Before that, on BBC4, Richard Holloway smashes some myths about John Knox in part
two of The Sword and the Cross.
It's the 19th of August, 1561, and a delegation of Edinburgh worthies is
making its way to Holyrood Palace.
Inside the palace, Mary, Queen of Scots, is preparing to spend her first night in
Scotland.
Brought up at the French court, Mary, still only 19, is beautiful and
highly educated, but she's also a Catholic.
For John Knox, the radical voice of Scottish Protestantism, the presence of a
Catholic Queen is intolerable.
The psalms which he and his delegation have come to sing to Mary are not a
welcome, but a warning.
O, still contrive a thing that is but vain.
The kings and rulers of the earth conspire and are all bent against the Lord.
But just how accurate is this image of John Knox, the preacher who challenged a
Queen and tore Scotland from the grasp of medieval Catholicism?
The trouble with characters like Knox is that it's now so difficult to separate the
man from the myth.
Was he the heroic figure of the Protestant myth, who fearlessly challenged authority
and single-handedly rescued Scotland from the clutches of Rome?
Or was he the heretic of the Catholic myth, who destroyed forever the unity of
the one true church?
Was he the misogynistic killjoy who pulled the plugs on pleasure, as the humanist
myth portrays him?
Well, the figure who emerges from behind all these myths is more complex,
frail and fascinating than we might have imagined.
But getting to that real human Knox isn't going to be easy.
Knox certainly didn't start out as a rebel with a cause.
He was ordained as a Catholic priest in the late 1530s, precisely at the moment
when the revolutionary Protestant thinking of Martin Luther was sweeping continental
Europe.
In order to understand the enormous significance of Luther's ideas,
we have to keep in mind the momentous claim that Christianity made for itself.
It offered men and women the possibility of eternal bliss or eternal damnation.
The only question was, how was heaven to be achieved and hell avoided?
As Martin Luther agonised over whether or not he would be saved, he had an epiphany.
We were not saved by our prayers or pilgrimages, by our masses or indulgences,
as the church proclaimed.
We were not even saved by our own good works.
We were saved only by the grace of God.
We were not justified by anything in our humanity, but only by our faith in the
mercy of God.
And by the 1540s, these ideas were convulsing Europe.
Roman Catholic Scotland was to encounter Luther's Protestant ideas at first hand
when a young man named Patrick Hamilton preached in St Andrews, the town where
John Knox was educated.
Hamilton was immediately branded a heretic by the church and executed.
Hamilton's martyrdom is now commemorated every year by students in the town.
He was arrested, charged with heresy, found guilty and sentenced to death.
On the last day in February 1528, he was burned at the stake on the spot now
marked with his initials.
He died after six hours of burning.
Today we remember Patrick Hamilton and all martyrs with the laying of a wreath on his
initials.
But if the church believed the execution would put an end to the preaching of the
Protestant heresy in Scotland, they couldn't have been more wrong.
Hamilton's death sent shockwaves round Scotland, and St Andrews itself was
buzzing with talk about these new ideas.
It was said that the reek of Mr Hamilton infected all it blew upon, with the
notable exception, it would seem, of John Knox.
Knox took up work within the church as a notary and a tutor.
He showed no signs of agreeing with the new heresy that was slowly infiltrating
Scotland until the day the preacher came to town.
George Wishart was an unlikely revolutionary.
Gentle and serious, while still a student at Cambridge, he regularly gave food and
clothing to the poor.
It was said that he even donated the sheet from his bed every time he changed it.
But Wishart had come to believe that the Roman Catholic Church had lost its way,
and he wasn't afraid to make his views known.
In 16th century Scotland, it was dangerous to believe in anything that might be
described as heretical, but it was downright suicidal to try to persuade
other people to believe it with you.
So it took enormous courage for George Wishart to agree to an extensive preaching
tour of Scotland in 1544.
Wishart is unauthorised, he is not part of the church establishment at all,
and he is coming to spread his message, a dangerous message, a heretical message.
Christ only is our Lord and King.
We refuse utterly all other means of life and salvation except by Christ only.
Knox was electrified.
Here was a young man, almost exact to the same age as himself, speaking directly and
passionately about a personal relationship with God and risking everything to do so.
Except by Christ only.
Fired with the excitement of his newfound convictions, Knox threw in his lot with
Wishart, and sometime around January 1546 went on the road with him.
