Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 03.djvu/168

 he returned in 1691 to Scotland, with ‘a warrant under King James's hands to treat with the Highland clans’ ( State Papers, 140). As an opportunity for a rising did not present itself, he returned again to France; but though he held the appointment of lieutenant in the ex-king's regiment of horse guards, commanded by the Duke of Berwick, he was also frequently employed along with Captain Williamson in negotiations with the adherents of James in England. In 1696 he arrived in England with a commission from James ‘requiring our loving subjects to rise in arms and make war upon the Prince of Orange, the usurper of our throne.’ According to the Duke of Berwick, 2,000 horse were to be raised to join the king on his arrival from France, Sir John Fenwick to be major-general, and Sir George Barclay brigadier (Memoirs of the Duke of Berwick, i. 134). Barclay, however, interpreted his commission as allowing him a certain discretion in the methods to be employed against ‘the usurper.’ Making the piazza of Covent Garden his headquarters, he gathered around him a body of conspirators—forty men in all, well mounted—who were to pounce on William as he was returning from Richmond to London, the spot selected being a narrow lane between Brentford and Turnham Green, where his coach and six could not turn. The time fixed was 15 Feb., but the plot having been revealed, the king remained at home both on that day and on the 22nd. The principal subordinates were captured, with the exception of Barclay, who made his escape to France. In a narrative published in Clarke's ‘Life of James II,’ Barclay exonerates his master from all knowledge of the plot; but that he did not strongly reprobate it, is sufficiently proved by the fact that he received Barclay again into his service. During the negotiations with France in 1698, the Earl of Portland demanded that Barclay should be delivered up; but Louis replied that the regiment he commanded had been disbanded, and that he did not know what had become of him.



BARCLAY, HUGH (1799–1884), a Scottish lawyer and sheriff substitute of Perthshire, was descended from the old Barclay family of Fifeshire, and was born on 18 Jan. 1799 in Glasgow, where his father was a merchant. After serving his apprenticeship as a law agent he was admitted a member of the Glasgow faculty in 1821. In 1829 he was appointed sheriff substitute of the western district of Perthshire, and in 1833 sheriff substitute of the county. He died at his residence at Early-bank, Craigie, near Perth, on 1 Feb. 1884, having for several years been the oldest judge in Scotland. Sheriff Barclay was the author of ‘A Digest of the Law of Scotland, with special reference to the Office and Duties of the Justice of the Peace,’ 1852–3, a work which has passed into several editions, and has proved of invaluable service to the class of magistrates for which it was intended. Besides editions of various other legal works, he also published ‘Law of Highways,’ 1847; ‘Public House Statutes,’ 1862; ‘Judicial Procedure in Presbyterian Church Courts,’ 1876; and other minor tractates, such as ‘Hints to Legal Students,’ ‘The Local Courts of England and Scotland compared,’ and ‘The Outline of the Law of Scotland against Sabbath Profanation.’ He was a frequent contributor to the ‘Journal of Jurisprudence’ and other legal periodicals, and his papers on the ‘Curiosities of the Game Laws’ and ‘Curiosities of Legislation’ were also published by him in a collected form. For many years he was a prominent member of the general assembly of the church of Scotland, and, taking an active interest in ecclesiastical and philanthropic matters, he published ‘Thoughts on Sabbath Schools,’ 1855; ‘The Sinaitic Inscriptions,’ 1866, and a few other small works of a similar kind.



BARCLAY, JOHN (1582–1621), author of the ‘Argenis,’ was born 28 Jan. 1582 at Pont-à-Mousson, where his father, [q. v.], was professor of civil law in the college then recently founded in that town by the Duke of Lorraine. His mother, Anne de Malleviller, was a French lady of distinguished birth; but Barclay always considered himself a Scotsman and a subject of James I, and the attempt to affiliate him to France, of which his native town at that period formed no part, has been renounced even by the French critics who have of late done so much to elucidate the circumstances of his life. He is said to have been educated by the jesuits, and this may partially have been the case; but his father is little likely to have resigned the main charge of his education to other hands, and his writings show no trace of the false taste which had already begun to infect the jesuit colleges. Like