THE PUBLIC LIFE: THE CONFLICT WITH QUEEN MARY
Parliament had made a great and revolutionary change. It had acted as if
the government had been already granted to it, or, in Cecil's phrase, to
'the nation of the land.' And the change was on one side a breaking off
of the old alliance with Catholic France. But the sovereigns of
Scotland, now and for the last twelvemonth, were no other than the King
and Queen of France. They, rather than Parliament, were the 'Authority,'
which, according to the consistent theory of that age, had the right to
make and enforce changes of religion; and which, according to the more
puzzling theory of Knox, had the right to do so--provided the religion
so to be enforced was the true one. Accordingly the new Confession of
Faith and the statutes passed by the late Parliament, were sent to Paris
by the Lord St John. He waited there long, but, of course, brought back
no ratification. But that, says Knox, 'we little regarded, nor yet do
regard'; for, he adds, falling back rather too late upon one of those
great principles his utterance of which has sunk into the hearts of his
countrymen,
'all that we did was rather to shew our dutiful obedience than
to beg of them any strength to our religion, which from God has
full power, and needeth not the suffrage of man, but in so far
as man hath need to believe it, if that ever he shall have
participation of the life everlasting.'[102]
It was no wonder that the royal pair did not ratify a Protestant
Confession, for during their brief reign over France they were the
centre of a keen crusade against Protestantism, conducted far more by
Mary's counsellors and uncles, the Guises, than by her feeble-minded
husband. Towards the end of 1560 this had gone so far that secret
preparations seem to have been made for immediately anticipating the St
Bartholomew of twelve years later. But the sudden death of Francis and
the widowhood of Mary changed the whole situation. The new King was in
the power, not of the Guises, but of his mother, Catherine de Medici;
and Mary of Scots would now have to accept a second or a third place in
Paris. But in Europe, and in the politics of Europe, the beautiful young
widow sprang at once into the foremost rank, and became the star of all
eyes. Ex-Queen of France, Queen-presumptive of England, and actual Queen
of Scotland, which had always been the link between the other two, and
to which she was now to return, the marriage destiny of this girl of
eighteen would probably decide the wavering balance of Christendom.[103]
Mary understood her high part, and accepted it with alacrity.
Fascinating and beautiful, keen-witted and strong-willed, she would have
found herself at home in this great game of politics, even if it had not
turned upon an element of intense personal interest for herself. But
while all men knew that her hand was the chief prize of the game, almost
the first man to act on this knowledge, strange to say, was Knox. The
Treaty of Edinburgh had acknowledged the right of the Duke (Hamilton or
Chatelherault), and of his eldest son Arran, as the next in succession
to the Scottish crown after its present holder. And while that present
holder was still married to the King of France, the Scottish nobles had
urged Arran as a suitable husband for Elizabeth of England. It would be
the best arrangement, they thought, for binding the two countries
together, and counteracting the inevitable pull asunder from the
Sovereigns in Paris. Elizabeth, however, had replied, to the grave
displeasure of the Estates, that she was not 'presently disposed to
marry.' And now a new question was raised. Scotland was, of course,
still more deeply interested in the probable second marriage of its own
Queen. Arran, an extremely flighty young man, was at this moment much
under the personal influence of the Reformer; and it was with Knox's
privity, and perhaps on his suggestion, and certainly without the
knowledge of the nobility generally, that before Mary had been a widow
for a month, her young Protestant cousin sent her a ring and a secret
letter of courtship. It was again in vain. When Elizabeth refused him,
the Estates had been offended, but Arran himself bore the loss with much
resignation. Now, however, the case was different; and though Mary at
all times treated her young kinsman with kindness, Arran took her prompt
rejection of his present overtures grievously to heart, and his wits,
never very stable, were soon completely overturned. Knox, however, had
now fair warning that Mary Stuart knew herself to be more than a mere
Queen of Scots, and that the infinitely difficult questions, which her
approaching return to Scotland must necessarily raise, were not to be
evaded on easy terms.
There was among these one theoretical question which _ought_ to have
been a difficulty for Knox, but of which he was not now disposed to
make much. According to his view women should not be sovereigns at all.
But, in truth, this was but one branch of the general grievance of
arbitrary power in that age. The Reformation took place, we must always
remember, at a time when the hereditary authority of kings was greater
than either before or since. And this arbitrary power of one man became,
if possible, a little more absurd when it happened to be the power of
one woman. In 1557, Knox had found himself confronted with a Queen of
England, a Queen of Scotland, and a Queen-Regent in Scotland--all of
them ladies immersed in Catholicism, and each in a position which, in
his view, implied the duty of selecting religion for all her lieges. We,
in our time, have a very simple way of getting rid of such an
intolerable difficulty. But in that age a man even of the boldness of
Knox was thankful to mitigate it. He thought he found a mitigation in
the view (held by thinkers and publicists at the time commonly enough)
that women should not be entrusted with such a power; and, in 1558, he
published anonymously his 'First Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstrous Regiment [Regimen or Rule] of Women.' Though anonymous, the
book was well known to be his; and being Knox's it was founded not so
much on theory as on Scripture precedents, largely misread according to
the exigencies of the argument. But the publication was, in any case, a
practical mistake. Mary of England died immediately after, and was
succeeded by Elizabeth, who was rather more of a woman than her sister,
but to whom Knox and Scotland looked as their only ally against
Continental Catholicism. Knox repeatedly tried to explain to the new
English Queen; but that very great but very feminine ruler never forgave
his book. Meantime he came, as we saw, into more personal contact with
the Queen-Regent of Scotland, and had the highest hopes from her.
