Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/431

 was, however, even in Cromarty, a favourite of the majority, being especially effective in enforcing the terrors of the law, and depicting the ‘miseries of the wicked in a future state’ (ib. p. 413). On 30 March 1774 he was ordained minister of the chapel-of-ease, now the high church, Kilmarnock. As a clergyman he did not belie the peculiar reputation he had gained as a schoolmaster. One of the most rigid of sabbatarians, he was accustomed on Sundays to go out, staff in hand, and forcibly turn back—being strong as well as determined—any of his parishioners about to indulge in the sin of Sunday walking; and it is said that at the sound of his heavy cudgel in the streets every one disappeared. His stentorian voice, aided by his dark and gloomy countenance, lent such effect to his fanatical denunciations that few even of his most reckless parishioners listened to him unmoved.

Having been called to the second charge of Stirling on 18 Jan. 1800, Russel demitted his charge at Kilmarnock on the 20th. He died at Stirling on 23 Feb. 1817 in his seventy-seventh year. Russel, who expounded a Calvinism of the narrowest and most forbidding type, published a number of sermons. He has gained immortality through the satire of Robert Burns. He is one of the combatants in the ‘Twa Herds, or the Holy Tulzie;’ ‘Black Jock,’ the state physician of ‘Glowrin Superstition’ in the ‘Epistle to John Goudie;’ ‘the Lord's ain trumpet’ in the ‘Holy Fairy;’ the ‘misca'er of common sense’ in the ‘Ordination;’ and ‘Rumble John’ in the ‘Kirk's Alarm.’

By his wife, Catherine Cunningham, he had a son John, who was minister of Muthill, Perthshire, and a daughter Anne, married to the Rev. William Sheriff of St. Ninians. A volume of the son's sermons was published in 1826, with a memoir by Dr. Chalmers.

[Hugh Miller's Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; King's History of Kilmarnock; Works of Robert Burns; Hew Scott's Fasti Eccles. Scoticanæ, ii. 177, 681.] 

RUSSEL, ROUSSEEL, or RUSSELL, THEODORE (1614–1689), portrait-painter, born in London, was baptised at the Dutch church, Austin Friars, on 9 Oct. 1614. He was the son of Nicasius Rousseel (or Russel), a goldsmith, of Bruges, jeweller to James I and Charles I, who settled in London about 1567, and on 21 April 1590 was married at the Dutch church, Austin Friars, to his first wife, Jacomina Wils of Meessene; by her he had a family, including a son John, who is probably identical with a Jan Rossel or Russel resident at Mortlake from 1629 to 1645, and probably connected with the tapestry works there. Nicasius married as his second wife, at the Dutch church, on 27 Nov. 1604, Clara Jansz, daughter of Cornelis and Johanna Jansz, and sister of Cornelis Jansz (Janssen or Jonson) van Ceulen [q. v.], the famous portrait-painter; by her also he had a numerous family, to one of whom (Isaac, born in May 1616) the famous miniature-painter, Isaac Oliver, stood godfather, while to another (Nicasius, born in January 1618–19) Cornelis Janssen and Isaac Oliver's widow stood sponsors.

Theodore Russel was brought up under his father, by whom he was admitted into the Dutch church in 1640, and afterwards by his uncle, Cornelis Janssen, with whom he lived for about nine years; afterwards he lived as assistant and copyist for about a year with Vandyck. He gained some repute as a portrait-painter, and copied many of Vandyck's portraits on a smaller scale. A portrait of Sir John Suckling, copied in this way, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Several of his copies were in the royal collections, and among the nobility by whom he was patronised were the Earls of Essex and Holland. Russel resided in Blackfriars, married in January 1649, and died in 1689, leaving a family. According to Vertue, he was ‘a lover of Ease and his Bottle.’

(1663?–1743), portrait-painter, son of Theodore Russel, carried on the tradition of portrait-painting, and is said to have studied under John Riley [q. v.] A portrait by him of the famous Dr. Sacheverell, painted in 1710, was engraved in mezzotint by John Smith. He was an intimate friend of George Vertue [q. v.], who engraved some of his portraits, and he supplied Vertue with many biographical notes concerning artists of the seventeenth century, which are now embodied in Walpole's ‘Anecdotes of Painting.’ He died in London in 1743, aged about eighty.

[Vertue's MS. Diaries (Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 23068, &c.); Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, ed. Wornum; Moens's Registers of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, and the French Church, Threadneedle Street; information from W. J. C. Moens, esq., F.S.A.] 

RUSSEL, WILLIAM (d. 1702), controversialist, son of John Russel, a baptist pastor of Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, was educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in arts, and was created M.D. per literas regias, 1688 (Cantabr. Grad. p. 336). In 1662 he was living at Chesham, Buckinghamshire, but before 1670 he settled in London, at St. Bartholomew's Close, having become first