A Century of Scottish Dissent
Preaching for religious reform had a century of history in Scotland. In 1433 Paul Crawar was accused of spreading the ideas of Wycliffe and Hus; the Church condemned him and the state burned him. In 1494 thirty of the "Lollards of Kyle" were summoned before the Bishop of Glasgow. They were charged with opposing relics and religious images, with denying the priestly power to absolve in confession, with rejecting transubstantiation, purgatory, the sale of indulgences, Masses for the dead, clerical celibacy and the authority of the pope. These were much the same ideas that Luther put into his Ninety-five Theses twenty-three years later. All thirty apparently recanted.
Soon afterward (1523) Luther's writings reached Scotland. Manuscript copies of the New Testament, rendered into Scots from Wycliffe's English version, passed from hand to hand, and people began to ask for a religion that agreed with the Bible. Patrick Hamilton went to Paris and Louvain, met the ideas of Erasmus and Greek learning, then went to Wittenberg, and came home to speak of salvation by faith. James Beaton, uncle of David Beaton and now Archbishop of St. Andrews, summoned him for examination. Hamilton went to the archbishop's seat, defended his convictions, and was condemned to death by fire (1528). Two more Scottish reformers were burned in 1534. A year later four men were hanged and a woman was drowned; according to Knox, whose accounts are not all credible, she went into the water while her infant was nursing at her breast.
These scattered executions provoked little reaction. But the execution of George Wishart shook the country, and his death was in fact the first great tragedy of the Scottish Reformation. Around 1543 Wishart translated the First Helvetic Confession. Sadly, this Protestant statement required rulers to punish heretics. From then on Swiss Protestantism, first rooted in the humane ideas of Zwingli and soon strongly shaped by Calvin, replaced Lutheranism in Scotland. Wishart preached at Montrose and Dundee, nursed plague victims with courage and self-sacrifice, and spread Protestantism in Edinburgh while the Scottish clergy were meeting there under David Beaton. The cardinal condemned him for heresy and had him burned (1546).
From Disciple to Galley Slave
One of those won to Protestantism through Wishart became a famous figure in history. John Knox was born near Haddington sometime between 1505 and 1515. His parents raised him for the priesthood. He studied at Glasgow and was ordained around 1532; his grasp of canon and civil law made his name. The history of the Reformation in Scotland that he later wrote says nothing of his youth, but it suddenly introduces him as Wishart's ardent disciple and fearless bodyguard (1546), carrying a heavy sword. After Wishart's arrest Knox fled, and in 1547 he joined, at St. Andrews, the company that had killed Cardinal Beaton. (The book dates this to Easter 1547, which does not match its own earlier date of 1546 for the cardinal's death.)
The cardinal's killers, who felt the need of religion, asked Knox to be their preacher. He thought himself unfit and refused, but under the pressure of his friends he accepted, and all agreed they had never heard such fiery preaching. In his sermons he called the Roman Catholic Church the "synagogue of Satan" and likened it to the terrible beast of the Book of Revelation. Like Luther, he held that man is saved "by faith alone, and that it is the blood of Jesus Christ that has freed us from the bondage of sin." In July a French fleet bombarded the castle where the killers had gathered. The defenders fell after four weeks, and Knox and his companions were carried off as slaves and set to the oars for nineteen months. We have no exact knowledge of how the French treated their prisoners, except that they tried to force them to attend Mass and (so Knox claims) they stubbornly refused. Perhaps the humiliation of captivity sharpened his hatred and made his tongue and pen aggressive.
England, Exile and Geneva
After the prisoners won their freedom (February 1549), Knox took up the ministry in England on a salary from the government of the Duke of Somerset. "Whenever his frail body allowed," he preached once a day. For those of us to whom religious talk means little, it is hard to grasp the appetite of sixteenth-century people for sermons. Parish priests had left preaching to bishops, and bishops left it occasionally to friars. Among Protestants, preachers became reporters and commentators who discussed the events of the day or week with their congregations and so mixed religion with daily life. They criticized the sins of their flock and pointed out the government's failings. One day, before an assembly attended by Edward VI and the Duke of Northumberland, Knox rebuked Christian rulers who choose irreligious advisers. The duke tried to silence him with the promise of a bishopric and got nowhere.
