The consternation which this direct announcement of hostilities occasioned among them, was still at its height, when the great champion of the Scottish Reformation, John Knox, arrived at Perth. This celebrated divine had already suffered much for "the good cause;" and though his zeal and devotion to it were well known, it was not till latterly that he had entertained much hope of its final triumph in his native country. He had spent the greater part of his life in imprisonment or exile; he had undergone many privations, and submitted to many trials. But these were the daily food of the Reformers; and, whilst they only served to strengthen them in the obduracy of their belief, they had the additional effect of infusing a morose acerbity into dispositions not naturally of the softest kind. Knox had returned only a few days before from Geneva, where he had been solacing his solitude by writing and publishing that celebrated work, which he was pleased to entitle, "The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women." This treatise, directed principally against Mary of England, not forgetting Mary Queen of Scots and her mother of Guise, rather overshot its own purpose, by bringing the Reformer into disrepute with Elizabeth, who came to the crown soon after its appearance. To pacify that Queen, for it appears even Knox could temporize occasionally, he gave up his original intention of blowing his trumpet thrice, and his first blast was his last.[5] The day after the ministers and their friends, had been declared rebels, Knox delivered at Perth what Keith terms "that thundering Sermon against Idolatry." The tumult which ensued at the conclusion of this discourse, has been attributed by some historians to accident; but Keith's suspicion, that Knox had a direct intention to excite it, seems well founded, when we consider the ferment in which the minds of his audience were at the time, and the peculiar style in which he addressed them. Buchanan is of the same opinion, though he would naturally have leant to the other conclusion. He says that Knox, "in that ticklish posture of affairs, made such a pathetic sermon to the multitude who were gathered together, that he set their minds, which were already fired, all in a flame." If, in addition to this, the usual manner of Knox's eloquence be considered, it will hardly be questioned but that the outrage of that day was of his doing. His vehemence in the pulpit was at all times tremendous; indeed, in so far as the effect he produced upon his hearers was concerned, he seems to have trusted almost as much to the display of his physical as of his mental energies. Many years after the period now alluded to, when he was in his old age, and very weak, Melville tells us, that he saw him every Sunday go slowly and feebly, with fur about his neck, a staff in his hand, and a servant supporting him, from his own house, to the parish church in St Andrews.