Robert Graham

Who is Robert Graham?

Robert Graham or Grimes, was a Scottish colonel in the English Army and later a Trappist monk.

Graham was the son of a certain 'Colonel' William Grimes. He is described in the contemporary letters of Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, as a Lieutenant in the cavalry under John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee, who was afterwards commander on Bass Rock, later a recipient of Jacobite bounty in Edinburgh, and an alleged conspirator against the life of King William III of England. He had two sons, both notorious libertines who turned monks, the elder becoming a Capuchin friar as Brother Archangel, the younger a Trappist, Brother Alexis.

The life of the younger was a stormy one. Graham had been whipped in his boyhood by a Presbyterian tutor for attending a Catholic service in Edinburgh, which led to his being transferred to the guardianship of a kinsman, the Earl of Perth; but when that nobleman's affairs became involved he passed into the hands of a Presbyterian uncle, whose harsh asceticism no doubt influenced his later life. His name cannot be traced with certainty in the military entry books in the Public Record Office, but he appears to have served in Flanders under King William.