Mary Queen of Scots had been for a short time also queen of France, and in 1561 returned to her native land, a young widow on whom the eyes of Europe were fixed. Knox's objections to the "regiment of women" were theoretical, and in the present case he hoped at first for the best, favouring rather his queen's marriage with the heir of the house of Hamilton. Mary had put herself into the hands of her half-brother, Lord James Stuart afterwards earl of Moray, the only man who could perhaps have pulled her through. A proclamation now continued the "state of religion" begun the previous year; but mass was cele brated in the queen's household, and Lord James himself de fended it with his sword against Protestant intrusion. Knox pub licly protested ; and Moray, who probably understood and liked both parties, brought the preacher to the presence of his queen. There is nothing revealed to us by "the broad clear light of that wonderful book,"' The History of the Reformation in Scot land, more remarkable than the four Dialogues or interviews, which, though recorded only by Knox, bear the strongest stamp of truth, and do almost more justice to his opponent than to himself. Mary took the offensive, and very soon raised the real question. "Ye have taught the people to receive another religion than their princes can allow ; and how can that doctrine be of God, seeing that God commands subjects to obey their princes?" The point was made keener by the fact that Knox's own Confes sion of Faith (like all those of that age, in which an unbalanced monarchical power culminated) had held kings to be appointed "for maintenance of the true religion," and suppression of the false; and the reformer now fell back on his more fundamental principle, that "right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly princes, but from the Eternal God alone." All through this dialogue too, as in another at Lochleven two years afterwards, Knox was driven to axioms, not of religion but of constitutionalism, which Buchanan and he may have learned from their teacher Major, but which were not to be accepted till a later age. " 'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects, having power, may resist their princes?' If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, they may be resisted and even deposed,' " Knox replied.
But these dialectics, creditable to both parties, had little effect upon the general situation. Knox had gone too far in intolerance, and Moray and Maitland of Lethington gradually withdrew their support. The court and parliament, guided by them, declined to press the queen or to pass the Book of Discipline; and meantime the negotiations as to the queen's marriage with a Spanish, a French or an Austrian prince revealed the real difficulty and peril of the situation. Her marriage to a great Catholic prince would be ruinous to Scotland, probably also to England, and perhaps to all Protestantism. Knox had already by letter formally broken with the earl of Moray, "committing you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those who better please you"; and now, in one of his greatest sermons before the assembled lords, he drove at the heart of the situation—the risk of a Catholic marriage. The queen sent for him for the last time and burst into passionate tears as she asked, "What have you to do with my marriage? Or what are you within this commonwealth?" "A subject born within the same," was the answer of the son of the East Lothian peasant; and the Scottish nobility, while thinking him overbold, refused to find him guilty of any crime, even when, later on, he had "convocated the lieges" to Edinburgh to meet a crown prose cution. In 1564 a change came. Mary had wearied of her guiding statesmen, Moray and the more pliant Maitland ; the Italian secretary David Rizzio, through whom she had corresponded with the pope, now more and more usurped their place ; and a weak fancy for her handsome cousin, Henry Darnley, brought about a sudden marriage in 1565 and swept the opposing Protestant lords into exile. Darnley, though a Catholic, thought it well to go to Knox's preaching; but was so unfortunate as to hear a very long sermon, with allusions not only to "babes and women" as rulers, but to Ahab who did not control his strong-minded wife. Mary and the lords still in her council ordered Knox not to preach while she was in Edinburgh, and he was absent or silent during the weeks which preceded the murder of Rizzio. During the rest of the year Knox was hidden in Ayrshire or else where, and throughout 1566 he was forbidden to preach when the court was in Edinburgh. But he was influential at the De cember Assembly in the capital where a greater tragedy was now preparing, for Mary's infatuation for Bothwell was visible to all. At the Assembly's request, however, Knox undertook a long visit to England, where his two sons by his first wife were being educated, and were afterwards to be fellows of St. John's, Cam bridge, the younger becoming a parish clergyman. It was thus during the reformer's absence that the murder of Darnley, the abduction and subsequent marriage of Mary, the flight of Both well, and the imprisonment in Lochleven of the queen, unrolled 'John Hill Burton ( Hist. of Scotland, iii. 339). Mr. Burton's view (differing from that of Professor Hume Brown) was that the dialogues —the earlier of them at least--must have been spoken in the French tongue, in which Knox had recently preached for a year.
themselves before the eyes of Scotland. Knox returned in time to guide the Assembly which sat on June 25, 1567, in dealing with this unparalleled crisis, and to wind up the revolution by preaching at Stirling on July 9, 1567, after Mary's abdication, at the coronation of the infant king.
