Part 17

KNOX, HENRY (1750-1806), American general, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, of Scottish-Irish parentage, on the 25th of July 1750. He was prominent in the colonial militia and tried to keep the Boston crowd and the British soldiers from the clash known as the Boston massacre (1770). In 1771 he opened the "London Book-Store" in Boston. He had read much of tactics and strategy, joined the American army at the outbreak of the War of Independence, and fought at Bunker Hill, planned the defences of the camps of the army before Boston, and brought from Lake George and border forts much-needed artillery. At Trenton he crossed the river before the main body, and in the attack rendered such good service that he was made brigadier-general and chief of artillery in the Continental army on the following day. He was present at Princeton; was chiefly responsible for the mistake in attacking the "Chew House" at Germantown; urged New York as the objective of the campaign of 1778; served with efficiency at Monmouth and at Yorktown; and after the surrender of Cornwallis was promoted major-general, and served as a commissioner on the exchange of prisoners. His services throughout the war were of great value to the American cause; he was one of General Washington's most trusted advisers, and he brought the artillery to a high degree of efficiency. From December 1783 until June 1784 he was the senior officer of the United States army. In April 1783 he had drafted a scheme of a society to be formed by the American officers and the French officers who had served in America during the war, and to be called the "Cincinnati"; of this society he was the first secretary-general (1783-1799) and in 1805 became vice-president-general. In 1785-1794 Knox was secretary of war, being the first man to hold this position after the organization of the Federal government in 1789. He urged ineffectually a national militia system, to enroll all citizens over 18 and under 60 in the "advanced corps," the "main corps" or the "reserve," and for this and his close friendship with Washington was bitterly assailed by the Republicans. In 1793 he had begun to build his house, Montpelier, at Thomaston, Maine, where he speculated unsuccessfully in the holdings of the Eastern Land Association; and he lived there until his death on the 25th of October 1806.

See F. S. Drake, _Memoir of General Henry Knox_ (Boston, 1873); and Noah Brooks, _Henry Knox_ (New York, 1900) in the "American Men of Energy" series.

KNOX, JOHN (c. 1505-1572), Scottish reformer and historian. Of his early life very little is certainly known, in spite of the fact that his _History of the Reformation_ and his private letters, especially the latter, are often vividly autobiographical. Even the year of his birth, usually given as 1505, is matter of dispute. Beza, in his _Icones_, published in 1580, makes it 1515; Sir Peter Young (tutor to James VI. of Scotland), writing to Beza from Edinburgh in 1579, says 1513; and a strong case has been made out for holding that the generally accepted date is due to an error in transcription (see Dr Hay Fleming in the _Bookman_, Sept. 1905). But Knox seems to have been reticent about his early life, even to his contemporaries. What is known is that he was a son of William Knox, who lived in or near the town of Haddington, that his mother's name was Sinclair, and that his forefathers on both sides had fought under the banner of the Bothwells. William Knox was "simple," not "gentle"--perhaps a prosperous East Lothian peasant. But he sent his son John to school (no doubt the well-known grammar school of Haddington), and thereafter to the university, where, like his contemporary George Buchanan, he sat "at the feet" of John Major. Major was a native of Haddington, who had recently returned to Scotland from Paris with a great academical reputation. He retained to the last, as his _History of Greater Britain_ shows, the repugnance characteristic of the university of Paris to the tyranny of kings and nobles; but like it, he was now alarmed by the revolt of Luther, and ceased to urge its ancient protest against the supremacy of the pope. He exchanged his "regency" or professorship in Glasgow University for one in that of St Andrews in 1523. If Knox's college time was later than that date (as it must have been, if he was born near 1515), it was no doubt spent, as Beza narrates, at St Andrews, and probably exclusively there. But in Major's last Glasgow session a "Joannes Knox" (not an uncommon name, however, at that time in the west of Scotland) matriculated there; and if this were the future reformer, he may thereafter either have followed his master to St Andrews or returned from Glasgow straight to Haddington. But till twenty years after that date his career has not been again traced. Then he reappears in his native district as a priest without a university degree (Sir John Knox) and a notary of the diocese of St Andrews. In 1543 he certainly signed himself "minister of the sacred altar" under the archbishop of St Andrews. But in 1546 he was carrying a two-handed sword in defence of the reformer George Wishart, on the day when the latter was arrested by the archbishop's order. Knox would have resisted, though the arrest was by his feudal superior, Lord Bothwell; but Wishart himself commanded his submission, with the words "One is sufficient for a sacrifice," and was handed over for trial at St Andrews. And next year the archbishop himself had been murdered, and Knox was preaching in St Andrews a fully developed Protestantism.

