With this view Knox, who was a statesman, and not the mere crazy
fanatic and demagogue that he is sometimes mistaken for, winked at
the moral irregularities of Morton, and would even have joined the
General Assembly in making him an ‘Elder,’ if he had not himself,
though quite free from scruples, felt that this would have been
putting on rather too much; while Buchanan gave him every support in
his power, and as internal evidence shows, wrote for him the Memorial
demanded by Elizabeth at the final London Conference, in which the
right of the Scottish nation to depose Mary from her regal office is
defended on the same principles and often in the same language as are
employed in the _Detectio_, the _De Jure_, the _History_, and indeed
all through Buchanan’s writings. After Knox’s death he still pursued
the anti-Marian and pro-Elizabethan policy, but with a difference. To
complete the unity of Scottish and English Protestantism, Morton sought
to reduce the Scottish Church to the same level with the English--that
is, to make it Episcopal and Erastian. When he made this proposal
he was fully aware of the opposition on which he had to reckon; for
although he made very light of the other Presbyterian clergy, and
indeed told some of them who kept boring him beyond endurance that he
might have some of them ‘hanged’ if they did not take care, he knew
that in Knox he met a man who was not afraid of him, or any one, or
anything else, and who was the one man in Scotland who was a stronger
man than himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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