by all faithful Christians.’ A letter from John Utenhove to Bullinger, dated London, 12 Oct. 1552, doubtless refers to Knox as ‘a pious preacher, chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland,’ who, in a sermon before the king, ‘inveighed with great freedom against kneeling at the Lord's Supper.’ He went to London in connection with the preparation of the church articles, which were submitted on 20 Oct., before their issue, to the royal chaplains, but soon returned to Newcastle. On 27 Oct. Northumberland wrote to Cecil, recommending the king to appoint Knox to the Rochester bishopric. On 23 Nov. the duke again reminded the king's secretaries that ‘some order be taken for Knox, otherwise you shall not avoid the Scots from out of Newcastle;’ but on 7 Dec., after he had seen Knox at Chelsea by Cecil's request, and found him not so pliable as he thought the offer of a bishopric should have made him, Northumberland altered his tone. He had found Knox ‘neither grateful nor pleasable,’ and wishes to have ‘no more to do with him than to wish him well.’ On Christmas day 1552 Knox was again at Newcastle, where he preached and declared that ‘whosoever in his heart was enemy to Christ's gospel then preached in England was enemy also to God, a secret traitor to the crown and commonwealth of England.’ A letter Northumberland received from Knox in January 1553, when the latter had been threatened with an accusation by Lord Wharton and Brandling, mayor of Newcastle, encouraged that nobleman again to befriend him, but in a way which shows he no longer regarded him as a man of much consequence. He calls him repeatedly ‘poor Knox,’ says ‘his letter shows what perplexity the poor soul remaineth in,’ and, dropping all mention of the bishopric, asks only that something ‘might be done for his comfort.’ In March new charges, to which Knox refers in his letters to Mrs. Bowes, were made to Lord Westmoreland, but these, too, broke down, for on the 23rd he says: ‘This assault of Satan has been to his confusion and to the glory of God.’
Knox himself states that he declined the bishopric because he was unwilling to accept even the modified formularies of the English church as leaning to Roman doctrine, though he was favourable to an office similar to the bishop's. A warrant of 2 Feb. 1553 to the archbishop to appoint him to the living of All Hallows, in Bread Street, London, was perhaps a compliance with Northumberland's last request, but in April he declined this preferment, and was summoned before the privy council. After a long debate between him and the council, in which he set forth his objections to the English ministry, he was dismissed with the gentle admonition ‘that they were sorry he was of a contrary mind to the common order,’ to which he replied ‘that he was more sorry that a common order should be contrary to Christ's institution.’ In the same month he preached his second and last sermon before Edward VI on the text ‘He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me,’ in which he affirmed that the most godly princes had most ungodly officers. Citing the example of the good king Hezekiah, he applied it to the English court. No wonder the bold preacher had enemies at court. But the English reformers could not afford to dispense with his services; and on 2 June 1553 he was sent as a preacher to Buckinghamshire, an office which gave him more liberty, and which his conscience distinguished from a settled charge. On the 6th of the following month Edward VI died, and as Mary Tudor for a time tolerated the protestants, he continued his preaching tour in Buckingham and Kent till October. England was fast becoming unsafe for a man of Knox's opinions, and a tract entitled ‘A Confession and Declaration of Prayer upon the Death of that most virtuous and famous King, Edward VI,’ issued in July 1554, though it contained a prayer ‘to illuminate the heart of our Sovereign Lady Queen Marie with pregnant gifts of Thy Holy Ghoste,’ had to conceal its place of printing under the ironical imprint, ‘At Rome, before the Castel of St. Angel, at the signe of Sanct Peter.’
Knox returned to Newcastle in December, but before the publication of his tract he had fled to Dieppe, where he remained from 20 Jan. 1554 to the end of February. While resident at Berwick in 1549 he had made the acquaintance of the family of Bowes of Streatlam Castle in Durham, and gained the friendship of Elizabeth, wife of Richard Bowes, captain of Norham [see Bowes, Elizabeth]. This lady accepted him as her spiritual adviser, and promised him the hand of her fifth daughter, Marjory. Their marriage, or betrothal, opposed by her father, was probably not celebrated till July 1553, after which he refers to Marjory as his wife. To her mother he had long used the signature ‘your Son.’ Mrs. Bowes was about his own age. The correspondence that passed between her and her son-in-law was always affectionate: she was confiding and importunate, he consolatory and invigorating, though as time went on he found his position as her spiritual guide somewhat tiring—‘faschious’ is his expressive Scotch word. Mrs. Bowes was afflicted with the religious melancholy which the Calvinistic doctrine of assurance
