Henry Charteris (c1565–1628)

Henry Charteris (c.1565–1628) was the second Principal of Edinburgh University, serving from 1599 to 1620.

Beginnings

The son of an eminent Edinburgh printer, Charteris was one of Robert Rollock's original class of students upon the opening of Edinburgh University in 1583. He laureated in 1587, and is the twelfth signatory for his class in Edinburgh University's Laureation Album. He returned to the university as a regent in 1589. Charteris was appointed Principal and Professor of Theology on the deathbed recommendation of Robert Rollock.

Principal and Professor of Theology

The University's historians Thomas Craufurd and Sir Alexander Grant argue that Charteris was too modest and retiring for the Town Council's taste, and suggest that a plot was hatched to replaced him with Patrick Sands. A pretext was found when Charteris requested that his salary be raised to the same level as the City's Ministers, as had, in fact, been promised him. The Town Council replied that the present state of University funds did not permit it, and insinuated that he might be wise to accept a call to the ministry elsewhere. Charteris took the hint, resigned the Principalship in 1620, and became Minister of North Leith.

The resignation of Charteris led to the separation of the offices of Principal and Professor of Theology, which in both Rollock and Charteris had been united in one person. Sands was a layman, so his appointment as Principal necessitated the creation of a new Professorship of Divinity, to which Andrew Ramsay was appointed. When Ramsay resigned in 1626, Charteris was invited to return as Professor of Divinity, a post he held until his death in 1629.

Relations and Legacy

Charteris married three times and had twenty-three children, including Laurence Charteris, Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University from 1675 to 1682. The only scholarly work that he appears to have left behind is a revision of Bartholomew Robertson's life of Robert Rollock: De vita et morte Roberti Rollok, printed by the Wodrow Society in 1826. Edinburgh University Library's collections also includes Latin verses by Charteris to Rollock's Memory in a manuscript of Rollock's Commentarius in primam beati Apostoli Petri Epistolam (ca. 1627).

Contemporary Judgements

When he visited Scotland in 1817, James VI and I summoned the professors of Edinburgh University to Stirling to hold a disputation before him. but the modesty of Charteris led him to decline to take part in it. Among the royal puns, on this occasion upon the names of the professors, that on Charteris is said to have been, ‘His name agreeth very well unto his nature, for charters contain much matter yet say nothing, but put great purposes in men's mouths’ (Craufurd, 86). According to Thomas Craufurd he was ‘certainly one of the most learned men of his time, both in tongues, and in philosophy and divinity, but he had too low thoughts of himself’.

Sources

• Thomas Craufurd, History of the University of Edinburgh, from 1580 to 1646: To Which is Prefixed the Charter Granted to the College by James VI of Scotland, in 1582 (Edinburgh: Printed by A. Neill & Co., 1808)
• Sir Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during its First Three Hundred Years, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1884)
• Stuart Handley, ‘Charteris, Henry (c.1565–1628)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [[1], accessed 23 May 2014]