Robert Graham (1735 – 11 December 1797), who took the name Bontine in 1770 and Cunninghame Graham in 1796, was a Scottish politician and poet. He is now remembered for a poem If doughty deeds my lady please, which was later set to music by his great-great-grandson, Rev. Malise Cunninghame Graham and also by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Early life Robert, the second son of Nicol Graham of Gartmore and Lady Margaret Cunningham, was born at Gartmore, Perthshire, and educated, along with his elder brother William, at the University of Glasgow (matriculating under Professor Andrew Rosse). He spent much of his early life in Jamaica, where he was a planter, slave-owner and merchant, and became Receiver-General for Taxes in 1753 and profited from his involvement in sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Slave holder in Jamaica Graham writes in his letters of numerous liaisons with enslaved women and this infers he is likely to have fathered children by them. As a wealthy businessman, Cunninghame acquired enslaved people as domestic servants, oversaw large groups of enslaved plantation workers and later sold the enslaved people he 'owned' when he and Anne Taylor returned to Scotland. In 1752, Graham left Britain for the Colony of Jamaica, where he was a slave-owner, landowner and planter, politician, and public servant until 1770. By 1753, aged 18, he was the receiver-general of taxes. Graham represented the parish of St David in the Assembly of Jamaica (1765–67). By 1770, he left Jamaica for Britain and became laird of Ardoch in Dunbartonshire. He had succeeded to the estate, (entailed upon him in 1757), on the death of his second cousin William Bontine in the late 1760s. Family and marriage While in Jamaica, Graham married Anne Taylor, sister of Sir John Taylor Baronet of Lyssons Hall, in 1764 (as recorded in the Cunninghame Graham Family Bible) and Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica's wealthiest merchants and plantation-owners. He built the current Ardoch House (near Dumbarton) in colonial style for Anne. Anne died in December 1780, leaving two daughters and two sons. He secondly married Elizabeth Buchanan circa 1783, by whom he had a further son and daughter; they separated in 1787 and divorced in 1789. Property He changed name twice; firstly, under the terms of an entail by which he inherited the Ardoch estate from William Bontine, he took the surname Bontine until his father died. Secondly, in line with the 1709