Ultimately she disappointed these; but even when she was deposed by the
nobles, to whom he had originally looked as the agents in the Reform,
Knox insisted on keeping open a door for her restoration, in the event
of her coming in the meantime to think with himself. And now her
daughter was come to her native country as Queen in her own right. Knox,
taught by experience, had already taken part in private overtures to
her, and was no longer disposed to stand on any theoretical difficulty
as to the rule of a woman. The practical difficulties were enough.
And the practical difficulties were tremendous. Had Mary ruled as a
modern constitutional Queen, with toleration of religion all around,
things would have been easy. She would have enjoyed the freedom which
she granted to the lowest of her subjects, and every one of them would
have supported her enthusiastically against domestic and foreign
aggression. But the reign of religion which, according to her first
proclamation, she, on her arrival, 'found publicly and universally
standing,' was very different. It was one by which half the lieges were
forbidden the exercise of their own religion and of their ordinary
worship; and by which Scotland and all its rulers were pledged to a
faith she had been trained as a child to detest, and as a Queen to
suppress. The situation was impossible from the first. The only question
was, how long it would last.
Knox would have met it fairly by making her acknowledgment of the
Protestant Acts and Confession a condition of her being acknowledged by
Scotland. And had the fact been known that Mary, by three secret
documents, executed just before her childless marriage to the Dauphin,
had already handed over her native kingdom, in the event of her having
no issue, to the King of France, the crisis, which was to be postponed
for so many years, might have come at once. But an intermediate plan
was arranged in Paris through 'the man whom all the godly did most
reverence,' and whose weight of character was gradually giving him the
foremost place in Scotland--Lord James Stewart, the Queen's natural
brother. Mary, quick to understand men, put herself under her brother's
guidance, and the result was that she was joyfully received in
Edinburgh, and a proclamation was issued forbidding, on the one hand,
any 'alteration or innovation of the state of religion' as Her Majesty
found it in the realm on her arrival, and, on the other, any tumult or
violence, especially against Her Majesty's French domestics and
followers. So, on the first Sunday, while the Evangel was publicly
preached in St Giles in Edinburgh, and in all the great towns and burghs
of Scotland, mass was privately celebrated in her chapel at Holyrood,
the Lord James with his sword keeping the door, to 'stop all Scottish
men to enter in,' whether to join in the worship or to disturb it. It
was drawing a different line from that which had been fixed by the
recent Parliament, whose Acts also the new Queen had evaded ratifying.
Knox's passion against 'idolatry,' beyond all other forms of false
religion or irreligion, was fully shared by the mass of his followers,
and he tells us that, on this occasion, he worked in private 'rather to
mitigate, yea to sloken, that fervency that God had kindled in others.'
But in the pulpit 'next Sunday' he said that 'one Mass was more fearful
to him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of the
realm, of purpose to suppress the whole religion'--an exaggeration of
intolerance which is unintelligible, until we remember that the 'one
mass' which he was thinking of was that of the ruler who might soon have
the power, and perhaps had already the intention, of suppressing
religion.
Mary had come to Scotland with the deliberate plan of conciliating and
capturing her native kingdom, and she was not the woman to shrink from
whatever seemed to be necessary in the process. It may have been her
brother who suggested a meeting between two people whom, in different
ways, he certainly liked as well as admired. In any case, Knox was now
at once sent for to the Court, and there followed the first of the
famous interviews between Knox and the Queen, recorded in the Fourth
Book of his History. The detailed truth of these Dialogues is not to be
inferred merely from their vigour and verisimilitude. It results equally
from the fact that, throughout, Knox represents the young Queen as
meeting him with perfect intelligence, while on most points she actually
has the better of the argument. The vindication of Knox has come, not so
much from what he has himself so faithfully recorded, as from the
judgment of history on the whole situation, and on the relation to it of
speakers who were also actors.
The first is probably the most important of the dialogues.[104] Mary and
her brother received Knox in Holyrood, two ladies standing in the other
end of the room. She commenced by taxing him with his book against her
'regimen.' He explained that, if Scotland was satisfied with a female
ruler, he would not object.
'But yet,' said she, 'ye have taught the people to receive
another religion than their Princes can allow: And how can that
doctrine be of God, seeing that God commands subjects to obey
their Princes?'
Knox, in answer, ignored the article of his Confession which
bears closely on this point,[105] and fell back on the more
fundamental truth.
'Madam, as right religion took neither original nor authority
from worldly princes, but from the Eternal God alone, so are not
subjects bound to frame their religion according to the
appetites of their Princes.'
He easily illustrated this by instances of men in Scripture, who
resisted such commands of Princes, and suffered.
'But yet,' said she, 'they resisted not with the sword.'
'God,' said he, 'Madam, had not given unto them the power and
the means.'
'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects, having power, may resist
their Princes?'
