Protestant reformer, born near Haddington, East Lothian, E Scotland, UK. A Catholic priest, he acted as a notary in Haddington (15403), and in 1544 was influenced by George Wishart to work for the Lutheran reformation. After Wishart was burned (1546), Knox joined the reformers defending the castle of St Andrews, and became a minister. After the castle fell to the French, he was kept a prisoner until 1549, then became chaplain to Edward VI, and was consulted over the Second Book of Common Prayer. On Mary's accession (1553), he fled to Dieppe, then to Geneva, where he was much influenced by Calvin. He returned to Scotland in 1555 to preach, and again in 1559, where he won a strong party in favour of reform, and founded the Church of Scotland (1560). He played a lasting part in the composition of The Scots Confession, The First Book of Discipline, and The Book of Common Order.
John Knox (1514?–1572) was a Scottish religious reformer who took the lead in reforming the Church in Scotland along Calvinist lines. He is widely regarded as the father of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland and of the Church of Scotland.
Early life
Many of the details of Knox's early life are unclear.
His father, William Knox of Haddingtonshire, had fought at the Battle of Flodden. The young Knox received his education via the Scottish Church, which was regarded as "liberal" compared with the pre-reformation Catholic standards of the day.
The uncertainty about Knox's early life is such that it is not even known at which university he studied, since the dates and time he spent at college are uncertain. He certainly studied under the celebrated John Mair (or John Major), a native, like Knox, of East Lothian and one of the greatest scholars of his time. The name "John Knox" is listed amongst Glasgow's incorporati in 1522, though it is also claimed that Knox went to St. Andrews.
Knox did not shine as an outstanding scholar when compared with contemporaries such as George Buchanan and Alesius. From his writing it is clear that Knox learned the Greek and Hebrew languages after ending his formal studies.
Knox is first mentioned as a priest in 1540, and in 1543 he was still an ordained Catholic clergyman.
Up to this time, however, he seems to have employed himself in private tuition, rather than in parochial duties. Both of these lairds, like Knox himself, had an interest in new religious ideas sweeping Europe at this time.
Conversion to Protestantism
Knox first publicly professed the Protestant faith about the end of 1545, though it is thought that his beliefs had been moving in that direction for some time. According to Calderwood, it was Thomas Guillaume, a fellow native of East Lothian, who was the first "to give Mr. Knox a taste of the truth."
However, it is thought that the Knox's actual conversion was probably the result of his friendship with George Wishart. Knox became one of Wishart's closest associates, and he followed him everywhere. He acted as Wishart's body-guard, bearing, it is said, a two-edged sword in order to defend Wishart against supporters of Cardinal David Beaton, leader of the anti-Protestant movement within the Scottish church.
In December 1545, Wishart was seized on Beaton's orders, and transferred to Edinburgh Castle on 19 January 1546. Knox was present on the night of Wishart's arrest, and was prepared to follow him into captivity, and consequently, in all probability death. Wishart persuaded him against this course however, saying:
Nay, return to your bairns [children].
Wishart was subsequently tried for heresy and burnt at the stake in St Andrews in March 1546. Knox went on to become a Protestant minister in St Andrews, a place with which he had strong links throughout his life.
Confinement in the French galleys
After Beaton's death, the castle at St. Andrews became a place of refuge for many Scottish Protestants, and Knox resided there in relative peace along with his pupils, the sons of Longniddry and Ormiston, for several months. Knox and some of the rest of the refugees were taken prisoner, and forced to row in the French galleys.
He spent eighteen months as a galley-slave, amid hardships and miseries which are said to have permanently injured his health:
How long I continued prisoner [and] what torments I sustained in the galleys, and what were the sobs of my heart, is now no time to recite.
He never gave up hope of returning to Scotland and indeed was confident that he would eventually do so. Knox, who at the time was so sick that few hoped for his life, replied:
Yea, I know it well;
The French made attempts to have Knox renounce his Protestant beliefs and on one occasion asked him to kiss the feet of an image of the Virgin Mary.
Residence in England
On his release early in 1549 through the apparent intervention of the English government, Knox found that he could be of little use in Scotland in its existing state. Like many of his countrymen in that troubled time, he therefore submitted to voluntary exile, continuing in his absence to devote himself to ministerial labours in connection with the Reformed Church, while for the first five years he worked as a minister of the English Church.
During the reign of Edward VI, the Church of England was in a transitional state; some of its most marked peculiarities (to which Knox himself and others in Scotland and abroad afterwards objected) were then in abeyance, or at least not insisted upon. but Knox held his commission, as a reformed preacher, directly from the privy council, and was virtually independent of diocesan jurisdiction.
The offices he held in the Church of England are briefly indicated in the History, which says, "He was first appointed preacher to Berwick, then to Newcastle;
From other sources it appears that in 1551 he was appointed one of the six chaplains in ordinary to the king. In this capacity he joined the other chaplains in sanctioning, after revision,The Articles concerning an Uniformity in Religion of 1552, which became the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
Europe and Geneva, 1554-1559
From England, after the death of Edward, Knox proceeded to the continent, travelling for a time from place to place in some uncertainty. In August, however, he was induced to set out for Scotland, where he remained for nine months preaching evangelical doctrine in various parts of the country, persuading those who favoured the Reformation to cease attending mass and join him in celebrating the Lord's Supper according to a reformed ritual.
