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| ISBN-13: | 9780300214185 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/23/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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John Knox
By Jane Dawson
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Jane DawsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21418-5
CHAPTER 1
Rare and wonderful gifts
23 May 1557, Geneva
It was a Sunday, not like any other Sunday in John Knox's life. As the afternoon sermon came to an end, Knox was standing beneath the pulpit proudly cradling his newborn son in his arms.1 Being a man to whom tears came easily, he was probably weeping with happiness. At his shoulder was his close friend William Whittingham, who had supported him through thick and thin in the recent troubles at Frankfurt, and was standing godfather, or gossip, to him and his son. The minister, Christopher Goodman, Whittingham's friend since childhood, came down from the pulpit after preaching the sermon. These three men of such different temperaments had forged a deep friendship at Frankfurt, and now in Geneva Knox and Goodman served as co-ministers to this church for English-speaking exiles, while Whittingham organized the congregation's great biblical translation project. They had all been involved in writing the service of baptism that was about to begin.
Before turning to the assembled congregation, Goodman addressed the ritual question to his two friends, 'Do you present this childe to be baptised, earnestly desiring that he may be ingrafted in the mysticall bodye of Jesus Christ?' Knox had himself frequently spoken the Exhortation that followed, which explained to the congregation the purpose of the sacrament of baptism. As a father, the words became charged with new meaning because it was his son who was joining the Church. Knox heard for himself the reassurance, 'our infantes apperteyne to hym [God] by covenant ... they be conteyned under the name of God's people'. On behalf of the baby boy, Whittingham and Knox repeated together the familiar words of the Apostles' Creed and the entire congregation joined in the Lord's Prayer. The communal repetition of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples expressed most deeply the experience Knox treasured of being part of one flock, following one Shepherd. Through obedience to the Shepherd's voice, Christians became members of the people of God united across all ages. From the basin, Goodman took the water and laid it on the boy's forehead, and baptized Nathaniel in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Knox experienced a profound satisfaction from the stark simplicity of combining the Trinitarian formula with the simple application of water. In this congregation's worship the 'superstitious ceremonies' he believed had defaced the sacrament had been banished. Man-made inventions, even signing with the cross, transgressed the maxim for the worship of God that every part must rest upon the words of Scripture alone. Though it might appear spare and unadorned, Knox believed this new Forme of Prayers was the first liturgy in English to follow the Old Testament maxim of neither adding to nor subtracting from the Scriptural injunctions.
Knox had chosen his son's name with great care. In Hebrew Nathaniel meant 'gift of God' and enabled him to express his sense of gratitude and thanksgiving at the birth of his first child. That name fitted perfectly with the thanksgiving in the post-baptismal prayer for the 'rare and wonderfull gyftes' God had given those who had been marked 'wyth thys Sacrament as a singuler token and badge of thy love' and would be numbered among the saints. Knox hoped his son would always wear and acknowledge the badge of his Christian faith, and he probably cherished the thought that his son might follow his father and become a preacher.
The final request was that God 'take this infant into thy tuition and defence'. For a Scot like Knox this phrase was full of strength, with tuition meaning far more than scholarly instruction and extending to guardianship and complete protection. Gone was the custom of naming children after saints and expecting that saint to act as their protector. Similarly, the exorcism of the Devil at the start of the baptism had been removed. Instead, Christ was to be the child's defender in the battle against sin and the Devil that, aided by divine power, 'he maye so prevayle against Satan, that in the end, obteyning the victorie, he may be exalted into the libertie of thy kingdome'. Knox was convinced that a triumphant gazing upon the kingdom of God was the right note to end the baptismal service celebrating a new addition to the congregation and reminding every existing member of their participation in God's covenant.
With the baptism complete, the familiar faces of friends and supporters would have crowded around Knox and his son in the intimate space of the Auditoire church in Geneva. Like most mothers of the time, Knox's wife Marjorie would have remained at home recovering from the birth and would hear all the details later from her friends. This particular congregation was a self-selected group of exiles from religious persecution, many of whom had settled in the city specifically to follow Knox and his views on Reformed worship. When they came together to form the English-speaking congregation they created a powerhouse of Protestant commitment. It generated an intense spiritual solidarity that Knox found exhilarating, and the Genevan congregation provided him with a close religious family bound together by the profound spiritual kinship of the 'mystical body of Jesus Christ'. He never forgot the security and religious strength this congregation had brought him and for the remainder of his life it was the model of what an ideal Reformed community should be.
