For we are debtors to more than to
princes, to wit, to the great multitude of our brethren_, of whom, no
doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and ignorance." It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly hope that
his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will
submissively discrown themselves at his appeal; what he does hope, in
plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion; and we shall see,
before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly
as I can put it for him. This he sees to be a matter of much hazard; he
is not "altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his
account what the finishing of the work may cost." He knows that he will
find many adversaries, since "to the most part of men, lawful and godly
appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received." He looks for opposition,
"not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and
quiet spirits of the earth." He will be called foolish, curious,
despiteful, and a sower of sedition; and one day, perhaps, for all he is
now nameless, he may be attainted of treason. Yet he has "determined to
obey God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat." Finally,
he makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first
instalment: it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter,
if God so permit; twice he intends to do it without name; but at the
last blast to take the odium upon himself, that all others may be
purged. Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a secondary
title: "The First Blast to awake Women degenerate." We are in the land
of assertion without delay. That a woman should bear rule, superiority,
dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is
repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order. Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish. God has denied to
woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable
to a commonwealth. Women have been very lightly esteemed; they have been
denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable
sway of their husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme
over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own
fireside. He appeals to the Bible; but though he makes much of the first
transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul's Epistles,
he does not appeal with entire success. The cases of Deborah and Huldah
can be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis. Indeed, I may
say that, logically, he left his bones there; and that it is but the
phantom of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end. Well
was it for Knox that he succeeded no better; it is under this very
ambiguity about Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter
before he is done with the regiment of women. After having thus
exhausted Scripture, and formulated its teaching in the somewhat
blasphemous maxim that the man is placed above the woman, even as God
above the angels, he goes on triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of
Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and
having gathered this little cloud of witnesses about him, like
pursuivants about a herald, he solemnly proclaims all reigning women to
be traitoresses and rebels against God; discharges all men thenceforward
from holding any office under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon
all the lieges with one consent to _"study to repress the inordinate
pride and tyranny" of queens_. If this is not treasonable teaching, one
would be glad to know what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not made
the case plain enough against himself, he goes on to deduce the
startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance must be incontinently
broken. If it was sin thus to have sworn even in ignorance, it were
obstinate sin to continue to respect them after fuller knowledge. Then
comes the peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of
that cursed Jezebel of England--that horrible monster Jezebel of
England; and after having predicted sudden destruction to her rule and
to the rule of all crowned women, and warned all men that if they
presume to defend the same when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to
vindicate the liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish
themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish:
"And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE
BLOWN." The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some
such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want
of passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it
is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic
canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained
metaphor of a hostile proclamation. It is curious, by the way, to note
how favourite an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to
it again and again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to
him what a ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he
had begun the world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is
surely characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before
various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he
appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding
hopefully to the front for some rough enterprise. And as his voice had
something of the trumpet's hardness, it had something also of the
trumpet's warlike inspiration. So Randolph, possibly fresh from the
sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your
honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is
able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets
continually blustering in our ears. "[66]

Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the
echoes of Europe. What success might have attended it, had the question
decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say. As it
was, it was to stand or fall not by logic, but by political needs and
sympathies. Thus, in France, his doctrine was to have some future,
because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no future
anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the
prosperity of Queen Elizabeth.