MINISTRY AT EDINBURGH, 1564-1570.
In the month of March, 1564, Knox, who had been a widower for now
rather more than three years, was united in marriage to Margaret
Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and the room in the old baronial
residence where the ceremony was performed is still pointed out to
visitors. Despite their dissimilarity in age, the union seems to have
been a very happy one, and such as brightened the last days of the
Reformer's home life. This year passed with little to make it
memorable save a long discussion between Knox and Secretary Maitland,
which originated in an attempt to restrain the freedom of the
Reformer's utterances on public questions in the pulpit, and wandered
over a great variety of topics, touching, among others, the duties of
magistrates and their subjects, but led to no immediate practical
result. The calm, however, was not of long continuance, for we come
now to those troublous times and dark doings which have made the reign
of Mary Queen of Scots the great debating ground of modern history.
She determined to marry Lord {180} Henry Darnley, the son of the Earl
of Lennox, a Catholic and an empty-headed fool. The knowledge of her
purpose provoked the project of an insurrection among some of her
nobles, who were headed by the Earl of Murray; but though they had the
promise of assistance from Elizabeth, she failed them when it came to
the point, and the result was that all who had been concerned in it
were proclaimed as outlaws and banished from the kingdom. In this
affair Knox took no part whatever, though Lord Ochiltree, his
father-in-law, was implicated in it, and was one of the exiles. But
though he did not compromise himself by proposing to join in the
meditated appeal to arms, he was as strongly opposed to Mary's marriage
as any of them, and as was his wont he liberated his conscience in the
pulpit, but it was not until after the nuptials had been consummated
that his words were especially regarded. The marriage was celebrated
on the 29th of July, 1565, and on the 19th of August, Darnley, for some
reason, chose to attend the public services in St. Giles' Cathedral,
where a great throne had been prepared for his reception. Whether Knox
had received any intimation of his intention to be present we are
unable to say, but in his sermon there were two things which gave great
offence to this prominent hearer. The first was his quotation of the
passage, "I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall
rule over them; children are their oppressors, and women rule over
them"; and the second, his declaration that "God had punished Ahab
because {181} he did not correct his idolatrous wife Jezebel." Darnley
believed that these words were meant for him, and went home in the
sulks, making his likeness to Ahab only the more striking by refusing
to eat his dinner. The preacher was immediately summoned before the
Privy Council, by whom he was told that he must desist from preaching
as long as their majesties were in the city. For his own exoneration
Knox printed the sermon for the preaching of which he was thus
condemned, and it remains the only specimen of his pulpit work proper
which has come down to us. It is founded on Isaiah xxvi. 13-21, and is
of the nature of an expository discourse, bringing out the primary
signification and reference of the words, and making application of the
principles evolved by that process to the characters and circumstances
of his hearers. It gives evidence of considerable scholarship, of
immense familiarity with Scripture, of good acquaintance with ancient
history, and of great fervour of spirit. It is neither a hasty nor ill
digested production, and it impresses us a good deal more by its
solidity than by its invective. Indeed, there are in it no passages
that one could put into comparison for that with others which have been
already mentioned by us; and it is a little difficult for the modern
reader to wed in his imagination a style so calm and weighty as that
which he finds here, with a manner so vehement as the Reformer's is
usually described to have been. But no printer can reproduce the man,
or the surroundings; here are the wood and the lamb indeed; but in
these {182} others were the fire--from heaven too in a sense--which
flamed forth with its energizing and consuming power, and made his
discourse a thing of might. Such difference as there is between a
bugle, and a bugle blown by a living martial musician, there is between
a printed sermon and the same discourse preached by its author with the
glow of spiritual enthusiasm in his heart and on his face. The one is
a thing of curious study to the professional man, the other is a
trumpet call which puts heart and heroism into hundreds in a moment.
Knox showed his law-abiding spirit by obeying the injunction of the
authorities. His biographer, indeed, says that "it does not appear
that he continued any time suspended from preaching," but Dr. Laing
believes that he did not resume his usual ministrations at Edinburgh,
unless at occasional intervals, until after Queen Mary had been
deprived of her authority. He was not idle, however, in those months,
for he was employed not only in the preparation of his "History of the
Reformation in Scotland," but also in the visitation of churches in the
south of Scotland, and in a journey into England, specially undertaken
to look after his two boys whom he had sent thither for education.
In this interval occurred the murder of David Rizzio, on the 9th March,
1566, in the palace of Holyrood. That wretched man was an Italian
adventurer, whose knowledge of foreign languages made him useful to
Mary in her correspondence with the other members of the
Anti-Protestant League to which she belonged. {183} His acquaintance
with her political designs thence derived opened the way for his
becoming one of the most confidential of her advisers. That roused
against him the enmity of the Scottish nobles, and Darnley became
jealous of his intimacy with the Queen; so with his assistance and
approval David was foully slain almost before the eyes of his mistress.
