The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even before his age, in two strangely different lights.  If they were not technically “kindly tenants,” in which case their conditions of existence and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their condition written in 1549, “were in more servitude than the children of Israel in Egypt.”  Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted, hopes that the agricultural class may yet live “as substantial commoners, not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours at their own expense,” as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House.  This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and England, in place of the old and romantic league with France.  That alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their national independence.  But, with the great revolution in religion, the interest of Scotland was a permanent political league with England, which Knox did as much as any man to forward, while, by resisting a religious union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.

If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners.  In 1515 the chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam Williamson:  “You know the use of this country.  Every man speaks what he will without blame.  The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content unless he knows the master’s counsel.  There is no order among us.”

Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was minded that “A man’s a man for a’ that!” Knox was the true flower of this vigorous Lowland thistle.  Throughout life he not only “spoke what he would,” but uttered “the Truth” in such a tone as to make it unlikely that his “message” should be accepted by opponents.  Like Carlyle, however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he says, ever began on his side; while, as “a good hater,” Dr. Johnson might have admired him.  He carried into political and theological conflicts the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns.  So far Knox was an example of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn in detail about his ancestors.

The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of Haddington, in a district on the path of English invasion.  The year of his birth has long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as 1505. {4} Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely, Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James vi., told Beza that Knox died in his fifty-ninth year.  Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see, appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.