Full of sound and fury

John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness’.
Yet this awkward cuss, son of a merchant in Haddington and initially a young Roman Catholic priest, became a pillar of the Reformation in Europe and the inspiration for Presbyterianism in Scotland. The recent Scottish political television debates remind us also that his strident tone is still fashionable in Scotland. The black and white judgments proclaimed rather than discussed, and the winning of arguments by out-shouting opponents, are exactly in the style of Knox.

He knew precisely what reforms were needed in the church. It was only necessary to follow the word of God: ‘add nothing to it; diminish nothing from it.’ The Bible did not prescribe vestments, the worship of saints, or sacraments other than baptism and communion. Such accretions were ‘idolatrie’.

The trouble was that almost everywhere the idolatrous Roman Catholic church (‘the synagogue of Satan’) was overwhelmingly powerful. In Knox’s lifetime Mary Tudor re-established Catholicism in England. Scotland was ruled by Mary of Guise and then by her daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, that ‘wicked woman’, widow of a French Catholic king. Huguenots were massacred in France. Knox himself was a galley-slave for 19 months after being captured by a French fleet off St Andrews. In Geneva and Frankfurt he was an exile and in both England and Scotland he lived in danger of arrest or worse — although, unlike his heroic mentor George Wishart, he was burned as a heretic only in effigy. Even at Knox’s death he remained deeply pessimistic about the very survival of the Reformation. To complain that he was ‘hatit and raillit on, but also perscutit most scharply, and huntit from place to place’ was no more than truth.