If, therefore, political and religious sympathy
led Knox himself into so grave a partiality, what was he to
expect from his disciples?
If the trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily
prepare himself for the battle? The question whether Lady
Jane Dudley was an innocent martyr, or a traitoress against
God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny had been effectually
repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind; and it was
not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox's readers concluded
that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree
of the sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the
Reformation. He should have been the more careful of such an
ambiguity of meaning, as he must have known well the lukewarm
indifference and dishonesty of his fellow-reformers in
political matters. He had already, in 1556 or 1557, talked
the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in "a private
conversation;" and the interview (1) must have been truly
distasteful to both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way
with him in theory, and owned that the "government of women
was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature,
to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments
consequent upon the fall of man." But, in practice, their
two roads separated. For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties
in the way of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and
Huldah, and in the prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be
the nursing mothers of the Church.
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