[1] E.g. for some extraordinary "reform" programmes among German
immigrants see Schmeckebier (as below), pp. 48-50.
[2] "The actual offence of the Catholic Church was its non-conformity
to American methods of church administration and popular education"
(Scisco).
[3] The Whigs bargained aid in New York city for "American" support
in the state, and charged that the latter was not given. Millard
Fillmore attributed the Whig loss of the state (see LIBERTY PARTY) to
the disaffection of Catholic Whigs angered by the alliance with the
nativists.
[4] The Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star Spangled
Banner, established in New York respectively in 1845 and 1850, were
the most important sources of its membership.
[5] This year "American Party" became the official name. Its strength
in Congress was almost thirty-fold that of 1852. It elected
governors, legislatures, or both, in four New England states, and in
Maryland, Kentucky and California; minor officers elsewhere; and
almost won six Southern states.
[6] For it delayed anti-slavery organization in the North, and
presumably discouraged immigration, which was a source of strength to
the North rather than to the South.
[7] They carried only Maryland. The popular vote in the North was
under one-seventh, in the South above three-sevenths, of the total
vote cast.
[8] Note the presidential vote. Seward's loss of the Republican
nomination was partly due to Know Nothing hostility.
[9] Its firmest hold was in Maryland. Its rule in Baltimore
(1854-1860) was marked by disgraceful riots and abuses.
KNOX, HENRY (1750-1806), American general, was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, of Scottish-Irish parentage, on the 25th of July 1750. He
was prominent in the colonial militia and tried to keep the Boston crowd
and the British soldiers from the clash known as the Boston massacre
(1770). In 1771 he opened the "London Book-Store" in Boston. He had read
much of tactics and strategy, joined the American army at the outbreak
of the War of Independence, and fought at Bunker Hill, planned the
defences of the camps of the army before Boston, and brought from Lake
George and border forts much-needed artillery. At Trenton he crossed the
river before the main body, and in the attack rendered such good service
that he was made brigadier-general and chief of artillery in the
Continental army on the following day. He was present at Princeton; was
chiefly responsible for the mistake in attacking the "Chew House" at
Germantown; urged New York as the objective of the campaign of 1778;
served with efficiency at Monmouth and at Yorktown; and after the
surrender of Cornwallis was promoted major-general, and served as a
commissioner on the exchange of prisoners. His services throughout the
war were of great value to the American cause; he was one of General
Washington's most trusted advisers, and he brought the artillery to a
high degree of efficiency. From December 1783 until June 1784 he was the
senior officer of the United States army. In April 1783 he had drafted a
scheme of a society to be formed by the American officers and the French
officers who had served in America during the war, and to be called the
"Cincinnati"; of this society he was the first secretary-general
(1783-1799) and in 1805 became vice-president-general. In 1785-1794 Knox
was secretary of war, being the first man to hold this position after
the organization of the Federal government in 1789. He urged
ineffectually a national militia system, to enroll all citizens over 18
and under 60 in the "advanced corps," the "main corps" or the "reserve,"
and for this and his close friendship with Washington was bitterly
assailed by the Republicans. In 1793 he had begun to build his house,
Montpelier, at Thomaston, Maine, where he speculated unsuccessfully in
the holdings of the Eastern Land Association; and he lived there until
his death on the 25th of October 1806.
See F. S. Drake, _Memoir of General Henry Knox_ (Boston, 1873); and
Noah Brooks, _Henry Knox_ (New York, 1900) in the "American Men of
Energy" series.
