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 1542, 1543, and 1554. During the latter year, in which Mary of Guise assumed the title of queen-regent, he was keeper of the privy seal. He was appointed an extraordinary lord in 1541, and was frequently chosen one of the lords of the articles. He was present at a convention of lords spiritual and temporal held at Stirling, 18 June 1545, in which both the contending factions in the state were represented, when, by mutual concessions, a basis of agreement was formed. The regent Arran was to have a privy council of twenty members, four of whom were to act in rotation for a month. The abbot was appointed to act during the second month of this new arrangement. He was again in office as a privy councillor two years later, in September 1547, at the critical juncture of affairs which led to the battle of Pinkie. Much obloquy has been attached to his name for the part he took in the negotiations prior to the battle. The members of the privy council deceived the Scotch army as to the conciliatory demands of the English, which they gave out to be insulting. They have been thought to have acted thus, less from patriotic feeling than from religious rancour. A large number of the clergy had been enrolled in the Scottish army, among whom a similar feeling prevailed. William Patten, the English chronicler of the ‘Expedition into Scotland,’ and an eye-witness of the battle, gives a very minute description of a banner found on the field after the fight, which was said to be that of the abbot of Dunfermline, and under which the ‘kirkmen’ had fought.

When the popular tide had run so far in Scotland that many of the queen-regent's most influential advisers had deserted her, the abbot showed no sign of defection. When her prospects were the darkest, he approved of her withdrawal to Leith, whither he accompanied her with others of the catholic clergy. The defence was entrusted almost entirely to French troops, to obtain help against whom the Scottish protestant party applied to England. The catholics, in their turn, sent the abbot to France to represent to King Francis and Queen Mary how they were situated. Although then sixty-seven years of age, he seems to have been quite as resolute as before. He embarked at Dunbar for France on 29 Jan. 1560. In August following the Scottish parliament voted the abolition of the Romish church and hierarchy in Scotland, and sent Sir James Sandilands to France to obtain the ratification of this measure by the queen. His untoward reception was attributed in Scotland partly to the influence of Durie, who was then at the French court.

In December Francis II died. Deputations were sent to France by both the protestant and catholic parties to invite Queen Mary to return. The abbot had the advantage of being with the queen previous to the deaths of her mother and her husband. He was also with her when she went to pay her visits of leave-taking among her relatives in Rheims and Joinville, where she remained six months. Holinshed says: ‘The queen, being desirous to have peaceful landing in Scotland, would not for the present meddle with religion, although Durie, abbot of Dunfermline, and John Sinclaire, lately appointed bishop of Brechin, did vehemently persuade and labour her to the contrary.’ The abbot died shortly afterwards, 27 Jan. 1561. Nicholas Sanders, in his ‘De Visibili Monarchia Ecclesiæ,’ chap. viii., has included him in the list he gives of the catholic clergy in Great Britain who had been deprived of their benefices on account of their attachment to their faith. Two years after his death he was beatified by the Roman catholic church. Dempster and other writers of the same period call him a saint and a martyr. He left a numerous family in Scotland. His two elder sons, Peter and Henry, were legitimated by an act passed under the great seal, dated 30 Sept. 1543. They appear to have acted as guardians to two younger ones, George and John, who were sent when young to the Scotch college at Paris, and subsequently to the college at Louvain. Several of their letters, dated from Louvain 1571, addressed to their brothers in Scotland, have been preserved in state papers relating to Scotland in the Record Office. John Durie [q. v.] became a jesuit.

[Dunfermline Charters; Calderwood; Spotiswood; Holinshed; Patten's Expedition into Scotland; State Papers relating to Scotland in Record Office; Registrum Magni Sigilli Regni Scotorum; Dempster's Historia Ecclesiastica; Thins's Continuation of Holinshed.] 

DURIE, JOHN (d. 1587), a Scotch jesuit, was ‘the son before he was abbat of the abbat of Dunfermling, brother to the lord of Duries’ (, Catalog of the Writers of Scotland, p. 463). He was born at Dunfermline, and educated at Paris and Louvain. He became a professed father of the Society of Jesus, and in 1582 he was residing at Clermont College in Paris, being then ‘presbyter et theologus.’ Father Anthony Possevin highly commends him for his learning and eloquence. Durie died in Germany in 1587. His only published work is entitled: ‘Confutatio Responsionis Gulielmi Whitakeri … ad Rationes decem, quibus fretus Edmundus Campianus … certamen Anglicanæ Ecclesiæ Ministris obtulit in Caussa Fidei,’ Paris, 1582, 8vo; Ingoldstadt, 1585, 8vo. 