target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#n39" type="note">39 declined any post, a bishopric, or a living, which would in honour oblige him to face the fire of persecution. At the same time he was even then far at odds with the Church of England that he had sound reasons for refusing benefices.
On Christmas day, 1552, 40 he preached at Newcastle against Papists, as “thirsting nothing more than the King’s death, which their iniquity would procure.” In two brief years Knox was himself publicly expressing his own thirst for the Queen’s death, and praying for a Jehu or a Phinehas, slayers of idolaters, such as Mary Tudor. If any fanatic had taken this hint, and the life of Mary Tudor, Catholics would have said that Knox’s “iniquity procured” the murder, and they would have had fair excuse for the assertion.
Meanwhile charges were brought against the Reformer, on the ground of his Christmas sermon of peace and goodwill. Northumberland (January 9, 1552-53) sends to Cecil “a letter of poor Knox, by the which you may perceive what perplexity the poor soul remaineth in at this present.” We have not Knox’s interesting letter, but Northumberland pled his cause against a charge of treason. In fact, however, the Court highly approved of his sermon. He was presently again in what he believed to be imminent danger of life: “I fear that I be not yet ripe, nor able to glorify Christ by my faith,” he wrote to Mrs. Bowes, “but what lacketh now, God shall perform in His own time.” 41 We do not know what peril threatened the Reformer now (probably in March 1553), but he frequently, later, seems to have doubted his own “ripeness” for martyrdom. His reluctance to suffer did not prevent him from constant attendance to the tedious self-tormentings of Mrs. Bowes, and of “three honest poor women” in London.
Knox, at all events, was not so “perplexed” that he feared to speak his mind in the pulpit. In Lent, 1553, preaching before the boy king, he denounced his ministers in trenchant historical parallels between them and Achitophel, Shebna, and Judas. Later, young Mr. Mackail, applying the same method to the ministers of Charles II., was hanged. “What wonder is it then,” said Knox, “that a young and innocent king be deceived by crafty, covetous, wicked, and ungodly councillors? I am greatly afraid that Achitophel be councillor, that Judas bear the purse, and that Shebna be scribe, comptroller, and treasurer.” 42
This appears the extreme of audacity. Yet nothing worse came to Knox than questions, by the Council, as to his refusal of a benefice, and his declining, as he still did, to kneel at the Communion (April 14, 1553). His answers prove that he was out of harmony with the fluctuating Anglicanism of the hour. Northumberland could not then resent the audacities of pulpiteers, because the Protestants were the only party who might stand by him in his approaching effort to crown Lady Jane Grey. Now all the King’s preachers, obviously by concerted action, “thundered” against Edward’s Council, in the Lent or Easter of 1553. Manifestly, in the old Scots phrase, “the Kirk had a back”; had some secular support, namely that of their party, which Northumberland could not slight. Meanwhile Knox was sent on a preaching tour in Buckinghamshire, and there he was when Edward VI. died, in the first week of July 1553. 43
Knox’s official attachment to England expired with his preaching license, on the death of Edward VI. and the accession of Mary Tudor. He did not at once leave the country, but preached both in London and on the English border, while the new queen was settling herself on the throne. While within Mary’s reach, Knox did not encourage resistance against that idolatress; he did not do so till he was safe in France. Indeed, in his prayer used after the death of Edward VI., before the fires of Oxford and Smithfield were lit, Knox wrote: “Illuminate the heart of our Sovereign Lady, Queen Mary, with pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost… Repress thou the pride of those that would rebel… Mitigate the hearts of those that persecute us.”
In the autumn of 1553, Knox’s health was very bad; he had gravel, and felt his bodily strength broken. Moreover, he was in the disagreeable position of being betrothed to a very young lady, Marjorie Bowes, with the approval of her devout mother, the wife of Richard Bowes, commander of Norham Castle, near Berwick, but to the anger and disgust of the Bowes family in general. They by no means shared Knox’s ideas of religion, rather regarding him as a penniless unfrocked “Scot runagate,” whose alliance was discreditable and distasteful, and might be dangerous. “Maist unpleasing words” passed, and it is no marvel that Knox, being persecuted in one city, fled to another, leaving England for Dieppe early in March 1554. 44
His conscience was not entirely at ease as to his flight. “Why did I flee? Assuredly I cannot tell, but of one thing I am sure, the fear of death was not the chief cause of my fleeing,” he wrote to Mrs. Bowes from Dieppe. “Albeit that I have, in the beginning of this battle, appeared to play the faint-hearted and feeble soldier (the cause I remit to God), yet my prayer is that I may be restored to the battle again.” 45 Knox was, in fact, most valiant when he had armed men at his back; he had no enthusiasm for taking part in the battle when unaided by the arm of flesh. On later occasions this was very apparent, and he has confessed, as we saw, that he did not choose to face “the trouble to come” without means of retreat. His valour was rather that of the general than of the lonely martyr. The popular idea of Knox’s personal courage, said to have been expressed by the Regent Morton in the words spoken at his funeral, “here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man,” is entirely erroneous. His learned and sympathetic editor, David Laing, truly writes: “Knox cannot be said to have possessed the impetuous and heroic boldness of a Luther when surrounded with danger… On more than one occasion Knox displayed a timidity or shrinking from danger, scarcely to have been expected from one who boasted of his willingness to endure the utmost torture, or suffer death in his Master’s cause. Happily he was not put to the test..” 46
Dr. Laing puts the case more strongly than I feel justified in doing, for Knox, far from “boasting of his willingness to face the utmost torture,” more than once doubts his own readiness for martyrdom. We must remember that even Blessed Edmund Campion, who went gaily to torture and death, had doubts as to the necessity of that journey. 47
Nor was there any reason why Knox should stay in England to be burned, if he could escape – with less than ten groats in his pocket – as he did. It is not for us moderns to throw the first stone at a reluctant martyr, still less to applaud useless self-sacrifice, but we do take leave to think that, having fled early, himself, from the martyr’s crown, Knox showed bad taste in his harsh invectives against Protestants who, staying in England, conformed to the State religion under Mary Tudor.
It is not impossible that his very difficult position as the lover of Marjorie Bowes – a position of which, while he remained in England, the burden fell on the poor girl – may have been one reason for Knox’s flight, while the entreaties of his friends that he would seek safety must have had their influence.
On the whole it seems more probable that when he committed himself to matrimony with a young girl, the fifth daughter of Mrs. Bowes, he was approaching his fortieth rather than his fiftieth year. Older than he are happy husbands made, sometimes, though Marjorie Bowes’s choice may have been directed by her pious mother, whose soul could find no rest in the old faith, and not much in the new.
At thirty-eight the Reformer, we must remember, must have been no uncomely wooer. His conversation must have been remarkably vivid: he had adventures enough to tell, by land and sea; while such a voice as he raised withal in the pulpit, like Edward Irving, has always been potent with women, as Sir Walter Scott remarks in Irving’s own case. His expression, says Young, had a certain geniality; on the whole we need not doubt that Knox could please when he chose, especially when he was looked up to as a supreme authority. He despised women in politics, but had many friends of the sex, and his letters to them display a manly tenderness of affection
Ibid., iii. 122.
Lorimer, i. 162-176.
But, for the date,
Laing,
Pollen,