In May, 1556, he was cited to appear before the hierarchy in Edinburgh, and he boldly responded to the summons;
The church in which he preached there (called the Église de Notre Dame la Neuve) had been granted, at Calvin's solicitation, for the use of the English and Italian congregations by the municipal authorities. Knox's life in Geneva was no idle one. His output at Geneva included his First Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558, in which he unleashed a torrent of vitriol against female rulers:
For who can denie but it is repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see?
With the exception of some months spent in Dieppe, France (1557-58), when he was contemplating a return to Scotland, he continued to officiate in Geneva, while remaining deeply interested in his native land and in constant communication with the reform party there, till January 1559, when he finally left for home.
Organization of the Church in Scotland
He arrived in Edinburgh May 2, 1559. The queen dowager, Mary of Guise, acting as regent for her daughter, the young Mary I of Scotland, then in France, had become keener to crush the Protestants and determined to use force. Knox at once became the leader of the reformers.
Knox negotiated with the English government to secure its support, and he approved of the declaration by the lords of his party in October 1559 suspending their allegiance to the regent. Knox, assisted by five other ministers, formulated the confession of faith adopted at this time and drew up the constitution of the new Church: the First Book of Discipline.
The Church—or Kirk—was organised on something approaching Presbyterian lines.
Knox and Queen Mary
Queen Mary returned to Scotland in August 1561 thoroughly predisposed against Knox, while he and the other reformers looked upon her with anxiety and suspicion. Five personal interviews between Knox and the queen are recorded, each at Mary's invitation.
Some historians have criticised Knox's behaviour towards Mary: for example Schaff portrays Knox as having an "unyielding and repelling" attitude towards the queen and claims that he was "harsh and uncourtierlike" with her. Others, such as Mackenzie, deny this and point out Knox's experience in courts during his chaplaincy for Edward VI. Mackenzie even claims Queen Mary as an unlikely character witness for Knox:
The last time he stood in her presence, Knox put it to her if he had ever spoken an offensive word in any one of their interviews. (Mackenzie 1888:352)
When Mary summoned Knox after he had preached against her proposed marriage to Don Carlos, son of Philip II of Spain, he reduced her to tears. After she had dried her eyes, Knox told her that he had never much liked weeping and could hardly abide the tears of his own boys when he beat them.
In an earlier interview, Knox had told Mary that he was "as well content to live under your Grace as St Paul was to live under Nero". Knox's theories about women rulers reveal him as a misogynist and a prude. This view of female psychology made Knox not only offensive to Mary but dangerous.
Mary moved against Knox by having him arrested and put on trial after he summoned a "convocation of the brethren", in terms that could be interpreted as incitement to violence, to free two Calvinists who had threatened one of the royal priests.
Ministry in Edinburgh and private life
When the reformed religion was formally ratified by law in Scotland in 1560, Knox was appointed minister of the Church of St.Giles, then the great parish church of Edinburgh.
At the very beginning of his labours as minister of Edinburgh, he had the misfortune to lose his much-loved young wife. In 1564 Knox made a second marriage, which was greatly talked of at the time, not only because the bride was distantly related to the royal family but because she was seventeen and Knox three times older. She bore Knox three daughters, of whom the youngest, Elizabeth, became the wife of the famous John Welsh, minister of Ayr.
At this time the reformer lived a very busy life. Knox also recieved a stipend of an hundred pounds and a further hundred and sixty pounds scots directly from the queen's private rents in 1564 (NAS E30/11 f19r).He had a good house, which was provided and kept in repair by the municipality.
During the greater part of his ministry in Edinburgh he lived in a house on a site now occupied by the City Council Chambers. Another house in Edinburgh, still preserved with little change and known since the eighteenth century at the latest as "John Knox's house," may have been occupied by him toward the close of his life.
Personal appearance and manner
A description of Knox's appearance in his later years and of his style as a preacher is furnished in the Diary of James Melville. Melville, who was a student in 1571 at St. Andrews when Knox, not for the first time in his life, had taken refuge in the city for his personal security, wrote:
Mr. Knox would sometimes come in, and repose him in our college-yard, and call us scholars unto him, and bless us, and exhort us to know God and his work in our country, and stand by the good cause; (Melville 1829)
A Latin epistle sent by Sir Peter Young to Theodore Beza in 1579 contains another description of the reformer's personal appearance in his later years.
Testimonies to his character
Knox's wife nursed him devotedly during his last illness, during which many important people visited his bedside. Knox's servant, Richard Ballantyne, after detailing the incidents of his last hours, says of him:
Of this manner departit this man of God, the lycht of Scotland, the comfort of the Kirke within the same, the mirrour of Godliness, and patrone and example to all trew ministeris, in puritie of lyfe, soundness in doctrine, and in bauldness in reproving of wicketness, and one that caired not the favore of men (how great soever they were) to reprove thair abuses and synes.
A testimony to Knox was pronounced at his grave in the churchyard of St. Giles by the Earl of Mortoun, the regent of Scotland, in the presence of a large crowd of mourners, who had followed the body to its last resting-place:
Here lyeth a man who in his life never feared the face of man, who hath been often threatened with dagge and dagger, but yet hath ended his dayes in peace and honour.
John Knox's gravesite at the Church of St Giles has (along with various other graves) been covered over by a car park for the adjacent Parliament Hall.
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