John Knox
John Knox was a priest who took up a two-handed sword to guard a Protestant preacher, spent nineteen months chained to an oar in a French galley for being in the castle where the cardinal was murdered, learned his theology from Calvin in Geneva, came home in 1559 and preached the sermon at Perth that started the Scottish Reformation, and told Mary Queen of Scots to her face that subjects could depose a ruler who defied God. He was born about 1514 near Haddington, was a notary and a tutor, and was converted by George Wishart, whom Cardinal Beaton burned in 1546; when Wishart's friends killed Beaton and held St Andrews castle, Knox went in as their chaplain. When the French took the castle in 1547 he went to the galleys. Released in 1549, he preached in Edward VI's England, refused a bishopric, fled Mary Tudor to the continent, quarrelled with the English exiles at Frankfurt, and at Geneva found the church he wanted, the most perfect school of Christ since the apostles. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, written there in 1558 against Mary Tudor and Mary of Guise, arrived as Elizabeth came to the throne and she never forgave him. He landed in Scotland in May 1559, and his sermon against idolatry at St John's in Perth on the 11th sent the crowd to break the images and sack the friaries, and the Lords of the Congregation rose. With English help they beat the French regent, and the parliament of August 1560 abolished the mass and adopted the Confession of Faith he and five other Johns had written in four days. The First Book of Discipline that followed wanted a school in every parish and the church's wealth for the poor, and the nobles kept the wealth. The young queen came home in 1561 and he had five interviews with her, in which she wept and he did not, and preached against her marriage and her mass from St Giles's until she fell. He married a girl of seventeen at fifty, which Mary made much of, wrote a History of the Reformation that is his own, and died in Edinburgh in November 1572, a fortnight after the massacre of St Bartholomew, which he had preached on.
- Lived: 1514 CE – 1572 CE
- Nationality: Scottish
- Roles: preacher, reformer
