Knox, John (1)
Knox, John
Presbyterian leader, born Haddington, Scotland, c.1505; died Edinburgh, Scotland, 1572. The facts of his early life are uncertain. His writings show that he had a knowledge of Latin, French, Greek, and Hebrew, and law and theology. He was a priest, and served as private tutor in 1547, when he was imprisoned in connection with the murder of Cardinal Beaton. In 1554 he was married, and visited Calvin at Geneva, from whence he returned, 1555, to begin his preaching career in Scotland. He was forced to leave for Geneva because of his hostility to Queen Mary of England but returned, 1559, upon the accession of Elizabeth. The Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, died in 1560, and Knox and the Protestant party were triumphant. The Mass was abolished, and the death penalty was incurred by those who assisted at the sacrifice. Knox was commissioned by the Lords of the Congregation to compile a new creed, and produced the famous Scottish Confession. He violently opposed the policies and religion of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had entered Scotland, 1561. In 1569, five years after his second marriage, he suffered an apoplectic stroke from which he never fully recovered. Knox was the greatest Protestant writer in the Scottish vernacular of his time. His preaching powers were above the ordinary, but he himself was as gloomy, austere, and unforgiving as the creed he preached.
Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary
Knox, John
Scotch Protestant leader, b. at Haddington, Scotland, between 1505 and 1515; d. at Edinburgh, 24 November, 1572. All the older biographies assign his birth to 1505, but recent authorities (Lang, Hay Fleming, etc.) give grounds for the latter date from contemporary evidence, and from certain facts in his career. Nothing authentic is known of his ancestry or kinsfolk, excepting that his mother was a Sinclair; his father was probably a small farmer. Educated at the Haddington burgh school, he is not known to have graduated at any university, though both Glasgow and St. Andrews have claimed him. His own writings testify to his knowledge of Latin and French, and his acquaintance with the works of some of the Fathers, and he seems to have acquired a smattering of Greek and Hebrew in later life. His mastery of vernacular Scotch is shown in his “History”, as well as the fact that he had studied law, for his citations from the Pandects are apt and not infrequent. We know from his own words that he was a priest — “one of Baal’s shaven sort”, as he expresses it — and practised as a notary by ecclesiastical authority. In a still extant document, he is styled “Johannis Knox, sacri altaris minister, sancte Andreæ diocesis auctoritate apostolica notarius.” Nothing whatever is known of his ecclesiastical career; and we can only surmise that he had already begun to doubt, if he had not actually repudiated, the Catholic tenets by 1540, when we first find him engaged as private tutor to certain “bairns”, a profession in which he continued until 1547. The names of some of his pupils have come down to us, but we know nothing of the details of his life until 1545, when his own “History of the Reformation”, written some eighteen years later and largely autobiographical in character, first brings him before us.
The most prominent exponent of the new doctrines in Scotland at this time was George Wishart, who had come home from his travels in Germany a confirmed Protestant, and was expounding his tenets in Haddington and other parts of the Scottish Lowlands. Bitterly hostile to Cardinal Beaton, the great champion of the Catholic cause, Wishart (whose most devoted adherent and disciple at this time was Knox) was deeply involved in the intrigues of the Protestant party with Henry VIII of England for the kidnapping or murder of the cardinal. Wishart was arrested in January, 1546, and burned at St. Andrews on 1 March; and on 29 May Beaton was murdered at the same place in revenge for Wishart’s death. The assassination was approved and applauded by Knox, who describes the deed with a gleeful and mocking levity strangely unbecoming in a Christian preacher, though his panegyrists speak of it merely as his “vein of humour”. Some months later we find him, with his pupils, shut up in the castle of St. Andrews, which Beaton’s murderers and their friends held for some months against the regent Arran and the Government. On 31 July, 1547, the besiegers being reinforced by a large French fleet, the castle was surrendered, and Knox was imprisoned with some others for nineteen months on board the French galleys and at Rouen. His captivity, however, was not rigorous enough to prevent him from writing a theological treatise, and preaching to his fellow prisoners.
