Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/230

Grierson 200l. a year. On 27 March he was appointed under the royal commission one of the lords justices of Wigtownshire, ordained to ‘concur’ with Colonel Douglas, who was appointed to the military command. In this capacity he presided at the trial of Margaret Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson known in tradition as the Wigtown martyrs who having refused to take the abjuration oath were condemned to death ; but on 30 April were reprieved, when a full pardon was recommended. Notwithstanding the tradition that they were drowned in the waters of the Blednoch on 11 May, it has been argued that the sentence was never carried into execution ; but the evidence adduced by the Rev. Archibald Stewart in ‘History Vindicated in the Case of the Wigtown Martyrs,’ 1869, places the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Grierson is represented as having presided at the execution and as having treated the women with insolent brutality. An old lady alive in 1834 remembered her grandfather stating that ‘there were cluds o' folk on the sands that day in clusters here and there praying for the women as they were put down’ (, Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway, p. 431).

After the fall of King James, Lag was on 21 May 1689 seized by Lord Kenmure as a suspected person, and lodged in the Tolbooth at Kirkcudbright; but after being sent to Edinburgh he ultimately obtained release on a large bail. On 8 July he was again apprehended on suspicion of being concerned with Claverhouse and others in a plot against the Convention parliament, but about the end of August he was liberated on account of the state of his health, after giving bail to the amount of 1,500l. In 1692 and 1693 he was again imprisoned ; in the latter instance for failing to pay the fine of a year's rent ‘for refusing the oath of allegiance and assurance.’ He was set at liberty on 9 Nov., but for several years passed a considerable portion of his time in durance. In June 1696 a charge was preferred against him of having let his mansion of Rockhall for the purpose of coining false money, but it turned out that it had been merely employed in connection with experiments for a method of stamping linen with ornamental patterns. In his latter years Grierson, whose fortunes had been seriously crippled by fines, took up his residence at Rockhall. He was not personally concerned in the rebellion of 1715, but permitted his eldest son, William, and his fourth son, Gilbert, to take part in Kenmure's luckless expedition into England. Both were taken prisoners at Preston, and conveyed to London. Grierson himself suffered no molestation from the government on this account, but on the attainder of his son William sentence of forfeiture was passed on the estates ; but although previous to this Grierson had placed his son in possession of the estates by infeftment he had made a stipulation that in case he should be in danger of arrest for debt the son should be required to relieve him within the space of six months after personal intimation. This proviso was undoubtedly made in good faith, and had led to disputes between father and son, so that Lag was able to plead—when sentence of forfeiture was passed against the son—that the provisions of the deed of infeftment had been infringed in such a manner as to annul it, and in August 1719 a decision was on this account given in his favour. Lag died of apoplexy 31 Dec. 1733. Several portents are stated to have appeared on the occasion. A ‘corbie,’ supposed to represent the evil one, is said to have perched upon the coffin and accompanied the cortège to the grave at Dunscore. The original team of horses were, it is stated, unable to move the hearse, and a team of Spanish horses which were then yoked to it by Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, and drew it at a furious gallop, are said to have died a few days afterwards. C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe vouched for the truth of this story (Correspondence, i. 4). By his wife, Lady Henrietta Douglas, sister of William, first duke of Queensberry, Grierson had four sons and a daughter, Henrietta, married to Sir Walter Laurie, bart., of Maxweltown. He was succeeded by his eldest son, William. Grierson is the Sir Robert Redgauntlet of Wandering Willie's Tale in Sir Walter Scott's ‘Redgauntlet.’

[Wodrow's Sufferings of the Church of Scotland; Howie's Heroes for the Faith; Mackenzie's History of Galloway; Alexander Stewart's Wigtown Martyrs, 1869; Napier's Life and Times of Dundee; C. K. Sharpe's Correspondence, 1888, i. 3-6, and passim; Colonel Alex. Fergusson's Laird of Lag, 1886.]  GRIEVE (or, as he latterly spelt it), GEORGE (1748–1809), persecutor of Madame Du Barry, was the son of Richard Grieve, an attorney, of Alnwick, by Elizabeth Davidson. Both Richard and the grandfather, Ralph, a merchant, had been prominent at Alnwick in political contests, and George's elder brother, Davidson Richard, was high sheriff of Northumberland in 1788. Grieve, on coming of age, had to go to law with the corporation to take up his freedom, their plea being that his father, who had died in 1765 at the age of eighty-four, had been temporarily disfranchised at the time of George's birth. In 1774 he took an active part in defeating the Duke of 