KNOX, JOHN (c. 1505-1572), Scottish reformer and historian. Of his early
life very little is certainly known, in spite of the fact that his
_History of the Reformation_ and his private letters, especially the
latter, are often vividly autobiographical. Even the year of his birth,
usually given as 1505, is matter of dispute. Beza, in his _Icones_,
published in 1580, makes it 1515; Sir Peter Young (tutor to James VI. of
Scotland), writing to Beza from Edinburgh in 1579, says 1513; and a
strong case has been made out for holding that the generally accepted
date is due to an error in transcription (see Dr Hay Fleming in the
_Bookman_, Sept. 1905). But Knox seems to have been reticent about his
early life, even to his contemporaries. What is known is that he was a
son of William Knox, who lived in or near the town of Haddington, that
his mother's name was Sinclair, and that his forefathers on both sides
had fought under the banner of the Bothwells. William Knox was "simple,"
not "gentle"--perhaps a prosperous East Lothian peasant. But he sent his
son John to school (no doubt the well-known grammar school of
Haddington), and thereafter to the university, where, like his
contemporary George Buchanan, he sat "at the feet" of John Major. Major
was a native of Haddington, who had recently returned to Scotland from
Paris with a great academical reputation. He retained to the last, as
his _History of Greater Britain_ shows, the repugnance characteristic of
the university of Paris to the tyranny of kings and nobles; but like it,
he was now alarmed by the revolt of Luther, and ceased to urge its
ancient protest against the supremacy of the pope. He exchanged his
"regency" or professorship in Glasgow University for one in that of St
Andrews in 1523. If Knox's college time was later than that date (as it
must have been, if he was born near 1515), it was no doubt spent, as
Beza narrates, at St Andrews, and probably exclusively there. But in
Major's last Glasgow session a "Joannes Knox" (not an uncommon name,
however, at that time in the west of Scotland) matriculated there; and
if this were the future reformer, he may thereafter either have followed
his master to St Andrews or returned from Glasgow straight to
Haddington. But till twenty years after that date his career has not
been again traced. Then he reappears in his native district as a priest
without a university degree (Sir John Knox) and a notary of the diocese
of St Andrews. In 1543 he certainly signed himself "minister of the
sacred altar" under the archbishop of St Andrews. But in 1546 he was
carrying a two-handed sword in defence of the reformer George Wishart,
on the day when the latter was arrested by the archbishop's order. Knox
would have resisted, though the arrest was by his feudal superior, Lord
Bothwell; but Wishart himself commanded his submission, with the words
"One is sufficient for a sacrifice," and was handed over for trial at St
Andrews. And next year the archbishop himself had been murdered, and
Knox was preaching in St Andrews a fully developed Protestantism.
Knox gives us no information as to how this startling change in himself
was brought about. During those twenty years Scotland had been slowly
tending to freedom in religious profession, and to friendship with
England rather than with France. The Scottish hierarchy, by this time
corrupt and even profligate, saw the twofold danger and met it firmly.
James V., the "Commons' King" had put himself into the hands of the
Beatons, who in 1528 burned Patrick Hamilton. On James's death there was
a slight reaction, but the cardinal-archbishop took possession of the
weak regent Arran, and in 1546 burned George Wishart. England had by
this time rejected the pope's supremacy. In Scotland by a recent statute
it was death even to argue against it; and Knox after Wishart's
execution was fleeing from place to place, when, hearing that certain
gentlemen of Fife had slain the cardinal and were in possession of his
castle of St Andrews, he gladly joined himself to them. In St Andrews he
taught "John's Gospel" and a certain catechism--probably that which
Wishart had got from "Helvetia" and translated; but his teaching was
supposed to be private and tutorial and for the benefit of his friends'
"bairns." The men about him however--among them Sir David Lindsay of the
Mount, "Lyon King" and poet--saw his capacity for greater things, and,
on his at first refusing "to run where God had not called him," planned
a solemn appeal to Knox from the pulpit to accept "the public office and
charge of preaching." At the close of it the speaker (in Knox's own
narrative) "said to those that were present, 'Was not this your charge
to me? And do ye not approve this vocation?' They answered, 'It was, and
we approve it.' Whereat the said Johnne, abashed, burst forth in most
abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber," remaining there in
"heaviness" for days, until he came forth resolved and prepared. Knox is
probably not wrong in regarding this strange incident as the spring of
his own public life. The St Andrews invitation was really one to danger
and death; John Rough, who spoke it, died a few years after in the
flames at Smithfield. But it was a call which many in that ardent dawn
were ready to accept, and it had now at length found, or made, a
statesman and leader of men. For what to the others was chiefly a
promise of personal salvation became for the indomitable will of Knox an
assurance also of victory, even in this world, over embattled forces of
ancient wrong. It is certain at least that from this date he never
changed and scarcely even varied his public course. And looking back
upon that course afterwards, he records with much complacency how his
earliest St Andrews sermon built up a whole fabric of aggressive
Protestantism upon Puritan theory, so that his startled hearers
muttered, "Others sned (snipped) the branches; this man strikes at the
root."