Knox gives us no information as to how this startling change in himself was brought about. During those twenty years Scotland had been slowly tending to freedom in religious profession, and to friendship with England rather than with France. The Scottish hierarchy, by this time corrupt and even profligate, saw the twofold danger and met it firmly. James V., the "Commons' King" had put himself into the hands of the Beatons, who in 1528 burned Patrick Hamilton. On James's death there was a slight reaction, but the cardinal-archbishop took possession of the weak regent Arran, and in 1546 burned George Wishart. England had by this time rejected the pope's supremacy. In Scotland by a recent statute it was death even to argue against it; and Knox after Wishart's execution was fleeing from place to place, when, hearing that certain gentlemen of Fife had slain the cardinal and were in possession of his castle of St Andrews, he gladly joined himself to them. In St Andrews he taught "John's Gospel" and a certain catechism--probably that which Wishart had got from "Helvetia" and translated; but his teaching was supposed to be private and tutorial and for the benefit of his friends' "bairns." The men about him however--among them Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, "Lyon King" and poet--saw his capacity for greater things, and, on his at first refusing "to run where God had not called him," planned a solemn appeal to Knox from the pulpit to accept "the public office and charge of preaching." At the close of it the speaker (in Knox's own narrative) "said to those that were present, 'Was not this your charge to me? And do ye not approve this vocation?' They answered, 'It was, and we approve it.' Whereat the said Johnne, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber," remaining there in "heaviness" for days, until he came forth resolved and prepared. Knox is probably not wrong in regarding this strange incident as the spring of his own public life. The St Andrews invitation was really one to danger and death; John Rough, who spoke it, died a few years after in the flames at Smithfield. But it was a call which many in that ardent dawn were ready to accept, and it had now at length found, or made, a statesman and leader of men. For what to the others was chiefly a promise of personal salvation became for the indomitable will of Knox an assurance also of victory, even in this world, over embattled forces of ancient wrong. It is certain at least that from this date he never changed and scarcely even varied his public course. And looking back upon that course afterwards, he records with much complacency how his earliest St Andrews sermon built up a whole fabric of aggressive Protestantism upon Puritan theory, so that his startled hearers muttered, "Others sned (snipped) the branches; this man strikes at the root."

Meantime the system attacked was safe for other thirteen years. In June 1547 St Andrews yielded to the French fleet, and the prisoners, including Knox, were thrown into the galleys on the Loire, to remain in irons and under the lash for at least nineteen months. Released at last (apparently through the influence of the young English king, Edward VI.), Knox was appointed one of the licensed preachers of the new faith for England, and stationed in the great garrison of Berwick, and afterwards at Newcastle. In 1551 he seems to have been made a royal chaplain; in 1552 he was certainly offered an English bishopric, which he declined; and during most of this year he used his influence, as preacher at court and in London, to make the new English settlement more Protestant. To him at least is due the Prayer-book rubric which explains that, when kneeling at the sacrament is ordered, "no adoration is intended or ought to be done." While in Northumberland Knox had been betrothed to Margaret Bowes, one of the fifteen children of Richard Bowes, the captain of Norham Castle. Her mother, Elizabeth, co-heiress of Aske in Yorkshire, was the earliest of that little band of women-friends whose correspondence with Knox on religious matters throws an unexpected light on his discriminating tenderness of heart. But now Mary Tudor succeeded her brother, and Knox in March 1554 escaped into five years' exile abroad, leaving Mrs. Bowes a fine treatise on "Affliction," and sending back to England two editions of a more acrid "Faithful Admonition" on the crisis there. He first drifted to Frankfort, where the English congregation divided as English Protestants have always done, and the party opposed to Knox got rid of him at last by a complaint to the authorities of treason against the emperor Charles V. as well as Philip and Mary. At Geneva he found a more congenial pastorate. Christopher Goodman (c. 1520-1603) and he, with other exiles, began there the Puritan tradition, and prepared the earlier English version of the Bible, "the household book of the English-speaking nations" during the great age of Elizabeth. Here, and afterwards at Dieppe (where he preached in French), Knox kept in communication with the other Reformers, studied Greek and Hebrew in the interest of theology, and having brought his wife and her mother from England in 1555 lived for years a peaceful life.

