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 Scotsmen, 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."[82] 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."[83] 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.[84] 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."[85] 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."[86]
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.[87] 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."[88] We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close
and continuous was their intercourse. "I think it best you remain till
to-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."[89] 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 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."[90] 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_."[91] 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."[92]
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.[93] 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."[94] 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.[95] 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 not 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 creatures laid aside."[96] 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."[97] 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.[98] Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in
this capacity, he calls her "his left hand."[99] 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."[100] 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 bedfellow, Marjorie
Bowes."[101] 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 the summer of 1554,
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.[102]
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 addressed 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 licence, hath not the less stubbornly and rebelliously
departed, separated herself from his society, left his house, and
withdrawn herself from this realm."[103] Perhaps some sort of licence
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.[104] 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.[105] 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."[106] 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."[107] 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."[108] 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."[109] 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 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."[110] 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 re-married, 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."[111] 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, downright 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."[112] 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."[113] 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."[114]
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."[115] 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.[116]
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-twenty 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-two years gladly, if one could be sure of the last twenty-five.
Most of us, even if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of grey
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 maybe 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.