Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/433

 parliament, appointed secretary of state for Scotland, in the room of the Marquis of Annandale, who had manifested a decided lukewarmness towards the proposal. As this office was abolished when effect was given to the act of union, Mar was then appointed keeper of the signet, a pension being also assigned him. He was chosen, 13 Feb. 1707, one of the sixteen representative peers of Scotland, and was re-elected in 1708, 1710, and 1713. In 1708 he was also named a privy councillor. Notwithstanding his efforts in bringing about the union, he, from motives not it is probable entirely patriotic, spoke strongly in favour of the motion of Lord Findlater in 1713 for its repeal. The fact that in 1713 he married as his second wife Lady Frances Pierrepoint, second daughter of the Duke of Kingston, and sister of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, has been regarded as an evidence of his desire to strengthen his position with the whigs; but as on 13 Sept. of this year he accepted the office of secretary of state under the tories, his marriage cannot be taken as indicating more than that he was ready to go over to the whigs should it again fall to their lot to be in power. It cannot be doubted that with the tories he looked forward to the death of Anne as affording an opportunity for the reinstatement of the exiled dynasty; but these designs being baffled by the prompt action of Argyll and Somerset, Mar gracefully bowed to the inevitable, and resolved to place himself as entirely at the service of King George as if no thoughts of another successor to the throne had ever crossed his mind. He wrote a letter to the king, dated 30 Aug., in which, after recounting the services rendered not only by himself to the protestant succession, but by his ancestors to the ancestors of King George ‘for a great tract of years,’ he added, ‘your majesty shall ever find me as faithful and dutiful a subject and servant as ever any of my family have been to the crown, or as I have been to my late mistress the queen’ (Letter, printed with Some Remarks on my Lord's subsequent conduct, by Richard Steele, 1715, and frequently reprinted). In addition to sending to the king this vauntingly loyal offer of his services Mar made it known that he had received a document signed by a large number of the most powerful highland chiefs, in which they desired him to assure the government of ‘their loyalty to his sacred majesty King George.’ Lockhart of Carnwath, who had abundant opportunities of knowing Mar, states that his ‘great talent lay in the cunning management of his designs and projects, in which it was hard to find him out when he desired to be incognito; and thus he showed himself to be a man of good sense but bad morals’ (Papers, i. 114). He was dismissed from office on 24 Sept., but he played the part of the fawning courtier to the very last, and attended a levee at court the evening before his departure to Scotland to place himself at the head of the movement in behalf of the chevalier. After leaving the court on the evening of 1 Aug. he changed his dress, and in the character of a common workman went on board a ship at Gravesend belonging to John Spence, a Leith skipper, and after a passage of about five days landed at Elie in Fife (Deposition of the Earl of Mar's valet, in Original Letters, p. 17). The Master of Sinclair states that he had information of the earl's landing the day afterwards from the Master of Grange (Memoirs, 19). From Elie Mar went to the house of Bethune of Balfour, near Markinch (ib.), where a meeting was held of the friends of the cause. On 17 Aug. he passed the Tay with forty horse, and, on his journey northwards to his fortalice at Kildrummy in the Braes of Mar, issued an invitation to those noblemen and chiefs on whom he could rely to attend a meeting on the 27th at Aboyne, ostensibly for the sport of hunting the deer in accordance with a custom ‘among the lords and chiefs of families in the highlands’. Those who responded to the invitation numbered about eight hundred, representing, with the exception of Argyll, the most influential nobles of the highlands, as well as several lowland nobles and gentlemen. The meeting was addressed by Mar in a speech the cleverness of which is sufficiently attested by its entire success. He frankly confessed that he had committed a great blunder in supporting the union, but stated that his eyes were now open to the fact that by it their ‘ancient liberties were delivered up into the hands of the English, whose power to enslave them further was too great, and their design to do it daily visible’. By the warlike clans his proposal was received with acclamation, and, after a more private meeting held on 3 Sept., arrangements were completed for putting the design into immediate execution. Having set up the standard of the chevalier on 6 Sept. at Braemar, on a rocky eminence overlooking the Cluny, and proclaimed James VIII king of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, Mar began his march southwards. On the 9th he issued a declaration, in which he announced that the chevalier had ‘been pleased to instruct me with the direction of his affairs and the command of the forces in this his ancient kingdom of Scotland’ (Collection of Original Letters, p. 15). Accompanied by some neigh-