onduct of the religious Mrs. Bowes. It
is a little bewildering, until we recollect the distinction between
faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was "a minister of Christ
Jesus, his evangel," while Richard Bowes, besides being own brother to a
despiser and taunter of God's messengers, is shrewdly suspected to have
been "a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catholic faith," or, as Knox
himself would have expressed it, "a rotten Papist."

You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with
female society. But we are not yet at the end of the roll. The last year
of his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he
was resident as one of the chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he
boasts, although a stranger, he had, by God's grace, found favour before
many.[104] The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once he
writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with
three, and he and the three women were all in tears.[105] Out of all,
however, he had chosen two. "_God_," he writes to them, "_brought us in
such familiar acquaintance, that your hearts were incensed and kindled
with a special care over me, as a mother useth to be over her natural
child_; and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be
more plain than ever I was to any."[106] And out of the two even he had
chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to
Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the address runs. If one may venture
to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.
I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character.
She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to;
she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by
some passages of Mrs. Bowes's letter, which the Reformer opened, and
read aloud to them before they went. "O would to God," cried this
impressionable matron, "would to God that I might speak with that
person, for I perceive there are more tempted than I."[107] This _may_
have been Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it were, we must not
conclude from this one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes. All
the evidence tends the other way. She was a woman of understanding,
plainly, who followed political events with interest, and to whom Knox
thought it worth while to write, in detail, the history of his trials
and successes. She was religious, but without tha