John Knox and the Reformation. Andrew Lang

and “the Hoore of Babylon,” and Knox dilated on the personal misconduct of Popes and “all shavelings for the most part.” He contrasted Justification by Faith with the customs of pardons and pilgrimages.

      After these remarks, a controversy was held between Knox and the sub-prior, Wynram, the Scottish Vicar of Bray, Knox being understood to maintain that no bishop who did not preach was really a bishop; that the Mass is “abominable idolatry”; that Purgatory does not exist; and that the tithes are not necessarily the property of churchmen—a doctrine very welcome to the hungry nobles of Scotland. Knox, of course, easily overcame an ignorant opponent, a friar, who joined in the fray. His own arguments he later found time to write out fully in the French galleys, in which he was a prisoner, after the fall of the castle. If he “wrate in the galleys,” as he says, they cannot have been always such floating hells as they are usually reckoned.

      That Knox, and other captives from the castle, were placed in the galleys after their surrender, was an abominable stretch of French power. They were not subjects of France. The terms on which they surrendered are not exactly known. Knox avers that they were to be free to live in France, and that, if they wished to leave, they were to be conveyed, at French expense, to any country except Scotland. Buchanan declares that only the lives of the garrison and their friends were secured by the terms of surrender. Lesley supports Knox, {30a} who is probably accurate.

      To account for the French severity, Knox tells us that the Pope insisted on it, appealing to both the Scottish and French Governments; and Scotland sent an envoy to France to beg “that those of the castle should be sharply handled.” Men of birth were imprisoned, the rest went to the galleys. Knox’s life cannot have been so bad as that of the Huguenot galley slaves under Louis XIV. He was allowed to receive letters; he read and commented on a treatise written in prison by Balnaves; and he even wrote a theological work, unless this work was his commentary on Balnaves. These things can only have been possible when the galleys were not on active service. In a very manly spirit, he never dilated on his sufferings, and merely alludes to “the torment I sustained in the galleys.” He kept up his heart, always prophesying deliverance; and once (June, 1548?), when in view of St. Andrews, declared that he should preach again in the kirk where his career began. Unluckily, the person to whom he spoke, at a moment when he himself was dangerously ill, denied that he had ever been in the galleys at all! {30b} He was Sir James Balfour, a notorious scoundrel, quite untrustworthy; according to Knox, he had spoken of the prophecy, in Scotland, long before its fulfilment.

      Knox’s health was more or less undermined, while his spiritual temper was not mollified by nineteen months of the galleys, mitigated as they obviously were.

      It is, doubtless, to his “torment” in the galleys that Knox refers when he writes: “I know how hard the battle is between the spirit and the flesh, under the heavy cross of affliction, where no worldly defence, but present death, does appear. … Rests only Faith, provoking us to call earnestly, and pray for assistance of God’s spirit, wherein if we continue, our most desperate calamities shall turn to gladness, and to a prosperous end. … With experience I write this.”

      In February or March, 1549, Knox was released; by April he was in England, and, while Edward VI. lived, was in comparative safety.

CHAPTER IV: KNOX IN ENGLAND: THE BLACK RUBRIC: EXILE: 1549–1554

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      Knox at once appeared in England in a character revolting to the later Presbyterian conscience, which he helped to educate. The State permitted no cleric to preach without a Royal license, and Knox was now a State licensed preacher at Berwick, one of many “State officials with a specified mission.” He was an agent of the English administration, then engaged in forcing a detested religion on the majority of the English people. But he candidly took his own line, indifferent to the compromises of the rulers in that chaos of shifting opinions. For example, the Prayer Book of Edward VI. at that time took for granted kneeling as the appropriate attitude for communicants. Knox, at Berwick, on the other hand, bade his congregation sit, as he conceived that to have been the usage at the first institution of the rite. Possibly the Apostles, in fact, supped in a recumbent attitude, as Cranmer justly remarked later (John xiii. 25), but Knox supposed them to have sat. In a letter to his Berwick flock, he reminds them of his practice on this point; but he would not dissent from kneeling if “magistrates make known, as that they” (would?) “have done if ministers were willing to do their duties, that kneeling is not retained in the Lord’s Supper for maintenance of any superstition,” much less as “adoration of the Lord’s Supper.” This, “for a time,” would content him: and this he obtained. {33a} Here Knox appears to make the civil authority—“the magistrates”—governors of the Church, while at the same time he does not in practice obey them unless they accept his conditions.

      This letter to the Berwick flock must be prior to the autumn of 1552, in which, as we shall see, Knox obtained his terms as to kneeling. He went on, in his epistle to the Berwickians, to speak in “a tone of moderation and modesty,” for which, says Dr. Lorimer, not many readers will be prepared. {33b} In this modest passage, Knox says that, as to “the chief points of religion,” he, with God’s help, “will give place to neither man nor angel teaching the contrary” of his preaching. Yet an angel might be supposed to be well informed on points of doctrine! “But as to ceremonies or rites, things of smaller weight, I was not minded to move contention. …” The one point which—“because I am but one, having in my contrary magistrates, common order, and judgments, and many learned”—he is prepared to yield, and that for a time, is the practice of kneeling, but only on three conditions. These being granted, “with patience will I bear that one thing, daily thirsting and calling unto God for reformation of that and others.” {33c} But he did not bear that one thing; he would not kneel even after his terms were granted! This is the sum of Knox’s “moderation and modesty”!

      Though he is not averse from talking about himself, Knox, in his “History,” spares but three lines to his five years’ residence in England (1549–54). His first charge was Berwick (1549–51), where we have seen he celebrated holy Communion by the Swiss rite, all meekly sitting. The Second Prayer Book, of 1552, when Knox ministered in Newcastle, bears marks of his hand. He opposed, as has been said, the rubric bidding the communicants kneel; the attitude savoured of “idolatry.”

      The circumstances in which Knox carried his point on this question are most curious. Just before October 12, 1552, a foreign Protestant, Johannes Utenhovius, wrote to the Zurich Protestant, Bullinger, to the effect that a certain vir bonus, Scotus natione (a good man and a Scot), a preacher (concionator), of the Duke of Northumberland, had delivered a sermon before the King and Council, “in which he freely inveighed against the Anglican custom of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper.” Many listeners were greatly moved, and Utenhovius prayed that the sermon might be of blessed effect. Knox was certainly in London at this date, and was almost certainly the excellent Scot referred to by Utenhovius. The Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was then in such forwardness that Parliament had appointed it to be used in churches, beginning on November 1. The book included the command to kneel at the Lord’s Supper, and any agitation against the practice might seem to be too late. Cranmer, the Primate, was in favour of the rubric as it stood, and on October 7, 1552, addressed the Privy Council in a letter which, without naming Knox, clearly shows his opinion of our Reformer. The book, as it stood, said Cranmer, had the assent of King and Parliament—now it was to be altered, apparently, “without Parliament.” The Council ought not to be thus influenced by “glorious and unquiet spirits.” Cranmer calls Knox, as Throckmorton later called Queen Mary’s Bothwell, “glorious” in the sense of the Latin gloriosus, “swaggering,” or “arrogant.”

      Cranmer goes on to denounce the “glorious and unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietude when things be most quiet and in good order.” {35} Their argument (Knox’s favourite), that whatever is not commanded in Scripture is unlawful and ungodly, “is a subversion of all order as well in religion as in common policy.”