CHAPTER XXVII
From Robert Bruce to John Knox
1300–1561

I. THE INDOMITABLE SCOTS

THE warm and genial south generates civilization; the cold and hardy north repeatedly conquers the lax and lazy south, and absorbs and transforms civilization. The extreme north—Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland—fights the almost Arctic elements to provide some welcome to civilization, and to contribute to it in the face of a thousand obstacles.

In Scotland the sterile, roadless Highlands encouraged feudalism and discouraged culture, while the green and fertile Lowlands invited invasion after invasion by Englishmen who could not understand why Scotland should not receive their overflow and their kings. The Scots, anciently Celtic, medievally mingled with Irish, Norse, Angles, Saxons, and Normans, had by 1500 merged into a people narrow as their peninsula in feelings and ideas, deep as their mists in superstition and mythology, proud as their promontories, rough as their terrain, impetuous as their torrents; at once ferocious and tender, cruel and brave, and always invincible. Poverty seemed rooted in geography, and manners in poverty; so parsimony grew out of the grudging soil. The peasants were too burdened with toil to have time for letters, and the nobles who kept them in bondage prided themselves on illiteracy, finding no use for the alphabet in their feuds or wars. The mountains and clans divided the sparse population into passionate jealousies that gave no quarter in war, no security in peace. The nobles, having nearly all the military power in their private bands, dominated the Parliament and the kings; the Douglases alone had 5,000 retainers, and revenues rivaling the Crown’s.

Before 1500 industry was primitive and domestic, commerce was precarious, cities were few and small. All Scotland had then some 600,000 inhabitants—half of Glasgow’s number today. Glasgow was a minor fishing town; Perth was, till 1452, the capital; Edinburgh had 16,000 souls. The individual, local, and national spirit of independence expressed itself in village and township institutions of self-government within the framework of feudalism and monarchy. The burghers—the enfranchised citizens of the towns—were allowed representatives in the Parliament or Assembly of Estates, but they had to sit, not in their own Commons as in England, but amid the feudal landowners, and their voice and vote were lost in the noble majority. Unable to buttress their power against the nobles by an alliance, as in France, with rich merchants and populous cities, the kings sought support in the affluence and influence of the Church. The nobles, always at odds with the kings, learned to hate the Church and love her property, and joined in the universal cry that national wealth was being siphoned to Rome. In Scotland it was the nobles—not, as in England, the kings and merchants—who made the Reformation, i.e., freed secular from ecclesiastical power.¹

Through its hold on the piety of the people the Scottish Church achieved opulence amid dulling poverty and transmundane hopes. A papal envoy, toward the end of the fifteenth century, reported to the pope that ecclesiastical income in Scotland equaled all other income combined.² The preachers and the burghers almost monopolized literacy. The Scottish clergy were already in the sixteenth century noted for scholarship, and it was the Church, of course, that founded and maintained the universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen. After 1487 the bishops and abbots were “nominated”—in effect appointed—by the kings, who used these offices as rewards for political services or as sinecures for their illegitimate sons. James V endowed three of his bastards with the ecclesiastical revenues of Kelso, Melrose, Holyrood, and St. Andrews. The worldly tastes of these royal appointees were in a measure responsible for the deterioration of the clergy in the sixteenth century.

But the general laxity of morals and discipline that marked the Church in the later Middle Ages was evident in Scotland long before the royal nomination of the prelacy. “The corruption of the Church, bad everywhere throughout Europe in the fifteenth century,” writes the strongly Catholic Hilaire Belloc, “had in Scotland reached a degree hardly known elsewhere”;³ hence, in part, the indifference with which the common people, though orthodox in creed, would look upon the replacement of Catholic with Protestant clergymen. In 1425 King James I complained of monastic dissoluteness and sloth; in 1455 a chaplain at Linlithgow, before receiving his appointment, had to give bond that he would not pawn the property of his church, and would not keep a “continual concubine.”⁴ Cardinal Beaton had eight bastards, and slept with Marion Ogilvy on the night before he went to meet his Maker;⁵ John, Archbishop Hamilton, obtained from divers sessions of the Scottish Parliament letters of legitimation for his increasing brood. The pre-Reformation poets of Scotland spared no words in satirizing the clergy; and the clergy themselves, in the Catholic provincial synod of 1549, ascribed the degradation of the Church in Scotland to “corruption in morals and profane lewdness of life in churchmen of almost all ranks.”⁶ We should add, however, that the morals of the clergy merely reflected those of the laity—above all, of the nobles and the kings.