In 1549 Knox was free to return home; but he preferred to stay for a time in England, where, under Edward VI, he would feel himself secure, rather than to expose himself to fresh arrest in Scotland. He received a state license to preach at Berwick, where he remained two years, and was then transferred to Newcastle, and at the same time appointed a royal chaplain. He preached at least twice before the young king, and in October, 1552, was nominated to the Bishopric of Rochester, which he refused, declining also a benefice in the city of London. His own alleged reason for declining these preferments was that he thought the Anglican Church too favourable to Roman doctrine, and that he could not bring himself to kneel at the communion service. When Edward VI was succeeded in July, 1553, by his Catholic sister Mary, Knox continued his preaching for a time, and, as long as he remained in England, took care not to attack the new sovereign, for whom indeed he published a devout prayer. But early in 1554 he thought it prudent to take refuge in Dieppe, having meanwhile gone through a form of marriage with Marjorie, fifth daughter of Mrs. Bowes, a Calvinistic lady of his own age living in Newcastle, who had taken him as her spiritual adviser. From Dieppe he went to Geneva, partly to consult Calvin and other divines as to the lawfulness and expediency of resisting the rule of Mary Tudor in England and Mary of Guise, just appointed Regent, in Scotland; but he got little satisfaction from his advisers. In September, 1554, he accepted the post of chaplain to the English Protestants at Frankfort; but his Puritanism revolted against the use of King Edward’s prayer-book and of the Anglican ceremonial. Schism arose in the congregation: Knox’s opponents accused him of comparing the Emperor Charles to Nero in a published tract; he was ordered by the authorities to leave Frankfort, and returning to Geneva he ministered for a time to the English congregation there. In August, 1555, however, an urgent summons from his mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes, caused him (as he says, “most contrarious to mine own judgement”) to set out for Scotland and join his wife at Berwick. The new doctrines had made headway during his absence, and he found himself able to preach both in public and in the country houses of his supporters among the nobles and gentry. At a historic supper, given by his friend Erskine of Dun, it was formally decided that no “believer in the Evangel” could attend Mass; and the external separation of the party from Catholic practice, as well as doctrine, thus became complete. Knox, whose religion had now become entirely of the Old-Testament type, boldly proclaimed that adherents to the old faith were as truly idolaters as the Jews who sacrificed their children to Moloch, and that the extermination of idolaters was the clear duty of Christian princes and magistrates, and, failing them, of all individual “believers”. In the letter, however, which he addressed about this time, on the advice of two of his noble supporters, to the queen regent, he assumed a somewhat different tone, appearing to petition only for toleration for his co-religionists. The letter contained at the same time violent abuse of Catholics and their beliefs, and threatened the regent with “torment and pain everlasting”, if she did not act on his counsel. Mary seems to have treated the effusion with silent contempt, which Knox resented bitterly; but it was no doubt with the conviction that the time was not yet come for the triumph of his cause that he returned to his ministry, in Geneva (in the summer of 1556), sending his wife and her mother thither before him. Immediately on his departure he was cited to appear before the judges in Edinburgh, condemned and outlawed (in absence) as contumacious, and publicly burnt in effigy.
Until the end of 1558 Knox remained at his post in Geneva, imbibing from Calvin all those rigid and autocratic ideas of church discipline which he was subsequently to introduce into Scotland — England would have none of them — and which were to be followed by over a century of unrest, persecution, and civil war. His two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar, were born to him at Geneva, and he was joined there by Mrs. Locke and other female admirers from England and Scotland. Glencairn and other friends tried to persuade him in 1557 to come back, on the ground that persecution was diminishing, and he actually got as far as Dieppe on his journey home. Here his courage seems to have evaporated; and after ministering for a time to the Dieppe Protestants he went back to Geneva. During 1558 his pen was constantly busy: he published his letter to the queen regent with comments, and his famous “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”, directed against Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise, Catherine de’ Medici, and the youthful Mary Stuart, who had just married the French Dauphin. In other writings he reiterated his views that every Christian man (i.e. Protestant) had a right to slaughter every idolater (i.e. Catholic), if he got an opportunity. In a “Brief Exhortation to England” he insisted on the expulsion of all “dregs of Popery” and the introduction of the full “Kirk discipline” of Calvin and Geneva; and in his “Treatise on Predestination” he answered the “blasphemous cavillations” of an Anabaptist. The last-named work was not published until 1560.
At length, in the first days of 1559 (Queen Mary of England having been succeeded by her sister Elizabeth a few weeks previously), Knox deemed it safe or opportune to leave Geneva for Scotland. He came to Dieppe, and, finding himself refused a safe-conduct through England, travelled by sea from Dieppe to Leith, arriving on 2 May. He had already heard by letter that the Scottish Protestants were no longer in any danger. The queen regent had indeed denounced and forbidden by proclamation attacks on priests, disturbance of Catholic services, invasion of churches by lay preachers, and religious tumults in general. But she was already in the grip of deadly illness, was meditating a retirement to France, and, notwithstanding certain advices from that country, had neither the power nor the intention of organizing movement to suppress the Protestant party in the realm, which was growing daily in power and influence. St. Giles’s Church in Edinburgh had been the scene of a riot, followed by the flight of the Catholic clergy. The Lords of the Congregation were practically in arms against the regent; and Knox, who had never seemed to be the least anxious for lonely martyrdom, showed himself full of fight and courage with a stout body-guard at his back. Repairing to Dundee, he found the Protestants masters of the situation there, and going thence to Perth he preached a series of inflammatory sermons which culminated on 25 May, when the mob of that city — angered, according to Knox, by the regent’s having broken her pledge of toleration of the preachers (see however as to this, Lange, “Knox and the Reformation”, Appendix A) — sacked and partly demolished the parish church and several of the monasteries. A private letter from Knox describes these deeds of violence and outrage as done by the “brethren”; but in his “History” — written partly for the followers of Calvin, who rebuked and condemned such works of pillage — he ascribes them to the “rascal multitude”, with no reference to their having been inspired by his own harangues or encouragement.
The Protestants, entrenched in Perth (the only fortified town in Scotland), were now in open rebellion against the regent, who advanced with her troops from Stirling. A parley with the Congregation resulted in a treaty, by which the Protestants were to be allowed complete freedom of worship, and no French troops were to be quartered in the town. Knox meanwhile moved on with his friends to St. Andrews, and, in spite of Archbishop Hamilton’s threat that if he dared to preach there he should be saluted with “a dozen of culverins, whereof the most part should light upon his nose”, he did preach there, with the result that the St. Andrews mob repeated the work of sack and pillage which had followed his sermons at Perth. The wreck of other great abbeys, such as Scone and Lindores, followed; the Congregation seized Stirling and marched to Edinburgh, the regent meanwhile retreating to Dunbar. Knox accompanied them to the capital, where the same scenes of devastation of churches and monasteries were repeated, and on 7 July he was chosen minister of the Edinburgh Protestants. “We meane no tumult, no alteratioun of authoritie”, he wrote to one of his female devotees in Geneva, “but onlie the reformation of religioun, and suppressing of idolatrie.” Knox wrote these words while actually in full revolt against the “authoritie” of the regent of the realm, with the further professed desire to prevent the lawful queen, Mary Stuart, from enjoying her hereditary crown.
