Thomas M'Crie:V. A Household Name.

Thomas M’Crie’s biography of John Knox is a great book by any standards. As I write my own copy of the seventh edition of 1855 is by my elbow. I refer to the seventh AUTHORISED edition - the book was also pirated. Also to the British edition, it was not only published in the United States but translated into French, Dutch and German. It was the book that every well-read Scotsman was expected to have read, and it gave Scotland a worthy biography of the great national reformer. His son, Thomas M’Crie the Younger wrote in the preface of the seventh edition: “It has long held its place among the standard histories of the land.” It restored Knox to his proper place alongside Robert the Bruce and William Wallace as one of the great Scottish heroes and patriots (although Mel Gibson would probably NOT want to play Knox).
M’Crie did not rest on his laurels. He wrote a sequel, the Life of Andrew Melville, who was in many ways the successor of Knox. It was not greeted with the same interest as the biography of Knox, but it was recognised as a worthy product of the same pen, and in many ways a continuation of the same history.
His next notable work was controversial in tone. It was a review of Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Old Mortality’, in which Scott caricatured the Covenanters of the seventeenth century as bigots who even justified cold-blooded murder in the name of the Gospel. M’Crie was not a man to stand for that, both as a careful historian and as an evangelical who professed the principles of the Covenanters. It originally appearred in three parts in the pages of the ‘Christian Instructor’, anonymously (as ‘Old Mortality’ was anonymous). Just as Scott could not hide, neither could his antagonist. The author of the ‘Life of Knox’ was instantly detected by his concern for historical accuracy. I have sitting on top of my copy of the ‘Life of Knox’ a small, fragile book bound in nondescript Brown cloth with a worn paper label on the spine reading ‘M’Crie’s Covenanters’. The publication date is 1845, and the title is ‘Vindication of the Covenanters’. The author of the introduction states: “It is valuable, not merely as a vindication of our fathers from the author of the Tales [Scott - H.H.], but as a piece of interesting and authentic history.” Scott was forced to try to vindicate himself. The judgement of this author is that he failed. Historical novels, M’Crie insisted, had to be historically accurate, expecially when they contained depictions of real historical figures and scenes. Scott was not, and to a careful historian like M’Crie that was unacceptable.
I think he might well have written against ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had he lived today. Although to go from Scott’s prose to Dan Brown’s would be like stepping from a Grecian temple into a pigsty.

God willing, next time we shall conclude our look at Thomas M’Crie’s labours.