[1] A descendant of a younger son of the original William de Douglas.
[2] On the murder of the knight of Liddesdale, his lands, with the
exception of Liddesdale and the Hermitage forfeited to the crown and
then secured by his nephew, fell to his nephew, Sir James Douglas of
Dalkeith and Aberdour (d. 1420), whose great-grandson James Douglas,
3rd Lord Dalkeith (d. 1504), became earl of Morton in 1458 on his
marriage with Lady Joan Stewart, third daughter of James I. His
grandson, the 3rd earl, left daughters only, of whom the eldest,
Margaret, married James Hamilton, earl of Arran, regent of Scotland,
ancestor of the dukes of Hamilton; Elizabeth married in 1543 James
Douglas, who became by this marriage 4th earl of Morton.
[3] Transferred to the British service in 1669 and eventually known
as the Royal Scots regiment.
DOUGLAS, SIR CHARLES, Bart. (d. 1789), British admiral, a descendant of
the Scottish earls of Morton, was promoted lieutenant in the navy on the
4th of December 1753. Nothing is known of his early life. He became
commander on the 24th of February 1759, and attained to post rank in
1761. When the War of American Independence began, he took an active
part in the defence of Canada in 1775, and he afterwards commanded the
"Stirling Castle" 64 in the battle of the Ushant, 27th of July 1778. His
reputation is based first on the part he played in the battle of
Dominica, 12th of April 1782, and then on the improvements in gunnery
which he introduced into the British navy. It appears from the testimony
of Sir F. Thesiger (d. 1805), who was present on the quarter-deck of the
flagship, that Sir Charles Douglas, who was then captain of the fleet,
first pointed out to Rodney the possibility and the advantage of passing
through the French line. His advice was taken with reluctance. On the
other hand, Lord Hood accuses Douglas of living in such abject fear of
his admiral that he did not venture to speak with the freedom which his
important post entitled him to take. His more certain claim to be ranked
high among naval officers is founded on the many improvements he
introduced into naval gunnery. Some account of these will be found in
the writings of his son. He became rear-admiral on the 24th of September
1787, and died suddenly of apoplexy in February 1789. He was made a
baronet for his services in the West Indies.
There is a life of Sir Charles Douglas in Charnock, _Biogr. Nav._ vi.
427.
DOUGLAS, GAVIN (1474?-1522), Scottish poet and bishop, third son of
Archibald, 5th earl of Angus (called the "great earl of Angus" and
"Bell-the-Cat"), was born c. 1474, probably at one of his father's
seats. He was a student at St Andrews, 1489-1494, and thereafter, it is
supposed, at Paris. In 1496 he obtained the living of Monymusk,
Aberdeenshire, and later he became parson of Lynton (mod. Linton) and
rector of Hauch (mod. Prestonkirk), in East Lothian; and about 1501 was
preferred to the deanery or provostship of the collegiate church of St
Giles, Edinburgh, which he held with his parochial charges. From this
date till the battle of Flodden, in September 1513, he appears to have
been occupied with his ecclesiastical duties and literary work. Indeed
all the extant writings by which he has earned his place as a poet and
translator belong to this period. After the disaster at Flodden he was
completely absorbed in public business. Three weeks after the battle he,
still provost of St Giles, was admitted a burgess of Edinburgh, his
father, the "Great Earl," being then civil provost of the capital. The
latter dying soon afterwards (January 1514) in Wigtownshire, where he
had gone as justiciar, and his son having been killed at Flodden, the
succession fell to Gavin's nephew Archibald (6th earl). The marriage of
this youth to James IV.'s widow on the 6th of August 1514 did much to
identify the Douglases with the English party in Scotland, as against
the French party led by Albany, and incidentally to determine the
political career of his uncle Gavin. During the first weeks of the
queen's sorrow after the battle, Gavin, with one or two colleagues of
the council, acted as personal adviser, and it may be taken for granted
that he supported the pretensions of the young earl. His own hopes of
preferment had been strengthened by the death of many of the higher
clergy at Flodden. The first outcome of the new connexion was his
appointment to the abbacy of Aberbrothock by the queen regent, before
her marriage, probably in June 1514. Soon after the marriage she
nominated him archbishop of St Andrews, in succession to Elphinstone,
archbishop-designate. But Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, having obtained
the vote of the chapter, expelled him, and was himself in turn expelled
by Forman, bishop of Moray, who had been nominated by the pope. In the
interval, Douglas's rights in Aberbrothock had been transferred to James
Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, and he was now without title or
temporality. The breach between the queen's party and Albany's had
widened, and the queen's advisers had begun an intrigue with England, to
the end that the royal widow and her young son should be removed to
Henry's court. In those deliberations Gavin Douglas took an active part,
and for this reason stimulated the opposition which successfully
thwarted his preferment.
