CHARTING A COURSE


a Gordon: Robert Gordon of Stral- och,


who would his


become a noted writer and collector of lute music but who is best remembered for contribution to the


production of the fi rst accu- rate maps of Scotland. Gordon was born at Kinmundy,


Aberdeenshire in 1580. His father, Sir John Gordon of Pitlurg, was a great friend and confi dant of George Gordon, sixth Earl of Huntly and inveterate intriguer with Catholic


of Aberdeen) in 1593, he was acting out of frus- tration with the poor educational standards of the religiously-suspect rival institution of King’s College, a mile up the road in Old Aberdeen. What he wanted was the kind of education in


W


the ‘humane arts’ in the North East that might produce men ‘through whose exertions and zeal the Church might fl ourish, the Country become illustrious, and the Commonwealth be more and more enlarged.’ Marischal was also motivated, however, by


a desire to strengthen his own power base in the region in the face of the all-powerful, Cath- olic-sympathising and notoriously unreliable Gordon Earls of Huntly. It is perhaps ironic, then, that the College’s fi rst student graduate was


Left: Copy of the portrait of Robert Gordon by George Jamesone, which hangs in Marischal college. Above: Gordon’s 1654 map of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire from the Blaeu series.


hen George Keith, Fifth Earl Marischal founded Marischal College in Aber- deen (later to become the university


Spain. His death in 1600 forced the young Gordon to cut short a continental sojourn that began with a trip to Paris after his graduation in 1598. In 1608 he married Catherine Irvine and bought the estate of Straloch, north of Aberdeen, where they raised their seventeen children, of whom, remarkably, ten sons and fi ve daughters reached adulthood. Gordon was a true scholar, keen antiquar-


ian and historian. Whilst he was in Paris, he became acquainted with the Scottish historian Robert Johnston, whose work was anti-Puritan and Royalist in outlook. Unlike the Covenanter Robert Baillie – who would declare of John- ston that he was ‘one of the poorest pedants and most unable for a storie, of any I ever saw in print,’ – the Royalist Gordon admired his friend’s work, preferring it to that of Buchanan or Knox. The former he regarded as partial and insincere, motivated by a desire to promote the interests of the Regent Moray, on whom Stral- och was scathing (Moray had been an arch enemy of the sixth Earl of Huntly, so Gordon


WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 53


LEFT – COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN MUSEUMS, RIGHT – MAP COLLECTION NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND


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