WHEN first the idea became widely spread among men that the Word of God,
instead of being truly the foundation of all existing institutions, was
rather a stone which the builders had rejected, it was but natural that
the consequent havoc among received opinions should be accompanied by the
generation of many new and lively hopes for the future. Somewhat as in
the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an
immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up
to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was
now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body
politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to
put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to
realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities
would surely pass away. Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year
1523, the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his wits for
help, to whom his doctor recommends Lutheran specifics. {329} The
Reformers themselves had set their affections in a different world, and
professed to look for the finished result of their endeavours on the
other side of death. They took no interest in politics as such; they
even condemned political action as Antichristian: notably, Luther in the
case of the Peasants’ War. And yet, as the purely religious question was
inseparably complicated with political difficulties, and they had to make
opposition, from day to day, against principalities and powers, they were
led, one after another, and again and again, to leave the sphere which
was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil, with the
affairs of State. Not much was to be expected from interference in such
a spirit. Whenever a minister found himself galled or hindered, he would
be inclined to suppose some contravention of the Bible. Whenever
Christian liberty was restrained (and Christian liberty for each
individual would be about coextensive with what he wished to do), it was
obvious that the State was Antichristian. The great thing, and the one
thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformers’ own interpretation of
it. Whatever helped was good; whatever hindered was evil; and if this
simple classification proved inapplicable over the whole field, it was no
business of his to stop and reconcile incongruities. He had more
pressing concerns on hand; he had to save souls; he had to be about his
Father’s business. This short-sighted view resulted in a doctrine that
was actually Jesuitical in application. They had no serious ideas upon
politics, and they were ready, nay, they seemed almost bound, to adopt
and support whichever ensured for the moment the greatest benefit to the
souls of their fellow-men. They were dishonest in all sincerity. Thus
Labitte, in the introduction to a book {330a} in which he exposes the
hypocritical democracy of the Catholics under the League, steps aside for
a moment to stigmatise the hypocritical democracy of the Protestants.
And nowhere was this expediency in political questions more apparent than
about the question of female sovereignty. So much was this the case that
one James Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little paper {330b} about the
religious partialities of those who took part in the controversy, in
which some of these learned disputants cut a very sorry figure.
Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated; and it is somewhat
characteristic of his luck that he figures here in the very forefront of
the list of partial scribes who trimmed their doctrine with the wind in
all good conscience, and were political weathercocks out of conviction.
Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his
article on the Scotch Reformer. This is a little less than fair. If any
one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious political
sense than another, it was assuredly Knox; and even in this very matter
of female rule, although I do not suppose any one nowadays will feel
inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great allowance
for his conduct. The controversy, besides, has an interest of its own,
in view of later controversies.
John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his
congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The
coincidence was tempting: here were many abuses centring about one abuse;
here was Christ’s Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous
power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female government was
anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable and incapable,
played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European history; and yet
their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here and there a wise
man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the great bulk of their
contemporaries. It was defended as an anomaly. It, and all that
accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single exception; and
no one thought of reasoning down from queens and extending their
privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know, had the
privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise forbidden
to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus, Margaret of
Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one, seemingly, saw
fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de Gournay,
Montaigne’s adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the world as to
whether a woman might be an author without incongruity. Thus, too, we
have Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné writing to his daughters about the
learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion, that
the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a middling station, and
should be reserved for princesses. {333a} And once more, if we desire to
see the same principle carried to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that
Reverend Father in God the Abbot of Brantôme, claiming, on the authority
of some lord of his acquaintance, a privilege, or rather a duty, of free
love for great princesses, and carefully excluding other ladies from the
same gallant dispensation. {333b} One sees the spirit in which these
immunities were granted; and how they were but the natural consequence of
that awe for courts and kings that made the last writer tell us, with
simple wonder, how Catherine de Medici would “laugh her fill just like
another” over the humours of pantaloons and zanies. And such servility
was, of all things, what would touch most nearly the republican spirit of
Knox. It was not difficult for him to set aside this weak scruple of
loyalty. The lantern of his analysis did not always shine with a very
serviceable light; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many
places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity
that hedged kings and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could
put the proposition in the form already mentioned: there was Christ’s
Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power plainly,
then, the “regiment of women” was Antichristian. Early in 1558 he
communicated this discovery to the world, by publishing at Geneva his
notorious book—_The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women_. {334}
As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is usual with
Knox, is both interesting and morally fine. Knox was not one of those
who are humble in the hour of triumph; he was aggressive even when things
were at their worst. He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather in his
mission; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at least
sure that he was one set apart to do great things. And he judged simply
that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from
persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish
and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not
fail to be of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world. There may be
something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that tends more and
more to withdraw a man’s personality from the lessons he inculcates or
the cause that he has espoused; but there is a loss herewith of wholesome
responsibility; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in the Epistles
of Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting and
anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in pledge for
the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of
delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not
unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light,
otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were
initiated and carried forward. Knox’s personal revelations are always
interesting; and, in the case of the “First Blast,” as I have said, there
is no exception to the rule. He begins by stating the solemn
responsibility of all who are watchmen over God’s flock; and all are
watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that
characterises him even when, as here, he shows himself most narrow), all
are watchmen “whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he pricketh
to admonish the ungodly.” And with the full consciousness of this great
duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of timorous or
worldly-minded people. How can a man repent, he asks, unless the nature
of his transgression is made plain to him? “And therefore I say,” he
continues, “that of necessity it is that this monstriferous empire of
women (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon the face
of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly and
plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and be
saved.” To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be
expected to amend those princes whom it would dispossess if once
accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest.
