Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

He had his way in almost everything. Like so many great men, he

was physically small, but his broad shoulders warned of strength,

and his stern visage announced certitude and demanded authority. Black

hair, narrow forehead, dense eyebrows, penetrating eyes, intrusive

nose, full cheeks, large mouth, thick lips, long beard, long

fingers- here were incarnate devotion and will to power. A man of

fanatical energy, who liked to preach two or three times a week for

two or three hours at a time, and, in addition, governed public

affairs and private lives- no wonder that "in twenty-four hours I have

not four free to natural rest." `062720 His courage was tempered

with timely timidity; he had the good sense to flee from imminent

death; he was accused of urging Protestants to perilous revolution

in England and Scotland while himself remaining at Geneva or Dieppe;

yet he faced a hundred dangers, denounced the corrupt Northumberland

to his face, and would later proclaim democracy to a queen. No money

could buy him. He thought or claimed that his voice was the voice of

God. Many accepted his claim, and hailed him as a divine oracle; hence

when he spoke, said an English ambassador, "he put more life in us

than 500 trumpets blustering in our ears." `062721

The Calvinist creed was one source of his strength. God had

divided all men into the elect and the damned; Knox and his supporters

were of the elect, and were therefore divinely destined to victory;

their opponents were reprobates, and sooner or later hell would be

their home. "We are persuaded," he wrote, "that all which our

adversaries do is diabolical." `062722 For such God-damned opponents

no Christian love was due, for they were sons of Satan, not of God;

there was no good in them whatever, and it would be well to

exterminate them completely from the earth. He rejoiced in that

"perfect hatred which the Holy Ghost engendereth in the hearts of

God's elect against the contemners of His holy statutes." `062723 In

conflict with the reprobate all methods were justified- lies,

treachery, `062724 flexible contradictions of policy. `062725 The

cause hallowed the means.

Yet Knox's moral philosophy, on its surface, was precisely the

opposite of Machiavelli's. He did not admit that statesmen should be

freed from the moral code required of citizens; he demanded that

governors and governed alike should obey the precepts of the Bible.

But the Bible to him meant chiefly the Old Testament; the thundering

prophets of Judea were more to his purpose than the man on the

cross. He would bend the nation to his will or burn it with flaming

prophecies. He claimed prophetic power, and correctly predicted Mary

Tudor's early death and Mary Stuart's fall- or were these wishes

luckily fulfilled? He was an undeceivable judge of other men's

characters, sometimes of his own. "Of nature I am churlish," he

handsomely confessed; `062726 and he attributed his flight from

Scotland to human weakness and "wickedness." `062727 There was a rough

humor behind his growl, and he could be gentle as well as violent.

He gave himself in full-blooded sincerity to his task, which was to

set up the sway of a cleansed and learned priesthood over mankind,

beginning with the Scots. He argued that a virtuous priesthood would

be inspired by God, so that in a society so administered God and

Christ would be the king. He believed in a theocracy, but did more for

democracy than any other man of his time.

His writings were no literary exercises; they were political

thunderclaps. They rivaled Luther's in vigor of vituperation. The

Roman Church was to him, as to Luther, a "harlot... altogether

polluted with all kinds of spiritual fornication." `062728 Catholics

were "pestilent papists" and "Mass-mongers," `062729 and their priests

were "bloody wolves." `062730 No man of that eloquent age was more

eloquent. When Mary Tudor married Philip II, Knox burst out in A

Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God's Truth in England

(1554): Has not Mary shown herself

-

to be an open traitress to the Imperial Crown of England... to

bring in a stranger and make a proud Spaniard King, to the shame,

dishonor, and destruction of the nobility; to the spoil from them

and theirs of their honors, lands, possessions, chief offices, and

promotions; to the utter decay of the treasures, commodities, navy,

and fortifications of the Realm; to the abasing of the yeomanry, to

the slavery of the commonalty, to the overthrow of Christianity and

God's true religion; and finally to the utter subversion of the

whole public estate and commonwealth of England?... God, for His great

mercy's sake, stir up some Phinehas, Elijah, or Jehu, that the blood

of abominable idolators may pacify God's wrath that it consume not the

whole multitude! `062731

-

But now and then, though more rarely, he wrote passages of

tenderness and beauty worthy of St. Paul, who inspired them, as in

A Letter... to His Brethren in Scotland:

-

I will use no threatenings, for my good hope is that ye shall walk

as the sons of light in the midst of this wicked generation; that ye

shall be as stars in the night season, who yet are not changed in

the darkness; that ye shall be as wheat amongst the cockle... that

ye shall be of the number of the prudent virgins, daily renewing

your lamps with oil, as they that patiently do abide the glorious

apparition and coming of the Lord Jesus, whose omnipotent spirit

rule and instruct, illuminate and comfort your hearts and minds in all

assaults now and ever. `062732

-

More characteristic was the First Blast of the Trumpet against

the Monstrous Regiment of Women, written at Dieppe in 1558 against

what seemed to Knox a plague of women rulers in Europe- Mary Tudor,

Mary of Lorraine, Mary Stuart, and Catherine de Medicis. We can

understand his horror at Mary Tudor's application of his principles.

But even if Mary had not persecuted, Knox would have considered her

a monster, a political freak, violating the normal rule that men

should govern states. He began:

-

Wonder it is that amongst so many pregnant wits as the Isle of Great

Britain hath produced, so many godly and zealous preachers as

England did sometime nourish, and amongst so many learned, and men

of grave judgment, as this day by Jezebel [Mary Tudor] are exiled,

none is found so stout of courage, so faithful to God... that they

dare admonish the inhabitants of that Isle how abominable before God

is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea, of a traitorous and

bastard; and what may a people or nation left destitute of a lawful

head do by authority of God's Word in electing and appointing common

rulers and magistrates.... We hear the blood of our brethren, the

members of Christ Jesus, most cruelly to be shed, and the monstrous

empire of a cruel woman... we know to be the only occasion of all

those miseries....

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire

above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to Nature, contumely

to God, a thing most contrarious to His revealed will and approved

ordinance; and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all

equity and justice.... For who can deny but it is repugnant to

Nature that the blind shall be appointed to lead and conduct such as

do see? That the weak, sick, and impotent persons shall nourish and

keep the whole strong? And finally that the foolish, mad, and

phrenetic shall govern the discreet, and give counsel to such as be of

sober mind? And such be all women, compared unto men in bearing of

authority.... Woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and

obey man, not to rule and command him. `062733

-

For this Knox quoted indisputable Scriptural authority; but when

he passed to history, and sought for examples of states ruined by

women rulers, he was evidently perplexed to find their record much

better than that of the kings. Nevertheless he concluded with

confident damnation:

-

Cursed Jezebel of England, with the pestilent and detestable

generation of papists, make no little bragging and boast that they

have triumphed not only against Wyatt, but also against all such as

have enterprised anything against them.... I fear not to say that

the day of vengeance, which shall apprehend that horrible monster

Jezebel of England... is already appointed in the council of the

Eternal.... Let all men be advertised, for the Trumpet has once

blown. `062734

-

Knox took the manuscript of his Blast to Geneva, had it printed

secretly and without his name, and sent copies to England. Mary banned

the book as an incitation to rebellion, and made its possession a

capital crime.

Knox returned to the attack in An Appellation to the Nobility and

Estates of Scotland (July 1558):

-

None provoking the people to idolatry *06058 ought to be exempted

from the punishment of death.... The same ought to be done wheresoever

Christ Jesus and His Evangel is so received... that the magistrates

and people have solemnly avowed and promised to defend the same; as

under King Edward of late days was done in England. In such place, I

say, it is not only lawful to punish to the death such as labor to

subvert the true religion, but the magistrates and people are bound to

do so unless they will provoke the wrath of God against themselves....

I fear not to affirm that it had been the duty of the nobility,

judges, rulers, and people of England not only to have resisted and

againstanded Mary, that Jezebel... but also to have punished her to

the death. `062736

-

Knox urged the people of Scotland to apply this doctrine of

legitimate rebellion to Mary of Lorraine. He complained that the

Regent had surrounded herself with French courtiers and soldiers who

were eating the spare substance of the Scots:

-

While strangers are brought in to suppress us, our commonwealth, and

posterity; while idolatry is maintained, and Christ Jesus His true

religion despised, while idle bellies and bloody tyrants, the bishops,

are maintained and Christ's true messengers persecuted; while,

finally, virtue is contemned and vice extolled... what godly man can

be offended that we shall seek reformation of these enormities (yes,

even by force of arms, seeing that otherwise it is denied us)?...

The punishment of such crimes as are idolatry, blasphemy, and others

that touch the majesty of God, doth not appertain to kings and chief

rulers only, but also to the whole body of that people, and to every

member of the same, according to that possibility and occasion which

God doth minister to revenge the injury done against His

glory. `062737

-

There is a strange mixture of revolution and reaction in Knox's

appeals. Many thinkers, including French Huguenots like Hotman and

Jesuits like Mariana, were to agree with him on the occasional

justification of tyrannicide. Yet his conviction that those who were

sure of their theology should suppress- if necessary, kill- their

opponents harked back to the darkest practices of the Inquisition.