On 22 July the regent and her advisers suddenly determined to march upon Edinburgh, before the Congregation could concentrate its scattered forces, and the Protestants consequently decided to come to terms, one of the articles of the treaty being that the capital was to be free to choose its own religion. The choice of the majority would certainly not have been in favour of the new doctrines, and this and other points of the agreement were openly violated by the Congregation, who left preachers in possession of the churches, and retired to Stirling. Conscious at this juncture of the immense advantage of gaining the support of England, now a Protestant kingdom, they determined to appeal to Elizabeth, and to send Knox on a mission to her powerful minister Cecil. Knox had already written to Cecil with a letter for the queen which was more or less an apology for his fiery pamphlet, the “Monstrous Blast”. He sailed from Fife to Northumberland early in August, interviewed Croft, the governor of Berwick, and finally brought back to Stirling letters from Cecil more or less favourable to the demands of the Congregation for help, but indefinite in their terms. Further correspondence, however, elicited from Sadler, Elizabeth’s agent, a gift of money, which encouraged the Scotch Protestants to believe that the Queen of England was on their side. Knox in a letter to Geneva, dated 2 September, describes his labours as envoy of the Congregation, and adds that ministers are now permanently appointed to eight of the chief towns in Scotland. A few weeks later, the regent being then at Leith, which she had strongly fortified and garrisoned with French troops, the Congregation took a bold step. Encouraged by English sympathy, and still more, perhaps, by the adhesion of the powerful Earl of Arran to their cause, they proceeded to depose — or, as Knox thought it more prudent to describe the measure, to suspend from office — the regent in the name of the young king and queen, whose great seal was counterfeited in order to give official weight to the proclamations announcing the step. Leith was vigorously besieged, but unsuccessfully, and Knox continued to appeal energetically to England for money, troops, and military commanders. The result was that Elizabeth sent a fleet to the Firth of Forth; the Congregation, thus reinforced, renewed the siege of Leith, and the regent took refuge in Edinburgh Castle, where she died on 10 June, 1560. Knox vilified this unfortunate princess to the end, but neither contemporary opinion nor the judgment of history has accepted his verdict, or his outrageous aspersions on her moral character. A month after her death the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed by representatives of England and France, providing for the withdrawal from Scotland of the French and English troops. The Congregation held a solemn thanksgiving service at St. Giles’s Church, Knox of course taking the leading part, and profiting by the occasion to prescribe from the pulpit the course which the Protestant leaders were bound to follow to secure the triumph of their cause.
That triumph was indeed now imminent. Parliament met on 1 August, Knox preaching daily to crowded audiences “speciall and vehement” harangues on the need of rebuilding the temple, in other words establishing the Protestant religion. The spirit of the assembly — at which, by the way, the sovereign was not represented, and which was consequently not really a parliament at all — was never in doubt. The new Confession of Faith, drawn up by Knox and his friends, was adopted word for word; the authority of the pope was abolished; the celebration of Mass was forbidden — “under certain penalties”, as one of Knox’s biographers mildly remarks, the penalty for the third offence being in fact death. The formality of praying the young king and queen to ratify these enactments was gone through; but Knox boldly says that such ratification was unnecessary — a mere “glorious vane ceremony”. The Catholic Church of Scotland was extinct, as far as human power could extinguish it, and the Protestant religion officially established. Parliament rose on 25 August, having commissioned Knox and three other ministers to draw up the plan of church-government, known as the “First Book of Discipline”, which was ready by the date (20 December, 1560) of the first meeting of the newly constituted “General Assembly” of the Kirk, of which Knox was of course the most prominent member. The “Book of Discipline” was founded on the code of various Protestant bodies, more especially on the Ordonnances of Geneva and on the formularies of the German Church founded in London in 1550, both very familiar to Knox and both thoroughly Calvinistic in spirit. The opening words are that all doctrine contrary to the new evangel must be suppressed as “damnable to man’s salvation”; and it is ordained that every home of the “ancient superstition” must be cleared out of the land. The several districts of Scotland were to be under the spiritual charge of officials known as superintendents, until such time as ministers were forthcoming for each parish; and there was provision for a comprehensive scheme of national education, elementary, secondary, and university. This plan, for which it has been customary to give all the credit to Protestantism, was devised on lines already laid down by the ancient Church; but as a matter of fact it was never carried into effect. Nor were the provisions for the diversion of the wealth of the old Church to national purposes any more effectual. Many of the Protestant nobles signed the book, but they had no idea of giving up their own share of the ecclesiastical plunder. “Converted in matter of doctrine”, says Lang, “in conduct they were the most avaricious, bloody, and treacherous of men.” Such as they were, they were the pillars of the new Church and the new religion.