After having instanced how the rumour of Christ’s censures found its way
to Herod in his own court, “even so,” he continues, “may the sound of our
weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south, or
blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the
chief offenders. _But whether it do or not_, _yet dare we not cease to
blow as God will give strength_. _For we are debtors to more than to
princes_, _to wit_, _to the great multitude of our brethren_, of whom, no
doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and ignorance.”
It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly hope that
his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will
submissively discrown themselves at his appeal; what he does hope, in
plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion; and we shall see,
before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly as
I can put it for him. This he sees to be a matter of much hazard; he is
not “altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his
account what the finishing of the work may cost.” He knows that he will
find many adversaries, since “to the most part of men, lawful and godly
appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received.” He looks for opposition,
“not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and quiet
spirits of the earth.” He will be called foolish, curious, despiteful,
and a sower of sedition; and one day, perhaps, for all he is now
nameless, he may be attainted of treason. Yet he has “determined to obey
God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat.” Finally, he
makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first instalment:
it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter, if God so
permit; twice he intends to do it without name; but at the last blast to
take the odium upon himself, that all others may be purged.
Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a secondary
title: “The First Blast to awake Women degenerate.” We are in the land
of assertion without delay. That a woman should bear rule, superiority,
dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is
repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.
Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish. God has denied to
woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable to
a commonwealth. Women have been ever lightly esteemed; they have been
denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable
sway of their husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme
over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own
fireside. He appeals to the Bible; but though he makes much of the first
transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul’s Epistles, he
does not appeal with entire success. The cases of Deborah and Huldah can
be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis. Indeed, I may say
that, logically, he left his bones there; and that it is but the phantom
of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end. Well was it for
Knox that he succeeded no better; it is under this very ambiguity about
Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter before he is
done with the regiment of women. After having thus exhausted Scripture,
and formulated its teaching in the somewhat blasphemous maxim that the
man is placed above the woman, even as God above the angels, he goes on
triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose,
Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and having gathered this little
cloud of witnesses about him, like pursuivants about a herald, he
solemnly proclaims all reigning women to be traitoresses and rebels
against God; discharges all men thenceforward from holding any office
under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon all the lieges with one
consent to “_study to repress the inordinate pride and tyranny_” _of
queens_. If this is not treasonable teaching, one would be glad to know
what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not made the case plain enough
against himself, he goes on to deduce the startling corollary that all
oaths of allegiance must be incontinently broken. If it was sin thus to
have sworn even in ignorance, it were obstinate sin to continue to
respect them after fuller knowledge. Then comes the peroration, in which
he cries aloud against the cruelties of that cursed Jezebel of
England—that horrible monster Jezebel of England; and after having
predicted sudden destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned
women, and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same when
any “noble heart” shall be raised up to vindicate the liberty of his
country, they shall not fail to perish themselves in the ruin, he
concludes with a last rhetorical flourish: “And therefore let all men be
advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE BLOWN.”
The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some
such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want of
passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it
is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic canon,
thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained metaphor of a
hostile proclamation. It is curious, by the way, to note how favourite
an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to it again and
again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to him what a
ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he had begun the
world as a trumpeter’s apprentice. The partiality is surely
characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before
various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he
appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding hopefully
to the front for some rough enterprise.