'If their Princes exceed their bounds,' quoth he, 'Madam, and do
against that wherefore they should be obeyed, it is no doubt but
they may be resisted, even by power.'
That Princes should regulate the religion of subjects Knox held
to be within their 'bounds,' but only apparently if they
regulated it aright, and according to the Word. Otherwise, he
now explained, the prince might be restrained, like a father
'stricken with a frenzy.' At this remarkable argument the Queen
'stood, as it were, amazed more than the quarter of an hour.'
Recovering herself, she said--
'Well, then, I perceive that my subjects shall obey you and not
me.'...
'God forbid,' answered he, in words which really express his
fundamental view, 'that ever I take upon me to command any to
obey me, or yet to set subjects at liberty to do what pleaseth
them. But my travel is that both princes and subjects obey God,
who,' he added, 'commands queens to be nurses unto His people.'
'Yea,' quoth she, 'but ye are not the Church that I will
nourish. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for, I think, it is the
true Kirk of God.'
'Your will,' quoth he, 'Madam, is no reason; neither doth your
thought make that Roman harlot to be the true and immaculate
spouse of Jesus Christ.'...
'My conscience,' said she, 'is not so.'
'Conscience, Madam, requires knowledge, and I fear that right
knowledge ye have none.'
'But,' said she, 'I have both heard and read.'
... 'Have ye heard,' said he, 'any teach, but such as the Pope
and his Cardinals have allowed?'
The Queen avoided a direct answer,[106] but took the next point
with unfailing acuteness.
'Ye interpret the Scriptures,' said she, 'in one manner, and
they interpret in another; whom shall I believe? and who shall
be judge?'
And Knox's answer is from his side perfect--
'Ye shall believe God, that plainly speaketh in His word; and
farther than the word teacheth you, ye neither shall believe the
one nor the other. The word of God is plain in itself; and if
there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, who is
never contrarious to Himself, explains the same more clearly in
other places.'
The conference was long, and was ended with mutual courtesies. Both
parties in the country suspected that the new sovereign might be
gradually coming round to the new faith. No triumph could have been more
glorious for Knox, and at the opening of the interview he had used every
method of conciliation. But he never henceforth deceived himself as to
the chances in this case. Outwardly, the Queen remained friendly, and he
remained loyal; but his opinion as expressed privately, immediately
after this first meeting, was recorded later on.
'If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an
indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth
me.'
Induration of heart was not a charitable judgment to pass against a
young woman brought up in the worst school of morals in Europe, but whom
the speaker held never to have met 'God and his truth' till that
forenoon. Yet, as usual, Knox's judgment was by no means wholly wrong.
There is a certain brilliant hardness about the charm of Mary Queen of
Scots, even with posterity; and as to religion, whatever may have been
the case in the later years of her sad imprisonment, there is no
evidence in her early days in Scotland of personal or earnest interest
in the religion even of her own church.[107] And a tender and serious
interest in religion was held by the whole Protestantism of that day to
be the one gate for the individual into 'God's truth.' Had his Queen
shown anything of this spirit of earnest enquiry, our rough Reformer
might have been precipitate to help her steps, though they should be as
yet on the wrong side of the dividing line. But Mary made no pretences
on the subject, and it was her misfortune, and that of all around, that
her opinion on religion--a matter in which she took no more interest
than was natural to her years--should have been all important to her
subjects. They at least were, or professed to be, in earnest about it;
and the man who in her presence now represented that earnestness made no
pretences either. But we may be sure that Knox's judgment on a 'proud
mind' as to the more central and personal truths of religion, would not
be mitigated by that keen 'wit' which played so freely round its
external parts, and transfixed so easily his own theory of Church and
State. We know from himself that Mary, having found the weak point of
the intolerant legislation, took care to press upon it. She was 'ever
crying conscience, conscience! it is a sore thing to constrain the
conscience;'[108] and she selected for her 'flattering words' the best
of the men around her, till from the question, 'Why may not the Queen
have her own Mass, and the form of her religion? what can that hurt us
or our religion?' there came a formal discussion and a vote of the Lords
that they were not entitled to constrain her. This state of matters
continued during the year 1562. But the real danger, of course, was from
abroad, and Knox had intelligence of all that was going on there. In
December 1562 a victory of the Guises in France had been followed by
dancing at Holyrood; and Knox preached against 'taking pleasure for the
displeasure of God's people.' The Queen sent for him, and suggested his
speaking to herself privately rather than haranguing publicly upon her
domestic proceedings: a proposal which he so promptly rejected that she
at once turned her back on him. It was on this occasion that, hearing
the whisper as he went out, 'He is not afraid,' he replied, with a
'reasonably merry' countenance, 'Wherefore should the pleasing face of a
