GIBSON, Sir Alexander (1630-61), of Durie, Scoonie Parish, Fife.

Sir Alexander Gibson came from a distinguished Scottish legal family. His grandfather, Alexander (d. 1644), was clerk of session and senator of the college of justice; and his father, Sir Alexander (known as Lord Durie), was clerk of session, lord clerk register and senator of the college of justice. Earlier in the seventeenth century the family had established marital alliances with prominent families, including the Craigs of Riccarton (and through them, with Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston* and Robert Baillie), and they built up a large landholding in Fife, centred on Durie near Leven, and also held lands in Nova Scotia – although the baronetcy usually included with such land-grants was never ratified.10CB; Wariston Diary, ii. 6, 8. Despite his strong links with the Scottish establishment, Lord Durie was a controversial figure, who turned his back on the Covenanters in the 1640s, was finally sacked as clerk register (in Wariston’s favour) in February 1649, and debarred from communion in his home parish in April 1650 because of his ‘malignancy’.11Wariston Diary, ii. 26n; Lamont Diary ed. Kintoch, 15. In 1650-1 Lord Durie was a stalwart supporter of Charles Stuart.12Wariston Diary, ii. 114, 129. In 1652 he sided with the English invaders, and in the face of opposition from the ‘fiery kirkists’ of Fife, in March 1652 he was sent to Dalkeith (and later, to London) as the shire’s deputy during the negotiations for union with England.13SP25/138, p. 5; Cromwellian Union ed. Terry, 26n, 89-90, 184; Lamont Diary, 36, 46. Thereafter, although he was a useful point of contact between Fife and the English administration, and collaborated with the earl of Rothes and others in an attempt to gain security against prosecution for public debts, Lord Durie was not a popular figure.14Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLVI, unfol.: 27 Nov. 1654; Corresp. of the Earls of Ancram and Lothian (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1875), ii. 507*-8*. He nearly came to blows with his fellow kirk elders, who publicly denounced him as ‘an opposer and persecutor of the Church of Scotland’.15Lamont Diary, 89. Lord Durie died in June 1656, and was succeeded by his 26-year-old son, Sir Alexander.16Brodie Diary ed. Laing, 183.

Sir Alexander Gibson was a much less volatile character than his father. The details of his upbringing and education are unknown, but in the midst of the Stuart resurgence, in June 1651, he was married to a daughter of Lord Balvaird, who was also a granddaughter of the 1st earl of Southesk.17CB. Despite these royalist connections, in the later 1650s Gibson cooperated with the English government - being appointed as a justice of the peace for Fife in 1656, and as assessment commissioner in 1657 and 1660 – and although he seems to have concentrated on securing his estates, which his father had left encumbered with debts, he was on good terms with the Cromwellian government.18Scot. and Protectorate, 312; A. and O. In July and August 1656 Gibson paid off one of his major creditors, and secured a grant of his lands at Durie as a unified barony.19Reg. Gt Seal Scot. 1652-9, pp. 229, 235-38. In November of the same year he was granted a pass to travel to and from Fife, and was allowed to keep two horses above the legal value.20Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLVIII, unfol.: 6 Nov. 1656. In December 1658 Gibson was elected as MP for Fife and Kinross at a meeting of the gentry at Cupar, and duly went to Westminster, leaving Scotland on 20 January 1659 (with a pass dated 22 Jan.) and returning on 21 May, although he left no trace in the official records of that Parliament.21Lamont Diary, 110-1; Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLIX, f. 27v. George Monck* rewarded Gibson’s efforts with permission to carry to a gun ‘for his coney warren’, granted on 13 April 1659.22Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLIX, f. 48v.

It was a year later that Gibson was to have his brief moment of national prominence. In March 1660, he was chosen with the earls of Glencairn and Home and the laird of Carden to go to London ‘to represent to the council of state and to the Parliament ensuing, the grievances of this oppressed kingdom’.23J. Nicoll, Diary of Public Transactions (Edinburgh, 1836), 297. In the event, this delegation was not sent south until April, when a small coterie of Scottish nobles, led by his father’s old associate, the earl of Rothes, chose the same four men to carry a letter to Charles Stuart via London.24Dow, Cromwellian Scot. 259, 263, 337. This ‘pretend commission’ was denounced by some Scots as illegal, but Gibson travelled to London nevertheless.25Consultations, ed. Stephen, ii. 203n. By early May, Rothes himself was planning to go to the Netherlands, and commented to Sir Alexander Wedderburn* of Blackness that although Gibson was now in London and preparing to set sail for the continent, ‘I [am] afraid there will be a speet [speech?] against him, as to that plan you and I could wish him in’.26A. Wedderburn, The Wedderburn Book (2 vols. privately printed, 1898), ii. 103. Despite the awkwardness of his position, Gibson did indeed attend Charles Stuart, and on 25 May, William Thomsone* reported to the Edinburgh council that on his arrival in the Netherlands he had met Gibson, who had ‘arrived about the same hour by way of Flushing’.27Recs. Burgh Edinburgh, 1655-65, 199.

The royalism of his father, and his own journey to meet the new king gave Gibson a distinct advantage in the months following the Restoration. On 27 November 1660 he was elected as commissioner for Fife to attend the Scottish Parliament which met on 1 January 1661.28Lamont Diary, 128; NRS, CC20/4/12. Thereafter, he was rapidly promoted within the Scottish government, being sworn in as a privy councillor on 13 July 1661. He served on a variety of commissions during the summer, and was a witness in the trial of his relative (and his father’s rival), Johnston of Wariston.29Reg. PC Scot. 1661-4, pp. 1, 2. Yet Gibson’s career was to be cut short, before his 32nd birthday. On 6 August 1661 he ‘departed out of this life at Durie’, succumbing to ‘a purple fever’, and was buried at Scoonie ten days later. According to Lamont, Gibson ‘left no sons behind him, but only two daughters (the youngest died shortly after), and his lady with child, which was a daughter also’. Sir Alexander was succeeded in his estate his brother, John Gibson.30Lamont Diary, 138. The only daughter to survive to adulthood, Anne, married John Murray of Touch Adam, Stirlingshire, and died in 1720.31CB.