SOURCE: An introduction to On Rebellion, by John Knox, edited by Robert A. Mason, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. viii-xxiv.

I

There was little in John Knox's background to suggest that as a self-styled instrument of God he was destined to wield considerable influence over the course of the Reformation in Britain. Of his early life, in fact, very little is known. Even the date of his birth—c. 1514—is conjectural, though we can say that he was born of humble parentage in the Scottish burgh of Haddington in East Lothian and was probably educated at the local grammar school before attending St Andrews University. There is no record of his graduating from St Andrews, but he did take holy orders in the later 1530s and, unable to obtain a benefice, eked out a living as a notary apostolic (a minor legal official) and a tutor to the children of the gentry. The date of his conversion to Protestantism is similarly obscure, but it must have occurred in the early 1540s as Knox was closely involved with the ministry of George Wishart who returned to Scotland in 1543 after five years of exile in England and on the continent. Wishart's return appears to have been prompted by the Protestant and anglophile policies pursued by the Regent Arran following the death of James V in 1542 and the accession to the Scottish throne of the infant Mary Stewart. If so, it proved a fatal miscalculation. The powerful Catholic and pro-French party, led by the queen mother, Mary of Guise, and ably seconded by the archbishop of St Andrews, Cardinal David Beaton, ensured that Arran's 'godly fit' was short-lived. Wishart was arrested in January 1546 and burned at the stake outside the cardinal's castle at St Andrews two months later.

It was fear of suffering the same fate as his mentor that drove Knox to seek refuge in the castle the following year. There he joined the Protestant lairds who had avenged Wishart's death by murdering the cardinal and who were now under siege vainly awaiting relief from England. It was in these inauspicious circumstances, during a prolonged armistice, that in April 1547 Knox preached his first Protestant sermon. According to his own account, however, he did so only reluctantly, at first refusing 'to run where God had not called him'. It was only when publicly summoned in the face of the congregation and after several days of soul-searching that he became convinced that this was a 'lawful vocation' which he could not deny. It is surely significant that, while he tells us nothing about his conversion in his History, Knox describes the circumstances of his calling in such detail (Laing, vol. I, pp. 185-93; Dickinson, vol. I, pp. 81-86). If he suffered a conversion experience, it paled into insignificance when set beside the public drama—and personal trauma—of discovering his vocation. Nor is this surprising. For it was precisely the fact of having been singled out by God through the agency of the congregation which justified for Knox the very public role which he thereafter assumed. Throughout his career as a reformed preacher, it was to his vocation that he constantly referred to legitimise his public actions and utterances.

It was a vocation, moreover, which he repeatedly identified with that of the Old Testament prophets. Knox was not alone among Protestant preachers in turning to the prophets for inspiration and example, but his sense of kinship with them was unusually strong. Time and again in his writings he had recourse to the careers of Isaiah, Ezekiel and particularly Jeremiah to justify his conduct. In part, this stemmed from a kind of biblical 'legalism' to which we shall return in a moment. But it was also founded on Knox's deep-rooted conviction that, like his biblical predecessors, he had an 'extraordinary' vocation which bound him to proclaim the divine will and warn the disobedient of the fearful consequences of their iniquity. Not unnaturally, the vehemence of his prophesying varied in proportion to the adversity he faced. Exiled from England during Mary Tudor's reign, he indulged in an orgy of prophetic denunciation quite unrestrained in its violent abuse of Catholicism. Yet while his identification with the Old Testament prophets was only fully realised in exile, it was firmly rooted in the conviction—dating from 1547—that he was indeed a chosen instrument of God.

In 1547, however, Knox's future as a prophet looked decidedly bleak. Within months of his debut in the pulpit, St Andrews castle fell to the French and he was to spend almost two years as a prisoner on a French galley. He was released in March 1549, but rather than return to Scotland, where English military intervention had failed to prevent Mary Stewart being sent to Catholic France and to an eventual French marriage, he settled in Protestant England. There he was licensed to preach by Edward VI' s reforming privy council and ministered to congregations at Berwick and Newcastle before his growing reputation as a preacher led to his appointment as a royal chaplain and the offer (which he declined) of the bishopric of Rochester. His years in England were in retrospect probably among the happiest of his career. But at the time Knox was less than satisfied with the slow pace of reform. While the offer of a bishopric is evidence of his growing stature within the English church, his rejection of it testifies to his refusal to conform with a moderate ecclesiastical establishment. His opposition to kneeling at communion, and hence to Cranmer's 1552 Prayer Book, clearly aligned Knox with the radicals in the English Protestant movement. At the same time, it betrayed a reluctance to deviate from biblical precept and precedent which is the most fundamental feature of his thought.