gentlewoman affray me? I have looked into the faces of many angry men,
and yet have not been affrayed above measure.' But the effect of that
pleasing face upon others around may be measured by a letter written
next day to Cecil by Randolph, who had for some time been Queen
Elizabeth's envoy in Edinburgh. He was an intelligent and well-meaning
man; but Mary was far more than a match for him, as she had been in
France for an abler diplomatist, Throckmorton. Randolph tells the
English minister that Knox is still full of 'good zeal and affection' to
England. 'I know also that his travail and care is great to unite the
hearts of the princes and people of these two realms in perpetual love
and hearty kindness.' In the previous year Randolph had heard an
incident of Knox's first interview with Mary, which we only know from
his letter. Even then Knox 'knocked so hastily upon her heart that he
made her weep, as well you know there be of that sex that will do that
as well for anger as for grief.' But since that date the Queen of Scots
had turned her caressing courtesy directly upon this Englishman, and
even the golden cup which she presented to him at Lord James Stewart's
marriage had perhaps less influence with Randolph than the bright eyes
of one of her 'four Maries' whom he was now pursuing. So he adds now
that Knox 'is so full of mistrust in all the Queen's doings, words, and
sayings, as though he were either of God's privy counsel, that know how
He had determined of her from the beginning, or that he knew the secrets
of her heart so well, that neither she did nor could have for ever one
good thought of God or of His true religion.' No criticism could be more
acute. And yet the research of later times has shown that Knox's
judgment, or information, as to what Mary of Scots was now doing, was
superior to that of all around him. This was the very close of 1562, and
in the next month of January she extended her Catholic correspondence,
which had hitherto been chiefly with the Guises and her Cardinal uncle,
by letters to the Pope.[109] On the 31st she writes Pius IV. assuring
him of her devotion to the Church, and that for it and for the
restoration to it of her kingdom she is ready to sacrifice her
life.[110] The bearer, too, of this secret missive was Cardinal
Granvelle, from Madrid, and deep at this moment in the persecuting
plans of Alva and his master Philip. For a new and greater danger was
now rising for Scotland. Hitherto the chief pretenders for the hand of
the Queen of Scots had been the Archduke Charles, and the Duke of Anjou.
(The new King of France was also supposed to be in love with her.) But
now the project was pressed of a marriage between her and Don Carlos,
the oldest son of Philip and the heir of the mighty monarchy of Spain.
And it was with this full in her mind, and with the determination to
take a step forward in her own kingdom, that Mary again sent for
Knox--this time to Lochleven, where she was hawking. The occasion was
well chosen. The Queen's mass was now tolerated: why should not private
subjects also be allowed to have it, provided they worshipped privately?
'Who can stop the Queen's subjects to be of the Queen's religion?'
Already many Catholics had acted upon this reasoning at Easter of 1563;
but in the West the Protestant barons and magistrates, instead of
complaining to the Queen and her Council, had apprehended the
wrong-doers and proposed to punish them. 'For two hours' the Queen urged
him to persuade the gentlemen of the West 'not to put hands to punish
any man for _the using of themselves_ in their religion as pleased
them.' Nothing could be more clearly right. But nothing could be more
clearly against the law; and Knox assured her that if she would enforce
that law herself her subjects would be quiet. But 'Will ye,' said she,
'that they shall take my sword into their hand?'
'The sword of justice, Madam,' he answered, 'is God's; and if the
magistrate will not use it the people must do so. And therefore it shall
be profitable to your Majesty to consider what is the thing your Grace's
subjects look to receive of your Majesty, and what it is that ye ought
to do unto them by mutual contract. They are bound to obey you, and
that not but in God. You are bound to keep laws unto them. You crave of
them service: they crave of you protection and defence against wicked
doers.'
The Queen, 'somewhat offended, passed to her supper,' and Knox prepared
to return to Edinburgh. But her brother, afterwards the Regent, had
heard the result of the conference, and Mary learned that matters could
not safely be left in this condition. Next morning the Queen sent for
Knox as she was going out hawking. She had apparently forgotten all the
keen dispute of the evening before; and her manner was caressing and
confidential. What did Mr Knox think of Lord Ruthven's offering her a
ring? 'I cannot love him,' she added, 'for I know him to use
enchantment.' Was Mr Knox not going to Dumfries, to make the Bishop of
Athens the superintendent of the Kirk in that county? He was, Knox
answered; the proposed superintendent being a man in whom he had
confidence. 'If you knew him,' said Mary, 'as well as I do, ye would
never promote him to that office, nor yet to any other within the Kirk.'
In yet another matter, and one more private and delicate, she required
his help. Her half-sister, Lady Argyll, and the Earl, her husband, were,
she was afraid, not on good terms. Knox had once reconciled them before,
but, 'do this much _for my sake_, as once again to put them at unity.'
And so she dismissed him with promises to enforce the laws against the
mass.
