- John Knox is famous for his preaching, yet when a Protestant leader first exhorted Knox to take up preaching, Knox was frightened and wept openly in confusion.
- In his sermons, Knox typically spent half an hour calmly exegeting a biblical passage. Then as he applied the text to the Scottish situation, he would become “active and vigorous” and violently pound the pulpit. Said one note taker, “He made me so to grew [quake] and tremble, that I could not hold pen to write.” A well-respected preacher, yet of the hundreds of sermons he preached, only two were ever published.
- Knox was once sentenced to slave labor, rowing in a French galley. Knox later spoke of the “torment. in the galleys, which brought forth sobs of my heart.” During those 19 months, he contracted a kidney infection and stomach ulcers, ailments that vexed him the rest of his life.
- The First Book of Discipline, an outline of government for the Reformed Scottish church co-authored by Knox, proposed that every Scottish child receive elementary and high school education—an idea centuries ahead of its time.
- During the stormy year of 1559, when religious revolution swept Scotland, Knox wrote that he could only get about four hours of sleep a night. He also asked a friend to secure a horse for him to use: “For great watch is laid for my apprehension, and large money promised [to] any that shall kill me.”
- Years after his first wife died, a 50- year-old Knox married again. His bride? Seventeen-year-old Margaret Stewart, a distant relative of Mary Queen of Scots—his chief antagonist.
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