Sir John Clerk, 2nd Baronet

Sir John Clerk, 2nd Baronet ( – 4 October 1755) was a Scottish politician, lawyer, judge and composer. He was vice-president of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, the pre-eminent learned society of the Scottish Enlightenment. Clerk was also the father of George Clerk-Maxwell and John Clerk of Eldin, and the great-great-grandfather of the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Early life

John Clerk was son of Sir John Clerk, 1st Baronet by his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Henderson of Elvington. He had a legal education first at University of Glasgow and then at Leiden University. During 1697 and 1698 he went on a Grand Tour. In 1699 he composed a cantata entitled Leo Scotiae Irratus (The Scottish Lion Angered), with Latin lyrics by his Dutch friend Herman Boerhaave, to celebrate the establishment of the Scottish trading colony at Darien by the Company of Scotland. In 1700 was admitted to the Scottish Bar.

Between 1700 and 1730 he planted 300,000 trees on the grounds of the family estate at Penicuik House.

Parliament

He was a member of the Parliament of Scotland for Whithorn from 1702 to 1707, and a commissioner for the Union of Parliaments for the Whig Party: he sat in the first Parliament of Great Britain in 1707.

He was appointed a Baron of the Exchequer for Scotland on the constitution of the Exchequer Court, 13 May 1708, a position he held for nearly half a century. With Baron Scrope, in 1726, he drew up an Historical View of the Forms and Powers of the Court of Exchequer in Scotland, which was printed at the expense of the Barons of Exchequer for private circulation.

Antiquarian leanings

Of his other treatises, Clerk wrote papers in the Philosophical Transactions: one an Account of the Stylus of the Ancients and their different sorts of Paper, printed in 1731, and the others On the effects of Thunder on Trees and Of a large Deer's Horns found in the heart of an Oak, printed in 1739. He was the author of a tract entitled Dissertatio de quibusdam Monumentis Romanis &c, written in 1730 but not published until 1750. For upwards of twenty years he also carried on a learned correspondence with Roger Gale, the English antiquary, which forms a portion of the Reliquiae Britannica of 1782. but his own work has often been overlooked, primarily since the only record of his composition seems to be his own papers. One of his humorous songs was O merry may the maid be that marries the miller. He died at Penicuik House on 4 October 1755.