Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/341

 gotiations, and now succeeded Montrose in the chancellorship. Montrose continued to support the king in his absolutist policy towards Scotland, and as his commissioner presided at the Red parliament (so called from the scarlet robes of the nobility, worn for the first time in accordance with acts lately passed) held at Perth on 9 July 1606, at which the principle of the royal authority ‘over all estates, persons, and causes whatsoever’ was ratified, and the episcopal government in the church restored. He was also present as the king's commissioner at a convention of the nobility and clergy held at Linlithgow on 10 Dec. for church business, and made a short address, which had to be explained to the convention by the moderator, ‘because his voice was weak’ (, vi. 605). Ill-health also compelled him on 7 Aug. 1607 to delegate his duties as commissioner of the Scottish parliament to the Duke of Lennox, his former ward, who presided until the parliament rose on 11 Aug. Montrose died on 9 Nov. of the following year at the age of sixty. ‘Because he had been his majesty's grand commissioner in the parliaments preceding and at conventions, his majesty thought meet that he should be buried in pomp before any other were named. So he was buried with great solemnity. The king promised to bestow forty thousand merks upon the solemnity of the burial; but the promise was not performed, which drew on the greater burden upon his son’ (ib. vii. 38). By his wife Lilias, daughter of David, lord Drummond, he had three sons (John, fourth earl, who was appointed president of the council in July 1626, and died on 24 Nov. of the same year; Sir William Graham of Braco, and Sir Robert Graham of Scottistown) and a daughter Lilias.

[Douglas's Scottish Peerage (Wood), ii. 239–40; Crawfurd's Officers of State, pp. 152–5; Reg. of Privy Council of Scotl. vols. iii–vi.; Calderwood's Hist. of Church of Scotland; Historie of James the Sext (Bannatyne Club); Sir James Melville's Memoirs (ib.); Moysie's Memoirs (ib.); Keith's Hist. of Scotland.] 

GRAHAM, JOHN, of Claverhouse, (1649?–1689), was descended from a younger branch of the Grahams of Kincardine, ancestors of the Montrose family. The link of connection between the Claverhouse and Montrose branches was Sir Robert Graham of Strathcarron, son of Sir William Graham of Kincardine, by his second wife, the Princess Mary Stewart, second daughter of Robert III. John, the second son of Sir Robert Graham, by his wife Marjory, daughter of Sir James Scrimgeour, ancestor of the earls of Dundee, had a son John, who in 1530 acquired the lands of Claverhouse in Mains parish, near Dundee, from which the family takes its name. The old mansion-house is now wholly demolished, its site being marked by a dovecote. The grandfather of Claverhouse, Sir William Graham of Claypots and Claverhouse, was one of the tutors or curators of the great Montrose. Claverhouse's father was also named Sir William, and his mother was Lady Madeline Carnegie, fifth daughter—not Lady Jean, fourth daughter, as usually stated—of the first Earl of Northesk (marriage contract in, History of the Carnegies, Earls of Southesk, p. 357). Hitherto the year of the birth of Claverhouse has been given as 1643, a date inferred from a note to a decision of the court of session of 24 July 1687. The decision declares a certain charter of Fotheringham of Powrie to give him a sufficient right and title to certain dues, on the supposition that he had possessed forty years by virtue of that title, but a note is added, ‘As for Clavers’ (one of the defendants) ‘he was seventeen years of this forty a minor, and so they must prove forty years before that’ (, Decisions, i. 468). The note does not necessarily mean (as has been supposed) that Claverhouse was a minor during the first seventeen of the forty years, but only that he was a minor during a certain seventeen of the previous forty years. It therefore does not follow that he came of age in 1664, or seventeen years after 1647, but only that he was born four years before the death of his father. The birth-date 1643 would make his age twenty-two when he entered the university, twenty-nine when he entered the army as a volunteer, thirty-one when he became a cornet, and forty when he married; and it scarcely harmonises with certain allusions to his age made by himself, or with his youthful appearance in his portraits. The marriage contract of his mother, dated 7, 15, and 24 Feb. 1645, and made ‘in contemplation of the marriage’ (, Carnegies, p. 357), must moreover be regarded as decisive against the date 1643. There is also undoubted evidence that his father was alive in 1649 (Acta Parl. Scot. vol. vi. pt. ii. p. 715); and the signature of a deed by his mother as tutrix-testamentur to her son, 7 April 1653 (, Carnegies, p. 358), renders it probable that the father died in that year. If he did so, then, according to the court of session note, the son must have been born about 1649.

Claverhouse was eldest son of the family, but whether he was eldest child or not is uncertain. On 22 Dec. 1660 he and his brother David were admitted burgesses of Dundee on their father's privilege (, Roll of Eminent Burgesses of Dundee, p. 166).