even addressed a letter to the regent, urging her to favour the
Evangel. She accepted it jocularly as a “pasquil,” and Knox
on his departure was condemned and burned in effigy. But he
left behind him a “Wholesome Counsel” to Scottish heads of
families, reminding them that within their own houses they
were “bishop and kings,” and recommending the institution
of something like the early apostolic worship in private congregations.
Of the Protestant barons Knox, though in exile,
seems to have been henceforward the chief adviser; and before
the end of 1557 they, under the name of the “Lords of the Congregation,”
had entered into the first of the religious “bands”
or “covenants” afterwards famous in Scotland. In 1558 he
published his “Appellation” to the nobles, estates and commonalty
against the sentence of death recently pronounced upon him,
and along with it a stirring appeal “To his beloved brethren,
the Commonalty of Scotland,” urging that the care of religion
fell to them also as being “God’s creatures, created and formed
in His own image,” and having a right to defend their conscience
against persecution. About this time, indeed, there was in
Scotland a remarkable approximation to that solution of the
toleration difficulty which later ages have approved; for the
regent was understood to favour the demand of the “congregation”
that at least the penal statutes against heretics “be
suspended and abrogated,” and “that it be lawful to us to use
ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as we must answer
to God.” It was a consummation too ideal for that early date;
and next year the regent, whose daughter was now queen of
France and there mixed up with the persecuting policy of the
Guises, forbade the reformed preaching in Scotland. A rupture
ensued at once, and Knox appeared in Edinburgh on the 2nd of
May 1559 “even in the brunt of the battle.” He was promptly
“blown to the horn” at the Cross there as an outlaw, but
escaped to Dundee, and commenced public preaching in the
chief towns of central Scotland. At Perth and at St Andrews
his sermons were followed by the destruction of the monasteries,
institutions disliked in that age in Scotland alike by the devout
and the profane. But while he notes that in Perth the act was
that of “the rascal multitude,” he was glad to claim in St
Andrews the support of the civic “authority”; and indeed the
burghs, which were throughout Europe generally in favour of
freedom, soon became in Scotland a main support of the Reformation.
Edinburgh was still doubtful, and the queen regent
held the castle; but a truce between her and the lords for six
months to the 1st of January 1560 was arranged on the footing
that every man there “may have freedom to use his own conscience
to the day foresaid”—a freedom interpreted to let Knox
and his brethren preach publicly and incessantly.
Scotland, like its capital, was divided. Both parties lapsed from the freedom-of-conscience solution to which each when unsuccessful appealed; both betook themselves to arms; and the immediate future of the little kingdom was to be decided by its external alliances. Knox now took a leading part in the great transaction by which the friendship of France was exchanged for that of England. He had one serious difficulty. Before Elizabeth’s accession to the English crown, and after the queen mother in Scotland had disappointed his hopes, he had published a treatise against what he called “The Monstrous Regiment (regimen or government) of Women”; though the despotism of that despotic age was scarcely appreciably worse when it happened to be in female hands. Elizabeth never forgave him; but Cecil corresponded with the Scottish lords, and their answer in July 1559, in Knox’s handwriting, assures England not only of their own constancy, but of “a charge and commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between you and us, contracted and begun in Christ Jesus, may by them be kept inviolated for ever.” The league was promised by England; but the army of France was first in the field, and towards the end of the year drove the forces of the “congregation” from Leith into Edinburgh, and then out of it in a midnight rout to Stirling—“that dark and dolorous night,” as Knox long afterwards said, “wherein all ye, my lords, with shame and fear left this town,” and from which only a memorable sermon by their great preacher roused the despairing multitude into new hope. Their leaders renounced allegiance to the regent; she ended her not unkindly, but as Knox calls it “unhappy,” life in the castle of Edinburgh; the English troops, after the usual Elizabethan delays and evasions, joined their Scots allies; and the French embarked from Leith. On the 6th of July 1560 a treaty was at last made, nominally between Elizabeth and the queen of France and Scotland; while Cecil instructed his mistress’s plenipotentiaries to agree “that the government of Scotland be granted to the nation of the land.” The revolution was in the meantime complete; and Knox, who takes credit for having done much to end the enmity with England which was so long thought necessary for Scotland’s independence, was strangely enough destined, beyond all other men, to leave the stamp of a more inward independence upon his country and its history.
At the first meeting of the Estates, in August 1560, the Protestants were invited to present a confession of their faith. Knox and three others drafted it, and were present when it was offered and read to the parliament. The statute-book says it was “by the estates of Scotland ratified and approved, as wholesome and sound doctrine grounded upon the infallible truth of God’s word.” The Scots confession, though of course drawn up independently, is in substantial accord with the others then springing up in the countries of the Reformation, but is Calvinist rather than Lutheran. It remained for two centuries the authorized Scottish creed, though in the first instance the faith of only a fragment of the people. Yet its approval became the basis for three acts passed a week later; the first of which, abolishing the pope’s authority and jurisdiction in Scotland, may perhaps have been consistent with toleration, as the second, rescinding old statutes which had established and enforced that and other catholic tenets, undoubtedly was. But the third, inflicting heavy penalties, with death on a third conviction, on those who should celebrate mass or even be present at it, showed that the reformer and his friends had crossed the line, and that their position could no longer be described as, in Knox’s words, “requiring nothing but the liberty of conscience, and our religion and fact to be tried by the word of God.” He was prepared indeed to fall back upon that, in the event of the Estates at any time refusing sanction to either church or creed, as their sovereign in Paris promptly refused it. But the parliament of 1560 gave no express sanction to the Reformed Church, and Knox did not wait until it should do so. Already “in our towns and places reformed,” as the Confession puts it, there were local or “particular kirks,” and these grew and spread and were provincially united, till, in the last month of this memorable year, the first General Assembly of their representatives met, and became the “universal kirk,” or “the whole church convened.” It had before it the plan for church government and maintenance, drafted in August at the same time with the Confession, under the name of The Book of Discipline, and by the same framers. Knox was even more clearly in this case the chief author, and he had by this time come to desire a much more rigid Presbyterianism than he had sketched in his “Wholesome Counsel” of 1555. In planning it he seems to have used his acquaintance with the “Ordonnances” of the Genevan Church under Calvin, and with the “Forma” of the German Church in London under John Laski (or A. Lasco). Starting with “truth” contained in Scripture as the church’s foundation, and the Word and Sacraments as means of building it up, it provides ministers and elders to be elected by the congregations, with a subordinate class of “readers,” and by their means sermons and prayers each “Sunday” in every parish. In large towns these were to be also on other days, with a weekly meeting for conference or “prophesying.” The “plantation” of new churches is to go on everywhere under the guidance of higher church officers called superintendents. All are to help their brethren, “for no man may be permitted to live as best pleaseth him within the Church of God.” And above all things the young and the ignorant are to be instructed, the former by a regular gradation or ladder of parish or elementary schools, secondary schools and universities. Even the poor were to be fed by the Church’s hands; and behind