II. ROYAL CHRONICLE: 1314–1554

The basic fact in the history of the Scottish state is fear of England. English kings, for England’s safety from rear attack, time and again tried to annex Scotland to the English crown. Scotland, to protect itself, accepted alliance with England’s perennial enemy, France. Thereby hangs this chronicle.

With bows and arrows and battle-axes the Scots won freedom from England at Bannockburn (1314). Robert Bruce, having there led them to victory, ruled them till his death by leprosy (1329). His son David II, like Scottish kings from time beyond memory, was crowned on the sacred “Stone of Destiny” in the abbey of Scone. When Edward III of England began the Hundred Years’ War with France he thought it wise first to secure his northern front; he defeated the Scots at Halidon Hill, and set up Edward Balliol as his puppet on the Scottish throne (1333). David II regained the crown only by paying the English a ransom of 100,000 marks ($6,667,000?). As he left no direct heir at his death (1371), the kingdom passed to his nephew Robert Stuart, with whom the fateful Stuart dynasty began.

The war of Britain’s two halves against the whole was soon resumed. The French sent an army to Scotland; Scots and French ravaged the border counties of England, took Durham, and put to death all its inhabitants—men, women, children, nuns, monks, priests. Playing the next move in this royal chess, the English invaded Scotland, burned Perth and Dundee, and destroyed Melrose Abbey (1385). Robert III carried on; but when the English captured his son James (1406) he died of grief. England kept the boy king in genteel imprisonment until the Scots signed the “Perpetual Peace” (1423), renouncing all further co-operation with France.

James I had picked up, in captivity, considerable education, and an English bride. In honor of this “milk-white dove” he composed, in the Scots tongue, The King’s Quair (i.e., book), an allegorical poem of surprising merit for a king. Indeed James was remarkable in a dozen ways. He was one of the best wrestlers, runners, riders, archers, spearmen, craftsmen, and musicians in Scotland, and he was a competent and beneficent ruler. He imposed penalties upon dishonest commerce and negligent husbandry, built hospitals, required taverns to close at nine, turned the energies of youth from football to martial exercises, and demanded a reform of ecclesiastical discipline and monastic life. When his active feign began (1424) he pledged himself to put down chaos and crime in Scotland, and to end the private wars of the nobles and their feudal despotism; “if God gives me but a dog’s life I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken keep the cow”—i.e., end robbery of homes and cattle—“through all Scotland.”⁷ A Highland thief robbed a woman of two cows; she vowed that she would ne’er wear shoon till she had walked to the King to denounce the weakness of the law. “You lie,” said the thief; “I will have you shod”; and he nailed horseshoes to her naked feet. She found her way to the King nevertheless. He had the robber hunted down, had him led about Perth with a canvas picture of the crime, and saw to it that the brute was safely hanged. Meanwhile he quarreled opportunely with obstructive barons, brought a few to the scaffold, confiscated excess holdings, taxed the lords as well as the burgesses, and gave the government the funds it needed to replace many tyrannies with one. He called to the Parliament the lairds—proprietors of the lesser estates—and made them and the middle class an offset to the nobles and the clergy. In 1437 a band of nobles killed him.

The sons of the nobles whom he had cut down in life or property continued against James II their struggle against the centralizing monarchy. While the new king was still a lad of seven his ministers invited the young Earl of Douglas, and a younger brother, to be the King’s guests; they came, were given a mock trial, and were beheaded (1440). Twelve years later James II himself invited William, Earl of Douglas, to his court at Stirling, gave him a safe-conduct, entertained him royally, and slew him on the charge that he had had treasonable correspondence with England. The King captured all English strongholds in Scotland but one, and was blown to bits by the accidental explosion of his own cannon. James III paid the penalty of his father’s lawlessness; after many ferocious encounters he was captured by nobles and summarily killed (1488). James IV married Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII; through that marriage Mary Queen of Scots would later claim the English throne. Nevertheless, when Henry joined Spain, Austria, Venice, and the papacy in attacking France (1511), James felt bound to help Scotland’s old ally, now so imperiled, by invading England. On Flodden Field he fought with mad courage while many of his men turned and fled; and in that disaster he died (1513).

James V was then but a year old. An involved struggle ensued for the regency. David Beaton—an ecclesiastic distinguished by ability, courage, and appreciation of women—secured the prize, was made Archbishop of St. Andrews, then Cardinal, and trained the young King in fervent allegiance to the Church. In 1538 James married Mary of Lorraine, sister of Francis, Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party in dogma-divided France. The Scottish nobility, increasingly anticlerical, looked with interest at the current divorce of England from the papacy, envied English lords appropriating or receiving church property, and took “wages” from Henry VIII to oppose their King’s alliance with France. When James V waged war on England the nobles refused to support him. Defeated at Solway Moss (1542), he fled in shame to Falkland, and died there on December 14. On December 8 his wife had given birth to Mary, who, six days old, became Queen of Scots.