Knox is a great enthusiast for Wishart, almost like a groupie, so he becomes a
semi-bodyguard, the famous image of Knox carrying the big double-handed sword,
the original Claymore.
You get this image of Knox being as proud as anything to be a bodyguard for Wishart.
It was only a matter of time before this unlikely Protestant roadshow came to the
attention of the Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews, Cardinal David Beaton.
Cardinal Beaton is a career churchman.
He's a statesman, he's also Archbishop of St Andrews, the primate of Scotland.
He's, therefore, the man at the top.
St Andrews was the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland and a tourist hotspot,
then as now.
Thousands of people poured into the town every year, not to play golf, but to
worship at the shrine of Scotland's patron saint.
And this medieval tourist trade helped to make Beaton richer even than the monarch.
He's not himself particularly interested in church reform, and so he sees these
heretical threats as just that, a threat to the authority of the church.
Heretics cannot defy the church authorities or even the state authorities.
And, therefore, they must be dealt with and dealt with severely.
Wishart was arrested and incarcerated in the dungeon of St Andrews Castle,
but he refused to allow Knox to share in his martyrdom, telling sympathisers to
keep Knox away.
Wishart was tried and duly sentenced to death.
When invited by the church to make a last confession, he gave no sign of recanting.
Next day, March the 1st, 1546, Wishart was brought under guard from his
cell in the sea tower to the forecourt of St Andrews Castle.
His pockets and sleeves were stuffed with gunpowder before he was tied to a stake
and set alight.
Some said the gunpowder was to create a fireworks display for Cardinal Beaton,
who watched the whole thing from the window of his private apartment.
The truth is more banal.
The executioners, it turned out, weren't very good at burning heretics.
They didn't get enough practice, so they stuffed Wishart's pockets with
gunpowder in case they botched the job and the poor guy burned too slowly.
Christ only is our Lord and King.
We refuse all other means of life and salvation except through Christ only.
As well as enormous courage, it takes a deeply rooted faith to die for an idea.
Wishart's martyrdom proved how deeply rooted his Protestant faith had become,
too deep for any mere cardinal to uproot.
Wishart's martyrdom was to make a huge impact on Knox, but his immediate concern
was to evade capture.
Knox was forced into hiding, but some more militant Protestants had other ideas.
They wanted revenge.
Early in the morning of May the 29th, just three months after Wishart's
execution, a small band of Protestant sympathizers gained entry to St. Andrew's
Castle.
The conspirators surprised the cardinal in his bedchamber, and ignoring his pleas not
to kill him because he was a priest,
they stabbed him to death.
As soon as the word got out, people from the town came running to find out what was
happening, and to prove that the cardinal really was dead, they hung his mutilated
corpse from the very window from which he'd watched Wishart burn.
With Beaton now dead, the conspirators found themselves at the centre of a
growing camp of Protestant rebels.
The castle was well defended.
A great deal of money had been spent on it in recent times.
It occupied this superb promontory.
It seemed to be impregnable.
And when they stayed there, perhaps they were surprised by the numbers who flocked
to it.
It's a bit like in a revolution, you capture the palace of the president,
and it becomes a symbol of defiance.
The conspirators had struck a blow for Protestantism right at the heart of the
Catholic regime.
And the government was quick to retaliate.
Troops were sent to besiege the castle.
You then get this rather weird siege.
One of the odd things for us about 16th century warfare in Scotland is the Scots'
habit of both talking and fighting at the same time, which they do quite frequently.
And so this sort of constant negotiation going on with people coming in and out of
the castle, and yet officially it's under siege.
As time went by, the castle became the focus for religious debate.
The first congregation of the Protestant church was formed within its walls.
Gradually, its occupants were joined by other dissidents and malcontents,
among them John Knox.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word
was God.
As the siege continued outside, inside, Knox resumed his duties as a
tutor.
While lecturing on a passage from St John's Gospel, he was overheard by the
castle's resident preacher.
And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
Deeply impressed by his skills as a communicator, the preacher immediately
tried to sign him up as an apologist for the Protestant cause.
Knox refused point blank.
Why?
Well, the reason he gave was that he would not run where God had not called him.
He just didn't feel cut out to be a preacher.
He had no desire to raise his head above the parapet quite so soon after his recent
brush with danger.
But the castle preacher is going to have the last word, and he does the dirty on
Knox in actually calling him in a sermon.
