ADAMSON, Patrick, Scottish prelate (real name was spelled Constyne, Constean, Conston, Constant, and Constans; later changed to Con stantine, then to Adamson) : b. Perth, 15 March 1536; d. 19 Feb. 1592. He took his degree at St. Andrews, and in 1566 went to Pans as tutor. Here he wrote a Latin ode on the birth in June of James VI, and called him °king of France and England," for which the French court gave him six months' imprisonment. Re leased, he went to Padua, Geneva and Paris, and finally to Bourses, where he lay in hiding for seven months in fear of the rage against Protestants let loose by the massacre of St. Bartholomew (15U), and which cost his host's life. Recalled to Scotland (in 1573), he became a prominent minister, one of the commissioners to settle Church matters, and chaplain to the regent Morton, who in October 1576 made him archbishop of St. Andrews. The tragedy of his life lay in his attempting to be an old fashioned prelate in the new Scotland which hated prelacy, and to air High-Church pref erences before men who considered them popery. He began the warfare himself by declaring that he would oppose all attempts to deprive the archbishopric of any of its former power; the presbytery took up the glove, and never ceased till they had pulled him down. He was assailed first for not having been con secrated to his post; making his peace some how for this, they again attacked him for in solence to the presbytery, for opposing its in terests in Parliament, for popery and heresy.
The conflict grew so hot that he retired to the castle of St. Andrew's, where he was cured by a `wise woman" of a disease the doctors could not handle, and the presbytery afterward seized and burnt her for it. In 1583 he went to Eng land as James' ambassador, exciting attention by his eloquence, and being savagely libeled by the Presbyterians for alleged looseness of be havior. Returning next May, he was high in favor with James, and his chief agent or promp ter in severe measures against the Puritans. In December 1585 he published a paper on the •King's Majesty's Intent in the Late Acts of Parliament," which was a chief article in his derelictions then, but in 1646, in the heart of the Civil war, was reprinted by the Puritans as on their own side. In 1585 Andrew Melville and other Presbyterian leaders returned after the Raid of Ruthven (q.v.), and that party was gaining the upper hand: Morton had been executed in 1581. In April 1586 Adamson was impeached and excommunicated; the next year the excommunication was removed, but in 1588 he was freshly accused,— among other things, of mutilating and abstracting registries,— and the King, tired of the quarrel or convinced that it was Adamson's fault, transferred the revenues of his see to another party and left him in actual want for himself and family. A small pension was afterward granted him, but he died poor and wretched.