John Knox House

Since Mom found out that we're probably related to John Knox, she really wanted to go to the the John Knox House where he lived his last few months. At least according to popular tradition he lived there. This house dates to about 1490 and is one of the oldest surviving houses in Edinburgh. It's not a very big museum but does have some interesting displays and artifacts. It's worth seeing, especially since it didn't cost that much. Unfortunately, this museum is not part of Historic Scotland, which allows members to visit Edinburgh Castle and other historic sites for free. Instead, the Church of Scotland owns and operates this building.

I took this following description about John Knox from several displays around the museum:

John Knox (1510-1572) studied at the University of St Andrews and once served the Catholic Church as a priest, and he is now considered the founder of the Presbyterian faith. Because of his involvement in the murder of the St Andrews Archbishop Cardinal Beaton in 1546, the French navy imprisoned Knox until 1549. After this release, he became a protestant leader in England and Europe. In England he served King Edward VI as a royal chaplain, and he had great influence on the rewriting of the Book of Common Prayer. The infighting in the English court gave Knox a hard political education that would later serve him in Scotland. After James VI's death, the Catholic Mary Tudor returned England to Catholicism, so Knox fled for continental Europe in 1554. There he spent much time in Geneva where he pastored an English-speaking congregation and studied under John Calvin. In Knox's view, Geneva offered a blueprint for a Reformed Protestant society. He wrote, "Geneva is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in earth since the days of the apostles." In 1559 Knox returned to Scotland from Geneva after the Scottish nobles invited him back. After a series of sermons against the Catholic Church and the authority of the Crown, agitated Scots rose against the Catholic Church and stripped several churches of their ornaments. They even attacked monasteries and friaries. Then the Protestants took up arms and marched on Edinburgh. The revolution that followed was swift and relatively bloodless. The Scottish Reformation had begun, and in 1560 Protestantism became the official Scottish religion. John Knox became the minister of the most influential church in Scotland, the St Giles Cathedral on Edinburgh's Royal Mile. In this position he remained politically relevant as he attacked the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, who could have extinguished the Protestant movement here just as Mary Tudor had done so in England. Mary Queen of Scots had grown up and lived in the Catholic French court since she was six but returned to Scotland in 1561 at the age of 18. Though she recognized Protestantism as the national religion, she continued to celebrate Mass in private. The private Mass angered Knox, who became Mary's enemy. In a series of spirited debates, Knox criticized Mary's religious practices and her pastimes of music, dancing, and masques. Meanwhile, Mary also had to deal with discontented nobility who were greedy for political influence and control. Many of these nobles supported Knox and opposed the Catholic Church, and Scotland came to the brink of civil war. By 1567 tensions exploded. In a political power play, a group of nobles forced Mary to abdicate the throne in favor of her one-year-old son, King James VI, who had been born in Edinburgh Castle because Mary wanted to stay in the important defensive building instead of living in a much more luxurious palace like Holyrood. Mary fled Scotland for England and never returned. In her absence, Mary's Catholic supporters, the "Queen's Men," campaigned for her restoration to the throne. In defiance of the Protestant government, these supporters seized control of Edinburgh Castle. As the situation deteriorated into civil war, Edinburgh became an increasingly dangerous place to live, and Knox left the city in May 1571. Even though he was almost 60 and very ill, he returned a year later in order to preach from St Giles Cathedral against the Catholic Church. Because of his deteriorating health, he needed to stay rather close to St Giles but far enough away from the fighting around the castle. The House in the Netherbow was suitable for these purposes, and tradition says he spent his last few months here. As Knox died on November 24, 1572- his young wife, Margaret Stewart, read 1 Corinthians to him. Meanwhile, cannons and reinforcements from the now Protestant England helped the Scottish retake the castle so that Scotland would remain Protestant without any threat that Mary Queen of Scots would return to make Scotland Catholic again.

For me, this narrative highlights how politicians can hijack religious movements for their own means, which often have little to do with piety.

Front of 'John Knox' House on the Royal Mile.

This is the house where Knox lived his last few

months while preaching at St Giles Cathedral just

up the road a little ways from here.

Stained glass window of John Knox.

A little chapel inside the house.

This book and table were part of a small display

where tourists could dress up like John Knox

in a cloak get a picture taken while looking studious.

This is a painted ceiling that has been renovated recently.

The Geneva Bible

Almost eighty percent of King James' Authorized Version (1611)

of the Bible was taken from the Geneva Bible of 1560. The explanatory

notes in the early editions ran to 300,000 words pressing home

a radical Protestant interpretation of each passage.

[I got this above explanation from the display]

While writing a research paper about the KJV, I read about

how the Geneva Bible was one of the most influential English

translations of the Bible. It was the first English Bible mechanically

printed and mass produced so that it was widely available.

This was the Bible that William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell,

John Milton, John Knox, John Donne, and John Bunyan used.

It is also the Bible that the pilgrims used one the Mayflower.