Attempts have been made to implicate Knox with this affair, but though
he does not conceal his satisfaction at David's "removal," he was in no
wise accessory to his death. The very next day after this tragedy the
exiled lords returned to Edinburgh, and then followed thick and fast
upon each other events of great and lasting importance to the land.
These were the birth of James VI. on the 19th of June, 1566; the murder
of Darnley, on the night between the 9th and 10th of February, 1567, a
deed which was planned and carried out by Bothwell and his agents, not
without dark grounds for the suspicion, to say the very least, that he
and they were acting with the knowledge and consent of Mary herself;
the marriage on the 15th May, 1567, of Mary to Bothwell, that
black-hearted villain who was the evil genius of her life; the
surrender of Mary to the opposing Lords at Carberry Hill on the 15th of
June; the imprisonment of Mary in Loch Leven Castle, where, on the 24th
of July, she signed a deed abdicating the crown in favour of her infant
son, and appointing Murray regent during his minority; the escape of
Mary from her place of confinement on the 2nd of May, 1568; and the
defeat on May 13th of her {184} forces at Langside, whence she fled to
seek from Elizabeth refuge in England, with the Fotheringay block as
the ultimate result. For full details regarding all of these we must
refer our readers to the Scottish histories, and we content ourselves
with mentioning them thus in a group in order that we may carry in our
hands the clue for the intelligent following out of our Reformer's
career.
When the infant James was crowned in the parish church of Stirling, on
the 29th of July, 1567, the sermon on the occasion was preached by
Knox, though he objected to perform the ceremony of anointing, which
accordingly was done by another. In the month of December following he
preached at the opening of Parliament, and had the satisfaction of
seeing an Act passed which ratified all that had been done in the way
of Reformation by the Parliament of 1560; while an additional statute
was now made providing that no prince should afterwards be admitted to
exercise authority in the kingdom without taking an oath to maintain
the Protestant religion.
During the regency of Murray everything went well, but his
assassination (what terrible times these were!) at Linlithgow, by
Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, on the 23rd of January, 1569, was a terrible
blow to Knox. Indeed, it may be said that he was never quite the same
man afterwards. Knox and Murray loved and trusted each other
thoroughly--perhaps all the more from the additional insight into each
other's hearts {185} which their temporary estrangement gave them, and
when the Regent was stricken down the Reformer felt as if his chief
human helper had been taken from him. Murray was a genuine patriot,
and in the main a sincere and noble man. He had his faults, and on
exceptional occasions like that described by Froude,[1] when he was
made the tool of Elizabeth, he was constrained to be, at least by his
silence, a party to deceit which in his heart he abhorred; but that
historian has not hesitated to call him "a noble gentleman of stainless
honour,"[2] and to affirm that "his noble nature had no taint of self
in it";[3] and though Robertson has done his best to belittle him, the
verdict of history we think will settle in the acceptance of
Spottiswood's eulogy: "a man truly good, and worthy to be ranked among
the best governors that this kingdom hath enjoyed, and therefore to
this day honoured with the title of 'the good Regent.'" On the Sunday
after this irreparable loss, Knox poured out his heart to God before
the congregation in a prayer which showed how deeply the bereavement
had depressed his spirit, and on the day of the funeral he preached a
sermon from the text, "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord," in
which he sketched the character and career of his friend with such
effect that three thousand persons were moved to tears by his words.
The blow fell sorely on the country; and it nearly crushed the {186}
Reformer. The loss preyed upon his spirit and enfeebled his strength,
so that in the month of October following he was stricken with
paralysis or apoplexy, which laid him aside altogether for a season
from his work, and gave warning of the approaching end. His enemies
exulted over his illness, and could not refrain from congratulating
themselves on the prospect that he would never preach again; but after
some weeks he so far regained his vigour as to resume, in part at
least, those labours in which he had found so much of his joy.
Throughout the winter and the spring he continued to bear testimony
from his pulpit to the principles which he had so long proclaimed, and
to expose and rebuke the evil-doers who were once more at work in the
land. For though the murder of Murray brought no permanent advantage
to the party of reaction, it brought back again, for a while at least,
the chaos and contentions out of which he had begun to bring order and
peace. Lennox, as the grandfather of the infant king, was put into the
place of Murray, but within a comparatively brief period he was
mortally wounded in an assault made upon the adherents of the king at
Stirling, by a force led by Huntly in the interests of Mary, and
Erskine of Mar was chosen as his successor. This was in September,
1571. Meanwhile Kirkaldy, of Grange, who had been appointed governor
of the Castle of Edinburgh by Murray, had turned his back upon the
professions and promise of his life, by avowing himself a partisan of
the Queen. He held that fortress for her {187} behoof, and gave its
protection to Secretary Maitland, who was working earnestly in her
cause. By Maitland's influence Kirkaldy was encouraged in a course
which was exceedingly painful to Knox. The Laird of Grange and he had
been fellow-sufferers in the French galleys, and to the last the heart
of the Reformer yearned after him. Yet he could not permit his conduct
as governor of the Castle to go unreproved. On two occasions, in
particular, he was constrained to take public notice of his doings.
