JOHN KNOX: NATIONAL HERO

The providential-unionist interpretation of the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce might seem unusual in the early twenty-first century, yet few would argue that these patriot heroes are unworthy of a prominent place in the nation's collective memory. Seen from the perspective of modern Scottish nationalism, the unionist element of the Victorian Wallace is selfevidently ‘wrong’, yet even the most ardent nationalist would agree that nineteenth-century Scots were quite correct to call upon Wallace as one of the founders of Scottish nationality. Wallace, Bruce, Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn still matter; their significance has endured. John Knox is different. Whereas Wallace remains a selfless patriot, sacrificing all for his country's freedom, more often than not we see John Knox as almost single-handedly ruining Scotland. Sombre, humourless and narrow-minded, Knox turned the nation away from a flowering renaissance culture in favour of a doom-mongering Calvinism, obsessed with dull sobriety, petty morality and pious money-grubbing. In the Prologue to his 2001 account of the Reformer's life titled John Knox: Democrat, Roderick Graham suggests that the modern Scottish view of Knox is of a ‘ranting, vain, dogmatic misogynist’. This is by no means a recent reading of the Great Reformer. In his biography of Knox from 1929, Edwin Muir assessed the influence of Knox on Scotland, citing one element of the Reformer's legacy, the Kirk Session, as having introduced ‘a sordid and general tyranny’. While Knox's Calvinism ‘stiffened the independent political spirit of the people’, Muir claimed it also ‘imposed a spiritual and moral tyranny’.

That Muir should emphasise forms of tyranny as a feature of Knox's legacy emphasises how rapidly memories of the Great Reformer could change. Compare Muir's depiction of a Calvinist tyrant with the picture painted by the former Scottish Secretary and prominent Established Churchman, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, at the unveiling of the statue to Knox in St Giles’ Cathedral some twenty-five years earlier: