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The Scottish Reformation
Chapter III.—The Knox Period, a. d. 1555—1560.
Section 4. Popular Tumults. The Reformation in Arms. 1559 |
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It was now time for the crafty Queen-Regent to throw
off the mask which she had so long worn with such perfect address. She
had made good her own objects. She no longer stood in need of protestant
votes, and having succeeded in reducing the kingdom to a virtual
dependency of the French monarchy, she felt strong enough to carry out
without any longer delay the designs of the French court against the
Reforming party. The resolute purpose of the Guises was
to annihilate the Reformation both in France and Scotland
In a few months after the Parliament of October,
1558, she began to "disclose the latent venom of her double heart" Early
in the spring of 1559, news was brought her that the town of Perth had
embraced the Reformed worship, and had welcomed the ministrations of the
preachers, John Christison and William Harlaw. Her real feelings in
regard to the progress of Reform only needed such an occasion to reveal
themselves. She was highly incensed by the tidings, and sent her
commands to Lord Ruthven, provost of the town, instantly to suppress the
new worship; and when Ruthven was so free as to reply, "That he could
make the bodies of his citizens to come to her Grace, and to prostrate
themselves before her, till she were fully satiated with their blood,
but to cause them to do against their consciences, he could not
promise," she sent him, in great anger, a second message, "That he was
too malapert to give her such answer, and that both he and they should
repent it." She sent instructions to James Halyburton, provost of
Dundee, to apprehend Paul Methven; which Halyburton evaded by causing
secret intimation to be given to the preacher to avoid the town for a
time. When the season of Easter approached she sent "such men as she
thought most able to persuade" to Dundee, Montrose, Perth, and other
towns which had embraced the Gospel, to endeavour to induce them to
return to the observation of Mass during that high festival of the
Church; but all their persuasions were without effect. Meanwhile, the
bishops, assembled in provincial synod in Edinburgh, were at her ear to
turn all these irritating disappointments to account, and to inflame her
resentment to the highest pitch. They had struck upon a new thought.
They might have the satisfaction of seeing persecution renewed without
bearing the public odium of being themselves. the persecutors. Let the
assumption of the function of preaching without ecclesiastical authority
be called rebellion, as an invasion of the constituted order of the
Church, as authorized by the State; and let the Regent take the
initiative against the offenders, by
summoning them as rebels as well as heretics.
It was a happy idea, and the Regent was too much
under the influence of hatred and resentment not to see that by adopting
such counsel she made herself the tool of the bishops, and would at once
launch her own personal credit and authority upon a struggle of which
she could not foresee the end. The goadings of mistaken zeal, seconded
by the urgency of her interested advisers, and by the known desires of
the French Court, overcame her prudence, and committed her to a conflict
with more than one half of her nobility and people, which was fatal to
the peace and prosperity of the rest of her regency, and brought her
life to a premature and unhappy end.
Soon after Easter she summoned all the preachers,
viz. John Willock, Paul Methven, William Harlaw, and John Christison, to
appear before her at Stirling on a charge of rebellion, on the 10th day
of May. It was in vain that the protestant nobles interposed, and sought
all means to appease her resentment, and protect the preachers. She was
inflexible in her resolution ; the die was cast; and the last decisive
struggle of this long Reformation warfare was now to begin.
Just at this critical moment arrived again from
Geneva, the very leader whom the Congregation needed—John Knox. On the
2d of May, 1559, he appeared in Edinburgh; and as soon as he understood
the position of affairs, he resolved to make common cause with his
menaced brethren. It had already been determined "that the gentlemen of
every country should accompany their preachers to Stirling, to give
confession of their faith along with them, and assist them in their
defence." This was exactly the course which Knox himself would have
advised, and he immediately left Edinburgh for Dundee, to join the
gentlemen of Angus and Mearns. It may easily be imagined with what joy
they welcomed him to their ranks, and with what an accession of
confidence they set off, with such a hero of the faith among them, to
Perth, on their way to Stirling.
