TO those who know Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter of this
paper will be somewhat astonishing. For the hard energy of the man in
all public matters has possessed the imagination of the world; he remains
for posterity in certain traditional phrases, browbeating Queen Mary, or
breaking beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that had long
smoked themselves out and were no more than sorry ruins, while he was
still quietly teaching children in a country gentleman’s family. It does
not consist with the common acceptation of his character to fancy him
much moved, except with anger. And yet the language of passion came to
his pen as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation against some
of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of yearning for the
society of an absent friend. He was vehement in affection, as in
doctrine. I will not deny that there may have been, along with his
vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only; that, like many
men, and many Scotchmen, he saw the world and his own heart, not so much
under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme flashes of passion,
true for the moment, but not true in the long run. There does seem to me
to be something of this traceable in the Reformer’s utterances:
precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and action somewhat
circumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a heroic light and to
place a ready belief in the disposition of the moment. Withal he had
considerable confidence in himself, and in the uprightness of his own
disciplined emotions, underlying much sincere aspiration after spiritual
humility. And it is this confidence that makes his intercourse with
women so interesting to a modern. It would be easy, of course, to make
fun of the whole affair, to picture him strutting vaingloriously among
these inferior creatures, or compare a religious friendship in the
sixteenth century with what was called, I think, a literary friendship in
the eighteenth. But it is more just and profitable to recognise what
there is sterling and human underneath all his theoretical affectations
of superiority. Women, he has said in his “First Blast,” are, “weak,
frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish;” and yet it does not appear that
he was himself any less dependent than other men upon the sympathy and
affection of these weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures;
it seems even as if he had been rather more dependent than most.
Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more or
less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We should
not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however beautiful.
We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a wife to their
bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more of their own
sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate need. They
will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our association—not the great
ones alone, but all. They will know not love only, but all those other
ways in which man and woman mutually make each other happy—by sympathy,
by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about them—down to the mere
impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces in the street. For, through
all this gradation, the difference of sex makes itself pleasurably felt.
Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry
due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are brought ever
so lightly into contact. We love our mothers otherwise than we love our
fathers; a sister is not as a brother to us; and friendship between man
and woman, be it never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as
friendship between man and man. Such friendship is not even possible for
all. To conjoin tenderness for a woman that is not far short of
passionate with such disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of
affection as there is between friends of the same sex, requires no
ordinary disposition in the man. For either it would presuppose quite
womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were, a curiosity in shades of
differing sentiment; or it would mean that he had accepted the large,
simple divisions of society: a strong and positive spirit robustly
virtuous, who has chosen a better part coarsely, and holds to it
steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain to himself and others; as
one who should go straight before him on a journey, neither tempted by
wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small lives under foot. It was in
virtue of this latter disposition that Knox was capable of those
intimacies with women that embellished his life; and we find him
preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women friends; a man of
some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready to comfort weeping
women, and to weep along with them.
Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that environ
written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape of
letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that is
not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of
women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is really
significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a true
man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in spite
of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in a
certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came to
her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts and
minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result from
all changes in the world’s way of thinking; and those whom he had thus
helped became dear to him, and were made the chosen companions of his
leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter if
they were afar.
It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in the
communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director, so
that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship
so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of spirits
the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference. The trick
of the country and the age steps in even between the mother and her
child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the
voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of confidence
between them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it is that we
must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social atmosphere
in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and trusted each
other. To the man who had been their priest and was now their minister,
women would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in these
latter days; the women would be able to speak, and the man to hear. It
was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should be no less
scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could come back to
earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly fashions. This,
then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends.
The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth, of interest, and
of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist of friendship, he
contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry relationship of penitent and
confessor.
It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to Berwick
in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age. At the
same time it is just possible that some of a little group at Edinburgh,
with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have been friends
of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his female
correspondents, the least personally favoured. He treats them throughout
in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have been a little
wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former letters, “which I
trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our sisters, for to me ye are
all equal in Christ.” {368} Another letter is a gem in this way.