Knox for once fell under the spell. He seems to have believed that this
most charming of women was at last leaning to the side of her native
land. And so he sat down and wrote a long letter to Argyll. He went to
Dumfries, and on making enquiry, he found that the Queen was right in
her shrewd estimate of the proposed superintendent, and took means to
prevent the election. It turned out, too, that she had kept her promise
about citing offenders, and no fewer than forty-eight persons, one of
them an Archbishop, had been indicted. The first Parliament since her
landing had been summoned for June, and Moray and Lethington seem to
have suggested to Knox that the Queen would be glad then to ratify the
Acts of 1560, in exchange for the approval by the estates of some
suitable marriage. Even now, it was these two heads of the Protestant
party whom Knox trusted rather than Mary. But the young Queen had
outwitted all of them together. The prosecutions throughout the country
had pacified the Protestants, and they did not come up to the
Parliament. When it met, it did not even ask that the 'state of
religion' should be ratified. Meantime the Cardinal of Lorraine had
carried to the Council of Trent the adhesion of the Queen of Scots, and
a special congregation was held by it for the private reception of her
letter. Worse still, the plan for a Spanish marriage, and for setting a
Scoto-Spanish queen upon the throne of the Bloody Mary, was now actively
prosecuted. All this spring, while professing to carry out her promises
to Knox, Mary was negotiating with Madrid, and 'already, in imagination,
Queen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Flanders, Naples, and the
Indies,' she was but little interested in the plans which her Scottish
nobility were proposing for her to England. Knox had hoped that if not a
Protestant noble like Leicester or Arran, at least a royal Protestant
like the King of Denmark or the King of Sweden, would, with Elizabeth's
help, be a successful suitor. But Queen Elizabeth, whom Knox pithily
describes as 'neither good Protestant nor yet resolute Papist,' was not
disposed to help any one to marry before herself, least of all her
lovely cousin. And the Scottish statesmen, Moray and Maitland, like her
own English advisers often, were now so driven to desperation by
Elizabeth's vacillations that they had actually--possibly with the hope
of frightening her--pressed both at home and abroad the project of
marrying the Queen of Scots to the heir of Spain! This apparently came
to the knowledge of Knox along with the refusal to meet his hopes on the
part of the Scots Parliament; and now his cup was full. Lord James
Stewart, by this time the Earl of Moray, son-in-law of the Earl
Marischal, and gifted with great estates of the forfeited Earl of
Huntly, had been his chief friend. But 'familiarly after that time they
spake not together more than a year and a half; for the said John, by
his letter, gave a discharge to the said Earl of all farther
intromission or care with his affairs.' In this stately letter Knox
recalled all their past career in common, and added that, seeing his
hopes had been disappointed,
'I commit you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those
who better please you. I praise my God, I this day leave you
victor of your enemies, promoted to great honours, and in credit
and authority with your sovereign. If so ye long continue, none
within the realm shall be more glad than I shall be; but if that
after this ye shall decay (as I fear that ye shall) then call to
mind by what means God exalted you.'
But the pulpit remained to him, and the pulpit in those days had
sometimes to combine the functions of free Parliament and free press.
Knox went into St Giles', and in a great sermon before the assembled
Lords, from whose retrospective eloquence we have already quoted,[111]
he drove right at the heart of the situation.
'And now, my Lords, to put end to all, I hear of the Queen's
marriage; dukes, brethren to emperors, and kings, all strive for
the best game. But this, my Lords, will I say--note the day, and
bear witness after--whensoever the nobility of Scotland,
professing the Lord Jesus, consent that an infidel (and all
Papists are infidels) shall be head to your Sovereign, ye do as
far as in you lieth to banish Christ Jesus from this realm; ye
bring God's vengeance upon the country, a plague upon
yourselves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your
Sovereign.'
That sovereign could scarcely be expected to take the same view, and for
the last time the Queen sent for Knox. No one knew so well as she that
he had laid his finger on the true hinge of the political question, and
that her opponent would have a far stronger case now than at any of
their previous interviews. She burst into tears the moment he entered.
'I have borne with you,' she said most truly, 'in all your rigorous
manner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means.'
'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers
controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended
at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not
wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the
generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood
and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had
at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own
so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with
my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself
invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the
pulpit, where he had to speak to the nobility and to think of the good
of the whole commonwealth.
'What have you to do,' she persisted, 'with my marriage? or what are you
within this commonwealth?'
'A subject born within the same,' said he, 'Madam. And albeit I neither
be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me (how abject that
ever I be in your eyes) a profitable member within the same.'
Under the new discipline the preacher claimed a right to utter opinions
even as to private marriages, and used it much beyond what the
fundamental principles of Protestantism could justify. But Knox was now
dealing with his Queen, and he felt himself well within the line of his
duty in repeating to herself the deadly consequences to Scotland if its
nobility ever consented to her being 'subject to an unfaithful husband.'
It was unanswerable, except by a new passion of tears, under which the
Reformer stood at first silent and unmoved. He broke silence at last
with a clumsy attempt to explain or to console; and Mary's indignation
was not diminished by Knox's quaint protest that he was really a
tenderhearted man, and could scarcely bear to see his own children weep
when corrected for their faults. She broke with him finally; and Knox,
dismissed to the ante-chamber, found himself so solitary, though among
the ladies of the Court, that (as we have already seen) he attempted to
'procure the company of women' by moralisings which they too may have
found impressive rather than delightful.
From this point--June 1563--the history slopes steadily downwards.
