It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly
hope that his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that
crowned women will submissively discrown themselves at his
appeal; what he does hope, in plain English, is to encourage
and justify rebellion; and we shall see, before we have done,
that he can put his purpose into words as roundly as I can
put it for him.  This he sees to be a matter of much hazard;
he is not "altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he
has laid his account what the finishing of the work may
cost."  He knows that he will find many adversaries, since
"to the most part of men, lawful and godly appeareth
whatsoever antiquity hath received."  He looks for
opposition, "not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the
wise, politic, and quiet spirits of the earth."  He will be
called foolish, curious, despiteful, and a sower of sedition;
and one day, perhaps, for all he is now nameless, he may be
attainted of treason.  Yet he has "determined to obey God,
notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat."  Finally,
he makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this
first instalment: it is his purpose thrice to blow the
trumpet in this matter, if God so permit; twice he intends to
do it without name; but at the last blast to take the odium
upon himself, that all others may be purged.

Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a
secondary title: "The First Blast to awake Women degenerate."
We are in the land of assertion without delay.  That a woman
should bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire over any
realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is repugnant to nature,
contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.  Women are
weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish.  God has denied
to woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what
is profitable to a commonwealth.  Women have been ever
lightly esteemed; they have been denied the tutory of their
own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable sway of their
husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign
supreme over a great kingdom who would be allowed no
authority by her own fireside.  He appeals to the Bible; but
though he makes much of the first transgression and certain
strong texts in Genesis and Paul's Epistles, he does not
appeal with entire success.  The cases of Deborah and Huldah
can be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis.
Indeed, I may say that, logically, he left his bones there;
and that it is but the phantom of an argument that he parades
thenceforward to the end.  Well was it for Knox that he
succeeded no better; it is under this very ambiguity about
Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter
before he is done with the regiment of women.  After having
thus exhausted Scripture, and formulated its teaching in the
somewhat blasphemous maxim that the man is placed above the
woman, even as God above the angels, he goes on triumphantly
to adduce the testimonies of Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose,
Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and having gathered this
little cloud of witnesses about him, like pursuivants about a
herald, he solemnly proclaims all reigning women to be
traitoresses and rebels against God; discharges all men
thenceforward from holding any office under such monstrous
regiment, and calls upon all the lieges with one consent to
"STUDY TO REPRESS THE INORDINATE PRIDE AND TYRANNY" OF
QUEENS.  If this is not treasonable teaching, one would be
glad to know what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not
made the case plain enough against himself, he goes on to
deduce the startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance
must be incontinently broken.  If it was sin thus to have
sworn even in ignorance, it were obstinate sin to continue to
respect them after fuller knowledge.  Then comes the
peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of
that cursed Jezebel of England - that horrible monster
Jezebel of England; and after having predicted sudden
destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned women,
and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same
when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to vindicate the
liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish
themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical
flourish: "And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE
TRUMPET HATH ONCE BLOWN."

The capitals are his own.  In writing, he probably felt the
want of some such reverberation of the pulpit under strong
hands as he was wont to emphasise his spoken utterances
withal; there would seem to him a want of passion in the
orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the capitals
as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips.
Indeed, as it is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the
trumpet, this current allusion to the fall of Jericho, that
alone distinguishes his bitter and hasty production, he was
probably right, according to all artistic canon, thus to
support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained metaphor
of a hostile proclamation.  It is curious, by the way, to
note how favourite an image the trumpet was with the
Reformer.  He returns to it again and again; it is the Alpha
and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to him what a ship is to the
stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he had begun the
world as a trumpeter's apprentice.  The partiality is surely
characteristic.  All his life long he was blowing summonses
before various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not
all.  Wherever he appears in history his speech is loud,
angry, and hostile; there is no peace in his life, and little
tenderness; he is always sounding hopefully to the front for
some rough enterprise.

And as his voice had something of the trumpet's hardness, it
had something also of the trumpet's warlike inspiration.  So
Randolph, possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer's
preaching, writes of him to Cecil:- "Where your honour
exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man
is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred
trumpets continually blustering in our ears." (1)

(1) M'Crie's LIFE OF KNOX, ii. 41.

Thus was the proclamation made.  Nor was it long in wakening
all the echoes of Europe.  What success might have attended
it, had the question decided been a purely abstract question,
it is difficult to say.  As it was, it was to stand or fall,
not by logic, but by political needs and sympathies.  Thus,
in France, his doctrine was to have some future, because
Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no
future anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was
bound up with the prosperity of Queen Elizabeth.  This
stumbling-block lay at the very threshold of the matter; and
Knox, in the text of the "First Blast," had set everybody the
wrong example and gone to the ground himself.  He finds
occasion to regret "the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley."
But Lady Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was
a would-be traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own
expressions.  If, therefore, political and religious sympathy
led Knox himself into so grave a partiality, what was he to
expect from his disciples?

