nd 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. This stumbling-block lay at the very
threshold of the matter; and Knox, in the text of the "First Blast," had
set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He
finds occasion to regret "the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley." But
Lady Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would-be
traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own expressions. If,
therefore, political and religious sympathy led Knox himself into so
grave a partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples? If the
trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare himself
for the battle? The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an innocent
martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny
had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind;
and it was not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox's readers concluded
that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree of the
sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation. He
should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as he
must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dishonesty of his
fellow-reformers in political matters. He had already, in 1556 or 1557,
talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in "a private
conversation"; and the interview[67] must have been truly distasteful to
both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and
owned that the "government of women was