Meantime the system attacked was safe for other thirteen years. In June
1547 St Andrews yielded to the French fleet, and the prisoners,
including Knox, were thrown into the galleys on the Loire, to remain in
irons and under the lash for at least nineteen months. Released at last
(apparently through the influence of the young English king, Edward
VI.), Knox was appointed one of the licensed preachers of the new faith
for England, and stationed in the great garrison of Berwick, and
afterwards at Newcastle. In 1551 he seems to have been made a royal
chaplain; in 1552 he was certainly offered an English bishopric, which
he declined; and during most of this year he used his influence, as
preacher at court and in London, to make the new English settlement more
Protestant. To him at least is due the Prayer-book rubric which explains
that, when kneeling at the sacrament is ordered, "no adoration is
intended or ought to be done." While in Northumberland Knox had been
betrothed to Margaret Bowes, one of the fifteen children of Richard
Bowes, the captain of Norham Castle. Her mother, Elizabeth, co-heiress
of Aske in Yorkshire, was the earliest of that little band of
women-friends whose correspondence with Knox on religious matters throws
an unexpected light on his discriminating tenderness of heart. But now
Mary Tudor succeeded her brother, and Knox in March 1554 escaped into
five years' exile abroad, leaving Mrs. Bowes a fine treatise on
"Affliction," and sending back to England two editions of a more acrid
"Faithful Admonition" on the crisis there. He first drifted to
Frankfort, where the English congregation divided as English Protestants
have always done, and the party opposed to Knox got rid of him at last
by a complaint to the authorities of treason against the emperor Charles
V. as well as Philip and Mary. At Geneva he found a more congenial
pastorate. Christopher Goodman (c. 1520-1603) and he, with other exiles,
began there the Puritan tradition, and prepared the earlier English
version of the Bible, "the household book of the English-speaking
nations" during the great age of Elizabeth. Here, and afterwards at
Dieppe (where he preached in French), Knox kept in communication with
the other Reformers, studied Greek and Hebrew in the interest of
theology, and having brought his wife and her mother from England in
1555 lived for years a peaceful life.
But even here Knox was preparing for Scotland, and facing the
difficulties of the future, theoretical as well as practical. In his
first year abroad he consulted Calvin and Bullinger as to the right of
the civil "authority" to prescribe religion to his subjects--in
particular, whether the godly should obey "a magistrate who enforces
idolatry and condemns true religion," and whom should they join "in the
case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous sovereign." In
August 1555 be visited his native country and found the queen-mother,
Mary of Lorraine, acting as regent in place of the real "sovereign," the
youthful and better-known Mary, now being brought up at the court of
France. Scripture-reading and the new views had spread widely, and the
regent was disposed to wink at this in the case of the "religious
nobility." Knox was accordingly allowed to preach privately for six
months throughout the south of Scotland, and was listened to with an
enthusiasm which made him break out, "O sweet were the death which
should follow such forty days in Edinburgh as here I have had three!"