“Albeit” it begins, “albeit I have no particular matter to write unto
you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to write these few lines to
you in declaration of my remembrance of you. True it is that I have many
whom I bear in equal remembrance before God with you, to whom at present
I write nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and
therefore they need the less my rude labours, or else because they have
not provoked me by their writing to recompense their remembrance.” {369a}
His “sisters in Edinburgh” had evidently to “provoke” his attention
pretty constantly; nearly all his letters are, on the face of them,
answers to questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity
that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really cares for.
So when they consult him about women’s apparel (a subject on which his
opinion may be pretty correctly imagined by the ingenious reader for
himself) he takes occasion to anticipate some of the most offensive
matter of the “First Blast” in a style of real brutality. {369b} It is
not merely that he tells them “the garments of women do declare their
weakness and inability to execute the office of man,” though that in
itself is neither very wise nor very opportune in such a correspondence
one would think; but if the reader will take the trouble to wade through
the long, tedious sermon for himself, he will see proof enough that Knox
neither loved, nor very deeply respected, the women he was then
addressing. In very truth, I believe these Edinburgh sisters simply
bored him. He had a certain interest in them as his children in the
Lord; they were continually “provoking him by their writing;” and, if
they handed his letters about, writing to them was as good a form of
publication as was then open to him in Scotland. There is one letter,
however, in this budget, addressed to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil,
which is worthy of some further mention. The Clerk-Register had not
opened his heart, it would appear, to the preaching of the Gospel, and
Mrs. Mackgil has written, seeking the Reformer’s prayers in his behalf.
“Your husband,” he answers, “is dear to me for that he is a man indued
with some good gifts, but more dear for that he is your husband. Charity
moveth me to thirst his illumination, both for his comfort and for the
trouble which you sustain by his coldness, which justly may be called
infidelity.” He wishes her, however, not to hope too much; he can
promise that his prayers will be earnest, but not that they will be
effectual; it is possible that this is to be her “cross” in life; that
“her head, appointed by God for her comfort, should be her enemy.” And
if this be so, well, there is nothing for it; “with patience she must
abide God’s merciful deliverance,” taking heed only that she does not
“obey manifest iniquity for the pleasure of any mortal man.” {371a} I
conceive this epistle would have given a very modified sort of pleasure
to the Clerk-Register, had it chanced to fall into his hands. Compare
its tenor—the dry resignation not without a hope of merciful deliverance
therein recommended—with these words from another letter, written but the
year before to two married women of London: “Call first for grace by
Jesus, and thereafter communicate with your faithful husbands, and then
shall God, I doubt not, conduct your footsteps, and direct your counsels
to His glory.” {371b} Here the husbands are put in a very high place; we
can recognise here the same hand that has written for our instruction how
the man is set above the woman, even as God above the angels. But the
point of the distinction is plain. For Clerk-Register Mackgil was not a
faithful husband; displayed, indeed, towards religion a “coldness which
justly might be called infidelity.” We shall see in more notable
instances how much Knox’s conception of the duty of wives varies
according to the zeal and orthodoxy of the husband.
As I have said, he may possibly have made the acquaintance of Mrs.
Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these Edinburgh friends
while he was still Douglas of Longniddry’s private tutor. But our
certain knowledge begins in 1549. He was then but newly escaped from his
captivity in France, after pulling an oar for nineteen months on the
benches of the galley _Nostre Dame_; now up the rivers, holding stealthy
intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of Rouen; now out
in the North Sea, raising his sick head to catch a glimpse of the far-off
steeples of St. Andrews. And now he was sent down by the English Privy
Council as a preacher to Berwick-upon-Tweed; somewhat shaken in health by
all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by gravel, that
sorrow of great men; altogether, what with his romantic story, his weak
health, and his great faculty of eloquence, a very natural object for the
sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the
company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in
Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a religious
hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and
giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured
with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she
formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his
society. {373a} Nor was Knox unresponsive. “I have always delighted in
your company,” he writes, “and when labours would permit, you know I have
not spared hours to talk and commune with you.” Often when they had met
in depression he reminds her, “God hath sent great comfort unto both.”
{373b} We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close and
continuous was their intercourse. “I think it best you remain till the
morrow,” he writes once, “and so shall we commune at large at afternoon.
