Knox was at this time in the prime and vigour of his manhood, being forty-two years of age. He was born in 1505 at Gifford-gate, a suburb connected with Haddington by the old stone bridge across the Tyne. His parents were not distinguished either for rank or fortune, for one of his adversaries affirms that he was "obscuris natus parentibus" (born of obscure parents), and even one of his admirers says that "he descended but of lineage small." His father was William Knox, and his mother's name was Sinclair. Both of them apparently belonged to families that were in some way feudatories to the Earls of Bothwell, for at the Reformer's first interview with that earl, whose name is so tragically { 11} coupled with Queen Mary's, he said, "Albeit that to this hour it hath not chanced me to speak to your lordship face to face, yet have I borne a good mind to your house; ... for, my lord, my grandfather, goodschir (_i.e._, according to Mr. Laing, maternal grandfather) and father have served your lordship's predecessors, and some of them have died under their standards." He received his earliest education at the Grammar School of Haddington, and passed when he was about sixteen years of age to the University of Glasgow, in the register of which his name appears among those of the students who were incorporated on the 25th October, 1522.
At that time and for a year later John Major, or Mair, Doctor of the Sorbonne, was Principal of the Glasgow University and Professor of Divinity in the same. He had some opinions, both ecclesiastical and political, which were considerably in advance of his age, and it has been supposed that Knox may have received from him some of those principles which he afterwards so ably advocated. But perhaps too much has been made of this by the Reformer's biographers, for Major remained only one year in Glasgow after Knox had been registered as a student at the University; and though he held some liberal notions in politics, he was in theology to the last a rigid scholastic. Moreover, he was so far from being a zealous promoter of the cause of the Reformation that his name appears as a judge on several of the tribunals at which the early Scottish { 12} confessors were condemned to banishment or death. Taking these things into consideration along with the youth of Knox when he first entered college, it will appear hardly likely that he received from Major anything more than a general impulse in the direction of liberty and liberality, which prepared him to look with favour on the efforts of those who, though they might be called innovators, were in reality only seeking to get back to the original simplicity of the gospel, and the primitive purity of the Church.