 |
"SIR ROBERT REDGAUNTLET" , G.F. Crosbie - P. 134
"SIR ROBERT REDGAUNTLET" , by G. F. Crosbie - Page 134
Sources: (1) The Glasgow Herald, 1934, January 6th, Page 4, Columns E & F.
"SIR ROBERT REDGAUNTLET" , by G. F. Crosbie
One essential licentenary link with (Sir) Robert Grierson of Lag -- who died, so ominously, in the closing hours of 1733 -- is CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE of Hoddam Castle. Scott, his contemporary, called Sharpe the scottish Horace Walpole. Not only was Sharpe addicted to the 18th century of letter-writing, ballad--collecting, polite learning, & rather highbrow talking. His addiction to hereditary strong-boxes & muniment rooms was made chronic by his kinship with many old families in the south of Scotland, the GRIERSONS of Lag amont them. It is particularly appropriate that the few original manuscripts by which the Naitonal Library remembers "the most callouse, the most cruel, the most malignant" of the persecutors -- as W. S. Crockett Whiggishly called the celebrated Lag -- should have been collected by Lag's Tory kinsman, C. K. SHARPE.
Hoddam House -
Of these MSS, one is half-Puckish, half-retrospective, in its irony. It is a £400 fire insurance policy of the London Sun Fire office Society taken out two years after Lag's death by MATTHEW SHARPE of Hoddam Castle "on his stone and slated house fronting the street over against the Fish Market in Dumfries." HODDAM HOUSE -- better known from its spiral stair as the Turnpike House -- was then still occupied by Lag's widow, (LADY) HENRIETTA GRIERSON, sister of the first Duke of Queensberry. To the plebein Whigs & the psychically susceptible, then & long after, the places was hardly less Satanic than the occuplt spiral-stairway house of the famous (Major) WEIR of Edinburgh. (Major) WEIR (a pushing Carluke man who became chief constable of Edinburgh in Charles the second's time) had been publically cremated alive for establishing diplomatic relations between Scotland and Hell. But the Erastian clemency of King William had suffered the Prince of Darkness's "trusty & well-beloved friend the Laird of Lag" to live out his earthly career--latterly in this house he rented from his Jacobite connection MATTHEW SHARPE. Here at the age of 77 he prematurely poisoned himself with the vast potations of physic noticed by C. K. SHARPE when he came along afterwards to sift the infernal evidence. Here his toxic distresses were interpreted by the credulous as his foretaste of eternal retribution. Here his chain of retainers handed up buckets of water from the Nith to cool his burning feet. And from here -- not from "Redgauntlet Castle" - he passed amid an amazing conjunction of portents to his appointed place.
SATANIC FUNERAL -
Before the house was demolished a century ago Sharpe satisfied that the wall between two of the narrow upper windows had evidence of the aperture through which the Laird was lowered to the hearse. Lag had deteriorated from the athletic Persecutor of half a century before. His funeral provided a complex problem of dynamics & mathematics. And, apart from deceased's corpulence, Satan had been noticed in attendance at the Turnpike House in the guise of a crow. Half-way to the hereditary place of interment at DUNSCORE the cortage was brought to a half -- "by the dead weight of the Deil & the Laird o' Lag" -- and by the added haz[z]ards of an 18th-century road in mid-winter. After a lengthy delay (Sir) THOMAS KIRKPATRICK of Closeburn, Lag's Nephew, & CHARLES KIRKPATRICK, Sharpe's grand-uncle, lost patience. Yoking his own team of strong young horses to the hearse, he galloped them non-stop to the kirkyard gate, where they are reported to have dropped dead at once. C. K. SHARPE confirmed the curious fact that all four [4] horses were dead within a few days of their feat. But as for the coach, which drove across Solway taht might and all the other signs attesting Lag's infernal status, SHARPE seems not even to have contemplated their inclusion in the demonology "omnibus" he more than once aspired to produce in conjunction with Mr. WALTER SCOTT, Advocate.
In truth it was almost with mixed feelings that SHARPE afterwards read the immortalisation of Lag in "REDGAUNTLET" Not a few Tory friends thought Scott a trifle too Miltonic in the only rehabilitation he achieved for (Sir) ROBERT [GRIERSON] -- in elevating him to the chairmanship of the Privy Council reunion in Hell detailed with such concentrated gusto by WANDERING WILLIE. The poetic license of Willie's Tale was plainer to SHARPE than most. But Scott's Laird in the classic of a decayed Persecutor, long before he knew Lag, the Nithsdale legends of Lag, "Lag's Elegy" -- that best-seller chapbook lament for his servant spoken by a Dumfries-shire dominie, and still circulating briskly in Mr. BRYCE of Glasgow's tenth printed edition in Scott's boyhood.
A SADISTIC RUFFIAN -
SHARPE, on whose pertinent bu unpublished defence of [JOHN GRAHAM of] CLAVERHOUSE - (Sheriff) Napier founded his own more immoderate work, attempted nothing of the sort for Lag. The Laird was too much of a ruffian. He would need an alienist to defend him. Urging that MARGARET WILSON & MARGARET LAUCHLAN of Solway fame were officially reprieved. NAPIER demanded any of its agents would dare to flout the Privy Council. Lag, brother-in-law of QUEENSBERRY, certainly would. Even if the reprieve had been unconditional, over-zeal was no crime in 1685 -- the hyear when Lag received his baronetcy in the pitiless JAMES'S CORONATION honour's list. The ingenious mode of killing the women in Solway water would interest the chief killer of "the Killing Times," the regional chief Justice of the Wigtown area, the chief thumbscrew loyalist of the courts of summary jurisdiction. It was Lag who denied moments for prayer to doomed Whigs, who was treacherous to captives, who insluted the expostulating (LORD) KENMURE by telling him to take BELL of Whiteside's unburied body and salt it in his lordship's larder. Sane but sadistic, Lag was as animal-like exponent of the 17th century's facilities for intolerance & Freudian gratification. To the Covenanting martyrologists he was something of a godsend. MacAulay's sweeping misrepresentation of CLAVERHOUSE derived vicariously -- through Wodrow -- in great part from the barbarity, the boisterous mockeries of religion truly attributed to Lag & his retinue.
Tolbooth after tolbooth hosted him at the Revolution, he suffered financially as well as politically, and was falsely indicted of coining. But on the whole his misfortunes signally incommensurate with his misdeeds. He lived for half a century in the Nithsdale of his exploits without much fear of assassination. Scotland, after a full-share of the tyrannical 17th century, had too many native tyrants subdued or quietly modernised. The worst of them lived on -- an ogre, a terror to little girls, a soul awaiting Satan -- but still (Sir) ROBERT GRIERSON, a Laird, and, above all, a Scotsman. "God speed ye!" he chuckled, when obliged to make one of his sons an apothecary at Carlisle. "Ye'll revenge the fecht (sp?) at Flowden!"
"SIR ROBERT REDGAUNTLET" , by G. F. Crosbie - Page 134
Grierson Origins & History - Page 133
Grierson Origins & History - Page 135
Send E-Mail to: griersonorigins@hotmail.com
Copyright © 2005 David Alan-MacGregor Grierson. All Rights Reserved