This day you know to be the day of my study and prayer unto God; yet if
your trouble be intolerable, or, if you think my presence may release
your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you. . . . Your messenger found me
in bed, after a sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so dolour may
complain to dolour when we two meet. . . . And this is more plain than
ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion in trouble.” {373c}
Once we have the curtain raised for a moment, and can look at the two
together for the length of a phrase. “After the writing of this
preceding,” writes Knox, “your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe, did
advertise me by writing, that your adversary (the devil) took occasion to
trouble you because that _I did start back from you rehearsing your
infirmities_. _I remember myself so to have done_, _and that is my
common on consuetude when anything pierceth or toucheth my heart_. _Call
to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick_. In very
deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was; and when I
heard proceed from your mouth the very same words that he troubles me
with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing in
myself the dolour thereof.” {374a} Now intercourse of so very close a
description, whether it be religious intercourse or not, is apt to
displease and disquiet a husband; and we know incidentally from Knox
himself that there was some little scandal about his intimacy with Mrs.
Bowes. “The slander and fear of men,” he writes, “has impeded me to
exercise my pen so oft as I would;_ yea_, _very shame hath holden me from
your company_, _when I was most surely persuaded that God had appointed
me at that time to comfort and feed your hungry and afflicted soul_.
_God in His infinite mercy_,” he goes on, “_remove not only from me all
fear that tendeth not to godliness_, _but from others suspicion to judge
of me otherwise than it becometh one member to judge of another_.” {374b}
And the scandal, such as it was, would not be allayed by the dissension
in which Mrs. Bowes seems to have lived with her family upon the matter
of religion, and the countenance shown by Knox to her resistance.
Talking of these conflicts, and her courage against “her own flesh and
most inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural friends,”
he writes it, “to the praise of God, he has wondered at the bold
constancy which he has found in her when his own heart was faint.” {375a}
Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out of a desire
to bind the much-loved evangelist nearer to her in the only manner
possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme of marrying him to her fifth
daughter, Marjorie; and the Reformer seems to have fallen in with it
readily enough. It seems to have been believed in the family that the
whole matter had been originally made up between these two, with no very
spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride. {375b} Knox’s idea of
marriage, as I have said, was not the same for all men; but on the whole,
it was not lofty. We have a curious letter of his, written at the
request of Queen Mary, to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household
matters; which, as he tells us, “was not well accepted of the said Earl.”
{375c} We may suppose, however, that his own home was regulated in a
similar spirit. I can fancy that for such a man, emotional, and with a
need, now and again, to exercise parsimony in emotions not strictly
needful, something a little mechanical, something hard and fast and
clearly understood, would enter into his ideal of a home. There were
storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside
even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So, from a wife, of all women,
he would not ask much. One letter to her which has come down to us is, I
had almost said, conspicuous for coldness. {376} He calls her, as he
called other female correspondents, “dearly beloved sister;” the epistle
is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case, but
upon that of her mother. However, we know what Heine wrote in his wife’s
album; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to intimate
some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly opposite
construction. “I think,” he says, “I _think_ this be the first letter I
ever wrote to you.” This, if we are to take it literally, may pair off
with the “two _or three_ children” whom Montaigne mentions having lost at
nurse; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in a parent.
Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his troubled
wooing than might have been expected. The whole Bowes family, angry
enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother, set
their faces obdurately against the match. And I daresay the opposition
quickened his inclination. I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes that she
need no further trouble herself about the marriage; it should now be his
business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his life “for the
comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all earthly
creature laid aside.” {377} This is a wonderfully chivalrous utterance
for a Reformer forty-eight years old; and it compares well with the
leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this and that
into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M.
Bungener calls “an honourable and Christian difficulty” of choice, in
frigid indecisions and insincere proposals. But Knox’s next letter is in
a humbler tone; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied;
he despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
England,—regards not “what country consumes his wicked carcass.” “You
shall understand,” he says, “that this sixth of November, I spoke with
Sir Robert Bowes” (the head of the family, his bride’s uncle) “in the
matter you know, according to your request; whose disdainful, yea,
despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.