And as his voice had something of the trumpet’s hardness, it had
something also of the trumpet’s warlike inspiration. So Randolph,
possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer’s preaching, writes of him
to Cecil:—“Where your honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the
voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six
hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” {341}
Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the
echoes of Europe. What success might have attended it, had the question
decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say. As it
was, it was to stand or fall, not by logic, but by political needs and
sympathies. Thus, in France, his doctrine was to have some future,
because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no future
anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the
prosperity of Queen Elizabeth. This stumbling-block lay at the very
threshold of the matter; and Knox, in the text of the “First Blast,” had
set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He finds
occasion to regret “the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley.” But Lady
Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would-be traitoress
and rebel against God, to use his own expressions. If, therefore,
political and religious sympathy led Knox himself into so grave a
partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples?
If the trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare
himself for the battle? The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an
innocent martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and
tyranny had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the
wind; and it was not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox’s readers
concluded that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree
of the sovereign’s orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation.
He should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as
he must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dishonesty of his
fellow-reformers in political matters. He had already, in 1556 or 1557,
talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in “a private
conversation;” and the interview {342} must have been truly distasteful
to both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and
owned that the “government of women was a deviation from the original and
proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the
punishments consequent upon the fall of man.” But, in practice, their
two roads separated. For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties in the way
of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and Huldah, and in the
prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the
Church. And as the Bible was not decisive, he thought the subject should
be let alone, because, “by custom and public consent and long practice,
it has been established that realms and principalities may descend to
females by hereditary right, and it would not be lawful to unsettle
governments which are ordained by the peculiar providence of God.” I
imagine Knox’s ears must have burned during this interview. Think of him
listening dutifully to all this—how it would not do to meddle with
anointed kings—how there was a peculiar providence in these great
affairs; and then think of his own peroration, and the “noble heart” whom
he looks for “to vindicate the liberty of his country;” or his answer to
Queen Mary, when she asked him who he was, to interfere in the affairs of
Scotland:—“Madam, a subject born within the same!” Indeed, the two
doctors who differed at this private conversation represented, at the
moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent history of
Europe. In Calvin we have represented that passive obedience, that
toleration of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the hand from
political affairs as from something unclean, which lost France, if we are
to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation; a spirit necessarily fatal
in the long run to the existence of any sect that may profess it; a
suicidal doctrine that survives among us to this day in narrow views of
personal duty, and the low political morality of many virtuous men. In
Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshadowed the whole Puritan Revolution
and the scaffold of Charles I.
There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what caused Knox
to print his book without a name. {344} It was a dangerous thing to
contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely, when one had had the
advantage of correction from him in a private conversation; and Knox had
his little flock of English refugees to consider. If they had fallen
into bad odour at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to? It was
printed, as I said, in 1558; and, by a singular _mal-à-propos_, in that
same year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England.
And just as the accession of Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female
rule in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth
justified it in the eyes of his colleagues. Female rule ceases to be an
anomaly, not because Elizabeth can “reply to eight ambassadors in one day
in their different languages,” but because she represents for the moment
the political future of the Reformation. The exiles troop back to
England with songs of praise in their mouths. The bright occidental
star, of which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen
over the darkness of Europe. There is a thrill of hope through the
persecuted Churches of the Continent. Calvin writes to Cecil, washing
his hands of Knox and his political heresies. The sale of the “First
Blast” is prohibited in Geneva; and along with it the bold book of Knox’s
colleague, Goodman—a book dear to Milton—where female rule was briefly
characterised as a “monster in nature and disorder among men.” {345a}
Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a moment led away by Knox or
Goodman, or their own wicked imaginations, are now more than convinced.
They have seen the occidental star. Aylmer, with his eye set greedily on
a possible bishopric, and “the better to obtain the favour of the new
Queen,” {345b} sharpens his pen to confound Knox by logic. What need?
He has been confounded by facts. “Thus what had been to the refugees of
Geneva as the very word of God, no sooner were they back in England than,
behold! it was the word of the devil.” {346a}
Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal subjects of Elizabeth?
They professed a holy horror for Knox’s position: let us see if their own
would please a modern audience any better, or was, in substance, greatly
different.
