for the betrothal being changed into marriage, or at least
acknowledged. 'It becomes me now to jeopard my life for the comfort and
deliverance of my own flesh, as that I will do by God's grace; both fear
and friendship of all earthly creature laid aside.'[33] Mrs Bowes
suggested that, in addition to writing her husband, he should lay his
case before an elder brother, Sir Robert Bowes, Warden of the Marches,
who seems to have acted as head of the family. Sir Robert turned out to
be more hostile to the perilous alliance proposed for his niece than
even her father; and Knox wrote that 'his disdainful, yea, despiteful
words have so pierced my heart that my life is bitter unto me.' When
Knox was about to have 'declared his heart' in the whole matter, Sir
Robert interrupted him with, 'Away with your rhetorical reasons! for I
will not be persuaded with them.' Knox, indignant, predicted to the
mother of his betrothed that 'the days should be few that England should
give me bread,'[34] but adds again, 'Be sure I will not forget you and
your company so long as mortal man may remember any earthly
creature.'[35] He escaped from England very soon, and not till September
1555 did he return, and that on Mrs Bowes' invitation; and with the
result that he brought off to Geneva, where he was now pastor of a
distinguished English colony, not only his wife Marjory, but his wife's
mother too. Here his two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar, afterwards
students at Cambridge and ministers of the Church of England, were born.
But in 1559 wife and mother-in-law accompanied or followed him from the
Continent to Edinburgh. During the anxious and critical winter which
followed, Mrs Knox seems to have acted as her husband's amanuensis, but
'the rest of my wife hath been so unrestful since her arriving here,
that scarcely could she tell upon the morrow what she wrote at
night.'[36] Next year brought victory and peace, but too late for her;
for in December 1560, about the time when the first General Assembly was
sitting in Edinburgh, Knox's wife died. We learn this from the 'History
of the Reformation,' in which Knox records a meeting of that date
between himself and the two foremost nobles of Scotland, Chatelherault
and Moray, upon public affairs, 'he upon the one part comforting them,
and they upon the other part comforting him, for he was in no small
heaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bedfellow, Marjorie
Bowes.'[37] And of her we have no fur