Robert Douglas

Robert Douglas (1594–1674) was the only minister of the Church of Scotland to be Moderator of the General Assembly five times.

He was a Scottish preacher who supported the Presbyterian system of Christianity, rather than the episcopal church of the King of England; his preaching as a Covenantor led to his arrest and the loss of his post at Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh.

Life He was son of George Douglas, governor of Laurence, Lord Oliphant; the father was said to be an illegitimate son of Sir George Douglas of Lochleven, brother of Sir William Douglas, 6th Earl of Morton. Sir George helped Mary Queen of Scots to escape from Lochleven in 1567, and at the end of the seventeenth century the Scottish historians stated that Queen Mary was the mother of Sir George's illegitimate son. Gilbert Burnet states, in the manuscript copy of his 'History of his own Time' in the British Museum, that the rumour that Robert Douglas was Queen Mary's grandson was very common in his day, and that Douglas 'was not ill-pleased to have this story pass.' Wodrow (Analecta, iv. 226) repeats the tale on the authority of 'Old Mr. Patrick Simson,' and suggests that it was familiar to most Scotchmen. But the report may be a Whig fiction fabricated about Queen Mary to discredit the Jacobites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was educated at the University of St Andrews, where he took the degree of M.A. in 1614.

He became minister of Kirkaldy in 1628, and a year later was offered a charge at South Leith, which he declined. In the following year he was one of the ministers who waited on Charles II at Dunfermline to obtain his signature to a declaration of religion; but as this document reflected on his father, Charles refused to sign it. The result was a division in the Scotch church on the matter, Douglas being a leader of the resolutioners, the party which preferred to treat the king leniently.

The Church of Scotland was now unhappily split into two contending sections. Old friends who had fought side by side in earlier days became opponents, and there was much bitterness and occasionally misrepresentations, due in some cases to misunderstandings, exaggerated reports or false rumours. Of the Resolutioners, Robert Douglas was, by head and shoulders, the acknowledged leader. His ministerial supporters included David Dickson, Robert Baillie, and James Wood. Among the Protesters the most outstanding ministers were James Guthrie, Samuel Rutherfurd, Andrew Cant, Patrick Gillespie, and John Livingstone; and, of the elders, Wariston and Sir John Cheisly; the two most strenuous fighters being Guthrie and Wariston.

In January 1651 Douglas officiated at the coronation of Charles II at Scone, preaching a sermon in which he said that it was the king's duty to maintain the established religion of Scotland, and to bring the other religions of the kingdom into conformity with it. Douglas was sent prisoner to London by Oliver Cromwell, when he suppressed the Scotch royalists, but was released in 1653.