John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer to Knox,
under the title of _An Harbour for Faithful and true Subjects against the
late Blown Blast_, _concerning the government of Women_. {346b} And
certainly he was a thought more acute, a thought less precipitate and
simple, than his adversary. He is not to be led away by such captious
terms as _natural and unnatural_. It is obvious to him that a woman’s
disability to rule is not natural in the same sense in which it is
natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn. He is doubtful, on the
whole, whether this disability be natural at all; nay, when he is laying
it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some elementary
conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
“The bringing-up of women,” he says, “is commonly such” that they cannot
have the necessary qualifications, “for they are not brought up in
learning in schools, nor trained in disputation.” And even so, he can
ask, “Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and
wisdom could tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any
Sir John there?” For all that, his advocacy is weak. If women’s rule is
not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither
so convenient nor so profitable as the government of men. He holds
England to be specially suitable for the government of women, because
there the governor is more limited and restrained by the other members of
the constitution than in other places; and this argument has kept his
book from being altogether forgotten. It is only in hereditary
monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly. “If rulers
were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that any women should
stand in the election, but men only.” The law of succession of crowns
was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to
Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in a
spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to be
more wise than He who made them. {348} If God has put a female child
into the direct line of inheritance, it is God’s affair. His strength
will be perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the
objectors in this not very flattering vein:—“I, that could make Daniel, a
sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast to
reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the great
clerks of the world—cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over you?”
This is the last word of his reasoning. Although he was not altogether
without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says of the
incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of things
than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up for
them this clerical champion. His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox. “Thy knee shall bow,” he
says, “thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy
sovereign.” For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent. Nothing
can stay the issue of his eloquent adulation. Again and again, “the
remembrance of Elizabeth’s virtues” carries him away; and he has to hark
back again to find the scent of his argument. He is repressing his
vehement adoration throughout, until, when the end comes, and he feels
his business at an end, he can indulge himself to his heart’s content in
indiscriminate laudation of his royal mistress. It is humorous to think
that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many other
excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the “marvellous
meekness of her stomach,” threatened him, years after, in no very meek
terms, for a sermon against female vanity in dress, which she held as a
reflection on herself. {349}
Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally, there was no
want of respect for the Queen; and one cannot very greatly wonder if
these devoted servants looked askance, not upon Knox only, but on his
little flock, as they came back to England tainted with disloyal
doctrine. For them, as for him, the occidental star rose somewhat red
and angry. As for poor Knox, his position was the saddest of all. For
the juncture seemed to him of the highest importance; it was the nick of
time, the flood-water of opportunity. Not only was there an opening for
him in Scotland, a smouldering brand of civil liberty and religious
enthusiasm which it should be for him to kindle into flame with his
powerful breath but he had his eye seemingly on an object of even higher
worth. For now, when religious sympathy ran so high that it could be set
against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion together of
England and Scotland, and to begin it at the sore place. If once the
open wound were closed at the Border, the work would be half done.
Ministers placed at Berwick and such places might seek their converts
equally on either side of the march; old enemies would sit together to
hear the gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many
generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith; or—let us say better—a
common heresy. For people are not most conscious of brotherhood when
they continue languidly together in one creed, but when, with some doubt,
with some danger perhaps, and certainly not without some reluctance, they
violently break with the tradition of the past, and go forth from the
sanctuary of their fathers to worship under the bare heaven. A new
creed, like a new country, is an unhomely place of sojourn; but it makes
men lean on one another and join hands. It was on this that Knox relied
to begin the union of the English and the Scotch. And he had, perhaps,
better means of judging than any even of his contemporaries. He knew the
temper of both nations; and already during his two years’ chaplaincy at
Berwick, he had seen his scheme put to the proof. But whether
practicable or not, the proposal does him much honour. That he should
thus have sought to make a love-match of it between the two peoples, and
tried to win their inclination towards a union instead of simply
transferring them, like so many sheep, by a marriage, or testament, or
private treaty, is thoroughly characteristic of what is best in the man.
Nor was this all. He had, besides, to assure himself of English support,
secret or avowed, for the reformation party in Scotland; a delicate
affair, trenching upon treason. And so he had plenty to say to Cecil,
plenty that he did not care to “commit to paper neither yet to the
knowledge of many.” But his miserable publication had shut the doors of
England in his face. Summoned to Edinburgh by the confederate lords, he
waited at Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to journey through England.
The most dispiriting tidings reach him. His messengers, coming from so
obnoxious a quarter, narrowly escape imprisonment. His old congregation
are coldly received, and even begin to look back again to their place of
exile with regret. “My First Blast,” he writes ruefully, “has blown from
me all my friends of England.” And then he adds, with a snarl, “The
Second Blast, I fear, shall sound somewhat more sharp, except men be more
moderate than I hear they are.” {352a} But the threat is empty; there
will never be a second blast—he has had enough of that trumpet. Nay, he
begins to feel uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the
rest of his life, unless he is to lose his right arm and go about his
great work maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace
with England and the indignant Queen. The letter just quoted was written
on the 6th of April 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his heels
for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether,
and writes a letter of capitulation to Cecil. In this letter, {352b}
which he kept back until the 22d, still hoping that things would come
right of themselves, he censures the great secretary for having “followed
the world in the way of perdition,” characterises him as “worthy of
hell,” and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere, and fervent
in the cause of Christ’s gospel, that he shall “taste of the same cup
that politic heads have drunken in before him.” This is all, I take it,
out of respect for the Reformer’s own position; if he is going to be
humiliated, let others be humiliated first; like a child who will not
take his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink of it
before him. “But I have, say you, written a treasonable book against the
regiment and empire of women. . . . The writing of that book I will not
deny; but to prove it treasonable I think it shall be hard. . . . It is
hinted that my book shall be written against. If so be, sir, I greatly
doubt they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the matter.” And here come
the terms of capitulation; for he does not surrender unconditionally,
even in this sore strait: “And yet if any,” he goes on, “think me enemy
to the person, or yet to the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted,
they are utterly deceived in me, _for the miraculous work of God_,
_comforting His afflicted by means of an infirm vessel_, _I do
acknowledge_, _and the power of His most potent hand I will obey_. _More
plainly to speak_, _if Queen Elizabeth shall confess_, _that the
extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy maketh that lawful unto
her which both nature and God’s law do deny to all women_, then shall
none in England be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I
shall be. But if (God’s wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God
forbid) the justness of her title upon consuetude, laws, or ordinances of
men, then”—Then Knox will denounce her? Not so; he is more politic
nowadays—then, he “greatly fears” that her ingratitude to God will not go
long without punishment.
His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a mere
amplification of the sentences quoted above. She must base her title
entirely upon the extraordinary providence of God; but if she does this,
“if thus, in God’s presence, she humbles herself, so will he with tongue
and pen justify her authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the same
in Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel.” {354} And so, you see, his
consistency is preserved; he is merely applying the doctrine of the
“First Blast.” The argument goes thus: The regiment of women is, as
before noted in our work, repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a
subversion of good order. It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up,
as exceptions to this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth
Tudor—whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate.
There is no evidence as to how the Reformer’s explanations were received,
and indeed it is most probable that the letter was never shown to
Elizabeth at all. For it was sent under cover of another to Cecil, and
as it was not of a very courtly conception throughout, and was, of all
things, what would most excite the Queen’s uneasy jealousy about her
title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his discretion (he
had Knox’s leave in this case, and did not always wait for that, it is
reputed) to put the letter harmlessly away beside other valueless or
unpresentable State Papers. I wonder very much if he did the same with
another, {355} written two years later, after Mary had come into
Scotland, in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an accomplice with
him in the matter of the “First Blast.” The Queen of Scotland is going
to have that work refuted, he tells her; and “though it were but
foolishness in him to prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done,” he
would yet remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own
security, nor so generously interested in Elizabeth’s, “that she would
take such pains, _unless her crafty counsel in so doing shot at a further
mark_.” There is something really ingenious in this letter; it showed
Knox in the double capacity of the author of the “First Blast” and the
faithful friend of Elizabeth; and he combines them there so naturally,
that one would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous.
Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate publication to another
queen—his own queen, Mary Stuart. This was on the first of those three
interviews which he has preserved for us with so much dramatic vigour in
the picturesque pages of his history. After he had avowed the authorship
in his usual haughty style, Mary asked: “You think, then, that I have no
just authority?” The question was evaded. “Please your Majesty,” he
answered, “that learned men in all ages have had their judgments free,
and most commonly disagreeing from the common judgment of the world; such
also have they published by pen and tongue; and yet notwithstanding they
themselves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne
patiently with the errors and imperfections which they could not amend.”
