Robert Douglas (minister)

But the report may be a Whig fiction fabricated about Queen Mary to discredit the Jacobites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He became chaplain to one of the brigades of Scottish auxiliaries sent with the connivance of Charles I to the aid of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War.

Gustavus landed in Germany in June 1630; Robert Wodrow, in his 'Analecta,' gives several anecdotes, showing how he appreciated Douglas's advice.

Returning to Scotland, he was elected in 1638 member of the General Assembly, and in the following year was chosen for the second charge of the High Church in Edinburgh.

In the following year he was chosen moderator of the general assembly—a post he also held in 1645, 1647, 1649, and 1651—and in 1643 he was named one of the commissioners of the Westminster Assembly.

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.

Douglas was now the acknowledged leader of the moderate presbyterians or 'public resolutioners,' and retained the position till the English Restoration, which he largely helped to bring about.

[1] After the Restoration Douglas was offered the bishopric of Edinburgh if he would agree to the introduction of episcopacy into Scotland, but declined the office, and remonstrated with Sharp for accepting the archbishopric of St. Andrews.

[1] He married (1) Margaret Kirkaldy, and had issue — James, of Earnslaw (Fife Sets., xii., 289); Thomas, who died before 1667, when Alexander is called second son (G. R.