If the trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily
prepare himself for the battle?  The question whether Lady
Jane Dudley was an innocent martyr, or a traitoress against
God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny had been effectually
repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind; and it was
not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox's readers concluded
that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree
of the sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the
Reformation.  He should have been the more careful of such an
ambiguity of meaning, as he must have known well the lukewarm
indifference and dishonesty of his fellow-reformers in
political matters.  He had already, in 1556 or 1557, talked
the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in "a private
conversation;" and the interview (1) must have been truly
distasteful to both parties.  Calvin, indeed, went a far way
with him in theory, and owned that the "government of women
was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature,
to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments
consequent upon the fall of man."  But, in practice, their
two roads separated.  For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties
in the way of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and
Huldah, and in the prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be
the nursing mothers of the Church.  And as the Bible was not
decisive, he thought the subject should be let alone,
because, "by custom and public consent and long practice, it
has been established that realms and principalities may
descend to females by hereditary right, and it would not be
lawful to unsettle governments which are ordained by the
peculiar providence of God."  I imagine Knox's ears must have
burned during this interview.  Think of him listening
dutifully to all this - how it would not do to meddle with
anointed kings - how there was a peculiar providence in these
great affairs; and then think of his own peroration, and the
"noble heart" whom he looks for "to vindicate the liberty of
his country;" or his answer to Queen Mary, when she asked him
who he was, to interfere in the affairs of Scotland:- "Madam,
a subject born within the same!"  Indeed, the two doctors who
differed at this private conversation represented, at the
moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent
history of Europe.  In Calvin we have represented that
passive obedience, that toleration of injustice and
absurdity, that holding back of the hand from political
affairs as from something unclean, which lost France, if we
are to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation; a spirit
necessarily fatal in the long run to the existence of any
sect that may profess it; a suicidal doctrine that survives
among us to this day in narrow views of personal duty, and
the low political morality of many virtuous men.  In Knox, on
the other hand, we see foreshadowed the whole Puritan
Revolution and the scaffold of Charles I.

(1) Described by Calvin in a letter to Cecil, Knox's Works,
vol. iv.

There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what
caused Knox to print his book without a name. (1)  It was a
dangerous thing to contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly
so, surely, when one had had the advantage of correction from
him in a private conversation; and Knox had his little flock
of English refugees to consider.  If they had fallen into bad
odour at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to?  It
was printed, as I said, in 1558; and, by a singular MAL-A-
PROPOS, in that same year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded
to the throne of England.  And just as the accession of
Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female rule in the eyes of
Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth justified
it in the eyes of his colleagues.  Female rule ceases to be
an anomaly, not because Elizabeth can "reply to eight
ambassadors in one day in their different languages," but
because she represents for the moment the political future of
the Reformation.  The exiles troop back to England with songs
of praise in their mouths.  The bright accidental star, of
which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen
over the darkness of Europe.  There is a thrill of hope
through the persecuted Churches of the Continent.  Calvin
writes to Cecil, washing his hands of Knox and his political
heresies.  The sale of the "First Blast" is prohibited in
Geneva; and along with it the bold book of Knox's colleague,
Goodman - a book dear to Milton - where female rule was
briefly characterised as a "monster in nature and disorder
among men." (2)  Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a
moment led away by Knox or Goodman, or their own wicked
imaginations, are now more than convinced.  They have seen
the accidental star.  Aylmer, with his eye set greedily on a
possible bishopric, and "the better to obtain the favour of
the new Queen," (3) sharpens his pen to confound Knox by
logic.  What need?  He has been confounded by facts.  "Thus
what had been to the refugees of Geneva as the very word of
God, no sooner were they back in England than, behold! it was
the word of the devil." (4)

(1) It was anonymously published, but no one seems to have
been in doubt about its authorship; he might as well have set
his name to it, for all the good he got by holding it back.
(2) Knox's Works, iv. 358.
(3) Strype's AYLMER, p. 16.
(4) It may interest the reader to know that these (so says
Thomasius) are the "ipsissima verba Schlusselburgii."

Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal subjects of
Elizabeth?  They professed a holy horror for Knox's position:
let us see if their own would please a modern audience any
better, or was, in substance, greatly different.