The hand of Divine Providence indeed was most
conspicuous in bringing Knox to the assistance of his brethren at such a
juncture. No one was so able as he to give courage, and inspiration, and
direction, at such a time. It was his spirit, in fact, infused in
absence by means of fervent epistles and appeals, into the protestant
nobles, which had brought forward the cause of Reform into its present
position. The noble words of their Petition and Protestation in the
previous year were simply the echoes of his manly voice. Never had
leader more thoroughly poured his own soul into the souls of his
followers; and now that the followers were to gather and gird themselves
in earnest for the strife, most fitting and most providential it was
that the leader should appear again personally in the field, to marshal
their ranks, and fight at their head the good fight of faith and duty.
As soon as they arrived at Perth he began to preach, or rather, as he
expresses it himself, to exhort, for all his words at this time
were spurs and goads to rouse men to action and stoutness of courage in
the cause of truth and liberty.
Though unarmed and men of peace, the numerous party
who had now assembled at Perth were sensible of the alarm and suspicion
which the Regent would naturally conceive on hearing of their approach.
They therefore adopted the precaution of sending on to Stirling, John
Erskine of Dun, "a zealous, prudent, and godly man," to declare to her
that the cause of their convocation was only to give confession with
their preachers, and to assist them in their just defence. Still she
could not help feeling that such a proceeding amounted to a
demonstration of physical force as well as of religious
conviction—which, in truth, it was, and was partly meant to be; and for
a time she seemed to feel the point of the warning, and to waver in her
resolve. When she understood "the fervency of the people, she began to
craft" with Erskine, begging him " to stay the multitude and also the
preachers, and promising that she would take some better order;" and so
much in earnest did she seem, that Erskine conceived sanguine hopes of a
change of purpose, and wrote to his friends at Perth to dissuade them
from coming forward; a course which, though disapproved at first by
some, who predicted that she would prove false, was at length concurred
in unanimously by all.
Here, then, was a brief pause in the action, during
which the Queen-Regent and her counsellors had one more opp6rtu-nity of
avoiding the collision which was now imminent. But again she gave ear to
evil advisers instead of taking counsel with her own prudence. She
violated her promise to Erskine; took a base advantage of the
non-appearance of the preachers at Stirling on the day appointed; and in
spite of every solicitation that could be made by Erskine and the Master
of Maxwell to the contrary, gave commandment to put them all to the horn
as rebels; "inhibiting all men, under the like pains of rebellion, to
assist, comfort, receive, or maintain them in any sort"—a most
unprincely act, and a heinous injustice which could only have been
perpetrated by a ruler who held the principle which she had not long
before avowed to the Earl of Glencairn, when he reminded her of her
manifold promises to protect the Protestant preachers, that "it became
not subjects to burden their princes with promises further than it
pleaseth them to keep the same." So grossly immoral were her maxims of
government, and that, too, in dealing with subjects who had become
fervent disciples of the high and holy morality of the word of God. Who
can be surprised at the ferment of indignation which followed such an
act of unblushing oppression? or who can greatly blame men for rebelling
against an act which wickedly entrapped them into the position of
rebels?
What consequences instantly resulted from this
treacherous proceeding of the Queen-Regent, must be told in Knox's own
words, for no narrative could equal his own in historic value and in
graphic effect.
"The Laird of Dun coming to St. Johnstoun, expounded
the case even as it was, and did conceal nothing of the Queen's craft
and falsehood. Which understood, the multitude was so inflamed
that neither could the exhortation of the preacher nor the commandment
of the magistrate stay them from destroying of the places of idolatry.
