John Knox

• 1. Introduction

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  John Knox was born sometime between 1505 and 1515 in Haddington, a small county town in East Lothian, Scotland. He died on the 24th of November 1572. In the six decades between those two dates, he reshaped the Christian faith of an entire nation, defied queens, survived French slave galleys, and wrote pamphlets so incendiary that even his allies winced. His epitaph, spoken at his grave in the churchyard of St Giles' by the newly elected regent of Scotland, James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, was terse and total: "Here lies one who never feared any flesh." That eulogy raises a question worth sitting with. How does a notary-priest from a market town become the man who brought down a regency, drove a queen from her throne, and founded a denomination whose members would number in the millions? The answers run through French galleys, Genevan classrooms, fiery sermons, and some of the most charged confrontations between a preacher and a monarch in recorded history.

• 2. From Notary to Reformer

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  Knox was ordained a Catholic priest in Edinburgh on Easter Eve of 1536 by William Chisholm, Bishop of Dunblane. He first appears in public records as a priest and a notary in 1540, describing himself in a notarial deed dated the 27th of March 1543 as a "minister of the sacred altar in the diocese of St Andrews, notary by apostolic authority". Rather than serve a parish, he became a tutor to the sons of Hugh Douglas of Longniddry and John Cockburn of Ormiston. Both of those lairds had already embraced the new ideas of the Reformation. The man who most directly turned Knox from a priest-tutor into a Protestant was George Wishart. Wishart had fled Scotland in 1538 to escape a heresy charge. He preached in Bristol against the veneration of the Virgin Mary, was forced into a public recantation, and was burned in effigy at the Church of St Nicholas. He took refuge on the Continent, translated the First Helvetic Confession into English, and returned to Scotland in 1544. When Wishart arrived in East Lothian, Knox became one of his closest associates, bearing a two-handed sword to serve as his bodyguard. In December 1545, Wishart was seized on the orders of Cardinal David Beaton by the Earl of Bothwell. On the night of his arrest, Knox was prepared to follow him into captivity. Wishart told him otherwise: "Nay, return to your bairns and God bless you. One is sufficient for a sacrifice." On the 1st of March 1546, Wishart was burnt at the stake in the presence of Beaton himself. That execution would set the next chapter of Knox's life in motion within months.

• 3. Galleys and Exile

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  Beaton was murdered on the 29th of May 1546 within the Castle of St Andrews by a gang of five persons, in direct revenge for Wishart's burning. The assassins seized the castle, and Knox arrived there on the 10th of April 1547 at the urging of Douglas and Cockburn, who wanted their sons to continue their studies in relative safety. It was there that the garrison chaplain, John Rough, publicly proposed Knox as a preacher to the congregation. Knox burst into tears and fled to his room. Within a week, however, he gave his first sermon, before a congregation that included his old teacher John Major. He expounded on the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, comparing the Pope with the Antichrist. The castle did not hold long. Mary of Guise requested the intervention of King Henry II of France. On the 29th of June 1547, twenty-one French galleys approached St Andrews under the command of Leone Strozzi, prior of Capua. The garrison surrendered on the 31st of July. Knox and the other prisoners were chained to benches and forced to row throughout the day while an officer watched over them with a whip in hand. The galleys sailed to France, navigated up the Seine to Rouen, and then continued to Nantes, where Knox spent the winter. When the galleys returned to Scotland in mid-1548, Knox was ill with fever. While the ships lay offshore between St Andrews and Dundee, a fellow prisoner, James Balfour, pointed toward the spires of the parish church where Knox had first preached. Knox declared he would not die until he had preached there again. In February 1549, after nineteen months in the galley-prison, Knox was released. He would make good on that declaration.

• 4. England, Geneva, and the Blast

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  On the 7th of April 1549, Knox was licensed to work in the Church of England, with his first posting in Berwick-upon-Tweed. His congregation grew. Towards the end of 1550, he was appointed a preacher at St Nicholas' Church in Newcastle upon Tyne. The following year he became one of the six royal chaplains serving King Edward VI. His influence reached all the way into the liturgy: he challenged the practice of kneeling during communion, which he and his fellow chaplains considered idolatry. The resulting debate before Archbishop Cranmer produced the famous Black Rubric, inserted into the second edition of the Book of Common Prayer, which declared that kneeling implied no adoration. John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, offered Knox the bishopric of Rochester. Knox refused it. When Edward VI died on the 6th of July 1553 and Mary Tudor restored Roman Catholicism, Knox left for the Continent in January 1554. He settled briefly in Geneva, where John Calvin had established his authority, and then accepted a call from an English refugee congregation in Frankfurt. Liturgical disputes drove him out of Frankfurt on the 26th of March 1555, marking his final break with the Church of England. Back in Geneva, Knox led a congregation that met in the Eglise de Notre Dame la Neuve, now known as the Auditoire de Calvin. He preached three sermons a week, each lasting well over two hours. His two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar, were born there. In mid-1558, Knox published his most notorious pamphlet, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. His targets were Mary I of England and Mary of Guise. He published it anonymously and did not tell Calvin, who denied knowledge of it until a year after its appearance. When the Protestant Elizabeth Tudor became Queen of England later that same year, Knox's pamphlet had offended exactly the wrong person. She never forgave him, and when he sought to pass through England on his way back to Scotland, she refused him a passport. He did not arrive in Scotland until the 2nd of May 1559.

