He was praised by contemporaries for his skills in calligraphy, and received a royal pension by privy seal letter in 1577 for making manuscripts of the works of George Buchanan.
[11] Geddie drew out a Latin acrostic poem for a work of his colleague William Fowler, a discourse on the history of mathematics titled 'Methodi, sive compendii mathematici'.
In January the English ambassador Robert Bowes asked Geddie to investigate and inform him of Spanish and Catholic intrigues at court, working with Roger Aston.
[13] Bowes mentioned that Geddie had carried a warning to the king from the rebel Earl of Bothwell in November 1592, which was false, and an attempt to incriminate Lord John Hamilton.
James apologised that the language of this copy had been corrupted first by the version of Scots used by Geddie, and by Patrick Young's attempts to convert the text into English spelling.