So publicly, he points to Knox and says, you must accept this call.
Knox is overcome.
He bursts into tears, rushes out, and goes to his room.
He clearly does not want this call.
And that might have been that.
We might never have heard of John Knox at all, had it not been for another John,
John Winram.
Winram was to have a profound influence on both the life of Knox and the progress of
the Scottish Reformation.
As a leading churchman, Winram had taken charge in St. Andrews following Beaton's
murder until a new archbishop could be appointed.
But unlike Beaton, he was already convinced of the need for reform.
To encourage debate on the issue, he agreed to a series of public sermons in
the parish church.
It was here that Knox took to the pulpit for the first time.
Whether the pressure from his fellows finally proved irresistible, or whether
God had finally called him, John Knox eventually had to preach.
And in his sermon, here in Holy Trinity, St. Andrews, we hear for the first time
the wrathful incantatory voice that was to change the history of Scotland.
I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to make war
against him that sat on the horse and his army and the beast was taken and with him
the false prophet these both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with
brimstone The first sermon that Knox preaches is very characteristic of Knox.
Full of fire, full of and linking it up with the imagery in the book of
Revelation, the Apocalypse, and talking about the Roman Catholic Church in terms
of anti-Christ.
So this is just Knox as he appears for the rest of his life.
Anti-Catholic, going straight for the heart of the matter, and full,
as I said, of violent language and vehemence.
The 16th century was a period of great upheaval both in Scotland and on the
continent.
With wars and religious persecution tearing Europe apart, it must have seemed
to many people that the end of the world was truly nigh.
Knox certainly seems to have interpreted his own age in this way.
It probably accounts for the increasing ferocity of his language.
Judgment was coming upon the world and people had to take sides.
As far as Knox was concerned, there could be no compromise.
He were either for God and the Protestant cause or against him.
It's a kind of thinking that's still common currency.
Islamic fundamentalists and some of the politicians in the West who oppose them
often speak in apocalyptic terms of light versus darkness, of good versus evil.
In this great spiritual battle, Knox was convinced he was on the side of
the angels.
The dangers and difficulties he had suffered in the 18 months since he
disposed the Protestant cause only made him more certain that he was right.
He believed that he had found his vocation as a Protestant preacher and given
encouraging developments in St. Andrews, it must have seemed to him as if reform of
the whole Scottish church was just around the corner.
But then the French fleet showed up and everything ground to a halt.
Why the French?
Well, St. Andrews Castle might be in the hands of the reformers, but Scotland was
still very much a Catholic country.
The widowed Scottish Queen, the French-born Mary of Guise, had called on
her countrymen to help her deal with these troublesome Protestants.
Mary's marriage to the Scottish King James V had cemented an alliance between the
two.
An alliance between Catholic France and Catholic Scotland, symbolized by the birth
of their daughter Mary, the future Queen of Scots.
But her eventual accession was now under threat from the growing momentum of the
Protestant rebellion.
The French fleet bombarded the castle into submission.
Now it was time to deal with these Protestant rebels.
It's a strange fate for these Castilians who had all bonded together as fellow
revolutionaries.
They're divided up rather into gentlemen and players.
The gentlemen are treated almost like honored house guests.
The riffraff, including Knox, are sent to the galleys.
Nothing in Knox's life had prepared him for this.
French galley ships of this time were about a hundred to a hundred and fifty
feet long, and about thirty feet wide.
They were equipped with sails, but when the winds died, they relied on
the rowers.
Six men fettered to each oar, who ate, slept, and relieved themselves where they
sat.
Under the watchful eye of his French Catholic guards, Knox could only seethe in
silence.
The firebrand preacher was reduced to sly and solitary acts of defiance.
He tells us, for example, of him being given an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary
to kiss, which he refuses to do, and then, having checked very quietly,
looked from side to side to make sure no one was looking, throws it overboard.
But he certainly checks beforehand to make sure he's not being watched.
Although Knox would defy authority, he clearly had little appetite for
physical danger, no martyr complex.
He was never reckless enough to put himself in the way of pain or death.
Nevertheless, his spirit was not broken.
Through even these darkest days, when it looked as though Satan had won,
he believed that in the end he would be defeated.
Knox was finally freed from the galleys in February 1549, after 19 punishing months.
By now, Scotland had been heavily reinforced by the French.
So, unwilling to risk returning to Scotland, Knox settled in England,
in the border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
England had become a refugee camp for reformers fleeing persecution.
