A kind of truce was now proclaimed, to last till May 1, 1555; Knox aiding in the confection of a service without responses, “some part taken out of the English book, and other things put to,” while Calvin, Bullinger, and three others were appointed as referees.  The Frankfort congregation had now a brief interval of provisional peace, till, on March 13, 1555, Richard Cox, with a band of English refugees, arrived.  He had been tutor to Edward VI., the young Marcellus of Protestantism, but for Frankfort he was not puritanic enough.  His company would give a large majority to the anti-Knoxian congregation.  He and his at once uttered the responses, and on Sunday one of them read the Litany.  This was an unruly infraction of the provisional agreement.  Cox and his party (April 5) represented to Calvin that they had given up surplices, crosses, and other things, “not as impure and papistical,” but as indifferent, and for the sake of peace.  This was after they had driven Knox from the place, as they presently did; in the beginning it was distinctly their duty to give up the Litany and responses, while the truce lasted, that is, till the end of April.  In the afternoon of the Sunday Knox preached, denouncing the morning’s proceedings, the “impurity” of the Prayer Book, of which “I once had a good opinion,” and the absence, in England, of “discipline,” that is, interference by preachers with private life.  Pluralities also he denounced, and some of the exiles had been pluralists.

For all this Knox was “very sharply reproved,” as soon as he left the pulpit.  Two days later, at a meeting, he insisted that Cox’s people should have a vote in the congregation, thus making the anti-puritans a majority; Knox’s conduct was here certainly chivalrous:  “I fear not your judgment,” he said.  He had never wished to go to Frankfort; in going he merely obeyed Calvin, and probably he had no great desire to stay.  He was forbidden to preach by Cox and his majority; and a later conference with Cox led to no compromise.  It seems probable that Cox and the anti-puritans already cherished a grudge against Knox for his tract, the “Admonition.”  He had a warning that they would use the pamphlet against him, and he avers that “some devised how to have me cast into prison.”  The anti-puritans, admitting in a letter to Calvin that they brought the “Admonition” before the magistrates of Frankfort as “a book which would supply their enemies with just ground for overturning the whole Church, and one which had added much oil to the flame of persecution in England,” deny that they desired more than that Knox might be ordered to quit the place.  The passages selected as treasonable in the “Admonition” do not include the prayer for a Jehu.  They were enough, however, to secure the dismissal of Knox from Frankfort.

Cox had accepted the Order used by the French Protestant congregation, probably because it committed him and his party to nothing in England; however, Knox had no sooner departed than the anti-puritans obtained leave to use, without surplice, cross, and some other matters, the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI.  In September the Puritans seceded, the anti-puritans remained, squabbling with the Lutherans and among themselves.