In January 1515 on the death of George Brown, bishop of Dunkeld,
Douglas's hopes revived. The queen nominated him to the see, which he
ultimately obtained, though not without trouble. For the earl of Athole
had forced his brother, Andrew Stewart, prebendary of Craig, upon the
chapter, and had put him in possession of the bishop's palace. The queen
appealed to the pope and was seconded by her brother of England, with
the result that the pope's sanction was obtained on the 18th of February
1515. Some of the correspondence of Douglas and his friends incident to
this transaction was intercepted. When Albany came from France and
assumed the regency, these documents and the "purchase" of the bishopric
from Rome contrary to statute were made the basis of an attack on
Douglas, who was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, thereafter in the
castle of St Andrews (under the charge of his old opponent, Archbishop
Hepburn), and later in the castle of Dunbar, and again in Edinburgh. The
pope's intervention procured his release, after nearly a year's
imprisonment. The queen meanwhile had retired to England. After July
1516 Douglas appears to have been in possession of his see, and to have
patched up a diplomatic peace with Albany.
On the 17th of May 1517 the bishop of Dunkeld proceeded with Albany to
France to conduct the negotiations which ended in the treaty of Rouen.
He was back in Scotland towards the end of June. Albany's longer absence
in France permitted the party-faction of the nobles to come to a head in
a plot by the earl of Arran to seize the earl of Angus, the queen's
husband. The issue of this plot was the well-known fight of
"Clear-the-Causeway," in which Gavin Douglas's part stands out in
picturesque relief. The triumph over the Hamiltons had an unsettling
effect upon the earl of Angus. He made free of the queen's rents and
abducted Lord Traquair's daughter. The queen set about to obtain a
divorce, and used her influence for the return of Albany as a means of
undoing her husband's power. Albany's arrival in November 1521, with a
large body of French men-at-arms, compelled Angus, with the bishop and
others, to flee to the Borders. From this retreat Gavin Douglas was sent
by the earl to the English court, to ask for aid against the French
party and against the queen, who was reported to be the mistress of the
regent. Meanwhile he was deprived of his bishopric, and forced, for
safety, to remain in England, where he effected nothing in the interests
of his nephew. The declaration of war by England against Scotland, in
answer to the recent Franco-Scottish negotiations, prevented his return.
His case was further complicated by the libellous animosity of Beaton,
archbishop of St Andrews (whose life he had saved in the
"Clear-the-Causeway" incident), who was anxious to thwart his election
to the archbishopric of St Andrews, now vacant by the death of Forman.
In 1522 Douglas was stricken by the plague which raged in London, and
died at the house of his friend Lord Dacre. During the closing years of
exile he was on intimate terms with the historian Polydore Vergil, and
one of his last acts was to arrange to give Polydore a corrected version
of Major's account of Scottish affairs. Douglas was buried in the church
of the Savoy, where a monumental brass (removed from its proper site
after the fire in 1864) still records his death and interment.
Douglas's literary work, now his chief claim to be remembered, belongs,
as has been stated, to the period 1501-1513, when he was provost of St
Giles. He left four poems.
