Robert Muller, 1773 -C.1800 portrait of the Rt Rev, John Douglas, Dd, Lord Bishop of Salisbury 1721-1807

Robert Muller, 1773 -C.1800

Portrait of the Rt Rev, John Douglas, DD, Lord Bishop of Salisbury 1721-1807

Signed/Inscribed:

inscribed on a plaque " Rt rev John Douglas, DD, Lord Bishop of Sarum, 1791"

oil on canvas

127 x 101.60 cm. (50 x 40 in.)

Provenance : By Direct Family descent

Notes

Douglas, John (1721–1807), bishop of Salisbury and writer, was born on 14 July 1721 in Pittenweem, Fife, the second son of Archibald Douglas, a merchant, and his wife, who was the daughter of Melvill of Carsender in Fife. His paternal grandfather was a distinguished minister in the Scottish Episcopal church, who, in 1669, had succeeded the historian Gilbert Burnet in the living of Saltoun, Haddingtonshire. Douglas attended the grammar school at Dunbar, where he received a good classical education, and was then sent for a short time to two private schools in London. In 1736 he was entered as a commoner at St Mary Hall, Oxford, and two years later he was elected to a Warner exhibition at Balliol College, where Adam Smith, a distant relative, was his contemporary. He graduated BA (1740) and MA (1743). He was sent abroad by his father, from 1740 to 1742, to learn French, and on taking deacon's orders in 1743 he embarked on a highly successful career as a clergyman. In July 1744 he became chaplain to the 3rd foot (Scots) guards, serving as an aide-de-camp at the battle of Fontenoy (29 April 1745). He resigned his commission on the army's return home the next year to fight the Jacobites, and was elected Snell exhibitioner at Balliol (1745–7).

Ordained priest in 1747, Douglas became curate of Tilehurst, near Reading, and also of Duns Tew, Oxfordshire. At about this time friends of his mother introduced him to William Pulteney, first earl of Bath, whose wealth and political and literary connections made him a highly desirable patron. An early assignment was to take Bath's ‘difficult’ heir, Lord Pulteney, on a grand tour of Holland, Germany, and France between July 1748 and October 1749. In Paris Douglas met Montesquieu but his journal of his tour devoted more pages to the Jansenist controversy and to the exposure of the miracles at deacon Pâris's tomb, which later figured in his pamphlet on supernatural phenomena, The Criterion. On his return to England he was presented by Lord Bath to the free chapel of Eaton Constantine and to the donative of Uppington in Shropshire, exchanging the latter, in 1750, for the vicarage of High Ercall, also in Shropshire. He seldom visited his livings but spent the winter in London, in a house next to that of his patron, whom he accompanied in the summer to Bath, Tunbridge Wells, and to nobles' houses, acting as Bath's chaplain and secretary. Douglas's first marriage, to Dorothy Pershore (d. 1752), sister of Richard Pershore of Reynolds Hall, Staffordshire, in September 1752, ended with her death in December of the same year. In April 1765 he married Elizabeth Rooke, daughter of Henry Brudenell Rooke. They had two children: William, who became chancellor of the diocese of Salisbury, and Elizabeth.

Douglas began to earn a reputation as a critic and controversialist, first by exposing the forgeries of William Lauder, who had accused Milton of plagiarism. His pamphlet on this subject, Milton No Plagiary, went into two editions (1750–51 and 1754), and caused Samuel Johnson, who had written a preface to Lauder's book, to dictate to Lauder a letter to Douglas, confessing to the imposture. Douglas then sought to elude David Hume's arguments against miracles in The Criterion (1752, 1754, and 1757), which made much of differences between alleged modern contraventions of the laws of nature and those presented in the Christian gospels. Later Douglas dined in a friendly spirit with Hume, who in 1773 considered him a ‘better hand’ than either Sir John Dalrymple or James Macpherson (Ossian) for continuin