Sir Robert Grierson, 1st Baronet of Lag (1655 – 31 December 1733) was a Scottish baronet from Dumfriesshire.
He is best remembered as a notorious persecutor of the Covenanters, particularly among the people of Galloway, and is still referred to by nickname, "Cruel Lag".
The character of Sir Robert Redgauntlet of "Wandering Willie's Tale" in Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet is based on Grierson.
Personal life
Robert Grierson was born in 1655 at the farm of Barquhar, in Dumfries, Scotland. His parents were William Grierson (1626–1666), laird of Barquhar, Kirkcudbright, Scotland, the 1st Tutor of Lag, and his wife, Margaret Douglas (b. 1633). His maternal grandfather was Sir James Douglas, of Mouswald, Dumfriesshire.
The Griersons claimed descent from Malcolm MacGregor of Glenorchy. MacGregor was supposedly a key ally of Robert the Bruce, resulting in claims that Henry II Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, granted him the lands of Lag in Dumfriesshire in 1408. There is no evidence to support such a claim and those Griersons who have undergone Y-DNA testing do not share any relevant markers with the MacGregors. Griersons carry the Haplogroup R-M222+ which has now been refined to R-FGC4125. Descent from the MacGregors is a genetic impossibility.
In 1666, Robert Grierson succeeded his cousin as laird of Lag and he acted as Steward of Kirkcudbright for a number of years.
On 21 September 1676, he married Henrietta Douglas (1657- 15 April 1736), daughter of Sir James Douglas, 2nd Earl of Queensberry, and Lady Margaret Stewart, at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfrieshire, Scotland.
Lady Henrietta's maternal grandparents were Sir John Stewart, 1st Earl of Traquair, and Catharina Carnegie.
Robert and Henrietta had five children: William, James, John, Gilbert and Henrietta.
Politics
Grierson sat as a Member of Parliament for Dumfriesshire between 1678 and 1686.
Between the 1660s and 1680s the Stuart king Charles II acted to suppress dissent among the militant Presbyterians of Galloway, who refused to conform to the king's authority and in several cases broke out into armed rebellion. The local heritors were charged with enforcing this policy, and Lag, a Stuart loyalist and Episcopalian, proved a particularly energetic supporter. In 1678 he made his own tenants sign a bond in which they agreed not to attend illegal conventicles or to commune with "vagrant preachers". He subsequently assisted John Graham of Claverhouse in policing the south-west of the country. As a commissioner for Galloway he was given control of one of the military courts set up to try rebellious Covenanters, and in this capacity was responsible for several executions of those refusing to take the oaths of loyalty to the monarch; he also gained a reputation, at least among subsequent martyrologists, of having a particularly contemptuous attitude towards those before the courts, and of invariably denying his victims' requests for a prayer before punishment. Most traditions make Grierson the presiding officer at the court that condemned the "Wigtown Martyrs", Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLachlan, in May 1685. A Cloud of Witnesses, the principal martyrology of the time, charged him with command of the troop of dragoons that shot John Bell of Whiteside along with four others in Tongland Parish in February 1685, and David Halliday and George Short in Twynholm later in the year.
In 1685, after the accession of King James II and VII, Grierson was created a Baronet, of Lag, in the Baronetage of Nova Scotia, and awarded a pension.