David Calderwood, a Scottish clergyman and historian, born about 1575, died at Jedburgh in 1651. In 1604 he became minister of Crailing, Roxburghshire; and in 1608, for rejecting the jurisdiction of the bishop of Glasgow, he was confined to his parish, and for several years was prevented from taking any share in the public business of the church. In 1617, with several of the clergy, he signed a protest to parliament against an article, or bill, by which the power of framing new laws for the church was to be intrusted to an ecclesiastical council appointed by the king. A commission court in regard to this protest sat at St. Andrews, to which Calderwood was summoned to answer for his seditious and mutinous behavior, and King James, who was present, examined him in person. "When threatened with deprivation, he denied the authority of the bishops, and for his contumacy was imprisoned in St. Andrews, and afterward was banished from the kingdom. From 1619 till the death of King James in 1625 he lived in Holland, and published there in 1623 his treatise Altare Bamascenum, originally published in English under the title " The Altar of Damascus" (8vo, 1621), in which he exposes the means by which the polity of the church of England was intruded upon that of Scotland. After his return to Scotland he lived for several years in Edinburgh, and was engaged in preparing his history of the Scottish church.

In 1638 he resumed his duty as a parish minister at Pencaithland, East Lothian; and in 1651, when Cromwell's army occupied the Lothians, he retired to Jedburgh. An abstract of his history was published by the general assembly in 1646, and the work was published complete 27 years after his death as the "True History of the Church of Scotland from the Beginning of the Reformation unto the End of the Reign of James VI." (fol., 1678). An edition in 8 vols. 8vo, from the original MS., edited by the Rev. J. Thomson, was published at Edinburgh in 1842-'9.