Few Christian traditions carry the name of a single founder the way Presbyterianism carries that of John Knox: a Scottish Catholic priest who became an unyielding reformer, and whose idea of church government by councils still organizes Reformed churches in dozens of countries.
Born around 1514 in Haddington, in eastern Scotland, Knox was ordained a Catholic priest and worked as a notary before drawing close to the reformed preaching of George Wishart. He became the preacher’s bodyguard in the last months of his life.
After the assassination of Cardinal Beaton in 1546, Knox joined the Protestant refugees at St Andrews Castle and was called to preach there. When the castle fell to French troops in 1547, he was captured and spent nineteen months as an enslaved oarsman in the galleys.
Freed in 1549, he ministered in England under King Edward VI, but the Catholic restoration under Mary Tudor pushed him into exile on the European continent. In Geneva, he spent time with John Calvin and pastored the city’s English congregation, which he described as the most perfect school of Christ since the apostles.
In 1558 he published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a harsh pamphlet against Catholic queens. The text ended up angering the Protestant Elizabeth I as well, and later hurt his standing with the English crown, an episode that history records without mincing words.
Back in Scotland in May 1559, Knox preached a sermon against idolatry in Perth that preceded a popular riot: the crowd looted the church and destroyed the city’s Dominican and Franciscan friaries over the following two days. The episode was repeated in other Scottish towns and shows the more violent side of the Reformation he helped lead, though Knox himself attributed the excesses to the mob rather than to his preaching.
Even so, he led the Reformation that the Scottish Parliament approved the following year. In 1560, he helped draft the Scots Confession together with five other ministers and, soon after, the First Book of Discipline, which organized the church into representative councils, from the parish to the general assembly.
As preacher at St Giles in Edinburgh, he clashed repeatedly with Queen Mary Stuart, arguing that civil authority also answered to the law of God; Knox’s own accounts describe the queen in tears in more than one of these encounters. In 1564, by then a widower of Marjorie Bowes, he married, at fifty, seventeen-year-old Margaret Stewart, a union that drew criticism at court for having been made without royal consent.
He died in 1572, leaving unfinished his History of the Reformation in Scotland, his first-hand account of the years he had helped transform.
The model of church government by councils rather than by a single bishop, which Knox helped structure, later traveled with Scottish, Irish, and North American missionaries to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Today it still sustains Presbyterian and Reformed churches in dozens of countries.