1. _The Palice of Honour_, his earliest work, is a piece of the later
type of dream-allegory, extending to over 2000 lines in nine-lined
stanzas. In its descriptions of the various courts on their way to the
palace, and of the poet's adventures--first, when he incautiously
slanders the court of Venus, and later when after his pardon he joins in
the procession and passes to see the glories of the palace--the poem
carries on the literary traditions of the courts of love, as shown
especially in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and "The Hous of Fame." The poem
is dedicated to James IV., not without some lesson in commendation of
virtue and honour. No MS. of the poem is extant. The earliest known
edition (c. 1553) was printed at London by William Copland; an Edinburgh
edition, from the press of Henry Charteris, followed in 1579. From
certain indications in the latter and the evidence of some odd leaves
discovered by David Laing, it has been concluded that there was an
earlier Edinburgh edition, which has been ascribed to Thomas Davidson,
printer, and dated c. 1540.
2. _King Hart_ is another example of the later allegory, and, as such,
of higher literary merit. Its subject is human life told in the allegory
of King Heart in his castle, surrounded by his five servitors (the
senses), Queen Plesance, Foresight and other courtiers. The poem runs to
over 900 lines and is written in eight-lined stanzas. The text is
preserved in the Maitland folio MS. in the Pepysian library, Cambridge.
It is not known to have been printed before 1786, when it appeared in
Pinkerton's _Ancient Scottish Poems_.
3. _Conscience_ is in four seven-lined stanzas. Its subject is the
"conceit" that men first clipped away the "con" from "conscience" and
left "science" and "na mair." Then they lost "sci," and had nothing but
"ens" ("that schrew, Riches and geir").
4. Douglas's longest, last, and in some respects most important work is
his translation of the _Aeneid_, the first version of a great classic
poet in any English dialect. The work includes the thirteenth book by
Mapheus Vegius; and each of the thirteen books is introduced by a
prologue. The subjects and styles of these prologues show great variety:
some appear to be literary exercises with little or no connexion with
the books which they introduce, and were perhaps written earlier and for
other purposes. In the first, or general, prologue, Douglas claims a
higher position for Virgil than for his master Chaucer, and attacks
Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the
_Aeneid_. That Douglas undertook this work and that he makes a plea for
more accurate scholarship in the translation have been the basis of a
prevalent notion that he is a Humanist in spirit and the first exponent
of Renaissance doctrine in Scottish literature. Careful study of the
text will not support this view. Douglas is in all important respects
even more of a medievalist than his contemporaries; and, like Henryson
and Dunbar, strictly a member of the allegorical school and a follower,
in the most generous way, of Chaucer's art. There are several early MSS.
of the _Aeneid_ extant: (a) in the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge, c. 1525, (b) the Elphynstoun MS. in the library of the
university of Edinburgh, c. 1525, (c) the Ruthven MS. in the same
collection, c. 1535, (d) in the library of Lambeth Palace, 1545-1546.
The first printed edition appeared in London in 1553. An Edinburgh
edition was issued from the press of Thomas Ruddiman in 1710.
For Douglas's career see, in addition to the public records and
general histories, Bishop Sage's _Life_ in Ruddiman's edition, and
that by John Small in the first volume of his edition of the _Works of
Gavin_ _Douglas_ (4 vols., 1874, the only collected edition of
Douglas's works). A new edition of the texts is much to be desired. On
Douglas's place in Scottish literature see SCOTLAND: _Scottish
Literature_, also G. Gregory Smith's _Transition Period_ (1900) and
chapters in the _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. ii.
(1908). P. Lange's dissertation _Chaucer's Einfluss auf die
Originaldichtungen des Schotten Gavin Douglas_ (Halle, 1882) draws
attention to Douglas's indebtedness to Chaucer. Further discussion of
the question of Douglas's alleged Humanism will be found in
Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, i. (1895), T. F. Henderson's
_Scottish Vernacular Literature_ (1898), and J. H. Millar's _Literary
History of Scotland_ (1903). For the language of the poems see G.
Gregory Smith's _Specimens of Middle Scots_ (1902). (G. G. S.)
