Sir John Clerk, 2nd Baronet

Sir John Clerk, Baronet
John Clerk of Pennycuik, 2nd Baronet by William Aikman, (circa 1725)
Member of Parliament for Scotland
In office 1 May 1707 – 3 April 1708 Serving with numerous others
Commissioner for Whithorn
In office 1702–1707
Personal details
Born	1676
Died	4 October 1755 (aged 79) Penicuik House, Midlothian
Political party	Whigs
Children	George Clerk Maxwell John Clerk of Eldin
Parents	Sir John Clerk, 1st Baronet Elizabeth Henderson
Alma mater	University of Glasgow Leiden University
Profession	Judge, Lawyer, Politician

Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd Baronet (1676–1755) 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.

He was the father of George Clerk Maxwell and John Clerk of Eldin, both of them friends of James Hutton and the great-great-grandfather of the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

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 and in 1700 was admitted to the Scottish Bar.

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. A leading supporter of the Act of Union 1707 with the Kingdom of England, Clerk wrote in his memoirs of English novelist, journalist and secret agent Daniel Defoe that it was not known at the time that Defoe had been sent by Godolphin : "... to give a faithful account to him from time to time how everything past here. He was therefor a spy among us, but not known to be such, otherways the of Edin. had pull him to pieces".