Here, the Reformation was flourishing under the young King Edward VI,
and sandwiched between the two Catholic powers of Scotland and France,
Edward's England was a thorn in both their sides.
It was here that Knox sought sanctuary.
Knox had learned a hard lesson.
It must have seemed to him now that joining the rebels in the castle at St.
Andrews, confident of their ultimate victory, had been a grave miscalculation
for which he'd paid a heavy price.
It was a mistake he'd never make again.
From now on, Knox would be a cautious man.
He would go only where he was made to feel welcome.
And in Berwick, he was made to feel very welcome.
As a charismatic preacher, the 35-year-old Knox soon attracted around him a coterie
of devoted followers, many of them women.
Shortly after his arrival in Berwick, Knox was introduced to Elizabeth Bowes,
the wife of an English officer at Norham Castle.
It was to be the beginning of an intimate, lifelong relationship.
Although Elizabeth wasn't much older than Knox, she had already borne her husband 15
children.
She seems to have become a Protestant before Knox arrived in Berwick.
But throughout her life, she struggled with doubts.
It was to Knox she turned for reassurance and support.
And Knox, who was so fierce and unyielding in his public life, was a man of many
talents.
He was a man of many talents.
In an age when most marriages were arranged, it was common for women to form
close, emotional relationships with their parish priests, rather than with their
husbands, who saw marriage as a purely contractual arrangement.
And it was natural that they would do the same with Protestant ministers like Knox.
From the beginning, there were accusations of sexual impropriety.
It was the intensity of their relationship that set tongues wagging.
She was deeply emotionally dependent on Knox, but he was just as committed to her.
I have always delighted in your company.
And when labors would permit, you know I would spend hours talking and communing
with you.
Was there a sexual subtext to their relationship?
There may well have been.
There is, after all, a dangerously fine line between pastoral affection and
passionate love.
In my body, you think I am no adulterer.
Let that be.
But the heart is infected with foul lusts.
Externally, I commit no adultery.
But my wicked heart loveth the self, and cannot refrain from vain imaginations.
Nevertheless, their affection and need for each other was controlled by their sincere
religious convictions.
However, Knox's marriage to Elizabeth's daughter Marjorie would ensure that they
never would be separated.
As a poor preacher, Knox could never really have hoped to propose to Marjorie.
And when she mentioned it to him, Captain Bowes opposed the match.
But Elizabeth was determined to make it happen, and happen it did.
Knox and Marjorie were betrothed.
So Elizabeth managed to remain an intimate part of Knox's life till the day she died,
even if it was as his mother-in-law.
I don't think that we could see within Knox's relationship with his wife and his
mother-in-law our normal picture of domestic bliss.
But it is obviously a relationship which is intellectual, which is a meeting of
minds as well as of spirits.
England also took Knox to her heart.
The Reformation there had the full backing of King Edward VI, and Knox's impressive
and fiery preaching skills were soon noticed at court.
Invited to become a royal chaplain, he accepted the post.
But for Knox, change was being introduced too slowly, and the Edwardian church
compromised by the continuing influence of some less than godly royal advisers.
Knox could have been forgiven for feeling quite satisfied with his life.
He had found acceptance in England.
He had the ear of the king.
He was surrounded by devoted followers and adoring women.
He was engaged to be married, and he was financially secure.
All was set fair, yet he was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding.
If you, O England, for any respect delay your repentance and conversion unto God,
if you shall retain in honour and authority such as have declared themselves
enemies of God, then I and others who faithfully have warned you of your duty
and of vengeance to come shall be clean of your blood.
He believed that it was only a matter of time before God would wreak his vengeance
on faithless England.
Sure enough, the following month, the king died.
Overnight, everything changed.
Edward, the great Protestant hope, was succeeded by his half-sister Mary.
But unlike her brother, Mary was a committed Catholic.
Upon her accession, a campaign of terror was unleashed in her goal to restore
England to Roman Catholicism.
Protestant literature was destroyed and preachers burned as heretics.
To Knox it looked like the end of the world.
The new queen was to become known as Bloody Mary and for good reason.
She set about expunging all evidence of Protestantism.
These were dangerous times for Protestants in England.
What did Knox do?
What he always did.
When the going got tough, he got out.
As Protestants burned, Knox fled to the continent, leaving behind the people who
had taken him to their hearts.
