Chapter 9

KNOX ON THE ANABAPTISTS: HIS APPEAL TO ENGLAND: 1558-1559

While the inevitable Revolution was impending in Scotland, Knox was living at Geneva. He may have been engaged on his "Answer" to the "blasphemous cavillations" of an Anabaptist, his treatise on Predestination. Laing thought that this work was "chiefly written" at Dieppe, in February-April 1559, but as it contains more than 450 pages it is probably a work of longer time than two months. In November 1559 the English at Geneva asked leave to print the book, which was granted, provided that the name of Geneva did not appear as the place of printing; the authorities knowing of what Knox was capable from the specimen given in his "First Blast." There seem to be several examples of the Genevan edition, published by Crispin in 1560; the next edition, less rare, is of 1591 (London). {101}

The Anabaptist whom Knox is discussing had been personally known to him, and had lucid intervals. "Your chief Apollos," he had said, addressing the Calvinists, "be persecutors, on whom the blood of Servetus crieth a vengeance. . . . They have set forth books affirming it to be lawful to persecute and put to death such as dissent from them in controversies of religion. . . . Notwithstanding they, before they came to authority, were of another judgment, and did both say and write that no man ought to be persecuted for his conscience' sake. . . ." {102a} Knox replied that Servetus was a blasphemer, and that Moses had been a more wholesale persecutor than the Edwardian burners of Joan of Kent, and the Genevan Church which roasted Servetus {102b} (October 1553). He incidentally proves that he was better than his doctrine. In England an Anabaptist, after asking for secrecy, showed him a manuscript of his own full of blasphemies. "In me I confess there was great negligence, that neither did retain his book nor present him to the magistrate" to burn. Knox could not have done that, for the author "earnestly required of me closeness and fidelity," which, probably, Knox promised. Indeed, one fancies that his opinions and character would have been in conflict if a chance of handing an idolater over to death had been offered to him. {102c}

The death of Mary Tudor on November 17, 1558, does not appear to have been anticipated by him. The tidings reached him before January 12, 1559, when he wrote from Geneva a singular "Brief Exhortation to England for the Spedie Embrasing of Christ's Gospel heretofore by the Tyrannie of Marie Suppressed and Banished."

The gospel to be embraced by England is, of course, not nearly so much Christ's as John Knox's, in its most acute form and with its most absolute, intolerant, and intolerable pretensions. He begins by vehemently rebuking England for her "shameful defection" and by threatening God's "horrible vengeances which thy monstrous