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JOHN: KNOX
by
A: TAYLOR INNES
Famous Scots: Series
Published by
Oliphant Anderson
Ferrier Edinbvrgh
and London
The designs and ornaments of this
volume are by Mr Joseph Brown,
and the printing from the press of
Messrs Turabull & Spears, Edinburgh.
_May_ 1896.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT 9
CHAPTER II
THE CRISIS: SINGLE OR TWO-FOLD? 25
CHAPTER III
THE INNER LIFE: HIS WOMEN FRIENDS 48
CHAPTER IV
THE PUBLIC LIFE: TO THE PARLIAMENT OF 1560 65
CHAPTER V
THE PUBLIC LIFE: LEGISLATION AND CHURCH PLANS 95
CHAPTER VI
THE PUBLIC LIFE: THE CONFLICT WITH QUEEN MARY 117
CHAPTER VII
CLOSING YEARS AND DEATH 144
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT
The century now closing has redeemed Knox from neglect, and has gathered
around his name a mass of biographical material. That material, too,
includes much that is of the nature of self-revelation, to be gleaned
from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet,
after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers
a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma--a blur,
bright or black, upon the historic page.
There is one real and great difficulty. For the first forty years of his
life we know absolutely nothing of the inner man. Yet at forty most men
are already made. And in the case of this man, from about that date
onwards we find the character settled and fixed. Henceforward, during
the whole later life with its continually changing drama, Knox remains
intensely and unchangeably the same. It is the contrast, perhaps the
crisis, which is worth studying. The contrast, indeed, is not
unprecedented. More than one Knox-like prophet, in the solemn days of
early faith, 'was in the desert until the time of his shewing unto
Israel'; and not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too,
has remained hid in the shadow of a mighty hand until the very day when
it was launched. But each such case impels us the more to inquire, What
was it after all which really made the man who in his turn made the age?
* * * * *
Knox was born in or near Haddington in 1505. Of his father, William
Knox, and his mother, whose maiden name was Sinclair, nothing is known,
except that the parents of both belonged to that district of country,
and had fought under the standard of the House of Bothwell. We shall
never know which of the two contributed the insight or the audacity, the
tenacity or the tenderness, the common-sense or the humour, which must
all have been part of Knox's natural character before it was moulded
from without. His father was of the 'simple,' not of the gentle, sort;
possibly a peasant, or frugal cultivator of the soil. But he saved
enough to send one of his two sons, John, now in the eighteenth year of
his age, and having, no doubt, received his earlier education in the
excellent grammar school of Haddington, to the University of Glasgow.
Haddington was in the diocese of St Andrews, but a native of Haddington,
John Major, was at this time Regent in Glasgow. He had brought from
Paris, four years before, a vast academical reputation, and Knox now
'sat as at his feet' during his last year of teaching in Glasgow. In
1523, however, Major was transferred to St Andrews, and there he taught
theology for more than a quarter of a century, during the latter half of
which time he was Provost or Head of St Salvator's College. Whether Knox
at any time followed him there does not appear. Beza, Knox's earliest
biographer, thought he did. But Beza's information as to this portion of
the life, though apparently derived from Knox's colleague and
successor,[1] is so extremely confused as to suggest that the Reformer
was equally reticent about it to those nearest him as he has chosen to
be to posterity. For nearly twenty years of manhood, indeed, Knox
disappears from our view. And when, in 1540, he emerges again in his
native district, it is as a notary and a priest. 'Sir John Knox' he was
called by others, that being the style by which secular priests were
known, unless they had taken not only the bachelor's but also the
master's degree at the University.[2] Knox in after years never alluded
to his priesthood, though his adversaries did; but so late as 27th March
1543 he describes himself in a notarial deed in his own handwriting as
'John Knox, minister of the sacred altar, of the Diocese of St Andrews,
notary by Apostolical authority.' Apostolical means Papal, the notarial
authority being transmitted through the St Andrews Archbishop; and Knox
at this time does not shrink from dating his notarial act as in such a
year 'of the pontificate of our most holy Father and Lord in Christ, the
Lord Paul, Pope by the Providence of God.' Only three years later, in
1546, he was carrying a two-handed sword before Wishart, then in danger
of arrest and condemnation to the stake at the hands of the same
Archbishop Beaton under whom Knox held his orders. And in the following
year, 1547, Knox is standing in the Church of St Andrews, and denouncing
the Pope (not as an individual, though the Pope of that day was a
Borgia, but) as the official head of an Anti-Christian system.
