Knox
shall marry a very near kinswoman of the Duke's, a Lord's
daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of age." (1)
He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
mad a story. And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564,
Margaret Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of
Ochiltree, aged seventeen, was duly united to John Knox,
Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh, aged fifty-nine, -
to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride, and I
would fain hope of many others for more humane
considerations. "In this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had
done otherwise." The Consistory of Geneva, "that most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the
days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help
wondering whether the old Reformer's conscience did not
uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good custom of
his religious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and-forty
years that separated him from his poor bride. Fitly enough,
we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she appears at
her husband's deathbed, eight years after. She bore him
three daughters in the interval; and I suppose the poor
child's martyrdom was made as easy for her as might be. She
was extremely attentive to him "at the end, we read and he
seems to have spoken to her with some confidence.
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