If sixteenth-century Protestantism was pre-eminently the religion of the Word, Knox was one of those who pressed the doctrine of sola scriptura to extremes. Certainly, in the First Blast, he shored up his argument with any authority—legal, classical or patristic—which came to hand. But this is the exception that proves the rule. For Knox took such authorities seriously only when they accorded with the will of God as revealed in the Word. Indeed, it was in the First Blast that he declared that the fundamental authority was 'the law moral … the constant and unchangeable will of God to the which the Gentile is no less bound than was the Jew' (p. 30). The effect of this biblical literalism was to turn the Scriptures—particularly the Old Testament—into a source book of 'legal' precedents which were as binding on the kingdoms of England and Scotland as they had been on Israel and Judah. At its most arid, this could give rise, as in the First Blast, to an obscure discussion of Jewish inheritance practices as evidenced by the daughters of Zelophehad (pp. 38-9). More generally, however, it meant that when Knox identified himself with Jeremiah, or Mary Tudor with Jezebel, he was doing much more than invoking convenient scriptural parallels or paradigms. He was appealing to biblical 'case law' to establish precedents which were universally binding because they revealed to man the immutable laws of God.

In the England of Edward VI, however, the immediate focus of Knox's biblical literalism was the Roman Catholic mass. Manifestly, he argued, the mass was a human invention and ipso facto an idolatrous ceremony repugnant to the divine law he had been called to proclaim. As a preacher and a prophet, Knox was bound in conscience to warn the people of the hideous consequences of participating in what he knew to be the most perverted ceremony of an antichristian church. 'For so odious and abominable I know the mass to be in God's presence', he wrote in 1550, 'that unless ye decline from the same, to life can ye never attain. And therefore, Brethren, flee from that idolatry rather than from the present death' (Laing, vol. III, pp. 69-70). With the accession in July 1553 of a Catholic sovereign to the throne of England, such advice was to strike sharply home among those Protestants who—unlike Knox—were in no position to seek solace and sanctuary in continental exile.

II

For those Protestants who did remain in England, Mary Tudor's accession, and the Catholic reaction she initiated, created an agonising dilemma. It posed in the acutest possible way the problem of whether the allegiance of the faithful was owed to the commands of God or to those of man. Knox himself, of course, had no doubt which was the sovereign authority. After arriving in Dieppe early in 1554, he wrote a series of letters to his former congregations in England whose leading theme was the absolute necessity 'as ye purpose and intend to avoid God's vengeance', of eschewing 'as well in body as in spirit, all fellowship and society with idolaters in their idolatry' (Laing, vol. III, p. 166). While such an uncompromising stance was fairly predictable, the main argument which Knox deployed in its support was not. For it was in this context that he made use for the first time of the idea that to participate in the mass was irrevocably to violate 'the league and covenant of God' which 'requires that we declare ourselves enemies to all sorts of idolatry' (Laing, vol. III, p. 193). Formulated in terms of a renewed Mosaic covenant, the avoidance of idolatry was transformed from a simple scriptural precept into a clause in a formal 'contract' drawn up between God and the elect. Moreover, according to Knox, just as the reward for fulfilling the terms of the covenant was eternal salvation, so the penalty for their infraction was eternal damnation. In effect, in the context of Mary Tudor's reign, this crudely conditional interpretation of the covenant rendered civil disobedience a precondition of salvation.