He was insistent that they should remain true to their newfound convictions and
defend the fledgling Protestant church, despite the dangers they now faced.
But from his letters, it's clear that he felt uneasy about abandoning his beloved
English sisters and brothers.
If I thought that I might have your presence, I would jeopardize my own life
to let men see what may be done with a safe conscience in these dangerous days.
But seeing that it cannot be done instantly, without danger to others than
to me, I will abide the time that God shall appoint.
You can almost hear him squirm, can't you?
He knew how bad it looked.
Here he was, telling them to stay and face the terrors of Mary's England,
while he himself was writing to them from the safety of the continent.
But although he was telling his friends to stay put in England, he did arrange for
his wife and his mother-in-law to join him on the continent.
And together, they made their way to what was to become Knox's true spiritual home,
the Vatican of radical Protestantism, the Swiss city of Geneva.
Geneva's internationalism was as strong then as it is today.
In the 16th century, it was the center of a radical experiment presided over by John
Calvin, and Protestants from all over Europe flocked to the city to be part of
it.
Martin Luther, the monk, may have agonized over whether he would be saved from the
wrath of God, but Calvin, the lawyer, confidently reckoned that you could prove
whom God had chosen.
And once the faithful had that assurance of salvation, they could stop agonizing
over their eternal destiny and get on with the job of creating a true reflection of
heaven in this world.
Under Calvin, this new city of God was established here on earth.
This ancient cathedral, once vivid with its altars and images, was stripped bare
of anything that might distract the soul from its pure encounter with God.
It's a place of utter starkness and simplicity.
Knox loved it.
He claimed that Geneva was the most godly place on earth since the days of the
apostles.
The Reformers had a rooted fear of idolatry, the idea that anything humanly
created could represent God.
They seemed to miss the fact that theology itself was humanly created, and that a
conceptual idol might be more dangerous than a physical one.
Unlike the imperfect Protestant state that Knox had found in England, Geneva was a
place where the state had been brought into line with the church.
Here there had been no compromise.
And as in Berwick, his charismatic preaching soon drew another loyal circle
of female friends around him, women whom he actively encouraged to join him from
England.
Friends who had been suffering under the rule of Bloody Mary and who were longing
for his company.
To one woman he wrote, you write that your desire is earnest to see me.
Dear sister, if I could express the thirst and languor I have had for your presence,
I should appear to pass measure.
Yea, I weep and rejoice in remembrance of you, but that would vanish by the comfort
of your presence, which I assure you is so dear to me, that if the charge of this
little flock did not impede me, I should be with you before this letter
could reach you.
The period he stays in Geneva is the happiest time of his life.
As the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters...
He's married, his two sons are born.
He also is in the comfort of a congregation who is entirely committed to
the cause in his view.
They provide him with that sense of being part of a godly community.
And it is that total commitment of the whole congregation, all of whom of course
have come into exile for their faith, that he sees as the ideal.
But it was not to last.
In March 1557, a group of reform-minded nobles invited Knox to come back to
Scotland.
Known as the Lords of the Congregation, they had signed a common bond,
the first of many covenants, which bound them to work together against the Catholic
state for the establishment of a reformed Kirk.
The first bond is very, very important in terms of a stage in the Reformation,
because it is the first public affirmation of noble support.
These nobles are saying quite clearly that they are prepared to put, if you like,
their money where their mouth is, or rather their power, even their military
power, where their convictions lie.
But even with this powerful support committing itself to the Protestant cause
in Scotland, Knox had no intention of leaving this heaven on earth.
It took Calvin to remind him that he'd come to Geneva in the first place to
observe this great Protestant experiment and to export it to Scotland.
Knox stayed around for another six months until Calvin finally booted him out.
Reluctantly, he left his beloved Geneva.
What he didn't know was that he was walking into history.
The journey back was not to be easy.
By the time he'd reached Dieppe, Knox received word again.
He was now to hold fire and wait on the continent.
Knox was furious.
To some it may appear a small matter that I have abandoned my public office,
leaving my poor family destitute and my beloved flock to the charge of another.
But to me, it is no small matter.
Knox accused the nobles of allowing politics to dictate their actions rather
than the word of God.
It was an unfair charge that revealed more of his own ambiguity about returning to
Scotland than about the motives of the lords of the congregation.