This early blank in the biography raises questions, some of which will
never be answered. We do not know at all when Knox took priest's orders.
It was almost certainly not before 1530, for it was only in that year
that he became eligible as being twenty-five years old. It may possibly
have been as late as 1540, when his name is first found in a deed. In
that and the two following years he seems to have resided at Samuelston
near Haddington, and may have officiated in the little chapel there. But
he was also at this time acting as 'Maister' or tutor to the sons of
several gentlemen of East Lothian, and he continued this down to 1547,
the time of his own 'call' to preach the Evangel. Nor do we know whether
the change in his views, which in 1547 was so complete, had been sudden
on the one hand or gradual and long prepared on the other. Knox's own
silence on this is very remarkable. A man of his fearless egoism and
honesty might have been expected to leave, if not an autobiography like
those of Augustine and Bunyan, at least a narrative of change like the
_Force of Truth_ of Thomas Scott, or the _Apologia_ of John Henry
Newman. He has not done so; indeed, the author who preserved for us so
much of that age, and of his own later history in it, seems for some
reason to have judged his whole earlier period unworthy of record--or
even of recal. For we find no evidence of his having been more
confidential on this subject with any of his contemporaries than he has
been with us. This certainly suggests that the change may have been very
recent--determined, perhaps, wholly through the personal influence of
Wishart, whom Knox so affectionately commemorates. Or, if it was not
recent, it is extremely unlikely that it can have been detailed, vivid,
and striking, as well as prolonged. Knox was not the man to suppress a
narrative, however painful to himself, which he could have held to be in
a marked degree to the glory of God or for the good of men. But whatever
the reason was, the time past of his life sufficed this man for silence
and self-accusation. We may be sure that it would have done so (and
perhaps done so equally), no matter whether those twenty years had been
spent in the complacent routine of a rustic in holy orders; in the
dogmatism, defensive or aggressive, of scholastic youth; in fruitless
efforts to understand the new views of which he was one day to be the
chief representative; or in half-hearted hesitation whether, after
having so far understood them, he could part with all things for their
sake. Which of these positions he held, or how far he may have passed
from one to another, we may never be able to ascertain. But there is one
too clear indication that Knox disliked, not only to record, but even to
recal, his life in the Catholic communion. His greatest defect in after
years, as a man and a writer, is his inability to sympathise with those
still found entangled in that old life. He absolutely refuses to put
himself in their place, or to imagine how a position which was for so
many years his own could be honestly chosen, or even honestly retained
for a day, by another. This would have been a misfortune, and a moral
defect, even in a man not naturally of a sympathetic temper. But Knox,
as we shall see, was a man of quick and tender nature, and had rather a
passion for sympathising with those who were not on the other side of
the gulf he thus fixed. And this one-sided incapacity for sympathy must
certainly be connected with his one-sided reticence as to the earlier
half of his own autobiography.
Incapacity to sympathise with persons entangled in a system is one
thing, and disapproval of that system, or even violent rejection of it,
is another. Knox, as is well known, broke absolutely with the church
system in which he was brought up. What was that system, and what was
Knox's individual outlook upon the Church--first, of Western Europe, and
secondly of Scotland?
We know at least that Knox, before breaking with the church system of
mediæval Europe, was for twenty years in close contact with it. And his
was no mere external contact such as Haddington, with its magnificent
churches and monasteries, supplied. It commenced with study, and with
study under the chief theological teacher of the land and the time.
Major was the last of the scholastics in our country. But the energy of
thought of scholasticism, marvellous as it often was, was built upon the
lines and contained within the limits of an already existing church
system. And that system was an authoritative one in every sense. The
hierarchy which governed the Church, and all but constituted it, was
sacerdotal; that is, it interposed its own mediation at the point where
the individual meets and deals with God. But it interposed
correspondingly at every other point of the belief and practice of the
private man, enforcing its doctrine upon the conscience, and its
direction upon the will, of every member of the church. Nor was the
system authoritative only over those who received or accepted it.
Originally, indeed, and even in the age when the faith was digested into
a creed by the first Council, the emperor, himself an ardent member of
the Church, left it free to all his subjects throughout the world to be
its members or not as they chose. But that great experiment of
toleration lasted less than a century. For much more than a thousand
years the same faith, slowly transformed into a church system under the
central administration of the Popes, had been made binding by imperial
and municipal law upon every human being in Europe.