In December, 1560, died the young King Francis II of France, “husband to our Jezebel”, as he is styled by Knox, who lost his own wife, Marjorie Bowes, about the same time. The whole situation in Scotland was now changed. The Catholic earls sent Bishop John Lesley to invite the widowed queen to land in the Catholic north; but she distrusted them, not without reason, and confided rather in her Protestant half-brother, Lord James Stewart, who promised that she should be allowed the private celebration of Mass in Scotland. Mary landed at Leith on 19 August, 1561, and on the following Sunday Mass was said in her chapel at Holyrood. This was followed by protests and riots; Knox publicly declared that “one mass was more fearful to him than 10,000 armed men”, and in an interview with the queen inveighed against “that Roman antichrist”, denounced the Catholic Church as a harlot, compared himself to Paul and Queen Mary to Nero, and indulged in much other abuse which he reports copiously in his “History” (suppressing most of Mary’s replies) and calls “reasoning”. The question of the queen’s privilege to have her own Catholic services became a burning one: Lord James (now created Earl of Moray), Morton, Marischal, and other leading Protestants were on her side, Knox and most of the preachers on the other. It was suggested to refer the question to Calvin; but the lords’ view was meanwhile accepted, and Mary kept the Feast of All Saints with what Knox calls “mischievous solemnity”. He continued his tirades against the queen both privately and from the pulit, sometimes reducing her to tears by his violence. In the spring of 1562 he held a public controversy on the doctrine of the Mass with Abbot Quintin Kennedy, a Benedictine of Crossraguel; and he also had a controversial correspondence with an able Catholic apologist, Ninian Winzet of Linlithgow.
Some months later Knox found himself in trouble for having summoned the “brethren” from all parts of Scotland to Edinburgh to defend — apparently by violence, if necessary — one Cranstoun, who was to be tried for brawling in the chapel-royal. Knox’s letter was interpreted by the council as treasonable, but when brought to trial he was judged to have done nothing more than his duty in summoning the brethren in time of danger. Soon after this — in March, 1564 — general surprise seems to have been caused by the second marriage of Knox, his bride being a girl of sixteen, Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree. He makes no mention of the fact himself in his “History”. The Lords of the Congregation, in the summer of this year, publicly censured Knox for his violence in speech and demeanour against the queen, but Knox retorted with his usual references to Ahab and Jezebel, and maintained that idolaters must “die the death”, and that the executioners must be the “people of God”. The Lords in vain cited the opinions of Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and other Continental Protestants as entirely opposed to Knox’s views, and requested him to write and ascertain their judgment on the questions at issue. Knox flatly refused to write to “Mr. Calvin and the learned of other Kirks”, and, as he always produced Scriptural texts to back up his opinions, the Lords were silenced if not convinced. A year later he was again in conflict with the council in consequence of a vehement attack he had made from the pulpit on Mary and the young king-consort, Darnley, in their presence, about a month after their marriage. He was formally suspended from preaching, but he seems to have disregarded the prohibition, remarking that if the Church (not the council) commanded him to abstain he would obey “so far as the Word of God would permit”; in other words, he would obey even the Church only so far as he himself thought fit. This particular sermon, which he printed with a preface, is the only extant specimen of his public eloquence; it is extremely long and dull to read, whatever may have been its effect when delivered.
The situation in Scotland was now, from the point of view of Knox and his friends, a gloomy one. Moray and the other lords who had protested against Mary’s marriage to Darnley were now in exile; all hope of the queen’s conversion to Protestantism was at an end; and her Catholic secretary Rizzio was high in her confidence, indeed her chief adviser. Whether Knox was actually privy to the foul murder of Rizzio before the queen’s eyes on 9 March, 1566, is a matter of doubt; but his own statement that “the act was most just and worthy of all praise” shows that his subsequent approval was beyond any doubt whatever. He thought it well at this juncture to leave Edinburgh for a time, and retired to his friends in Ayrshire, where he busied himself with the writing of his “History”. In December he received from the General Assembly leave of absence from Scotland for six months, so that he was not a witness of the events of the first half of 1567, which included the murder of Darnley, the abduction of Mary by Bothwell, and her marriage to him on 15 May, 1567. The queen was already, after the disaster of Carberry Hill, a prisoner at Lochleven, when Knox re-appeared at Edinburgh and at once resumed, in spite of the disuasion of Throgmorton, the English Ambassador, his pulpit invectives against the sovereign, and his denunciations of the national alliance with France. On 29 July Knox went to Stirling to preach at the coronation of the young king, James VI, when he protested against the rite of unction as a relic of popery. The appointment of Moray to the regency brought him again into close association with Knox, who, however, after the fall of the queen, his great antagonist, never seems to have regained his former prominence in the country. “I live as a man already dead from all civil affairs”, he wrote a little later to Moray’s agent in England. “Foolish Scotland”, he said on another occasion, “hath disobeyed God by sparing the queen”, and he seemed constantly harassed and haunted by a dread of her restoration. Her escape from Lochleven apeared to justify his worst fears, but a fortnight later she was hopelessly defeated at Langside, and was a fugitive to England. Henceforth Knox’s declining forces were devoted to his ministerial work, which he seemst to have carried on with many intervals of weariness and depression. “With his one foot in the grave”, as he describes himself, the assassination of Moray in January, 1569, was a great blow to him. He preached the Regent’s funeral sermon in St. Giles’s Church and, according to one of his admirers, “moved three thousand persons to shed tears for the loss of such a good and godlie governor”. The shock of this event doubtless affected his health, and he was struck by apoplexy in the autumn, and never entirely recovered.