DOUGLAS, SIR HOWARD, Bart. (1776-1861), British general, younger son of
Admiral Sir Charles Douglas, was born at Gosport in 1776, and entered
the Royal Military Academy in 1790. He was commissioned second
lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1794, becoming first lieutenant a
few months later. In 1795 he was shipwrecked while in charge of a draft
for Canada, and lived with his men for a whole winter on the Labrador
coast. Soon after his return to England in 1799 he was made a
captain-lieutenant, and in the same year he married. In his regimental
service during the next few years, he was attached to all branches of
the artillery in succession, becoming captain in 1804, after which he
was placed on half-pay to serve at the Royal Military College. Douglas
was at this time (1804) appointed to a majority in the York Rangers, a
corps immediately afterwards reduced, and he remained on the roll of its
officers until promoted major-general. The senior department of the
R.M.C. at High Wycombe, of which he was in charge, was the forerunner of
the Staff College. Douglas, since 1806 a brevet lieutenant-colonel,
served in 1808-1809 in the Peninsula and was present at Corunna, after
which he took part in the Walcheren expedition. In 1809 he succeeded to
the baronetcy on the death of his half-brother, Vice-admiral Sir William
Henry Douglas. In 1812 he was employed in special missions in the north
of Spain, and took part in numerous minor operations in this region, but
he was soon recalled, the home government deeming his services
indispensable to the Royal Military College. He became brevet colonel in
1814 and C.B. in 1815. In 1816 appeared his _Essay on the Principles and
Construction of Military Bridges_ (subsequent editions 1832, 1853); in
1819, _Observations on the Motives, Errors and Tendency of M. Carnot's
System of Defence_, and in the following year his _Treatise on Naval
Gunnery_ (of which numerous editions and translations appeared up to the
general introduction of rifled ordnance). In 1821 he was promoted
major-general. Douglas's criticisms of Carnot led to an important
experiment being carried out at Woolwich in 1822, and his _Naval
Gunnery_ became a standard text-book, and indeed first drew attention to
the subject of which it treated. From 1823 to 1831 Sir Howard Douglas
was governor of New Brunswick, and, while there, he had to deal with the
Maine boundary dispute of 1828. He also founded Fredericton College, of
which he was the first chancellor. On his return to Europe he was
employed in various missions, and he published about this time _Naval
Evolutions_, a controversial work dealing with the question of "breaking
the line" (London, 1832). From 1835 to 1840 Douglas, now a G.C.M.G., was
lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, where, amongst other
reforms, he introduced a new code of laws. In 1837 he became a
lieutenant-general, in 1840 a K.C.B., in 1841 a civil G.C.B., and in
1851 a general. From 1842 to 1847 Douglas sat in parliament, where he
took a prominent part in debates on military and naval matters and on
the corn laws. He was frequently consulted on important military
questions. His later works included _Observations on the Modern System
of Fortification, &c._ (London, 1859), and _Naval Warfare Under Steam_
(London, 1858 and 1860). He died on the 9th of November 1861 at
Tunbridge Wells. Sir Howard Douglas was a F.R.S., one of the founders of
the R.G.S., and an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford University. Shortly before
his death he declined the offer of a military G.C.B.
See S. W. Fullom, _Life of Sir Howard Douglas_ (London, 1862), and
_Gentleman's Magazine_, 3rd series, xii. 90-92.
DOUGLAS, JOHN (1721-1807), Scottish man of letters and Anglican bishop,
was the son of a small shopkeeper at Pittenweem, Fife, where he was born
on the 14th of July 1721. He was educated at Dunbar and at Balliol
College, Oxford, where he took his M.A. degree in 1743, and as chaplain
to the 3rd regiment of foot guards he was at the battle of Fontenoy,
1745. He then returned to Balliol as a Snell exhibitioner; became vicar
of High Ercall, Shropshire, in 1750; canon of Windsor, 1762; bishop of
Carlisle, 1787 (and also dean of Windsor, 1788); bishop of Salisbury,
1791. Other honours were the degree of D.D., 1758, and those of F.R.S.
and F.S.A. in 1778. Douglas was not conspicuous as an ecclesiastical
administrator, preferring to his livings the delights of London in
winter and the fashionable watering-places in summer. Under the
patronage of the earl of Bath he entered into a good many literary
controversies, vindicating Milton from W. Lauder's charge of plagiarism
(1750), attacking David Hume's rationalism in his _Criterion of
Miracles_ (1752), and the Hutchinsonians in his _Apology for the Clergy_
(1755). He also edited Captain Cook's _Journals_, and Clarendon's _Diary
and Letters_ (1763). He died on the 18th of May 1807, and a volume of
_Miscellaneous Works_, prefaced by a short biography, was published in
1820.
