Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/341

 iii. 23). On 20 May 1579 he was appointed one of a committee for the sighting of the Lennox papers (ib. p. 163); on 8 Aug. one of a commission for enforcing the act of parliament for the reformation of the universities, with special reference to the university of St. Andrews (ib. pp. 199–200); and on 23 April one of the arbiters in reference to the feud between the clans of Gordon and Forbes (ib. p. 279). Along with other chief persons of the realm, he signed the second confession of faith, commonly called the king's confession, at Edinburgh, 28 Jan. 1580–1 (, iii. 501). He was one of a commission appointed on 15 July following to hear the suit of Sir James Balfour (d. 1583) [q. v.] and report to the king (''Reg. P. C. Scotl''. iii. 403). Although latterly an opponent of Morton, the sympathies of the commendator were with the protestant party, and he had a principal share in the contrivance of the raid of Ruthven on 23 Aug. 1582, by which the ascendency of Lennox and Arran in the king's counsels was for the time overthrown. On 11 Jan. following the keepers of the great seal were ordered, under pain of rebellion, to append the great seal to the gift of the abbacy of Dunfermline to Henry Pitcairn, son of the commendator's brother, reserving the life-rent to the commendator. This was to insure that the nephew would succeed, the gift having been made in recognition of ‘the long and true service of the commendator to the king since his coronation’ (ib. iii. 543). On 26 April the commendator was appointed assessor to the treasurer, the Earl of Gowrie.

The commendator used the utmost endeavours to prevent the counter-revolution at St. Andrews on 24 June 1583; and, while seeming to favour the king's proposal for a convention of the nobility there, he ‘gave the king counsel to let none of the lords come within the castle accompanied with more than twelve persons.’ ‘This crafty counsel,’ says Sir James Melville, ‘being followed, the next morning the castle was full of men for them of the contrary party well armed,’ who would again have made themselves masters of the king but for the immediate arrival of various gentlemen from Fife (Memoirs, pp. 288–9). For some time after the counter-revolution the commendator remained at court. Finding his position insecure, he endeavoured to retain the king's favour by bribing Colonel Stewart, captain of the guard, to whom he presented a velvet purse containing thirty-four pound-pieces of gold. The colonel, however, informed the king of the gift, representing that the purse had been sent to bribe him to betray the king. He further distributed the gold pieces among thirty of the guard, ‘who bored them and set them like targets upon their knapsacks, and the purse was born upon a spear-point like an ensign’ on the march from Perth to Falkland (ib. p. 292;, iii. 721–2). Arran having shortly afterwards arrived at Falkland, where the king then was, the commendator was sent into ward in the castle of Lochleven; but on 23 Sept. he was set at liberty upon caution to remain in Dunfermline, or within six miles of it, under pain of 10,000l. (, iii. 730). During the winter of 1583–4 he set sail to Flanders (ib. viii. 270). He returned to Scotland in a precarious state of health on 12 Sept. 1584, and obtained license to remain in Limekilns, near Dunfermline (ib. p. 725). He died on 18 Oct. following, in his sixty-fourth year. In the entry in the records of the privy council, representing him as having died before 25 April 1584 (Reg. P. C. iii. 755), the date 1584 seems to be a mistake for 1585. Nor did he die in exile, as stated in the preface to the volume (p. lxvii).

After his death the grants made by him out of the abbacy were revoked, on the ground that he was ‘suspect culpable’ of treason and had greatly dilapidated his benefices (ib. pp. 711–12); but after the extrusion of the master of Gray from the abbacy in 1587, Pitcairn's nephew Henry entered into possession of it. The commendator was buried in the north aisle of the church of Dunfermline, where he is commemorated in a laudatory Latin epitaph as the ‘hope and pillar of his country.’ Pitcairn is supposed to have been the author of the inscription on the abbot's house, on the south side of Maygate Street, Dunfermline:

 PITCAIRN, ROBERT (1747?–1770?), midshipman, son of Major John Pitcairn of the marines, killed in the battle of Bunker's Hill, was born in Edinburgh about 1747. [q. v.] was his younger brother. On 15 July 1766 he was entered as a midshipman on board the Swallow, then fitting out for a voyage of discovery under Captain [q. v.] According to the Swallow's pay-book, he was then nineteen.