been answered. As to magic, he always preached against the practice.

Mary then said that Knox persuaded the people to use religion not allowed by their princes. He justified himself by biblical precedents, to which she replied that Daniel and Abraham did not resort to the sword. They had not the chance, he answered, adding that subjects might resist a prince who exceeded his bounds, as sons may confine a maniac father.

The Queen was long silent, and then said, “I perceive my subjects shall obey you and not me.” Knox said that all should be subject unto God and His Church; and Mary frankly replied, “I will defend the Church of Rome, for I think that it is the true Church of God.” She could not defend it! Knox answered with his wonted urbanity, that the Church of Rome was a harlot, addicted to “all kinds of fornication.”

He was so accustomed to this sort of rhetoric that he did not deem it out of place on this occasion. His admirers, familiar with his style, forget its necessary effect on “a young princess unpersuaded,” as Lethington put it. Mary said that her conscience was otherwise minded, but Knox knew that all consciences of “man or angel” were wrong which did not agree with his own. The Queen had to confess that in argument as to the unscriptural character of the Mass, he was “owre sair” for her. He said that he wished she would “hear the matter reasoned to the end.” She may have desired that very thing: “Ye may get that sooner than ye believe,” she said; but Knox expressed his disbelief that he would ever get it. Papists would never argue except when “they were both judge and party.” Knox himself never answered Ninian Winzet, who, while printing his polemic, was sought for by the police of the period, and just managed to escape.

There was, however, a champion who, on November 19, challenged Knox and the other preachers to a discussion, either orally or by interchange of letters. This was Mary’s own chaplain, René Benoit. Mary probably knew that he was about to offer to meet “the most learned John Knox and other most erudite men, called ministers”; it is thus that René addresses them in his “Epistle” of November 19.

He implores them not to be led into heresy by love of popularity or of wealth; neither of which advantages the preachers enjoyed, for they were detested by loose livers, and were nearly starved. Benoit’s little challenge, or rather request for discussion, is a model of courtesy. Knox did not meet him in argument, as far as we are aware; but in 1562, Fergusson, minister of Dunfermline, replied in a tract full of scurrility. One quite unmentionable word occurs, and “impudent lie,” “impudent and shameless shavelings,” “Baal’s chaplains that eat at Jezebel’s table,” “pestilent papistry,” “abominable mass,” “idol Bishops,” “we Christians and you Papists,” and parallels between Benoit and “an idolatrous priest of Bethel,” between Mary and Jezebel are among the amenities of this meek servant of Christ in Dunfermline.

Benoit presently returned to France, and later was confessor to Henri IV. The discussion which Mary anticipated never occurred, though her champion was ready. Knox does not refer to this affair in his “History,” as far as I am aware. 220 Was René the priest whom the brethren menaced and occasionally assaulted?

Considering her chaplain’s offer, it seems not unlikely that Mary was ready to listen to reasoning, but to call the Pope “Antichrist,” and the Church “a harlot,” is not argument. Knox ended his discourse by wishing the Queen as blessed in Scotland as Deborah was in Israel. The mere fact that Mary spoke with him “makes the Papists doubt what shall come of the world,” 221 says Randolph; and indeed nobody knows what possibly might have come, had Knox been sweetly reasonable. But he told his friends that, if he was not mistaken, she had “a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and His truth.” She showed none of these qualities in the conversation as described by himself; but her part in it is mainly that of a listener who returns not railing with railing.

Knox was going about to destroy the scheme of les politiques, Randolph, Lethington, and the Lord James. They desired peace and amity with England, and the two Scots, at least, hoped to secure these as the Cardinal Guise did, by Mary’s renouncing all present claim to the English throne, in return for recognition as heir, if Elizabeth died without issue. Elizabeth, as we know her, would never have granted these terms, but Mary’s ministers, Lethington then in England, Lord James at home, tried to hope. 222 Lord James had heard Mary’s outburst to Knox about defending her own insulted Church, but he was not nervously afraid that she would take to dipping her hands in the blood of the saints. Neither he nor Lethington could revert to the old faith; they had pecuniary reasons, as well as convictions, which made that impossible.

Lethington, returned to Edinburgh (October 25), spoke his mind to Cecil. “The Queen behaves herself.. as reasonably as we can require: if anything be amiss the fault is rather in ourselves. You know the vehemency of Mr. Knox’s spirit which cannot be bridled, and yet doth utter sometimes such sentences as cannot easily be digested by a weak stomach. I would wish he should deal with her more gently, being a young princess unpersuaded… Surely in her comporting with him she declares a wisdom far exceeding her age.” 223 Vituperation is not argument, and gentleness is not unchristian. St. Paul did not revile the gods of Felix and Festus.

