Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/419

  the title of Earl of Buchan. This title was confirmed to him by a royal charter, dated 22 March 1617, the countess resigning her rights in his favour, and he was allowed the possession and exercise of all honours, dignities, and precedence of former earls of Buchan. A decree of the court of sessions, 25 July 1628, restored to Buchan and his wife the precedency over the earls of Eglinton, Montrose, Cassilis, Caithness, and Glencairn, which had been claimed by them, and granted by a former decree in 1606. On the accession of Charles I, Buchan became one of the lords of the bedchamber. He lived chiefly in London, where he died in 1640. He was buried at Auchterhouse, Forfarshire. His wife died before him in 1628. They left six children, two sons, James, who succeeded to the title, and John, and four daughters.

[Douglas and Wood's Peerage of Scotland.]  ERSKINE, JAMES, (1679–1754), judge, second son of Charles, tenth earl of Mar, by Lady Mary Maule, eldest daughter of George, second earl of Panmure, was born in 1679. He was educated for the law, and became a member of the Faculty of Advocates on 28 July 1705. His advancement was very rapid. On 18 Oct. 1706 he was appointed to the bench in succession to Sir Archibald Hope of Rankeillor, and took his seat 18 March 1707. On 6 June of the same year he succeeded Lord Crocerig as a lord of justiciary, and on 27 July 1710 became, with the title of Lord Grange, lord justice clerk, in place of Lord Ormistone. ‘This is a fruit,’ says Wodrow, ‘of Mar's voting for Dr. Sacheverell’ (see too Carstares State Papers, 787). Though professing rigid piety and strict presbyterian principles and loyalty to the Hanoverian succession, he kept up a connection, as close as it was obscure, with the opposite party, and especially with his brother the Earl of Mar, and was employed by him to draw up the address from the highland chiefs to George I, which was presented to the king on his landing, and was rejected by him. In the rebellion of 1715, however, Grange took no part. He was held in high favour by the stricter presbyterians, took an active share in the affairs of the general assembly, and is said to have found a peculiar pleasure in undertaking any act of rigour or inquisition in church government which required to be performed. He was in particular staunch in the assertion of the utmost freedom of ministers and presbyteries from the control either of lay patrons or the government. Thus in 1713 he urged the lord treasurer not to prosecute recusants who refused to observe the thanksgiving, and when the question of presentations arose in the East Calder case, he advised the ministers to evade the Patronage Act, by agreeing among themselves ‘to discourage and bear down all persons who accepted presentations,’ so as to cause the presentation to pass by lapse of time from the patron to the presbytery. In 1731 he pushed his opposition against heritors, as heritors, being electors of a minister, ‘and to lodge all in the hands of the christian people and communicants’ so far as to be accused of causing schism in the church. His piety manifested itself in various ways. He was intimate with and much esteemed by Wodrow, who reckons him ‘among the greatest men in this time, and would fain hope the calumnies cast on him are very groundless.’ At one time he propounds for discussion, and to pass the time, the question ‘wherein the spirits proper work upon the soul did lye;’ at another he laments Lord Townsend's withdrawal from public life, ‘for he was the only one at court that had any real concern about the interests of religion;’ and his causal talk with a barber's lad who was shaving him so moved the boy that it led to his conversion. And yet this pious judge did not escape the abuse of his contemporaries as a jesuit and a Jacobite, a profligate and a pretender to religion, and is thus characterised by the historian of his country.

His treatment of his wife throws some light on his character. She was Rachel Chiesly, a daughter of that Chiesly of Dalry who murdered the lord president of the court of session in the streets of Edinburgh in 1689 (see Archæologia Scotica, iv. 15). Grange had first debauched her and married her under compulsion. Proud, violent, and jealous like her family, she was also a drunkard, and at times an imbecile. Grange was constantly absent from her in England; she suspected him, probably not without cause, of infidelity, and set spies about him. Her conduct was an open scandal, and Grange was much pitied by his friends. The story on their side is that she accused him of treason, stole his letters to support the baseless charge, attempted his life, separated from him, and forced a maintenance from him under pressure of legal process. Her misconduct lasted at least from 1730 to 1732, and Grange had other family troubles. His sister-in-law, Lady Mar, was also, it appeared, at times insane, and he endeavoured in April 1731, under some form of law, to carry her off from England to Scotland ‘for the advantage of her family,’ but was thwarted by her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with a warrant from the king's bench. Lady Mar remained in Lady Mary's custody for some