Major, not only by his own earlier writings, but as the representative
in Scotland of the University of Paris, recalled to his countrymen the
great struggle of the Middle Age in favour of freedom--and especially of
church freedom against the Popes. That struggle indeed had Germany
rather than France for its original centre, and it was under the flag of
the Empire that the progressive despotism of Hildebrand and his
successors over the feudal world was chiefly resisted. The Empire,
however, was now a decaying force. Europe was being split into
nationalities; and national churches--a novelty in Christendom--were,
under various pretexts, coming into existence. For the last two
centuries France had thus been the chief national opponent of the
centralising influence of Rome, and the University of Paris was, during
that time, the greatest theological school in the world. As such it had
maintained the doctrine that the church universal could have no absolute
monarch, but was bound to maintain its own self-government, and that its
proper organ for this was a general council. And in the early part of
the fifteenth century, when the schism caused by rival Popes had thrown
back the Church upon its native powers, the University of Paris was the
great influence which led the Councils of Constance and of Basle, not
only to assert this doctrine, but to carry it into effect.
But Major, when Knox met him, represented in this matter a cause already
lost. Even in the previous century the decrees of the reforming Councils
were at once frustrated by the successors of the Popes whom they
deposed, and in this sixteenth century a Lateran Council had already
anticipated the Vatican of the nineteenth by declaring the Pope to be
supreme over Council and Church alike. Even the anti-Papal Councils
themselves, too, were exclusively hierarchical, and accordingly they
opposed any independent right on the part of the laity, as well as all
serious enquiries into the earlier practice and faith of the Church. So
at Constance the Chancellor of Paris, _Doctor Christianissimus_ as well
as statesman and mystic, compensated for his successful pressure upon
Rome by helping to send to the stake, notwithstanding the Emperor's
safe-conduct, the pure-hearted Huss. The result was that, even before
the time of Major, the expectation, so long cherished by Europe, of a
great reform through a great Council had died out. And the University of
Paris, instead of continuing to act in place of that coming Council as
'a sort of standing committee of the French, or even of the universal,
Church,'[3] had become a reactionary and retarding power. It opposed
Humanism, and was the stronghold of the method of teaching which the new
generation knew as 'Sophistry.' It opposed Reuchlin, and was preparing
to oppose Luther, and to urge against its own most distinguished pupils
the law of penal fire. It continued to oppose the despotism of the Pope,
but it did so rather from the standpoint of a narrow and nationalist
Gallicanism, based largely upon the counter-despotism of the King. This
selfish policy attained in Major's own time its fitting result and
reward. The despotic King and despotic Pope found it convenient for
their interests to partition between them the 'liberties' of the
Gallican Church; and by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, Leo gained a
huge revenue from the ecclesiastical endowments of France, while Francis
usurped the right of nominating all its bishops. The University, as well
as the Parliaments, resisted, and Major, who now lectured in the
Sorbonne as Doctor in Theology, and had become famous as a
representative of the anti-Papal school of Occam, took his share in the
work. He was preparing for publication a Commentary on the Gospel of
Matthew, and he now added to it four Disputations against the arbitrary
powers of Popes and Bishops, and especially against the authority of
Popes in temporal matters over Kings, and in spiritual matters over
Councils. It was all in vain. In 1517 the University was forced by the
Crown to submit, after a protest of the broadest kind;[4] and in 1518
Major returned to his native country a famous teacher, but a defeated
churchman. Yet the grave fact for Scotland was that Major and his old
University, and the Western hierarchy everywhere, henceforward
practically acquiesced in their own defeat. A greater question had
arisen, and one which they were unwilling to face. On the other side of
the Rhine, Luther and his friends now claimed for the individual
Christian the same kind of freedom against Councils and Bishops which
the previous century had claimed for Councils and Bishops against Popes.
Paris took the lead in opposition to the new Evangel by its Academic
decrees of 1521. And when Major, in 1530, republished his Commentary, he
not only omitted from it his Disputations against Papal absolutism, but
dedicated it to Archbishop James Beaton as the 'supplanter' and
'exterminator' of Lutheranism, and, above all, as the judge who, amid
the murmurings of many, had recently[5] and righteously condemned the
nobly-born Patrick Hamilton.
