Wishart was Knox's forerunner, and during this tour in the Lothians, Knox had been his constant companion. The Romanist party had tried to assassinate the bold preacher, and Knox carried a two-handed sword ready to cut down anyone who attempted to strike at the missionary while he was speaking. All the tenderness which lay beneath the sternness of Knox's character appears in the account he gives of Wishart in his _History_. And to Wishart, Knox was the beloved disciple. When he foresaw that the end was near, he refused to allow Knox to share his danger.[287] Assassination was a not infrequent way of getting rid of a political opponent in the sixteenth century, and Beaton's death had long been planned, not without secret promptings from England. Three months after Wishart's martyrdom (May 29th, 1546), Norman Lesley and Kirkcaldy of Grange at the head of a small band of men broke into the Castle of St. Andrews and slew the Cardinal. They held the stronghold, and the castle became a place of refuge for men whose lives were threatened by the Government, and who sympathised with the English alliance. The Government laid siege to the place but were unable to take it, and their troops withdrew. John Rough, who had been Arran's Reformed chaplain, joined the company, and began to preach to the people of St. Andrews. Knox, who had become a marked man, and had thought of taking refuge in Germany, was persuaded to enter the castle, and there, sorely against his will, he was almost forced to stand forth as a preacher of the Word. His first sermon placed him at once in the foremost rank of Scottish Reformers, and men began to predict that he would share the fate of Wishart. "Master George Wishart spak never so plainelye, and yitt he was brunt: evin so will he be."[288] Next to nothing is known about the early history of John Knox. He came into the world at or near Haddington in the year 1515,[289] but on what day or month remains hidden. He sprang from the commons of Scotland, and his forebears were followers of the Earls of Bothwell; he was a papal notary, and in priest's orders in 1540; he was tutor to the sons of the lairds of Ormiston and Longniddry in 1545; he accompanied Wishart in December and January 1545, 1546--these are the facts known about him before he was called to stand forward as a preacher of the Reformation in Scotland. He was then thirty-two--a silent, slow ripening man, with quite a talent for keeping himself in the background.