The manner whereof was this : The preachers before had declared how
odious was idolatry in God's presence, what commandment He had given for
the destruction of the monuments thereof, what idolatry and what
abomination was in the mass. It chanced the next day, which was the
eleventh of May, that after the sermon, which was vehement against
idolatry, a priest in contempt would go to the mass, and to declare his
malapert presumption, he would open up a glorious tabernacle which stood
upon the high altar. There stood beside certain godly men, and among
others a young boy, who cried with a loud voice, 'This is intolerable,
that when God by his word hath plainly damned idolatry, we shall stand
and see it used in despite.' The priest hereat offended, gave the child
a great blow, who in anger took up a stone and casting at the priest did
hit the tabernacle and brake down an image; and immediately the whole
multitude that were about cast stones, and put hands to the said
tabernacle and to all other monuments of idolatry, which they despatched
before the tenth man in the town were advertised (for the most part were
gone to dinner); which noised abroad, the whole multitude convened—not
of the gentlemen, neither of them that were earnest professors, but of
the rascal multitude, who finding nothing to do in that church, did run
without deliberation to the Gray and Black Friars, and notwithstanding
that they had within them very strong guards kept for their defence, yet
were their gates incontinent burst up. The first invasion was upon the
idolatry, and thereafter the common people began to seek some spoil; but
the preachers before had so threatened all men that for covetousness'
sake none should put their hand to such a Reformation, that no honest
man {i.e. no man of respectability) was enriched thereby the value of a
groat. Their conscience so moved them, that they suffered these
hypocrites to take away what they could of that which was in their
places. So were men's consciences before beaten with the word, that they
had no respect to their own particular profit, but only to abolish
idolatry, and the places and monuments thereof; in which they were so
busy and so laborious, that within two days these three great places, to
wit, the Gray and Black thieves and Charterhouse monks (a building of a
wondrous cost and greatness) were so destroyed that the walls only did
remain of all these great edifications."
If the treacherous
tyranny of princes is grievous to subjects, the tumults of subjects, and
their uncontrollable violence, are no less grievous to princes, and
prove too easily the occasion for new tyrannies. When this outbreak at
Perth was reported to the Queen, she was so enraged that she vowed
"utterly to destroy the town, roan, woman, and child, and to consume the
same by fire, and thereafter to salt it, in sign of a perpetual
desolation." She instantly sent for the great nobles of the kingdom, and
induced a majority of them to consent to assist her in pursuing the men
assembled at Perth as rebels. She summoned to her aid several bands of
French soldiers, who were quartered at different points, and arranged
her military plans with Mons. D'Osell, the French king's lieutenant. Not
only the Duke of Chatelherault, but even ths young Earl of Argyle, and
Lord James Stewart, were induced for a time to take part in her
measures, under the impression that a rebellion was intended; while the
bishops and abbots, more zealous against the destroyers of the
monasteries as heretics than as rebels, "ceased not to cast faggots on
the fire; continually crying out, Forward upon these heretics, and we
shall rid the realm of them once for all, and for ever."
The cry to arms on one
side inevitably led to the cry to arms on the other. A war of religion
began; and it was indeed deplorable to see the Reformation compelled to
lay aside the sword of the Spirit, and to take up the carnal weapons of
the world. But the blame was with the Regent, not with the Reformers. It
was false to allege that the Reformers intended rebellion. The breaking
down of images and the levelling of churches was not a rebellion, but a
tumult. On the part of the Reformers, the civil war which was now to
follow was one of pure defence against tyranny and oppression; and they
felt and maintained with abundant reason that such a war of defence was
just. "As heretofore, they observed in a letter of remonstrance
addressed to her Grace from Perth, on the 22d of May, "with jeopard of
our lives, and yet with, willing hearts, we have served the authority of
Scotland and your Grace, now Regent in this realm, in service to our
bodies dangerous and painful; so now with most dolorous minds we are
constrained by unjust tyranny purposed against us, to declare unto your
Grace, That except this cruelty be stayed by your wisdom, we will be
compelled to take the sweard in just defence against all that shall
pursue us for the matter of religion, for conscience' sake, which ought
not, nor may not, be subject to mortal creatures, farther than by God's
word man be able to prove that he hath power to command us. We signify,
moreover, unto your Grace, that if by rigour we be compelled to seek the
extreme defence, we will not only notify our innocency and petitions to
the King of France, to our mistress and her husband, but also to the
princes and counsel of every Christian realm, declaring unto them that
this cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical murder intended against towns
and multitudes was and is the only cause of our revolt from our
accustomed obedience—which, in God's presence, we faithfully promise to
our sovereign mistress, to her husband, and unto your Grace Regent,
provided that our consciences may live in that peace and liberty which
Christ Jesus hath purchased to us by his blood."
