1. William, Earl of Glenallan, otherwise Lord Glenallan, is a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, a Scottish aristocrat whose life has been ruined by the suicide of his wife and the belief that he has unwittingly committed incest.
Lord Glenallan first makes a brief appearance in the novel as the chief mourner at the midnight funeral procession of his mother, the Countess of Glenallan, near the north-eastern Scottish town of Fairport.
Lord Glenallan tells the earl that Elspeth wishes to confide to him something of great importance that hangs on her conscience.
Lord Glenallan responds to the summons by visiting the Mucklebackit cottage, and there finds the whole family in mourning for Elspeth's drowned grandson, young Steenie Mucklebackit who has been buried that day.
Lord Glenallan reminds Glenallan of the arrival in his life many years ago of Eveline Neville, the young woman with whom he fell in love, and tells him that his mother opposed their marriage because the birth of any son to them would deprive her of her legal rights to the Glenallans' house and estate.
Lord Glenallan hoped to prevent such a match by telling him falsely that Eveline was his own half-sister, and not the cousin she claimed to be, but she was unaware that the two lovers had some months before married secretly.
Oldbuck leaves the house to avoid the unpleasant memories his rival evokes, but Lord Glenallan persuades Oldbuck to listen to his story.
Lord Glenallan invites him to Monkbarns, the Oldbuck family home, and the uproarious household there show the gloomy earl its best hospitality, though Glenallan follows his usual practice of eating with penitential sparingness.
Lord Glenallan raises a body of troops from his vast Lowland and Highland estates and leads them in person to Fairport, where he meets a cavalry officer called Major Neville, who has been sent with the news that the invasion is a false alarm.
Lord Glenallan has already privately learned that Neville is his younger brother's foster-son, and on meeting him he is immediately struck by the man's resemblance to Eveline and recognizes him as his own long-lost son.
Lord Glenallan is almost the only representative in the novel of the old feudal Scotland, now in the last stages of decline.
Lord Glenallan's character is dominated by his sense of loss over the disappearance of his son, and by the all-consuming Catholic guilt he feels over his supposedly incestuous marriage, which leads him to a life of despondent penitence and which he has come to self-destructively embrace.