John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer
to Knox, under the title of AN HARBOUR FOR FAITHFUL AND TRUE
SUBJECTS AGAINST THE LATE BLOWN BLAST, CONCERNING THE
GOVERNMENT OF WOMEN. (1)  And certainly he was a thought more
acute, a thought less precipitate and simple, than his
adversary.  He is not to be led away by such captious terms
as NATURAL AND UNNATURAL.  It is obvious to him that a
woman's disability to rule is not natural in the same sense
in which it is natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn.
He is doubtful, on the whole, whether this disability be
natural at all; nay, when he is laying it down that a woman
should not be a priest, he shows some elementary conception
of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
"The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that
they cannot have the necessary qualifications, "for they are
not brought upon learning in schools, nor trained in
disputation."  And even so, he can ask, "Are there not in
England women, think you, that for learning and wisdom could
tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any Sir
John there?"  For all that, his advocacy is weak.  If women's
rule is not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very
existence, it is neither so convenient nor so profitable as
the government of men.  He holds England to be specially
suitable for the government of women, because there the
governor is more limited and restrained by the other members
of the constitution than in other places; and this argument
has kept his book from being altogether forgotten.  It is
only in hereditary monarchies that he will offer any defence
of the anomaly.  "If rulers were to be chosen by lot or
suffrage, he would not that any women should stand in the
election, but men only."  The law of succession of crowns was
a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a
law to Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other
counsels his readers, in a spirit suggestively alike, not to
kick against the pricks or seek to be more wise than He who
made them. (2)  If God has put a female child into the direct
line of inheritance, it is God's affair.  His strength will
be perfected in her weakness.  He makes the Creator address
the objectors in this not very flattering vein:- "I, that
could make Daniel, a sucking babe, to judge better than the
wisest lawyers; a brute beast to reprehend the folly of a
prophet; and poor fishers to confound the great clerks of the
world - cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over you?"
This is the last word of his reasoning.  Although he was not
altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in
what he says of the incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather
loyalty to the old order of things than any generous belief
in the capacity of women, that raised up for them this
clerical champion.  His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox.  "Thy knee
shall bow," he says, "thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall
speak reverently of thy sovereign."  For himself, his tongue
is even more than reverent.  Nothing can stay the issue of
his eloquent adulation.  Again and again, "the remembrance of
Elizabeth's virtues" carries him away; and he has to hark
back again to find the scent of his argument.  He is
repressing his vehement adoration throughout, until, when the
end comes, and he feels his business at an end, he can
indulge himself to his heart's content in indiscriminate
laudation of his royal mistress.  It is humorous to think
that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many
other excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the
"marvellous meekness of her stomach," threatened him, years
after, in no very meek terms, for a sermon against female
vanity in dress, which she held as a reflection on herself.
(3)

(1) I am indebted for a sight of this book to the kindness of
Mr. David Laing, the editor of Knox's Works.
(2) SOCIAL STATICS, p. 64, etc.
(3) Hallam's CONST.  HIST. OF ENGLAND, i. 225, note m.

Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally,
there was no want of respect for the Queen; and one cannot
very greatly wonder if these devoted servants looked askance,
not upon Knox only, but on his little flock, as they came
back to England tainted with disloyal doctrine.  For them, as
for him, the accidental star rose somewhat red and angry.  As
for poor Knox, his position was the saddest of all.  For the
juncture seemed to him of the highest importance; it was the
nick of time, the flood-water of opportunity.  Not only was
there an opening for him in Scotland, a smouldering brand of
civil liberty and religious enthusiasm which it should be for
him to kindle into flame with his powerful breath but he had
his eye seemingly on an object of even higher worth.  For
now, when religious sympathy ran so high that it could be set
against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion
together of England and Scotland, and to begin it at the sore
place.  If once the open wound were closed at the Border, the
work would be half done.  Ministers placed at Berwick and
such places might seek their converts equally on either side
of the march; old enemies would sit together to hear the
gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many
generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith; or - let us
say better - a common heresy.  For people are not most
conscious of brotherhood when they continue languidly
together in one creed, but when, with some doubt, with some
danger perhaps, and certainly not without some reluctance,
they violently break with the tradition of the past, and go
forth from the sanctuary of their fathers to worship under
the bare heaven.  A new creed, like a new country, is an
unhomely place of sojourn; but it makes men lean on one
another and join hands.  It was on this that Knox relied to
begin the union of the English and the Scotch.  And he had,
perhaps, better means of judging than any even of his
contemporaries.  He knew the temper of both nations; and
already during his two years' chaplaincy at Berwick, he had
seen his scheme put to the proof.  But whether practicable or
not, the proposal does him much honour.  That he should thus
have sought to make a love-match of it between the two
peoples, and tried to win their inclination towards a union
instead of simply transferring them, like so many sheep, by a
marriage, or testament, or private treaty, is thoroughly
characteristic of what is best in the man.  Nor was this all.
He had, besides, to assure himself of English support, secret
or avowed, for the reformation party in Scotland; a delicate
affair, trenching upon treason.  And so he had plenty to say
to Cecil, plenty that he did not care to "commit to paper
neither yet to the knowledge of many."  But his miserable
publication had shut the doors of England in his face.
Summoned to Edinburgh by the confederate lords, he waited at
Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to journey through
England.  The most dispiriting tidings reach him.  His
messengers, coming from so obnoxious a quarter, narrowly
escape imprisonment.  His old congregation are coldly
received, and even begin to look back again to their place of
exile with regret.  "My First Blast," he writes ruefully,
"has blown from me all my friends of England."  And then he
adds, with a snarl, "The Second Blast, I fear, shall sound
somewhat more sharp, except men be more moderate than I hear
they are." (1)  But the threat is empty; there will never be
a second blast - he has had enough of that trumpet.  Nay, he
begins to feel uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered
useless for the rest of his life, unless he is to lose his
right arm and go about his great work maimed and impotent, he
must find some way of making his peace with England and the
indignant Queen.  The letter just quoted was written on the
6th of April 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his
heels for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave
in altogether, and writes a letter of capitulation to Cecil.
In this letter, (2) which he kept back until the 22d, still
hoping that things would come right of themselves, he
censures the great secretary for having "followed the world
in the way of perdition," characterises him as "worthy of
hell," and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere,
and fervent in the cause of Christ's gospel, that he shall
"taste of the same cup that politic heads have drunken in
before him."  This is all, I take it, out of respect for the
Reformer's own position; if he is going to be humiliated, let
others be humiliated first; like a child who will not take
his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink
of it before him.  "But I have, say you, written a
treasonable book against the regiment and empire of women. .
. . The writing of that book I will not deny; but to prove it
treasonable I think it shall be hard. . . . It is hinted that
my book shall be written against.  If so be, sir, I greatly
doubt they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the matter."
And here come the terms of capitulation; for he does not
surrender unconditionally, even in this sore strait: "And yet
if any," he goes on, "think me enemy to the person, or yet to
the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted, they are
utterly deceived in me, FOR THE MIRACULOUS WORK OF GOD,
COMFORTING HIS AFFLICTED BY MEANS OF AN INFIRM VESSEL, I DO
ACKNOWLEDGE, AND THE POWER OF HIS MOST POTENT HAND I WILL
OBEY.  MORE PLAINLY TO SPEAK, IF QUEEN ELIZABETH SHALL
CONFESS, THAT THE EXTRAORDINARY DISPENSATION OF GOD'S GREAT
MERCY MAKETH THAT LAWFUL UNTO HER WHICH BOTH NATURE AND GOD'S
LAW DO DENY TO ALL WOMEN, then shall none in England be more
willing to maintain her lawful authority than I shall be.
But if (God's wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God
forbid) the justness of her title upon consuetude, laws, or
ordinances of men, then" - Then Knox will denounce her?  Not
so; he is more politic nowadays - then, he "greatly fears"
that her ingratitude to God will not go long without
punishment.

(1) Knox to Mrs. Locke, 6th April 1559.  Works, vi. 14.
(2) Knox to Sir William Cecil, 10th April 1559.  Works, ii.
16, or vi. 15.

His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a
mere amplification of the sentences quoted above.  She must
base her title entirely upon the extraordinary providence of
God; but if she does this, "if thus, in God's presence, she
humbles herself, so will he with tongue and pen justify her
authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the same in
Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel." (1)  And so, you
see, his consistency is preserved; he is merely applying the
doctrine of the "First Blast."  The argument goes thus: The
regiment of women is, as before noted in our work, repugnant
to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.
It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up, as exceptions to
this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth Tudor -
whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate.

(1) Knox to Queen Elizabeth, July. 20th, 1559.  Works, vi.
47, or ii. 26.

