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John Knox was a strange and rather frightening character. He was narrow-minded and intolerant. He lacked generosity of spirit and loved to hate. But he possessed immense courage and feared no one.

In the pulpit, he was at his most powerful. He mesmerized thousands of Scots, who were prepared to lay their lives down for Protestantism at his behest. By his preaching, he molded both nobility and ordinary folk into a formidable fighting force and thus left his stamp on the Protestantism of Scotland for centuries to come.

The man who was to lead this great religious revolt and challenge the authority of monarchs had humble, or as Knox put it, “base” beginnings. He was born, probably in 1514, at Haddington, a small town of some 1,500 inhabitants south of Edinburgh. We do not know whether his father, William, was a merchant or a craftsman. But Knox’s humble background gave him an instinctive ability to communicate effectively with ordinary people.

He was able to avail himself of a good education, and he probably mastered the rudiments of Latin at a school in Haddington. Around 1529 he entered the University of St. Andrews and went on to study theology under distinguished theologian John Major, who had both criticized Luther’s theology and condemned abuses in the Catholic church.

Knox was ordained in April 1536, but that did not lead to a parish appointment because there was an excess of priests in Scotland. Since Knox had studied law, he became a notary in the neighborhood around Haddington and then a tutor to the sons of local lairds (lower-ranking nobility).

Dramatic events were unfolding in Scotland during Knox’s youth. The constant sea traffic between Scotland and Europe allowed Lutheran literature to be easily smuggled into the country. The port of Dundee became an early center of Protestant activity. Church authorities became alarmed by the emergence of this “heresy,” and they tried to suppress it.

In February 1528, Patrick Hamilton, an outspoken Protestant convert, was burned at the stake in St. Andrews—the first Protestant martyr in Scotland. But people began to ask why Hamilton had been executed, and when his heresies were explained, according to Knox, “Many began to call in doubt that which before they held for a certain verity.”

The outlook for Scottish Protestants brightened in 1543 when the regent for the infant Mary Queen of Scots initiated a pro-English, and therefore Protestant, policy. He encouraged Bible reading and promoted preaching by reformers. He appointed Thomas Guilliame, a converted friar, and John Rough, a converted monk, as his chaplains. They engaged at once in preaching campaigns throughout central Scotland. The preaching of Guilliame had a dramatic influence on John Knox: it made a Protestant of him.

In the mid-1540s, the authorities abandoned their Reformation policies and began threatening Protestants. Protestant preacher George Wishart nonetheless courageously proclaimed his convictions, traveling about the country. Impressed with what he heard about Wishart, Knox joined Wishart’s band, who acted as a kind of bodyguard for Wishart—Knox, in fact, armed himself with a two-handed sword.

For five weeks, he followed Wishart until it became clear the church authorities would soon arrest the preacher. Although Knox and his friends wished to accompany him at his arrest, Wishart sent them home and faced his accusers alone.

Cardinal David Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews, the religious capital of Scotland, ordered Wishart’s arrest in January 1546. Wishart was tried, found guilty of heresy, strangled, and burned on March 1. For Knox, Wishart was the supreme hero—“a man of such graces as before him were never heard within this realm, yea, and are rare to be found yet in any man.”

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