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Finally arrested by Cardinal Beaton’s henchmen, Wishart ordered Knox to flee so as to escape the punishment for heresy that he endured in St Andrews in 1546 – burning at the stake. Dropping everything to follow him, Knox took up a two-handed sword to serve as his bodyguard. According to Knox, he was born again when Wishart pulled him from ‘the puddle of papistry’. Then, in 1536, though he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, he served as a notary apostolic at St Mary’s Collegiate Church in Haddington.Īround 1542 he became tutor to the sons of local Protestant lairds, but it was the charismatic reformist preacher, George Wishart, who changed the course of his life. He attended the local grammar school before going on to St Andrews University, but for some reason did not graduate. His father was killed at Flodden and his mother died soon after, leaving Knox and his brother William orphans. He was born in Giffordgate, on the banks of the River Tyne in Haddington, East Lothian around 1513/14. Several facts have been established, however.
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So who was John Knox? While Knox wrote reams about his later life, he was notoriously tight-lipped about his first thirty years. Whatever else he may have achieved, Knox’s notorious ‘blast’ has reverberated throughout history, drowning out the legacy of ‘the one Scotchman to whom all others, his country and the world, owed a debt’ – in the words of the historian Thomas Carlyle. Writers veer away from him, no doubt because, in the popular imagination at least, Knox has become a caricature of himself: the cartoon Calvinist who banned Christmas, the pulpit-thumping misogynist who wrote the notorious polemic, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. 2014 marks the 500 th anniversary of the birth of John Knox, yet surprisingly little has been written about the founding father of the Scottish Reformation.