It may be well thus to represent to ourselves what must have been the
outlook into the Western Church of Major, or of any one who looked
through Major's eyes, in that year 1523. But I think it very unlikely
that Knox could have derived from such an outlook, or from Major in any
aspect, a serious impulse to his career as Reformer. Knox no doubt
learned from him scholastic logic, and turned it in later days with much
vigour to his own purposes. Major, too, may have unconsciously revealed
to his pupils with how much hope the former generation had looked
forward to a council. We find afterwards that Knox and his friends, like
Luther in his earlier stages, when appealing against the hierarchy,
sometimes appealed to a General Council. But neither side regarded this
as serious. It would have been more important if we could have shown
that Major transmitted to his pupil the opposition maintained for
centuries by his university to an ultramontane Pontiff as the hereditary
opponent of all Church freedom and all Church reform. But Luther and the
German Reformers had already exaggerated this view, so far as to suggest
that the usurping chief of the Church must be the scriptural Antichrist.
And their views, brought direct to Scotland by men like Hamilton, had,
as we have seen, immensely increased the reaction in the mind of Major,
which was begun abroad before 1518. It is, indeed, curious to notice
how in his later writings the old university feeling against tyranny in
the Church almost disappears, while the equally old and honourable
feeling of the learned Middle Age, and especially of its universities,
against the tyranny of kings and nobles, finds expression alike in his
history and his commentaries. Buchanan, who proclaimed to all Europe the
constitutional rights, even against their sovereign, of the people of
Scotland, and Knox, the 'subject born within the same,' who was destined
to translate that Radical theory so largely into fact, were both taught
by Major. And they may well have been much influenced on this side by a
man who had long before written that 'the original and supreme power
resides in the whole of a free people, and is incapable of being
surrendered,' insomuch that an incorrigible tyrant may always be
'deposed by that people as by a superior authority.'[6] For even Fergus
the First, he narrates, 'had no right' other than the nation's choice,
and when Sir William Wallace was yet a boy, he was taught by his
Scottish tutor to repeat continually the rude inspiring rhyme, '_Dico
tibi verum Libertas optima rerum_.'[7] These views as to the rights of
man, and of Scottish men, may well have fanned, or even kindled, the
strong feeling of independence in secular matters and as a citizen,
which burned in the breast of Knox. But as to spiritual matters and the
Church universal, the only feelings which we can imagine Major, on his
return from abroad, to have impressed upon the younger man from
Haddington are a despair of reform, and a disbelief in revolution.
Let us turn, therefore, from abroad to the Church at home. It is
admitted on all hands that the clergy of this age in Scotland were
extraordinarily corrupt in life, a reproach which applied eminently to
the higher ranks and the representative men. But corruption of churchmen
is always a symptom of deeper things. It does not appear that Scotland
was much influenced by the spirit of the Renaissance, whether you apply
that term to the intellectual passion for both knowledge and beauty
which spread over most parts of Europe during the three previous
centuries, or to the more specific and half-Pagan culture which in some
parts of Europe was the result. It may be more important to observe that
the Church in Scotland had not enjoyed any period of inward religious
revival--any which could be described as native to it or original. On
the contrary its great epoch had been its transformation, through royal
and foreign influence, into the likeness of English and continental
civilisation, as civilisation was understood in the Middle Age. And that
transformation in the days of Queen Margaret and her sons was
accompanied, and to a large extent compensated, by a less desirable
incorporation into the western ecclesiastical system. The later 'coming
of the Friars' had not the same powerful effect in the remote north
which it had in some other realms. And in any case that impulse too had
long since yielded to a strong reaction, and the preachers were now
regarded with the disgust with which mankind usually resent the attempt
to manipulate them by external means without a real message. But there
were two great sources of ruin to the Scottish church, both connected
with its relation to a powerful aristocracy. One was the extraordinary
extent to which its high offices were used as sinecures for the