Before leaving he even addressed a letter to the regent, urging her to
favour the Evangel. She accepted it jocularly as a "pasquil," and Knox
on his departure was condemned and burned in effigy. But he left behind
him a "Wholesome Counsel" to Scottish heads of families, reminding them
that within their own houses they were "bishop and kings," and
recommending the institution of something like the early apostolic
worship in private congregations. Of the Protestant barons Knox, though
in exile, seems to have been henceforward the chief adviser; and before
the end of 1557 they, under the name of the "Lords of the Congregation,"
had entered into the first of the religious "bands" or "covenants"
afterwards famous in Scotland. In 1558 he published his "Appellation" to
the nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death
recently pronounced upon him, and along with it a stirring appeal "To
his beloved brethren, the Commonalty of Scotland," urging that the care
of religion fell to them also as being "God's creatures, created and
formed in His own image," and having a right to defend their conscience
against persecution. About this time, indeed, there was in Scotland a
remarkable approximation to that solution of the toleration difficulty
which later ages have approved; for the regent was understood to favour
the demand of the "congregation" that at least the penal statutes
against heretics "be suspended and abrogated," and "that it be lawful to
us to use ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as we must
answer to God." It was a consummation too ideal for that early date; and
next year the regent, whose daughter was now queen of France and there
mixed up with the persecuting policy of the Guises, forbade the reformed
preaching in Scotland. A rupture ensued at once, and Knox appeared in
Edinburgh on the 2nd of May 1559 "even in the brunt of the battle." He
was promptly "blown to the horn" at the Cross there as an outlaw, but
escaped to Dundee, and commenced public preaching in the chief towns of
central Scotland. At Perth and at St Andrews his sermons were followed
by the destruction of the monasteries, institutions disliked in that age
in Scotland alike by the devout and the profane. But while he notes that
in Perth the act was that of "the rascal multitude," he was glad to
claim in St Andrews the support of the civic "authority"; and indeed the
burghs, which were throughout Europe generally in favour of freedom,
soon became in Scotland a main support of the Reformation. Edinburgh was
still doubtful, and the queen regent held the castle; but a truce
between her and the lords for six months to the 1st of January 1560 was
arranged on the footing that every man there "may have freedom to use
his own conscience to the day foresaid"--a freedom interpreted to let
Knox and his brethren preach publicly and incessantly.
Scotland, like its capital, was divided. Both parties lapsed from the
freedom-of-conscience solution to which each when unsuccessful appealed;
both betook themselves to arms; and the immediate future of the little
kingdom was to be decided by its external alliances. Knox now took a
leading part in the great transaction by which the friendship of France
was exchanged for that of England. He had one serious difficulty. Before
Elizabeth's accession to the English crown, and after the queen mother
in Scotland had disappointed his hopes, he had published a treatise
against what he called "The Monstrous Regiment (regimen or government)
of Women"; though the despotism of that despotic age was scarcely
appreciably worse when it happened to be in female hands. Elizabeth
never forgave him; but Cecil corresponded with the Scottish lords, and
their answer in July 1559, in Knox's handwriting, assures England not
only of their own constancy, but of "a charge and commandment to our
posterity, that the amity and league between you and us, contracted and
begun in Christ Jesus, may by them be kept inviolated for ever." The
league was promised by England; but the army of France was first in the
field, and towards the end of the year drove the forces of the
"congregation" from Leith into Edinburgh, and then out of it in a
midnight rout to Stirling--"that dark and dolorous night," as Knox long
afterwards said, "wherein all ye, my lords, with shame and fear left
this town," and from which only a memorable sermon by their great
preacher roused the despairing multitude into new hope. Their leaders
renounced allegiance to the regent; she ended her not unkindly, but as
Knox calls it "unhappy," life in the castle of Edinburgh; the English
troops, after the usual Elizabethan delays and evasions, joined their
Scots allies; and the French embarked from Leith. On the 6th of July
1560 a treaty was at last made, nominally between Elizabeth and the
queen of France and Scotland; while Cecil instructed his mistress's
plenipotentiaries to agree "that the government of Scotland be granted
to the nation of the land." The revolution was in the meantime complete;
and Knox, who takes credit for having done much to end the enmity with
England which was so long thought necessary for Scotland's independence,
was strangely enough destined, beyond all other men, to leave the stamp
of a more inward independence upon his country and its history.
