John Knox Biography

CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHIES LECTURE 10 JOHN KNOX

John Knox (born c. 1514, near Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland—died November 24, 1572, Edinburgh) was the foremost leader of the Scottish Reformation, who set the austere moral tone of the Church of Scotland and shaped the democratic form of government it adopted. After a period of intermittent imprisonment and exile in England and on the European continent, in 1559 he returned to Scotland, where he supervised the preparation of the constitution and liturgy of the Reformed Church. His most important literary work was his History of the Reformation in Scotland.

George Wishart, a Scottish Reformation leader, began a preaching tour in the Lothians in December 1545. Knox, [as a young man], was much in his company, and Knox's complete conversion to the Reformed faith dates from this contact with Wishart, whose memory he cherished ever afterward. Wishart was burned for heresy in March 1546 by Cardinal David Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews, who, rather than the weak governor, was the real ruler of Scotland. Wishart's execution began a chain of events that profoundly altered Knox's life.

Meantime, Knox [was employed to help in the tutoring of two gentlemen; and, during this time], was moving from place to place to escape persecution and arrest. His desire was to go to Germany to study there at the Protestant seats of learning, but his employers sent word to him to take their sons to St. Andrews and continue their education under the protection of the castle. Thus, in April 1547, less than a year after the cardinal's murder and against his own desire, Knox arrived with his pupils in St. Andrews—still an unknown man. The three months that he spent there transformed him, against his own predisposition, into the acknowledged spokesman and protagonist of the Reformation movement in Scotland. The Protestants in the castle had become involved in controversy with the university; several of them, becoming aware that a man of uncommon gifts had joined them, pressed upon Knox's conscience the duty of taking up “the public office and charge of preaching.” Knox's inclination was for the quiet of the study and the schoolroom, not for the responsibilities and perils of the life of a preacher of a proscribed and persecuted faith. He resisted the call with tears, and only after great hesitation was he persuaded to preach in the town of St. Andrews a sermon that convinced friend and foe alike that the great spokesman of Scottish Protestantism had been found. This was the turning point of Knox's life; from this time forward he regarded himself as called to preaching by God, and he was the more certain of the divine origin and compulsion of the call in that it ran counter to every inclination of his .

At the end of June 1547, French assistance reached the governor of Scotland. The garrison of St. Andrews castle, bombarded from without and assailed by plague within, capitulated on terms that were not kept; Knox and others were carried off to slavery in the French galleys. English intervention secured his release 19 months later, though with permanently broken health.

In England the Protestant government of Edward VI was endeavouring to hurry clergy and people into the Reformation faster, if anything, than most of them were willing to go. For this program preachers and propagandists were urgently required; and because a return to a Scotland under Roman Catholic rule was impossible for Knox at this time, the English government promptly made him one of a select corps of licensed preachers and sent him north to propagate the Reformation in the turbulent garrison town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. He brought order to the town and established a congregation on Puritan lines, and there he met Marjorie Bowes, who was to become his wife. Early in 1551 he was given a new assignment in Newcastle and a little later was appointed to be one of the six royal chaplains whose duties included periodic residence at, and preaching before, the court as well as itinerant evangelism in areas where the regular clergy were lacking in Protestant zeal. He later refused to accept the bishopric of Rochester and the vicarage of Allhallows, London, but continued, under the patronage of the government, to exercise an itinerant ministry, mainly, but not exclusively, in Buckinghamshire, Kent, and London.

In three respects Knox left his mark on the Church of England: he took part in the shaping of its articles; he secured the insertion into The Book of Common Prayer of the so-called black rubric, which denies the corporal presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine used in Holy Communion and explains that kneeling at communion implies no adoration of the elements; and he was one of the chief foster fathers of English Puritanism, a reform movement started within the state church with a view to the more rigorous application of Reformation principles in doctrine and worship.

On the insistence of John Calvin, Knox became minister of a congregation of English refugees, mainly Puritan, in Frankfurt am Main; but he remained there for only a few months. He then became minister of the growing congregation of English exiles in Geneva, a pastorate that lasted until his final return to Scotland in 1559, but was interrupted at the outset by a visit (1555–56) to Berwick and a nine-month sojourn in Scotland, in the course of which he married Marjorie Bowes. She died, having borne him two sons, in 1560.

