John Dury[1] (1596 in Edinburgh[2] – 1680 in Kassel) was a Scottish Calvinist minister and an intellectual of the English Civil War period.
He made efforts to re-unite the Calvinist and Lutheran wings of Protestantism, hoping to succeed when he moved to Kassel in 1661, but he did not accomplish this.
He was the fourth son of the exiled Scottish presbyterian minister Robert Durie;[3] John was brought up in the Netherlands, at Leiden, attending the university there.
[16] He had a long though unproductive meeting with René Descartes in 1635;[17][18] also in the Netherlands he was an associate of Adam Boreel and Petrus Serrarius, and an influential figure.
At a key moment in English and European politics, Dury in August 1641 published Concerning the Work of Peace Ecclesiastical, urging Protestants to unite across national boundaries.
In 1639 Viscount Mandeville was writing to Dury, in the context that the situation in particular of German Protestants was being mooted and linked to the possibility of the English and Scottish churches could organise or broker such a union.
[27] Hill[28] places Dury with Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham as propounding the theory that Parliament had legitimacy conferred by God because it held power de facto.
[29] Hill[30] considers that the failure of Cromwell's plan to create a unified Protestant church in England of the 1650s put paid to Dury's ecumenical ideas.
In 1652 he translated John Milton's Eikonoklastes into French as Eikonoklastēs, ou, Réponse au livre intitulé Eikon basilikē.
[35] Dury met Manasseh ben Israel in 1644, and heard from him an account of Antonio de Montesinos's alleged discovery of the Ten Tribes in America.
[45] That relationship soured, since Dury had a hand in Johnson's dismissal as chaplain to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, suspected of Socinianism.
[46] According to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Dury’s irenicism and philosemitism can be understood as interrelated aspects of an expansionist Protestant cause focussed on Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, and the Atlantic world.
[55] Dorothy Durie (sic), daughter of Sir John King and Catherine Drury, was a noted writer on education and the role of women in the church.