Hold up in Dieppe in a foul mood and hearing more and more stories of the
terrible sufferings of his English brothers and sisters under the rule of
Bloody Mary, Knox sat down to compose a text denouncing her tyrannical rule,
the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women.
The first sentence of Knox's blast leaves us in no doubt as to the purpose of what
he's written.
To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any
realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, consummally to God, a thing most
contrarious to his revealed will and a subversion of good order, of all equity
and justice.
It is, of course, an attack upon the rule of women, not against women as such.
Queen Mary was reigning in England at the time the book is written.
Mary dies in November and is succeeded by her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I of
England, the great hope for the English Protestants, the great hope of Knox
himself.
But the timing is disastrous because he has just written this book saying all
women should not rule.
So not surprisingly, Queen Elizabeth is not very chuffed.
Elizabeth was incandescent, but Knox could hardly add an addendum.
I didn't mean you, ma'am.
And Elizabeth wasn't the only one who was furious.
Knox's great hero and mentor, Calvin, described the first blast as a piece of
thoughtless arrogance.
But Knox felt he had no choice.
He had to preach God's word.
No matter how it was received, he saw himself as an Old Testament prophet
sent to bring the bad news, the news no one wanted to hear.
With no prospect now of ever returning to England, there was only one place to go –
Scotland.
In his ten years' absence, the Reformation had secretly been making slow and
deliberate progress.
Protestant nobles were plotting both the removal of the Catholic French and the
Regent Mary of Guise.
In St. Andrew's John Wyndham, the man who had first given Knox the opportunity to
find his voice as a preacher had used the intervening years well.
He had remained within the Catholic Church, but was stacking his priory with
reform- minded priests who would provide the manpower for the new Protestant
Church.
And when on St. Giles' Day, a small band of rioters broke up a Catholic procession
in Edinburgh, it was a sign that a Protestant revolution was gaining
momentum.
It's one thing for nobles to declare their support publicly, but ordinary people do
it in different ways.
A statue being carried through the town, as the St. Giles statue was in the
procession in Edinburgh, was attacked and then of course smashed up.
So a public demonstration, through action this time, of saying we don't want
statues, we don't want the saints' cults, we want to attack this sort of thing.
The situation was getting out of control.
The French Regent had to act.
She passed a decree in 1559, outlawing leading Protestant preachers.
The final battle was approaching, and it was at this critical moment that
John Knox returned to Scotland.
As soon as Knox landed, he was thrust into the heart of it.
His gifts as a charismatic preacher meant that he could be used to trigger events.
Whether or not he knew it, he was being used as a rabble rouser, as a voice that
got the mob moving.
Knox was sent by the Protestant nobles to preach in the tinderbox town of Perth.
I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies.
Perth was a town riven by class tensions and barely contained violence.
The response of the congregation was to tear down the statues and the altars and
all the signs and symbols of Catholic spirituality.
And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet.
And these both were cast into a lake of fire, burning with brimstone.
Knox's sermon in Perth in May 1559 was the signal for armed confrontation with the
forces of the regent Mary of Guise, who once again had called on the French to
help her deal with the Protestant threat.
Knox finally found the courage to throw himself into the fray.
As chaplain and morale booster, with the odds stacked against them,
he marched with the Protestant troops.
And within a short period of time they had seized the strategically important town of
St Andrews.
The ecclesiastical capital of Scotland had fallen.
This was the tipping point.
This was the moment when the great breaking finally happened.
In the autumn of that year, Knox was appointed Protestant minister of St
Andrews, 12 years after he'd preached his first historic sermon.
And in St Andrews, a new force was mobilizing.
The reform-minded priests whom John Wynrom had attracted to his priory were now ready
to go out into the parishes and take their places as the first generation of
Protestant ministers.
John Wynrom comes forward as a Protestant, and so do many, many other members of the
clergy, many of them well-educated Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans,
parish priests.
And we have to remember that these men were faced with a choice between joining
the Protestant church or unemployment.
And so many of them were able to see a place for themselves within Protestantism.
The military conflict continued, but by June 1560, the French army had been
driven back to Leith and placed under siege.
And then, quite unexpectedly, it was all over.
The Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, died at Edinburgh Castle.
Overnight, the whole political landscape was changed.
A treaty was signed between the Scots and the French.
In return for a Protestant parliament, the Scottish nobles agreed to the
accession of the Queen Regent's daughter Mary, now Queen of Scots, to the Scottish
throne.