Knox continued to preach in his church in Edinburgh, but with the nobles, Protestant as well as Catholic, many of them his own former friends, in league for the queen’s restoration, he was no longer at home or at ease in the capital; and in the spring of 1571 he retired to St. Andrews, where he remained for fifteen months, continuing to write, and preaching occasionally, notwithstanding his infirmities, with his old fire and vehemence. In August, 1572, Mary’s adherents having left Edinburgh, Knox was persuaded to return thither. The news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew had just reached Scotland, and Knox thundered from his pulpit (to which he had almost to be carried), in the presence of the French ambassador, denunciations of “that cruel murderer and false traitor, the King of France”. On 9 November he took part in the induction-services of Mr. Lawson as minister of St. Giles’s in his place; and fifteen days later, on 24 November, 1572, he died in his house at Edinburgh. Contemporary narratives of his last illness and death (by Richard Bannatyne and Thomas Smeton) are printed by Laing in his edition of Knox’s “Works” (vol. VI). At his burial, two days later, the Regent Morton uttered the well-known words, “Here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man.” The facts of his life perhaps hardly justify these laudatory words. “Knox”, says his learned and sympathetic biographer and editor, Dr. Laing, “cannot be said to have possessed the impetuous and heroic boldness of a Luther.…On more than one occasion he displayed a timidity or shrinking from danger scarcely to have been expected from one who boasted of his willingness to suffer death in his master’s cause.” On his own showing he was courageous enough in his personal encounters with his unfortunate queen; but, according to another of his Protestant biographers, “he was most valiant when he had armed men at his back, and the popular idea of his personal courage, said to have been expressed by the Regent Morton, is entirely erroneous”.
As to Knox’s religion, it is sufficient to say, without questioning the sincerity of his convictions, that the reaction from the Catholicism of his youth seems to have landed him outside the pale of Christianity altogether. Permeated with the spirit of the Old Testament and with the gloomy austerity of the ancient prophets, he displays neither in his voluminous writings nor in the record of his public acts the slightest recognition of the teachings of the Gospel, or of the gentle, mild, and forgiving character of the Christian dispensation. Genial, amiable, and kind-hearted he may have been in private life, though it is difficult to see from what premises his panegyrists deduce his possession of those qualities; but the ferocity and unrestrained violence of his public utterances stand out, even in the rude and lawless age in which he lived, as surpassing almost everything recorded of his contemporaries, even those most closely in sympathy with his political and ecclesiastical views. It is to his credit that he died, as he had lived, a poor man, and that he never enriched himself with the spoils of the Church which he had abandoned — a trait in which he contrasts singularly with the Protestant lords and lairds who were his friends and adherents. Of his ability and his power of influencing those among whom he lived and laboured, there is no room to doubt. His gifts as a speaker and a preacher we have to take on the evidence of his contemporaries, whose testimony there is no need to question; of his command of his native tongue we have abundant proof in his writings, in particular in his “History”, by far the most remarkable specimen of the vernacular Scots of the sixteenth century which has come down to us. The best edition of it is in his collected “Works”, edited by David Laing in six volumes.
The best-known likeness of Knox (of whom no contemporary portrait exists) is the woodcut of him in Beza’s “Icones”, published at Geneva in 1580, and often since reproduced. Lord Torphichen possesses a portrait of him painted a century later, probably from Beza’s. The so-called Somerville portrait, maintained by Carlyle to be the only authentic likeness of Knox, apparently represents a divine of the seventeenth century. Knox was survived by his widow, who married again, and by two sons of his first marriage (who both died childless) and three daughters of his second. Descendants of his youngest daughter still exist.
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LAING, Works of John Knox, with introductory and chronological notes (6 vols., Edinburgh, 1895); MCCRIE, Life of Knox (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1813); HUME BROWN, John Knox (2 vols., London, 1845); LANG, John Knox and the Reformation (London, 1905); MILLER, John Knox, the Hero of the Scottish Reformation (London, 1905); GOSSE, Life and Times of John Knox (London, 1888); ROGERS, Genealogical Memoirs of John Knox (Grampian Club, 1879); TAYLOR INNES, John Knox (Famous Scots Series, Edinburgh, 1896); WILMOT, John Knox and the Scottish Reformation (Glasgow, Catholic Truth Society, s. d.); MACKAY in Dict. Nat. Biog., s. v. (London, 1892); CARLYLE, Essay on the Portaits of John Knox in Collected Works (London, 1885); BROWN, The Life Story of John Knox (London, 1905).
D.O. HUNTER-BLAIR Transcribed by WGKofron With thanks to Fr. John Hilkert, Akron, Ohio
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIIICopyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Knox, John (1)
the Reformer of Scotland. I. Early Life. He was born in Gifford, a village in East Lothian, in 1505, of respectable parents, members of the Romish Church, who were able to give their soin a liberal education. After spending some time at the grammar-school of Haddington, he was sent by his father, in 1521, to the University of Glasgow. Here he studied under Mayor, a famous professor of philosophy and theology. A disciple, by the way, of Gerson and Peter d’Ailly, he advocated the supremacy of general councils over the popes, and, carrying this view into politics, held also that the king’s authority is derived from the people-a doctrine which he inculcated in his pupils (Knox as well as Buchanan), and which fully explains the democratic tendencies of the Scottish reformer. Soon after taking the degree of M.A., Knox became an assistant professor, and rivalled his master in the subtleties of the dialectic art. He obtained clerical orders even before he reached the age fixed by the canons, and about 1530 went to St. Andrew’s, and began to teach there. A veil of obscurity hangs over his life for several of the following years. It is supposed, however, that the study of the fathers, especially Jerome and Augustine, shook his attachment to the Romish Church as early as 1535, but he did not become an avowed Protestant until 1542 -a fact which shows that lie did not act from hasty or turbulent impulses, but with prudence and deliberation. His reproof of existing corruptions compelled him to retire from St. Andrew’s to the south of’ Scotland, and he was degraded from his orders as a heretic. He now became a tutor to the sons of two noble families, and occasionally preached to the people in the neighborhood. During this period he became a frequent companion of the reformer and martyr Geo. Wishart, to whose instructions he was greatly indebted. When Wishart was apprehended, Knox would fain have clung to him and shared his fate, but his friend refused, saying, ” Nay, return to your barns, and God bless you; one is sufficient for a sacrifice.” Wishart was burnt at the stake, under cardinal Beaton’s orders, in March. 1516, and within two months afterwards the cardinal was put to death in his own castle of St. Andrew’s by a band of nobles and others who held the castle as a stronghold of the reforming interest. Knox, who was daily in danger of his life from Beaton’s successor, determined to go to Germany to pursue his studies, but was induced by the parents of his pupils to give up his purpose and take refuge in the castle, which he did with many other Protestants in Easter, 1547. Here for the first time he entered upon the public ministry of the Gospel, and he distinguished himself both as a powerful preacher and a fearless opponent of the papacy. But this did not continue long.