Thus did “Plato the philosopher:” thus will do John Knox. “I have
communicated my judgment to the world: if the realm finds no
inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they approve,
shall I not further disallow than within my own breast; but shall be as
well content to live under your Grace, as Paul was to live under Nero.
And my hope is, that so long as ye defile not your hands with the blood
of the saints of God, neither I nor my book shall hurt either you or your
authority.” All this is admirable in wisdom and moderation, and, except
that he might have hit upon a comparison less offensive than that with
Paul and Nero, hardly to be bettered. Having said thus much, he feels he
needs say no more; and so, when he is further pressed, he closes that
part of the discussion with an astonishing sally. If he has been content
to let this matter sleep, he would recommend her Grace to follow his
example with thankfulness of heart; it is grimly to be understood which
of them has most to fear if the question should be reawakened. So the
talk wandered to other subjects. Only, when the Queen was summoned at
last to dinner (“for it was afternoon”) Knox made his salutation in this
form of words: “I pray God, Madam, that you may be as much blessed within
the Commonwealth of Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever
Deborah was in the Commonwealth of Israel.” {357} Deborah again.
But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own “First Blast.” In
1571, when he was already near his end, the old controversy was taken up
in one of a series of anonymous libels against the Reformer affixed,
Sunday after Sunday, to the church door. The dilemma was fairly enough
stated. Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a “false
doctor” and seditious; or, if it be true, why does he “avow and approve
the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen of England’s person;
which he avoweth and approveth, not only praying for the maintenance of
her estate, but also procuring her aid and support against his own native
country?” Knox answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday, from
the pulpit. He justified the “First Blast” with all the old arrogance;
there is no drawing back there. The regiment of women is repugnant to
nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order, as before.
When he prays for the maintenance of Elizabeth’s estate, he is only
following the example of those prophets of God who warned and comforted
the wicked kings of Israel; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews pray for
the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar. As for the Queen’s aid, there is no
harm in that: _quia_ (these are his own words) _quia omnia munda mundis_:
because to the pure all things are pure. One thing, in conclusion, he
“may not pretermit” to give the lie in the throat to his accuser, where
he charges him with seeking support against his native country. “What I
have been to my country,” said the old Reformer, “What I have been to my
country, albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come
will be compelled to bear witness to the truth. And thus I cease,
requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against me, that he may
(they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself and all my doings
manifest to the world. For to me it seemeth a thing unreasonable, that,
in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to fight against shadows,
and howlets that dare not abide the light.” {359}
Now, in this, which may be called his _Last Blast_, there is as sharp
speaking as any in the “First Blast” itself. He is of the same opinion
to the end, you see, although he has been obliged to cloak and garble
that opinion for political ends. He has been tacking indeed, and he has
indeed been seeking the favour of a queen; but what man ever sought a
queen’s favour with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little courtly
policy? The question of consistency is delicate, and must be made plain.
Knox never changed his opinion about female rule, but lived to regret
that he had published that opinion. Doubtless he had many thoughts so
far out of the range of public sympathy, that he could only keep them to
himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the errors and
imperfections that he could not amend. For example, I make no doubt
myself that, in his own heart, he did hold the shocking dogma attributed
to him by more than one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe,
had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would have
been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of
hereditary—“elective as in the days of paganism,” as one Thevet says in
holy horror. {360} And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no
hint of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the regiment of women
was another matter that he should have kept to himself; right or wrong,
his opinion did not fit the moment; right or wrong, as Aylmer puts it,
“the _Blast_ was blown out of season.” And this it was that he began to
perceive after the accession of Elizabeth; not that he had been wrong,
and that female rule was a good thing, for he had said from the first
that “the felicity of some women in their empires” could not change the
law of God and the nature of created things; not this, but that the
regiment of women was one of those imperfections of society which must be
borne with because yet they cannot be remedied. The thing had seemed so
obvious to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and
his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common
consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise and
shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself wrong, and he showed
that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the spirit
of true compromise. He came round to Calvin’s position, in fact, but by
a different way. And it derogates nothing from the merit of this wise
attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest. We are all
taught by interest; and if the interest be not merely selfish, there is
no wiser preceptor under heaven, and perhaps no sterner.
Such is the history of John Knox’s connection with the controversy about
female rule. In itself, this is obviously an incomplete study; not fully
to be understood, without a knowledge of his private relations with the
other sex, and what he thought of their position in domestic life. This
shall be dealt with in another paper.