Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/64

Johnston pression of the Rump he was appointed a member of the committee of safety, and appears to have become its permanent president, and when the form of government was debated, made a stand against a general religious toleration (, Life of Milton, v. 508).

At the Restoration Charles II singled him out for condign punishment (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 30 July 1660). A decreet of forfeiture and death was issued against him in his absence (13 May 1661) as guilty of high treason in accepting office from Cromwell, and sitting in his House of Peers after having been king's advocate. He had escaped to Hamburg, and had gone thence to Rouen, where his place of concealment was discovered. With the assent of the French government he was arrested there, and brought a prisoner to the Tower. On the ground that he was ‘ill with palsy and dropsy,’ his wife petitioned to be allowed to accompany him to Scotland, whither he was transported to be imprisoned in the Tolbooth. Illness, and it was asserted a deliberate ill-treatment of the physicians attending him, had so prostrated him, mentally as well as physically, that he ‘did not know his own children’ (, i. 351). On his first appearance before the Scottish parliament he showed weakness, but on a second he rallied, and received with calmness the intimation that only a fortnight would be allowed him to prepare for death. His position excited some compassion in parliament, but the king's desire for his execution was so well known that Lauderdale protested against delay (Lauderdale Papers, i. 135, 155;, p. 170). Burnet visited him both in the Tower and in the Tolbooth. He was hanged at the market-cross of Edinburgh on 23 July 1663, and his head was fixed on the Netherbow, near that of his friend Guthrie. He met death with firmness. On the scaffold he delivered a long speech (given in, i. 358–60, note), and expressed contrition for having taken office under Cromwell, a lapse which he ascribed to ‘too much fear anent the straits my numerous family might be brought into.’ Bishop Burnet (i. 48) says of Johnston that ‘he looked at the covenant as setting Christ on his throne, as out of measure zealous for it,’ and that he had ‘an unrelenting severity of temper against all who opposed it,’ adding that ‘he had no regard to the raising of himself or his family, though he had thirteen children, but presbytery was to him more than all the world.’ Carlyle (Letters and Speeches, iii. 128) calls him a ‘canny, lynx-eyed lawyer, and austere presbyterian zealot, full of fire, of heavy energy and gloom; in fact a very notable character, of whom our Scotch friends would do well to give us further elucidations.’ His son James (1655–1737), ‘Secretary Johnston,’ is separately noticed.

 JOHNSTON, ARTHUR, M.D. (1587–1641), writer of Latin verse, fifth son of George Johnston of Johnston and Caskieben, was born in 1587 at Caskieben, Aberdeenshire. His mother was Christian, third daughter of William, seventh lord Forbes (d. 1593). Of his five brothers, John, the eldest, was sheriff of Aberdeen in 1630. William, the youngest, was successively professor of humanity and philosophy at Sedan, and of mathematics in the Marischal College, Aberdeen. Arthur was educated at the burgh school of Kintore, Aberdeenshire, and probably at King's College, Old Aberdeen. He may possibly have attended the Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1608 he went abroad for a further course of medical study, visited Rome twice, and graduated M.D. at Padua in 1610. After extending his travels to the north of Europe, he settled in France at Sedan, the seat of one of the six protestant universities of France, and the place of exile of Andrew Melville [q. v.] from 1611 till his death in 1622. With Melville and with Daniel Tilenus, the colleague, and afterwards the adversary, of Melville, Johnston lived in close intimacy.

His cultivation of Latin verse began at least as early as his residence in Padua. It is even possible that he was laureated for his verses at Paris in his twenty-third year (1609–10). But the statement is doubtful, and a later story, which makes him poet-laureate to Louis XIII from 1612 to 1632, is an absurd amplification of it. Some of his best epigrams were written while he was at Sedan. In 1619 he was practising in Paris as a physician, and in the course of a literary 