[8][9] Having received a classical education from his father, who was one of the best Latin scholars of the time, Patrick entered St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, at the age of fourteen, and in 1574 took his degree.
He was then sent by his father to the University of Cambridge, but he was induced to remain for a time at Bridgstock, where there was a library, and to pursue his studies privately, which he did with such success that he mastered Greek, then little known in Scotland, and attained great proficiency in the knowledge of ancient history, civil and ecclesiastical.
About 1580 he was translated to Cramond in the presbytery of Edinburgh, and in 1584, when all the clergy were ordered to subscribe the acts then made in favour of episcopacy, and to promise obedience to their bishops on pain of forfeiting their stipends, Simson refused, although his diocesan, Patrick Adamson, archbishop of St. Andrews, was his maternal uncle.
[7] In 1590 the general assembly appointed Simson to Stirling, then a royal residence and a resort of courtiers and learned men, and there he spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.
He attended the trial of the six ministers for high treason at Linlithgow, and befriended them by every means in his power; he drew up and signed the protest against episcopacy presented to parliament in 1606, raised a subscription for Andrew Melville when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and refused the permanent moderatorship of the presbytery of Stirling.
At the same time he took a leading part in the conferences that were held to prevent an open schism in the church, and urged his brethren to continue to attend the synods after the bishops began to preside over them.
Such was his conciliatory spirit that he was sometimes blamed by extreme men of his own party, and his efforts to preserve peace were taken advantage of by the bishops, and improved to advance their own purposes.
He was successful as a preacher and pastor, and was held in affection by his flock, many of whom, such as Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar, the king's cousin, and the Lady Erskine, venerated him as their spiritual father.
[12] He married His publications were: These treatises were corrected and republished with the title of ‘The History of the Church since the Days of our Saviour Jesus Christ until the Present Age,’ by the author's brother (London, 1624).