Abstract
This is a splendid book: handsomely produced, beautifully written and doing full justice to the complex and often rebarbative personality of Scotland’s leading Protestant reformer. John Knox (1514–72) has not been well-served by his previous biographers. Almost without exception they have taken him at his word and cast him in the role of an enlightened liberator who freed Scotland from the shackles of Roman tyranny and whose precocious egalitarianism turned the Scottish Reformation into a proto-democratic revolt against Catholic tyranny. In so far as Knox is remembered at all in the early twenty-first century, it still tends to be in these simplistic whig–presbyterian terms.
Little of this comforting image survives Dawson’s thoroughly researched and judiciously argued biography. Given her expertise not only in the history of sixteenth-century Scotland, but also of England and Europe, no one is better equipped to reassess Knox’s career and to speak with equal authority of his Scottish background, the critical years he spent in England, his exile in Frankfurt and Geneva, and his last dozen years in Scotland. Dawson brings an unobtrusive but exceptional level of learning to her task that illuminates Knox’s life as never before without ever overloading with academic detail her clear and compelling prose. She also brings to light a hitherto unexplored cache of Knox’s correspondence with his close friend, the English Protestant reformer, Christopher Goodman, the first substantial new source materials relating to Knox to have been uncovered since 1875.
This does little to illuminate Knox’s early years before his conversion to Protestantism and involvement with the ministry of George Wishart. Here Dawson has to rely on reinterpreting existing evidence in context – achieved most memorably in her discussion of Wishart and the long-lasting impression he made on the young reformer. However, the Goodman correspondence is critical to the reinterpretation of the ‘troubles’ at Frankfurt where Dawson argues that Knox was totally outmanoeuvred by his opponents, his radically Scripture-based view of ‘ceremonies’ being overwhelmingly rejected by an English congregation still wedded to the 1552 Prayer Book.
In some ways, the split at Frankfurt, which propelled a disconsolate Knox to Geneva, foreshadowed the divisions between moderates and ‘puritans’ that would characterize the church in England for generations after 1558. For Knox, Geneva reinforced his abiding belief in the primacy of Scripture and the imperatives that flowed from his reading of God’s word. It also fed his frustration at events back home, in England as much as Scotland, prompting the salvo of printed pamphlets that issued from his pen in 1558, most notably the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. This is acutely analysed by Dawson, with the new Goodman correspondence adding fascinating detail as to how the two reformers reinforced each other’s thinking, while his diatribe against female government is set sensitively in the context of Knox’s own marriage to Marjorie Bowes and his role as spiritual counsellor to his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Bowes.
Knox’s relationships with women and the wider networks of friends and families that sustained him after his return to Scotland in 1559 is a leitmotif of the later chapters of the book, and Dawson evokes the intimate world of his Protestant household in illuminating detail. Not surprisingly, however, it is Knox as a public figure who dominates the stage following Elizabeth’s refusal to allow him entry into England and the preacher’s decision to return instead to Scotland. Here Dawson’s extensive knowledge of the Scottish Reformation and its aftermath, and the crucial British and European contexts within which the personal rule of Mary Queen of Scots was played out, enables her to weave Knox’s personal story into a bigger picture of diplomatic and confessional conflict over which he had lessening control. Once again exploiting the new material in the Goodman letters, she captures brilliantly Knox’s response to events before and after Mary’s overthrow in 1567 – elation, despair, vindictiveness and, increasingly, intimations of his own mortality.
Knox was only 58 when he died in November 1572, haunted by fears that the Protestant Reformations in England as well as Scotland were fragile achievements and that, as presaged by the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of August that year, the forces of a resurgent Catholicism posed as grave a threat as ever to the ‘true’ Church of Christ. Knox would have abhorred the messy political compromises that shaped the developments of the reformed British churches in their continuing fight to survive and develop. Nonetheless, as Dawson argues, his legacy for Anglophone Protestantism was profound and long-lasting, embodied in the products of his Genevan years – the Bible, the Psalter and the Form of Prayer – that were so widely used in Britain from the 1560s to the 1640s.
One is by turns repelled and captivated by Dawson’s portrait of a complex man who, though utterly convinced of his calling as God’s prophet, was nonetheless prone to serious bouts of guilt and depression, and who was as capable of hateful vindictiveness as he was of gentle pastoral persuasion. This is surely as close to the ‘real’ Knox as we are ever likely to come.