John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer
to Knox, under the title of AN HARBOUR FOR FAITHFUL AND TRUE
SUBJECTS AGAINST THE LATE BLOWN BLAST, CONCERNING THE
GOVERNMENT OF WOMEN. (1) And certainly he was a thought more
acute, a thought less precipitate and simple, than his
adversary. He is not to be led away by such captious terms
as NATURAL AND UNNATURAL. It is obvious to him that a
woman's disability to rule is not natural in the same sense
in which it is natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn.
He is doubtful, on the whole, whether this disability be
natural at all; nay, when he is laying it down that a woman
should not be a priest, he shows some elementary conception
of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
"The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that
they cannot have the necessary qualifications, "for they are
not brought upon learning in schools, nor trained in
disputation." And even so, he can ask, "Are there not in
England women, think you, that for learning and wisdom could
tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any Sir
John there?" For all that, his advocacy is weak. If women's
rule is not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very
existence, it is neither so convenient nor so profitable as
the government of men. He holds England to be specially
suitable for the government of women, because there the
governor is more limited and restrained by the other members
of the constitution than in other places; and this argument
has kept his book from being altogether forgotten.
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