Ct9 



SPOTSWOOD, JOHN. 



SPRAT, THOMAS. 



650 



honour," among other things, " for composing one excellent liturgie." 

 But iu truth, Spotswood appears to have been all along disinclined to 

 the innovation, though, possibly, as the project was one upon which 

 Charles himself had set his heart, he did not openly oppose it. It was 

 pushed principally by Laud, who had formed a party among the 

 younger Scottish bishops; and the new liturgy and book of canons 

 were compiled by three or four members of this party, whose adher- 

 ence to the English primate had for some time thrown them into 

 opposition to the head of their own church. Spotswood, who was 

 constitutionally of a temporising disposition, and could gain nothing 

 by any disturbance of the established state of things, did what he 

 could to check the precipitation of these zealots, and, in recommending 

 delay and caution, is believed to have entertained the hope of being 

 able to prevent the perilous experiment altogether. But of course he 

 shared with the rest in the destruction brought upon their whole order 

 by its failure. Deposed from his 'pretended' office of a bishop, 

 declared infamous, and excommunicated by the famous Assembly 

 which met at Glasgow in November 1638, he fled to England, " where," 

 says his biographer, " age and grief, with a sad soul in a crazy body, 

 had so distempered him, that he was driven to take harbour in New- 

 castle, till by some rest, and the care of his physicians, be had recovered 

 so much strength as brought him to London." Laing, in his 'History 

 of Scotland ' (iii. 154), says we do not know upon what authority 

 that he now " resigned the seals for a pecuniary consideration : " if 

 so, the money was probably all he had to subsist upon. The writer 

 of his ' Life ' expressly affirms that he enjoyed the honour of the chan- 

 cellorship " to his death." But, however this may be, he soon fell ill 

 again, and died on the 26th of November (6to ' Calendas Decembris ') 

 1639. " The manner of his burial," concludes his biographer, " by the 

 command and care of his religious king, was solemnly ordered ; for, 

 the corpse being attended by many mourners, and at least 800 torches, 

 and being brought near the abbey church of Westminster, the whole 

 nobility of England and Scotland then present at court, with all the 

 kirg's servants and many gentlemen, came out of their coaches, and 

 conveyed the body to the west door, where it was met by the dean 

 and prebendaries of that church in their clerical habits, and buried 

 according to the solemn rites of the English church, before the exter- 

 mination of decent Christian burial was come in fashion." 



Burnet, in his ' History of his own Time ' (i. 26), has described 

 Spotswood as "a prudent and mild man, but of no great decency in 

 his course of life; for/' he adds, in a passage first printed in the 

 Oxford edition of 1823, " he was a frequent player at cards, and used 

 to eat often in taverns ; besides that all his livings were scandalously 

 exposed to sale by his servants." This version of the gossip of the 

 day may be taken as giving us a tolerably correct view of the arch- 

 bishop's character. Like the generality of the members of the Scottish 

 episcopal church in that age, he appears to have signalised his aversion 

 and contempt for the precisianism of the Puritans by a laxity of 

 manners which would now be accounted indecorous in a churchman ; 

 but those were the days when even the puritanical Abbot, wearing the 

 mitre of Canterbury, was wont to join in the diversion of the chase ; 

 and there is no evidence that Spotswood led in any respect an actually 

 immoral life; on the contrary, writers of his own party warmly 

 eulogise the piety and simplicity with which" he demeaned himself. 

 " In his life,'' says his biographer ; "he had set so severe a watch upon 

 himself, that his conversation was without reproof, even in those times 

 when the good name of every clergyman was set at a rate, as formerly 

 were the heads of wolves." He was no doubt an ambitious man ; and 

 he was probably chargeable with the carelessness as to money matters, 

 and something of the unscrupulousness in other respects, which are 

 the frequent concomitants of political ambition. Of the superiority 

 of his general talents, or at least of the skill with which he turned 

 undoubted talents to account, his success in the world may be taken 

 as a sufficient evidence; of his learning and literary abilities we have 

 a sample in his ' History of the Church of Scotland, from the year 

 203 to the end of the reign of James VI.,' a folio volume of about 550 

 closely printed pages, published at London in 1655. It was under- 

 taken, we are told, in obedience to the command of King James, and 

 it is dedicated by the author to Charles I. in an epistle dated " from 

 the place of my peregrination, 15th November, 1639." This would be 

 only eleven days before the archbishop's death, according to the 

 common account ; yet the dedication, which extends to three page 1 ', 

 contains no allusion either to the illness or the exile of the writer. On 

 the contrary, he speaks throughout as if he were still in Scotland. All 

 but the first 120 pages of this work, which bring down the history of 

 the Scottish Church to the Reformation, may be regarded as the 

 narrative of a contemporary; and it contains some details not else- 

 where to be found : but its chief value consists in its giving us the 

 views of public events entertained by one of the principal actors ; and 

 in this way even its suppressions and perversions of facts are not 

 without interest. It is written in a clear enough but in a poor and 

 unimpressive style. Spotswood's biographer says that he had heard of 

 no other works which he had left behind him ; but Martine, in his 

 notice of him in the ' Reliquiae,' attributes to him likewise "a like tract, 

 in good and refined Latin, called Refutatio Libelli de Regimiue 

 Ecclesise Scoticanse, dedicated to King Charles I., a learned and elo- 

 quent piece, pitifully refuted by Mr. David Calderwood, under the 

 name of Dido Clavius." 