Mary Tudor was more dangerous and more intractable than any ruler of Knox's time. After dodging events in England for a while, he fled to Dieppe and Geneva (1554). Calvin made him preacher to an English-speaking church at Frankfurt, but his ideas did not suit that congregation and he was asked to leave. He returned to Geneva (1555). The depth of Calvin's influence shows in the fact that he could tame a man who, like Calvin himself, was strong and able. Knox described Calvin's Geneva as "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles." Calvinism suited his nature, for it had firm self-confidence, thought itself inspired by the Creator, saw it as its duty to set the conduct and beliefs of the people, and claimed the right to guide the state. Knox adopted every aspect of Calvin's system and spread it in Scotland. Fearing the rule of Mary Stuart over Scotland, he asked Calvin and Bullinger whether one may turn away from the commands of a ruler who encourages idolatry and suppresses true religion. They gave no clear answer, but Knox had already made up his mind.
In the autumn of 1555, when he was probably fifty, Knox went back to Mary Tudor's England and then to Berwick, where he married Marjory Bowes. The marriage came about because Knox was fond of her mother, Elizabeth Bowes, a woman with five sons, ten daughters and a Catholic husband. Through Knox's words she had become a Protestant and shared her family troubles with him, and he was glad to guide her. Their spiritual friendship apparently remained pure to the end of their lives. After Knox married her daughter, Mrs. Bowes left her husband and lived with her daughter and her confessor son-in-law. Marjory died five years after the wedding, and although Knox married again, Mrs. Bowes stayed in his house. It is rare in history to find such a pure and lasting friendship between a woman and her daughter's husband.
Knox went on to Scotland, where Mary of Guise still treated Protestants kindly and relied on the Protestant faction among the nobles. He praised the regent as a "princess worthy of honor, singular in wisdom and mercy." In Edinburgh and elsewhere he founded Protestant congregations and brought able, influential men to the faith, among them William Maitland, laird of Lethington, and James Stewart, the illegitimate brother of Mary Stuart, who later became regent as Earl of Moray. A Church court alarmed by the spread of Protestantism summoned Knox for examination. He did not lose his caution; with his wife and mother-in-law he left Scotland (July 1556). The court, its quarry gone, burned his effigy. This made him dearer to Scottish Protestants, and wherever he went people accepted him as the leader of the Scottish Reformation.
At Geneva he became minister of an English-speaking church and, by close supervision of his members' morals and conduct, put the ideals of Calvinism into practice. From there he wrote to Mrs. Anne Locke, who had turned Protestant in London under his guidance, asking her to leave her husband and come to Geneva with her daughter. One letter in summary says: my dearest sister, my tongue cannot express how much I long to see you here; whenever I remember you, tears come to my eyes, and only the hope of seeing you consoles me; were it not for the care of the small flock gathered here in Christ's name, I would come to you in person; I would pray God to guide you here. Mrs. Locke, disregarding her husband's opposition, left London with her son, her daughter and a servant and came to Geneva (1557). Her daughter died a few days after arriving, but Mrs. Locke stayed with Knox, and together with Mrs. Bowes, now very old, she served him. We have no information that their relationship went beyond friendship, and neither Mrs. Locke nor Knox's wife is recorded as complaining of it. Mrs. Locke tended with a mother's care the man who had broken up her family, and counted it her religious duty.
The Man and His Theology
Knox had a manner of his own. Like many great men he was small of frame, but his broad shoulders showed strength of will and his stern face showed self-confidence and a demand for obedience from those beneath him. Black hair, a narrow forehead, thick brows, a compelling eye, a flattened nose, fleshy cheeks, a wide mouth, thick lips, a long beard and long fingers marked a man who stood for devotion to a purpose and appetite for power. It is no wonder that a man of such zeal, who spoke two or three times a week for three or four hours at a time, could say, "I have no leisure in twenty-four hours to rest." His courage was mixed with caution, and he knew when the danger of death was real and fled it. He was accused of staying safely in Geneva or Dieppe while stirring Protestants in England and Scotland to bloody revolt. Even so, he put himself at risk hundreds of times, rebuked the Duke of Northumberland to his face for his misdeeds, and later told the queen of his support for democracy. He could not be bought, and he believed and declared that he spoke for the Creator.