I bear a good countenance with a sore troubled heart, because he that
ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a
despiser, but also a taunter of God’s messengers—God be merciful unto
him! Amongst others his most unpleasing words, while that I was about to
have declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, ‘Away with your
rhetorical reasons! for I will not be persuaded with them.’ God knows I
did use no rhetoric nor coloured speech; but would have spoken the truth,
and that in most simple manner. I am not a good orator in my own cause;
but what he would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare to him
one day to his displeasure, unless he repent.” {378} Poor Knox, you see,
is quite commoved. It has been a very unpleasant interview. And as it
is the only sample that we have of how things went with him during his
courtship, we may infer that the period was not as agreeable for Knox as
it has been for some others.
However, when once they were married, I imagine he and Marjorie Bowes hit
it off together comfortably enough. The little we know of it may be
brought together in a very short space. She bore him two sons. He seems
to have kept her pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his
work; so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into disorder.
{379a} Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in this
capacity, he calls her “his left hand.” {379b} In June 1559, at the
headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the
absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, “whose presence” (this is the
not very grammatical form of his lament) “whose presence I more thirst,
than she that is my own flesh.” {379c} And this, considering the source
and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender
sentiment. He tells us himself in his history, on the occasion of a
certain meeting at the Kirk of Field, that “he was in no small heaviness
by reason of the late death of his dear bed-fellow, Marjorie Bowes.”
{379d} Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as “a wife whose like
is not to be found everywhere” (that is very like Calvin), and again, as
“the most delightful of wives.” We know what Calvin thought desirable in
a wife, “good humour, chastity, thrift, patience, and solicitude for her
husband’s health,” and so we may suppose that the first Mrs. Knox fell
not far short of this ideal.
The actual date of the marriage is uncertain but by September 1566, at
the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with his wife. There is
no fear either that he will be dull; even if the chaste, thrifty, patient
Marjorie should not altogether occupy his mind, he need not go out of the
house to seek more female sympathy; for behold! Mrs. Bowes is duly
domesticated with the young couple. Dr. M‘Crie imagined that Richard
Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free to live where she
would; and where could she go more naturally than to the house of a
married daughter? This, however, is not the case. Richard Bowes did not
die till at least two years later. It is impossible to believe that he
approved of his wife’s desertion, after so many years of marriage, after
twelve children had been born to them; and accordingly we find in his
will, dated 1558, no mention either of her or of Knox’s wife. {380} This
is plain sailing. It is easy enough to understand the anger of Bowes
against this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married the
daughter in spite of the father’s opposition, alienated the wife from the
husband and the husband’s religion, supported her in a long course of
resistance and rebellion, and, after years of intimacy, already too close
and tender for any jealous spirit to behold without resentment, carried
her away with him at last into a foreign land. But it is not quite easy
to understand how, except out of sheer weariness and disgust, he was ever
brought to agree to the arrangement. Nor is it easy to square the
Reformer’s conduct with his public teaching. We have, for instance, a
letter by him, Craig, and Spottiswood, to the Archbishops of Canterbury
and York, anent “a wicked and rebellious woman,” one Anne Good, spouse to
“John Barron, a minister of Christ Jesus his evangel,” who, “after great
rebellion shown unto him, and divers admonitions given, as well by
himself as by others in his name, that she should in no wise depart from
this realm, nor from his house without his license, hath not the less
stubbornly and rebelliously departed, separated herself from his society,
left his house, and withdrawn herself from this realm.” {381} Perhaps
some sort of license was extorted, as I have said, from Richard Bowes,
weary with years of domestic dissension; but setting that aside, the
words employed with so much righteous indignation by Knox, Craig, and
Spottiswood, to describe the conduct of that wicked and rebellious woman,
Mrs. Barron, would describe nearly as exactly the conduct of the
religious Mrs. Bowes. It is a little bewildering, until we recollect the
distinction between faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was “a
minister of Christ Jesus his evangel,” while Richard Bowes, besides being
own brother to a despiser and taunter of God’s messengers, is shrewdly
suspected to have been “a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catholic faith,”
or, as Knox himself would have expressed it, “a rotten Papist.”