But the conditions were clear.
Although Mary was a Catholic, she would only be allowed to govern as the monarch
of a Protestant people.
The summer of 1560 is making everything not just public, but official.
Making Protestantism the official religion of the realm.
Doing this through parliament.
So the key things are acts of parliament which abolish the mass and the other
sacraments.
The much more positive thing that you do is adopt the Scots Confession of Faith.
The Scots Confession of Faith was drawn up by Knox, John Wyndham, and four other
ministers, and outlined in clear, unambiguous language the key doctrines of
the Protestant faith.
To the rest of Europe, it made it absolutely plain that Scotland had adopted
Protestantism.
At last, Knox had achieved his goal.
Scotland was now officially a Protestant country.
This was his moment of triumph.
He was made minister here at St Giles in the capital city of Edinburgh.
The exile was once again at the heart of things.
But his euphoria would be short-lived.
After the revolution, there always comes the long process of bedding it in,
of making the revolutionary ideas and insights work in the real lives of actual
human beings.
And that's a messy business, more shades of grey than black and white.
It was not a job that Knox was suited to temperamentally.
For him, there was only black and white, good and evil.
In his theology, there was no middle ground, no room for compromise.
Men like John Wyndham, who had lived and worked in Scotland all their lives,
and knew the Scottish people and the Scottish church intimately, now took up
the task.
Without the abrasive certainty of Knox, Wyndham was able to carry people with him
through the process of reformation.
And Knox found himself gradually eased out.
And worse was to follow.
In November, his wife Marjorie died.
Knox was devastated.
Then the final straw.
In the following August, Mary, Queen of Scots, returned from France to
take up her throne.
Knox was immediately fearful that she would attempt to reintroduce Catholicism.
And he'd good reason to fear.
He'd heard at first hand how Mary's uncles had persecuted French Protestants.
There must be no compromise with this new Catholic queen.
So when he heard that the nobles had agreed that Mary could continue to hear
Mass in her private chapel, Knox was beside himself.
He railed that the courtiers had declined from the purity of God's and begun to
follow the world and so again to shake hand with the devil and with idolatry.
For Knox, it was England all over again.
Surely God would judge the Scots as he had judged the English for their faithlessness
with a terrible persecution at the hands of a Catholic queen.
This perfect church, as Knox will describe it later, suddenly is confronted by the
return of a Catholic queen.
There's the threat of the spreading of Catholicism from her household outwards.
And probably Knox does anticipate that.
He is a frightened man because, of course, she's landed in a town that is
largely Catholic in sympathies.
He's the one in the hostile environment.
He's the one given the toughest job in Scotland, convert Edinburgh.
Vulnerable and isolated, Knox led concerned Protestant supporters to
Holyrood Palace to sing psalms outside Mary's window.
But what at first sight might have looked like an act of triumphalism was in fact an
act of desperation.
To the Protestant nobles, Knox was now becoming an embarrassment.
They had agreed to the queen's return as the price to be paid for a Protestant
state.
But for Knox, the price was too high.
No good could come of such compromise.
Mary would become the instrument of God's judgment as bloody Mary had in England.
But he may well have misjudged her.
In an effort to win Knox over, she summoned him to a meeting to discuss
his violent opposition to her.
Mary, Queen of Scots, asks him whether he will come to court, whether he will
essentially be some sort of royal chaplain.
Knox is very wary and will not take up that offer at all.
It's almost as if he's afraid of her charm and also, not simply of her personal
charm, of being sucked into court politics.
Once more, the fear of compromising his hard-won Protestant beliefs led Knox to
refuse.
The meeting was a disaster.
He was now more fearful than ever, but he couldn't get the nobles to listen.
In desperation, Knox even briefly considered summoning the godly to arms.
If you think that I or any other preacher within this realm may amend such
enormities, you are deceived.
For we have discharged our consciences, but remedy there appeareth none,
unless we would arm the hands of the people in whom abideth yet some spark of
God's fear.
When Mary chose the young Catholic nobleman Lord Darnley as her husband,
Knox was beside himself.
What better evidence was there of a popish plot to reverse the hard-won achievements
of the Reformation?
His prophecies of doom seemed to be coming true, but what could he do about it?
When Darnley attended the service in St. Giles on his first Sunday as the husband
of Queen Mary, he probably meant it as a gesture of goodwill.
