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Then Mary tried her hand at converting Knox to the “Mother Church.” And as a last inducement legend has it that she offered to marry him if he would become a Catholic. Here John Knox coughed and hesitated– she was getting near his price. He was he saw the devil’s tail behind her chair. He rushed from her presence, quaking with fear.

Stormy interviews followed, back up by handy epithets in which they both proved expert. It was a pivotal point. Had John Knox married Mary, Queen of Scots, there would have been no Presbyterian Church, no Princeton, no Doctor McCosh, no Grover Cleveland.

On March Twentieth, Fifteen Hundred Sixty-three, the banns were read between John Knox and Margaret “Stewart,” or Stuart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and a forebear of our own Tom Ochiltree. The young lady was two months past sixteen years old. The Queen was furious, for the girl, being of Royal blood, “should really have consulted me before renouncing her religion for this praying and braying man with long whiskers.”

There was full and just cause for indignation, for although Mary was then safely wedded to Darnley, preparing to have him assassinated (and later to lose her own head), she yet regarded John Knox as her private property.

Marriage merely added another trouble to the stormy and burdened life of our great reformer. He had successfully fought the powers of Rome; the queenly daughter of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Boleyn had found him incorrigible and given him up as a hopeless case; Calvin could not tame him; but now a chit of a girl with retrousse nose, who should have been at work in a paper-box factory, led him a merry dance, and the voice that had thundered threat and defiance piped in forced assent. December strawberries, I am told, lack the expected flavor.

When Knox died, he left a widow aged twenty-five, come Michaelmas. She wore deep mourning, and so did Mary, Queen of Scots, but Mary explained that her deep veil was merely to hide her smiles.

In two years the widow married Andrew Ker, notorious for having once leveled a pistol at the Queen. The widow survived Knox just sixty-two years, and died undeceived, not realizing that she had once been wedded to a man who had shaped a great religion–one whom Carlyle, his countryman, calls the master mind of his day.