While Knox had thrust the convenant firmly into the political arena, it is important to emphasis that he did not at this stage view forcible resistance to ungodly rule as one of its terms. Certainly, when formulated in terms of a binding contract, the injunction to obey God rather than man represented a formidable challenge to power structures founded on human rather than biblical precepts. Nevertheless, Knox expressly warned his English brethren 'that ye presume not to be revengers of your own cause, but that ye resign over vengeance unto Him' (Laing, vol. III, p. 244). Such a policy of non-resistance was as distasteful to Knox as it was dangerous for his fellow Protestants in England. But in 1554 it was the only option available to him. For just as his belief that allegiance was owed to God rather than man had an impeccable biblical source (Acts 5.29), so too did the claim that the powers that be were ordained by God and whoever resisted them resisted the ordinance of God and would suffer eternal damnation (Romans 13.1-7). The latter Pauline injunction was the most influential biblical precept of the age and, beyond advocating a policy of passive disobedience in all things repugnant to the law of God, Knox was in no position to deny it.

His stance conformed, moreover, with the views of the leading lights of European Protestantism. Knox's attempt during a tour of the Swiss churches early in 1554 to elicit a more aggressive response from John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger proved unsuccessful. Bullinger responded cautiously that, while it might be possible to justify rebellion in the cause of God and the Word, the great danger was that baser motives would masquerade under the cloak of religious zeal. Of Calvin's response we know only that it differed little from Bullinger's and offered Knox no great encouragement. Given their emphatic belief in the divine nature of political authority and their anxiety to distance themselves from the excesses of the Anabaptist sects, Calvin and his associates were ill-equipped to forge any justification of resistance in the early 1550s. Knox became more sensitive to these constraints as he fell directly under Calvin's influence during his exile. As a result, he continued to urge on the faithful in England the orthodox Calvinist policy of disobedience in all things repugnant to the law of God, but passive acceptance of any persecution that such a stance might bring upon them.

Gradually Knox did learn how to interpret St Paul's injunction to obey in such a way as to admit the possibility of armed resistance to an idolatrous ruler. But he did so only with significant reservations. After all, as Calvin surely made clear to him, to admit the general principle of resistance was to provide also the means of challenging those very powers to whom he looked for the imposition of godly rule. Knox was no more a radical antinomian than he was a popular constitutionalist. His aim was the establishment of a godly commonwealth ruled by a godly prince in strict accordance with the law of God. It was against the background of a Calvinist ideal of a severely disciplined society, a society in which obedience to the temporal power was of paramount importance, that his theory of resistance was evolved. To understand its development, however, we must see it in the context, not just of Knox's relations with Marian England, but also of his complex reaction to events in contemporary Scotland.

III

Knox spent the winter of 1554-5 ministering to the English congregation at Frankfort and locked in a bitter dispute over his radical liturgical views. Forced to leave Frankfort, he spent the summer months in Geneva before returning to Berwick in the autumn of 1555 to marry the Englishwoman, Marjory Bowes, to whom he had been betrothed before his flight to the continent. While there, he ventured into Scotland and was astonished at the warm reception he received. Although Mary of Guise had formally assumed the regency the previous year (buying off the earl of Arran, a former supporter of reform, with the French duchy of Châtelherault), her hostility to her Protestant subjects was tempered by her need to win their acquiscence in the marriage of her daughter to the French dauphin. Unlike their English counterparts, therefore, Scottish Protestants were not being actively persecuted and, during the winter of 1555-6, Knox was able to undertake a hastily improvised mission criss-crossing the country ministering to congregations assembled in the houses of sympathetic brethren. He returned to Geneva in July 1556, but not before the Scottish bishops, increasingly alarmed at his activities, summoned him to Edinburgh to face a charge of heresy. The trial never took place. Unwilling to risk a confrontation with her Protestant subjects, Mary of Guise had the proceedings quashed.

It is indicative of the impact of his mission that, after his departure, the Scottish bishops did condemn Knox as a heretic and publicly burned his effigy. As he preached mostly in private and to audiences already sympathetic to his cause, he can have done little to extend the existing base of Protestant support. But his rapid movement around the country lent the scattered congregations a sense of common purpose which they had never previously experienced. For the first time both Knox and the lay leaders of the localised Protestant cells became aware of the possibility of adding a concerted political dimension to what had hitherto been a haphazard spiritual movement. In this respect, the most crucial aspect of his visit was his success in establishing contact with sympathetic noblemen. For it was these men—the future lords of the Congregation—who were to turn the fledgling movement for reform into a significant political force. In securing the support of such notables as Lord James Stewart and the earls of Glencairn and Argyll, Knox had laid the foundations of the organised Protestant party which within a few years was to embark on revolution. If he still remained reticent as to the legitimacy of resistance, he had gone some way towards consolidating a movement capable of armed rebellion.