But even here Knox was preparing for Scotland, and facing the difficulties of the future, theoretical as well as practical. In his first year abroad he consulted Calvin and Bullinger as to the right of the civil "authority" to prescribe religion to his subjects--in

## particular, whether the godly should obey "a magistrate who enforces

idolatry and condemns true religion," and whom should they join "in the case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous sovereign." In August 1555 be visited his native country and found the queen-mother, Mary of Lorraine, acting as regent in place of the real "sovereign," the youthful and better-known Mary, now being brought up at the court of France. Scripture-reading and the new views had spread widely, and the regent was disposed to wink at this in the case of the "religious nobility." Knox was accordingly allowed to preach privately for six months throughout the south of Scotland, and was listened to with an enthusiasm which made him break out, "O sweet were the death which should follow such forty days in Edinburgh as here I have had three!" Before leaving he even addressed a letter to the regent, urging her to favour the Evangel. She accepted it jocularly as a "pasquil," and Knox on his departure was condemned and burned in effigy. But he left behind him a "Wholesome Counsel" to Scottish heads of families, reminding them that within their own houses they were "bishop and kings," and recommending the institution of something like the early apostolic worship in private congregations. Of the Protestant barons Knox, though in exile, seems to have been henceforward the chief adviser; and before the end of 1557 they, under the name of the "Lords of the Congregation," had entered into the first of the religious "bands" or "covenants" afterwards famous in Scotland. In 1558 he published his "Appellation" to the nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death recently pronounced upon him, and along with it a stirring appeal "To his beloved brethren, the Commonalty of Scotland," urging that the care of religion fell to them also as being "God's creatures, created and formed in His own image," and having a right to defend their conscience against persecution. About this time, indeed, there was in Scotland a remarkable approximation to that solution of the toleration difficulty which later ages have approved; for the regent was understood to favour the demand of the "congregation" that at least the penal statutes against heretics "be suspended and abrogated," and "that it be lawful to us to use ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as we must answer to God." It was a consummation too ideal for that early date; and next year the regent, whose daughter was now queen of France and there mixed up with the persecuting policy of the Guises, forbade the reformed preaching in Scotland. A rupture ensued at once, and Knox appeared in Edinburgh on the 2nd of May 1559 "even in the brunt of the battle." He was promptly "blown to the horn" at the Cross there as an outlaw, but escaped to Dundee, and commenced public preaching in the chief towns of central Scotland. At Perth and at St Andrews his sermons were followed by the destruction of the monasteries, institutions disliked in that age in Scotland alike by the devout and the profane. But while he notes that in Perth the act was that of "the rascal multitude," he was glad to claim in St Andrews the support of the civic "authority"; and indeed the burghs, which were throughout Europe generally in favour of freedom, soon became in Scotland a main support of the Reformation. Edinburgh was still doubtful, and the queen regent held the castle; but a truce between her and the lords for six months to the 1st of January 1560 was arranged on the footing that every man there "may have freedom to use his own conscience to the day foresaid"--a freedom interpreted to let Knox and his brethren preach publicly and incessantly.

Scotland, like its capital, was divided. Both parties lapsed from the freedom-of-conscience solution to which each when unsuccessful appealed; both betook themselves to arms; and the immediate future of the little kingdom was to be decided by its external alliances. Knox now took a leading part in the great transaction by which the friendship of France was exchanged for that of England. He had one serious difficulty. Before Elizabeth's accession to the English crown, and after the queen mother in Scotland had disappointed his hopes, he had published a treatise against what he called "The Monstrous Regiment (regimen or government) of Women"; though the despotism of that despotic age was scarcely appreciably worse when it happened to be in female hands. Elizabeth never forgave him; but Cecil corresponded with the Scottish lords, and their answer in July 1559, in Knox's handwriting, assures England not only of their own constancy, but of "a charge and commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between you and us, contracted and begun in Christ Jesus, may by them be kept inviolated for ever." The league was promised by England; but the army of France was first in the field, and towards the end of the year drove the forces of the "congregation" from Leith into Edinburgh, and then out of it in a midnight rout to Stirling--"that dark and dolorous night," as Knox long afterwards said, "wherein all ye, my lords, with shame and fear left this town," and from which only a memorable sermon by their great preacher roused the despairing multitude into new hope. Their leaders renounced allegiance to the regent; she ended her not unkindly, but as Knox calls it "unhappy," life in the castle of Edinburgh; the English troops, after the usual Elizabethan delays and evasions, joined their Scots allies; and the French embarked from Leith. On the 6th of July 1560 a treaty was at last made, nominally between Elizabeth and the queen of France and Scotland; while Cecil instructed his mistress's plenipotentiaries to agree "that the government of Scotland be granted to the nation of the land." The revolution was in the meantime complete; and Knox, who takes credit for having done much to end the enmity with England which was so long thought necessary for Scotland's independence, was strangely enough destined, beyond all other men, to leave the stamp of a more inward independence upon his country and its history.