favourites, and the sons of favourites, of nobles and of kings. This did
not tend to impoverish the church; on the contrary, it made it an object
to all the great families to keep up the wealth on which they proposed
that their unworthy scions should feed. 'In proportion to the resources
of the country the Scottish clergy were probably the richest in
Europe.'[8] But the wealth, accumulated in idle and unworthy hands, was
now a scandal to religion, and a constant fountain of immorality. Still
worse was the extent to which that wealth was in Scotland diverted from
its best uses to the less desirable side--the monastic side--of the
mediæval church. In the revival which came from England before the
twelfth century, a great impulse had been given to the parochialising of
the country, and to keeping up religious life in every district and
estate. But a prejudice running back to very early centuries branded the
parish priests as seculars, and gradually drew away again the devotion
and the means of the faithful from the parishes where they were needed,
and to which they properly belonged. It drew them away, in Scotland, not
only to rich centres like cathedrals, with their too wasteful retinue,
but far more to the great monasteries scattered over the land. Kings and
barons, who proposed to spend life so as to need after its close a good
deal of intercession, naturally turned their eyes, even before
death-bed, to these wealthy strongholds of poverty and prayer; and of a
hundred other places besides Melrose, we know 'That lands and livings,
many a rood, had gifted the shrine for their soul's repose.' But the
transfer, to such centres, of lands (which were supposed, by the feudal
law, to belong to chiefs rather than to the community), was not so
direct an injury to the people of Scotland, as the alienation to the
same institutions of parochial tithes--sometimes under the form of
alienating the churches to which the tithes were paid. These parochial
tithes all possessors of land in the parish were bound by law to pay,
whether they desired it or not. And, strictly, they should have been
paid to the pastor of the parish and for its benefit. But by a
scandalous corruption, often protested against by both Parliament and
the Church, the Lords of lands were allowed to divert the tithes, which
they were already bound to pay, to congested ecclesiastical centres,
sometimes to cathedrals, more often to religious houses of 'regulars.'
After this was done the monastery or religious House enjoyed the whole
sheaves or tithes of the land in question; the local vicar, if the House
appointed one, being entitled only to the 'lesser tithes' of domestic
animals, eggs, grass, etc. This robbery of the parishes of
Scotland--parishes which were already far too large and too scattered,
as John Major points out--was carried on to an extraordinary extent.
Each of the religious houses of Holyrood and Kelso had the tithes of
twenty-seven parishes diverted or 'appropriated' to it. In some
districts two-thirds of the whole parish churches were in the hands of
the monks, and no fewer than thirty-four were bestowed on Arbroath Abbey
in the course of a single reign. When we remember that the Lords of
these great houses were generally members--often unworthy members--of
the families which were thus enriching them to the detriment of the
country, we can imagine the complicated corruption which went on from
reign to reign. Unfortunately the nepotism and simony which resulted had
direct example and sanction in the relation to Scotland of the Head of
the Church at Rome.[9] The most ardent Catholics admit this as true in
relation to Europe generally in the time with which we deal;[10] and the
Holy See had been allowed some centuries before to claim Scotland as a
country which belonged to it in a peculiar sense, and the Church of
Scotland as subject to it specially and immediately. The jealousy of an
Italian potentate which was always powerful in England, and which had
now, under Henry the Eighth, made it possible to reject the Romish
supremacy while retaining the whole of Roman Catholic doctrine, had
little influence farther north. Scotland followed the Pope, even when he
went to Avignon, and when England had accepted his rival or Anti-Pope.
And while in this it sympathised with France, it had little of that
traditional dislike to high Ultramontane claims which we saw to have
been so strong in Paris. The Pope remained the centre of our church
system, and there were in Scotland no projects of serious reform except
those which went so deep as (in the case of the Lollards and other
precursors of the Reformation) to break with the existing ecclesiastical
machine as a whole, and so to challenge the deadliest penalties of the
law.