At the first meeting of the Estates, in August 1560, the Protestants
were invited to present a confession of their faith. Knox and three
others drafted it, and were present when it was offered and read to the
parliament. The statute-book says it was "by the estates of Scotland
ratified and approved, as wholesome and sound doctrine grounded upon the
infallible truth of God's word." The Scots confession, though of course
drawn up independently, is in substantial accord with the others then
springing up in the countries of the Reformation, but is Calvinist
rather than Lutheran. It remained for two centuries the authorized
Scottish creed, though in the first instance the faith of only a
fragment of the people. Yet its approval became the basis for three acts
passed a week later; the first of which, abolishing the pope's authority
and jurisdiction in Scotland, may perhaps have been consistent with
toleration, as the second, rescinding old statutes which had established
and enforced that and other catholic tenets, undoubtedly was. But the
third, inflicting heavy penalties, with death on a third conviction, on
those who should celebrate mass or even be present at it, showed that
the reformer and his friends had crossed the line, and that their
position could no longer be described as, in Knox's words, "requiring
nothing but the liberty of conscience, and our religion and fact to be
tried by the word of God." He was prepared indeed to fall back upon
that, in the event of the Estates at any time refusing sanction to
either church or creed, as their sovereign in Paris promptly refused it.
But the parliament of 1560 gave no express sanction to the Reformed
Church, and Knox did not wait until it should do so. Already "in our
towns and places reformed," as the Confession puts it, there were local
or "particular kirks," and these grew and spread and were provincially
united, till, in the last month of this memorable year, the first
General Assembly of their representatives met, and became the "universal
kirk," or "the whole church convened." It had before it the plan for
church government and maintenance, drafted in August at the same time
with the Confession, under the name of _The Book of Discipline_, and by
the same framers. Knox was even more clearly in this case the chief
author, and he had by this time come to desire a much more rigid
Presbyterianism than he had sketched in his "Wholesome Counsel" of 1555.
In planning it he seems to have used his acquaintance with the
"Ordonnances" of the Genevan Church under Calvin, and with the "Forma"
of the German Church in London under John Laski (or A. Lasco). Starting
with "truth" contained in Scripture as the church's foundation, and the
Word and Sacraments as means of building it up, it provides ministers
and elders to be elected by the congregations, with a subordinate class
of "readers," and by their means sermons and prayers each "Sunday" in
every parish. In large towns these were to be also on other days, with a
weekly meeting for conference or "prophesying." The "plantation" of new
churches is to go on everywhere under the guidance of higher church
officers called superintendents. All are to help their brethren, "for no
man may be permitted to live as best pleaseth him within the Church of
God." And above all things the young and the ignorant are to be
instructed, the former by a regular gradation or ladder of parish or
elementary schools, secondary schools and universities. Even the poor
were to be fed by the Church's hands; and behind its moral influence,
and a discipline over both poor and rich, was to be not only the
coercive authority of the civil power but its money. Knox had from the
first proclaimed that "the teinds (tithes of yearly fruits) by God's law
do not appertain of necessity to the kirkmen." And this book now demands
that out of them "must not only the ministers be sustained, but also the
poor and schools." But Knox broadens his plan so as to claim also the
property which had been really gifted to the Church by princes and
nobles--given by them indeed, as he held, without any moral right and to
the injury of the people, yet so as to be Church patrimony. From all
such property, whether land or the sheaves and fruits of land, and also
from the personal property of burghers in the towns, Knox now held that
the state should authorize the kirk to claim the salaries of the
ministers, and the salaries of teachers in the schools and universities,
but above all, the relief of the poor--not only of the absolutely
"indigent" but of "your poor brethren, the labourers and handworkers of
the ground." For the danger now was that some gentlemen were already
cruel in exactions of their tenants, "requiring of them whatever before
they paid to the Church, so that the papistical tyranny shall only be
changed into the tyranny of the lords or of the laird." The danger
foreseen alike to the new Church, and to the commonalty and poor, began
to be fulfilled a month later, when the lords, some of whom had already
acquired, as others were about to acquire, much of the Church property,
declined to make any of it over for Knox's magnificent scheme. It was,
they said, "a devout imagination." Seven years afterwards, however, when
the contest with the Crown was ended, the kirk was expressly
acknowledged as the only Church in Scotland, and jurisdiction given it
over all who should attempt to be outsiders; while the preaching of the
Evangel and the planting of congregations went on in all the accessible
parts of Scotland. Gradually too stipends for most Scottish parishes
were assigned to the ministers out of the yearly _teinds_; and the
Church received--what it retained even down to recent times--the
administration both of the public schools and of the Poor Law of
Scotland. But the victorious rush of 1560 was already somewhat stayed,
and the very next year raised the question whether the transfer of
intolerance to the side of the new faith was as wise as it had at first
seemed to be successful.
