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They sat along the four sides of the large drawing-room, looking like a black dado against the white walls, and the Rev. Cecil Wray Goodchild, the pastor of the larger number of that sombre flock, sonorously read the prayers for the dead. Hugh Knox felt that his was the right to perform that ceremony; but he was a Presbyterian, and Peter Lytton was not one of his converts.
His countrymen of his own order had long displayed these peculiarities of humour. The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even before his age, in two strangely different lights.
The Council ought not to be thus influenced by "glorious and unquiet spirits." Cranmer calls Knox, as Throckmorton later called Queen Mary's Bothwell, "glorious" in the sense of the Latin gloriosus, "swaggering," or "arrogant."
That was the burning at the stake of Wishart on the campus in front of Saint Andrews. That his Alma Mater should lend itself to such a horrible crime in the name of justice caused Knox to break forth in curses that reached the ears of those in power, and had he not fled, the Fate that overtook Wishart would have been his.
And its absurdity would have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social and political life, which was nevertheless ripening into a State of the American Union. Yet if General Knox could be roused from his grave at Thomaston, he would see the dream realized.
As to his actual predictions of events, he occasionally writes as if they were mere deductions from Scripture. God will punish the idolater; A or B is an idolater; therefore it is safe to predict that God will punish him or her. But if the art of prophecy is common to all Bible-reading mankind, all mankind, being prophets, may promulgate treason, which Knox perhaps would not have admitted.
In the opening of 1563 they resolved "to put to their own hands," and without further plaint to Queen or Council to carry out "the punishment that God had appointed to idolaters in his law." In Mary's eyes such a resolve was rebellion. But her remonstrances only drew a more formal doctrine of resistance from Knox.
At the request of the Lords, she saw Willock, and said, as she naturally would, that "there was no salvation but in and by the death of Jesus Christ." "She was compelled . . . to approve the chief head of our religion, wherein we dissent from all papists and popery." Knox had strange ideas about the creed which he opposed.
So upon Mary's half-compulsory abdication, Moray became Regent for the infant King, who was crowned at Stirling, Knox preaching the coronation sermon. It was the second great climax of Knox's life; and now his public work was done. We shall not find it necessary to follow his later years in detail. They were troubled by ineffectual attempts to reverse the verdict of the people already given.
Knox would not serve; and his ill temper, irritated still further by the apparent preference of the President and by the talk of his immediate circle, prevailed. On the other hand, Pinckney, one of the most generous and patriotic of men, accepted service at once without a syllable of complaint on the score that he had ranked Hamilton in the former war.
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