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Over his lifetime, John Knox had personal contact with four female rulers, and his relationship with each was a stormy one.

The first was Mary Tudor of England (Mary I, 1553–1558, also called “Bloody Mary”). Knox was ministering in England when this Catholic monarch ascended the throne; he anticipated the coming persecution of Protestants and fled to Europe. Seeing the imprisonments and martyrdoms inflicted by Mary Tudor, Knox sent instructions back to his English brethren on how to pray for her and her government:

“Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord! but let death devour them in haste; let the earth swallow them up; and let them go down quickly into hell. For there is no hope of their amendment … consume them in thine anger, and let them never bring their wicked counsels to effect.”

Pray this way sincerely, Knox assured his flock in England, and God will send a Jehu to slay Jezebel and her followers!

Knox originally showed more hope for Mary of Guise, queen regent governing Scotland (1554–1560). At first, Mary of Guise tolerated Protestants, and Protestants increased their numbers. When Knox’s 1555 preaching tour of Scotland was so successful that a frightened Catholic hierarchy charged him with heresy, Mary of Guise suppressed his trial.

Hoping she might support the Reformation, Knox wrote a letter urging her to reform the church. If she obeyed God’s will, God would “crown your battle with double benediction and reward you with wisdom, riches, glory, honor, and long life in this your [temporal rule], and with life everlasting.”

The letter failed. She called it a joke. Worse, after Knox had left Scotland, the bishops revived his trial and burned him in effigy. He never forgot that Mary of Guise had ridiculed him and let him be condemned to death. Henceforth he considered her murderously sly and crafty.

In a 1558 letter, he writes of the “hot displeasure of God” against her for persecuting the righteous and ignoring the call to reform. Her regent’s crown, he later added, was as fitting as “a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.”

Then he published his infamous The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment [unnatural government] of Women, in which he called for rebellion against England’s Mary Tudor and vehemently protested all female rulers. In a caustic, bitter tone, he argued that women must never govern because God created women as servants and subjects to men. God allowed women to rule only as retribution for national sins.

The First Blast was badly timed. England’s Mary Tudor died, succeeded by Protestant Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Her right to the throne was immediately questioned by her citizens, and she needed support, something Knox publicly refused to do, even though she promoted Protestantism.

Nevertheless the Scottish Reformation needed Elizabeth’s help and got it when it counted. But Knox had no sympathy for emerging Anglicanism, and he denounced Elizabeth’s use of cross and candles: she was “neither good Protestant nor yet resolute Papist.”

After Regent Mary of Guise died, her daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, left France to assume her rightful role as monarch of Scotland. Knox dreaded her arrival, fearing the Catholic queen might overturn the Reformation, which had just triumphed. Mary promised to respect Scotland’s new religion, but she insisted on her right to worship privately as a Catholic. To Knox, attending Mass flouted the law and defied God’s Word.

When Knox protested along these lines from the pulpit, he was summoned before the queen in the first of five famous meetings between them. In this first encounter, Mary said subjects should adhere to their monarch’s religion. Knox denied her right to dictate her faith to the people. He left the meeting convinced that Mary had “a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and his truth.” She was obstinately “proceeding from evil to worse.”

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