Mary Queen of Scots had been for a short time also queen of France, and
in 1561 returned to her native land, a young widow on whom the eyes of
Europe were fixed. Knox's objections to the "regiment of women" were
theoretical, and in the present case he hoped at first for the best,
favouring rather his queen's marriage with the heir of the house of
Hamilton. Mary had put herself into the hands of her half-brother, Lord
James Stuart afterwards earl of Moray, the only man who could perhaps
have pulled her through. A proclamation now continued the "state of
religion" begun the previous year; but mass was celebrated in the
queen's household, and Lord James himself defended it with his sword
against Protestant intrusion. Knox publicly protested; and Moray, who
probably understood and liked both parties, brought the preacher to the
presence of his queen. There is nothing revealed to us by "the broad
clear light of that wonderful book,"[1] _The History of the Reformation
in Scotland_, more remarkable than the four Dialogues or interviews,
which, though recorded only by Knox, bear the strongest stamp of truth,
and do almost more justice to his opponent than to himself. Mary took
the aggressive and very soon raised the real question. "Ye have taught
the people to receive another religion than their princes can allow; and
how can that doctrine be of God, seeing that God commands subjects to
obey their princes?" The point was made keener by the fact that Knox's
own Confession of Faith (like all those of that age, in which an
unbalanced monarchical power culminated) had held kings to be appointed
"for maintenance of the true religion," and suppression of the false;
and the reformer now fell back on his more fundamental principle, that
"right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly
princes, but from the Eternal God alone." All through this dialogue too,
as in another at Lochleven two years afterwards, Knox was driven to
axioms, not of religion but of constitutionalism, which Buchanan and he
may have learned from their teacher Major, but which were not to be
accepted till a later age. "'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects,
having power, may resist their princes?' 'If their princes exceed their
bounds, Madam, they may be resisted and even deposed,'" Knox replied.
But these dialectics, creditable to both parties, had little effect upon
the general situation. Knox had gone too far in intolerance, and Moray
and Maitland of Lethington gradually withdrew their support. The court
and parliament, guided by them, declined to press the queen or to pass
the Book of Discipline; and meantime the negotiations as to the queen's
marriage with a Spanish, a French or an Austrian prince revealed the
real difficulty and peril of the situation. Her marriage to a great
Catholic prince would be ruinous to Scotland, probably also to England,
and perhaps to all Protestantism. Knox had already by letter formally
broken with the earl of Moray, "committing you to your own wit, and to
the conducting of those who better please you"; and now, in one of his
greatest sermons before the assembled lords, he drove at the heart of
the situation--the risk of a Catholic marriage. The queen sent for him
for the last time and burst into passionate tears as she asked, "What
have you to do with my marriage? Or what are you within this
commonwealth?" "A subject born within the same," was the answer of the
son of the East Lothian peasant; and the Scottish nobility, while
thinking him overbold, refused to find him guilty of any crime, even
when, later on, he had "convocated the lieges" to Edinburgh to meet a
crown prosecution. In 1564 a change came. Mary had wearied of her
guiding statesmen, Moray and the more pliant Maitland; the Italian
secretary David Rizzio, through whom she had corresponded with the pope,
now more and more usurped their place; and a weak fancy for her handsome
cousin, Henry Darnley, brought about a sudden marriage in 1565 and swept
the opposing Protestant lords into exile. Darnley, though a Catholic,
thought it well to go to Knox's preaching; but was so unfortunate as to
hear a very long sermon, with allusions not only to "babes and women" as
rulers, but to Ahab who did not control his strong-minded wife. Mary and
the lords still in her council ordered Knox not to preach while she was
in Edinburgh, and he was absent or silent during the weeks in which the
queen's growing distaste for her husband, and advancement of Rizzio over
the nobility remaining in Edinburgh, brought about the conspiracy by
Darnley, Morton and Ruthven. Knox does not seem to have known beforehand
of Rizzio's "slaughter," which had been intended to be a semi-judicial