You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with female
society. But we are not yet at the end of the roll. The last year of
his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he was
resident as one of the chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he boasts,
although a stranger, he had, by God’s grace, found favour before many.
{382a} The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once he
writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with
three, and he and the three women were all in tears. {382b} Out of all,
however, he had chosen two. “_God_,” he writes to them, “_brought us in
such familiar acquaintance_, _that your hearts were incensed and kindled
with a special care over me_, _as a mother useth to be over her natural
child_; and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be more
plain than ever I was to any.” {382c} And out of the two even he had
chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to
Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the address runs. If one may venture
to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.
I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character.
She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to;
she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by
some passages of Mrs. Bowes’s letter, which the Reformer opened, and read
aloud to them before they went. “O would to God,” cried this
impressionable matron, “would to God that I might speak with that person,
for I perceive there are more tempted than I.” {383} This may have been
Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it were, we must not conclude from this
one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes. All the evidence tends
the other way. She was a woman of understanding, plainly, who followed
political events with interest, and to whom Knox thought it worth while
to write, in detail, the history of his trials and successes. She was
religious, but without that morbid perversity of spirit that made
religion so heavy a burden for the poor-hearted Mrs. Bowes. More of her
I do not find, save testimony to the profound affection that united her
to the Reformer. So we find him writing to her from Geneva, in such
terms as these:—“You write that your desire is earnest to see me. _Dear
sister_, _if I should express the thirst and languor which I have had for
your presence_, _I should appear to pass measure_. . . _Yea_, _I weep and
rejoice in remembrance of you_; but that would evanish by the comfort of
your presence, which I assure you is so dear to me, that if the charge of
this little flock here, gathered together in Christ’s name, did not
impede me, my coming should prevent my letter.” {384} I say that this
was written from Geneva; and yet you will observe that it is no
consideration for his wife or mother-in-law, only the charge of his
little flock, that keeps him from setting out forthwith for London, to
comfort himself with the dear presence of Mrs. Locke. Remember that was
a certain plausible enough pretext for Mrs. Locke to come to Geneva—“the
most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of
the Apostles”—for we are now under the reign of that “horrible monster
Jezebel of England,” when a lady of good orthodox sentiments was better
out of London. It was doubtful, however, whether this was to be. She
was detained in England, partly by circumstances unknown, “partly by
empire of her head,” Mr. Harry Locke, the Cheapside merchant. It is
somewhat humorous to see Knox struggling for resignation, now that he has
to do with a faithful husband (for Mr. Harry Locke was faithful). Had it
been otherwise, “in my heart,” he says, “I could have wished—yea,” here
he breaks out, “yea, and cannot cease to wish—that God would guide you to
this place.” {385} And after all, he had not long to wait, for, whether
Mr. Harry Locke died in the interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving
permission, five months after the date of the letter last quoted, “Mrs.
Anne Locke, Harry her son, and Anne her daughter, and Katharine her
maid,” arrived in that perfect school of Christ, the Presbyterian
paradise, Geneva. So now, and for the next two years, the cup of Knox’s
happiness was surely full. Of an afternoon, when the bells rang out for
the sermon, the shops closed, and the good folk gathered to the churches,
psalm-book in hand, we can imagine him drawing near to the English chapel
in quite patriarchal fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs.
Locke, James his servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of
children and maids. He might be alone at work all morning in his study,
for he wrote much during these two years; but at night, you may be sure
there was a circle of admiring women, eager to hear the new paragraph,
and not sparing of applause. And what work, among others, was he
elaborating at this time, but the notorious “First Blast”? So that he
may have rolled out in his big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail,
impatient, feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the
spirit of counsel, and how men were above them, even as God is above the
angels, in the ears of his own wife, and the two dearest friends he had
on earth. But he had lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to
despise in theory the sex he honoured so much in practice, of whom he
chose his most intimate associates, and whose courage he was compelled to
wonder at, when his own heart was faint.
