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Updated: June 8, 2025
Abating his intrigue and ambition, he was a most estimable man, and deserved the affections of the nation, which he retained until his death. M'Crie, in his Life of Knox, represents him as a model of Christian virtue and integrity, and every way worthy of the place he held in the affections of his party.
M'Crie says of David Dickson that he was singularly successful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to the Redeemer, and all that we know of Dickson bears out that high estimate.
But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste.
It is time to part from the public life of the greatest public man whom Scotland has known. That side of Knox's work, attractively presented to the world at first in the memorable biography of Dr Thomas M'Crie, has been admirably restated by Dr Hume Brown for a later age and from his own judicial standpoint. But Knox's public life was not the whole of his work: in bulk, it was a small part of it.
Locke that the Regent outlawed "the assisters" of the preachers. Dr. M'Crie publishes an extract from the "Justiciary Records" of May 10, in which Methuen, Christison, Harlaw, and Willock, and no others, are put to the horn, or outlawed, in absence, for breach of the Regent's proclamations, and for causing "tumults and seditions."
Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in Old Mortality.
M'Crie, indeed, says that on hearing of the affair of Vassy, the Queen "immediately after gave a splendid ball to her foreign servants." The Queen sent for Knox, and made "a long harangue," of which he does not report one word. He gives his own oration. Mary then said that she could not expect him to like her uncles, as they differed in religion.
Then came the Court of High Commission, instituted for the purpose of compelling the "faithful" ministers to acknowledge the bishops appointed by the king a court called into existence by royal proclamation, "a sort of English Inquisition," writes Dr. M'Crie, "composed of prelates, noblemen, knights, and ministers, and possessing the combined power of a civil and ecclesiastical tribunal."
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