DOUGLAS, STEPHEN ARNOLD (1813-1861), American statesman, was born at
Brandon, Vermont, on the 23rd of April 1813. His father, a physician,
died in July 1813, and the boy was under the care of a bachelor uncle
until he was fourteen, when his uncle married and Douglas was thrown
upon his own resources. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in
Middlebury, Vt., and then to another in Brandon, but soon abandoned this
trade. He attended schools at Brandon and Canandaigua (N.Y.), and began
the study of law. In 1833 he went West, and finally settled in
Jacksonville, Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar in March 1834,
and obtained a large practice. From the first he took an active interest
in politics, identifying himself with the Jackson Democrats, and his
rise was remarkably rapid even for the Middle West of that period. In
February 1835 he was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial
circuit, the most important at that time in Illinois; in 1835 he was one
of several Democrats in Morgan county to favour a state Democratic
convention to elect delegates to the national convention of 1836--an
important move toward party regularity; in December 1836 he became a
member of the state legislature. In 1837 he was appointed by President
Van Buren registrar of the land office at Springfield, which had just
become the state capital. In 1840 he did much to carry the state for Van
Buren; and for a few months he was secretary of state of Illinois. He
was a judge of the supreme court of Illinois from 1841 to 1843. In 1843
he was elected to the national House of Representatives.
In Congress, though one of the youngest members, he at once sprang into
prominence by his clever defence of Jackson during the consideration by
the House of a bill remitting the fine imposed on Jackson for contempt
of court in New Orleans. He was soon recognized as one of the ablest and
most energetic of the Democratic leaders. An enthusiastic believer in
the destiny of his country and more especially of the West, and a
thoroughgoing expansionist, he heartily favoured in Congress the
measures which resulted in the annexation of Texas and in the Mexican
War--in the discussion of the annexation of Texas he suggested as early
as 1845 that the states to be admitted should come in slave or free, as
their people should vote when they applied to Congress for admission,
thus foreshadowing his doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty." He took an
active share in the Oregon controversy, asserting his unalterable
determination, in spite of President Polk's faltering from the
declaration of his party's platform, not to "yield up one inch" of the
territory to Great Britain, and advocating its occupation by a military
force; indeed he consistently regarded Great Britain as the natural and
foremost rival of the United States, the interests of the two nations,
he thought, being always opposed, and few senators fought more
vigorously the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty or Great Britain's reassertion of
the right of search on the high seas. He ardently supported the policy
of making Federal appropriations (of land, but not of money) for
internal improvements of a national character, being a prominent
advocate of the construction, by government aid, of a trans-continental
railway, and the chief promoter (1850) of the Illinois Central; in 1854
he suggested that Congress should impose tonnage duties from which towns
and cities might themselves pay for harbour improvement, &c. To him as
chairman of the committee on territories, at first in the House, and
then in the Senate, of which he became a member in December 1847, it
fell to introduce the bills for admitting Texas, Florida, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Oregon into the Union, and for
organizing the territories of Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah,
Washington, Kansas and Nebraska. In 1848 he introduced a bill proposing
that all the territory acquired from Mexico should be admitted into the
Union as a single state, and upon the defeat of this bill proposed
others providing for the immediate admission of parts of this territory.