A noble manifesto ! the language of men become
conscious of the greatness of their manhood; of freemen, who have
learned that liberty of conscience is the most sacred and precious of
all liberties; of Christians who have become really awake to the value
and authority of the truth of God.
To say a word at this time of day in vindication of
the principles of this manifesto, would be an absurd anachronism; for
what great nation of Europe has not since then passed through
revolutions produced by the explosive action of the same principles %
and what literature of civilized men does not contain equivalents
for the grand words which then flowed from the pen of the Scottish
Reformers. While a nation is a child, it speaks like a child, because it
understands like a child; but when it becomes a man, it understands like
a man, and speaks like a man, and puts away theories of slavish
obedience and submission to the tyranny of priests and princes as
childish things.
The story of the two months' struggle which followed
the resolution of the Regent to pursue the Reformers with the sword,
though full of incident and vicissitude, must be rapidly told. Happily
the actual collisions which took place between the contending parties
were few, and very little blood was shed on either side. The brief
campaign, if such it can be called, was more fruitful in "appointments,"
or treaties, than in battles. At Perth, the Regent's forces found
themselves outnumbered by the Reformers ; for the latter, had been
strengthened by an accession of 2,500 men from Ayrshire, who had hurried
over mountain and moor to the aid of their brethren, under the gallant
conduct of the Earl of Glencairn; so that she was obliged to accept an u
appointment," dated the 28th of May, by which she engaged to leave the
citizens unmolested in the exercise of their religion, while the
Reformers on their side engaged to break up from Perth, and return to
their several countries. This appointment she violated in many points;
but her faithlessness cost her dear, for it caused the secession from
her ranks of Lord James Stewart and the Earl of Argyle, who from that
moment became the chief strength of the opposite party, both in counsel
and in the field. At Cupar Moor, where she made a second demonstration
of force, in order to put a stop to a work of reformation which was
going on at St Andrews, she found herself again in the same situation,
and was under the humbling necessity of agreeing to an "assurance,"
dated the 13th of June, by which she bound herself to abstain for eight
days from "invading, troubling, or inquieting" the Protestant Lords; and
under which, the only advantage she gained was the ignominious one of
being allowed to withdraw her troops unattacked to the south side of the
Firth.
Contrary to the
"appointment of Perth, she had left a garrison of soldiers in that town*
by whom its evangelical citizens were miserably oppressed, and the Lords
convened under its walls for its relief on the 24th of June. But the
siege was very short After a single volley from Lord Ruthven, who
besieged the west quarter, and another from the men of Dundee, who
beleaguered the east, the captains of the garrison sued for terms, and
they were allowed to depart the town at noon the next day, with ensigns
displayed, "without further molestation." At Stirling, where the Regent
intended to dispute the passage of the Forth, the Earl of Argyle and
Lord James anticipated her French bands, and without once crossing
swords with them, got secure possession. At Linlithgow, the reformers
found that the Frenchmen had continued their retreat to Edinburgh; and
at Edinburgh, where they arrived on the 29th of June, they found the
cannon of the castle peaceable, and the city evacuated by the Regent,
who had withdrawn to Dunbar. Their advance had been a continued series
of victories without blood, and the Regent's retreat a train of
discomfitures with hardly a show of fight
At Edinburgh, however, by and by, the tide of success
began to turn. The Regent's French troops, though too few to cope with
the reformers when in full force, were regular soldiers in constant pay.
