ABSTRACT
Poor John Knox. My text is taken from the first three words of the opening sentence of Jane Dawson's fascinating article, 'The Scottish Reformation and the Theatre of Martyrdom'. 1 Her sympathy was directed to the sense of inferiority Knox felt when he wrote his Scottish martyrology, the first book of the History of the Reformation in Scot land·, for, unlike his more fortunate English friend John Foxe (if 'fortunate' is the word), whose Book of Martyrs was stuffed with examples of those who died for their faith, Knox was somewhat strapped for lack of martyrs, even if he did succeed in discovering rather more than he had at first thought. And indeed, given the vigour and passion of Knox's prose style, and his burning desire to present a picture of a suffering and oppressed Scotland delivered from bondage by God, one may well sympathize with him; for undoubtedly his abhorred Scottish Regent, Mary of Guise, and her daughter whom he characterized as the Scottish Jezebel, let him down very badly by an infuriating tolerance which allowed Scottish Protestants to live their lives singularly free from that persecution visited on their English counterparts by the English Jezebel Mary Tudor, and so necessary to his vision of the heroic struggle of God's chosen people. Already, therefore, the stakes look a little lower than Knox claimed. His problem in depicting the 1550s, when Mary Queen of Scots was in France and her mother was in control, was that the Regent, while giving the Scottish Protestants little chance to advance their cause, had equally given them no chance to be martyrs. But the replacement of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1558 with 221her sister Elizabeth, the death of the Regent in June 1560, and English intervention in Scotland which saw the withdrawal of her French troops, gave Scottish Protestants their chance at last; and it was seized with enthusiasm in the Reformation Parliament of August 1560, which abolished the authority of the Pope and the saying of Mass, and issued one of the most moving Confessions of Faith of the sixteenth century. 2