Mary's ambition was still to be Queen of Spain. Messengers on the
subject went to Spain and came to Scotland. But her plans were secretly
counterworked by her old enemy Catherine de Medici, the French
Queen-mother, and Philip changed his mind continually. In December an
incident happened which shewed Knox's new position. A riot arose in the
Queen's absence between Catholics who wished to worship in her private
chapel and Protestants who wished to prevent or denounce it. The latter
were indicted for 'invading' the palace. Knox instantly wrote a letter
summoning the faithful to attend in a body along with them; and he was
cited to appear before the Queen in Council on a charge of 'convocation
of the lieges.' Once more he stood before Mary, but now it was at her
bar. Knox had the weakness of listening to gossip, especially as to what
his feminine adversaries said; and he records not only what he saw, that
'her pomp lacked one principal point, to wit, womanly gravity,' but also
that she was heard to observe--this time apparently in admirable
Scots--'Yon man gart me greet, and grat never tear himself. I will see
if I can gar him greet.' Knox absolutely refused to withdraw his letter
or to apologise for it: and though the Council did not desire to justify
his conduct, they heard with some sympathy his plea that Papists were
not good advisers of princes, being sons of him who was 'a murderer from
the beginning.' Lethington, the Secretary, conducted the prosecution,
and it was probably he who at this point remarked--
'You forget yourself: you are not now in the pulpit.'
'I am in the place,' said Knox--and again his word has become
memorable--'where I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth, and
therefore the truth I speak, impugn it whoso list.'
The votes were taken twice over; but the nobles steadily refused to find
Knox guilty, and 'that night there was neither dancing nor fiddling in
the palace.' During the whole of 1564, however, Knox and the General
Assembly were divided from the Protestant courtiers, who argued, with
perfect justice, that the attitude of the Reformer and his fellow
preachers to the Queen was one of scarcely veiled disloyalty. In a long
and formal conference upon the subject, Knox said some things so plainly
that Lethington answered--
'Then will ye make subjects to control their princes and rulers?'
'And what harm,' said the other, 'should the Commonwealth receive, if
that the corrupt affections of ignorant rulers were moderated, and so
bridled by the wisdom and discretion of godly subjects that they should
do wrong nor violence to no man?'
But even the leading men of the Court, themselves Protestants, were now
beginning to be disquieted by a sense that they did not know what their
queen was planning, and that they could not be responsible for her
actions. During this year, 1564, she was making herself more
independent, both of them and of her old advisers in France; one great
step being the promotion of the Italian, Rizzio, who was now her
confidential secretary. The Spanish marriage was becoming more hopeless,
and the eyes of Mary's Catholic friends were now turning in another
direction. The man at the English court nearest to the English throne
was young Henry Darnley, and Elizabeth had herself jealously suggested
that 'yonder long lad' might possibly please her Scottish cousin. Mary
and he were both great-grandchildren of Henry VII., and their union
would consolidate the Scottish claim to the English crown--a dangerous
result for the daughter of Ann Boleyn. That was a sufficient reason for
Darnley not being encouraged to go to Scotland; but he was at last
allowed to leave London secretly in February 1565. The young people met
in Wemyss Castle, and it was soon plain that Mary and her handsome
cousin were on the best terms. Archbishop Beaton, acting as her
secretary in Paris, was still pressing King Philip, and on the 15th of
March he warned the Spanish ambassador that unless his master came to
the rescue Mary would have to throw herself away on her English
relative. There was no response, and between the 7th and 10th of April,
Mary of Scots and Henry Lord Darnley were privately married in Rizzio's
apartment in Holyrood. No one knew it; and nearly two months after, the
Archbishop again urges the King of Spain to consent, for his Queen is
not yet married, and there is still time for the greater alliance.
Seven weeks more passed, and on the 29th June the public marriage took
place, and Mary gave her husband the title of king.
It was the downfall of Moray, and, as Knox points out, of the whole
temporising Protestant policy since the Queen came to Scotland. Moray
saw that clearly enough, and confederating with a number of the other
Lords to protest against the marriage and the proposed kingship, the
whole party were within three months driven out of Scotland by the
energy of the Queen. In the field, Knox confesses, 'her courage
increased manlike so much, that she was ever with the foremost.' And in
her proclamation she frankly made it her case against the recalcitrant
nobility
'that the establishment of Religion will not content them, but
we must be forced to govern by Council, such as it shall please
them to appoint us; a thing so far beyond all measure, that we
think the only mention of so unreasonable a demand is sufficient
... for what other thing is this but to dissolve the whole
policy, and in a manner to invert the very order of nature, to
make the Prince obey and subjects command?'