We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and so, as he
would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his
fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited. Called into
Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his
best claim to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
mother-in-law. The wife soon died. The death of her daughter did not
altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and
gone between his house and England. In 1562, however, we find him
characterised as “a sole man by reason of the absence of his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes,” and a passport is got for her, her man, a
maid, and “three horses, whereof two shall return,” as well as liberty to
take all her own money with her into Scotland. This looks like a
definite arrangement; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to
England yet again, I cannot find.
With that great family of hers, unless in leaving her husband she had
quarrelled with them all, there must have been frequent occasion for her
presence, one would think. Knox at least survived her; and we possess
his epigraph to their long intimacy, given to the world by him in an
appendix to his latest publication. I have said in a former paper that
Knox was not shy of personal revelations in his published works. And the
trick seems to have grown on him. To this last tract, a controversial
onslaught on a Scottish Jesuit, he prefixed a prayer, not very pertinent
to the matter in hand, and containing references to his family which were
the occasion of some wit in his adversary’s answer; and appended what
seems equally irrelevant, one of his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with
an explanatory preface. To say truth, I believe he had always felt
uneasily that the circumstances of this intimacy were very capable of
misconstruction; and now, when he was an old man, taking “his good night
of all the faithful in both realms,” and only desirous “that without any
notable sclander to the evangel of Jesus Christ, he might end his battle;
for as the world was weary of him, so was he of it;”—in such a spirit it
was not, perhaps, unnatural that he should return to this old story, and
seek to put it right in the eyes of all men, ere he died. “Because that
God,” he says, “because that God now in His mercy hath put an end to the
battle of my dear mother, Mistress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an
end to my wretched life, I could not cease but declare to the world what
was the cause of our great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was
neither flesh nor blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which
never suffered her to rest but when she was in the company of the
faithful, of whom (from the first hearing of the word at my mouth) she
judged me to be one. . . . Her company to me was comfortable (yea,
honourable and profitable, for she was to me and mine a mother), but yet
it was not without some cross; for besides trouble and fashery of body
sustained for her, my mind was seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the
comfort of her troubled conscience.” {388} He had written to her years
before, from his first exile in Dieppe, that “only God’s hand” could
withhold him from once more speaking with her face to face; and now, when
God’s hand has indeed interposed, when there lies between them, instead
of the voyageable straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass,
this is the spirit in which he can look back upon their long
acquaintance. She was a religious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not
without some cross and fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to
tend. He might have given a truer character of their friendship, had he
thought less of his own standing in public estimation, and more of the
dead woman. But he was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that
ever memorable passage, a public creature. He wished that even into this
private place of his affections posterity should follow him with a
complete approval; and he was willing, in order that this might be so, to
exhibit the defects of his lost friend, and tell the world what weariness
he had sustained through her unhappy disposition. There is something
here that reminds one of Rousseau.
I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left Geneva; but his
correspondence with her continued for three years. It may have continued
longer, of course, but I think the last letters we possess read like the
last that would be written. Perhaps Mrs. Locke was then remarried, for
there is much obscurity over her subsequent history. For as long as
their intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in the
Reformer’s life. Here is one passage, for example, the most likable
utterance of Knox’s that I can quote:—Mrs. Locke has been upbraiding him
as a bad correspondent. “My remembrance of you,” he answers, “is not so
dead, but I trust it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by no
outward token for one year. _Of nature_, _I am churlish_; _yet one thing
I ashame not to affirm_, _that familiarity once thoroughly contracted was
never yet broken on my default_. _The cause may be that I have rather
need of all_, _than that any have need of me_. However it (_that_) be,
it cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can
quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which half
a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and confirm. And
therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have you
in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the faithful.” {390}
This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can remember to have
seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer’s collected works: it is no
small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection for her should have brought
home to him this unwonted feeling of dependence upon others. Everything
else in the course of the correspondence testifies to a good, sound,
down-right sort of friendship between the two, less ecstatic than it was
at first, perhaps, but serviceable and very equal. He gives her ample
details as to the progress of the work of reformation; sends her the
sheets of the _Confession of Faith_, “in quairs,” as he calls it; asks
her to assist him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause
in Scotland, and to send him books for himself—books by Calvin
especially, one on Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the “Institutes.”