Acutely conscious that he had received many rare and wonderful gifts, Knox might have chosen Sunday, 23 May 1557 as one of the happiest days of his life. He had a dear wife and son, and his family and household were safe in Geneva and far away from the heresy trials and executions in England. He enjoyed the best of working relationships with his fellow minister Goodman and with the other officials and members of the congregation, and they had created a model of a Reformed kirk. In addition, he lived in the most perfectly Reformed city in Europe, where he was able to learn from the great Master Calvin and from the other theologians and scholars who were resident there.
This particular day in his life has been reconstructed to challenge many of the traditional assumptions made about John Knox. He has been regarded, especially within Scotland, as the personification of the puritanical kill-joy who championed the strictest Presbyterian tenets on all issues and delighted in haranguing Mary, Queen of Scots. Having been claimed as the country's Protestant Reformer, Knox's activities in Scotland have taken centre stage, downgrading or even excluding other periods of his life. The concentration upon his famous tract with its eye-catching title, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, has given rise to the view that Knox was a misogynist or a woman-hater and has distorted understandings of Knox's political thought and his other writings. The reconstruction of the happy day in 1557 when Nathaniel Knox was baptized in the English-speaking exile church in Geneva offers a sharp contrast to that conventional image. The relaxed and happy John Knox was not preaching or prophesying doom, but behaving as an ordinary father and family man. He was not expounding misogynist ideas but was surrounded by female friends and about to return to his dear wife. He was not in Scotland bringing in the Protestant Reformation, but was part of an English congregation located in a Swiss city. He was not behaving as a puritanical Calvinist, but was laughing, joking and looking forward to a celebration. This biography also acknowledges, and even emphasizes, the darker side to Knox with his 'holy hatred', increasing intransigence, bouts of depression and gloomy predictions about the future of Protestantism. By challenging the monochrome portrait of the dour Scottish Reformer that has dominated popular perceptions, it shows the many different shades within Knox's character that make this complex man such a fascinating subject. This fresh and more nuanced account of Knox's life reveals new aspects of the interconnected and many-layered story of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. The biography also provides a re-assessment of the worlds through which Knox moved as he lived during the age of Reformations in Scotland, Britain and Europe.
Sources
A recent 'rare and wonderful gift' has made this biography possible: the discovery of new evidence from the pen of Knox himself and about his life revealed aspects of his personality only glimpsed before. The first new Knox material unearthed since 1875 has been discovered in the manuscript papers of his best friend, Christopher Goodman. They contain six previously unknown letters written by Knox – one holograph letter in Chester and five others in fine eighteenth-century transcripts in the surviving copy of Christopher Goodman's Letter-book at Ruthin in north Wales. One of the new Knox letters dates from 1555 and the others fall in the period 1566 to 1572. Equally significant, Goodman's papers contain many additional documents that have a direct bearing upon Knox's life or illumine the events in which he played a part. Of greatest value for the breadth of the new material are thirty-five new documents from the Marian exile that alter the interpretation of the time Knox spent within Germany, Switzerland and France and enrich the narration in Chapters 6–11. In particular, Goodman's Letter-book transforms the chronology and understanding of the Troubles at Frankfurt of 1554–5, and an entirely new account of that period in Knox's life can be found in Chapter 7. This new chronology of the Frankfurt Troubles has allowed the letter of 4 January 1555 Knox wrote and signed as 'Tinoterius' to be conclusively identified as from his pen. It has also redated to December 1554 a fascinating letter and memo written by John Bale and has proved that they were directly attacking Knox.
A further forty documents in Goodman's Letter-book relate to the first two decades of Queen Elizabeth's reign and give additional context for the new letters from Knox discussed in Chapters 11–19. They chart Knox's growing pessimism because he was prepared to reveal to his close friend his inner thoughts about the situation in Scotland. The letters reveal for the first time that in 1566 Knox was contemplating accompanying Goodman on an evangelical preaching mission within Ireland that would have had the full backing of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney. They also demonstrate in detail how much interest Knox continued to show in the disputes within the Elizabethan Church of England and especially in the Vestments Controversy of the 1560s. In addition to providing many new insights and details about Knox's life, the Goodman papers have driven a major re-evaluation of the existing and well-known Knox material that has been in circulation since the nineteenth century.
Several other finds have added fresh insights. A new source has been recognized for the final years of Knox's life. Much of Knox's 'table-talk' during those years can be reconstructed because it was embedded within the Memorials written by his secretary, Richard Bannatyne. He recorded snippets of Knox's conversations, though he rarely attributed them directly. Those sayings have been identified and collected and they have added to this biography substantial additional details concerning Knox's views from 1567 to 1572. They include pithy remarks, so characteristic of Knox's descriptions of his contemporaries, and a range of short prayers or statements revealing his state of mind and his views on contemporary events. This has provided for the biography a rich vein of new sayings, many in the memorable and direct format Knox had perfected and often containing a sharp, or even vindictive, edge.
