IN 1881 George Stuart, 14th earl of Moray, commemorated his ancestor, James Stewart, Regent Moray, by erecting a memorial stained-glass window in St Giles’ Church in Edinburgh. Its top panel dramatically illustrated the Regent's assassination in Linlithgow in 1570, portraying him as dying for his country, then riven by civil war. The bottom panel depicted John Knox, the Scottish Reformer, in full preaching flow delivering the funeral sermon. In Victorian Scotland it was taken as axiomatic that Moray and Knox belonged together as heroes of the Scottish Protestant Reformation. Many Scots of that period assumed Protestantism had moulded their national identity and that its providential outlook and mission was actively shaping the British Empire. The sixteenth-century labels of Knox as an Old Testament prophet and Moray as a captain of Israel continued to resonate in Scotland and Britain in subsequent centuries, but their first names suggest additional New Testament parallels. The apostles James and John, sons of Zebedee, had been nicknamed ‘Sons of Thunder’ by Jesus because they had wanted to send a fiery vengeance upon a Samaritan village that had failed to welcome him. Like the first sons of thunder, James Stewart and John Knox shared a desire for vengeance against those they labelled enemies of God. They were prepared with all their might to wield the civil and the spiritual swords against their opponents. The Biblical account also related how Simon Peter, James and John were the three disciples present at Jesus’ Transfiguration. Not long after that indication of their special status, their mother, Salome, had asked Jesus to, when he came to glory, place James and John on his right- and left-hand sides. This provoked indignation from their fellow disciples and a rebuke from Jesus that explained the meaning of true discipleship. Moray's mother, the formidable Margaret Erskine, Lady Lochleven, was similarly ambitious for her eldest son. She did not forget that his father, King James V, had sought a papal annulment to separate her from her husband, Sir William Douglas of Lochleven, so he could marry her instead.