John Knox in the galleys
Knox as a French galley slave
John Knox is a Scottish priest who has converted to Reformed Christianity, become a bodyguard to the Protestant preacher George Wishart, and watched Wishart burned in front of Cardinal Beaton's window in 1546. When Scottish Protestant lords murder Cardinal Beaton in revenge and hold his castle at St. Andrews, Knox joins them.
The French fleet arrives and the castle falls. Knox and the other Protestant prisoners are sentenced to the galleys.
A French galley in the sixteenth century is one of the most brutal environments a human being can inhabit. Chained to a bench, rowing under the whip, in the Mediterranean sun, for eighteen to twenty hours a day. The prisoners are fed barely enough to keep them functional. Many die.
Knox survives nineteen months.
One story from this period has the quality of legend but captures something true: when the galley passes the coast of Scotland, within sight of the town of St. Andrews where Knox had preached and where his story began, a fellow prisoner shows Knox an image of the Virgin Mary venerated on the ship and asks him to kiss it.
Knox reportedly throws it into the sea: Let our Lady save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.
The man who will return to Scotland and terrify Mary Queen of Scots is already fully formed in the galleys.
He is released in 1549 through English diplomatic pressure and goes to England, then to Geneva, then home.
“Let our Lady save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.”
— John Knox, attributed, in the French galleys, c. 1547–1549 AD
“Now I exhort you to cheer up, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship.”
The galleys did not break Knox. They may have formed him.
Nineteen months chained to an oar in the Mediterranean sun, watching the coast of his homeland pass at a distance he could not cross — and he came out of it with an iron will that nothing in his subsequent career would bend.
Suffering does not automatically produce strength. It can produce bitterness, despair, or the hollow compliance of a person who has given up. What it produces depends on what is at the center.
Knox had something at the center that the galleys could not reach. The oars could take his strength. The sun could take his comfort. The chain could take his freedom. Nothing could take the thing he had thrown his life at.
What is at the center of you? And is it something the worst circumstances can take?