But Knox's reticence may only have applied to his public utterances. It is likely that privately he did broach the possibility of some form of organised resistance with the nobility. Certainly, they appeared to be acting with the foreknowledge of his approval when, in March 1557, they wrote to him in Geneva asking that he return once again to Scotland and assuring him that they were now prepared 'to jeopard lives and goods in the forward setting of the glory of God' (pp. 133-4). Knox duly responded to the call, but he had travelled only as far as Dieppe before he received further letters intimating that the nobles had changed their minds. Understandably incensed, on 27 October 1557 he wrote an indignant reply upbraiding them for their irresolution and affirming that, as noblemen, their 'office and duty' bound them 'to vindicate and deliver your subjects from all violence and oppression to the uttermost of your power' (p. 137). It is tempting to read into this letter the full-blown theory of armed rebellion which Knox was to set out in the Appellation the following year. As we shall see, however, the Appellation is much less radical in the demands it makes of the Scottish nobility than is commonly supposed. The same applies to Knox's correspondence of 1557. Although an earlier letter in which he explained what he expected of the nobility was 'lost by negligence and troubles' (p. 137), in one of 17 December, he made it plain that, while they were duty bound to defend their brethren from persecution, they were under no circumstances to deny 'lawful obedience' to the regent (pp. 147-8).

Paradoxically, however, it was while advising the Scottish nobility to respect the authority of Mary of Guise, that Knox began to write his classic diatribe against the very principle of female government itself. Although not published until he returned to Geneva in the spring of 1558, Knox began work on the First Blast in Dieppe in the latter months of 1557. Here there was none of the caution evident in his Scottish correspondence. Writing in the style of the schools, but enlivening his scholastic reasoning with outbursts of prophetic invective, Knox took as his starting-point the wholly unambiguous proposition that nature and the Scriptures, both of which were revelations of the divine will, demanded the total exclusion of women from power. He then proceeded to marshal an array of authorities, ranging from Aristotle to Augustine and from the civil law to secular history, to support his claim. But he was patently more at home when he turned to biblical 'case law' and was able to exercise his exegetical talents on the precedents set by such exemplars of vicious female rule as Athaliah and Jezebel. Well armed with scriptural references, he had no difficulty in proving that 'the regiment of a woman is a thing most odious in the presence of God'. Less predictably, however, he then concluded that those who 'have most heinously offended against God, placing in authority such as God by His Word hath removed from the same … ought without further delay to remove from authority all such persons as by usurpation, violence or tyranny do possess the same' (pp. 43-4). This was, without doubt, an unequivocal call to revolution.

Although its conclusion was extreme, in terms of sixteenth-century attitudes to women, the premises on which the First Blast was based were hardly exceptional. Knox was merely articulating, albeit in his characteristic language of imperatives, a prejudice common among his contemporaries. But it was not a view which was to commend itself to Protestants in Scotland or England over the next few years. With the accession of Elizabeth only months later, the publication of the First Blast proved a source of acute embarrassment to those—including Knox and the Scottish Congregation—who were to look to the English queen for aid. Subsequently, in an interview with Mary Stewart, Knox refused to retract the principles expounded in the First Blast, but argued that 'that book was written most especially against that wicked Jezebel of England', Mary Tudor (p. 177). He was substantially correct. For although God's law was universal and immutable, Knox chose in the First Blast to apply it only to England. He was certainly aware that Scotland too was ruled by a female regent on behalf of a female sovereign, but it was only the English whom he explicitly instructed to fulfil the divine ordinance and destroy the 'monster' who reigned over them (p. 46). That this was not an oversight, but was based on a deliberate distinction between the two countries, is borne out by the Appellation, but it is also evident in the very different attitude that Knox displayed towards Mary of Guise in the Letter to the Regent.

