Flying Scotsman
The Thundering Scot. By Geddes MacGregor. (Macmillan, 25s.) The Tyrannous Reign of Mary Stewart: George Buchanan's Account. Edited by W. A. Gatherer. (Edinburgh U.P., 25s.)
THE Scottish Reformers told their own story and came out of it very well. George Buchanan told it as favourably as any; his annals are perhaps the clearest case of the 'pragmatistic' history, in Pro- fessor MacGregor's sanguine phrase, with which they sweetened their .performance. And now Professor MacGregor himself has told it all over again. Like Edwin Muir he has written a popular life of John Knox based on the standard biographies, but unlike Muir, whom he puts aside as out of touch with Knox's deepest feelings, he has written a work of almost unrelieved praise. A notable Presbyterian minister himself, he has no doubts whatsoever about Knox's personal charac- ter (the religion has come a long way from the days when Calvinists could say 'the best that we can do is a little lobe pardoned'), and he bases his account on the assumption that Catholicism in Scotland had erred well beyond the point at which any good or Christian people could be found to call them- selves by the old name. The book seems toll been written for a Scottish-American publiet,81 smiles and innocence, who needed to be told 0113 monks wore tonsures : this led to a very Scent' American title. Though it is packed with foi; ful guesswork about how people felt about th:, and that, it leaves the facts alone and prefers,,, do its sweetening through interpretation. It is written in a smooth and pretty style. The whAclij effect, however, is to remind one that if Muir '4 not write for the converted and left out rrdt;', too much religion, he did at least write for aduir, Knox, it seems, was all things good and beauti ful. The shouts of his megalomania are dila° p away as strokes of righteous indignation : his resentments' were lodged in a 'generous heart, ri was neither ranting nor despotic. The lies hisI9,,r told were not 'barefaced lies.' When Knox fell ',he with some of his Frankfurt congregation over ;A use of the English prayer book, his uncontrot attacks on the 'roisterers of the opposing setio; 'not undeserved.' And when he arrived in Gene'oi where Calvinism has been established by r1ear15,1,e 'gaol, torture and execution,' we are told that,' place gave him 'a foretaste of the Beatific Visi've. At the end of his career he was longing to le8for the world in the hands of God,' longing, toct.,' the execution (not, of course, undeserved) of le Queen of Scots, deposed in the name of
people's right to get rid of a tyrannous ruler.
„nite Professor MacGregor lets it be known, ne"hg himself, that Knox was no thinker, no and no diplomat. His courage was very g t though also odd and vacillating—why all le ti h. anging about in Dieppe? Once screwed le ,, n issue his strength of will was all the more scati,;s 1: 0 ing for his narrow mind. The Knox that emerge,:b. Ii a demagogue who did God's work with the 113'1' It ness of his kind and who delivered a substal popular vote, a national hero all right, but II( disfigured one. It is not a question of approvtor men like him. They are simply there. Pr°fe'fbe MacGregor admits, on the other hand, that ied Scottish Reformation would never have succeed C without England, without• that division in d..1,1 it
country's foreign loyalties, without interests and worldly ends. If any single hist°' parallel were required, it might almost he tr temporary Hungary. George Buchanan's history of Scotland reve,3!:
a very different Reformation. Professor 1‘1,';'i at Gregor's flying Scotsman plays a backward r and there is a monstrous regiment of arist0e1d5,0 motives. The sections of the history which with the 1560s have been made into a book,11."-1, lated from the Latin into stout periods bY W. A. Gatherer, who writes an able introdtic`;',01 \' and notes, setting out the lines of Buchanan's g:10, A, prevarications as an 'engaged' humanist histnri`o, , The two books are a startling contrast, "t both have this much in common. The prejudice trl "n-ar I .1," of them passes at times into something verY,:oetto indecency. The Thundering Sent sees on '11 fault in Knox, that he married a girl of sevell'e;r '1 when he was in his fifties; most people, the virie supposes, would think that 'repellent.' One °r„rt, te people might think it equally repellent to cleerlof the murder of the Queen's secretary, Rie.c'„11.5 whom nothing is known beyond the garlaltrivvi Protestant propaganda, with references to 111ebild'. tim of fifty stab wounds 'screaming like %,ctccior Buchanan is relatively restrained about ,i`7„,,,,/ And as a man who had recently retired, '701c Scotos, from the thick of. thesi 'eventS, he viost in any case out of pride and rage. Thereos to have been far fewer adderr, fewer incitenle be unfair or unfeeling, among Professor d Gregor's laurels at Bryn Mawr. It all haPPen
KARL
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