Knox took the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy as still in force, and

interpreted it literally. Every heretic was to be put to death, and

cities predominantly heretical were to be smitten with the sword and

utterly destroyed, even to the cattle therein, and every house in them

should be burned down. Knox confesses that at times these merciless

commandments appalled him:

-

To the carnal man this may appear a rigorous and severe judgment,

yea, it may rather seem to be pronounced in rage than in wisdom. For

what city was ever yet in which... were not to be found many

innocent persons, as infants, children, and some simple and ignorant

souls who neither did nor could consent to... impiety? And yet we find

no exception, but all are appointed to the cruel death. But in such

cases God wills that all creatures stoop, cover their faces, and

desist from reasoning when commandment is given to execute His

judgments. `062738

-

We must not try Knox by our own frail standards of tolerance; he

voiced with hard consistency the almost universal spirit of the

time. His years in Geneva, where Servetus had just been burned,

confirmed his own tendency toward stern literalism and proud

certainty; and if he read Castellio's plea for toleration, he was

presumably reassured by Beze's answer to it. Yet an obscure Anabaptist

in those same years penned a criticism of Calvinism, under the title

of Careless by Necessity; Scottish Protestants sent it to Knox to be

confuted, and for a moment the voice of reason whispered amid the

war of faiths. The author wondered how the Calvinists, after knowing

Christ's conception of a loving Father, could believe that God had

created men whose eternal damnation he had foreseen and willed. God,

said the Anabaptist, had given men a natural inclination to love their

offspring; if man was made in the image of God how could God be more

cruel than man? Calvinists, the author continued, did more harm than

atheists, for "they are less injurious to God who believe that He is

not, than they which say that He is unmerciful, cruel, and an

oppressor." Knox replied that there are mysteries beyond human reason.

"The pride of those shall be punished who, not content with the will

of God revealed, delight to mount and fly above the skies, there to

ask the secret will of God." "Nature and reason," he wrote

elsewhere, "do lead men from the true God. For what impudence is it to

prefer corrupt nature and blind reason to God's Scriptures?" `062739

Unconvinced by reason, and believing himself faithful to the

spirit of Christ, Knox in 1559, when England was under a Protestant

queen, sent to its people A Brief Exhortation advising them to atone

for the Marian persecution by making the Calvinist creed and its moral

discipline compulsory throughout the land. England rejected the

advice. In that year Knox returned to Scotland to preside over the

ideology of its revolution.

IV. THE CONGREGATION OF JESUS CHRIST: 1557-60

-

His appeals to the Scots to throw off the yoke of Rome had

combined with the preaching of other reformers, the influx of

Protestants from England, the infiltration of Bibles and pamphlets

from England and the Continent, the land-hunger of Scottish nobles,

and their irritating displacement by powdered Frenchmen at the

court, to raise the temperature of revolt to the bursting point. The

populace of Edinburgh, firmly Catholic in 1543, bore most directly and

resentfully the influx of supercilious Gauls during the regency of

Mary of Lorraine. Everything was done to make life miserable for the

intruders. Feeling rose on both sides, and as the clergy supported the

French, the spirit of nationalism took on anti-Catholic overtones.

Religious processions- in which effigies of the Virgin and the

saints were carried and apparently worshiped, and relics were

reverently displayed and kissed- aroused increasing ridicule and

doubt. In September 1557, a group of enthusiastic skeptics seized

the image of St. Giles, in the "Mother Kirk" of that name in

Edinburgh, doused it in a pond, and later burned it to ashes.

According to Knox similar iconoclastic sallies occurred in all parts

of the country.

On December 3, 1557, a "Common Band" of anticlerical nobles- Argyll,

Glencairn, Morton, Lorne, and Erskine- met at Edinburgh (which had

become the capital in 1542), and signed the "First Scottish Covenant."

They called themselves "Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ," as

opposed to the "Congregation of Satan"- i.e., the Church. They pledged

themselves to maintain "the most blessed Word of God," called for a

"reformation in religion and government," and demanded from the Regent

the liberty to "use ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as

we must answer to God." They resolved to establish reformed churches

throughout Scotland, and announced that the Book of Common Prayer,

prescribed for England under Edward VI, was to be adopted by all their

congregations. The Catholic bishops protested against this bold

schism, and urged Archbishop Hamilton to suppress it. Reluctantly he

ordered the burning (April 28, 1558) of Walter Milne- an aged priest

who had unfrocked himself, married, and taken to preaching the

Reformed faith among the poor. The people had high respect for the old

man; they voiced their horror at this last burning of a Scottish

Protestant for heresy, and raised a cairn of stones over the site of

his death. When another preacher was summoned to trial his defenders

took up arms, forced their way into the Regent's presence, and

warned her that they would allow no further persecution of religious

belief. The Lords of the Congregation notified the Regent (November

1558) that unless liberty of worship were granted they would not be

responsible "if it shall chance that abuses be violently

reformed." `062740 In that month they sent word to Knox that they

would protect him if he returned.

