Part 2 (1/2)
Such was Knox's share in the working out of the English Reformation; and we have dwelt thus long upon it because the facts which we have stated have only recently been brought to light; and because we wished to set forth with as much clearness as condensation would allow the opinions which were held, and the mode of wors.h.i.+p which was observed, by him, even at this early stage in his history. If Knox did something for England, England did much also for him. If he was instrumental in keeping the Church of that country from greater affinity with Romanism than it might otherwise have shown, there can be no doubt that the evil effects {63} of compromise as witnessed by him there helped to make him more thorough in his later work in Scotland; while it is also most true that during his residence there his contact with the Christian people whom he met did something to soften and sweeten his piety, and to make it more inward and sympathising. Most of all, G.o.d was preparing him by it for the great work which he was afterwards to perform in his native land; and his years of service in England were blessed in securing for him the friends.h.i.+p and confidence of her ablest statesmen, without whose a.s.sistance, humanly speaking, Scotland might have been lost to Protestantism in the very crisis of her history.
[1] Lorimer, p. 73.
[2] Ibid., p. 74.
[3] Dr. Lorimer has said (p. 31) that ”in both the formularies recently set forth,” the Order of Communion in 1548 and the ”Book of Common Prayer” in 1549, the practice of kneeling in the Lord's Supper had been retained; and on a subsequent page (112) that ”in the Second Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. a rubric had _for the first time_ been inserted appointing the Lord's Supper to be administered to the communicants in a kneeling posture.” But these statements are not made with that author's usual accuracy. For the ”Order of Communion” reads thus: ”Then shall the priest rise, the people still reverently kneeling, and the priest shall deliver the communion, first to the ministers, if any be there present, that they may help the chief minister, and after to the others.” But in the ”Book” of 1549, the rubric is as we give it in the text. What the motive was for the omission of kneeling in the Book of 1549 it is not easy to say, but the fact of its omission is undoubted. (See ”The Two Liturgies,” by Rev.
Joseph Kelley, p. 92.)
[4] Lorimer, p. 98.
[5] Lorimer, p. 109.
[6] For the full discussion of this subject we refer to Dr. Lorimer's monograph, ”John Knox and the Church of England,” a most valuable and original contribution to English Ecclesiastical history, though the absence of an index makes it less serviceable to the student than such a work should be.
[7] Lorimer, pp. 149-150.
[8] Lorimer, p. 151.
[9] See Laing: ”Knox's Works,” vol. iii. pp. 86-7.
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CHAPTER V.
LAST DAYS IN ENGLAND, 1553.
During the last illness of the young King Edward, Knox, as we have seen, received a commission to go upon a preaching tour in the county of Buckingham, where, like an old Hebrew prophet, he warned his hearers of the coming crisis. He was back in London, however, as we learn from the date of the first of his published letters, on the 23rd of June (1553); but before the death of his majesty, which happened on the 6th of July, he had returned to Buckinghams.h.i.+re, and there, at Amersham, on the 16th of that month, he preached a sermon suited to the times in the very thick of the turmoil caused by the dispute as to the succession to the crown. The Duke of Northumberland had presumed to set the Lady Jane Dudley on the throne, but Mary Tudor's adherents could not brook such disloyalty to their mistress, and had already entered on that struggle which ended in the collapse of the reign of ”the twelfth-day Queen.” The county of Bucks, as Froude tells us, ”both Catholic and Protestant,” was ”arming to the teeth.” Sir Edward Hastings had called {65} out its musters, in Mary's name, and had been joined by Peckham, the cofferer of the royal household, who had gone off with the treasure under his charge, so that the Reformer was speaking ”at the peril of his life among the troopers of Hastings.” Nevertheless, nothing daunted, he thus apostrophised the land:[1] ”O England! now is G.o.d's wrath kindled against thee. Now hath He begun to punish as He hath threatened a long while by His true prophets and messengers. He hath taken from thee the crown of thy glory, and hath left thee without honour as a body without a head. And this appeareth to be only the beginning of sorrows, which appeareth to increase. For I perceive that the heart, the tongue, and the hand of one Englishman is bent against another, and division to be in the whole realm, which is an a.s.sured sign of desolation to come. O England! England! dost thou not consider that thy commonwealth is like a s.h.i.+p sailing on the sea; if thy mariners and governors shall one consume another, shalt thou not suffer s.h.i.+pwreck in short process of time? O England! England! alas these plagues are poured upon thee, for that thou wouldest not know the most happy time of thy gentle visitation. But wilt thou yet obey the voice of thy G.o.d and submit thyself to His holy words? Truly if thou wilt, thou shalt find mercy in His sight, and the estate of thy commonwealth shall be preserved. But if thou obstinately wilt return into Egypt, that is, if thou contract marriage, confederacy, and league with such {66} princes as do maintain and advance idolatry (such as the Emperor, which is no less enemy unto Christ than ever was Nero); if for the pleasure and friends.h.i.+p (I say) of such princes them return to thine old abominations, before used under the papistry, then a.s.suredly, O England, thou shall be plagued and brought to desolation by the means of those whose favour thou seekest, and by whom thou art procured to fall from Christ and to serve Antichrist.” These were bold words.
Some of them, indeed, might be called rash, and, as we shall see, furnished a weapon for his adversaries at a future day; but there was no quailing in the heart of him who uttered them, and the sting of them after all was in their truth.
