Before reforming Scotland's church, John Knox spent 19 months as a galley prisoner
John Knox began as a Catholic priest and notary in East Lothian. He ended as the driving force of Scotland's Reformation, lecturing Mary, Queen of Scots to her face. In between came a siege, a year and a half chained in French galleys, a royal chaplaincy in England and an apprenticeship with Calvin in Geneva.
Haddington, the county town of East Lothian, or somewhere close by, saw Knox's birth at an uncertain date between 1505 and 1515. He was the son of a merchant, William Knox; his mother, whose maiden name was Sinclair, died while he was small. With scholarship pointing him toward the church, he studied under the noted scholar John Major, probably at St Andrews, and was ordained in Edinburgh on Easter Eve 1536. By 1540 he shows up in records as a priest and notary, though he spent his time tutoring the sons of two lairds who had already embraced reformed ideas.
The preacher George Wishart, who had fled Scotland in 1538 on heresy charges and later returned, was probably the decisive influence. After Wishart's execution, a band of five killed Cardinal David Beaton in St Andrews Castle on 29 May 1546 and held the fortress. Knox, dodging arrest, joined the roughly one hundred and fifty people sheltering inside, where the garrison chaplain John Rough publicly proposed him as a preacher. When French forces took the castle in 1547, Knox was sent to the galleys. Fever nearly killed him, and he was freed only in February 1549 after 19 months.
England, then breaking with Rome, gave him refuge. He became a royal chaplain to Edward VI, pushed reforms into the wording of the Book of Common Prayer and married Margery Bowes. Mary I's Catholic restoration drove him abroad to Frankfurt and Geneva, where Calvin taught him Reformed doctrine and presbyterian church order. There he composed a service book, The Forme of Prayers.
Back home, Knox and the Protestant nobility led a movement so sweeping that it can fairly be called a revolution: it unseated the regent Mary of Guise, who ruled for her young daughter. He co-wrote the confession of faith and church order of the new Kirk, worked on a five-volume history of the Scottish Reformation between 1559 and 1566, and in several audiences rebuked Queen Mary for favouring Catholic practice. He died on 24 November 1572.
Source: John Knox
