LAST DAYS IN ENGLAND, 1553.
During the last illness of the young King Edward, Knox, as we have
seen, received a commission to go upon a preaching tour in the county
of Buckingham, where, like an old Hebrew prophet, he warned his hearers
of the coming crisis. He was back in London, however, as we learn from
the date of the first of his published letters, on the 23rd of June
(1553); but before the death of his majesty, which happened on the 6th
of July, he had returned to Buckinghamshire, and there, at Amersham, on
the 16th of that month, he preached a sermon suited to the times in the
very thick of the turmoil caused by the dispute as to the succession to
the crown. The Duke of Northumberland had presumed to set the Lady
Jane Dudley on the throne, but Mary Tudor's adherents could not brook
such disloyalty to their mistress, and had already entered on that
struggle which ended in the collapse of the reign of "the twelfth-day
Queen." The county of Bucks, as Froude tells us, "both Catholic and
Protestant," was "arming to the teeth." Sir Edward Hastings had called
{65} out its musters, in Mary's name, and had been joined by Peckham,
the cofferer of the royal household, who had gone off with the treasure
under his charge, so that the Reformer was speaking "at the peril of
his life among the troopers of Hastings." Nevertheless, nothing
daunted, he thus apostrophised the land:[1] "O England! now is God's
wrath kindled against thee. Now hath He begun to punish as He hath
threatened a long while by His true prophets and messengers. He hath
taken from thee the crown of thy glory, and hath left thee without
honour as a body without a head. And this appeareth to be only the
beginning of sorrows, which appeareth to increase. For I perceive that
the heart, the tongue, and the hand of one Englishman is bent against
another, and division to be in the whole realm, which is an assured
sign of desolation to come. O England! England! dost thou not
consider that thy commonwealth is like a ship sailing on the sea; if
thy mariners and governors shall one consume another, shalt thou not
suffer shipwreck in short process of time? O England! England! alas
these plagues are poured upon thee, for that thou wouldest not know the
most happy time of thy gentle visitation. But wilt thou yet obey the
voice of thy God and submit thyself to His holy words? Truly if thou
wilt, thou shalt find mercy in His sight, and the estate of thy
commonwealth shall be preserved. But if thou obstinately wilt return
into Egypt, that is, if thou contract marriage, confederacy, and league
with such {66} princes as do maintain and advance idolatry (such as the
Emperor, which is no less enemy unto Christ than ever was Nero); if for
the pleasure and friendship (I say) of such princes them return to
thine old abominations, before used under the papistry, then assuredly,
O England, thou shall be plagued and brought to desolation by the means
of those whose favour thou seekest, and by whom thou art procured to
fall from Christ and to serve Antichrist." These were bold words.
Some of them, indeed, might be called rash, and, as we shall see,
furnished a weapon for his adversaries at a future day; but there was
no quailing in the heart of him who uttered them, and the sting of them
after all was in their truth.
From Amersham he went up to London, where on the 19th of July he was a
witness of the great outburst of popular enthusiasm with which Mary was
welcomed to the throne; but he could not share in the wild delight of
the multitude, for as he tells us himself, "in London, in more places
than one, when fires of joy and riotous banqueting were at the
proclamation of Mary," his tongue was vehement in declaring his
forebodings of the storm which was so soon to break. On the 26th of
July he wrote to Mrs. Bowes from Carlisle, and again on the 25th of
September we find him writing to her on his return to London from Kent,
where he seems to have been labouring for some weeks. The dates
indicate that he was both "in labours abundant" and "in journeyings
often," and show that he had little reason to {67} upbraid himself, as
in one of his writings referring to this time he does, for "allowing
the love of friends and carnal affection for some men more than others
to allure him to make more residence in one place than another, thus
having more respect to the pleasure of a few than to the necessity of
many, and not sufficiently considering how many hungry souls were in
other places to whom none took pains to break and distribute the bread
of life." But he was ere long to be "in peril" as well as labour.