Beaton produced a will in which the late King had named him regent for the infant Queen. The nobles questioned the authenticity of the document, imprisoned the Cardinal, and chose as regent James, Earl of Arran; but Arran released Beaton and made him chancellor. When Beaton renewed the alliance with France, Henry VIII resolved on merciless war. To his army in the north he sent orders to burn and destroy everything in its path, “putting nan, woman, and child to fire and sword without exception where any resistance shall be made,” and particularly “sparing no creature alive” in Beaton’s St. Andrews.⁸ The army did its best; “abbey and grange, castle and hamlet, were buried in a common ruin”;⁹ for two days Edinburgh was sacked and burned; farm villages for seven miles around were pillaged and razed; 10,000 horned cattle, 12,000 sheep, 1,300 horses, were led away to England (1544). Sir James Kirkcaldy, Norman Leslie, and other Scottish gentlemen offered to help the English “burn places belonging to the extreme party in the Church, to arrest and imprison the principal opponents of the English alliance, and to ‘apprehend and slay’ the Cardinal himself.”¹⁰ Henry welcomed the offer, and promised a thousand pounds toward expenses. The plan fell through for a time, but was carried out on May 29, 1546. Two Kirkcaldies, two Leslies, and a numerous band of nobles and cutthroats forced entry into the Cardinal’s palace, and slew him almost in fragrante delicto, “for,” said Knox, “he had been busy at his accounts with Mistress Ogilvy that night.”¹¹ “Now, because the weather was hot,” Knox added, “it was thought best, to keep him from stinking, to give him great salt enough, a cope of lead... to await what exequies his brethren the bishops could prepare for him. These things we write merrily.”¹² The assassins retired to the castle of St. Andrews on the coast, and awaited aid from England by sea.

Arran resumed charge of the government. To assure French help he promised the infant Queen Mary Stuart to the French dauphin; and to prevent her seizure by the English she was clandestinely sent to France (August 13, 1548). The accession of Mary Tudor in England ended for a time the danger of further English invasions; Catholicism now ruled on both sides of the border. French influences prevailed upon Arran to resign the regency (1554) to Mary of Lorraine, mother of the absent Queen. She was a woman of intelligence, patience, and courage, who yielded only to the overwhelming spirit of the age. Dowered with the culture of the French Renaissance, she smiled tolerantly at the rival religious dogmas that raged around her. She ordered the release of several imprisoned Protestants, and allowed such freedom of preaching and worship to “heretics” that many English Protestants, fleeing from Mary Tudor, found refuge, and were allowed to form congregations, under Mary of Lorraine. She was the most humane and civilized ruler that Scotland had known for centuries.

III. JOHN KNOX: 1505–59

The propaganda of reform was already a hundred years old in Scotland. In 1433 Paul Crawar was accused of importing the doctrines of Wyclif and Huss; he was convicted by the Church and burned by the state. In 1494 thirty “Lollards of Kyle” were summoned before the Bishop of Glasgow on charges of repudiating religious relics and images, auricular confession, priestly ordination and powers, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, Masses for the dead, clerical celibacy, and papal authority;¹³ here was almost a summary of the Reformation twenty-three years before Luther’s Theses. Apparently the accused men recanted.

Soon after 1523 the writings of Luther entered Scotland. A Scots translation of Wyclif’s New Testament circulated in manuscript, and a cry arose for a Christianity based exclusively on the Bible. Patrick Hamilton went to Paris and Louvain, studied Erasmus and Greek philosophy, went on to Wittenberg, returned to Scotland swelling with the new dogmas, preached justification by faith, was invited by James (uncle of David) Beaton, then Archbishop of St. Andrews, to come and explain himself, came, stood his ground, and was burned (1528). Two other “professors,” as the early Scottish reformers called themselves, were burned in 1534. Four men were hanged, and one woman was drowned, in 1544; according to the not always reliable Knox, she went to her death with a sucking babe at her breast.¹⁴

These murders had been too scattered in time and place to arouse any powerful public reaction; but the hanging of George Wishart touched the souls of many, and was the first effective event of the Scottish Reformation. About 1543 Wishart translated the First Helvetic Confession; unfortunately this Protestant declaration ordered secular powers to punish heretics.¹⁵ From that time the Swiss forms of Protestantism—at first humanely Zwinglian, then rigorously Calvinist—more and more displaced Lutheranism in the Scottish movement. Wishart preached in Montrose and Dundee, bravely tended the sick in a plague, and expounded the new faith in Edinburgh at a time when David Beaton was holding a convocation of Scottish clergy there. The Cardinal had him arrested and tried for heresy; he was convicted, strangled, and burned (1546).