The forces of the Lords of the Congregation, being levied and
provisioned only for a few weeks, could not be long kept together; and
as soon as they found that there was to be no fighting about Edinburgh,
they began to disperse and melt away. The Regent was well aware of this
peculiarity of a Scottish feudal army; and she managed to prolong the
negotiations which went on between her and the Protestant lords, till it
had fully developed itself. If she was inferior to them in arms, she was
as much their superior in finesse. "To no point proposed by them would
she answer directly, but in all things was so general and ambiguous,"
that at last her craft became manifest to all. But they were too late in
discovering it While they were reasoning and protocoling to no purpose
with her commissioners at Preston, their "compan " at Edinburgh was
already "skailled;" and when the Regent, cleverly seizing her
opportunity, marched suddenly upon them from Dunbar, they found
themselves outnumbered and outgeneraled in their turn. They were
compelled to accept an "appointment" which in such circumstances could
only be of the nature of an unsatisfactory compromise. It secured to
their party much less than they could have wished, and it
guaranteed even that little only for a time. The appointment was dated
the 24th of July, 1559, and was to hold only till the Parliament met on
the 10th of January, 1560.
The Lords, with the slender remains of their
followers, immediately withdrew to Stirling, where, after renewing their
band for "maintenance of religion and for mutual defence" on the 1st of
August, and arranging to hold a convention in Stirling on the 10th of
September, for consultation and further action, they separated to their
different dwellings and domains.
But the brief campaign which we have thus hurriedly
sketched had the curious peculiarity of being as much a campaign of
attack upon Romish superstition, as a campaign of defence against civil
and ecclesiastical oppression. Where-ever the Reformers marched, they
carried a sword in one hand and a crow-bar in the other. Unlike the Jews
under Nehemiah, their mission was not to fight and to build up, but to
fight and to pull down. Wherever they appeared, the churches were
thoroughly purged of images and mass-altars, and the monasteries were
levelled with the ground in a tempest of indignation and disgust The
work of demolition and purgation which was begun in a frenzy of popular
rage at Perth, was continued in a more deliberate manner in St Andrews,
Cupar, and other places in Fife, and at Scone, Cambuskenneth, Linlithgow,
and Edinburgh. The parish churches were spared after being roughly
purged; but the monastic buildings, including many beautiful churches,
were demolished with an unsparing hand. In Stirling and Edinburgh the
monasteries were attacked and sacked by the multitude before the Lords
arrived; and at Scone, the demolition was carried through by the
townsmen of Dundee and Perth, in spite of the most earnest exertions of
the noblemen and of Knox himself to save the palace and church, which
were of national and historic interest These facts reveal the strength
and violence of the public hatred of the religious orders. It was a long
accumulation of popular feeling which exploded that summer against the
Scottish monks. The indolence, the greed, the impurities, and the
hypocrisies of ages were avenged and expiated in a single day. And are
such storms of national indignation to be lamented for the havoc that
they work upon buildings and monuments of art % No! Like storms
in the air, they clear the moral and social atmosphere of nations; they
dissipate the accumulated poison of bad principles, bad examples, and
bad institutions ; they explode at small cost the choke-damp of popular
discontent, which would otherwise find a vent for itself with much more
fatal effects; and though they leave many ruins upon the ground, to mark
the way they took in their irresistible progress, they make room, by
these very demolitions, for edifices and institutions of a more useful
and beneficial kind. It would be childish to lament and condemn the law
of storms in nature because of the wreck and ruin with which they cover
the land and the ocean. And what less than childish is it to be
lamenting for ever the fall of monastic refectories, and dormitories,
and churches, as mere buildings, and to be for ever condemning the
Reformation as the cause of all that ruin; when in virtue of the
explosion, a nation was delivered for ever from the corrupt and
corrupting institution of monkery, and saw the primitive order both of
nature and Christianity reasserted and restored % We confess no
little admiration for fine buildings, but we have more for good morals.
