When the day came, he stood forth as the champion of the liberty of assembly, as before he had appeared in vindication of free speech; and so admirably did he plead his cause that he was acquitted, if not unanimously { 175} at least _nem. con._, of the charge which had been brought against him.
Much has been said of the bearing of Knox towards Queen Mary, and said, as we believe, most unjustly, for though he felt himself constrained to oppose her course, and would not yield to her wishes, yet he was never rude, or irreverent, or ungentlemanly. As Carlyle says, "he was never in the least ill-tempered with her Majesty;" and most of those who accuse him in this matter, we shrewdly suspect, have never read the accounts of his interviews with her, but have simply accepted the common babblement which has been so long current regarding them. No candid student of the rehearsal of these interviews in Knox's History, we are sure, could refuse to endorse the accuracy of Carlyle's statement of the case when he says "Mary often enough bursts into tears, oftener than once into passionate long continued fits of weeping, Knox standing with mild and pitying visage, but without the least hair's-breadth of recanting or recoiling, waiting till the fit pass, and then with all softness but with all inexorability taking up his theme again."