John Knox and the Reformation | Page 3

Hogg; and Knox, though he married a maid of
the Queen's kin, bore traces of his descent. "A man ungrateful and
unpleasable," Northumberland styled him: he was one who could not
"smiling, put a question by"; if he had to remonstrate even with a
person whom it was desirable to conciliate, he stated his case in the
plainest and least flattering terms. "Of nature I am churlish, and in
conditions different from many," he wrote; but this side of his character
he kept mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and
indifferent or hostile to his aims. To others, especially to women whom
he liked, he was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social
superiority aroused his wakeful independence. His countrymen of his
own order had long displayed these peculiarities of humour.
The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear,
even before his age, in two strangely different lights. If they were not
technically "kindly tenants," in which case their conditions of existence
and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were
liable to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of
their condition written in 1549, "were in more servitude than the
children of Israel in Egypt." Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we
have quoted, hopes that the agricultural class may yet live "as

substantial commoners, not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and
slay their neighbours at their own expense," as under the standards of
the unruly Bothwell House. This Henderson was one of the political
observers who, before the Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure
union between Scotland and England, in place of the old and romantic
league with France. That alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and
Scotland to maintain their national independence. But, with the great
revolution in religion, the interest of Scotland was a permanent political
league with England, which Knox did as much as any man to forward,
while, by resisting a religious union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.
If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly
oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners. In 1515
the chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam
Williamson: "You know the use of this country. Every man speaks
what he will without blame. The man hath more words than the master,
and will not be content unless he knows the master's counsel. There is
no order among us."
Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was
minded that "A man's a man for a' that!" Knox was the true flower of
this vigorous Lowland thistle. Throughout life he not only "spoke what
he would," but uttered "the Truth" in such a tone as to make it unlikely
that his "message" should be accepted by opponents. Like Carlyle,
however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he
says, ever began on his side; while, as "a good hater," Dr. Johnson
might have admired him. He carried into political and theological
conflicts the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who
had ridden under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns. So far Knox
was an example of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however
little we learn in detail about his ancestors.
The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of
Haddington, in a district on the path of English invasion. The year of
his birth has long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as
1505. {4} Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him
well, namely, Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza

that Knox died in his fifty-ninth year. Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out
that his natal year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning,
we shall see, appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.
If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priest's orders, and
adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which
the canonical law permitted. No man ought to be in priest's orders
before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five
in 1540, when he is styled "Sir John Knox" (one of "The Pope's
Knights") in legal documents, and appears as a notary. {5} He certainly
continued in orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543.
The law of the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but
in an age when "notaires" were often professional forgers, the
additional security for character yielded by Holy Orders must have
been welcome to clients, and Bishops permitted priests to practise this
branch of the law.
Of Knox's near