Scottish ecclesiastic and poet, educated at St. Andrews and Bourges, and in 1569 elected principal of Kings College, Aberdeen, which office he retained until his death. He played an active part in the stirring church politics of the period, and was twice moderator of the kirk, and a member of the commission of inquiry into the condition of the university of St. Andrews (1583). The correctness of his attitude on all public questions won for him the commendation of Catholic writers; he is not included in Nicol Burnes list of periurit apostatis; but his policy and influence were misliked by James VI., who, when the Assembly had elected Arbuthnot to the charge of the church of St. Andrews, ordered him to return to his duties at Kings College. He had been for some time minister of Arbuthnott in Kincardineshire. His extant works are (a) three poems, The Praises of Wemen (224 lines), On Luve (10 lines), and The Miseries of a Pure Scholar (189 lines), and (b) a Latin account of the Arbuthnot family, Originis et Incrementi Arbuthnoticae Familiae Descriptio Historica (still in MS.), of which an English continuation, by the father of Dr. John Arbuthnot, is preserved in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh. The praise of the fair sex in the first poem is exceptional in the literature of his age; and its geniality may help us to understand the authors popularity with his contemporaries. Arbuthnot must not be confused with his contemporary and namesake, the Edinburgh printer, who produced the first edition of Buchanans History of Scotland in 1582. Some have discovered in the publication of this work a false clue to Jamess resentment against the principal of Kings College.
The particulars of Arbuthnots life are found in Calderwood, Spottiswood, and other Church historians, and in Scotts Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae. The poems are printed in Pinkertons Ancient Scottish Poems (1786), i. pp. 138155.