Knox, John (1514–1572)

Church reformer, preacher, author, and founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Born in Haddington, Knox was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church in 1536, and worked as a notary and tutor to the noble families of Lothian. By 1545 he had converted to the cause of the reformed church under the influence of George Wishart. Despite the founding of the Protestant Church of England, Scotland's rulers remained resolutely Catholic, and in 1546, Wishart was arrested for his teachings and burned at the stake. When his Protestant followers avenged themselves by killing a Catholic cardinal, Knox joined them at Saint Andrews Castle, where he rallied the besieged reformers with his fiery sermons and his polemics against the evils of the Catholic Church. The group took refuge from Scottish and French soldiers but was finally overwhelmed in 1547. Knox was sentenced to a term of service in the French navy as a galley slave.

In 1549, after his release, Knox returned to England, where he served as one of the king's chaplains. Unwilling to accept an appointment as a bishop in the Church of England, Knox was unwilling to temper his scathing denunciations of his religious enemies. His stand made him a wanted man on the accession of the very Catholic queen Mary in 1553. He escaped to Europe, joining John Calvin in Geneva and preaching Calvinist reforms and government in the German city of Frankfurt, which expelled him in 1555. Knox did not improve his standing with the queen of England with his pamphlet First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which denounced Queen Mary as well as the Catholic Mary of Guise, who ruled Scotland as a regent. The pamphlet ridiculed the notion of women holding political power, and so enraged Mary's Protestant successor Elizabeth I that she prohibited him from ever setting foot in England.

In 1559 Knox was invited back to Scotland to lead Protestants rebelling against the authority of Mary of Guise. Knox and his allies forced French troops out of Scotland and defeated the Catholic Church. The new Presbyterian Church was established, in which each congregation elected its parish leaders, and by an act of the Scottish parliament in 1560 Scotland officially threw off the authority of the Catholic pope. Knox was also author of History of the Reformation in Scotland, an important history of this period.

See Also: Calvin, John; Elizabeth I; Reformation, Protestant; Tudor, Mary