II. His Exile.-The arrival of a French fleet enabled the regent of Scotland to invest the castle by sea and by land, and on the last day of July the garrison was compelled to surrender, which they did upon honorable terms. But instead of being simply expatriated according to the engagement. they were taken to France, where the principal gentlemen were hell as prisoners, and Knox and others were made galley-slaves. The following winter the galleys lay on the Loire, but the next summer they cruised on the east coast of Scotland, often in sight of the steeple of St. Andrew’s. Knox’s constancy continued unshaken under all toils and trials, which were greatly increased at one time by disease, until in Feb. 1549, after nineteen months of bondage, he was released through the personal interposition of Edward V1 of England with the king of France. He immediately repaired to England, where he was warmly welcomed by Cranmer and the council. He was stationed in the north at Berwick, and afterwards at Newcastle, where he labored indefatigably, preaching often every day in the week, notwithstanding many bodily infirmities. He enjoyed the confidence of the English reformers, was made one of king Edward’s chaplains, was consulted in the revision of the Prayer-book, and also of the Articles of Religion, and was offered the bishopric of Rochester, but declined it from scruples as to the divine authority of the office. After five years of great and faithful activity, at the end of which he married a Miss Bowes, of Berwick, the accession of Mary to the throne put an end to his usefulness and endangered his life. His own desire was to remain and meet the issue, for, as he said, “never could he die in a more honest quarrel,” but the tears and importunity of friends prevailed on him to fly.
Accordingly, in January, 1554, he took ship to Dieppe, where he spent his first leisure in writing suitable advices to those whom he could no longer reach by his voice. Afterwards he travelled in France and Switzerland, visiting particular churches and conferring with the learned. At Geneva he studied Hebrew, and formed with the celebrated Calvin an intimate friendship, which ended only with Calvin’s death. By Calvin’s influence he was induced to take charge of the Church of English exiles at Frankfort-on-the-Main, but unhappy disputes about the service-book led to his withdrawal after less than six months’ service, in March, 1555. He immediately turned his steps to Geneva, where he took charge of an English congregation. But in the same year he made a flying visit to Scotland, during which he preached incessantly, and labored night and day. Among the many distinguished converts he made at this time figured three young lords, who afterwards played no unimportant part in the affairs of their country: Archibald Horn, later earl of Argyle; James Stuart, natural brother of Mary, and later earl of Murray, and regent during the minority of James VI; and John Erskine, who, under the title of earl of Marr, also acted as regent. His influence rendered the reformers more decided in their course, and he instituted in 1556 the first of those religious bonds’ or covenants which are so marked a feature in Scottish ecclesiastical history. But he judged that the time was not ripe for a general movement, and accordingly returned to Switzerland. After his departure he was cited to appear before an assembly of the Romish clergy, and in his absence was condemned to be burnt as a heretic, and the sentence was executed upon his effigy. In Geneva he spent nearly three years, the happiest and most tranquil of his life. He counted it ” the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles.” He was surrounded by his family, and lived in the greatest harmony with his colleague, Goodman, and the small flock under his charge. During his stay he took part in the preparation of what is called the Geneva Bible. He also wrote a number of letters and appeals which were forwarded to Scotland, and had great influence in guiding the counsels of the friends of the Reformation. His most singular treatise was a volume entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of’ Women. Although undoubtedly honest in his opinions, it is certain that he was led to them by his abhorrence of Bloody Mary, who was then wearying England by her cruelties. But it was an unfortunate publication, for it subjected him to the resentment of two queens, during whose reign it was his lot to live; the one his native princess, Mary, queen of Scots, and the other Elizabeth, exercising a sway in Scotland scarcely inferior to that of any of its own sovereigns. Although his residence at Geneva was so agreeable in many ways, yet duty to Scotland was always uppermost in his mind, and when a summons came from the leading Protestants there for his return, he yielded at once.
