Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Knox (c. 1514-1572) was a Scottish minister, Reformed theologian, and writer who led the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. He helped write the Scots Confession and the Book of Discipline that established the Reformed Kirk, and he is considered the notional founder of the Presbyterian denomination.
John Knox was born sometime between 1505 and 1515 in or near Haddington, the county town of East Lothian. He was probably educated at the Knox Academy grammar school in Haddington and proceeded to further studies at the University of St Andrews, where he studied under the scholar John Major.
Knox was taken prisoner when French forces under Leone Strozzi besieged and captured the Castle of St Andrews on the 31st of July 1547 at the request of Mary of Guise. He spent nineteen months as a galley slave, chained to a bench and forced to row, before being released in February 1549.
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women was a pamphlet Knox published anonymously in mid-1558. It argued that female rule was unnatural and contrary to scripture, targeting Mary I of England and Mary of Guise. It offended the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England, who never forgave Knox and later refused him a passport through England.
Knox had at least four recorded interviews with Mary Queen of Scots between 1561 and 1563. The most dramatic took place on the 24th of June 1563 at Holyrood, when Mary wept and demanded to know what Knox had to do with her proposed marriage to Don Carlos of Spain. Knox replied that as a subject of the realm, he had a duty to warn of dangers to the commonwealth.
John Knox died on the 24th of November 1572 in Edinburgh. At his grave in the churchyard of St Giles', James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton and newly elected regent of Scotland, pronounced: "Here lies one who never feared any flesh." The precise site of his grave was lost when the churchyard was destroyed in 1633.