In popular books and films Mary, Queen of Scots, is usually depicted as the beautiful, innocent young woman, who is pitched against John Knox, the grumpy old religious bigot. It has become a caricature moulded by myth. Certainly, Mary was beautiful and full of charm with her French accent, and certainly her life was full of tragedy, drawing great sympathy from us. When she was first seen by the crowds on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, many fell in love with this fairy-tale queen. Even the Lords, stating that they would stand firm in their convictions, were usually melted by her, especially as she seemed to be promoting toleration. Not so with John Knox: she was a Jezebel in his eyes, a serpent in the grass, and he must keep blowing the trumpet as a watchman of the city, even if he stood alone. For him, the allowance of her private Mass in her own palace was a major setback, for ‘one Mass… was more fearful to him than if ten thousand armed enemies had landed in any part of the realm, of purpose to suppress the whole religion.’
It might seem to us in our post-modern time, that Knox was becoming extreme in his view, and even many of his Protestant friends refused to stand with him in this opinion. For Knox though, Mary was a dyed-in-the-wool de Guise, using her charm and pretended tolerance to deceive the Protestants, and when the time was right would rise up and destroy the reformers and bring Scotland back to the papacy and tyranny. In the meantime, her Masses were multiplying. Was Knox right? Or was he really overreacting? ‘Madam,’ he said to Queen Mary, after hearing that the night before she had celebrated the news of the de Guise massacre of French Protestants with dancing, ‘I am assured that your uncles are enemies to God, and unto his Son Jesus Christ; and that for maintenance of their own pomp, they spare not to spill the blood of many innocents.’
We do know that in the same year the religious war erupted in France between the Romanists and Huguenots in 1562, that Nicolas de Gouda, a Jesuit, was sent by Pope Pius IV to meet with Queen Mary to seek a way forward to bring Scotland back to Rome. On 31st January 1563, she wrote to Pope Pius IV expressing her hope that the Scottish people would ‘worthily acknowledge the holy Roman Catholic Church, in the obedience of which we wish to live your most devoted daughter. To which end we shall spare no effort in our power, even life itself, if need be.’
Queen Mary sent a letter to her uncle, Cardinal of Lorraine, deploring the fact that she was unable to send any delegates in support of the Council of Trent because of the situation in Scotland. Her desire to bring back Scotland to Rome, even if she lost her life in the process, delighted the Council there, but only two months later she made plans to make sure that forty-eight Roman Catholics were imprisoned for celebrating Mass. What was she doing? It would appear that she was acting with the same duplicity as her mother, to deceive the Protestant Lords. Again, in May 1565, when she was preparing for her second marriage to Darnley, she promised the Lords that the Protestant religion would be established, but at about the same time she and Darnley promised the pope that ‘they would defend the Catholic religion to the utmost of their power.’
About seven weeks later she made four proclamations telling the Scottish people that the Protestant faith would be safe, but only three weeks after this she wrote to Philip II, King of Spain, beseeching his help to prevent the demise of Catholicism in Scotland. This was the same king who was known to be a fanatical Romanist, and who later sent the Spanish Armada in 1588 to invade England! Mary had even sought, unsuccessfully, to marry his son and heir, Don Carlos, after the death of her first husband, Francis II, causing Knox great consternation, and leading to Mary’s angry retort, ‘What have ye to do with my marriage?’ The thought of Mary potentially becoming the Queen of Spain, France, Scotland, and England, filled him with dread.
It was clearly the Romanist intention to remove Queen Elizabeth I and place Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. Alexander Renwick, a former professor of Church History in Edinburgh wrote: ‘Philip II had indeed given instructions in 1568 to his commander-in-chief, the Duke of Alva, to do his utmost to aid the proposed rebellion in Scotland in favour of the dethroned Queen Mary.’In 1572, as Knox was stricken with a terminal sickness, he broken-heartedly heard of the brutal St Bartholomew massacre of an estimated 30,000 Protestants in France in one month. But the Romanist revolution never came to Scotland, thanks largely to the trumpet-blowing John Knox.
‘Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in My holy mountain!’ (Joel 2:1, NKJV).
Image: St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 1572, François Dubois, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.