Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his
article on the Scottish Reformer. This is a little less than fair. If
any one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious
political sense than another, it was assuredly Knox; and even in this
very matter of female rule, although I do not suppose anyone nowadays
will feel inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great
allowance for his conduct. The controversy, besides, has an interest of
its own, in view of later controversies. John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his
congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The
coincidence was tempting; here were many abuses centring about one
abuse; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one
anomalous power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female
government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable
and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European
history; and yet their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here
and there a wise man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the
great bulk of their contemporaries. It was defended as an anomaly. It,
and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single
exception; and no one thought of reasoning down from queens and
extending their privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know,
had the privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise
forbidden to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus,
Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one,
seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de
Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the
world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity. Thus, too, we have Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné writing to his daughters
about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in
conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
middling station, and should be reserved for princesses. [63] And once
more, if we desire to see the same principle carried to ludicrous
extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God, the Abbot of
Brantôme, claiming, on the authority of some lord of his acquaintance, a
privilege, or rather a duty, of free love for great princesses, and
carefully excluding other ladies from the same gallant dispensation. [64]
One sees the spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and kings that
made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder, how Catherine de
Medici would "laugh her fill just like another" over the humours of
pantaloons and zanies. And such servility was, of all things, what would
touch most nearly the republican spirit of Knox. It was not difficult
for him to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of his
analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable light; but he had
the virtue, at least, to carry it into many places of fictitious
holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity that hedged kings
and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could put the proposition
in the form already mentioned: there was Christ's Gospel persecuted in
the two kingdoms by one anomalous power; plainly, then, the "regiment of
women" was Antichristian. Early in 1558 he communicated this discovery
to the world, by publishing at Geneva his notorious book--"The First
Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. "[65]

As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is usual with
Knox, is both interesting and morally fine. Knox was not one of those
who are humble in the hour of triumph; he was aggressive even when
things were at their worst. He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather
in his mission; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at
least sure that he was one set apart to do great things. And he judged
simply that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from
persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish
and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not
fail to be of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world. There may be
something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that tends more
and more to withdraw a man's personality from the lessons he inculcates
or the cause that he has espoused; but there is a loss herewith of
wholesome responsibility; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in
the Epistles of Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting
and anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in pledge
for the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of
delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not
unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light,
otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were
initiated and carried forward. Knox's personal revelations are always
interesting; and, in the case of the "First Blast," as I have said,
there is no exception to the rule. He begins by stating the solemn
responsibility of all who are watchmen over God's flock; and all are
watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that
characterises him even when, as here, he shows himself most narrow), all
are watchmen "whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he
pricketh to admonish the ungodly." And with the full consciousness of
this great duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of
timorous or worldly-minded people. How can a man repent, he asks, unless
the nature of his transgression is made plain to him? "And therefore I
say," he continues, "that of necessity it is that this monstriferous
empire of women (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon
the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly
and plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and
be saved." To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be
expected to amend those princes whom it would dispossess if once
accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest. After having instanced how the rumour of Christ's censures found its way
to Herod in his own court, "even so," he continues, "may the sound of
our weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south,
or blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the
chief offenders. _But whether it do or not, yet dare we not cease to
blow as God will give strength.