KNOX, JOHN

Scottish Protestant reformer; b. near Haddington, East Lothian, 1513; d. Edinburgh, Nov. 24, 1572. Of his early life, little is recorded. His family for several generations had been retainers of the house of Bothwell. The Universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow claim him as a student, but definite proof of his attendance is lacking. A recent document asserts that he was ordained by Bp. William Chisholm of Dunblane on April 15, 1536. During the next decade he performed the duties of notary apostolic in the Archdiocese of St. Andrews and acted as tutor to the children of some East Lothian lairds who patronized the leading Protestant preacher of the day, George wishart.

Conversion to Evangelicalism. During this period, Knox became a convert to the "new Evangel," and in the winter of 1545–46 he himself carried a "two-handed sword" before the preacher. When Wishart was put to death for heresy at St. Andrews (March 28, 1545–46), a group of disaffected gentry assassinated Cardinal David Beaton, Chancellor of Scotland, and occupied the archepiscopal castle at St. Andrews. On April 10, 1547, Knox and his pupils joined the "Castilians," a group of devout and radical Protestants. The group soon recognized Knox's ability as a controversialist preacher and commissioned him to undertake the public preaching of the new doctrines. Knox began preaching in the castle and parish kirk of St. Andrews. When the French fleet captured the castle on July 30, 1547, Knox was taken captive with the others and remained aboard a French galley for 19 months. Released early in 1549, Knox made his way to England and became a licensed preacher, first at Berwick, then at Newcastle, and finally in London, where he was one of the six chaplains to the young King, Edward VI. His intervention in the preparatory discussions for the revised book of common prayer is responsible for the inclusion of the "Black Rubric" in the service (when approaching the Lord's Supper, "no adoration is intended or ought to be done"). Knox turned down the offer of the bishopric of Rochester, for he shrewdly foresaw that Catholic Mary Tudor would succeed to the throne.

Exile at Geneva. When that event occurred (1553), Knox fled to the Continent, where he preached in various English Protestant colonies. He visited Dieppe several times, but his principal place of sojourn was that "perfect school of Christ," Calvin's Geneva. There was a short visit to Scotland in 1555, "at the end of the harvest," when he claims to have laid the small beginnings of a Protestant church. The French Queen-Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, constrained by the pressure of international politics, had allowed religious toleration. Before long the political and religious climate changed, and Knox, now married to the English Marjory Bowes (spring 1556), returned to Geneva. The Protestant nobles in Scotland invited Knox (May 1557) to return to minister to them, but by the time he reached Dieppe they had changed their minds. This vacillation brought about a change in Knox's political thinking. Hitherto following Calvin, he had advocated moderation and nonviolence in dealing with "idolatrous" rulers. Then, in 1558, he published several pamphlets asserting that punishment of

"idolatry" and "blasphemy" in rulers "doth not appertain to kings and chief rulers only but also to the whole body of that people and to every member of the same" and that this duty extends to deposing and punishing rulers who are "tyrants against God and against his truth known." In these pamphlets Knox provided the ideology for the revolution that was shortly to be accomplished in Scotland.

Return to Scotland. Some Protestant nobles and lairds, after pledging themselves "to maintain, set forward and establish the most blessed word of God and his Congregation" (December 1557), invited Knox to return to Scotland. He landed on May 2, 1559, joined the forces of the Congregation at Perth, and on May 11, in the parish kirk of St. John, he preached the sermon that led to the "casting down" of the town churches and the wrecking of the religious houses in the neighborhood. In June the coast towns of Fife and the primatial city of St. Andrews were purged by the army of the Congregation: Stirling, Linlithgow, and Edinburgh were visited in turn. On June 10, 1560, the whole resistance of the Catholic and French party collapsed with the death of the Queen-Regent, Mary of Guise. The Treaty of Edinburgh, in July, eliminated the French and created a situation where the Lords of the Congregation, with English help, could now dominate Scotland. The illegal "Reformation Parliament," held in August, abolished the jurisdiction of the pope in Scotland and prohibited the celebration of Mass, together with all doctrine and practice contrary to the Confession of Faith, which was now adopted.

Knox was the architect of the new ecclesiastical system. Although the Confession of Faith, drawn up by him and his associates, was accepted, the Book of Discipline, which sought to redistribute the temporal possessions of the medieval Church in accordance with the needs of the new Protestant regime, was rejected. Knox was appointed minister of Edinburgh, and during the tumultuous years of the personal reign of mary stuart, queen of scots, he made the pulpit of the collegiate kirk of St. Giles a focal point in the political and religious life of the kingdom. In March 1564, now a widower in his 50s, he contracted his second marriage, with Margaret Stewart, the 16-year-old daughter of Lord Ochiltree. After the assassination of the regent, James Stewart, Earl of Moray (1570), Knox's health began to decline. He was buried in the kirkyard of St. Giles.

During his lifetime, Knox was known chiefly as a powerful and inspiring preacher with a strong sense of his personal vocation as a prophet. His posthumous fame rests mostly on his History of the Reformation in Scotland, an extremely biased but vigorous and dramatic specimen of 16th-century Anglo-Scottish prose. From this work and from his other writings, especially the Confession of Faith, can be pieced together the main elements of Knox's theological teaching. His contribution lay not in original thought; his works instead repeated Protestant teachings, but in a lively idiom that inspired his admirers. In his early Protestant years, due no doubt to the influence of Wishart, Knox accepted the Zwinglian views of a symbolic presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Later at Geneva his theological tenets were molded into Calvinism, and his antipathy to traditional Catholic doctrine concentrated on the rejection of the sacrificial character of the Mass and of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Among his writings are: The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), a diatribe against Mary of Guise; Treatise on Predestination (1560); English Metrical Psalter (1564).

See Also: scotland, church of.

Bibliography: Works, ed. d. laing, 6 v. (Edinburgh 1846–64); History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed. w. c. dickinson, 2 v. (New York 1949). a. lang, John Knox and the Reformation (London 1905). t. mccrie, The Life of John Knox, 2 v. (Edinburgh 1812; 1 v. ed. Inverness 1960). d. mcroberts, ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation, 1513–1625 (Glasgow 1962). e.s. c. percy, John Knox (London 1937). g. macgregor, The Thundering Scot (Philadelphia 1957). m. schmidt, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 7 v. (3d ed. Tübingen 1957–65) 3:1686. a. j. g. mackay, The Dictionary of National Biography From the Earliest Times to 1900, 63 v. (London 1885–1900; repr. With corrections, 21 v., 1908–09, 1921–22, 1938; suppl. 1901–) 11:308–328. r. mason, ed., John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot UK. 1998). j. mcewen, The Faith of John Knox (Richmond 1961). j. g. ridley, John Knox (New York 1968). d. shaw, ed., John Knox: A Quartercentenary Reappraisal (Edinburgh 1975).

[d. mcroberts]