stated his case in the plainest
and least flattering terms. "Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions
different from many," he wrote; but this side of his character he kept
mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and indifferent
or hostile to his aims. To others, especially to women whom he liked, he
was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social superiority
aroused his wakeful independence. His countrymen of his own order had
long displayed these peculiarities of humour.

The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even
before his age, in two strangely different lights. If they were not
technically "kindly tenants," in which case their conditions of existence
and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable
to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their
condition written in 1549, "were in more servitude than the children of
Israel in Egypt." Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted,
hopes that the agricultural class may yet live "as substantial commoners,
not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours _at
their own expense_," as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House.
This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the
Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and
England, in place of the old and romantic league with France. That
alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their
national independence. But, with the great revolution in religion, the
interest of Scotland was a permanent political league with England, which
Knox did as much as any man to forward, while, by resisting a religious
union, he left the seeds of many sorrows.

If the Lowland peasantry, from one point of view, were terribly
oppressed, we know that they were of independent manners. In 1515 the
chaplain of Margaret Tudor, the Queen Mother, writes to one Adam
Williamson: "You know the use of this country. Every man speaks what he
will without blame. The man hath more words than the master, and will
not be content unless he knows the master's counsel. There is no order
among us."

Thus, two hundred and fifty years before Burns, the Lowland Scot was
minded that "A man's a man for a' that!" Knox was the true flower of
this vigorous Lowland thistle. Throughout life he not only "spoke what
he would," but uttered "the Truth" in such a tone