KNOX, JOHN (c. 1505-1572), Scottish reformer and his torian. Of his early life very little is certainly known, in spite of the fact that his History of the Reformation and his private letters, especially the latter, are often vividly autobiographical. Even the year of his birth, usually given as 15°5, is matter of dispute. Beza makes it 1515; Sir Peter Young (tutor to James VI. of Scotland), writing to Beza from Edinburgh in 1579, says 1513 ; and a strong case has been made out for holding that the generally accepted date is due to an error in transcription. (See Dr. Hay Fleming in the Bookman, Sept. 1905.) He was a son of William Knox, who lived in or near Haddington, his mother's name was Sinclair, and his forefathers on both sides had fought under the banner of the Bothwells. William Knox was perhaps a prosperous East Lothian peasant. John went to school and to the university, where he sat "at the feet" of John Major. Major exchanged his "regency" or professorship in Glasgow University for one in that of St. Andrews in 1523. If Knox's college time was later than that date (as it must have been, if he was born near 1515), it was no doubt spent, as Beza narrates, at St. Andrews, and probably exclusively there. But in Major's last Glasgow session a "Joannes Knox" matriculated there; and if this were the future reformer, he may thereafter either have followed his master to St. Andrews or returned from Glasgow straight to Haddington. But there is no trace of him for another twenty years. Then he reappears in his native district as a priest without a university degree (Sir John Knox) and a notary of the diocese of St. Andrews. In 1543 he signed himself "min ister of the sacred altar" under the archbishop of St. Andrews. But in 1546 he was carrying a two-handed sword in defence of the reformer George Wishart, on the day when the latter was arrested by the archbishop's order. Knox would have resisted, though the arrest was by his feudal superior, Lord Bothwell; but Wishart himself commanded his submission, with the words "One is sufficient for a sacrifice," and was handed over for trial at St. Andrews. Next year the archbishop himself had been murdered, and Knox was preaching in St. Andrews a fully devel oped Protestantism.
Knox gives us no information as to how this startling change in himself had been brought about. After Wishart's execution he fled from place to place, and, hearing that certain gentlemen of Fife had slain the cardinal and were in possession of his castle of St. Andrews, he gladly joined himself to them. In St. Andrews he taught "John's Gospel" and a certain catechism— probably that which Wishart had got from "Helvetia" and trans lated; but his teaching was supposed to be private and tutorial and for the benefit of his friends' "bairns." The men about him however—among them Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, "Lyon King" and poet—saw his capacity for greater things, and, on his at first refusing "to run where God had not called him," planned a solemn appeal to Knox from the pulpit to accept "the public office and charge of preaching." At the close of it the speaker (in Knox's own narrative) "said to those that were present, 'Was not this your charge to me? And do ye not approve this voca tion?' They answered, 'It was, and we approve it.' Whereat the
said Johnne, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber," remaining there in "heavi ness" for days, until he came forth resolved and prepared. Knox is probably not wrong in regarding this strange incident as the spring of his own public life. The St. Andrews invitation was really one to danger and death; John Rough, who spoke it, died a few years after at Smithfield. What to the others was chiefly a promise of personal salvation became for the indomitable will of Knox an assurance also of victory, even in this world, over embattled forces of ancient wrong. It is certain at least that from this date Knox never changed and scarcely even varied his public course. And looking back upon that course afterwards, he records with much complacency how his earliest St. Andrews sermon built up a whole fabric of aggressive Protestantism upon Puritan theory, so that his startled hearers muttered, "Others sned (snipped) the branches; this man strikes at the root." Meantime the system attacked was safe for another thirteen years. In June 1547 St. Andrews yielded to the French fleet, and the prisoners, including Knox, were thrown into the galleys on the Loire, to remain in irons and under the lash for at least nine teen months. Released at last (apparently through the influence of the young English king, Edward VI.), Knox was appointed one of the licensed preachers of the new faith for England, and stationed in the great garrison of Berwick, and afterwards at Newcastle. In 1551 he seems to have been made a royal chaplain; in 1552 he was certainly offered an English bishopric, which he declined; and during most of this year he used his influence, as preacher at court and in London, to make the new English settle ment more Protestant. To him at least is due the Prayer-book rubric which explains that, when kneeling at the sacrament is ordered, "no adoration is intended or ought to be done." While in Northumberland Knox had been betrothed to Margaret Bowes, one of the fifteen children of Richard Bowes, the captain of Norham Castle. Her mother, Elizabeth, co-heiress of Aske in Yorkshire, was the earliest of that little band of women-friends whose correspondence with Knox on religious matters throws an unexpected light on his discriminating tenderness of heart. But now Mary Tudor succeeded her brother, and Knox in March escaped into five years' exile abroad, leaving Mrs. Bowes a fine treatise on "Affliction," and sending back to England two edi tions of a more acrid "Faithful Admonition" on the crisis there. He first drifted to Frankfort, where the English congregation was divided, and the party opposed to Knox got rid of him at last by a complaint to the authorities of treason against the em peror Charles V. as well as Philip and Mary. At Geneva he found a more congenial pastorate. Christopher Goodman (c. 1520 1603) and he, with other exiles, began there the Puritan tradition, and prepared the earlier English version of the Bible. Here, and afterwards at Dieppe (where he preached in French), Knox kept in touch with the other Reformers, studied Greek and Hebrew in the interest of theology, and having brought his wife and her mother from England in 1555 lived for years a peaceful life.