John Knox and the Reformation. Lang Andrew

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      He supplied the Kirk with the tradition of supernormal premonitions in preachers – second-sight and clairvoyance – as in the case of Mr. Peden and other saints of the Covenant. But just as good cases of clairvoyance as any of Mr. Peden’s are attributed to Catherine de Medici, who was not a saint, by her daughter, La Reine Margot, and others. In Knox, at all events, there is no trace of visual or auditory hallucinations, so common in religious experiences, whatever the creed of the percipient. He was not a visionary. More than this we cannot safely say about his prophetic vein.

      The enthusiasm which induced a priest, notary, and teacher like Knox to carry a claymore in defence of a beloved teacher, Wishart, seems more appropriate to a man of about thirty than a man of forty, and, so far, supports the opinion that, in 1545, Knox was only thirty years of age. In that case, his study of the debates between the Church and the new opinions must have been relatively brief. Yet, in 1547, he already reckoned himself, not incorrectly, as a skilled disputant in favour of ideas with which he cannot have been very long familiar.

      Wishart was taken, was tried, was condemned; was strangled, and his dead body was burned at St. Andrews on March 1, 1546. It is highly improbable that Knox could venture, as a marked man, to be present at the trial. He cites the account of it in his “History” from the contemporary Scottish narrative used by Foxe in his “Martyrs,” and Laing, Knox’s editor, thinks that Foxe “may possibly have been indebted for some” of the Scottish accounts “to the Scottish Reformer.” It seems, if there be anything in evidence of tone and style, that what Knox quotes from Foxe in 1561-66 is what Knox himself actually wrote about 1547-48. Mr. Hill Burton observes in the tract “the mark of Knox’s vehement colouring,” and adds, “it is needless to seek in the account for precise accuracy.” In “precise accuracy” many historians are as sadly to seek as Knox himself, but his peculiar “colouring” is all his own, and is as marked in the pamphlet on Wishart’s trial, which he cites, as in the “History” which he acknowledged.

      There are said to be but few copies of the first edition of the black letter tract on Wishart’s trial, published in London, with Lindsay’s “Tragedy of the Cardinal,” by Day and Seres. I regard it as the earliest printed work of John Knox. 18 The author, when he describes Lauder, Wishart’s official accuser, as “a fed sow.. his face running down with sweat, and frothing at the mouth like ane bear,” who “spat at Maister George’s face… ” shows every mark of Knox’s vehement and pictorial style. His editor, Laing, bids us observe “that all these opprobrious terms are copied from Foxe, or rather from the black letter tract.” But the black letter tract, I conceive, must be Knox’s own. Its author, like Knox, “indulges his vein of humour” by speaking of friars as “fiends”; like Knox he calls Wishart “Maister George,” and “that servand of God.”

      The peculiarities of the tract, good and bad, the vivid familiar manner, the vehemence, the pictorial quality, the violent invective, are the notes of Knox’s “History.” Already, by 1547, or not much later, he was the perfect master of his style; his tone no more resembles that of his contemporary and fellow-historian, Lesley, than the style of Mr. J. R. Green resembles that of Mr. S. R. Gardiner.

      CHAPTER III: KNOX IN ST. ANDREWS CASTLE: THE GALLEYS: 1547-1549

      We now take up Knox where we left him: namely when Wishart was arrested in January 1546. He was then tutor to the sons of the lairds of Langniddrie and Ormiston, Protestants and of the English party. Of his adventures we know nothing, till, on Beaton’s murder (May 29, 1546), the Cardinal’s successor, Archbishop Hamilton, drove him “from place to place,” and, at Easter, 1547, he with his pupils entered the Castle of St. Andrews, then held, with some English aid, against the Regent Arran, by the murderers of Beaton and their adherents. 19 Knox was not present, of course, at Beaton’s murder, about which he writes so “merrily,” in his manner of mirth; nor at the events of Arran’s siege of the castle, prior to April 1547. He probably, as regards these matters, writes from recollection of what Kirkcaldy of Grange, James Balfour, Balnaves, and the other murderers or associates of the murderers of the Cardinal told him in 1547, or later communicated to him as he wrote, about 1565-66. With his unfortunate love of imputing personal motives, he attributes the attacks by the rulers on the murderers mainly to the revengeful nature of Mary of Guise; the Cardinal having been “the comfort to all gentlewomen, and especially to wanton widows. His death must be revenged.” 20

      Knox avers that the besiegers of St. Andrews Castle, despairing of their task, near the end of January 1547 made a fraudulent truce with the assassins, hoping for the betrayal of the castle, or of some of the leaders. 21 In his narrative we find partisanship or very erroneous information. The conditions were, he says, that (1) the murderers should hold the castle till Arran could obtain for them, from the Pope, a sufficient absolution; (2) that they should give hostages, as soon as the absolution was delivered to them; (3) that they and their friends should not be prosecuted, nor undergo any legal penalties for the murder of the Cardinal; (4) that they should meanwhile keep the eldest son of Arran as hostage, so long as their own hostages were kept. The Government, however, says Knox, “never minded to keep word of them” (of these conditions), “as the issue did declare.”

      There is no proof of this accusation of treachery on the part of Arran, or none known to me. The constant aim of Knox, his fixed idea, as an historian, is to accuse his adversaries of the treachery which often marked the negotiations of his friends.

      From this point, the truce, dated by Knox late in January 1547, he devotes eighteen pages to his own call to the ministry by the castle people, and to his controversies and sermons in St. Andrews. He then returns to history, and avers that, about June 21, 1547, the papal absolution was presented to the garrison merely as a veil for a treasonable attack, but was rejected, as it included the dubious phrase, Remittimus irremissibile– “We remit the crime that cannot be remitted.” Nine days later, June 29, he says, by “the treasonable mean” of Arran, Archbishop Hamilton, and Mary of Guise, twenty-one French galleys, and such an army as the Firth had never seen, hove into view, and on June 30 summoned the castle to surrender. The siege of St Andrews Castle, from the sea, by the French then began, but the garrison and castle were unharmed, and many of the galley slaves and some French soldiers were slain, and a ship was driven out of action. The French “shot two days” only. On July 19 the siege was renewed by land, guns were mounted on the spires of St. Salvator’s College chapel and on the Cathedral, and did much scathe, though, during the first three weeks of the siege, the garrison “had many prosperous chances.” Meanwhile Knox prophesied the defeat of his associates, because of “their corrupt life.” They had robbed and ravished, and were probably demoralised by Knox’s prophecies. On the last day of July the castle surrendered. 22 Knox adds that his friends would deal with France alone, as “Scottish men had all traitorously betrayed them.”

      Now much of this narrative is wrong; wrong in detail, in suggestion, in omission. That a man of fifty, or sixty, could attribute the attacks on Beaton’s murderers to mere revenge, specially to that of a “wanton widow,” Mary of Guise (who had, we are to believe, so much of the Cardinal’s attentions as his mistress, Mariotte Ogilvy, could spare), is significant of the spirit in which Knox wrote history. He had a strong taste for such scandals as this about the “wanton widow.”

      Wherever he touches on Mary of Guise (who once treated him in a spirit of banter), he deals a stab at her name and fame. On all that concerns her personal character and political conduct, he is unworthy of credit when uncorroborated by better authority. Indeed Knox’s spirit is so unworthy that for this, among other reasons, Archbishop Spottiswoode declined to believe in his authorship of the “History.” The actual facts were not those recorded by Knox.

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