“I must be bold on your liberality,” he writes, “not only in that, but in
greater things as I shall need.” {391a} On her part she applies to him
for spiritual advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes,
but in a more positive spirit,—advice as to practical points, advice as
to the Church of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
“mingle-mangle.” {391b} Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him
“a token, without writing.” “I understand your impediment,” he answers,
“and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of
my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat.” {391c}
One letter more, and then silence.
And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence.
It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description of
his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come to
the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a widower
at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred apparently to
yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the altar of his
respect for the Reformer. In January 1563, Randolph writes to Cecil:
“Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall write unto you
that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the Duke’s, a Lord’s
daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of age.” {392} He adds
that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so mad a story. And
yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret Stewart, daughter of
Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen, was duly united to John
Knox, Minister of St. Giles’s Kirk, Edinburgh, aged fifty-nine,—to the
great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride, and I would fain hope of
many others for more humane considerations. “In this,” as Randolph says,
“I wish he had done otherwise.” The Consistory of Geneva, “that most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the
Apostles,” were wont to forbid marriages on the ground of too great a
disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering whether the old Reformer’s
conscience did not uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good
custom of his religious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and-forty
years that separated him from his poor bride. Fitly enough, we hear
nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she appears at her husband’s
deathbed, eight years after. She bore him three daughters in the
interval; and I suppose the poor child’s martyrdom was made as easy for
her as might be. She was “extremely attentive to him” at the end, we
read and he seems to have spoken to her with some confidence. Moreover,
and this is very characteristic, he had copied out for her use a little
volume of his own devotional letters to other women.
This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had
delighted much in his company “by reason that she had a troubled
conscience,” and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the
pages of his history. {393}
And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox’s intercourse with
women was quite of the highest sort. It is characteristic that we find
him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the
women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self
in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never
condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not
anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so
renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they
were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were
about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because
a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong
and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as
these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters
full of their “earnest desire for him” when he is absent. It is not over
a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are “incensed and kindled with a special care,” as it
were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all
his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of
the fascination he possessed for these religious women. Here was one
whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated it
was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you were
so depressed it was plain God had cast you off for ever; and he would
read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an answer in
the most reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into heads—who
knows?—like a treatise on divinity. And then, those easy tears of his.
There are some women who like to see men crying; and here was this
great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the solid
pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous denunciations to
the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in their parlours by
the hour, and weep with them over their manifold trials and temptations.
Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea with all these penitents.
. . . It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will do, if we look into it
too closely. We could not let these great folk of old into our
drawing-rooms. Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a
housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking from grade to
grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited the glimpses of the moon,
he would not find any one of his way of thinking, any one he could strike
hands with and talk to freely and without offence, save perhaps the
porter at the end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who
loafs all day before the public-house. So that this little note of
vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it is to be put away from us,
as we recall the fashion of these old intimacies; so that we may only
remember Knox as one who was very long-suffering with women, kind to them
in his own way, loving them in his own way—and that not the worst way, if
it was not the best—and once at least, if not twice, moved to his heart
of hearts by a woman, and giving expression to the yearning he had for
her society in words that none of us need be ashamed to borrow.
And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this
essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and
already broken in bodily health: it has been the story of an old man’s
friendships. This it is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past
forty, he had then before him five-and-thirty years of splendid and
influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon degree
of power, lived in his own country as a sort of king, and did what he
would with the sound of his voice out of the pulpit. And besides all
this, such a following of faithful women! One would take the first forty
years gladly, if one could be sure of the last thirty. Most of us, even
if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of gray hairs, we retain
some degree of public respect in the latter days of our existence, will
find a falling away of friends, and a solitude making itself round about
us day by day, until we are left alone with the hired sick-nurse. For
the attraction of a man’s character is apt to be outlived, like the
attraction of his body; and the power to love grows feeble in its turn,
as well as the power to inspire love in others. It is only with a few
rare natures that friendship is added to friendship, love to love, and
the man keeps growing richer in affection—richer, I mean, as a bank may
be said to grow richer, both giving and receiving more—after his head is
white and his back weary, and he prepares to go down into the dust of
death.
* * * * *