Robert Moray

Sir Robert Moray, who lived from 1608 or 1609 to 1673, was a Scottish soldier, statesman, diplomat, judge, spy and natural philosopher. The elder son of a Perthshire laird, he joined the Garde Écossaise in the French army in 1633, became a favourite of Cardinal Richelieu and served as quartermaster-general of the Scottish army that invaded England in 1640. After the Restoration he was one of the founders of the Royal Society at its first formal meeting in 1660, influential in gaining its Royal Charter and in formulating its statutes, and was its first president. His scientific work concerned the tides: staying on the island of Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides, he observed a strong diurnal tidal stream combined with the normal semidiurnal tide and reported these extraordinary tides to the Royal Society in 1665. In 1666 he published Considerations and Enquiries concerning Tides, which proposed for the first time in the scientific literature the use of stilling-wells as tide gauges. He is also recorded as one of the earliest men initiated into speculative Freemasonry on English soil, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.