Neither alternative is very creditable to the prophet.
In the "Historie of the Estate of Scotland," it is "the brethren" who break, burn, and destroy.

{113b} In Knox's "History" no mention is made of the threat of death against the priests.

In the letter to Mrs.Locke he says, apparently of the threat, perhaps of the whole affair, "which thing did so enrage the venom of the serpent's seed," that she decreed death against man, woman, and child in Perth, after the fashion of Knox's favourite texts in Deuteronomy and Chronicles.

This was "beastlie crueltie." The "History" gives the same account of the Regent's threatening "words which might escape her in choler" (of course we have no authority for her speaking them at all), but, in the "History," Knox omits the threat by the brethren of death against the priests--a threat which none of his biographers mentions! If the menace against the priests and the ruin of monasteries were not seditious, what is sedition?
But Knox's business, in Book II.

of his "History" (much of it written in September-October 1559), is to prove that the movement was _not_ rebellious, was purely religious, and all for "liberty of conscience"-- for Protestants.