Crookshanks, John (d. 1666), presbyterian minister, was son of John Crookshanks, presbyterian minister of Redgorton, Perthshire, Scotland, and his wife Janet (née Young), daughter of the previous minister of Redgorton. His father (with whom he has been confused) seems also to have ministered in Ireland. Crookshanks entered (1644) St Leonard's College, St Andrews, and presumably graduated, but was accused of drunkenness in 1649. Because of his criticism of the Scottish general assembly, Perth presbytery refused to license him to preach in 1653. From April to August 1656 he was temporary regent in Edinburgh university, and in 1657 was ordained in the parish of Raphoe by the Laggan presbytery in Donegal, where he was paid £100 a year by the protectorate government. However, the de facto toleration of presbyterian ministers ended in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy and the resultant resurgence of episcopacy, and Crookshanks, along with many others who refused episcopal reordination, was ejected from his living. For some months, he preached against episcopacy in large secret meetings, called conventicles, but was hunted by the authorities and in 1661 fled from Lough Foyle to La Rochelle, France. In January 1662 he returned to Ireland, and was in contact with William Lecky and Thomas Blood (qv), whose plot against the Dublin government was discovered in May 1663; he was alleged to have helped recruit supporters in Donegal in spring 1663. Many presbyterians were imprisoned in the aftermath of the plot's failure, but Crookshanks escaped to Scotland. Here he is said to have translated for wider circulation George Buchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos (1579), a radical work which advocated limited monarchical powers. In 1664 the Scottish authorities twice proclaimed him a rebel, and actively sought for him in south-west Scotland, where he and others who were known as ‘covenanters’ were in hiding. In 1666 he and Andrew McCormack joined a covenanters’ rebellion in Galloway; it was soon crushed by the authorities and both the ministers, with about fifty others, were killed on 28 November 1666 in a battle at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills above Edinburgh. As Crookshanks's body was never found, it was thought for a time that he might have survived, and he was tried in his absence and condemned to death for treasonable crimes. Crookshanks was married, but all that is known is that he had at least one son. A John Crookshank (d. 1674), dean of Clonfert, appears in J. B. Leslie, Raphoe clergy and parishes (1940).
Sources
Alexander Smellie, Men of the covenant: the story of the Scottish church in the years of the persection (1903; reprinted 1975), 165; Alexander G. Lecky, In the days of the Laggan presbytery (1908), 87; McConnell, Fasti (1936); T. H. Mullin, The kirk and lands of Convoy (1960), 87–102; Richard L. Greaves, God's other children: protestant nonconformists and the emergence of denominational churches in Ireland 1660–1700 (1997), 82, 92, 93, 407, 407n