Among his converts was one of the most powerful and influential figures in history. John Knox was born between 1505 and 1515 near Haddington. His peasant parents destined him for the priesthood; he studied at Glasgow, was ordained (c. 1532), and became known for his learning in both civil and canon law. His autobiographical History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland says nothing of his youth, but suddenly introduces him (1546) as the ardent disciple and fearless bodyguard of George Wishart, bearing a heavy two-handed sword. After Wishart’s arrest Knox wandered from one hiding place to another; then, at Easter of 1547, in the castle of St. Andrews, he joined the band that had killed Cardinal Beaton.

Feeling a need for religion, the hunted men asked Knox to be their preacher. He protested his unfitness, and consented, and they soon agreed that they had never heard such fiery preaching before. He called the Roman Church “the Synagogue of Satan,” and identified her with the awful beast described in the Apocalypse. He adopted the Lutheran doctrine that man is saved “only by faith that the blood of Jesus Christ purges us from all sins.”¹⁶ In July a French fleet sailed up and bombarded the castle. For four weeks the besieged held out; finally they were overpowered, and for nineteen months Knox and the others labored as galley slaves. We have few details of their treatment, except that they were importuned to hear Mass, and (Knox tells us) stoutly refused. Perhaps those bitter days, and the cut of the overseer’s lash, shared in sharpening Knox’s spirit to hatred and his tongue and pen to violence.

When the captives were freed (February 1549), Knox took service as a Protestant clergyman in England, on a salary from the Somerset government. He preached every day in the week, “if the wicked carcass would permit.” We of today, who do not often enjoy sermons, can but faintly imagine the hunger that the sixteenth century felt for them. The parish priests had left preaching to the bishops, who had left it to the friars, who were occasional. In Protestantism the preachers became journals of news and opinion; they told their congregation the events of the week or day; and religion was then so interwoven with life that nearly every occurrence touched the faith or its ministers. They denounced the vices and errors of their parishioners, and instructed the government as to its duties and faults. In 1551 Knox, preaching before Edward VI and Northumberland, asked how it was that the most pious princes had so often the most ungodly councilors. The Duke tried to silence him with a bishopric, but failed.

Mary Tudor was more dangerous, and after some cautious dallying Knox fled to Dieppe and Geneva (1554). Calvin recommended him to an English-speaking congregation at Frankfurt, but his code and countenance proved too severe for his hearers, and he was asked to leave. He returned to Geneva (1555), and we may judge the force of Calvin’s character from the influence that he now exerted upon a personality as positive and powerful as his own. Knox described Geneva under Calvin as “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles.”¹⁷ Calvinism suited his temper because that faith was sure of itself, sure of being inspired by God, sure of its divine obligation to compel the individual in conduct and creed, sure of its right to direct the state. All this sank into Knox’s spirit, and through him into Scottish history. Anticipating with horror the rule of Catholic Mary Stuart in Scotland, he asked Calvin and Bullinger whether a people might righteously refuse to obey “a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion.” They would not commit themselves, but John Knox knew his own mind.

In the fall of 1555, now presumably fifty years old, he showed the tender side of a rough character by returning to Mary Tudor’s England, going to Berwick, and marrying Margaret Bowes because he loved her mother. Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes had five sons, ten daughters, and a Catholic husband. She was won to Protestantism by Knox’s preaching; she confided her domestic troubles to him; he found pleasure in advising her, and comfort in her friendship, and apparently the relationship remained spiritual to the end. When Margaret married Knox, Mrs. Bowes left her husband and went to live with her daughter and her confessor. The wife died after five years of marriage. Knox married again, but Mrs. Bowes remained with him. Rarely in history has a mother-in-law been so loving and so loved.

The strange trio went on to Scotland, where Mary of Lorraine still found tolerance useful in winning the support of the Protestant faction in the nobility. He praised the Regent as “a princess honorable, endowed with wisdom and graces singularly.”¹⁸ He organized Protestant congregations in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and made such influential converts as William Maitland, Laird of Lethington, and Mary Stuart’s illegitimate brother, James Stuart, destined to be regent as Earl of Murray or Moray. An ecclesiastical court, disliking this development, summoned Knox to give an account of his doings. He chose discretion, and slipped out of Scotland with his wife and her mother (July 1556). In his absence the ecclesiastical court burned him in effigy. This painless martyrdom ennobled him in the eyes of the Scottish Protestants, and from that moment, wherever he was, he was accepted as the leader of the Scottish Reform.

