"History," spares but three lines to his five years' residence in England
(1549-54). His first charge was Berwick (1549-51), where we have seen he
celebrated holy Communion by the Swiss rite, all meekly sitting. The
Second Prayer Book, of 1552, when Knox ministered in Newcastle, bears
marks of his hand. He opposed, as has been said, the rubric bidding the
communicants kneel; the attitude savoured of "idolatry."

The circumstances in which Knox carried his point on this question are
most curious. Just before October 12, 1552, a foreign Protestant,
Johannes Utenhovius, wrote to the Zurich Protestant, Bullinger, to the
effect that a certain vir bonus, Scotus natione (a good man and a Scot),
a preacher (concionator), of the Duke of Northumberland, had delivered a
sermon before the King and Council, "in which he freely inveighed against
the Anglican custom of kneeling at the Lord's Supper." Many listeners
were greatly moved, and Utenhovius prayed that the sermon might be of
blessed effect. Knox was certainly in London at this date, and was
almost certainly the excellent Scot referred to by Utenhovius. The
Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was then in such forwardness that
Parliament had appointed it to be used in churches, beginning on November
1. The book included the command to kneel at the Lord's Supper, and any
agitation against the practice might seem to be too late. Cranmer, the
Primate, was in favour of the rubric as it stood, and on October 7, 1552,
addressed the Privy Council in a letter which, without naming Knox,
clearly shows his opinion of our Reformer. The book, _as it stood_, said
Cranmer, had the assent of King and Parliament--now it was to be altered,
apparently, "without Parliament." The Council ought not to be thus
influenced by "glorious and unquiet spirits." Cranmer calls Knox, as
Throckmorton later called Queen Mary's Bothwell, "glorious" in the sense
of the Latin gloriosus, "swaggering," or "arrogant."