He was the son of John Henry, a welleducated Scotsman, among whose relatives was the historian William Robertson, and who served in Virginia as county surveyor, colonel and judge of a county court.
It is a Treatise on Trigonometry, by a Scotsman, James Hume of Godscroft, Berwickshire, a place still in possession of the family of Hume.
In the second, which took place in the Church of St John and St Paul, and lasted three days, he undertook to refute innumerable errors in Aristotelians, mathematicians and schoolmen, to conduct his dispute either logically or by the secret doctrine of numbers, &c. According to Aldus, who attended the debate and published an account of it in his dedication to Crichton prefixed to Cicero's "Paradoxa" (1581), the young Scotsman was completely successful.
As a Scotsman, Aberdeen was interested in the ecclesiastical controversy which culminated in the disruption of 1843.
He was the only Scotsman who had been named to that high office by an undisputed right, Cardinal Wardlaw, bishop of Glasgow, having received his appointment from the anti-pope Clement VII.