LESLEY, JOHN (1527-1596), Scottish bishop and his torian, natural son of Gavin Lesley, rector of Kingussie, was edu cated at the University of Aberdeen. In June 1546 he was made an acolyte in the cathedral church of Aberdeen, of which he was afterwards appointed a canon and prebendary. He also studied at Poitiers, at Toulouse and at Paris, where he was made doctor of laws in 1553. In 1558 he took orders and was appointed Offi cial of Aberdeen, and inducted into the parsonage and prebend of Oyne. At the Reformation Lesley became a champion of Catholicism. He was present at the disputation held in Edin burgh in 1561, when Knox and Willox were his antagonists. He was one of the commissioners sent the same year to bring over the young Queen Mary to take the government of Scotland. He returned in her train, and received the bishopric of Ross and other preferments. He was one of the 16 commissioners appointed to revise the laws of Scotland.
The bishop was one of the most steadfast friends of Queen Mary. He was one of the commissioners at the conference at York in 1568, and he appeared as her ambassador at the court of Elizabeth. He projected a marriage for her with the duke of Norfolk, which ended in the execution of that nobleman. For this he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. During his con finement he collected materials for his history of Scotland, by which his name is now chiefly known.
In 1573 he was liberated from prison, but was banished from England. For two years he attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the assistance of Continental princes in favour of Queen Mary. While at Rome in 1578 he published his Latin history De Origine, Moribus, et Rebus Gestis Scotorum. In 1579 he went to France, and was made suffragan and vicar-general of the archbishopric of Rouen. In 1593 he was made bishop of Coutances in Nor mandy, and had licence to hold the bishopric of Ross till he should obtain peaceable possession of the former see. He retired to
an Augustinian monastery near Brussels, where he died on May 31, 1596.
The chief works of Lesley are as follows : A Defence of the Honour of . . . Marie, Queene of Scotland, by Eusebius Di caeophile (1569), reprinted, with alterations, at Liege in 1571, under the title, A Treatise concerning the Defence of the Honour of Marie, Queene of Scotland, made by Morgan Philippes, Bachelor of Divinitie; Piae aicti animi consolationes, ad Mariam Scot. Reg. (Paris, 1574) De origine, moribus et rebus gestis Scotorum libri decem (Rome, 1578; reissued 1675) ; De illustrium femi narum in republica administranda authoritate libellus (Reims, 158o; a Latin version of a tract on "The Lawfulness of the Regi ment of Women:" cf. Knox's pamphlet) ; De titulo et iure Mariae Scot. Reg., quo regni Angliae successionem sibi iuste vindicat (Reims, 1580; translated in 1584). The history of Scotland from 1436 to 1561 owes much, in its earlier chapters, to the accounts of Hector Boece (q.v.) and John Major (q.v.). In the later sections he gives an independent account (from the Catholic point of view) which is a valuable supplement and a corrective in many details, to the works of Buchanan and Knox.
A Scots version of the history was written in 1596 by James Dal rymple of the Scottish Cloister at Regensburg. It has been printed for the Scottish Text Society (2 vols., 1888-95). A slight sketch by Lesley of Scottish history from 1562 to 1571 has been translated by Forbes Leith in his Narrative of Scottish Catholics (1885), from the original ms. now in the Vatican.