His main work was now really done; for the parliament of 1567 made Moray regent, and Knox was only too glad to have his old friend back in power, though they seem to have differed on the question whether the queen should be allowed to pass into retirement without trial for her husband's death, as they had differed all along on the question of tolerating her private religion. Knox's victory had not come too early, for his physical strength soon began to fail. But Mary's escape in 1568 resulted only in her def eat at Langside, and in a long imprisonment and death in England. In Scotland the regent's assassination in 157o opened a miserable civil war, but it made no permanent change. The massacre of St. Bartholomew rather united English and Scot tish Protestantism; and Knox in St. Giles' pulpit, challenging the French ambassador to report his words, denounced God's vengeance on the crowned murderer and his posterity. When
open war broke out between Edinburgh Castle, held by Mary's friends, and the town, held for her son, both parties agreed that the reformer, who had already had a stroke of paralysis, should remove to St. Andrews. While there he wrote his will, and lished his last book, in the preface to which he says, "I heartily take my good-night of the faithful of both realms . . . for as the world is weary of me, so am I of it." And when he now merely signs his name, it is "John Knox, with my dead hand and glad heart." In the autumn of 1572 he returned to Edinburgh to die, probably in the picturesque house in the "throat of the Bow," which for generations has been called by his name. With him were his wife and three young daughters; for though he had lost Margaret Bowes at the close of his year of triumph, 156o, he had four years after married Margaret Stewart, a daughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree. She was a bride of only seventeen and was related to the royal house ; yet, as his Catholic biog rapher put it, "by sorcery and witchcraft he did so allure that poor gentlewoman that she could not live without him." He died on Nov. 24, 1572, and at his funeral in St. Giles' Churchyard the new Regent Morton, speaking under the hostile guns of the castle, expressed the first surprise of those around that one who had "neither flattered nor feared any flesh" had now "ended his days in peace and honour." Knox was a rather small man, with a well-knit body; he had a powerful face, with dark blue eyes under a ridge of eyebrow, high cheek-bones, and a long black beard which latterly turned grey. This description, taken from a letter in 1579 by his junior contemporary Sir Peter Young, is very like Beza's fine engrav ing of him in the engraving probably founded on a portrait which was to be sent by Young to Beza along with the letter. The portrait, which was unfortunately adopted by Car lyle, has neither pedigree nor probability. After his two years in the French galleys, if not before, Knox suffered permanently from gravel and dyspepsia, and he confesses that his nature "was for the most part oppressed with melancholy." Yet he was always a hard worker ; as sole minister of Edinburgh studying for two sermons on Sunday and three during the week, besides having innumerable cares of churches at home and abroad. He was undoubtedly sincere in his religious faith, and most disinter ested in his devotion to it and to the good of his countrymen. But like too many of them, he was self-conscious, self-willed and dogmatic ; and his transformation in middle life, while it im mensely enriched his sympathies as well as his energies, left him unable to put himself in the place of those who retained the views which he had himself held. All his training too, university, priestly and in foreign parts, tended to make him logical over much. But this was mitigated by a strong sense of humour (not always sarcastic, though sometimes savagely so), and by tender ness, best seen in his epistolary friendships with women ; and it was quite overborne by an instinct and passion for great practical affairs. Hence it was that Knox as a statesman so often struck successfully at the centre of the complex motives of his time, leaving it to later critics to reconcile his theories of action. But hence too he more than once took doubtful shortcuts to some of his most important ends; giving the ministry within the new Church more power over laymen than Protestant principles would suggest, and binding the masses outside who were not members of it, equally with their countrymen who were, to join in its worship, submit to its jurisdiction, and contribute to its support. And hence also his style (which contemporaries called anglicized and modern), though it occasionally rises into liturgical beauty, and often flashes into vivid historical portraiture, is generally kept close to the harsh necessities of the few years in which he had to work for the future. That work was indeed chiefly done by the living voice; and in speaking, this "one man," as Eliza beth's very critical ambassador wrote from Edinburgh, was "able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets con tinually blustering in our ears." But even his eloquence was con straining and constructive—a personal call for immediate and uni versal co-operation; and that personal influence survives to this day in the institutions of his people, and perhaps still more in their character. His countrymen indeed have always believed that to Knox more than to any other man Scotland owes her political and religious individuality. And since his 19th century biography by Dr. Thomas McCrie, or at least since his recognition in the following generation by Thomas Carlyle, the same view has taken its place in literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Knox's books, pamphlets, public documents and letters are collected into the great edition in six volumes of Knox's Works, by David Laing (Edinburgh, 1846-64), with introductions, appendices and notes. Of his books the chief are the following: 1.— The History of the Reformation in Scotland, incorporating the Con fession and the Book of Discipline. Begun by Knox as a party manifesto in 156o, it was continued and revised by himself in 1566 so as to form four books, with a fifth book apparently written after his death from materials left by him. It was partly printed in London in 1586 by Vautrollier, but was suppressed by authority and published by David Buchanan, with a Life, in 1664. 2.-On Predestination: an Answer to an Anabaptist (London, 1590. 3.—On Prayer (1554). 4.—On Affliction (1556). 5.—Epistles, and Admonition, both to English Brethren in 1554. 6.—The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). 7.—An Answer to a Scottish Jesuit (1572).
Knox's life is more or less touched upon by all the Scottish histories and Church histories which include his period, as well as in the mass of literature as to Queen Mary. Dr. Laing's edition of the Works contains important biographical material. But among the many express biographies two especially should be consulted—those by Thomas McCrie (Edinburgh, 1811 revised and enlarged in 1813, the later editions containing valuable notes by the author) ; and by P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1895). John Knox and the Reformation, by Andrew Lang (2905), is not so much a biography as a collection of materials, bearing upon many parts of the life, but nearly all on the unfavourable side. See also J. Glasse, John Knox, a Criticism and an Appreciation (1905) ; Edwin Muir, John Knox (1929). (A. T. I.)