At the first meeting of the Estates, in August 1560, the Protestants were invited to present a confession of their faith. Knox and three others drafted it, and were present when it was offered and read to the parliament. The statute-book says it was "by the estates of Scotland ratified and approved, as wholesome and sound doctrine grounded upon the infallible truth of God's word." The Scots confession, though of course drawn up independently, is in substantial accord with the others then springing up in the countries of the Reformation, but is Calvinist rather than Lutheran. It remained for two centuries the authorized Scottish creed, though in the first instance the faith of only a fragment of the people. Yet its approval became the basis for three acts passed a week later; the first of which, abolishing the pope's authority and jurisdiction in Scotland, may perhaps have been consistent with toleration, as the second, rescinding old statutes which had established and enforced that and other catholic tenets, undoubtedly was. But the third, inflicting heavy penalties, with death on a third conviction, on those who should celebrate mass or even be present at it, showed that the reformer and his friends had crossed the line, and that their position could no longer be described as, in Knox's words, "requiring nothing but the liberty of conscience, and our religion and fact to be tried by the word of God." He was prepared indeed to fall back upon that, in the event of the Estates at any time refusing sanction to either church or creed, as their sovereign in Paris promptly refused it. But the parliament of 1560 gave no express sanction to the Reformed Church, and Knox did not wait until it should do so. Already "in our towns and places reformed," as the Confession puts it, there were local or "particular kirks," and these grew and spread and were provincially united, till, in the last month of this memorable year, the first General Assembly of their representatives met, and became the "universal kirk," or "the whole church convened." It had before it the plan for church government and maintenance, drafted in August at the same time with the Confession, under the name of _The Book of Discipline_, and by the same framers. Knox was even more clearly in this case the chief author, and he had by this time come to desire a much more rigid Presbyterianism than he had sketched in his "Wholesome Counsel" of 1555. In planning it he seems to have used his acquaintance with the "Ordonnances" of the Genevan Church under Calvin, and with the "Forma" of the German Church in London under John Laski (or A. Lasco). Starting with "truth" contained in Scripture as the church's foundation, and the Word and Sacraments as means of building it up, it provides ministers and elders to be elected by the congregations, with a subordinate class of "readers," and by their means sermons and prayers each "Sunday" in every parish. In large towns these were to be also on other days, with a weekly meeting for conference or "prophesying." The "plantation" of new churches is to go on everywhere under the guidance of higher church officers called superintendents. All are to help their brethren, "for no man may be permitted to live as best pleaseth him within the Church of God." And above all things the young and the ignorant are to be instructed, the former by a regular gradation or ladder of parish or elementary schools, secondary schools and universities. Even the poor were to be fed by the Church's hands; and behind its moral influence, and a discipline over both poor and rich, was to be not only the coercive authority of the civil power but its money. Knox had from the first proclaimed that "the teinds (tithes of yearly fruits) by God's law do not appertain of necessity to the kirkmen." And this book now demands that out of them "must not only the ministers be sustained, but also the poor and schools." But Knox broadens his plan so as to claim also the property which had been really gifted to the Church by princes and nobles--given by them indeed, as he held, without any moral right and to the injury of the people, yet so as to be Church patrimony. From all such property, whether land or the sheaves and fruits of land, and also from the personal property of burghers in the towns, Knox now held that the state should authorize the kirk to claim the salaries of the ministers, and the salaries of teachers in the schools and universities, but above all, the relief of the poor--not only of the absolutely "indigent" but of "your poor brethren, the labourers and handworkers of the ground." For the danger now was that some gentlemen were already cruel in exactions of their tenants, "requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so that the papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lords or of the laird." The danger foreseen alike to the new Church, and to the commonalty and poor, began to be fulfilled a month later, when the lords, some of whom had already acquired, as others were about to acquire, much of the Church property, declined to make any of it over for Knox's magnificent scheme. It was, they said, "a devout imagination." Seven years afterwards, however, when the contest with the Crown was ended, the kirk was expressly acknowledged as the only Church in Scotland, and jurisdiction given it over all who should attempt to be outsiders; while the preaching of the Evangel and the planting of congregations went on in all the accessible parts of Scotland. Gradually too stipends for most Scottish parishes were assigned to the ministers out of the yearly _teinds_; and the Church received--what it retained even down to recent times--the administration both of the public schools and of the Poor Law of Scotland. But the victorious rush of 1560 was already somewhat stayed, and the very next year raised the question whether the transfer of intolerance to the side of the new faith was as wise as it had at first seemed to be successful.