As published in the summer of 1558, the Letter to the Regent was a revised version with substantial additions of an appeal which Knox had addressed to Mary of Guise while in Scotland in May 1556. To some extent, this explains the difference in tone between it and the First Blast. In 1556, Knox thought it possible that the regent might be persuaded to extend her policy of conciliating Protestants to one of formal toleration and perhaps even to embrace the 'true religion' herself. It would have been a dereliction of his duty not to warn her of the terrible fate she was courting by continuing to participate in idolatry. But his central purpose was to instruct her in her duty to reform religion in accordance with the Word of God. If Knox was far from confident of success, in 1556 he at least wrote more in sorrow than in anger. By 1558, however, his attitude had hardened and the additions to the original text betray a less temperate spirit. A discordant note is introduced by citing the untimely death of the regent's husband and two male children as evidence of 'the anger and hot displeasure of God' (p. 66), while more pertinently, in an echo of the First Blast, she is reminded that 'seldom it is that women do long reign with felicity and joy' (p. 65). Yet this was as close as Knox came in the Letter to the Regent to pronouncing against Mary of Guise the sentence he had already pronounced against Mary Tudor. That this was not simply a matter of expediency—the faint and fading hope that the regent might yet be persuaded to forsake idolatry—is apparent from the Appellation. For there it becomes clear that the contrasting agendas which Knox was setting for Scotland and England rested on compelling ideological foundations.

IV

The Appellation is the most important as well as the most easily misconstrued of Knox's political writings. Taking shape in his mind as he wrote the Letter to the Regent, it was published in Geneva in July 1558 together in a single volume with its companion piece, the Letter to the Commonalty, and a summary of the questions which he intended to address in his Second Blast of the Trumpet. The latter was never written, but the former three were clearly intended by Knox to be read as one. Having defined the duties of a godly prince, it was his purpose now to make clear those of the nobility and estates (in effect, the Scottish landed elite) and finally those of the common people.

As its title suggests, the Appellation is an appeal to the Scottish nobility and estates against 'the cruel and most injust sentence' which the Scottish clergy had pronounced against Knox in 1556. In this, it has much in common with the Letter to the Regent where Mary of Guise was similarly implored to protect the preacher from the bishops' wrath and allow him to defend himself against the charge of heresy. Underlying this argument lay the Erastian contention that the authority of the church was subject at all times to that of the crown. As a whole, Knox's writings hardly suggest consistent support for the idea of the royal supremacy. But the belief in the primacy of the civil sword is fundamental to the case he presented in 1558. On the basis of such precedents as the subjection of Aaron to the authority of Moses, he argued in the Appellation that, just as the civil magistrate was duty bound to reform religion, so he possessed the authority to discipline the clergy. This applied, however, not simply to the supreme magistrate—the crown—but also to the inferior magistrates of the realm—the nobility. It was a crucial extension of the principle. For it was in pursuing this argument that Knox finally established the grounds which, without denying the authority of Romans 13, allowed him nevertheless to elaborate a theory of aristocratic resistance to ungodly rule.

The key element in this theory was the idea that, as St Paul had said that the 'powers' (plural) were ordained by God, there must exist in each kingdom alternative—albeit inferior—magistrates whose office was, like a king's, of divine institution, and whose duty it was, again like a king's, to reform the religion in accordance with the law of God. The inferior magistrates of Scotland were, primarily, the nobility. It was to them, therefore, as 'lawful powers by God appointed' (p. 72), that Knox addressed his Appellation. That his reasoning was squarely based on Romans 13 is revealed by a passage where, after quoting the appropriate verses, he went on to explain to the nobility that 'if you be powers ordained by God (and that I hope all men will grant), then by the plain words of the Apostle is the sword given unto you by God for maintenance of the innocent and for punishment of malefactors' (p. 85). Like a godly prince, the godly nobility were to wield the sword of justice in the cause of Christian discipline. Even when the superior power commanded the contrary, the inferior magistrates were bound to fulfil the function assigned to them by God. That being so, Knox could now insist that a godly Protestant magistrate was duty bound to protect the innocent elect from a godless Catholic prince. Moreover, from this position it was but a short step to the more radical conclusion that those 'whom God hath raised up to be princes and rulers … whose hands He hath armed with the sword of His justice' were also 'appointed to be as bridles to repress the rage and insolency of your kings whensoever they pretend manifestly to transgress God's blessed ordinance' (p. 102). Apparently, unlike in 1557, this was a step which Knox was now prepared to take.