From Amersham he went up to London, where on the 19th of July he was a witness of the great outburst of popular enthusiasm with which Mary was welcomed to the throne; but he could not share in the wild delight of the mult.i.tude, for as he tells us himself, ”in London, in more places than one, when fires of joy and riotous banqueting were at the proclamation of Mary,” his tongue was vehement in declaring his forebodings of the storm which was so soon to break. On the 26th of July he wrote to Mrs. Bowes from Carlisle, and again on the 25th of September we find him writing to her on his return to London from Kent, where he seems to have been labouring for some weeks. The dates indicate that he was both ”in labours abundant” and ”in journeyings often,” and show that he had little reason to {67} upbraid himself, as in one of his writings referring to this time he does, for ”allowing the love of friends and carnal affection for some men more than others to allure him to make more residence in one place than another, thus having more respect to the pleasure of a few than to the necessity of many, and not sufficiently considering how many hungry souls were in other places to whom none took pains to break and distribute the bread of life.” But he was ere long to be ”in peril” as well as labour.
From the first he had augured nothing but evil from the accession of Mary, and it is to his honour that with such misgivings in his heart, he was at this very time in the habit of using in the pulpit a prayer of singular beauty and comprehensiveness, in which we find this pet.i.tion: ”Illuminate the heart of our Sovereign Lady Queen Mary with pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost, and influence the hearts of her council with Thy true fear and love.” As the months rolled round, however, it became only too apparent that England would no longer be a safe place for him. The door of opportunity which Edward had opened was speedily closed by Mary. In August, indeed, she issued a proclamation giving toleration to all meanwhile, forbidding her Protestant and Catholic subjects to interrupt each other's services, yet prohibiting all preaching on either side without licence from herself. But in November, under the influence of the violent reaction which had set in, and in obedience to the opinion of the people, three-fourths of whom were still attached to the old religion, the {68} Commons, by a vote of 350 to 80, enacted that from the 20th December following there should be no other form of service in the churches but what had been used in the last year of Henry the Eighth, and leaving it free to all up till that date to use either of the books appointed by Edward or the old one at their pleasure. Up till the day thus specified, therefore, Knox was comparatively safe, and during that time he was probably in London a guest in the families of the Lockes and the Hickmans, with whose members he afterwards corresponded. It was in this interval also, as seems most probable, that he began to prepare his exposition of the sixth Psalm, and his ”G.o.dly letter to the faithful in London, Newcastle, Berwick, and all others within the realm of England that love the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” both of which were afterwards finished in France.
From London he went to Newcastle, whence on the 22nd of December he wrote to Mrs. Bowes a letter which contains a postscript to this effect: ”I may not answer the places of Scripture, nor yet write the exposition of the sixth Psalm, for every day of this week must I preach, if this wicked carcase will permit.” But dangers began to thicken around him; for in the end of December or beginning of January, his servant was seized as he carried letters from him to Mrs. Bowes and her daughter, in the expectation of finding something in them that might furnish matter of accusation against him. They contained nothing but religious advices and such things as he was prepared to avow before any {69} tribunal in the country, but fearing that the report of the matter might cause uneasiness to his friends at Berwick, he set out to visit them in person. On the way, however, he was met by some of the relatives of his betrothed, who prevailed on him to relinquish his intention, and to retire to a place of safety on the coast, from which, if necessary, he might escape out of the country by sea. From this retreat he wrote to his friends, saying that ”his brethren had, partly by tears and partly by admonition, compelled him to obey, somewhat contrary to his own mind, for never could he die in a more honest quarrel than by suffering as a witness for that truth of which G.o.d had made him a messenger,” yet promising if Providence prepared the way to do as his counsellors advised, and ”give place to the fury and rage of Satan for a time.” So when he became satisfied that the apprehensions of his friends were, well founded, he procured a vessel which landed him safely at Dieppe on the 20th of January, 1554. What his pecuniary circ.u.mstances at this time were may be inferred from these words in a letter to his future mother-in-law: ”I will not make you privy how rich I am, but off (_i.e._ from) London I departed with less money than ten groats; but G.o.d has since provided, and will provide I doubt not hereafter abundantly for this life. Either the Queen's Majesty or some treasurer will be forty pounds richer by me, for so much lack I of duty of my patents (that is, salary as Royal Chaplain), but that little troubles me.” And more interesting even than that glimpse {70} into his poverty is the recital of his feelings toward England in a letter to the same correspondent written just before his embarkation: ”My daily prayer is for the sore afflicted in those quarters. Some time I have thought that it had been impossible so to have removed my affection from Scotland that any realm or nation could have been equally dear unto me; but I take G.o.d to record in my conscience that the troubles present and appearing to be in the realm of England are doubly more dolorous unto my heart than ever were the troubles of Scotland.”
Thus Knox parted from the realm of England. Had he remained much longer in it, he would most probably have shared the fate of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and the ”n.o.ble army,” whom Mary's intolerance ”chased up to heaven.” But G.o.d had other work for him to do, and it was well for Scotland that he listened to the entreaty of those who counselled him when he was ”persecuted in one country” to ”flee to another”; so it came about that for a brief season he found refuge in that land wherein only a few years before he had been a galley-slave.
[1] ”Works,” vol. iii. pp. 308-9.
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CHAPTER VI.
FIRST DAYS OF EXILE, 1554.
From England Knox went to Dieppe, where he sojourned at this time for a month, and finished his exposition of the sixth Psalm, the first instalment of which he had sent to Mrs. Bowes just before leaving the sh.o.r.es of Britain. This production was primarily designed for the consolation and encouragement of that lady, who, as we have already hinted, seems to have been afflicted with religious melancholy.