its moral influence, and a discipline over both poor and rich, was
to be not only the coercive authority of the civil power but its
money. Knox had from the first proclaimed that “the teinds
(tithes of yearly fruits) by God’s law do not appertain of necessity
to the kirkmen.” And this book now demands that out of
them “must not only the ministers be sustained, but also the
poor and schools.” But Knox broadens his plan so as to claim
also the property which had been really gifted to the Church by
princes and nobles—given by them indeed, as he held, without
any moral right and to the injury of the people, yet so as to
be Church patrimony. From all such property, whether land
or the sheaves and fruits of land, and also from the personal
property of burghers in the towns, Knox now held that the
state should authorize the kirk to claim the salaries of the ministers,
and the salaries of teachers in the schools and universities,
but above all, the relief of the poor—not only of the absolutely
“indigent” but of “your poor brethren, the labourers and
handworkers of the ground.” For the danger now was that
some gentlemen were already cruel in exactions of their tenants,
“requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church,
so that the papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the
tyranny of the lords or of the laird.” The danger foreseen alike
to the new Church, and to the commonalty and poor, began to be
fulfilled a month later, when the lords, some of whom had already
acquired, as others were about to acquire, much of the Church
property, declined to make any of it over for Knox’s magnificent
scheme. It was, they said, “a devout imagination.” Seven
years afterwards, however, when the contest with the Crown was
ended, the kirk was expressly acknowledged as the only Church
in Scotland, and jurisdiction given it over all who should attempt
to be outsiders; while the preaching of the Evangel and the planting
of congregations went on in all the accessible parts of Scotland.
Gradually too stipends for most Scottish parishes were
assigned to the ministers out of the yearly teinds; and the Church
received—what it retained even down to recent times—the administration
both of the public schools and of the Poor Law of
Scotland. But the victorious rush of 1560 was already somewhat
stayed, and the very next year raised the question whether
the transfer of intolerance to the side of the new faith was as
wise as it had at first seemed to be successful.
Mary Queen of Scots had been for a short time also queen of France, and in 1561 returned to her native land, a young widow on whom the eyes of Europe were fixed. Knox’s objections to the “regiment of women” were theoretical, and in the present case he hoped at first for the best, favouring rather his queen’s marriage with the heir of the house of Hamilton. Mary had put herself into the hands of her half-brother, Lord James Stuart afterwards earl of Moray, the only man who could perhaps have pulled her through. A proclamation now continued the “state of religion” begun the previous year; but mass was celebrated in the queen’s household, and Lord James himself defended it with his sword against Protestant intrusion. Knox publicly protested; and Moray, who probably understood and liked both parties, brought the preacher to the presence of his queen. There is nothing revealed to us by “the broad clear light of that wonderful book,”[1] The History of the Reformation in Scotland, more remarkable than the four Dialogues or interviews, which, though recorded only by Knox, bear the strongest stamp of truth, and do almost more justice to his opponent than to himself. Mary took the aggressive and very soon raised the real question. “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?” The point was made keener by the fact that Knox’s own Confession of Faith (like all those of that age, in which an unbalanced monarchical power culminated) had held kings to be appointed “for maintenance of the true religion,” and suppression of the false; and the reformer now fell back on his more fundamental principle, that “right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly princes, but from the Eternal God alone.” All through this dialogue too, as in another at Lochleven two years afterwards, Knox was driven to axioms, not of religion but of constitutionalism, which Buchanan and he may have learned from their teacher Major, but which were not to be accepted till a later age. “’Think ye,’ quoth she, ‘that subjects, having power, may resist their princes?’ ‘If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, they may be resisted and even deposed,’” Knox replied. But these dialectics, creditable to both parties, had little effect upon the general situation. Knox had gone too far in intolerance, and Moray and Maitland of Lethington gradually withdrew their support. The court and parliament, guided by them, declined to press the queen or to pass the Book of Discipline; and meantime the negotiations as to the queen’s marriage with a Spanish, a French or an Austrian prince revealed the real difficulty and peril of the situation. Her marriage to a great Catholic prince would be ruinous to Scotland, probably also to England, and perhaps to all Protestantism. Knox had already by letter formally broken with the earl of Moray, “committing you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those who better please you”; and now, in one of his greatest sermons before the assembled lords, he drove at the heart of the situation—the risk of a Catholic marriage. The queen sent for him for the last time and burst into passionate tears as she asked, “What have you to do with my marriage? Or what are you within this commonwealth?” “A subject born within the same,” was the answer of the son of the East Lothian peasant; and the Scottish nobility, while thinking him overbold, refused to find him guilty of any crime, even when, later on, he had “convocated the lieges” to Edinburgh to meet a crown prosecution. In 1564 a change came. Mary had wearied of her guiding statesmen, Moray and the more pliant Maitland; the Italian secretary David Rizzio, through whom she had corresponded with the pope, now more and more usurped their place; and a weak fancy for her handsome cousin, Henry Darnley, brought about a sudden marriage in 1565 and swept the opposing Protestant lords into exile. Darnley, though a Catholic, thought it well to go to Knox’s preaching; but was so unfortunate as to hear a very long sermon, with allusions not only to “babes and women” as rulers, but to Ahab who did not control his strong-minded wife. Mary and the lords still in her council ordered Knox not to preach while she was in Edinburgh, and he was absent or silent during the weeks in which the queen’s growing distaste for her husband, and advancement of Rizzio over the nobility remaining in Edinburgh, brought about the conspiracy by Darnley, Morton and Ruthven. Knox does not seem to have known beforehand of Rizzio’s “slaughter,” which had been intended to be a semi-judicial act; but soon after it he records that “that vile knave Davie was justly punished, for abusing of the commonwealth, and for other villainy which we list not to express.” The immediate effect however of what Knox thus approved was to bring his cause to its lowest ebb, and on the very day when Mary rode from Holyrood to her army, he sat down and penned the prayer, “Lord Jesus, put an end to this my miserable life, for justice and truth are not to be found among the sons of men!” He added a short autobiographic fragment, whose mingled self-abasement and exultation are not unworthy of its striking title—“John Knox, with deliberate mind, to his God.” During the rest of the year he was hidden in Ayrshire or elsewhere, and throughout 1566 he was forbidden to preach when the court was in Edinburgh. But he was influential at the December Assembly in the capital where a greater tragedy was now preparing, for Mary’s infatuation for Bothwell was visible to all. At the Assembly’s request, however, Knox undertook a long visit to England, where his two sons by his first wife were being educated, and were afterwards to be Fellows of St John’s, Cambridge, the younger becoming a parish clergyman. It was thus during the reformer’s absence that the murder of Darnley, the abduction and subsequent marriage of Mary, the flight of Bothwell, and the imprisonment in Lochleven of the queen, unrolled themselves
- ↑ John Hill Burton (Hist. of Scotland, iii. 339). Mr Burton’s view (differing from that of Professor Hume Brown) was that the dialogues—the earlier of them at least—must have been spoken in the French tongue, in which Knox had recently preached for a year.