Yet it was not a step which he could base solely on the expedient of pluralising the Pauline maxim that the powers are ordained by God. Of itself, the idea of an inferior magistracy did nothing to counter the injunction to obey in Romans 13. On the contrary, it confused the issue by positing a plurality of powers to each and all of whom obedience was theoretically due. It was, of course, palpably absurd to invite a situation in which divinely ordained magistrates were opposed to a divinely ordained prince, both of whom were demanding obedience in accordance with the divine will. But how was such a scenario to be avoided without denying that all the powers are ordained by God and must not be resisted? According to Knox, the answer lay in distinguishing between a prince acting according to God's ordinance and a prince acting ultra vires. When faced with the contention that the powers are to be obeyed 'be they good or be they bad', Knox retorted that, when kings acted wickedly, God 'hath commanded no obedience, but rather He hath approved, yea, and greatly rewarded, such as have opponed themselves to their ungodly commandments and blind rage' (p. 95). Although not fully articulated here, Knox was working towards the conclusion that there was a great difference between the power ordained by God and the person who wielded that power. As a divine ordinance, the former was perfect and unchallengeable, but the latter was prone to all the imperfections stemming from man's fallen nature. In the General Assembly debate of 1564, Knox made the distinction much more explicitly in defending the proposition 'that the prince may be resisted and yet the ordinance of God not violated' (pp. 191-2). But it is already present in embryo in the Appellation. In addition to having located a magistra cy empowered to resist an ungodly prince, Knox had found a way of sanctioning rebellion without negating the divine ordinance of obedience to the royal office.

Knox's use of these ideological devices was crucial to the radicalisation of his political thought. It should be stressed, however, that they were by no means original to him. Knox's theory was a variation on the constitutionalist case for resistance developed by Lutheran theologians in the 1520s and 1530s. Radical French reformers like Pierre Viret and Theodore Beza had already learned to tap this tradition and Knox, together with his fellow Marian exiles, John Ponet and Christopher Goodman, was to do the same. A key document here was the Magdeburg Confession of 1550 which, drawn up by the city's Lutheran pastors to vindicate their defiance of the emperor, summed up many of the ideas on resistance promulgated by previous generations of Protestants in their struggles with Charles V. It was to prove a valuable source for militant Calvinists whose own leaders were unable to provide ideological backing for their revolutionary schemes. Although there is no proof that Knox was aware of its existence before 1564 (p. 204), the Confession does contain the key elements of the theory set out in the Appellation. As with the First Blast, however, it is important to distinguish between the general principles espoused by Knox and the particular circumstances in which he thought them applicable. For, whatever the source of his theory, at no point in the Appellation did he instruct the Scottish nobility to act on it against duly constituted authority. On the contrary, it was only the inferior magistrates of England who received such explicitly radical instructions.

What lay behind this distinction was the belief that, while England was a covenanted nation, Scotland was not. 'I fear not to affirm', Knox wrote in the Appellation, 'that the Gentiles (I mean every city, realm, province or nation amongst the Gentiles embracing Christ Jesus and His true religion) be bound to the same league and covenant that God made with His people Israel' (p. 103). In the case of England where, under Edward VI, the magistrates and people had 'solemnly avowed and promised to defend' God's truth, Knox insisted that the terms of such a covenant still applied. Consequently, he had no compunction about arguing that there it was 'lawful to punish to the death such as labour to subvert the true religion'—including 'Mary that Jezebel whom they call their queen' (p. 104). Unlike the English, however, the Scots had never officially embraced Protestantism and were not bound under the convenant in the same way. Knox's instructions to the Scottish nobility, therefore, fall far short of demanding the execution of their sovereign, Mary Stewart, or of her representative, Mary of Guise. In contrast to the remarks which immediately precede it, his advice to the Scottish nobility was aimed at the punishment, not of the crown, but only of the Catholic clergy: 'if ye know that in your hands God hath put the sword … then can ye not deny but that the punishment of obstinate and malapert idolaters (such as all your bishops be) doth appertain to your office' (pp. 104-5).

