Knox was now requested to consult Calvin, “and the learned in other Kirks, to know their judgment in that question.”  The question, judging from Makgill’s interpellation, was “whether subjects might lawfully take her Mass from the Queen.” {241b} As we know, Knox had already put the question to Calvin by a letter of October 24, 1561, and so had the anonymous writer of November 18, 1561, whom I identify with Arran.  Knox now refused to write to “Mr. Calvin, and the learned of other Kirks,” saying (I must quote him textually, or be accused of misrepresentation), “I myself am not only fully resolved in conscience, but also I have heard the judgments in this, and all other things that I have affirmed in this Realm, of the most godly and most learned that be known in Europe.  I come not to this Realm without their resolution; and for my assurance I have the handwritings of many; and therefore if I should move the same question again, what else should I do but either show my own ignorance and forgetfulness, or else inconstancy?” {241c} He therefore said that his opponents might themselves “write and complain upon him,” and so learn “the plain minds” of the learned—­but nobody took the trouble.  Knox’s defence was worded with the skill of a notary.  He said that he had “heard the judgments” of “the learned and godly”; he did not say what these judgments were.  Calvin, Morel, Bullinger, and such men, we know, entirely differed from his extreme ideas.  He “came not without their resolution,” or approval, to Scotland, but that was not the question at issue.

If Knox had received from Calvin favourable replies to his own letter, and Arran’s, of October 24, November 18, 1561, can any one doubt that he would now have produced them, unless he did not wish the brethren to find out that he himself had written without their knowledge?  We know what manner of answers he received, in 1554, orally from Calvin, in writing from Bullinger, to his questions about resistance to the civil power. {242a} I am sceptical enough to suppose that, if Knox had now possessed letters from Calvin, justifying the propositions which he was maintaining, such as that “the people, yea, or ane pairt of the people, may execute God’s jugementis against their King, being ane offender,” {242b} he would have exhibited them.  I do not believe that he had any such letters from such men as Bullinger and Calvin.  Indeed, we may ask whether the question of the Queen’s Mass had arisen in any realm of Europe except Scotland.  Where was there a Catholic prince ruling over a Calvinistic state?  If nowhere, then the question would not be raised, except by Knox in his letter to Calvin of October 24, 1561.  And where was Calvin’s answer, and to what effect?