III. His Life work in Scotland.-The inducement for him to return was the concession of liberty of worship promised by the queen regent, but upon his arrival at Leith in May, 1559, he found that she had thrown off all disguises (she had just stipulated to assist the Guises in their plans against Elizabeth), and was determined to suppress the Reformation by force. Not only did she refuse the demands of the Protestants, but even summoned a number of the preachers for trial at Stirling. But Knox was not disheartened. He wrote to his sister, ” Satan rageth to the uttermost, and I am come, I praise my God, even in the brunt of the battle.” The regent, alarmed at the attitude of the Protestants, promised to put a stop to the trial, and induced the accused to stay away, and then outlawed them for not appearing. The news of this outrage came to Perth on the day when Knox preached against the idolatry of the mass and of image worship. At the conclusion of the service, an encounter between a boy and a priest who was preparing to celebrate mass led to a terrible riot. The altar, the images, and all the ornaments of the church were torn down and trampled under foot; nor did the rascall multitude,” as Knox called them, stop till the houses of the Gray and Black Friars and the Carthusian Monastery were laid in ruins. Treating this tumult as a designed rebellion, the regent advanced upon Perth with a large force, but finding the Protestants prepared to resist, made an accommodation. Henceforth the latter came to be distinguished as the Congregation, and their leaders as the lords of the Congregation. Under the advice of Knox, they reformed the worship wherever their power extended, and the iconoclasm of Perth was repeated at St. Andrew’s and many other parts of the kingdom, not, however, by a riotous proceeding, but by the harmonious action of the authorities and the people. The briefest and best defence of this course is the reformer’s pithy saying, that “;the rookeries were demolished that the rooks might not return.” The contest between the two parties went on for a year, during part of which Knox prosecuted a flaming evangelism in the southern and eastern counties, while at other times he acted as chief agent in securing foreign help for his oppressed countrymen. In this occurred the only serious blot on his fair fame. He wrote to the English governor of Berwick that England might send troops to their aid, and then, to escape reproach from France, might disown them as rebels. The rebuke which he received from Sir James Croft was well deserved. The civil war was at length terminated by the entrance of an English army, which invested Edinburgh, and by the death of the queen regent. These events led to a truce, and the calling of a free Parliament to settle religious differences.
This body met in August, 1560, and, carrying out what was undoubtedly the wish of the greater part of the people, established the Reformed religion, and interdicted by law any performance of Roman Catholic worship. In all this Knox was not only an active agent, but the agent above all others. The Confession of Faith and the First Book of Discipline both bear the impress of his mind. Thus a great step was taken, from which there never afterwards was any serious recession. Knox did not attain all that he desired, especially in respect to the provision for the support of the Church and of education throughout the country. Still he accomplished a radical work, of which all that followed was only the expansion and consolidation. The arrival in the next year (1561) of the youthful queen Mary, who had high notions of prerogative, as well as an ardent attachment to Romanism, occasioned new difficulties, in which Knox, as minister in the metropolis, was actively engaged. He had prolonged interviews with her, in which she exerted all her wiles to win him to her side, but in vain. He was always uncompromising, and once drove her into tears, for which he has often been censured; but his own statement to Mary at the time was that he took no delight in any one’s distress, that he could hardly bear to see his own boys weep when corrected for their faults, but that, since he had only discharged his duty. he was constrained, though unwillingly, to sustain her majesty’s tears rather than hurt his conscience and betray the commonwealth through his silence. Meanwhile his activity in the pulpit was unabated. In the Church of St. Giles, where sometimes as many as three thousand hearers were gathered, he preached twice on Sundays, and thrice on other days of the week.
To these were added other services in the surrounding country. The effect of these prodigious labors was immense, as we learn from what the English ambassador wrote to Cecil: Where your honor exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able in an hour to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” The vehemence, however, of his public discourses offended some of his friends, and his unyielding opposition to the court led to his alienation from the more moderate party who tried to govern the country in the queen’s name; so that from 1563 to 1565 he retired into comparative privacy, but he continued his labors in the pulpit and in the assembly of the kirk. The rapid series of events which followed Mary’s marriage with Darnley in July, 1565, the murder of Rizzio in the next year, the murder of’ Darnley in 1567, and the queen’s marriage with Bothwell, brought Knox again to the front. Mary was compelled to abdicate in favor of her son, and Murray, Aug. 1567, became regent. Further reforms were effected by the Parliament of 1567. The sovereign was bound to be a Protestant, and some better provision was made for the support of the clergy. Knox and Murray were in complete accord, and the affairs of religion seemed so settled that the former deemed his work done, and thought of retiring to Geneva to end his days in peace. But in 1570 Murray was assassinated. Knox shared in the general grief, and this event, with the confusions that followed, led to a stroke of apoplexy, which affected his speech considerably. He recovered in part, and was able to resume preaching, but misunderstandings sprang up between him and the nobles, and even some of his brethren in the General Assembly. His life having been threatened, he, in 1571, by the advice of his friends, who feared bloodshed, retired to St. Andrew’s, where he preached with all his former vigor, although unable to walk to the pulpit without assistance. In the latter part of 1572 he was recalled to Edinburgh, and came back to die, ” weary of the world,” and ” thirsting to depart.” One of his last public services was an indignant denunciation of the inhuman massacre of St. Bartholomew’s. On the 24th of November he quietly fell asleep, not so much oppressed with years as worn out by his incessant and extraordinary labors of body and mind. In an interview with the session of his Church a few days before, he solemnly protested the sincerity of his course. Many had complained of his severity, but God knew that his mind was void of hatred to those against whom he had thundered the severest judgments, and his only object was to gain them to the Lord. He had never made merchandise of God’s word, nor studied to please men, nor indulged his own or others’ private passions, but had faithfully used whatever talent was given to him for the edification of the Church.
