John Knox and the Reformation. Lang Andrew
the other hand, bade his congregation sit, as he conceived that to have been the usage at the first institution of the rite. Possibly the Apostles, in fact, supped in a recumbent attitude, as Cranmer justly remarked later (John xiii. 25), but Knox supposed them to have sat. In a letter to his Berwick flock, he reminds them of his practice on this point; but he would not dissent from kneeling if “magistrates make known, as that they” (would?) “have done if ministers were willing to do their duties, that kneeling is not retained in the Lord’s Supper for maintenance of any superstition,” much less as “adoration of the Lord’s Supper.” This, “for a time,” would content him: and this he obtained. 34 Here Knox appears to make the civil authority – “the magistrates” – governors of the Church, while at the same time he does not in practice obey them unless they accept his conditions.
This letter to the Berwick flock must be prior to the autumn of 1552, in which, as we shall see, Knox obtained his terms as to kneeling. He went on, in his epistle to the Berwickians, to speak in “a tone of moderation and modesty,” for which, says Dr. Lorimer, not many readers will be prepared. 35 In this modest passage, Knox says that, as to “the chief points of religion,” he, with God’s help, “will give place to neither man nor angel teaching the contrary” of his preaching. Yet an angel might be supposed to be well informed on points of doctrine! “But as to ceremonies or rites, things of smaller weight, I was not minded to move contention..” The one point which – “because I am but one, having in my contrary magistrates, common order, and judgments, and many learned” – he is prepared to yield, and that for a time, is the practice of kneeling, but only on three conditions. These being granted, “with patience will I bear that one thing, daily thirsting and calling unto God for reformation of that and others.” 36 But he did not bear that one thing; he would not kneel even after his terms were granted! This is the sum of Knox’s “moderation and modesty”!
Though he is not averse from talking about himself, Knox, in his “History,” spares but three lines to his five years’ residence in England (1549-54). His first charge was Berwick (1549-51), where we have seen he celebrated holy Communion by the Swiss rite, all meekly sitting. The Second Prayer Book, of 1552, when Knox ministered in Newcastle, bears marks of his hand. He opposed, as has been said, the rubric bidding the communicants kneel; the attitude savoured of “idolatry.”
The circumstances in which Knox carried his point on this question are most curious. Just before October 12, 1552, a foreign Protestant, Johannes Utenhovius, wrote to the Zurich Protestant, Bullinger, to the effect that a certain vir bonus, Scotus natione (a good man and a Scot), a preacher (concionator), of the Duke of Northumberland, had delivered a sermon before the King and Council, “in which he freely inveighed against the Anglican custom of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper.” Many listeners were greatly moved, and Utenhovius prayed that the sermon might be of blessed effect. Knox was certainly in London at this date, and was almost certainly the excellent Scot referred to by Utenhovius. The Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was then in such forwardness that Parliament had appointed it to be used in churches, beginning on November 1. The book included the command to kneel at the Lord’s Supper, and any agitation against the practice might seem to be too late. Cranmer, the Primate, was in favour of the rubric as it stood, and on October 7, 1552, addressed the Privy Council in a letter which, without naming Knox, clearly shows his opinion of our Reformer. The book, as it stood, said Cranmer, had the assent of King and Parliament – now it was to be altered, apparently, “without Parliament.” The Council ought not to be thus influenced by “glorious and unquiet spirits.” Cranmer calls Knox, as Throckmorton later called Queen Mary’s Bothwell, “glorious” in the sense of the Latin gloriosus, “swaggering,” or “arrogant.”
Cranmer goes on to denounce the “glorious and unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietude when things be most quiet and in good order.” 37 Their argument (Knox’s favourite), that whatever is not commanded in Scripture is unlawful and ungodly, “is a subversion of all order as well in religion as in common policy.”
Cranmer ends with the amazing challenge: “I will set my foot by his to be tried in the fire, that his doctrine is untrue, and not only untrue but seditious, and perilous to be heard of any subjects, as a thing breaking the bridle of obedience and loosing them from the bond of all princes’ laws.”
Cranmer had a premonition of the troubled years of James VI. and of the Covenant, when this question of kneeling was the first cause of the Bishops’ wars. But Knox did not accept, as far as we know, the mediæval ordeal by fire.
Other questions about practices enjoined in the Articles arose. A “Confession,” in which Knox’s style may be traced, was drawn up, and consequently that “Declaration on Kneeling” was intercalated into the Prayer Book, wherein it is asserted that the attitude does not imply adoration of the elements, or belief in the Real Presence, “for that were idolatry.” Elizabeth dropped, and Charles II. restored, this “Black Rubric” which Anglicanism owes to the Scottish Reformer. 38 He “once had a good opinion,” he says, of the Liturgy as it now stood, but he soon found that it was full of idolatries.
The most important event in the private life of Knox, during his stay at Berwick, was his acquaintance with a devout lady of tormented conscience, Mrs. Bowes, wife of the Governor of Norham Castle on Tweed. Mrs. Bowes’s tendency to the new ideas in religion was not shared by her husband and his family; the results will presently be conspicuous. In April 1550, Knox preached at Newcastle a sermon on his favourite doctrine that the Mass is “Idolatry,” because it is “of man’s invention,” an opinion not shared by Tunstall, then Bishop of Durham. Knox used “idolatry” in a constructive sense, as when we talk of “constructive treason.” But, in practice, he regarded Catholics as “idolaters,” in the same sense as Elijah regarded Hebrew worshippers of alien deities, Chemosh or Moloch, and he later drew the inference that idolaters, as in the Old Testament, must be put to death. Thus his was logically a persecuting religion.
Knox was made a King’s chaplain and transferred to Newcastle. He saw that the country was, by preference, Catholic; that the life of Edward VI. hung on a thread; and that with the accession of his sister, Mary Tudor, Protestant principles would be as unsafe as under “umquhile the Cardinal.” Knox therefore, “from the foresight of troubles to come” (so he writes to Mrs. Bowes, February 28, 1554), 39 declined any post, a bishopric, or a living, which would in honour oblige him to face the fire of persecution. At the same time he was even then far at odds with the Church of England that he had sound reasons for refusing benefices.
On Christmas day, 1552, 40 he preached at Newcastle against Papists, as “thirsting nothing more than the King’s death, which their iniquity would procure.” In two brief years Knox was himself publicly expressing his own thirst for the Queen’s death, and praying for a Jehu or a Phinehas, slayers of idolaters, such as Mary Tudor. If any fanatic had taken this hint, and the life of Mary Tudor, Catholics would have said that Knox’s “iniquity procured” the murder, and they would have had fair excuse for the assertion.
Meanwhile charges were brought against the Reformer, on the ground of his Christmas sermon of peace and goodwill. Northumberland (January 9, 1552-53) sends to Cecil “a letter of poor Knox, by the which you may perceive what perplexity the poor soul remaineth in at this present.” We have not Knox’s interesting letter, but Northumberland pled his cause against a charge of treason. In fact, however, the Court highly approved of his sermon. He was presently again in what he believed to be imminent danger of life: “I fear that I be not yet ripe, nor able to glorify Christ by my faith,” he wrote to Mrs. Bowes, “but what lacketh now, God shall perform in His own time.” 41 We do not know what peril threatened the Reformer now (probably in March 1553), but he frequently, later, seems to have doubted his own “ripeness” for martyrdom. His reluctance to suffer did not prevent him from constant
Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England, 261.
Ibid., 158.
Ibid., 156, 157.
Compare the preface, under the Restoration, to our existing prayer book.
Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England, 98-136.
Ibid., iii. 122.