But Knox used the opportunity to preach a sermon about the Old Testament story of
King Ahab and his wicked queen Jezebel.
Ahab received many great benefits of God.
And how did Ahab thank God for his great benefits received?
Did he remove his idolatry?
Did he correct his idolatrous wife Jezebel?
No, we find no such thing.
For the last visitation of God was that dogs lick the blood of one and eat the
flesh of the other.
It was obvious to everyone what he was on about.
For Ahab and Jezebel read Darnley and Mary.
This time he'd gone too far.
Restrictions were placed upon when and where he might preach in future.
The truth is that his Protestantism was becoming respectable.
Knox was becoming more of an embarrassment.
His outbursts more scandalous.
Convinced that a Catholic conspiracy was going to overthrow the fledgling
Protestant state, but unable to persuade the Protestant nobles to take action,
Knox, as he had done on so many occasions before, simply got out.
For the last eight years of his life, Knox turned his back on public affairs and
focused his attention now on his private life.
In 1564, he had remarried at the age of 50.
His bride, Margaret Stuart, had been just 16.
But it was his relationship with his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Bowes,
that continued to cause comment.
Dogged by accusations of sexual impropriety, after her death he felt
compelled to refute the charges.
I declare to the world what was the cause of our great familiarity and long
acquaintance, which was neither flesh nor blood, but a troubled conscience upon her
part.
In his last remaining years, unable to make any real impact on public affairs,
Knox was reduced to railing from the pulpit.
In the end, even his voice failed.
It was too weak to carry in the great church of St Giles, so he had to preach in
its smaller, tall booth section.
In the beginning was the what, and the what was with God, and the what
was God.
Knox preached his last sermon on the 9th of November, 1572, at the induction of his
chosen successor.
He'd known for some time that he was dying, and in his letters he seemed ready,
almost eager to go.
I heartily salute and take good night of the faithful in both the realms.
For as the world is weary of me, so am I of it.
The last two weeks of his life were spent privately at his home in Edinburgh,
with his young wife and daughters.
Towards the end, Knox asked his wife to read to him from the Gospel of John,
chapter 17, the place, he said, where he had cast his first anchor.
Father, I have shown your glory on earth.
I have finished the work you gave me to do.
Give me glory in your presence now.
John Knox died on November the 24th, 1572.
He's buried here in this parking lot outside St. Giles Cathedral.
We don't know where exactly, but we think it's just beneath this site hut.
At his funeral, the Earl of Morton described Knox as a man who never feared.
The irony is that his last writings are filled with fear and foreboding for the
future.
He did not know that the Reformation, the Protestant Kirk in Scotland,
would triumph and be the Kirk of the following centuries.
As he looked around him, what he saw, particularly when he's old and depressed
and ill, were the things that might go wrong, the things that were not working,
rather than the things that were.
But the fear that Protestantism was still fragile was very, very real.
The canny Winram, on the other hand, lived to see the Reformation take root and
flourish.
From his base in St. Andrews, he oversaw his Protestant ministers as they imprinted
the Reformation on Scotland.
And after Knox's death, Mary's own tragic story would unfold.
She would lose the support of the nobles and ultimately her life at the hands of
her Protestant English cousin, Elizabeth I.
And the Reformation that Knox had died believing a failure would be permanently
secured.
So in the end, what can we say about the man behind the myths?
Doer woman hater?
Far from it.
Twice married, father to five children, Knox enjoyed close and loving
relationships with women throughout his life.
In fact, it's doubtful if he could have carried on his work at all without the
emotional and psychological support of his network of women friends and supporters.
Architect of the Scottish Reformation?
Hardly.
Knox didn't even live in Scotland for most of the decade leading up to 1560.
And yes, his voice may have been the loudest when the final moment of
revolution came, but it was only one voice among many.
Champion of conscience in the face of oppression?
Only if you agreed with his conscience.
Knox shows how easy it is for one person's conscience to become another person's
destroyer, as we see only too clearly today.
But if the church struggles of 16th century Scotland teaches anything,
it is that no human being, no human system, no church on earth is in
possession of final and absolute truth about anything.
And the Sword and the Cross is back next Thursday at seven.
And on Tuesday, how faith has shaped the Welsh way of life in Bread of Heaven with
Hugh Edwards at 8.30.
Stay with BBC4 tonight for The World, next.
Can you hear me?
The artist who created this painting made some of the most precious masterpieces of
northern Europe.