IV. His Character. Knox was a man of small stature, and of a weakly habit of body, but he had a vigorous mind and an unconquerable will. Firmness and decision characterized his entire course. His piety was deep and fervent, and the zeal which consumed him never knew abatement. Yet it was not unintelligent. He was well educated for his time, and always endeavored to increase his knowledge, even in middle life seizing his first opportunity to learn Hebrew. Anl inward conviction of eternal realities inspired him with a bold and fervid eloquence which often held thousands of his countrymen as if under a spell. In dealing with men, he was shrewd and penetrating to the last degree. No outward show or conventional pretence deceived him. Whether he encountered queens, nobles, or peasants, he went straight to the heart of things, and insisted upon absolute reality. His mind was not of a reflective or speculative cast, and his writings, which are not few, have at this day mainly an antiquarian interest.
His earnestness was all in a practical direction, as, indeed, his life was one long conflict from his flight from St. Andrew’s in 1542 until his return thither in 1571. His language was such as became his thought-simple, homely, and direct. ” He had learned,” as he once said in the pulpit, “plainly and boldly to call wickedness by its own terms, a fig a fig, and a spade a spade.” Nor did he ever quail. Nothing daunted him; his spirit rose high in the midst of danger. The day his body was laid in the grave, the regent Morton said truly, ” There lies he who never feared the face of man.” Just such a man was needed for the work to which Providence called him. To lay the axe to the root of the tree and warn a generation of vipers requires one stern as Elijah, vehement as John the Baptist. It has been asked if the work would not have been done better had the spirit of love and moderation, as well as of power, presided over it; the answer is that, considering the character of the times and the people, in that case perhaps. the thing would not have been done at all. But it was done, thoroughly done, and more effectually than in any other country in Europe. The First Book of Discipline required a school in every parish, a college in every “notable town,” and three universities in the kingdom. The burst of Carlyle (Essay on Sir Walter Scott) is well deserved: “Honor to all the brave and true; everlasting honor to brave old Knox, one of the truest of the true ! That, in the moment while he and his cause, amid civil broils, in convulsion and confusion, were still but struggling for life, he sent the schoolmaster forth into all corners, and said, ‘Let the people be taught;’ this is but one, and, indeed, an inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His message in its true compass was, Let men know that they are men; created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of time what will last through eternity. This great message Knox did deliver with a man’s voice and strength, and found a people to believe him…. The Scotch national character originates in many circumstances; first of all, in the Saxon stuff there was to work oni; but next, and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian Gospel of John Knox.” Says Cunningham (Church Hist. of Scotland [Edinb. 1859, 2 vols. 8vo], i, 407 sq.), ” Knox was not perfect, as no man is.
He was coarse, fierce, dictatorial; but he had great redeeming qualities-qualities which are seldom found in such stormy, changeful periods as that in which he lived. He was consistent, sincere, unselfish. From first to last he pursued the same straight, unswerving course, turning neither to the righthand nor to the left; firm amid continual vicissitudes; and if he could have burned and disembowelled unhappy Papists, he would have done it with the fullest conviction that he was doing God service. He hated Popery with a perfect hatred; and regarding Mary and her mother as its chief personations in the land, he followed them through life with a rancor which was all the more deadly because it was rooted in religion. He was, perhaps, fond of power and popularity, but he gained them by no mean compliances. On a question of principle he would quarrel with the highest, and, having quarreled, he would not hesitate to vilify them to their face. His hands were clean of bribes. He did not grow rich by the spoils of the Reformation. He was content to live and die the minister of St. Giles’s. Is not such a one, rough and bearish though he be, more to be venerated than the supple, time- serving Churchmen who were the tools of the English Reformation? Does he not stand out in pleasing relief from the grasping barons with whom he was associated, who hated monks because they coveted their corn-fields, and afterwards disgraced the religion they professed by their feuds, their conspiracies, and coldblooded assassinations ?” But perhaps the greatest tribute that has ever been paid to the memory of John Knox has of late been penned by Froude (Hist. of England, 10:457 sq.). Frequently the charge of fanaticism has been laid at the door of the great Scottish reformer; this Froude unhesitatingly refutes, and assures us that it was only against Popery, the system that enslaves both the Church and the State, that he fought. ‘ He was no narrow fanatic who, in a world in which God’s grace was equally visible in a thousand creeds, could see truth and goodness nowhere but in his own formula. He was a large, noble, generous man, with a shrewd perception of actual fact, who found himself face to face with a system of hideous iniquity. He believed himself a prophet, with a direct commission from heaven to overthrow it, and his return to Scotland became the signal, therefore, for the renewal of the struggle.”
V. Works and Literature.-Besides the Geneva Bible and occasional pamphlets, John Knox wrote, History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland from 1422 to 1567 (Lond. 1644, folio; Edinb. 1732, folio). His Works have been collected and edited by Duv. Laing (Edinb. 1846, 8vo). See M’Crie, Life of John Knox (Edinb. 1814, and often since); Ch. Niemever, Knox Leben (Lpz. 1824, 8vo); T. Brandes, Life of’ John Knox (London, 1863); Hetherington, list. o/’ Ch. of Scotland; Burton, Hist. of Scotland, particularly ch. 38; Tytler, Hist. of Scotland, vols. vi and vii; Hardwick, Hist. of the Reformation, p. 142 sq.; Russell, Ch. in Scotland; Hallam, Const. Hist. Engl. i, 140, note, 171, 280; 3:210; Froude, Hist. of Engl. vols. 4:v, 6:7:9, and 10, and his Studies on great Subjects, series i and ii; Edinb. Rev. xcv, 236 sq.; Westminster Rev. 41:37 sq.; London Qu. 418 sq.; 85, 148 sq.; Meth. Qu. Rev. ii, 325 sq.; Edinb. Rev. July, 1853. (T.W. C.)