John Knox

John Knox was born in or near Haddington, East Lothian, around 1514. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1536 and served as a notary, but by the late 1540s he had embraced the Reformed cause through the preaching of George Wishart — a Scottish Reformer who was burned at the stake in 1546. Knox was captured by French troops at the siege of St. Andrews in 1547 and spent nineteen months as a galley slave on a French ship. He never forgot the experience: it set the iron in his character and the fire in his preaching.

Released through English intervention in 1549, Knox spent the next decade in England (as a Reformed preacher under Edward VI, and a chaplain to the king) and then in continental exile after Mary I's accession. He served Reformed congregations in Frankfurt and Geneva, where he sat under Calvin's preaching and absorbed the Genevan model of church order. The First Blast of the Trumpet of 1558 — written against female rule and aimed at Mary Tudor and Mary of Guise — was the most politically inconvenient pamphlet of Knox's life: Elizabeth I came to the English throne the same year, and never forgave him for it.

Knox returned to Scotland in May 1559 and led the Reformation there at a moment when the Catholic regency was politically vulnerable. The Parliament of August 1560 abolished papal jurisdiction in Scotland, prohibited the Mass, and adopted the Scots Confession — drafted by Knox and five other ministers (the "six Johns"). The First Book of Discipline of the same year laid out the Presbyterian church order — local kirk sessions, regional synods, a national general assembly, the rejection of episcopal hierarchy. The pattern would shape Presbyterian Christianity from Scotland to Ulster to colonial America.

Knox's confrontations with Mary Queen of Scots are the dramatic core of his ministry as it has been remembered. Mary returned from France in 1561 and Knox preached against her Catholicism from the pulpit of St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, often in her hearing. The two had four recorded private audiences. The transcripts, preserved in Knox's own History, show a politically reckless, theologically immovable preacher in conversation with a young Catholic queen who could not break him. Mary's reign collapsed in 1567. Knox died in his bed in 1572 — a death he had not expected for himself.