the oaths of loyalty to the monarch; he also gained a reputation, at least among subsequent martyrologists, of having a particularly contemptuous attitude towards those before the courts, and of invariably denying his victims' requests for a prayer before punishment. Most traditions make Grierson the presiding officer at the court that condemned the "Wigtown Martyrs", Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLachlan, in May 1685. A Cloud of Witnesses, the principal martyrology of the time, charged him with command of the troop of dragoons that shot John Bell of Whiteside along with four others in Tongland Parish in February 1685, and David Halliday and George Short in Twynholm later in the year. In 1685, after the accession of King James II and VII, Grierson was created a Baronet, of Lag, in the Baronetage of Nova Scotia, and awarded a pension. Subsequent to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, Lag was arrested in May 1689 as a supporter of the old Stuart regime. Although he obtained his release on a substantial bail, and continued to receive his pension from William III, he remained under suspicion as a potential Jacobite rebel and was imprisoned again several times during the 1690s. In 1696 he was charged with being involved with the coining of false money at his mansion, Rockhall Tower, but it was eventually discovered that the house was merely being used for experiments in stamping linen with decorative patterns. For much of the remainder of his life Lag's fortunes were seriously impacted by fines, and he took no further part in the politics of the period. He continued to serve as a Justice of the peace and permitted his sons to become involved in the 1715 Jacobite Rising. However, the family's status never came under real threat as their connections with the influential Duke of Queensberry, both by blood and by marriage, probably served to protect them to some extent. Although Lag lived on unmolested in semi-retirement he remained feared and reviled by Covenanters: the writer Patrick Walker (c.1666-1745) in his Remarkable Passages of the Life and Death of Mr. Alexander Peden, described him as "a great persecutor, a great swearer, a great whorer, blasphemer, drunkard, liar and cheat, and yet out of hell". In 1713 Lag handed over his estates to his eldest son, William, in return for a life rent. The two subsequently fell out over Lag's request to sell some of the property,