Douglas, GAWIN or GAVIN, the poet-bishop, the third son of Archibald 'Bell-the-Cat,' fifth Earl of Angus, was born at Tantallon Castle about 1474. He was educated at St Andrews for the priesthood, and in 1496 was first presented to Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, but ere long was appointed to Prestonkirk, near Dunbar, then called Hauch or Prestonhaugh. In 1501 he was made dean or provost of St Giles, Edinburgh, and while holding these preferments he wrote all his poems. From the marriage of his nephew, the sixth Earl of Angus, to the widowed queen of James IV., Douglas expected rapid preferment; but the jealousy of the nobility and the Regent Albany was such that he was disappointed of the abbacy of Aberbrothock and the archbishopric of St Andrews, and when, through the influence of the queen, he had obtained the bishopric of Dunkeld directly from the pope (January 1515), he was imprisoned on an old statute for receiving bulls from the pope, and not allowed to be consecrated until more than a year after. On the fall of the party of Angus, after the queen, stung by his ill-treatment, had flung herself into the arms of Albany and determined on a divorce, the bishop fled to England to obtain the aid of Henry VIII., but was suddenly cut off at London by the plague in 1522, and buried in the hospital church of the Savoy. The three extant poems of Gavin Douglas are The Palice of Honour, most likely written in 1501, an allegory of the life of the virtuous man; a translation of the Aneid, with prologues; and
King Hart, an allegory of the human heart in its struggle with the temptations of the flesh, not printed in its author's lifetime, nor apparently till it appeared in Pinkerton's Ancient Scottish Poems (1786). There is also a minor poem entitled Conscience, whose beauties are sadly marred by its excessive conceits. Throughout his verse Douglas shows his deep indebtedness to Chaucer, but his youthful exuberance of ornament, his sense for colour and splendour, and the vigour of his 'braid and plane' Scotch dialect, are his own. His Aneid, which he finished most likely about 1513, was the first version of a Latin classic published in Britain; it remains to Gavin Douglas no small achievement in the history of English literature, that 'in a barbarous age he gave rude Scotland Virgil's page.' His collected works were edited by the late Dr John Small (4 vols. Edin. 1874). See also chap. vii. of the late Dr J. M. Ross's Scottish History and Literature to the Reformation (1884).