As Scotland moves towards its referendum on staying in the United Kingdom, Don Stephens gives a snapshot of the life of John Knox
In the 1500s there was no United Kingdom.
There was England, there was Scotland and there was Wales. And they hated each other deeply. The border between England and Scotland was criss-crossed by warring parties and armies and the greatest ally of Scotland was France. What stopped the wars was that Scotland became a Protestant country. The alliance with France was broken. And behind all this was one man who set things in motion. That man was John Knox (1514 –1572).
He had a very complicated life and all we can do in this short article is to give the headlines of his story.
Preacher’s bodyguard
He was a little man, probably born in 1514 near Edinburgh. His father was a farmer. After grammar school he went on to St Andrew’s University. In 1536 he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. By the early 1540s he had become tutor to the sons of some minor landowners near his home. We are not sure of the date of his conversion but in 1543 he heard the ex-friar Thomas Gwilliam proclaim the gospel of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone. Knox’s commitment to the Protestant faith is more certainly established from December 1545, when he accompanied George Wishart on his preaching tour around Leith and West Lothian. Bearing a two-handed sword, Knox acted as the bodyguard and assistant to Wishart.
The galleys
Knox himself was preaching in St Andrews in July 1547 when a French fleet brought soldiers and laid siege to the place. The town surrendered and Knox was among those rounded up and made into galley slaves. He was chained to work the oars of a boat called the Notre Dame. He says in his book The Reformation in Scotland that while the boat was at anchor in the Loire estuary near Nantes, pressure was put on him to renounce his faith and become a good Catholic by venerating a picture of the Virgin Mary. These Catholic zealots tried to hand him the picture. He repeatedly said, ‘Don’t give it to me!’, They did and the picture went out through the porthole into the river! He must have got away with this only because the ship needed its rowers.
He was released in 1549. At that point the boy King Edward VI sat on the English throne and he and his council were anxious to promote the Protestant faith in England. Knox was asked to go to Berwick where there was a garrison of rowdy soldiers. He spent two years there and then two years in Newcastle, where he met his future wife Marjorie Bowes. In both places he left a gospel church.
Exile in Geneva
King Edward died at the age of 15 in July 1553. To avoid the persecution which ensued when Mary I ascended the throne bent on reestablishing Catholicism, Knox fled to the continent and to Geneva. Calvin’s influence had just reached its apex in that city, which seemed to Knox ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles’. Many Christians who had become refugees because of their commitment to the Reformation were there, and to walk the streets of Geneva in those days was to rub shoulders with spiritual giants. Eventually Knox became the pastor there of the church of the English refugees. Here, he and Marjorie had two sons. In 1558 he published his famous treatise aimed at the English queen (nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’) entitled ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’. It called for a revolt on the basis of a broadly held aversion to female rule. This backfired on Knox when the Protestant Elizabeth I became queen after Mary had died. Knox later said, ‘my First Blast has blown from me all my friends in England’.
Reformation in Scotland
Knox was finally recalled to his homeland. He arrived back in Scotland at one of those rare moments in history. The country was at a crossroads. Things could have gone either way. There was a lot of anti-Catholic feeling, much of it to do with the many Protestants who had been burnt on the area where now the Edinburgh Military Tattoo is staged. Mary of Guise, Queen of Scotland, died and English and French forces withdrew. But more importantly the gospel was beginning to sweep through Scotland. Knox was appointed minister in Edinburgh with the approval of the town council.
Political change ensued. The Scottish Parliament broke with France, outlawed mass, abolished papal authority and established the Scots Confession of Faith. Knox was the key man in all of this. The parliament decided there should be a school in every town. Education was made compulsory. Children needed to learn how to read so that they could read the Bible. There were to be colleges for the gifted. Money was set aside for the relief of the poor.
Around this time the English ambassador heard Knox preach. Subsequently he wrote, ‘In one hour that one man put more life into the congregation than if they had heard 500 trumpets!’. Sadly, Knox’s wife died leaving him with sons, three and two years old.
Then Mary Queen of Scots, the daughter of Mary of Guise, returned from France to take the throne. She set out to restore Roman Catholicism and was allowed to hear mass at Holyrood. This was particularly vexing to Knox, and idolatry and the right of the people to resist ungodly leadership were central themes of the four heated meetings between the new queen and Knox which took place between 1561 and 1563. Eventually scandal and dissatisfied nobles finally led the queen to abdicate in favour of her son James VI in 1567 and Knox preached at the coronation of the young king. The Reformation in Scotland was established.
His legacy
Two years before Knox died, a man named James Melville heard him preach. Knox was frail and was escorted to the pulpit by two strong men. He ascended the pulpit with difficulty and gave out his text. Melville began to take notes but he said that after half an hour he put his pen down, for he had begun to tremble. In the pulpit Knox’s weakness seemed, almost miraculously, to disappear. ‘He was so active and vigorous’, wrote Melville, ‘that he was like to ding that pulpit to blads’ (break the pulpit to pieces).
Knox had remarried. On his deathbed he asked his young wife to read from John 17, ‘where I first cast my anchor’, he said. Presumably this text had been crucial in his conversion to Christ.
It is strange that in this year of the 500th anniversary of the man who laid the foundations for a United Kingdom, in September Scotland is to hold a referendum on whether or not the Union should continue. However, perhaps the political union of England and Scotland is not Knox’s greatest legacy. One historian wrote of him, ‘Wherever that man went, he left a church’.
