Knox, John

KNOX, JOHN. - Principal architect and historian of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. His place and date of birth are uncertain (Haddington, Gifford; 1505, 1513, 1515); d. at Edinburgh on 24 Nov. 1572. A priest in 1543 and notary of the diocese of St. Andrews, three years later, it is unknown by what paths, he already professed an integral Protestantism and openly took up the defense of 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. K., [along with other] ecclesiastics after Wishart's condemnation, joined them with other adherents and was entrusted with preaching. After 14 months, when the city fell into the power of the regent of Scotland, the Earl of Arran, K. shared the fate reserved for Beaton's murderers and spent 19 months on the French galleys; he was freed following a Franco-English agreement. Having gone to England (Apr. 1549), he was appointed court chaplain to Edward VI with the task of preaching first at Berwick and then at Newcastle.

K. made a name for himself through his attacks on the Mass, which he judged an abomination, and on the prescriptions of the Prayer Book. In 1551 he was proposed for the episcopal see of Rochester, but refused. After the death of Edward VI (1553), K., no longer feeling safe, went first to Dieppe, then to Geneva and finally to Frankfurt, against the English exiles. However, the controversies that soon arose over the lawfulness of using the Book of Common Prayer brought him into conflict with the ritualist Anglican faction led by R. Cox, who, to rid himself of his opponent, cast suspicion on him before the local civil authority. K. had in fact recently published a violent libel: A Faithful Admonition to all those who profess the divine truth in England (1554), in which he inveighed against Mary Tudor, the King of Spain, the Emperor and other princes: he therefore had 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 K. took advantage of this to return to his homeland and preach freely there in the territories of the nobles who had gone over to Protestantism. After a few months his open attacks on the regent's government and on the Catholic religion provoked a reaction, and to escape the possible consequences of a criminal proceeding, he crossed back to the continent, followed by his wife, Marjorie Bowes. From Geneva, where he remained until the outbreak of the civil war in Scotland (1556-59), he kept up an intimate epistolary contact with his faithful in England, instructing them and urging them to perseverance. From this period date the famous treatise: First Blast of Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), directed principally against Mary Tudor, and the Brief Exhortation to England to embrace promptly the Gospel of Christ suppressed and banished by Mary's tyranny (1559). He remained above all the soul of the Scottish movement, which soon formed itself into a league called "The Congregation of the Lord" (Dec. 1557) with the precise task of annihilating Catholicism. Scottish Protestantism had taken its first steps along the paths traced by Luther; K. impressed upon it a decisively Calvinist character, wholly perverted by the tragic and comfortless doctrine of predestination. His followers are the elect; the reprobate are the idolaters, that is, the Catholics, against whom he believes he finds in Scripture a precept of extermination. Even in the face of legitimate authority it is lawful for the community of the elect, and in its name for the simple private individual, to take up the dagger. A temperament neither original nor great, but hard and inflexible, coarse and reckless, K. found good soil in Scotland, where the nobility, in the face of the snares set by England against the nation's independence, played an abject part. When the civil war broke out (1559) between the pro-English nobles on one side and, on the other, the regent favorable to France, K. returned to his homeland to secure for the Calvinist cause its triumph, and his word produced vandalic and iconoclastic effects. Meanwhile political events took a turn favorable to Protestantism, since the threatened war of three kingdoms did not break out and the death of Mary of Guise (10 June 1560) opened the way to peace negotiations concluded in the Treaty of Edinburgh (6 July 1560). And here the skill of the English minister Cecil succeeded in placing Scotland in the hands of England's allies, that is, the Scottish Protestant faction. The effects were seen at once: the Parliament assembled in the following Aug. abolished Catholic worship and introduced Calvinism as the state religion, according to the profession of faith formulated (Scotica confessio) principally by K., to whom is also due the Book of Discipline, which dealt with the government of the Church, 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 into her hands. Faced with the inexperienced Queen, lacking able and trustworthy counselors,

K. had an easy game, humiliating her in every way from the pulpit and in his writings. If he did not take part in it, he certainly approved the assassination of David Rizzio, the Queen's secretary (1566), entered into negotiations with England to the detriment of Mary Stuart, and when she fell into the hands of the English, he demanded her condemnation to death. In his last years the rancor that animated his action against the Catholics, treated on the same footing as the worshippers of Moloch, did not diminish in him. What he believed to be the discipline of the primitive Church he wished to impose on Scotland, just as Calvin had done in Geneva. He claimed for the preachers elected by the local congregations the privileges of the Apostles, practicing 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. Dying, he left to posterity the memory of those turbulent years in a work that assured him fame: The history of reformation of religion within the realm of Scotland (London 1586). Divided into four books, it narrates the premises of the Reformation (1422-1558) and then the events that followed down to 1566. It is an apology for the Reformation, not unlike other official apologies of the kind. From the historical standpoint it no longer has importance, because it was compiled in an openly partisan tone. Its theory is simple, like that of all fanatics: history is a struggle between light and darkness. Persuaded as he is of possessing the light, he neither investigates nor speculates; yet he narrates with great effectiveness and warmth.

Francesco Carpino