But, prior to these utterances of October, the brethren had been baiting Mary. On her public entry (which Knox misdates by a month) her idolatry was rebuked by a pageant of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Huntly managed to stop a burning in effigy of a priest at the Mass. They never could cease from insulting the Queen in the tenderest point. The magistrates next coupled “mess-mongers” with notorious drunkards and adulterers, “and such filthy persons,” in a proclamation, so the Provost and Bailies were “warded” (Knox says) in the Tolbooth. Knox blamed Lethington and Lord James, in a letter to Cecil; 224 in his “History” he says, “God be merciful to some of our own.” 225

The Queen herself, as a Papist, was clearly insulted in the proclamation. Moray and Lethington, the latter touched by her “readiness to hear,” and her gentleness in the face of Protestant brutalities; the former, perhaps, lured by the hope of obtaining, as the price of his alliance, the earldom of Moray, were by the end of October still attempting to secure amity between her and Elizabeth, and to hope for the best, rather than drive the Queen wild by eternal taunts and menaces. The preachers denounced her rites at Hallowmass (All Saints), and a servant of her brother, Lord Robert, beat a priest; but men actually doubted whether subjects might interfere between the Queen and her religion. There was a discussion on this point between the preachers and the nobles, and the Church in Geneva (Calvin) was to be consulted. Knox offered to write, but Lethington said that he would write, as much stood on the “information”; that is, on the manner of stating the question. Lethington did not know, and Knox does not tell us in his “History” that he had himself, a week earlier, put the matter before Calvin in his own way. Even Lord James, he says to Calvin, though the Abdiel of godliness, “is afraid to overthrow that idol by violence” —idolum illud missalicum. 226

Knox’s letter to Calvin represents the Queen as alleging that he has already answered the question, declaring that Knox’s party has no right to interfere with the Royal mass. This rumour Knox disbelieves. He adds that Arran would have written, but was absent.

Apparently Arran did write to Calvin, anonymously, and dating from London, November 18, 1561. The letter, really from Scotland, is in French. The writer acknowledges the receipt, about August 20, of an encouraging epistle from Calvin. He repeats Knox’s statements, in the main, and presses for a speedy reply. He says that he goes seldom to Court, both on account of “that idol,” and because “sobriety and virtue” have been exiled. 227 As Arran himself “is known to have had company of a good handsome wench, a merchant’s daughter,” which led to a riot with Bothwell, described by Randolph (December 27, 1561), his own “virtue and sobriety” are not conspicuous. 228 He was in Edinburgh on November 15-19, and the London date of his anonymous letter is a blind. 229

It does not appear that Calvin replied to Knox, and to the anonymous correspondent, in whom I venture to detect Arran; or, if he answered, his letter was probably unfavourable to Knox, as we shall argue when the subject later presents itself.

Finally – “the votes of the Lords prevailed against the ministers”; the Queen was allowed her Mass, but Lethington, a minister of the Queen, did not consult a foreigner as to the rights of her subjects against her creed.

The lenity of Lord James was of sudden growth. At Stirling he and Argyll had gallantly caused the priests to leave the choir “with broken heads and bloody ears,” the Queen weeping. So Randolph reported to Cecil (September 24).

Why her brother, foremost to insult Mary and her faith, unless Randolph errs, in September, took her part in a few weeks, we do not know. At Perth, Mary was again offended, and suffered in health by reason of the pageants; “they did too plainly condemn the errors of the world… I hear she is troubled with such sudden passions after any great unkindness or grief of mind,” says Randolph. She was seldom free from such godly chastisements. At Perth, however, some one gave her a cross of five diamonds with pendant pearls.

Meanwhile the statesmen did not obey the Ministers as men ought to obey God: a claim not easily granted by carnal politicians.

CHAPTER XV: KNOX AND QUEEN MARY (continued), 1561-1564

Had Mary been a mere high-tempered and high-spirited girl, easily harmed in health by insults to herself and her creed, she might now have turned for support to Huntly, Cassilis, Montrose, and the other Earls who were Catholic or “unpersuaded.” Her great-grandson, Charles II., when as young as she now was, did make the “Start” – the schoolboy attempt to run away from the Presbyterians to the loyalists of the North. But Mary had more self-control.

The artful Randolph found himself as hardly put to it now, in diplomacy, as the Cardinal’s murderers had done, in war, when they met the scientific soldier, Strozzi. “The trade is now clean cut off from me,” wrote Randolph (October 27); “I have to traffic now with other merchants than before. They know the value of their wares, and in all places how the market goeth… Whatsoever policy is in all the chief and best practised heads of France; whatsoever craft, falsehood, or deceit is in all the subtle brains of Scotland,” said the unscrupulous agent, “is either fresh in this woman’s memory, or she can bring it out with a wet finger.” 230