We love " the Gothic " much, but we love pure Christianity more; and no
doubt it is a happy state of things when we can have our love for both
gratified at the same time and by the same institutions. But when
architectural losses are all we have to pay for moral and religious
reformations, we think the bargain a very good one, and worthy to be
congratulated and gratefully remembered by all the wise and good.
The Reformation in St. Andrews and Edinburgh had some
points of peculiar interest in relation to John Knox, which must not be
omitted. In the former city it was Lord James Stewart the Commendator of
the Priory, who took the direction of the work; and Knox was invited by
him to preach on Sunday, the 10th of June, in the pulpit of the
Cathedral. But as soon as the Archbishop heard of this intention, he
hastened into the city from Falkland with a hundred spears, and on
Saturday night sent a message to the Prior to say, "that in case John
Knox presented himself to the preaching-place in his town and principal
Church, he should gar him be saluted with a dozen of culverines, whereof
the most part should light upon his nose." Lord James and Argyle were
alarmed, and did their utmost to dissuade Knox from preaching. But the
reformer stood firm—he spoke like a hero. "As for the fear of danger
that shall come to me, let no man be solist, for my life is in the
custody of Him whose glory I seek. I desire the hand nor weapon of no
man to defend me; only do I crave audience." "At these words the lords
were fully content that he should occupy the place, which he did upon
Sunday, and did entreat of the ejection of the buyers and sellers furth
of the Temple of Jerusalem; and so applied the corruption that was there
to the corruption that is in the Papistrie, and Christ's part to the
duty of those to whom God gave the power and zeal thereto, that as weill
the magistrates, as the commonalty for the most part within the town did
agree to remove all monuments of idolatry, which also they did with
expedition."
In Edinburgh, after steps had been taken for the
suppression of all superstitious monuments within the city, and in all
the places adjacent, the magistrates and many of the leading citizens
met in the Tolbooth on the 7 th of July, and elected Knox to be their
minister ; and he immediately entered upon the discharge of his duties
as first reformed pastor of the capital of the kingdom. For the first
time his intrepid voice was heard ringing through the vaults of the
great church of St. Giles, where for thirteen years afterwards, with
occasional interruptions, it continued not only to be heard, but to be
obeyed. For it was the voice, not only of a true man, but of a true
minister of God—a man and a minister who was "the apostle of the Scots,"
in the judgment of foreigners; and who, in the estimation of his
own countrymen, was almost a prophet— a "preacher of righteousness in
the spirit and power of Elias." But it was not till the civil war was
over that Knox could exercise his ministry statedly in the capital He
was too important a personage, and too obnoxious to the Queen-Regent and
the Bishops, to be left exposed to the dangers of a residence in
Edinburgh, in the absence of the Protestant Lords. John Willock took his
place for a time, while Knox went on a preaching expedition through the
south and west of the kingdom. From St. Andrews, which continued to be
his headquarters till the ensuing spring, he wrote to one of his
correspondents on the 2d of September, in the following glowing terms,
respecting the progress of the proper work of the Reformation throughout
the realm :—
"I have been in continual
travel since the day of appointment, and, notwithstanding the fevers
have vexed me the space of a month, yet have I travelled through the
most part of this realm, where, all praise be to his blessed Majesty,
men of all sorts and conditions embrace the truth. Enemies we have many,
by reason of the Frenchmen who are lately arrived, of whom our parties
hope golden hills, and such support as we are not able to resist We do
nothing but go about Jericho, blowing with trumpets as God giveth
strength, hoping victory by his favour alone. Christ Jesus is preached
even in Edinburgh, and his blessed sacraments rightly ministered in all
congregations where the ministry is established; and they be these,
Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Dundee, St Johnstoun, Brechin, Montrose,
Stirling, and Ayr. And now Christ Jesus is begun to be preached upon the
south borders, in Jedburgh and Kelso, so that the trumpet soundeth over
all, blessed be our God." |
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