From the first he had augured nothing but evil from the accession of
Mary, and it is to his honour that with such misgivings in his heart,
he was at this very time in the habit of using in the pulpit a prayer
of singular beauty and comprehensiveness, in which we find this
petition: "Illuminate the heart of our Sovereign Lady Queen Mary with
pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost, and influence the hearts of her
council with Thy true fear and love." As the months rolled round,
however, it became only too apparent that England would no longer be a
safe place for him. The door of opportunity which Edward had opened
was speedily closed by Mary. In August, indeed, she issued a
proclamation giving toleration to all meanwhile, forbidding her
Protestant and Catholic subjects to interrupt each other's services,
yet prohibiting all preaching on either side without licence from
herself. But in November, under the influence of the violent reaction
which had set in, and in obedience to the opinion of the people,
three-fourths of whom were still attached to the old religion, the {68}
Commons, by a vote of 350 to 80, enacted that from the 20th December
following there should be no other form of service in the churches but
what had been used in the last year of Henry the Eighth, and leaving it
free to all up till that date to use either of the books appointed by
Edward or the old one at their pleasure. Up till the day thus
specified, therefore, Knox was comparatively safe, and during that time
he was probably in London a guest in the families of the Lockes and the
Hickmans, with whose members he afterwards corresponded. It was in
this interval also, as seems most probable, that he began to prepare
his exposition of the sixth Psalm, and his "godly letter to the
faithful in London, Newcastle, Berwick, and all others within the realm
of England that love the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ," both of
which were afterwards finished in France.
From London he went to Newcastle, whence on the 22nd of December he
wrote to Mrs. Bowes a letter which contains a postscript to this
effect: "I may not answer the places of Scripture, nor yet write the
exposition of the sixth Psalm, for every day of this week must I
preach, if this wicked carcase will permit." But dangers began to
thicken around him; for in the end of December or beginning of January,
his servant was seized as he carried letters from him to Mrs. Bowes and
her daughter, in the expectation of finding something in them that
might furnish matter of accusation against him. They contained nothing
but religious advices and such things as he was prepared to avow before
any {69} tribunal in the country, but fearing that the report of the
matter might cause uneasiness to his friends at Berwick, he set out to
visit them in person. On the way, however, he was met by some of the
relatives of his betrothed, who prevailed on him to relinquish his
intention, and to retire to a place of safety on the coast, from which,
if necessary, he might escape out of the country by sea. From this
retreat he wrote to his friends, saying that "his brethren had, partly
by tears and partly by admonition, compelled him to obey, somewhat
contrary to his own mind, for never could he die in a more honest
quarrel than by suffering as a witness for that truth of which God had
made him a messenger," yet promising if Providence prepared the way to
do as his counsellors advised, and "give place to the fury and rage of
Satan for a time." So when he became satisfied that the apprehensions
of his friends were, well founded, he procured a vessel which landed
him safely at Dieppe on the 20th of January, 1554. What his pecuniary
circumstances at this time were may be inferred from these words in a
letter to his future mother-in-law: "I will not make you privy how rich
I am, but off (_i.e._ from) London I departed with less money than ten
groats; but God has since provided, and will provide I doubt not
hereafter abundantly for this life. Either the Queen's Majesty or some
treasurer will be forty pounds richer by me, for so much lack I of duty
of my patents (that is, salary as Royal Chaplain), but that little
troubles me." And more interesting even than that glimpse {70} into
his poverty is the recital of his feelings toward England in a letter
to the same correspondent written just before his embarkation: "My
daily prayer is for the sore afflicted in those quarters. Some time I
have thought that it had been impossible so to have removed my
affection from Scotland that any realm or nation could have been
equally dear unto me; but I take God to record in my conscience that
the troubles present and appearing to be in the realm of England are
doubly more dolorous unto my heart than ever were the troubles of
Scotland."
Thus Knox parted from the realm of England. Had he remained much
longer in it, he would most probably have shared the fate of Cranmer,
Ridley, Latimer, and the "noble army," whom Mary's intolerance "chased
up to heaven." But God had other work for him to do, and it was well
for Scotland that he listened to the entreaty of those who counselled
him when he was "persecuted in one country" to "flee to another"; so it
came about that for a brief season he found refuge in that land wherein
only a few years before he had been a galley-slave.
[1] "Works," vol. iii. pp. 308-9.
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