When Mary Tudor ascended to the English throne in 1553, after the death of Edward VI, she was driven by the desire to reverse all of the Protestant activity of her teenage step-brother, and bring the nation full throttle back to Rome. Within a few years she was rounding up many Protestant ‘heretics’ and almost 300 perished by burning, among them being Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Bishops Latimer, Ridley and Hooper. John Knox fled to Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany, where for a time he led the English-speaking refugee church. The Englishman, Christopher Goodman, joined him there and became his close friend.
Goodman was born in about 1519 in Chester and went on to study divinity at Oxford University, where he became the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity from about 1548 until 1554, when he fled the carnage of ‘Bloody Mary’. However, his life was entwined with Knox and Scotland. He became co-pastor with Knox at the English-speaking congregation in Geneva during the great persecution, where he also assisted Miles Coverdale and others in the production of the Geneva Bible, which became the primary bible text for the English-speaking Protestants of the 16th century.
In 1558, inspired by Knox’s bold example of a tract called The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, he produced his own treatise called How superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects: and wherin they may lawfully by Gods Worde be disobeyed and resisted.
At the request of Knox, he came up later to Edinburgh, where he was appointed the minister of the reformed church in Ayr in November 1559. Goodman was among the first twelve ministers in the newly established Church of Scotland and was present at the first General Assembly which met in Magdalen Chapel on 20th December, 1560, after which he was appointed to lead the work in St Andrews, as Knox’s right-hand man. As such, he played a significant part in steering the fledgling Protestant Church in Scotland.
In 1565 he became embroiled with James Stewart, Earl of Moray, over the issue of Mary Queen of Scots marrying her cousin, Lord Darnley. Their opposition backfired, and they wisely fled to England. Although Goodman never returned to Scotland, he was appointed as chaplain to Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Having been inspired by Knox’s vision for universal education, Goodman used his influence to stir the otherwise controversial Sidney to establish schools in Ireland. In 1603 Goodman died in Chester.
Although his scholarship and influence for education were significant in Scotland for the Protestant cause, probably his most important role was that of being John Knox’s close friend and encourager, who through the constant assault course of betrayals, slander, strife, and birth pains of the Scottish Protestant Church, needed a constant supporter, just as Moses needed his friends, Aaron and Hur, to lift up his hands in prayer. More than that, he was Knox’s sounding-board, a man of rock-like integrity from whom he could seek counsel. Of this David-Jonathan covenant friendship, Knox could write in a letter to him: ‘God made you to bear with me to the comfort of many in the time most dangerous.’ To his friend Anne Locke, in a time of depression, he wrote that he missed ‘my deir brother, Mr Gudman, whose presence I more thrist [thirst] than she that is my own fleshe [Knox’s wife].’ Just as Barnabas was to Paul in the early church as an encourager, so was Goodman to Knox.
‘A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity’ (Proverbs 17:17, NKJV)