For it is a mistake to suppose that heresy, in the modern misuse of the
word (as equivalent to false doctrine), was greatly dreaded in the Roman
Catholic Church, or savagely punished by our ancient code. In Scotland,
as elsewhere, the fundamental law was that of Theodosius and the empire,
that every man must be a member of the Catholic Church, and submit to
it. That law was indeed the original establishment of the Church, and
for many centuries there had been in Scotland no penalty for breaking it
except death. But the Church, when its authority was thus once for all
sufficiently secured, was, in the early Middle Age, rather tolerant of
theological opinion. And not until error had been published and
persisted in, in face of the injunctions of authority--not until the
heresy thus threatened to be internal schism, or repudiation of that
authority--was the secular power usually invoked. Unfortunately Western
Europe as a whole, ever since its intellectual awakening three or more
centuries ago, was moving on to precisely this crisis; and the very
existence of the Church, in the sense of a body of which all citizens
were compulsorily members, was now felt to be at stake. The Scottish
sovereign had long since been taken bound, by his coronation oath, to
interpose his authority; and the present King, delivered in 1528 from
the tutory of the Douglases by the Beatons, had thrown himself into the
side of those powerful ecclesiastics. A statute, the first against
heresy for nearly a century, was passed two years after Knox went to
college. When he was twenty-three years old, England was preparing to
reject the Pope's supremacy; but Scotland was so far from it that this
year Patrick Hamilton was burned at St Andrews. When he was thirty-four
years old, the English revolution had been accomplished by the despotic
Henry; but his Scottish nephew had refused to follow the lead, and in
that year five other heretics were burned on the Castle-hill of
Edinburgh, the popular 'Commons King' looking on. On James V.'s death
there was a slight reaction under the Regent, and Parliament even
sanctioned the publication of the Scriptures. But Arran made his peace
with the Church in 1543, and Beaton, the able but worldly Archbishop of
St Andrews, and as such Knox's diocesan, became once more the leader of
Scotland. He had already instituted the Inquisition throughout his see;
he was now advanced to be Papal Legate; and he was fully prepared to
press into execution the Acts which a few years before he and the King
had persuaded the Parliament to pass. Not to be a member of the Church
had always meant death. But now it was death by statute to argue against
the Pope's authority; it was made unlawful even to enter into discussion
on matters of religion; and those in Scotland who were merely
_suspected_ of heresy were pronounced incapable of any office there.
And, lastly, those who left the country to avoid the fatal censure of
its Church on such crimes as these, were held by law to be already
condemned. The illustrious Buchanan was one of those who thus fled. Knox
remained, and suddenly becomes visible.
[1] Knox's later biographer, Dr Hume Brown, has given to the world a
letter from Sir Peter Young to Beza, transmitting a posthumous portrait
of Knox, which is thus no doubt the original of the likeness in Beza's
Icones, and makes the latter our only trustworthy representation of him.
The letter adds, 'You may look for (expectabis) his full history from
Master Lawson'; and this raises the hope that Beza's biography, founded
upon the memoir of Knox's colleague, James Lawson, as the _icon_
probably was upon the Edinburgh portrait, would be of great value. In
point of fact Beza's biography does give great prominence to Knox's
closing pastorate and last days, as his newly-appointed colleague might
be expected to do. But about his early years it is hopelessly
inaccurate, to say the least.
[2] So, in Shakespeare, Sir Hugh, who is 'of the Church'; Sir Topas the
curate, whose beard and gown the clown borrows; Sir Oliver Martext, who
will not be 'flouted out of his calling;' and Sir Nathaniel, who claims
to have 'taste and feeling,' and whose female parishioners call him
indifferently the 'Person' or the 'Parson.'
[3] Rashdall's 'Universities of Europe,' i. 525.
[4] The Act of Appeal of the University lays down principles which apply
far beyond the bounds of Gallicanism; that 'the Pope, although he holds
his power immediately from God, is not prevented, by his possession of
this power, from going wrong'; that 'if he commands that which is
unjust, he may righteously be resisted'; and 'if, by the action of the
powers that be, we are deprived of the means of resisting the Pope,
there remains one remedy, founded on natural law, which no Prince can
take away--the remedy of appeal, which is competent to every individual,
by divine right, and natural right, and human right.' And, accordingly,
the University, protesting that the Basle Council's decrees of the past
have been set aside, Appeals to a Council in the future.--Bulaeus'
'Hist. of the University of Paris,' vol. viii. p. 92.
[5] This uncompromising preface took the place of one in which Major, on
his arrival in Scotland in 1518, praised the same Archbishop, then in
Glasgow, for his many-sided and 'chamaelon-like mildness.' It is
generally recognised that the stern policy latterly carried on under the
nominal authority of James Beaton was really inspired by his nephew and
coadjutor, David Beaton, the future cardinal.
[6] 'Expositio Matt.' fol. 71. (Paris.)
[7] 'I tell the truth to thee, there's nought like Liberty!'--Major's
'History of Greater Britain.'
[8] Hume Brown's 'Knox,' i. 44.
[9] See Scots Acts, A.D. 1471, c. 43.
[10]
An Petrus Romae fuerit, sub judice lis est:
Simonem Romae nemo fuisse negat.