By his wife " Rachael Lindsay, daughter to David Lindsay, bishop of 

 Ross, of the house of Edzell, an honourable family in Scotland," Arch- 

 bishop Spotswood left two sons and a daughter. Of the eldest, Sir 

 John Spotswood, his father's biographer, writing in 1655, says that 

 be was then alive, " though not iu a plentiful, yet in a contented 

 condition, not any way cast down or ashamed of his suffering!), but 

 comforting himself rather, that, in this general ruin brought upon his 

 country, he hath kept his conscience free, though his estate hath 

 suffered." These are like the expressions of a man speaking of him- 

 self, and would lead us to conjecture that Sir John Spotswood was 

 the writer of this sketch of his father's life, and the editor of his 

 ' History.' The archbishop's second son, Sir Robert Spotswood, after 

 having been made a lord of session by James VI., and lord president 

 of that court by King Charles, was removed from the bench by the 

 Covenanters in 1641, and in January 1646, after the defeat of Mont- 

 rose at Philiphaugh, was executed at St. Andrews, along with other 

 adherents of that royalist general, A son of one of these brothers was 

 also put to death at Edinburgh, in March 1650, a few days after the 

 execution of Montrosc. The archbishop's daughter was married to 

 Sir William Sinclair of Rosslyn. 



In the neighbourhood of his residence at St. Andrews, Archbishop 

 Spotswood has left a memorial of his taste in the church of the parish 

 of Daireie, ' which," his biographer tells us, " he publicly at bis own 

 charges built, and adorned . . . after the English form ; " adding that 

 "if the boisterous hand of a mad reformation hath not disordered" 

 it, it " is at this time one of the beautifullest little pieces of church- 

 work that is left to that now unhappy country." The church still 

 stands, though disfigured in the interior, and stripped of whatever 

 decoration it had that could be torn down without pulling the build- 

 ing to pieces. There is a view of it, and also of a house (now, we 

 believe, entirely demolished) built by the archbishop in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the church, in the last edition of Sir Robert Sibbald's 

 'History of Fife and Kinross,' 8vo, Cupar-Fife, 1803. Spotswood had 

 purchased the estate of Dairsie. 



SPRAGGE, SIR EDWARD, was a distinguished commander in the 

 naval battles between the English and Dutch during the reign of 

 Charles II. Of his parentage, the date of his birth, and the circum- 

 stances of his early life, there are no records. He fought as a captain 

 in the battle between the English and Dutch, on the 3rd of June 1665, 

 and for his gallantry on that occasion received the honour of knight- 

 hood. He was engaged in the four days' battle which took place in 

 June 1666, and also in the following one of July 24th. When Van. 

 Tromp sailed up the Thames in 1667 he defended Sheerness, which 

 however, from the weak state of the garrison, he was compelled to 

 abandon. He afterwards collected a few frigates and fire-ships, and 

 when the Dutch admiral Van Nes sailed up the Thames, Spragge 

 engaged him, burnt some of his ships, and chased him out of the river. 

 In 1671 Sir EH ward Spragge fought against the Algerines, burnt several 

 of their vessels, and did considerable damage to the castles and towns 

 on the coast of Algiers. In the battle of Solebay, May 28, 1672, he 

 sunk a Dutch ship of 60 guns. In 1673 he was made admiral of the 

 blue, and on the 28th of May in that year another fight took place, in 

 which Spragge and Van Tromp were compelled to change their ships 

 two or three times in consequence of the damage done to them. On 

 the 4th of June he fought Van Tromp again, and the two admirals 

 were once more compelled to leave their shattered vessels. On the 

 llth of August another similar contest took place between them, 

 when Spragge, passing in a boat from the battered St. George to the 

 Royal Charles, was drowned, a shot having struck and sunk the boat. 

 He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Sir Edward Spragge has been 

 highly praised by his contemporaries, not only for his courage and 

 skill as a commander, but for his gentlemanly manners and amiable 

 disposition. 



SPRANGER, BARTOLOM^EUS, a great mannerist, but a cele- 

 brated painter in his time, was born at Antwerp in 1546. His father 

 was a wealthy merchant, and after he had received in.-truction from 

 several masters at Antwerp he visited Paris and Italy, where at Milan 

 he placed himself with Bernardo Gatti, called Soiaro. From Milan he 

 went to Rome, where he found a patron in the Cardinal Farnese, Who 

 introduced him to Pope Pius V., who commissioned Spranger to paint 

 him a picture of the ' Last Judgment,' gave him apartments in the 

 Vatican, and appointed him his painter. This picture of the ' Last 

 Judgment,' which contained about 500 heads, was painted on a large 

 sheet of copper, and after the death of the pope it was fixed over his 

 tomb in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, but must have been long 

 since removed. 



In 1575 Spranger left Rome to enter the service of the Emperor 

 Maximilian II., at Vienna, to whom he had been recommended by 

 John of Bologna. After the death of Maximilian he remained in the 

 service of Rudolph II., who ennobled him in 1588. He visited his 

 native place in 1602, after an absence of thirty-seven years, and was 

 treated with great distinction by his countrymen. He returned again 

 to Prague, and died there about 1625, according to Von Mechel. There 

 are many pieces by Spranger in the gallery of Vienna, and in other 

 German collections. He painted with facility, but his figures are 

 heavy, gross, and distorted ; he was fond of allegorical and mytho- 

 logical subjects, which were utterly unfit for his style. 



SPRAT, THOMAS, was born in 1636, at Fallaton in Devonshire. 