In the bitter debates concerning the keenly disputed question of the
permission of slavery in the territories, Douglas was particularly
prominent. Against slavery itself he seems never to have had any moral
antipathy; he married (1847) the daughter[1] of a slaveholder, Colonel
Robert Martin of North Carolina, and a cousin of Douglas's colleague in
Congress, D. S. Reid; and his wife and children were by inheritance the
owners of slaves, though he himself never was. He did more probably than
any other one man, except Henry Clay, to secure the adoption of the
Compromise Measures of 1850. In 1849 the Illinois legislature demanded
that its representatives and senators should vote for the prohibition of
slavery in the Mexican cession, but next year this sentiment in Illinois
had grown much weaker, and, both there and in Congress, Douglas's name
was soon to become identified with the so-called "popular sovereignty"
or "squatter sovereignty" theory, previously enunciated by Lewis Cass,
by which each territory was to be left to decide for itself whether it
should or should not have slavery. In 1850 his power of specious
argument won back to him his Chicago constituents who had violently
attacked him for not opposing the Fugitive Slave Law.
The bill for organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which
Douglas reported in January 1854 and which in amended form was signed by
the president on the 30th of May, reopened the whole slavery
dispute--wantonly, his enemies charged, for the purpose of securing
Southern support,--and caused great popular excitement, as it repealed
the Missouri Compromise, and declared the people of "any state or
territory" "free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in
their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."
The passage of this Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of the most momentous in
its consequences ever passed by the Federal Congress, was largely a
personal triumph for Douglas, who showed marvellous energy, adroitness
and resourcefulness, and a genius for leadership. There was great
indignation throughout the free states; and even in Chicago Douglas was
unable to win for himself a hearing before a public meeting. In 1852,
and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in
the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was
unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1857 he broke with
President Buchanan and the "administration" Democrats and lost much of
his prestige in the South, but partially restored himself to favour in
the North, and especially in Illinois, by his vigorous opposition to the
method of voting on the Lecompton constitution, which he maintained to
be fraudulent, and (in 1858) to the admission of Kansas into the Union
under this constitution. In 1858, when the Supreme Court, after the vote
of Kansas against the Lecompton constitution, had decided that Kansas
was a "slave" territory, thus quashing Douglas's theory of "popular
sovereignty," he engaged in Illinois in a close and very exciting
contest for the senatorship with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican
candidate, whom he met in a series of debates (at Ottawa, Freeport,
Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton), in one of which,
that at Freeport, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by
"unfriendly legislation," could exclude slavery, no matter what the
action of the Supreme Court. This, the famous "Freeport Doctrine," lost
to Douglas the support of a large element of his party in the South, and
in Illinois his followers did not poll so large a vote as Lincoln's.
Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54
to 46. In the Senate he was not reappointed chairman of the committee on
territories. In 1860 in the Democratic national convention in Charleston
the adoption of Douglas's platform brought about the withdrawal from the
convention of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida,
Texas and Arkansas. The convention adjourned to Baltimore, where the
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Maryland delegations
left it, and where Douglas was nominated for the presidency by the
Northern Democrats; he campaigned vigorously but hopelessly, boldly
attacking disunion, and in the election, though he received a popular
vote of 1,376,957, he received an electoral vote of only 12--Lincoln
receiving 180. Douglas urged the South to acquiesce in Lincoln's
election. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he denounced secession as
criminal, and was one of the strongest advocates of maintaining the
integrity of the Union at all hazards. At Lincoln's request he undertook
a mission to the border states and the North-west to rouse the spirit of
Unionism; he spoke in West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois. He died on the
3rd of June 1861 at Chicago, where he was buried on the shore of Lake
Michigan; the site was afterwards bought by the state, and an imposing
monument with a statue by Leonard Volk now stands over his grave.
In person Douglas was conspicuously small, being hardly five feet in
height, but his large head and massive chest and shoulders gave him the
popular sobriquet "The Little Giant." His voice was strong and carried
far, he had little grace of delivery, and his gestures were often
violent. As a resourceful political leader, and an adroit, ready,
skilful tactician in debate, he has had few equals in American history.
See Allen Johnson's _Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics_
(New York, 1908), W. G. Brown's _Stephen Arnold Douglas_ (Boston,
1902), and an excellent review of his later life in James Ford
Rhodes's _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850_
(New York, 1893-1906); also P. O. Ray, _Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise_ (Cleveland, Ohio, 1909), and E. C. Carr, _Stephen A.
Douglas_ (Chicago, 1909).