For now the triumph of absolutism and of Rizzio, as the Papal agent, was
complete--more so than Moray or Knox knew. France and Spain, long
divided, seemed at last to be working together for the faith. And the
greatest of European monarchs, though he declined to wed his heir in
Scotland, had by no means abandoned the cause there. On the contrary, in
this very spring of 1565, while the Darnley-marriage was preparing, the
savage Alva and Granvelle were laying down at Bayonne, by Philip's
authority, the first lines of the plan for sending an Armada against
Protestant England, in order to place Mary on its throne: and the
assurance to that effect, given by Alva's own lips to Mary's envoy, was
carried by him to Scotland in time to swell the exultation of her
nuptials.[112]
One man was left in Scotland, and he now had at least the people of
Edinburgh with him. Darnley, though a Catholic, thought it prudent to
come to Knox's preaching on a Sunday very soon after the marriage, but
was so unfortunate as to hear a sermon on the text--'Other lords than
Thou have had dominion over us.' The preacher explained that in very bad
cases of ingratitude of the people, God permitted such lords to be 'boys
and women,' and the weakness of Ahab was specially dwelt upon in not
restraining his strong-minded wife. Worse than all, the service was an
hour longer than he had expected; and the king, characteristically,
'would not dine, and with great fury passed to the hawking.' Knox was
summoned to the Council, and ordered not to preach while the Court
remained in town. He gave the particularly cautious answer that '_if the
Church_ would command him either to speak or abstain, he would obey, _so
far_ as the Word of God would permit him'; but times were changed, and
in this matter the Church had now to obey the Authority. The Lords of
the Congregation, for four years the Queen of Scots' nominal advisers,
were very soon in exile in England; and Queen Elizabeth, in mortal dread
of the apprehended union of France and Spain in a Catholic crusade
against her own crown, received 'her sister's rebels' with upbraiding
and almost menace. Knox and the General Assembly maintained a defensive
warfare all through the year 1565-6. But they had no representation in
the Court, and Rizzio succeeded so far that Mary herself tells[113] how
she had arranged for the counter-revolution being commenced by a
Parliament in April 1566, 'the spiritual estate being placed therein in
the ancient manner, tending to have done some good anent restoring the
old religion.' Two things prevented this smooth programme being carried
out. Mary's rather weak fancy for Darnley seems to have only lasted for
a few weeks after her marriage. He turned out to be a fool; and his wife
and the nobility declined to promise him the Crown-matrimonial, _i.e._,
to make him successor to her in case there were no children. Darnley now
courted the banished lords, and made a 'Band' with them according to the
old Scots fashion, a fashion which was to break out nearer home in more
savage survival still. For Mary's imprudent favouritism of Rizzio had
roused the deadly jealousy both of her husband and of the nobles who
remained at home. And on the 9th of March a band of men headed by Morton
and Ruthven dragged the Italian out from her supper-table at Holyrood,
and stabbed him to death in the ante-chamber; Darnley and the lords
remaining in order to make terms with their Queen. The outrage was
unavailing; in two days Mary had talked over her husband, escaped with
him from Holyrood to Dunbar, and summoned her new favourite, Lord
Bothwell, to her aid. Years before, when fighting the Earl of Huntly in
the far North, she had expressed to Randolph her regret 'that she was
not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to
walk on the causeway, with a jack and knapschalle, a Glasgow buckler,
and a broadsword.' And now, as before, her energy swept the field clear
of her enemies, and she returned to Edinburgh victorious. Knox may not
have known of the formal Band; but he was even more opposed to his Queen
than were those who signed it, and on 17th March 1566 he 'departed of
the Burgh at two hours afternoon, with a great mourning of the godly of
religion.' Five days before, on the very day, indeed, after Mary had
ridden away through the night from Holyrood, he had penned, 'with
deliberate mind to his God,' his retrospective confession,[114]
prefixing to it the prayer--
'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit, and put an end, at thy good
pleasure, to this my miserable life; for justice and truth are
not to be found among the sons of men!'
It was the old sigh, which has been breathed from the most heroic hearts
in times of crisis and failure; 'Let me now die, for I am not better
than my fathers!' And here once again it was premature. For the Queen,
now awakened to the whole situation, saw how rash had been her recent
aggressive policy. After the birth of her son in June 1566, instead of
framing Parliamentary enactments against the new religion, she vaguely
proposed to make some provision for the ministers, and allowed the
banished lords, one by one, to come back. And though they now found
their unfortunate confederate, Darnley, in neglect and disgrace, they
found also their sovereign passing rapidly under a new and more
controlling influence; and the Earl of Bothwell was a nominal
Protestant. Knox at first was forbidden to return to his pulpit, and he
visited the Churches in Ayrshire and Fife, occupying himself among other
things in revising the first four books of his history--the only part
which is finished by his trenchant pen. But in December the General
Assembly met in Edinburgh, and Knox was with them. We have already seen
the striking answer sent by this Assembly[115] as to the proposed gifts
of the Queen. But their attention was arrested at this moment by another
and very inconsistent order of the Crown restoring the Archbishop of St
Andrews, the head of the old hierarchy, to his consistorial
jurisdiction, contrary to the law of 1560. It was either a very absurd,
or a very alarming, step; and Knox, at the request of the Assembly,
prepared a powerful manifesto on the subject. He then went away, with
their approval, on a long-meditated visit to England, to visit his sons
in Northumberland or Yorkshire, and to strengthen his friends on the
more Puritan side of the English Church in their new troubles under
Elizabeth. Little is known of his proceedings there; though he remained
in England during the whole time between the Assembly of December 1566
and another which sat on 25th June 1567.
But between these dates, and in Knox's absence, the most amazing tragedy
in the history of Scotland had unrolled itself in Edinburgh. Week by
week, the increasing power of Lord Bothwell over the Queen, and her
increasing dislike of her husband, had attracted the attention of men.