While it is true that there is no explicit mention of the covenant in the First Blast, the way it is used in the Appellation does help to resolve the puzzle of the different programmes of action which Knox set out for Scotland and England in the 1558 tracts. But where does it leave the claim that in the Letter to the Commonalty Knox developed a populist theory of resistance? It is certainly the case that his colleague, Christopher Goodman, propounded such a theory in his How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed, also published in Geneva in 1558. But there is nothing in the Letter to the Commonalty to suggest that Knox accepted Goodman's extreme views. Admittedly, there are undeveloped references in the Appellation to a people's obligation under the covenant to punish idolaters and revenge the injuries committed against God's majesty. But on each occasion Knox introduced a note of ambiguity by adding such qualifying phrases as 'according to the vocation of every man' (pp. 99-102). The implications of this are explained neither in the Appellation nor in the Letter to the Commonalty. The latter, in fact, goes no further than to advise the people to demand true preachers of their superiors, themselves to establish and defend them if necessary, and 'to withhold the fruits and profits'—the tithes—'which your false bishops and clergy most injustly receive of you' (pp. 123-4). This hardly amounts to a radically populist theory of resistance. As with the other tracts of 1558, the Letter to the Commonalty suggests that Knox's Scottish agenda was far less extreme than is often supposed.

V

This interpretation of the 1558 tracts is borne out by the development of Knox's views after he returned to Scotland in May 1559 and threw his weight behind the Congregation's armed defiance of the regent. It was the marriage of Mary Stewart to the French dauphin in April 1558, followed six months later by the accession of Elizabeth to the English throne, which led Mary of Guise to abandon her conciliatory policy towards her Protestant subjects and which made some form of confrontation inevitable. But it was Knox who brought matters to a head when, immediately on his arrival in Scotland, he preached a sermon against idolatry which led to a wave of iconoclastic rioting. The rebellion had effectively begun and Knox had found an arena in which his theory of resistance could be tested in practice.

Although there is no proof that Knox wrote the series of public documents issued by the rebels in the course of 1559, the imprint of his ideas on the Congregation's propaganda is unmistakable. At the outset of the rebelion, a justification of resistance was deployed which, heavily reliant on the distinction between the office and the person of a prince, is strikingly similar to that developed in the Appellation (pp. 153-4). There was, however, no attempt to use this theory to justify the regent's overthrow. By August, in an attempt to broaden their appeal, the Congregation had abandoned their exclusively religious demands in favour of a wholesale indictment of her administration designed to tap the Scots' fear of French military occupation (pp. 159-65). But at the same time, in response to the regent's assertion that the preachers were encouraging disobedience to the 'higher powers', it was claimed that they had always maintained that 'they ought to be honoured, feared, obeyed, even for conscience sake, provided that they command nor require nothing expressly repugning to God's commandment and plain will, revealed in His Holy Word' (p. 166). Certainly, if wicked rulers commanded wicked things, then those who 'may and do bridle' them 'cannot be accused as resisters of the authority, which is God's good ordinance' (p. 166). But if this passage was written by Knox, it is as close as he came in 1559 to pressing on the Scots the extreme solution to the problem of ungodly rule which he had earlier urged on the English.

There were, of course, sound tactical reasons for sparing Mary of Guise the full rigour of the death sentence which he had pronounced against Mary Tudor. Not only would it have proved too extreme for the Scottish political community to stomach, but it would have done nothing to encourage Elizabeth to lend the Congregation her much-needed support. Consequently, when in October 1559 the Congregation formally 'suspended' Mary of Guise from the regency, they did so on the grounds that she was an enemy of the commonwealth rather than because she was a Catholic idolatress (pp. 171-4). Tactical considerations aside, however, Knox's attitude to Mary of Guise still appears remarkably moderate. In the debate among the Congregation which preceded her suspension, while agreeing with John Willock's views on the legitimacy of resistance, he added significant reservations: firstly, that her suspension, should not detract from the obedience owed to Mary Stewart and her husband; secondly, that it should not be motivated by 'malice and private envy'; and thirdly, that 'upon her known and open repentance, and upon her conversion to the commonwealth and submission to the nobility, place should be granted unto her of regress to the same honours from the which, for just causes, she justly might be deprived' (pp. 170-1). While the second condition is reminiscent of Bullinger's fears regarding rebellion, the others reflect a pragmatism far removed from the imperatives which Knox thought binding on a covenanted nation.