In Geneva, as pastor of an English congregation, he developed the full Calvinist program of ministerial supervision over the morals and manners of his parishioners. At the same time he invited Mrs. Anne Locke, whom he had converted in London, to leave her husband and come with her daughter to live near him in Geneva. He wrote her irresistible letters:

Over the opposition of her “head” Mrs. Locke left London and arrived in Geneva (1557) with a son, a daughter, and a maid. The daughter died a few days later, but Mrs. Locke remained near Knox, and helped the aging and now less comforting Mrs. Bowes to minister to the preacher’s needs. We have no evidence of sexual relations, and we hear of no complaint from Mrs. Knox; we hardly hear of her at all. The old home-breaker would be mothered, and had his way in Christ’s name.

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.”²⁰ 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.”²¹

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.”²² 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.”²³ In conflict with the reprobate all methods were justified—lies, treachery,²⁴ flexible contradictions of policy.²⁵ 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; ²⁶ and he attributed his flight from Scotland to human weakness and “wickedness.” ²⁷ 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.” ²⁸ Catholics were “pestilent papists” and “Mass-mongers,”²⁹ and their priests were “bloody wolves.”³⁰ 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

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:

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 Médicis. 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:

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:

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):

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:

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:

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 Bèze’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.⁴’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?” ³⁹

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, Lome, 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.” ⁴⁰ 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.” ⁴¹ 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.”⁴² 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.”⁴³

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.⁴⁴ And on May 22 the Lords of the Congregation, now backed by their armed retainers, sent her an ominous ultimatum:

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.” ⁴⁶

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.⁴⁷ 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.” ⁴⁸

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 Elizabeth. All foreign troops except 120 French were to leave Scotland; Mary Stuart and Francis II relinquished claim to the English crown; Mary was acknowledged Queen of Scotland, but she was never to make war or peace without the consent of the Estates; these were to name five of the twelve men in her privy council; no foreigner or clergyman was to hold high office; and a general amnesty was to be declared, with exceptions to be specified by the Estates. It was a humiliating peace for the absent Queen, and a remarkable and almost bloodless triumph for the Congregation.

The Parliament that met on August 1, 1560, accepted, with only eight dissenting votes, a Confession of Faith drawn up by Knox and his aides and softened in some clauses by Maitland of Lethington. As still the official creed of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, some major articles should be commemorated:

Pursuant to this Confession the Scottish Reformation Parliament repudiated the jurisdiction of the pope, made the Reformed creed and ritual compulsory, and forbade celebration of the Mass on pain of corporal punishment and confiscation of goods for the first offense, exile for the second, death for the third. But as the nobles who controlled the Parliament wanted land rather than blood, and did not take the Calvinist theology literally, the persecution of those Scots who still remained Catholic was kept comparatively mild, and never came to corporal punishment. Now that the nobles were allowed to reject purgatory as a myth, they claimed to have been cheated in some part of their patrimony by ancestral donations of land or money to pay priests to say Masses for the dead, who, on the new theology, were irrevocably saved or damned before the creation of the world. So the appropriation of ecclesiastical property could be pleasantly phrased as the restoration of stolen goods. Most of the Scottish monasteries were closed, and their wealth was taken by the nobles. At first no provision was made by the government for the Calvinist ministers; these had been used as ideological aides in the revolution, but the nobles had now lost interest in theology. Knox and his fellow preachers, who had risked and sacrificed so much for the new order, had expected the property of the Church to be applied to the support of the Kirk and its clergy. They petitioned Parliament for such an arrangement; they received no reply, but were finally allotted a sixth of the spoils. Finding this inadequate, they turned against the grasping aristocracy, and began the historic alliance of Scottish Presbyterianism with democracy.

Of all the Reformations, the Scottish shed the least blood, and was the most permanent. The Catholics suffered silently; their bishops fled; mos parish priests accepted the change as no worse than episcopal exactions and visitations. Rural districts lost their wayside crosses, ancient shrines of pilgrimage were deserted, the saints no longer provided easeful holydays. Many spirits must have mourned and idealized the past, many must have waited hopefully for the coming of their young queen from France. Much had been lost that had been gay and beautiful, much that had been brutal and merciless and insincere; much was to come that would be hard and dour. But the change had to be. When the recriminations died down, and men adjusted themselves to the new order, it would be a boon that some likeness of faith joined with converging lines of royalty to end the bitter wars between Scots and Englishmen. Soon the weaker nation would give the stronger land a king, and Britain would be one.