There is no evidence as to how the Reformer's explanations
were received, and indeed it is most probable that the letter
was never shown to Elizabeth at all.  For it was sent under
cover of another to Cecil, and as it was not of a very
courtly conception throughout, and was, of all things, what
would most excite the Queen's uneasy jealousy about her
title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his
discretion (he had Knox's leave in this case, and did not
always wait for that, it is reputed) to put the letter
harmlessly away beside other valueless or unpresentable State
Papers.  I wonder very much if he did the same with another,
(1) written two years later, after Mary had come into
Scotland, in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an
accomplice with him in the matter of the "First Blast."  The
Queen of Scotland is going to have that work refuted, he
tells her; and "though it were but foolishness in him to
prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done," he would yet
remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own
security, nor so generously interested in Elizabeth's, "that
she would take such pains, UNLESS HER CRAFTY COUNSEL IN SO
DOING SHOT AT A FURTHER MARK."  There is something really
ingenious in this letter; it showed Knox in the double
capacity of the author of the "First Blast" and the faithful
friend of Elizabeth; and he combines them there so naturally,
that one would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous.

(1) Knox to Queen Elizabeth, August 6th, 1561.  Works, vi.
126.

Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate
publication to another queen - his own queen, Mary Stuart.
This was on the first of those three interviews which he has
preserved for us with so much dramatic vigour in the
picturesque pages of his history.  After he had avowed the
authorship in his usual haughty style, Mary asked: "You
think, then, that I have no just authority?"  The question
was evaded.  "Please your Majesty," he answered, "that
learned men in all ages have had their judgments free, and
most commonly disagreeing from the common judgment of the
world; such also have they published by pen and tongue; and
yet notwithstanding they themselves have lived in the common
society with others, and have borne patiently with the errors
and imperfections which they could not amend."  Thus did
"Plato the philosopher:" thus will do John Knox.  "I have
communicated my judgment to the world: if the realm finds no
inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they
approve, shall I not further disallow than within my own
breast; but shall be as well content to live under your
Grace, as Paul was to live under Nero.  And my hope is, that
so long as ye defile not your hands with the blood of the
saints of God, neither I nor my book shall hurt either you or
your authority."  All this is admirable in wisdom and
moderation, and, except that he might have hit upon a
comparison less offensive than that with Paul and Nero,
hardly to be bettered.  Having said thus much, he feels he
needs say no more; and so, when he is further pressed, he
closes that part of the discussion with an astonishing sally.
If he has been content to let this matter sleep, he would
recommend her Grace to follow his example with thankfulness
of heart; it is grimly to be understood which of them has
most to fear if the question should be reawakened.  So the
talk wandered to other subjects.  Only, when the Queen was
summoned at last to dinner ("for it was afternoon") Knox made
his salutation in this form of words: "I pray God, Madam,
that you may be as much blessed within the Commonwealth of
Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever Deborah was
in the Commonwealth of Israel." (1)  Deborah again.

(1) Knox's Works, ii. 278-280.

But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own "First
Blast."  In 1571, when he was already near his end, the old
controversy was taken up in one of a series of anonymous
libels against the Reformer affixed, Sunday after Sunday, to
the church door.  The dilemma was fairly enough stated.
Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a "false
doctor" and seditious; or, if it be true, why does he "avow
and approve the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen
of England's person; which he avoweth and approveth, not only
praying for the maintenance of her estate, but also procuring
her aid and support against his own native country?"  Knox
answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday, from the
pulpit.  He justified the "First Blast" with all the old
arrogance; there is no drawing back there.  The regiment of
women is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a
subversion of good order, as before.  When he prays for the
maintenance of Elizabeth's estate, he is only following the
example of those prophets of God who warned and comforted the
wicked kings of Israel; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews
pray for the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar.  As for the
Queen's aid, there is no harm in that: QUIA (these are his
own words) QUIA OMNIA MUNDA MUNDIS: because to the pure all
things are pure.  One thing, in conclusion, he "may not
pretermit" to give the lie in the throat to his accuser,
where he charges him with seeking support against his native
country.  "What I have been to my country," said the old
Reformer, "What I have been to my country, albeit this
unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be
compelled to bear witness to the truth.  And thus I cease,
requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against me,
that he may (they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make
myself and all my doings manifest to the world.  For to me it
seemeth a thing unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age,
I shall be compelled to fight against shadows, and howlets
that dare not abide the light." (1)

(1) Calderwood's HISTORY OF THE KIRK OF Scotland, edition of
the Wodrow Society, iii. 51-54.