Knox's attitude underwent a marked change, however, once the intervention of Elizabeth had ensured the Congregation's success and the Reformation Parliament of August 1560 had given a Protestant settlement statutory backing. Although never ratified by Mary Stewart, the acts renouncing papal authority, abolishing the mass and adopting a Protestant Confession of Faith were assumed to have the force of law. Scotland had publicly embraced the 'true religion' and, like England under Edward VI, had entered into a covenant with God. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mary Stewart's return to Scotland in August 1561 was met by Knox with a furious tirade against the reintroduction of the mass to the heart of the realm. It threatened apostasy on a scale equal only to that of England under Mary Tudor. It also led to the first of a series of 'reasonings' with the queen during which he refused to retract the arguments against female rule laid down in the First Blast. Although, as we have seen, he maintained that it was directed primarily against Mary Tudor, he otherwise conceded only that, if the realm found 'no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman', he would be 'as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero' (p. 176). Moreover, he added that, irrespective of their gender, when 'princes exceed their bounds … and do against that wherefore they should be obeyed, it is no doubt but that they may be resisted, even by power' (p. 178). Knox was thinking here of princes who actively persecuted the faithful. Nevertheless, it was an argument capable of much broader interpretation.

If Knox's interviews with the queen were intended to charm him into silence, they did not succeed. He continued to denounce her mass from his Edinburgh pulpit and to demand that the nobility deprive her of it. Indeed, preaching on Romans 13 during a meeting of the General Assembly in June 1564, he finally applied to Scotland the arguments which in the Appellation he had reserved only for England. When asked the following day to defend his views in a debate with William Maitland of Lethington, he reaffirmed that the distinction between the office and the person of a prince empowered men to 'oppone themselves to the fury and blind rage of princes; for so they resist not God, but the devil, who abuses the sword and authority of God' (p. 192). Now, however, he did not hesitate, as he had before, to apply this in Scotland to its fullest extent. Asked by Lethington 'whether that we may and ought to suppress the Queen's mass?', Knox replied without equivocation that 'Idolatry ought not [only] to be suppressed, but the idolater ought to die the death' (p. 195). As with 'the carnal seed of Abraham', in the time of their Egyptian bondage the Scots had been obliged only to avoid idolatry, but having taken full possession of the land of Canaan they were now duty bound to suppress it (pp. 196-7). Like the English before them, they had entered into a covenant with God which bound them to fulfil the divine injunction that idolaters—including royal idolaters—must die the death.

VI

It would have marked a fitting climax to Knox's career had Mary Stewart been deposed in 1567 for her manifest idolatry rather than her alleged adultery. As it was, though he advocated her execution from the pulpit, he was already on the political sidelines and was to remain there throughout the ensuing years of civil war, revising and extending his History, until his death in 1572. To expect consistency in a writer as unsystematic as Knox, whose works were all written in haste and in response to rapidly changing circumstances, would be to expect too much. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a clear logic in the development of his ideas on rebellion and, just as importantly, in the limits of their application. Throughout his career, these limits were set, as his political vision was defined, by the intense biblicism which is the true hallmark of his thought. It is conceivable that, had he written his Second Blast of the Trumpet, he might have developed a secular theory of the accountability of kings to their subjects akin to that which he attributes in the General Assembly debate to his colleague John Craig (pp. 206-8). Yet it hardly seems likely. When a fellow member of the General Assembly, George Buchanan, published his theory of contractual monarchy in 1579, his solution to the problem posed by Romans 13 was to dismiss Paul's words as relevant only to the historical context in which they were written. Such a blatant disregard for the immutable will of God was wholly alien to the closed world of biblical precept and precedent inhabited by John Knox.