The first was briefly this. There had been a scuffle in Dunfermline
between a cousin of Kirkaldy and his relatives, and some of the Duries,
a family with whom the Kirkaldys had a feud; and one of the latter
having been seen shortly afterwards in the streets of Edinburgh, was by
Kirkaldy's orders followed to Leith by some of his tools, that they
might chastise him with a cudgel. But they took the sword instead and
left him dead. In the attempt to escape, one of the assailants was
arrested and committed to the Tolbooth, but Grange and his men attacked
the building, violently forced it open, and marched off with their
liberated comrade to the Castle, the guns of which they fired, either
in token of triumph or for the purpose of striking terror into the
citizens. In his sermon on the following Sunday Knox protested against
this interference with the course of justice, using language which
seems to us both temperate and kindly: "Had it been done," he said, "by
the authority of a bloodthirsty man, or one who had no fear of God, he
would not have been so much {188} moved; but he was affected to think
that one, of whom all good men had formed so great expectations, should
have fallen so low as to act such a part, one too who, when formerly in
prison, had refused to purchase his own liberty by the shedding of
blood." An utter misrepresentation of this statement was carried to
Kirkaldy, who complained to John Craig, the Reformer's colleague, by
whom he was referred to the elders of the Church of which Kirkaldy
still professed to be a member. Knox himself, as soon as he had the
matter brought before him, denied that he had used the words imputed to
him, and took the first opportunity of correcting the false report, by
repeating and vindicating what he had really said.
The other occasion was that of the appearance shortly after, in the
church, of Kirkaldy, accompanied by a strong armed escort, composed of
those who had been most conspicuous in the recent outrages. He had not
attended the public services for nearly a year, and Knox looked upon
his presence so surrounded as an attempt to overawe him. But he was
not the man to be thus intimidated, and so, as his good servant
Ballantyne tells us, he took occasion then and there to inveigh
"against all such as forget God's benefits received, and in treating of
God's great mercies bestowed upon penitents, according to his common
manner, he forewarned proud contemners that God's mercy appertained not
to such as with knowledge proudly transgressed, and after, more proudly
maintained the same." Kirkaldy was greatly {189} enraged at these
words, and even in the church he gave vent to his anger so loudly as to
be heard by a great part of the congregation. The report went out in
consequence that he meant to kill the preacher; but Knox held on his
way, dealing defiantly with the anonymous libels that were sent him,
and publicly declaring in words that have become proverbial, that "from
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other inspired writers, he had learned to call a
fig a fig, and a spade a spade."
But when, in 1571, Kirkaldy received the Hamiltons and their forces
into the Castle, the friends of Knox became seriously alarmed for his
safety. They proposed to form a guard who should constantly accompany
him for his protection; but he would not accept the offer, and even if
he had accepted it Kirkaldy would not have permitted it to be carried
out. It was according to military etiquette that he should suppress or
prevent all such outrages, and he expressed his willingness to provide
a guard for Knox from the soldiers of his garrison. He even tried to
get the Hamiltons to guarantee the safety of the Reformer, but they
declared that they could not enter into any such engagement, "because
there were many rascals and others among them who loved him not, who
might do him harm without their knowledge." One evening a musket was
fired into his window, and had he not been sitting in a place different
from that which he usually occupied, the ball must have struck him, and
would in all probability have mortally wounded him. After that he
{190} was importuned by his friends to seek a place of safety
elsewhere, but he refused to leave his post until they told him that
they had made up their minds to defend him, if need be, with their
lives, and that if blood was shed they would leave it on his head.
This argument prevailed, and he consented to remove to St. Andrews,
whither he went by easy stages, and where he arrived in the month of
May, 1571. In his absence his pulpit in St. Giles was filled for a
while by Alexander Gordon, Bishop of Galloway, who pleased the Queen's
party but displeased the vast majority of the Protestants, so that the
Church of Edinburgh was for a time dissolved, while disorder reigned in
the city, and what was virtually a civil war was raging in the country.
[1] "History," vol. vii. pp. 345-7.
[2] Vol. vii. p. 340.
[3] Vol. iii. p. 355.
{191}