as to make it unlikely
that his "message" should be accepted by opponents. Like Carlyle,
however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he
says, ever began on his side; while, as "a good hater," Dr. Johnson might
have admired him. He carried into political and theological conflicts
the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden
under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns. So far Knox was an example
of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn in
detail about his ancestors.

The birthplace of Knox was probably a house in a suburb of Haddington, in
a district on the path of English invasion. The year of his birth has
long been dated, on a late statement of little authority, as 1505. {4}
Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely,
Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza that Knox died
in his fifty-ninth year. Dr. Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal
year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see,
appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.

If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priest's orders, and
adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which
the canonical law permitted. No man ought to be in priest's orders
before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five in
1540, when he is styled "Sir John Knox" (one of "The Pope's Knights") in
legal documents, and appears as a notary. {5} He certainly continued in
orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543. The law of
the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but in an age
when "notaires" were often professional forgers, the additional security
for character yielded by Holy Orders must have been welcome to clients,
and Bishops permitted priests to practise this branch of the law.

Of Knox's near kin no more is known than of his ancestors. He had a
brother, William, for whom, in 1552, he procured a licence to trade in
England as owner of a ship of 100 tons. Even as late as 1656, there were
not a dozen ships of this burden in Scotland, so William Knox must have
been relatively a prosperous man. In 1544-45, there was a William Knox,
a fowler or gamekeeper to the Earl of Westmoreland, who acted as a secret
agent between the Scots in English pay and their paymasters. We much
later (1559) find the Reformer's brother, William, engaged