He took his time, but on May 2, 1559, he reached Edinburgh. On May 3

he preached at Perth the sermon that let loose the revolution. It

was a sermon, he tells us, "vehement against idolatry"; it explained

"what idolatry and what abomination was in the Mass," and "what

commandment God had given for the destruction of the monuments

thereof." `062741 The "rascal multitude," as he describes it, got

out of hand. When a priest in a neighboring church tried to

celebrate Mass a youth cried out: "This is intolerable, that when

God by His Word hath plainly damned idolatry, we shall stand to see it

used in despite." The priest, in Knox's account, "gave the child a

great blow, who in anger took up a stone, and casting at the priest,

did hit the tabernacle and broke down an image; and immediately the

whole multitude that were about cast stones, and put hands to the said

tabernacle, and to all other monuments of idolatry." `062742 The crowd

poured into three monasteries, pillaged them, smashed the images,

but allowed the friars to carry away whatever their shoulders could

bear. "Within two days these three great places... were so destroyed

that the walls only did remain." `062743

The Regent was between fires. Her brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine,

advised her to imitate Mary Tudor and cut down the leading

Protestants; while in and around Perth the victorious rebels were

threatening to kill any priest who dared to say Mass. `062744 And on

May 22 the Lords of the Congregation, now backed by their armed

retainers, sent her an ominous ultimatum:

-

To the Queen's Grace Regent, all humble duty and obedience premised:

As heretofore, with jeopardy of our lives, and yet with willing

hearts, we have served the authority of Scotland and your Grace...

so now with most dolorous minds we are constrained, by unjust

tyranny proposed against us, to declare unto your Grace, that except

this cruelty be stayed by your wisdom, we will be compelled to take

the sword of just defense against all that shall pursue us for the

matter of religion.... This cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical

murder intended against towns and multitudes was, and is, the only

cause of our revolt against our accustomed obedience, which, in

God's presence, we faithfully promise to our Sovereign Mistress

[Mary Queen of Scots], to her husband, and unto your Grace Regent;

provided that our consciences may live in that peace and liberty which

Christ Jesus hath purchased unto us by His blood.... Your Grace's

obedient subjects in all things not repugnant to God.- The Faithful

Congregation of Jesus Christ in Scotland. `062745

-

At the same time the Congregation dispatched an appeal to the nobles

to support the revolt; and another public letter warned "the

generation of Antichrist, the pestilent prelates and their

shavelings... that if ye proceed in this your malicious cruelty ye

shall be treated, wheresoever ye shall be apprehended, as murderers

and open enemies of God.... Contract of peace shall never be made

until ye desist from your open idolatry and cruel persecution of God's

children." `062746

Regent Mary entered Perth with what troops she could muster. But the

friends of the Congregation gathered in armed array, and Mary,

perceiving that she could not overcome them, signed a truce (May 29,

1559). Knox retired to St. Andrews, and, over archiepiscopal

prohibitions, preached in the parish church against idolatry (June

11-14). Moved by his fervor, his hearers removed "all monuments of

idolatry" from the churches of the city, and burned these images

before the eyes of the Catholic clergy. `062747 The archbishop fled to

Perth; but the forces of the Congregation, claiming that Mary had

violated the truce by using French funds to pay her Scottish troops,

attacked and captured that citadel (June 25). On the twenty-eighth

they sacked and burned the abbey of Scone. If we may believe the

sometimes imaginative Knox, a "poor aged matron," watching the

conflagration, said: "Now I see and understand that God's judgments

are just. Since my remembrance this place hath been nothing else but a

den of whoremongers. It is incredible... how many wives have been

adulterated, and virgins deflowered, by the filthy beasts that have

been fostered in this den, but especially by that wicked man... the

bishop." `062748

Mary of Lorraine, now so seriously ill that she momentarily expected

death, fled to Leith, and tried to delay the victorious Protestants

with negotiations until aid might come from France. The Congregation

outplayed her by winning support from Elizabeth of England. Knox wrote

the Queen a letter assuring her that she had not been included in

his trumpet blast against female sovereigns. William Cecil,

Elizabeth's first minister, advised her to help the Scottish

revolution as a move toward bringing Scotland into political

dependence upon England; this, he felt, was a legitimate protection

against Mary Stuart, who, on becoming Queen of France (1559), had

claimed also the throne of England on the ground that Elizabeth was

a bastard usurper. Soon an English fleet in the Firth of Forth blocked

any landing of French aid for the Regent, and an English army joined

the Congregation's forces in attacking Leith. Mary of Lorraine retired

to the castle of Edinburgh, and- having kissed her retinue one by one-

died (June 10, 1560). She was a good woman cast for the wrong part

in an inescapable tragedy.

Her last defenders, blockaded and starving, surrendered. On July

6, 1560, the representatives of the Congregation, of Mary Stuart,

France, and England, signed the Treaty of Edinburgh, whose articles

were to enter deeply into the later conflict between Mary and

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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