Many people accepted his claim and took him for a prophet speaking for God. An English ambassador once said that his voice put more life into them than five hundred trumpets blaring in their ears. Knox's strength came partly from his faith in Calvin's theology. Like Calvin, he held that God divides mankind into the elect and the damned; he and his friends were saved and so victory was theirs, while their opponents were under God's wrath and would sooner or later be cast into hell. He wrote: "We are sure that the faith of our adversaries is devilish." The damned did not deserve Christian love, being children of the devil with nothing good in them, and they must vanish from the earth. Knox declared himself glad that "the Holy Spirit has put hatred of the reprobate in the hearts of the elect." In dealing with them he thought deceit, treachery and hypocrisy permissible, and any means justified by the end.
Yet in appearance his moral philosophy was opposed to Machiavelli's. He did not allow rulers to evade society's moral rules and held that rulers and subjects alike must take the teaching of Scripture as the measure of their conduct. But when he spoke of Scripture he meant the Old Testament, and he found the thunder of the Hebrew prophets more congenial to his purpose than the words of the man who died on the cross. He meant either to bend a nation to his will or to burn all in the fire of his prophecy. Knox claimed a divine commission. He predicted correctly the early death of Mary Tudor and the fall of Mary Stuart, or perhaps his wishes simply came true. He judged himself and others with insight, frankly admitting his own rusticity and blaming his flight from Scotland on human weakness and wickedness. He had made the reform of the clergy, which was to begin in Scotland, his chief aim, believing that pure, devout clergy would be inspired by God and that God and Christ would rule a society that had such clergy. Though he believed in establishing a religious government, he did more than anyone of his age to advance democracy.
Trumpets Against Queens and Catholic Rulers
His writings lack literary value and are full of sharp political attack; in abuse they rival Luther's letters. Like Luther he called the Catholic Church a harlot and Catholics "filthy papists" and "merchants of the Mass," and their priests "bloodthirsty wolves." (I give only the gist of these insults.) In that age no one spoke more eloquently than this. Angered by Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II, he wrote a violent pamphlet, A Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God's Truth in England (1554). In it he asked whether Mary, by bringing a foreigner into the country and seating a proud Spaniard beside her, had not proved her treason against the English crown: at the cost of the nobility's disgrace and ruin, by stripping them of dignity, land, property, key offices and chances of advancement, by wasting the realm's wealth, goods, navy and fortresses, by despising the lesser landowners, by enslaving the common people, by overthrowing Christianity and the true religion, and by handing over state and nation completely. He prayed God to raise up men like Phinehas, Elijah and Jehu, who would appease divine wrath by shedding the blood of idolaters, lest God's anger consume the whole people.
Even so, among his writings we sometimes come on tender, compassionate passages, as eloquent as the style of the apostle Paul, who inspired him, as in a letter to his brethren in Scotland. In it he says he will utter no threats, since he hopes they will live among a wicked and wandering generation as children of light, shining like bright stars in a dark sky, growing like wheat among tares, and, like the wise virgins awaiting the glorious return of the Lord Jesus, keeping their lamps full of oil so that his almighty Spirit may guide them always and, in every hardship, console and enlighten their hearts and minds.
The most characteristic example of Knox's style is The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which he wrote at Dieppe in 1558 against women such as Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart and Catherine de' Medici, who ruled Europe and whose government he regarded as a plague on the continent. His fear of Mary Tudor's moves against his beliefs is clear to us. But even if Mary had not troubled his fellow believers, Knox would have thought her a fearsome monster and a capricious ruler who, in her own way, trampled the customs and methods of government that men had established. The tract opens by wondering that, among all the wise men Great Britain has produced, all the godly and zealous preachers England has raised and all the learned scholars, such as those now driven from the country by "Jezebel" (Mary Tudor), no one dares tell the island's people how hateful to God is the empire or rule of a treacherous woman. It complains of the blood of Christ's members being shed and puts all these crimes down to the rule of a cruel woman.
In summary, Knox argued that raising a woman to rule a nation, a people or a city is against the order of nature, an insult to God and a defiance of his will, and finally a cause of disorder in society and justice. Who can deny, he asked, that to put a blind man in charge of those who see, a weak and sick person in charge of feeding the healthy and strong, or a fool and a madman in charge of the young and wise is against nature? He said this holds for all women: at her best, a woman was made to serve and obey man, not to rule and lead him. To prove his claim he appealed to the Bible, but when he turned to history to find evidence of countries ruined by women, he was baffled and found that the record of women in governing was far brighter than that of men. Yet he did not stop condemning Mary Tudor's rule, writing that "cursed Jezebel of England" and her corrupt adherents never cease boasting of their victory over Wyatt and his supporters, and he declared that God had already fixed the day of reckoning for her; let everyone know that the first trumpet had sounded.
