Protestants and Patriots

For most Presbyterians, the road to church government by elders and assemblies rather than bishops, ran through Geneva. This was an odd circumstance for English and Scottish Protestants since Geneva was a republic with no real analogy to monarchy. Church reform in Geneva, like most of the Protestant world, came at the behest of civil magistrates who had various motives—some devout, some earthly—for having a church free from Rome’s oversight. But civil government in Geneva was through a city council, a political body that has little hold in the West’s political imagination compared to the glories of the Palace of Versailles, Buckingham Palace, the Hofburg, or even the White House. Rarely do members of city councils emerge as national leaders or empire builders. In Geneva’s case, Ami Perrin (1500-1561), who functioned as the city’s mayor and had a thorny relationship with John Calvin, colored within the lines of urban politics. One of his notable interventions in international affairs came in 1546 when fears that Charles V would invade the city because of an influx of Protestant refugees. Perrin called on a French garrison to secure Geneva’s integrity. That act of foreign policy landed Perrin in a trial for treason. The courts acquitted the mayor. But the incident was part of a larger struggle between Calvin’s ideals for a reformed church and native Genevans’ preference for less strict norms in personal and civic righteousness, a position nicknamed “libertine” by the devout.

Friction between church and civil government, Calvin and Perrin, may have resembled remotely what transpired in England and Scotland between Presbyterians and Tudor and Stuart monarchs, but pastors taking mayors to court was not the lesson that Scottish and English Protestant exiles learned in Geneva. John Knox sojourned in the city twice and led to his often quoted observation about Geneva’s reformed church and godly society, which came during his second stay. His first visit had occurred in 1554, when Knox was forty years old, during a time when many English Protestants were in exile thanks to Mary Tudor’s religious policies. Knox was not there long since a group of English Protestants in Frankfurt called him to be their pastor. There amidst antagonisms over liturgy among English-speaking Protestants, Knox was in the rare position of conciliator. After a return to Scotland for church reform, in 1556 he received a call to Geneva from a congregation of English-speaking exiles. He was pastor at that church with Calvin’s blessing for three years before his final return to Scotland and the official start of the Scottish Reformation. In Geneva Knox paid more attention to texts and orders of worship than he did to church government. He was operating within one congregation of English-speaking refugees while Calvin’s church polity covered the network of churches in Geneva and the surrounding territories. But when Knox returned to Scotland and after gaining support from Parliament, he was responsible for a book of discipline that relied on lessons learned in Geneva. As Jane Dawson observes, Scotland’s First Book of Discipline “probably reflected” Knox’s experience of church life with Calvin at the helm of Geneva’s company of pastors.

Thomas Cartwright, arguably the most prominent voice for Presbyterianism in England a few years after Knox’s successes in Scotland, was also several years behind his Scottish contemporary in visiting and learning from church life in Geneva. Eighteen-years-old when Mary Tudor became queen, Cartwright had to abandon studies at Cambridge University but found work as a law clerk. When Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558, Cartwright completed his studies and became a fellow at Trinity College. After serving as a chaplain in Ireland under the bishop of Armagh, he returned to Cambridge as the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity. When the Admonition Controversy broke out in the early 1570s—based on pamphlets surreptitiously published that attacked episcopacy in ways that troubled members of Parliament—Cartwright himself backed the side of the Church of England and called for “thorow [sic] Reformation.” Lectures that Cartwright gave in 1570 on the polity of the New Testament church – he found no support for bishops – crossed authorities. They denied him his professorship. Only in 1571 did Cartwright leave for what was in effect the capital of Presbyterianism – Geneva. He did not relocate as a refugee or exile. John Calvin had been dead for almost a decade, which left another Frenchman, Theodore Beza the primary force in the city.

(excerpted from chapter 1)