• 5. Revolution and the Kirk

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  Two days after Knox arrived in Edinburgh in 1559, he proceeded to Dundee. He had already been declared an outlaw. The Protestant forces, threatened with a summary trial by the Queen Regent, gathered first at Perth. At the Church of St John the Baptist, Knox preached a sermon that precipitated a riot. A mob gutted the church and attacked two friaries in the town, looting gold and silver and smashing images. The Queen Regent gathered loyal nobles and a French force. She promised to keep French troops out of Perth if the Protestants evacuated. They did. When she entered Perth, she garrisoned it with Scottish soldiers on the French payroll. Lord Argyll and Lord Moray, who had been sent to negotiate her terms, switched sides and joined Knox. Knox moved to St Andrews, where he preached again from the pulpit where he had first spoken back in 1547, fulfilling the vow he had made in the galleys. In June 1559, a Protestant mob ransacked the cathedral; by 1561 it had been abandoned. The Queen Regent retreated to Dunbar. On the 1st of July, Knox preached from the pulpit of St Giles', the most influential in Edinburgh. Knox negotiated covertly with William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief adviser, sailing secretly to Lindisfarne under the assumed name John Sinclair and meeting English contacts at Berwick upon Tweed. The Scots formally deposed Mary of Guise from the regency on the 24th of October 1559. Mary of Guise died suddenly in Edinburgh Castle on the 10th of June 1560. The Treaty of Edinburgh followed, and French and English troops withdrew. On the 19th of July, Knox held a National Thanksgiving Service at St Giles'. On the 1st of August, the Scottish Parliament met. Knox and five other ministers, all named John, drafted the Scots Confession in four days. Parliament passed it and then, in a single day, abolished papal jurisdiction in Scotland, condemned doctrine contrary to the reformed faith, and forbade the celebration of Mass. Before Parliament dissolved, Knox and his colleagues were charged with drafting the Book of Discipline, the governing document for the new Kirk.

• 6. Knox and Mary Queen of Scots

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  On the 19th of August 1561, cannons fired in Leith to announce Mary's return to Scotland. Five days later she attended Mass at Holyrood Palace, and Knox protested from the pulpit of St Giles' the following Sunday. Two weeks into her reign, Mary summoned him. She accused him of inciting rebellion against her mother and of writing against female rule. Knox replied that if monarchs exceeded their lawful limits, they could be resisted, even by force. On the 13th of December 1562, Mary sent for him again, charging that he had made her appear contemptible to her subjects. She asked him to come to her directly in future with any grievances. Knox replied that he would continue to voice his convictions from his pulpit and would not wait upon her. The most dramatic of their encounters took place on the 24th of June 1563, when Mary summoned Knox to Holyrood over his sermons against her proposed marriage to Don Carlos, the son of Philip II of Spain. She wept. "What have ye to do with my marriage?" she demanded. "What are ye within this commonwealth?" Knox replied: "A subject born within the same, Madam." When she wept again, he told her directly: "Madam, in God's presence I speak: I never delighted in the weeping of any of God's creatures; yea I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hand corrects, much less can I rejoice in your Majesty's weeping." He added that he would rather endure her tears than "betray my Commonwealth". Mary ordered him out of the room. After Lord Darnley's murder and the Queen's near-immediate marriage to the chief suspect, the Earl of Bothwell, she was forced to abdicate and was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. On the 29th of July 1567, Knox preached the coronation sermon for the infant King James VI at the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling. He called openly for Mary's execution. She escaped on the 2nd of May 1568, and the civil war that followed claimed the life of the regent Lord Moray on the 23rd of January 1570.

• 7. Legacy and Lasting Impact

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  After inducting his successor, James Lawson of Aberdeen, as minister of St Giles' on the 9th of November 1572, Knox returned home for the last time. His young wife read to him from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians on his final day. The grave itself was eventually lost when the churchyard was destroyed in 1633; its precise location can no longer be established. In his will, Knox stated: "None have I corrupted, none have I defrauded; merchandise have I not made." The modest sum he left behind bore that claim out, and the regent Lord Morton asked the General Assembly to continue paying his stipend to his widow for a full year after his death. Knox was, as his epitaph suggested, not primarily a political operator. His sons Nathaniel and Eleazar attended St John's College, Cambridge. Eleazar was ordained into the Church of England, served the parish of Great Clacton, and was buried in the chapel of St John's College in 1591. His second wife Margaret later married Andrew Ker, one of those involved in the murder of David Rizzio. Knox's influence on the English Puritans was deep, and he is regarded as having argued for a duty to resist unjust government as a path toward moral and spiritual renewal. He is considered the notional founder of the Presbyterian denomination, though it took 120 years after his death for Presbyterian polity to be formally established in Scotland, which finally occurred in 1689. A bust by the sculptor David Watson Stevenson stands in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in Stirling, and the grammar school in Haddington where he was educated was renamed the John Knox Memorial Institute in 1879.