Knox had the text of the First Blast printed secretly, without his name, at Geneva and sent copies to England. Mary banned the book for inciting rebellion and made owning it a serious crime. He renewed the attack in another pamphlet, An Appellation to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland (July 1558). In it he wrote that whoever leads people into idolatry will not escape the penalty of death. Where the leaders and people have accepted Jesus Christ and his Gospel and made its defense their duty, as in England not long before under Edward, there the people and their leaders are not only permitted but obliged to punish with death those who pervert true religion, unless they wish to anger God. He insisted that the nobles, judges, rulers and people of England were obliged not only to resist Mary, "the Jezebel of England," but to put her to death.
He also stirred the Scots against Mary of Guise, saying the regent had surrounded herself with French courtiers and soldiers who left the Scots no strength. Now that foreigners had come in to crush the country and its descendants, he said, now that idolatry stood firm, Christ and his true religion were forgotten, idle oppressors and bloodthirsty bishops were at the height of power, Christ's true apostles were persecuted, and piety was blamed while vice was praised, what harm could come to God's people if they rose to cure these evils and, since no other means remained, took up arms? Crushing evils such as idolatry, he argued, is not the business of kings and rulers alone; God's wrath falls on all who insult his majesty, so the whole people must wipe these stains from society. (One phrase in the book's text is garbled; I have rendered it from context.)
Revolution and Intolerance
In Knox's writings revolutionary and reactionary tendencies are mixed in a remarkable way. Many thinkers, among them French Huguenots such as Hotman and Jesuits such as Mariana, like him allowed the killing of tyrants. But his view that anyone who believes in the truth of his religion has the right to suppress opponents, and if necessary kill them, revives the bitter memory of the dark days of the Inquisition. Knox drew it from chapter thirteen of Deuteronomy, which he read literally. He held that the erring must be put to death, that the people of any city whose inhabitants had mostly turned to other gods must be put to the sword, and that their houses and even their animals must not be spared. He admits that this harsh command sometimes upset and alarmed him. Worldly people, he wrote, may call such a judgment severity and blame it on madness rather than wisdom, for what city is without innocents, infants, children, simple people and the ignorant who never defiled their hands; yet no exceptions are made, and God sometimes expects all his creatures to obey him blindly and, where his judgment must be carried out, to refrain from reasoning.
We should not measure Knox's ideas by our own liberal standards, since he confidently reflected the thinking of his contemporaries. The years he spent in Geneva, a city that had only just burned Servetus, sharpened his tendency toward literal, rigid ideas of religion and a certainty mixed with pride and fanaticism. If he read Castellio's tract in defense of religious freedom, Theodore Beza's reply must certainly have convinced him. In those years an obscure Anabaptist attacked Calvinist theology in a tract titled, in effect, The Boldness Born of Need. Scottish Protestants sent it to Knox for an answer, and for a moment the voice of reason was heard amid the war of faiths. The author had asked how Calvinists, knowing Christ's understanding of God's love and mercy, could claim that the Creator had cursed some of his creatures from the moment of creation and made them for punishment in the next world. He argued that the Creator made man to love his children by instinct, and if man is made in God's image, how could God be more merciless and hardhearted than his creature. He judged the Calvinists more dangerous than unbelievers, writing that they dishonor God less who call him cruel and tyrannical than these do. Knox replied that man cannot reach the Creator's mysteries by reason: those proud people who are not content with God's revealed will and want to fly through the heavens to grasp his secrets will pay for their pride. Elsewhere he wrote that following nature and human reason leads man away from God, and that it is presumptuous to set corruptible nature and blind reason above the written word of God.
Knox, who was not moved by argument and firmly believed in the truth of his creed, sent a pamphlet to the English in 1559, when England was ruled by a Protestant queen, titled A Brief Exhortation to England. It urged them to make the Calvinist creed and its moral code compulsory across the country as payment for the persecutions and killings of Mary's reign. England ignored the advice. In the same year Knox returned to Scotland to oversee the doctrinal side of the Scottish revolution.