JOHN KNOX. — Principal architect and historian of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. The place and date of his birth are uncertain (Haddington, Gifford; 1505, 1513, 1515); he died in Edinburgh on 24 Nov. 1572. Ordained priest in 1543 and notary of the diocese of St Andrews, three years later, by unknown means, he had already embraced integral Protestantism and openly defended the Lutheran George Wishart, who was tried and put to death on 2 March 1546. Two months later, the primate of St Andrews, Cardinal D. Beaton, fell victim to a conspiracy hatched by a group of aristocrats who seized St Andrews. Knox, a cleric after Wishart’s condemnation, joined them with other adherents and was entrusted with preaching. After fourteen months, when the city fell into the power of the Regent of Scotland, the Earl of Arran, Knox shared the fate of those who had killed Beaton and spent nineteen months in the French galleys; he was later freed as a result of a Franco-English agreement. Going to England (Apr. 1549), he was appointed chaplain to the court of Edward VI with the task of preaching first at Berwick and then at Newcastle.
Knox distinguished himself by his attacks on the Mass, which he judged an abomination, and on the prescriptions of the *Book of Common Prayer*. In 1551 he was proposed for the see of Rochester but refused. After the death of Edward VI (1553), Knox, feeling unsafe, first went to Dieppe, then to Geneva, and finally to Frankfurt, a centre of English exiles. Soon, however, disputes arose over the legitimacy of using the *Book of Common Prayer*, and Knox sided with the Anglican ritualist faction led by R. Cox, who, to rid himself of his opponent, cast suspicion on Knox before the local civil authority. Having recently published a violent pamphlet, *A Faithful Admonition to the Professed Followers of the Divine Truth in England* (1554), in which he railed against Mary Tudor, the King of Spain, the Emperor, and other princes, Knox was forced to withdraw to Geneva. Meanwhile, the regency of the Kingdom of Scotland passed into the hands of Mary of Guise, mother of Mary Stuart, who, for political reasons, initially tolerated the new doctrines, and Knox took advantage of this to return to his homeland and preach freely in the territories of nobles who had embraced Protestantism. After a few months, his open attacks on the regency government and the Catholic religion provoked a reaction, and to escape the possible consequences of a criminal proceeding, he returned to the Continent accompanied by his wife, Marjorie Bowes. From Geneva, where he remained until the outbreak of the Scottish civil war (1556–59), he kept in close contact with his faithful in England, instructing and encouraging them in perseverance. It was during this period that he wrote the famous treatise *The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women* (1558), directed mainly against Mary Tudor, and *A Brief Exhortation to the English* to embrace promptly the Gospel of Christ, suppressed and banned by the tyranny of Mary (1559). Above all, he became the driving force of the Scottish movement organized under the league known as “The Lords of the Congregation” (Dec. 1557), with the explicit aim of annihilating Catholicism. Scottish Protestantism had taken its first steps along the paths traced by Luther; Knox impressed upon it a distinctly Calvinist character, pervaded by the tragic and despairing doctrine of predestination. His followers are the elect; the reprobate are the idolaters, i.e., Catholics, against whom he believed he found in Scripture a precept of extermination. Even in the face of legitimate authority, it is permissible for the community of the elect, and in its name for the individual, to take up the dagger. Knox was not an original or great thinker, but a harsh and inflexible, coarse and reckless man, and he found fertile ground in Scotland, where the nobility, faced with the snares set by England against the nation’s independence, played a despicable role.
The civil war broke out in 1559 between the pro-English nobles on one side and the regency favourable to France on the other. Knox returned to his homeland to ensure the triumph of the Calvinist cause, and his words produced vandalistic and iconoclastic effects. Meanwhile, political events took a turn favourable to Protestantism, since the threatened war among three kingdoms did not break out, and the death of Mary of Guise (16 June 1560) opened the way to peace negotiations concluded in the Treaty of Edinburgh (6 July 1560). Here, the skill of the English minister Cecil succeeded in placing Scotland in the hands of England’s allies, namely the Scottish Protestant faction. The effects were immediate: the Parliament convened the following August abolished Catholic worship and introduced Calvinism as the state religion, according to the profession of faith formulated (the *Scotica Confessio*) mainly by Knox, to whom is also attributed the *Book of Discipline*, which dealt with Church governance and was approved the following year (1561). This new situation could not be altered by the young Mary Stuart, who in Aug. 1561 took the reins of the kingdom. Facing the inexperienced Queen, lacking able and reliable counsellors,
Knox easily humiliated her in every way from the pulpit and through his writings. Though he did not take part in it, he certainly approved the assassination of David Riccio, the Queen’s secretary (1566), entered into negotiations with England against Mary Stuart, and when she fell into the power of the English, he demanded her execution. In his later years, his hatred against Catholics, whom he treated as worshippers of Moloch, did not diminish. What he believed to be the discipline of the early Church he sought to impose on Scotland, just as Calvin had done in Geneva. He claimed for the preachers elected by local congregations the privileges of the Apostles, practising the methods of the sons of thunder, which made of him a follower of the religion of the ancient prophets rather than of the Founder of Christianity. Knox left posterity the memory of those “Turkish” years in a work that secured him fame: *The History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland* (London 1586). Divided into four books, it narrates the preconditions of the Reformation (1422–1558) and then the events that followed until 1566. It is an apology of the Reformation, not unlike other unofficial works of the kind. From a historical standpoint, it is no longer important because it was compiled in an openly partisan tone. His theory is as simple as that of all fanatics: history is a struggle between light and darkness. Convinced as he was of possessing the light, he neither investigated nor speculated; yet he narrated with great vigour and warmth.