act; but soon after it he records that "that vile knave Davie was justly
punished, for abusing of the commonwealth, and for other villainy which
we list not to express." The immediate effect however of what Knox thus
approved was to bring his cause to its lowest ebb, and on the very day
when Mary rode from Holyrood to her army, he sat down and penned the
prayer, "Lord Jesus, put an end to this my miserable life, for justice
and truth are not to be found among the sons of men!" He added a short
autobiographic fragment, whose mingled self-abasement and exultation are
not unworthy of its striking title--"John Knox, with deliberate mind, to
his God." During the rest of the year he was hidden in Ayrshire or
elsewhere, and throughout 1566 he was forbidden to preach when the court
was in Edinburgh. But he was influential at the December Assembly in the
capital where a greater tragedy was now preparing, for Mary's
infatuation for Bothwell was visible to all. At the Assembly's request,
however, Knox undertook a long visit to England, where his two sons by
his first wife were being educated, and were afterwards to be Fellows of
St John's, Cambridge, the younger becoming a parish clergyman. It was
thus during the reformer's absence that the murder of Darnley, the
abduction and subsequent marriage of Mary, the flight of Bothwell, and
the imprisonment in Lochleven of the queen, unrolled themselves before
the eyes of Scotland. Knox returned in time to guide the Assembly which
sat on the 25th of June 1567 in dealing with this unparalleled crisis,
and to wind up the revolution by preaching at Stirling on the 9th of
July 1567, after Mary's abdication, at the coronation of the infant
king.
His main work was now really done; for the parliament of 1567 made Moray
regent, and Knox was only too glad to have his old friend back in power,
though they seem to have differed on the question whether the queen
should be allowed to pass into retirement without trial for her
husband's death, as they had differed all along on the question of
tolerating her private religion. Knox's victory had not come too early,
for his physical strength soon began to fail. But Mary's escape in 1568
resulted only in her defeat at Langside, and in a long imprisonment and
death in England. In Scotland the regent's assassination in 1570 opened
a miserable civil war, but it made no permanent change. The massacre of
St Bartholomew rather united English and Scottish Protestantism; and
Knox in St Giles' pulpit, challenging the French ambassador to report
his words, denounced God's vengeance on the crowned murderer and his
posterity. When open war broke out between Edinburgh Castle, held by
Mary's friends, and the town, held for her son, both parties agreed that
the reformer, who had already had a stroke of paralysis, should remove
to St Andrews. While there he wrote his will, and published his last
book, in the preface to which he says, "I heartily take my good-night of
the faithful of both realms ... for as the world is weary of me, so am I
of it." And when he now merely signs his name, it is "John Knox, with my
dead hand and glad heart." In the autumn of 1572 he returned to
Edinburgh to die, probably in the picturesque house in the "throat of
the Bow," which for generations has been called by his name. With him
were his wife and three young daughters; for though he had lost Margaret
Bowes at the close of his year of triumph 1560, he had four years after
married Margaret Stewart, a daughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree. She
was a bride of only seventeen and was related to the royal house; yet,
as his Catholic biographer put it, "by sorcery and witchcraft he did so
allure that poor gentlewoman that she could not live without him." But
lords, ladies and burghers also crowded around his bed, and his
colleague and his servant have severally transmitted to us the words in
which his weakness daily strove with pain, rising on the day before his
death into a solemn exultation--yet characteristically, not so much on
his own account as for "the troubled Church of God." He died on the 24th
of November 1572, and at his funeral in St Giles' Churchyard the new
Regent Morton, speaking under the hostile guns of the castle, expressed
the first surprise of those around as they looked back on that stormy
life, that one who had "neither flattered nor feared any flesh" had now
"ended his days in peace and honour." Knox himself had a short time
before put in writing a larger claim for the historic future, "What I
have been to my country, though this unthankful age will not know, yet
the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth."