Now, in this, which may be called his LAST BLAST, there is as
sharp speaking as any in the "First Blast" itself.  He is of
the same opinion to the end, you see, although he has been
obliged to cloak and garble that opinion for political ends.
He has been tacking indeed, and he has indeed been seeking
the favour of a queen; but what man ever sought a queen's
favour with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little
courtly policy?  The question of consistency is delicate, and
must be made plain.  Knox never changed his opinion about
female rule, but lived to regret that he had published that
opinion.  Doubtless he had many thoughts so far out of the
range of public sympathy, that he could only keep them to
himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the
errors and imperfections that he could not amend.  For
example, I make no doubt myself that, in his own heart, he
did hold the shocking dogma attributed to him by more than
one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe, had there
been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would
have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective
instead of hereditary - "elective as in the days of
paganism," as one Thevet says in holy horror. (1)  And yet,
because the time was not ripe, I find no hint of such an idea
in his collected works.  Now, the regiment of women was
another matter that he should have kept to himself; right or
wrong, his opinion did not fit the moment; right or wrong, as
Aylmer puts it, "the BLAST was blown out of season."  And
this it was that he began to perceive after the accession of
Elizabeth; not that he had been wrong, and that female rule
was a good thing, for he had said from the first that "the
felicity of some women in their empires" could not change the
law of God and the nature of created things; not this, but
that the regiment of women was one of those imperfections of
society which must be borne with because yet they cannot be
remedied.  The thing had seemed so obvious to him, in his
sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and his fine
contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common
consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would
arise and shake off the debasing tyranny.  He found himself
wrong, and he showed that he could be moderate in his own
fashion, and understood the spirit of true compromise.  He
came round to Calvin's position, in fact, but by a different
way.  And it derogates nothing from the merit of this wise
attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest.
We are all taught by interest; and if the interest be not
merely selfish, there is no wiser preceptor under heaven, and
perhaps no sterner.

(1) BAYLE'S HISTORICAL DICTIONARY, art. Knox, remark G.

Such is the history of John Knox's connection with the
controversy about female rule.  In itself, this is obviously
an incomplete study; not fully to be understood, without a
knowledge of his private relations with the other sex, and
what he thought of their position in domestic life.  This
shall be dealt with in another paper.


II. - PRIVATE LIFE.


TO those who know Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter
of this paper will be somewhat astonishing.  For the hard
energy of the man in all public mattress has possessed the
imagination of the world; he remains for posterity in certain
traditional phrases, browbeating Queen Mary, or breaking
beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that had long
smoked themselves out and were no more than sorry ruins,
while he was still quietly teaching children in a country
gentleman's family.  It does not consist with the common
acceptation of his character to fancy him much moved, except
with anger.  And yet the language of passion came to his pen
as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation against
some of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of
yearning for the society of an absent friend.  He was
vehement in affection, as in doctrine.  I will not deny that
there may have been, along with his vehemence, something
shifty, and for the moment only; that, like many men, and
many Scotchmen, he saw the world and his own heart, not so
much under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme
flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not true in the
long run.  There does seem to me to be something of this
traceable in the Reformer's utterances: precipitation and
repentance, hardy speech and action somewhat circumspect, a
strong tendency to see himself in a heroic light and to place
a ready belief in the disposition of the moment.  Withal he
had considerable confidence in himself, and in the
uprightness of his own disciplined emotions, underlying much
sincere aspiration after spiritual humility.  And it is this
confidence that makes his intercourse with women so
interesting to a modern.  It would be easy, of course, to
make fun of the whole affair, to picture him strutting
vaingloriously among these inferior creatures, or compare a
religious friendship in the sixteenth century with what was
called, I think, a literary friendship in the eighteenth.
But it is more just and profitable to recognise what there is
sterling and human underneath all his theoretical
affectations of superiority.  Women, he has said in his
"First Blast," are, "weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and
foolish;" and yet it does not appear that he was himself any
less dependent than other men upon the sympathy and affection
of these weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish
creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather more
dependent than most.

Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we
should expect always something large and public in their way
of life, something more or less urbane and comprehensive in
their sentiment for others.  We should not expect to see them
spend their sympathy in idyls, however beautiful.  We should
not seek them among those who, if they have but a wife to
their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no
more of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for
their immediate need.  They will be quick to feel all the
pleasures of our association - not the great ones alone, but
all.  They will know not love only, but all those other ways
in which man and woman mutually make each other happy - by
sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about
them - down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy
faces in the street.  For, through all this gradation, the
difference of sex makes itself pleasurably felt.  Down to the
most lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry
due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are
brought ever so lightly into contact.  We love our mothers
otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a
brother to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it
never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as
friendship between man and man.  Such friendship is not even
possible for all.  To conjoin tenderness for a woman that is
not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness and
beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends
of the same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man.
For either it would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of
perception, and, as it were, a curiosity in shades of
differing sentiment; or it would mean that he had accepted
the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and positive
spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its
consequences of pain to himself and others; as one who should
go straight before him on a journey, neither tempted by
wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small lives under
foot.  It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished
his life; and we find him preserved for us in old letters as
a man of many women friends; a man of some expansion toward
the other sex; a man ever ready to comfort weeping women, and
to weep along with them.

Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private
life and more intimate thoughts as have survived to us from
all the perils that environ written paper, an astonishingly
large proportion is in the shape of letters to women of his
familiarity.  He was twice married, but that is not greatly
to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of
women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying.
What is really significant is quite apart from marriage.  For
the man Knox was a true man, and woman, the EWIG-WEIBLICHE,
was as necessary to him, in spite of all low theories, as
ever she was to Goethe.  He came to her in a certain halo of
his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came to her
in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled
hearts and minds exercised in the painful complications that
naturally result from all changes in the world's way of
thinking; and those whom he had thus helped became dear to
him, and were made the chosen companions of his leisure if
they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter if
they were afar.

It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of
the old Church, and that the many women whom we shall see
gathering around him, as he goes through life, had probably
been accustomed, while still in the communion of Rome, to
rely much upon some chosen spiritual director, so that the
intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a
certain survival of the spirit of the confessional in the
Reformed Church, and are not properly to be judged without
this idea.  There is no friendship so noble, but it is the
product of the time; and a world of little finical
observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union
of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference.  The trick of the country and the age steps in
even between the mother and her child, counts out their
caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of
authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of
confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.  And
thus it is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended
to modify the social atmosphere in which Knox and his women
friends met, and loved and trusted each other.  To the man
who had been their priest and was now their minister, women
would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in
these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and the
man to hear.  It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay
we should be no less scandalised at their plain speech than
they, if they could come back to earth, would be offended at
our waltzes and worldly fashions.  This, then, was the
footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends.  The
reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth, of
interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the
very gist of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this
somewhat dry relationship of penitent and confessor.

It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse
with women (as indeed we know little at all about his life)
until he came to Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the
forty-fifth year of his age.  At the same time it is just
possible that some of a little group at Edinburgh, with whom
he corresponded during his last absence, may have been
friends of an older standing.  Certainly they were, of all
his female correspondents, the least personally favoured.  He
treats them throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that
must at times have been a little wounding.  Thus, he remits
one of them to his former letters, "which I trust be common
betwixt you and the rest of our sisters, for to me ye are all
equal in Christ." (1)  Another letter is a gem in this way.
"Albeit" it begins, "albeit I have no particular matter to
write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance
of you.  True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal
remembrance before God with you, to whom at present I write
nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and
therefore they need the less my rude labours, or else because
they have not provoked me by their writing to recompense
their remembrance." (2)  His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
evidently to "provoke his attention pretty constantly; nearly
all his letters are, on the face of them, answers to
questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity
that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really
cares for.  So when they consult him about women's apparel (a
subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctly imagined
by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to
anticipate some of the most offensive matter of the "First
Blast" in a style of real brutality. (3)  It is not merely
that he tells them "the garments of women do declare their
weakness and inability to execute the office of man," though
that in itself is neither very wise nor very opportune in
such a correspondence one would think; but if the reader will
take the trouble to wade through the long, tedious sermon for
himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved,
nor very deeply respected, the women he was then addressing.
In very truth, I believe these Edinburgh sisters simply bored
him.  He had a certain interest in them as his children in
the Lord; they were continually "provoking him by their
writing;" and, if they handed his letters about, writing to
them was as good a form of publication as was then open to
him in Scotland.  There is one letter, however, in this
budget, addressed to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil,
which is worthy of some further mention.  The Clerk-Register
had not opened his heart, it would appear, to the preaching
of the Gospel, and Mrs. Mackgil has written, seeking the
Reformer's prayers in his behalf.  "Your husband," he
answers, "is dear to me for that he is a man indued with some
good gifts, but more dear for that he is your husband.
Charity moveth me to thirst his illumination, both for his
comfort and for the trouble which you sustain by his
coldness, which justly may be called infidelity."  He wishes
her, however, not to hope too much; he can promise that his
prayers will be earnest, but not that they will be effectual;
it is possible that this is to be her "cross" in life; that
"her head, appointed by God for her comfort, should be her
enemy."  And if this be so, well, there is nothing for it;
"with patience she must abide God's merciful deliverance,"
taking heed only that she does not "obey manifest iniquity
for the pleasure of any mortal man." (4)  I conceive this
epistle would have given a very modified sort of pleasure to
the Clerk-Register, had it chanced to fall into his hands.
Compare its tenor - the dry resignation not without a hope of
merciful deliverance therein recommended - with these words
from another letter, written but the year before to two
married women of London: "Call first for grace by Jesus, and
thereafter communicate with your faithful husbands, and then
shall God, I doubt not, conduct your footsteps, and direct
your counsels to His glory." (5)  Here the husbands are put
in a very high place; we can recognise here the same hand
that has written for our instruction how the man is set above
the woman, even as God above the angels.  But the point of
the distinction is plain.  For Clerk-Register Mackgil was not
a faithful husband; displayed, indeed, towards religion a
"coldness which justly might be called infidelity."  We shall
see in more notable instances how much Knox's conception of
the duty of wives varies according to the zeal and orthodoxy
of the husband.