Mary, in fact, was in the hands of Lethington (a pensioner of Elizabeth) and of Lord James: “subtle brains” enough. She was the “merchandise,” and Lethington and Lord James wished to make Elizabeth acknowledge the Scottish Queen as her successor, the alternative being to seek her price as a wife for an European prince. An “union of hearts” with England might conceivably mean Mary’s acceptance of the Anglican faith. It is not a kind thing to say about Mary, but I suspect that, if assured of the English succession, she might have gone over to the Prayer Book. In the first months of her English captivity (July 1568) Mary again dallied with the idea of conversion, for the sake of freedom. She told the Spanish Ambassador that “she would sooner be murdered,” but if she could have struck her bargain with Elizabeth, I doubt that she would have chosen the Prayer Book rather than the dagger or the bowl. 231 Her conversion would have been bitterness as of wormwood to Knox. In his eyes Anglicanism was “a bastard religion,” “a mingle-mangle now commanded in your kirks.” “Peculiar services appointed for Saints’ days, diverse Collects as they falsely call them in remembrance of this or that Saint.. are in my conscience no small portion of papistical superstition.” 232 “Crossing in Baptism is a diabolical invention; kneeling at the Lord’s table, mummelling,” (uttering the responses, apparently), “or singing of the Litany.” All these practices are “diabolical inventions,” in Knox’s candid opinion, “with Mr. Parson’s pattering of his constrained prayers, and with the mass-munging of Mr. Vicar, and of his wicked companions.” (A blank in the MS.) “Your Ministers, before for the most part, were none of Christ’s ministers, but mass-mumming priests.” He appears to speak of the Anglican Church as it was under Edward VI. (To Mrs. Locke, Dieppe, April 6, 1559.) 233 As Elizabeth brought in “cross and candle,” her Church must have been odious to our Reformer. Calvin had regarded the “silly things” in our Prayer Book as “endurable,” not so Knox. Before he came back to Scotland, the Reformers were content with the English Prayer Book. By rejecting it, Knox and his allies disunited Scotland and England.

Knox’s friend Arran was threatening to stir up the Congregation for the purpose of securing him in the revenues of three abbeys, including St. Andrews, of which Lord James was Prior. The extremists raised the question, “whether the Queen, being an idolater, may be obeyed in all civil and political actions.” 234

Knox later made Chatelherault promise this obedience; what his views were in November 1561 we know not. Lord James was already distrusted by his old godly friends; it was thought he would receive what he had long desired, the Earldom of Moray (November 11, 1561), and the precise professors meditated a fresh revolution. “It must yet come to a new day,” they said. 235 Those about Arran were discontented, and nobody was more in his confidence than Knox, but at this time Arran was absent from Edinburgh; was at St. Andrews.

Meanwhile, at Court, “the ladies are merry, dancing, lusty, and fair,” wrote Randolph, who flirted with Mary Beaton (November 18); and long afterwards, in 1578, when she was Lady Boyne, spoke of her as “a very dear friend.” Knox complains that the girls danced when they “got the house alone”; not a public offence! He had his intelligencers in the palace.

There was, on November 16, a panic in the unguarded palace: 236 “the poor damsels were left alone,” while men hid in fear of nobody knew what, except a rumour that Arran was coming, with his congregational friends, “to take away the Queen.” The story was perhaps a fable, but Arran had been uttering threats. Mary, however, expected to be secured by an alliance with Elizabeth. “The accord between the two Queens will quite overthrow them” (the Bishops), “and they say plainly that she cannot return a true Christian woman,” writes Randolph. 237

Lethington and Randolph both suspected that if Mary abandoned idolatry, it would be after conference with Elizabeth, and rather as being converted by that fair theologian than as compelled by her subjects. Unhappily Elizabeth never would meet Mary, who, for all that we know, might at this hour have adopted the Anglican via media, despite her protests to Knox and to the Pope of her fidelity to Rome. Like Henri IV., she may at this time have been capable of preferring a crown – that of England – to a dogma. Her Mass, Randolph wrote, “is rather for despite than devotion, for those that use it care not a straw for it, and jest sometimes against it.” 238

Randolph, at this juncture, reminded Mary that advisers of the Catholic party had prevented James V. from meeting Henry VIII. She answered, “Something is reserved for us that was not then,” possibly hinting at her conversion. Lord James shared the hopes of Lethington and Randolph. “The Papists storm, thinking the meeting of the queens will overthrow Mass and all.”

The Ministers of Mary, les politiques, indulged in dreams equally distasteful to the Catholics and to the more precise of the godly; dreams that came through the Ivory Gate; with pictures of the island united, and free from the despotism of Giant Pope and Giant Presbyter. 239 A schism between the brethren and their old leaders and advisers, Lord James and Lethington, was the result. At the General Assembly of December 1561, the split was manifest. The parties exchanged recriminations, and there was even question of the legality of such conventions as the General Assembly. Lethington asked whether the Queen “allowed” the gathering. Knox (apparently) replied, “Take from us the freedom of Assemblies, and take from us the Evangel.” He defended them as necessary for order among the preachers; but the objection, of course, was to their political interferences. The question was to be settled for Cromwell in his usual way, with a handful of hussars. It was now determined that the Queen might send Commissioners to the Assembly to represent her interests.