Knox was a rather small man, with a well-knit body; he had a powerful
face, with dark blue eyes under a ridge of eyebrow, high cheek-bones,
and a long black beard which latterly turned grey. This description,
taken from a letter in 1579 by his junior contemporary Sir Peter Young,
is very like Beza's fine engraving of him in the _Icones_--an engraving
probably founded on a portrait which was to be sent by Young to Beza
along with the letter. The portrait, which was unfortunately adopted by
Carlyle, has neither pedigree nor probability. After his two years in
the French galleys, if not before, Knox suffered permanently from gravel
and dyspepsia, and he confesses that his nature "was for the most part
oppressed with melancholy." Yet he was always a hard worker; as sole
minister of Edinburgh studying for two sermons on Sunday and three
during the week, besides having innumerable cares of churches at home
and abroad. He was undoubtedly sincere in his religious faith, and most
disinterested in his devotion to it and to the good of his countrymen.
But like too many of them, he was self-conscious, self-willed and
dogmatic; and his transformation in middle life, while it immensely
enriched his sympathies as well as his energies, left him unable to put
himself in the place of those who retained the views which he had
himself held. All his training too, university, priestly and in foreign
parts, tended to make him logical overmuch. But this was mitigated by a
strong sense of humour (not always sarcastic, though sometimes savagely
so), and by tenderness, best seen in his epistolary friendships with
women; and it was quite overborne by an instinct and passion for great
practical affairs. Hence it was that Knox as a statesman so often struck
successfully at the centre of the complex motives of his time, leaving
it to later critics to reconcile his theories of action. But hence too
he more than once took doubtful shortcuts to some of his most important
ends; giving the ministry within the new Church more power over laymen
than Protestant principles would suggest, and binding the masses outside
who were not members of it, equally with their countrymen who were, to
join in its worship, submit to its jurisdiction, and contribute to its
support. And hence also his style (which contemporaries called
anglicized and modern), though it occasionally rises into liturgical
beauty, and often flashes into vivid historical portraiture, is
generally kept close to the harsh necessities of the few years in which
he had to work for the future. That work was indeed chiefly done by the
living voice; and in speaking, this "one man," as Elizabeth's very
critical ambassador wrote from Edinburgh, was "able in one hour to put
more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our
ears." But even his eloquence was constraining and constructive--a
personal call for immediate and universal co-operation; and that
personal influence survives to this day in the institutions of his
people, and perhaps still more in their character. His countrymen indeed
have always believed that to Knox more than to any other man Scotland
owes her political and religious individuality. And since his 19th
century biography by Dr Thomas McCrie, or at least since his recognition
in the following generation by Thomas Carlyle, the same view has taken
its place in literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Knox's books, pamphlets, public documents and letters
are collected into the great edition in six volumes of _Knox's Works_,
by David Laing (Edinburgh, 1846-1864), with introductions, appendices
and notes. Of his books the chief are the following: 1.--_The History
of the Reformation in Scotland_, incorporating the Confession and the
Book of Discipline. Begun by Knox as a party manifesto in 1560, it was
continued and revised by himself in 1566 as so to form four books,
with a fifth book apparently written after his death from materials
left by him. It was partly printed in London in 1586 by Vautrollier,
but was suppressed by authority and published by David Buchanan, with
a _Life_, in 1664. 2.--_On Predestination: an Answer to an Anabaptist_
(London, 1591). 3.--_On Prayer_ (1554). 4.--_On Affliction_ (1556).
5.--_Epistles_, and _Admonition_, both to English Brethren in 1554.
6.--_The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women_ (1558). 7.--_An Answer to a Scottish Jesuit_ (1572).
Knox's life is more or less touched upon by all the Scottish histories
and Church histories which include his period, as well as in the mass
of literature as to Queen Mary. Dr Laing's edition of the _Works_
contains important biographical material. But among the many express
biographies two especially should be consulted--those by Thomas McCrie
(Edinburgh, 1811; revised and enlarged in 1813, the later editions
containing valuable notes by the author); and by P. Hume Brown
(Edinburgh, 1895). _John Knox and the Reformation_, by Andrew Lang
(London, 1905), is not so much a biography as a collection of
materials, bearing upon many parts of the life, but nearly all on the
unfavourable side. (A. T. I.)