In Edinburgh Knox was astounded by the progress made by the Reformed cause and by the eager reception given to him by all classes in the community. To the nobility, in visits to their country houses, he propounded his doctrine of “justifiable resistance” to Roman Catholic rulers who attacked the faith of Protestant subjects and urged them to withdraw from all the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Church and to band themselves together for the defense of Protestantism in case that should prove necessary. A peremptory summons from his congregation called him back to Geneva; but he left to the faithful in Scotland an important Letter of Wholesome Counsel (1556) enjoining not only private family worship but also weekly meetings of believers for corporate Bible study and discussion. From these weekly meetings, Reformed congregations grew apace, and from the leaders of these congregations came the elders of the Reformed Church.

Geneva [Switzerland] was to Knox a beloved city in which he spent the happiest years of his life, highly esteemed, in peace, and among kindred souls. From this period (1556–58) dates his elaborate and rather tedious treatise on Predestination as well as his first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment [rule] of women, in which he states with uncurbed vehemence the common belief of his day that the exercise of authority by women is contrary to both natural law and revealed religion. The pamphlet was aimed at the three women who were holding the reins of government in England, France, and Scotland and were oppressing Protestantism; but, unfortunately for Knox, publication coincided with the accession in England of the Protestant Elizabeth I, who indignantly and permanently debarred the rash author from her realm.

[In 1559, Scotland was becoming a dictatorship for Catholicism and the Queen regent, Mary of Guise, was attempting to bring France, Scotland, and England under the reign of her beloved friend, Francis II, the new king of France. Knox stirred up the dissenters (Protestants) and begged the Queen of England (Elizabeth I) to join with the Scottish Protestants in their efforts.]

In the spring of 1560, Elizabeth at last consented to English action. In April, 10,000 English troops joined the Scottish Protestants, the queen regent died in Edinburgh castle, and the disheartened French gave up. By treaty, French and English troops were then withdrawn, leaving the victorious Scottish Protestants to set their own house in order. The Scots Confession (hurriedly prepared by Knox and three others) was adopted, and papal jurisdiction was abolished.

Knox, aided by a committee of distinguished churchmen, laid before the Scottish Parliament the First Book of Discipline containing proposals for the constitution and finance of the Reformed Church. Worship was to be regulated by the Book of Common Order (also called Knox's Liturgy), according to which congregations were to be governed by elders elected annually by the people and the elders were to aid the minister to maintain firm moral discipline among the people. Knox's system contained the most essential element of later Presbyterianism.

Mary (not Mary of Guise) arrived in Scotland in 1561 already persuaded that Knox was to be her archenemy and that the country could not hold them both. Knox, who hoped at first that the young queen would prove pliable, soon reached a similar conviction. Hearing that Mary was contemplating marriage with Don Carlos of Spain, a match that would have had fatal consequences for the Scottish Reformation and probably for England as well, Knox sounded the Protestant alarm. Mary, enraged at this intervention by a heretic preacher and commoner in affairs of state, berated Knox with hysterical fury and charged him with treason, but the Privy Council refused to convict him. Knox filled Mary's cup of bitterness in 1564 by marrying, without the royal assent, Margaret Stewart, a 17-year-old distant relative of the queen.

In 1564 Mary dismissed her Protestant advisers and undertook the mismanagement of her own affairs. For a time the Reformed Church was in real danger, but in 1567 came Mary's ruin and abdication, and Knox's old friend James Stewart, earl of Moray, became regent. In him the Reformed Church would have found a powerful patron, but he was murdered and the country plunged into a struggle between the supporters of the queen and those of the regency. Knox was involved in the turmoil, but he suffered a paralytic stroke. When Edinburgh became a battleground between the factions in 1571, the leaders on both sides insisted on his removal to safety in St. Andrews, from where he returned in 1572 to die. When the news of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants reached Scotland, Knox dragged himself to his pulpit in St. Giles's and drove home the lesson of that tragedy. He stood one last time in the pulpit of St. Giles's, to introduce his successor.

(James Stevenson McEwen)