John Knox

John Knox, by A. Taylor Innes

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Title: John Knox
Author: A. Taylor Innes

Release Date: July 19, 2007 [eBook #22106]
Language: English
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KNOX***
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JOHN: KNOX
by

A: TAYLOR INNES
Famous Scots: Series

Published by Oliphant Anderson Ferrier Edinbvrgh and London
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr Joseph Brown,
and the printing from the press of Messrs Turabull & Spears,
Edinburgh.
May 1896.

CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT 9
CHAPTER II
THE CRISIS: SINGLE OR TWO-FOLD? 25
CHAPTER III
THE INNER LIFE: HIS WOMEN FRIENDS 48
CHAPTER IV
THE PUBLIC LIFE: TO THE PARLIAMENT OF 1560 65
CHAPTER V
THE PUBLIC LIFE: LEGISLATION AND CHURCH PLANS 95

CHAPTER VI
THE PUBLIC LIFE: THE CONFLICT WITH QUEEN MARY 117
CHAPTER VII
CLOSING YEARS AND DEATH 144
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT
The century now closing has redeemed Knox from neglect, and has
gathered around his name a mass of biographical material. That
material, too, includes much that is of the nature of self-revelation, to
be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his
time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to
many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an
enigma--a blur, bright or black, upon the historic page.
There is one real and great difficulty. For the first forty years of his life
we know absolutely nothing of the inner man. Yet at forty most men
are already made. And in the case of this man, from about that date
onwards we find the character settled and fixed. Henceforward, during
the whole later life with its continually changing drama, Knox remains
intensely and unchangeably the same. It is the contrast, perhaps the
crisis, which is worth studying. The contrast, indeed, is not
unprecedented. More than one Knox-like prophet, in the solemn days
of early faith, 'was in the desert until the time of his shewing unto
Israel'; and not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too,
has remained hid in the shadow of a mighty hand until the very day
when it was launched. But each such case impels us the more to inquire,
What was it after all which really made the man who in his turn made
the age?
* * * * *

Knox was born in or near Haddington in 1505. Of his father, William
Knox, and his mother, whose maiden name was Sinclair, nothing is
known, except that the parents of both belonged to that district of
country, and had fought under the standard of the House of Bothwell.
We shall never know which of the two contributed the insight or the
audacity, the tenacity or the tenderness, the common-sense or the
humour, which must all have been part of Knox's natural character
before it was moulded from without. His father was of the 'simple,' not
of the gentle, sort; possibly a peasant, or frugal cultivator of the soil.
But he saved enough to send one of his two sons, John, now in the
eighteenth year of his age, and having, no doubt, received his earlier
education in the excellent grammar school of Haddington, to the
University of Glasgow. Haddington was in the diocese of St Andrews,
but a native of Haddington, John Major, was at this time Regent in
Glasgow. He had brought from Paris, four years before, a vast
academical reputation, and Knox now 'sat as at his feet' during his last
year of teaching in Glasgow. In 1523, however, Major was transferred
to St Andrews, and there he taught theology for more than a quarter of
a century, during the latter half of which time he was Provost or Head
of St Salvator's College. Whether Knox at any time followed him there
does not appear. Beza, Knox's earliest biographer, thought he did. But
Beza's information as to this portion of the life, though apparently
derived from Knox's colleague and successor,[1] is so extremely
confused as to suggest that the Reformer was equally reticent about it
to those nearest him as he has chosen to be to posterity. For nearly
twenty years of manhood, indeed, Knox disappears from our view. And
when, in 1540, he emerges again in his native district, it is as