John Clement Gordon

John Clement Gordon (1644–1726), originally just John Gordon, Bishop of Galloway, was born in Scotland on 1644 and was a member of the Gordon family of Coldwells, near Ellon in Buchan, Aberdeenshire.

Life Gordon became a chaplain in the Royal Navy and then royal chaplain "at New York in America", by which time he was a Doctor of Theology; when, on a vacancy in the see of Galloway, a congé d'élire in his favour was issued on 3 December 1687. He was accordingly elected bishop on 4 February 1688 and consecrated at Glasgow by John Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow.

After the "Glorious Revolution", he followed James VII/II to Ireland and then to France, and while residing at Saint-Germain he read the liturgy of the Church of England to such English, Scottish and Irish Protestants as resorted to his lodgings. Subsequently, however, he was converted to Roman Catholicism by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. It appears that he was privately received into the Roman Church during his sojourn in France, though at a later period he made a public abjuration of Protestantism in Rome, before Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripanti, the cardinal protector of the Scottish nation. He was the last Bishop of Galloway in the official Church of Scotland, episcopacy being abolished in the Scottish Church in 1689, but Bishops of Galloway continued to exist in (then illegal) Episcopal Church of Scotland, that was for Jacobites the real heir of the ancient Church, existed before the Revolution of 1689.