But before February there was a sudden reconciliation between her and
Darnley. She brought him to a house in Kirk of Field, near Edinburgh,
and at midnight of the 9th it was blown up with gunpowder by the
servants of Bothwell, the body of the King being found in the garden. On
21st April Bothwell waylaid and carried off Mary to Dunbar. But he was
still a married man, having wedded Lord Huntly's sister fourteen months
before. And now in May, came in the new consistorial jurisdiction of the
Archbishop, for the only act which that prelate ever performed under it
was to confirm a sentence of nullity of this very marriage, and that on
the ground that Bothwell and his wife being too nearly related, had not
procured a Papal dispensation (the Papal dispensation having not only
been procured before the marriage, but having been granted by the hands
of the Archbishop himself as Legate). Ten days after this divorce, and
in spite of dissuasions from her friends at home and abroad, the
ill-fated Queen publicly married the murderer of her husband, and the
strong shudder of disgust that passed through the commons of Scotland
shook her throne to the ground. So upon Mary's half-compulsory
abdication, Moray became Regent for the infant King, who was crowned at
Stirling, Knox preaching the coronation sermon. (There were men present
on this triumphal occasion before whom he had preached once before in
the same place, when sunk in despair after that 'dark and dolorous'
flight from Edinburgh.) And now came that great winding up already
discussed in our last chapter, the Protestant legislative settlement of
Church matters in 1567.
It was the second great climax of Knox's life; and now his public work
was done. We shall not find it necessary to follow his later years in
detail. They were troubled by ineffectual attempts to reverse the
verdict of the people already given. For Mary had a majority of the
nobles still with her, and Elizabeth of England resented the claim of a
nation to judge its sovereign. An appeal to arms followed: the Regent
was victorious at Langside, and the Queen of Scots fled to a long
captivity in England. But her claims threw Scotland into civil war
during most of the remaining life of Knox. Moray was assassinated in
1570 by one of the Hamiltons whose life he had spared upon Knox's
intercession; and next Sunday Knox, who had long since returned into
friendship with him, preached on 'Blessed are the dead,' and 'moved
three thousand persons to shed tears for the loss of such a good and
godly governor.' But Lethington had now gone over to the exiled Queen,
and took with him even Kirkaldy, who had fought with Moray at Langside.
Henceforth the Castle, where they resided, was a danger to Edinburgh,
and in July, 1571, Knox, by agreement of both parties there, was sent
for a twelvemonth to St Andrews to be out of harm's way. He had left
Edinburgh in wholly broken health, after a fit of apoplexy: he returned
feebler still, and had a colleague at once appointed. Yet when the news
came from Paris, in September, 1572, of the great massacre of St
Bartholomew, Knox himself took charge of organising the protest of
Scotland against the gigantic crime. But that crime of France saved
Scotland, and the voice of Scotland's leader was no longer needed. The
end was now near, and while 'so feeble as scarce can he stand alone' he
sends a farewell message to 'Mr Secretary Cecil' through Killigrew, the
new English envoy.
'John Knox doth reverence your Lordship much, and willed me once
again to send you word, that he thanked God he had obtained at
His hands, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly and simply
preached throughout Scotland, which doth so comfort him as he
now desireth to be out of this miserable life.'[116]
And with an explosion, equally characteristic, against one who had
anonymously accused Knox of 'seeking support against his native
country,' we may close our notices of this great public life.
'I give him a lie in his throat!... What I have been to my
country, although this unthankful age will not know, yet the
ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth....
To me it seems a thing most unreasonable, that, in this my
decrepit age, I should be compelled to fight against shadows and
howlets, that dare not abide the light!'[117]
[102] 'Works,' ii. 126.
[103] So much was this looked forward to, that two months _before the
death_ of her husband King Francis, the English ambassador, writing from
Paris to London of the King's feeble health, says: 'There is much talk
of the Queen's second marriage. Some talk of the Prince of Spain, some
of the Duke of Austrich, others of the Earl of Arran.
[104] 'Works,' ii. 277.
[105] 'To Kings, Princes, Rulers, and Magistrates we affirm that,
chiefly and most principally, the reformation and purgation of the
Religion appertains, so that, not only are they appointed for civil
policy, but also for maintenance of the true Religion, and for
suppressing of idolatry and superstition whatsoever.... And, therefore,
we confess and avow that such as resist the supreme power (doing that
thing which appertains to his charge) do resist God's ordinance, and
therefore cannot be guiltless.'--'Works,' ii. 119.
[106] Mary may not have met a Protestant teacher before, except those
whom she and her husband had more than once viewed suffering on the
scaffold; but she had read books like the Colloquies of Erasmus with
keen appreciation, she was instructed in the great controversy from the
Catholic side, and one of the youthful exercises which remain written in
her girlish hand is a letter to John Calvin in defence of purgatory.
[107] See Hume Brown, ii. 171, note.
[108] 'Works,' ii. 276. Her answer to the General Assembly in 1565, was
that 'she prays all her loving subjects, seeing they have had experience
of her goodness, that she neither has in times past, nor yet means
hereafter to press the conscience of any man, but that they may worship
God in such sort as they are persuaded to be best, that they also will
not press her to offend her own conscience.'--'Book of the Universall
Kirk,' p. 34.
[109] The Pope had already, since her husband's death, sent her the
Golden Rose, with the suggestion that in Scotland she must be a rose
_among thorns_.
[110] Labanoff's 'Lettres de Marie Stuart,' i. 177.
[111] Page 89.
[112] The dates are indicated generally in Hill Burton's 'History,' iv,
133.
[113] Labanoffs 'Lettres de Marie Stuart,' i. 342.
[114] Page 28.
[115] Page 113.
[116] 'Works,' vi. 633.
[117] 'Works,' vi. 596.