(1) Works, iv. 244.
(2) Works, iv. 246.
(3) IB. iv. 225.
(4) Works, iv. 245.
(5) IB. iv. 221.

As I have said, he may possibly have made the acquaintance of
Mrs. Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these
Edinburgh friends while he was still Douglas of Longniddry's
private tutor.  But our certain knowledge begins in 1549.  He
was then but newly escaped from his captivity in France,
after pulling an oar for nineteen months on the benches of
the galley NOSTRE DAME; now up the rivers, holding stealthy
intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of
Rouen; now out in the North Sea, raising his sick head to
catch a glimpse of the far-off steeples of St. Andrews.  And
now he was sent down by the English Privy Council as a
preacher to Berwick-upon-Tweed; somewhat shaken in health by
all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by
gravel, that sorrow of great men; altogether, what with his
romantic story, his weak health, and his great faculty of
eloquence, a very natural object for the sympathy of devout
women.  At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a
Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in
Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children.  She was a
religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of
doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to
herself or to those whom she honoured with her confidence.
From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high
opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his society.
(1)  Nor was Knox unresponsive. "I have always delighted in
your company," he writes, "and when labours would permit, you
know I have not spared hours to talk and commune with you."
Often when they had met in depression he reminds her, "God
hath sent great comfort unto both." (2)  We can gather from
such letters as are yet extant how close and continuous was
their intercourse.  "I think it best you remain till the
morrow," he writes once, "and so shall we commune at large at
afternoon.  This day you know to be the day of my study and
prayer unto God; yet if your trouble be intolerable, or, if
you think my presence may release your pain, do as the Spirit
shall move you. . . . Your messenger found me in bed, after a
sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so dolour may
complain to dolour when we two meet. . . . And this is more
plain than ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion
in trouble." (3)  Once we have the curtain raised for a
moment, and can look at the two together for the length of a
phrase.  "After the writing of this preceding," writes Knox,
"your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe, did advertise me by
writing, that our adversary (the devil) took occasion to
trouble you because that I DID START BACK FROM YOU REHEARSING
YOUR INFIRMITIES.  I REMEMBER MYSELF SO TO HAVE DONE, AND
THAT IS MY COMMON ON CONSUETUDE WHEN ANYTHING PIERCETH OR
TOUCHETH MY HEART.  CALL TO YOUR MIND WHAT I DID STANDING AT
THE CUPBOARD AT ALNWICK.  In very deed I thought that no
creature had been tempted as I was; and when I heard proceed
from your mouth the very same words that he troubles me with,
I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble,
knowing in myself the dolour thereof." (4) Now intercourse of
so very close a description, whether it be religious
intercourse or not, is apt to displease and disquiet a
husband; and we know incidentally from Knox himself that
there was some little scandal about his intimacy with Mrs.
Bowes.  "The slander and fear of men," he writes, "has
impeded me to exercise my pen so oft as I would; YEA, VERY
SHAME HATH HOLDEN ME FROM YOUR COMPANY, WHEN I WAS MOST
SURELY PERSUADED THAT GOD HAD APPOINTED ME AT THAT TIME TO
COMFORT AND FEED YOUR HUNGRY AND AFFLICTED SOUL. GOD IN HIS
INFINITE MERCY,"  he goes on, "REMOVE NOT ONLY FROM ME ALL
FEAR THAT TENDETH NOT TO GODLINESS, BUT FROM OTHERS SUSPICION
TO JUDGE OF ME OTHERWISE THAN IT BECOMETH ONE MEMBER TO JUDGE
OF ANOTHER," (5)  And the scandal, such as it was, would not
be allayed by the dissension in which Mrs. Bowes seems to
have lived with her family upon the matter of religion, and
the countenance shown by Knox to her resistance.  Talking of
these conflicts, and her courage against "her own flesh and
most inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural
friends," he writes it, "to the praise of God, he has
wondered at the bold constancy which he has found in her when
his own heart was faint." (6)