Sir Robert Moray (alternative spellings: Murrey, Murray) FRS (1608 or 1609 – 4 July 1673) was a Scottish soldier, statesman, diplomat, judge, spy, and natural philosopher.
His grandfather was Robert Moray of Abercairny (near Crieff), and his mother was a daughter of George Halket of Pitfirran, Dunfermline.
[2] In 1633, he joined the Garde Écossaise, a regiment which fought under Colonel John Hepburn in the army of King Louis XIII of France.
[3] Experienced in military engineering, he was appointed quartermaster-general in the Scottish Army that invaded England in 1640 in the Second Bishops' War and took Newcastle upon Tyne.
[5] Moray helped to persuade the Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, to visit Scotland for his coronation as King of Scots at Scone on 1 January 1651.
Charles then invaded England from Scotland, but was defeated at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, and forced to escape to France.
[8] There he advocated careful quantitative observation of tidal phenomena and proposed, for the first time in the scientific literature, the use of stilling-wells as tide gauges.
His grave is unmarked, but his name appears on the stone of Abraham Cowley, near the ashes of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, in Poets' Corner.
[11] Moray had a range of notable friends: James Gregory, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn and Gilbert Burnet.