The confirmation that 'John Knox's Bible' has survived adds an interesting new facet to our knowledge of his life and of his extensive network of friends in different countries. The late Professor David Wright, my colleague at New College in Edinburgh, investigated and verified the copy of 'John Knox's Bible' currently housed in the University of Melbourne. Although it is not annotated through the text, it does have the name of those who associated with the volume. From there and with further information found in the Goodman papers, it has been possible to piece together a great deal more information about the Bible's context and the individuals involved. It was a special presentation volume Knox was given by some of his English friends around 1567, long after he had returned to Scotland. It had been printed in 1566 at Rouen, a French city Knox knew well, and was part of a bespoke folio edition. Its production is itself an indication of the complex patterns of contacts between the Reformed Protestants in France, Geneva, England and Scotland during the 1560s. The idea of a presentation and the trouble and expense of organizing a special printing demonstrated the long-lasting esteem in which Knox was held by those he had known in the London Protestant community during the reign of King Edward VI and those who had been part of his exile congregation in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. This provides additional evidence supporting the new insights from the Goodman papers to show how Knox remained closely involved with the 'godly' community who were pressing for further reform to the Church of England.
The choice of biblical version was significant because Knox was presented with a copy of the Great Bible first produced in King Henry VIII's reign that would have been the Bible he used when he had been a minister in England from 1549. A number of those connected to the presentation, such as John Bodley, the father of the founder of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, had also been involved in the production of the Geneva Bible in 1560. That version was adopted by Knox and the Scottish Reformed Kirk, was beloved by the English 'godly', was used by Shakespeare and became by far the most popular edition in Elizabethan England. When choosing their elaborate gift, the presenters must have known that Knox had a special affection for the earlier Great or Matthews Bible, possibly because it was the English translation he had first encountered when he had been converted to Protestantism. The chance survival in Australia of this special presentation copy is a reminder that Knox's personal library has been largely lost to view, though a copy of a German chronicle that his nephew, Paul Knox, read to his uncle in 1568 now resides in Edinburgh University Library. It is possible that other volumes once owned by Knox also found their way into the library of Clement Litill, who was Knox's friend and an elder of St Giles' Kirk, Edinburgh. In 1580 part of Litill's library became the foundation for Edinburgh University Library.
No contemporary portrait of Knox, if any were made, has survived, and exactly what he looked like has been a perennial puzzle. From the nineteenth century onwards, different images of him have been suggested and have generated considerable debate. The general consensus had fixed upon the portrait in Theodore Beza's Icones as the best likeness. However, the recent cleaning and conservation of a painting owned by the University of Edinburgh have suggested a much earlier date of composition than had previously been thought. This portrait in oils, probably painted at the end of the sixteenth century, can now be placed among the earliest surviving images of Knox and possibly supersedes the black and white woodcut in Beza's Icones. It depicts a man with a thinner face and longer beard than usual who appears less relaxed and certain than we find in the traditional representations of Knox. This new portrait seems to reflect some of the characteristics revealed in the newly discovered written evidence in which Knox can be seen as tired, ill and depressed.
Such significant discoveries have given a fresh perspective to Knox's life and shine extra light upon episodes, such as his visit to England in 1567, when previously his movements had been shrouded in mystery. They have brought some surprises that run counter to the popular understanding of Knox. Nothing had previously been known of the trip to Ireland he almost made at the start of 1567 to join Goodman in an evangelical mission. Similarly, the special printing of a Great Bible for Knox by his English friends had not been widely known. It had also not been recognized that his Edinburgh ministry comprised three discrete periods and that he answered three separate calls to become the preacher at St Giles', Edinburgh's burgh church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Knox by Jane Dawson. Copyright © 2015 Jane Dawson. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of illustrations and maps, vi,Preface and acknowledgements, vii,
1 Rare and wonderful gifts, 1,
2 Tinoterius: The man from the banks of the Tyne, 11,
3 My first anchor, 22,
4 Called by my God, 38,
5 The realm of England, 53,
6 Why held we back the salt?, 71,
7 A farrago of ceremonies, 90,
8 Double cares, 109,
9 Pierced with anguish and sorrow, 128,
10 Quietness of conscience and contentment of heart, 147,
11 England, in refusing me, refused a friend, 164,
12 Restorer of the Gospel among the Scots, 177,
13 Churching it like a Scythian, 192,
14 Sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety, 210,
15 What have you to do with my marriage?, 231,
16 Unthankful (yea alas miserable) Scotland, 247,
17 This most miraculous victory and overthrow, 267,
18 Weary of the world, 286,
19 Haste, lest you come too late, 305,
Notes, 322,
Further reading, 349,
Index, 356,