John Knox (c.1514-November 24, 1572) was the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland.
Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom Niccolò Machiavelli dedicated his notorious book, The Prince, 1515, had his daughter, Catherine de’ Medici, marry the next King of France, Henry II.
Henry II suppressed Protestant Huguenots in France. After his death, Catherine de’ Medici was credited with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572, after which Protestants fled France.
Catherine de’ Medici’s teenage son, King Francis II, was married to Mary-Queen of Scots,as France had for centuries helped Scotland struggle for independence from England.
Earlier, as a young man, John Knox had been arrested and sentenced in 1547 to be a galley slave on a French ship. Sailing away from Scotland, John Knox looked up as they passed St. Andrews and said:
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When King Edward died, his sister Queen Mary Tudor took the throne and attempted to bring England back under the Catholic Church.
Knox fled from Queen Mary I in 1554. He went to Geneva, working with John Calvin.
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In 1559, Knox returned to Scotland with Calvinist Protestantism. He preached a sermon in St. Andrews which incited hearers, who proceeded to smash statues and vandalize Catholic churches. He was instrumental in having the Scottish Parliament officially accepted the Reformation in 1560, beginning the Presbyterian Church.
Through Knox, John Calvin’s beliefs not only influenced Scotland, but also the millions of Scots, Scots-Irish, Puritan and Presbyterian immigrants who came to America.
U.S. Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft published a ten-volume History of the United States (1834-74), the first comprehensive history of America. Bancroft wrote:
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Following Calvin’s example of confronting monarchs, Knox opposed Mary Queen of Scots. His written works include: First Blast of the Trumpets Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1556-58, and the Book of Common Order, which regulated Scottish worship.
Mary-Queen of Scots had a tragic life. After returning from France, she had married Lord Darnley in 1565, but he became jealous of Mary’s private secretary, David Rizzio, and had him murdered.
Lord Darnley was then suspiciously killed two years later in an explosion. The chief suspect in his murder was the Earl of Bothwell, who manipulated Mary into marrying him a month later.
This upheaval resulted in the Scottish Parliament forcing Mary to abdicate her throne. She was replaced by her and Lord Darnley’s infant son, James.
James, at the age of 13 months, was crowned King James VI of Scotland. John Knox gave the coronation sermon.
The Earl of Bothwell tried to raise forces to return Mary-Queen of Scots to her throne, but he was captured in Norway and died in prison.
Mary-Queen of Scots fled to England in 1568 to be protected by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I,who ended up putting her into forced custody for 19 years.
Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII by Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn had refused to be another of Henry’s mistresses. This led Henry to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, whose daughter was Mary. Henry broke from the Catholic Church and began the Anglican Church.
Henry VIII later beheaded Anne Boleyn. The fate of Henry VIII’s six wives were:
Elizabeth was made aware of a plot against her life, which questionably implicated her captive Catholic cousin Mary-Queen of Scots. Elizabeth tragically signed the order for Mary’s execution in 1587. Catholics in England went into hiding or fled. Large numbers of priests sent to England were captured and executed.
In 1588, Elizabeth had Sir Francis Drake fight the Spanish Armada. Like Francis I earlier, the seriousness of Spain’s threat led Queen Elizabeth to make a treaty with Spain’s enemies, Moroccan ruler Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur and the Ottoman Sultan Murad III.
King James I had been raised by Scottish Presbyterian Protestant tutors. He was responsible for arranging Anglican, Puritan and Presbyterian scholars to work together to produce the King James Bible – the best-selling and the most distributed book of all time.
King James I is the namesake of Jamestown, Virginia – the first permanent English settlement in America. The Pilgrims were sailing on the Mayflower ship to join the Jamestown Colony when the got blown off course in a winter storm and landed at Cape Cod. The Pilgrims had no charter from the King so they wrote their famous Mayflower Compact.
When Spanish and Italian Catholic troops plotted to help Ireland break from Anglican English control, beginning in 1569, the English crushed the attempt and executed thousands of Irish Catholics. The Irish had their crops and farms destroyed, leading to famine and disease and thousands dying. Over the next century, the British killed over a half-million Irish Catholics and sold the same number into slavery in the West Indies, New England, Barbados and Virginia.
In an effort to make Ireland more Protestant, Britain relocated 200,000 Presbyterians from Scotland to Ireland. In the following years, crop failures, the collapsing linen trade, and increased rents caused over a million Scots and Scots-Irish Protestant Presbyterian descendants to leave Ireland and immigrate to the American colonies.
Between 1717 and 1775, over 200,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America, becoming nearly a third of the country’s population. At the time of the Revolution, the population of America was around 3 million, of which Puritans comprised about 600,000.
Other settlers included groups influenced by John Calvin:
Many of these held the basic Calvinistic confession, which was comprised of 39 Articles.
<Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. That good idea combines a commitment to man’s inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man’s obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today.> 1514JK005
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American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:
1514JK001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024). John Knox, statement made while sailing past St. Andrews, Scotland.
1514JK002. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024). John Calvin, to Jeanne d’Albret Queen Regnant of Navarre, near the border of France and Spain.
1514JK003. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024). John Calvin, to Queen Regnant of Navarre, April 28, 1545.
1514JK004. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024). U.S. Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, ten-volume History of the United States, 1834-74.
1514JK005. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024).
TIME Magazine article “Looking to Its Roots,” May 25, 1987.
1514JK006. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2024). John Knox, inscription on the Reformation Monument in Geneva, Switzerland. John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 162.
This post originally appeared at https://americanminute.com/blogs/todays-american-minute/john-knox-c-1514-november-24-1572