Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/330

 ,’ by his friend Principal George Campbell [q. v.], with a memoir (1800), and published several single sermons and addresses. In 1797 he was engaged in arranging and composing a ‘System of Political Philosophy,’ which was never completed.

 KEITH, JAMES FRANCIS EDWARD (1696–1758), called commonly, was born near Peterhead, at the castle of Inverugie, on 11 June 1696. He was the second son and fourth and youngest child of William, the ninth earl Marischal (d. 1712), an episcopalian; his mother, Lady Maria Drummond (d. 1729), daughter of the Earl of Perth, was a catholic, author of the Jacobite song, ‘Lady Keith's Lament.’ With his elder brother, George, the tenth earl Marischal (1693?–1778) [q. v.], he was carefully educated, first, from 1703 till 1710, under his young kinsman, Robert Keith [q. v.], bishop of Fife, and then, for about four years, under William Meston, the Jacobite poet, on whose appointment to the chair of philosophy at Marischal College James seems to have followed him to Aberdeen. He next studied law at Edinburgh; but his heart was set upon soldiering, and in 1715 he was on his way to London to ask a commission, when at York he was met by his brother, who meanwhile had served under Marlborough, and who was hurrying back to take part in Mar's insurrection. At the cross of Aberdeen, on 20 Sept., the brothers proclaimed James VIII, and they served together through the rebellion, fighting bravely in the right wing at Sheriffmuir, welcoming the chevalier to their Kincardineshire seat, Fetteresso, and in May 1716 escaping from the west coast of Scotland to Brittany.

James resumed his interrupted studies at Paris, made rapid progress in mathematics in a class conducted by Maupertuis, and became a member of the Académie des Sciences. During this same period he vainly offered his sword to both Sweden and Russia, and fell deeply in love. His stay in Paris terminated in 1719, when he engaged in Alberoni's expedition to the west highlands, commanded by his brother and the Marquis of Tullibardine. It ended with the ‘battle’ of Glenshiel (10 June) and the surrender next morning of the 274 Spanish auxiliaries; and, after three months' more hiding, Keith followed his brother from Peterhead to Holland. He was a colonel for nine years in the Spanish service, and in 1726–7 took part in the siege of Gibraltar, which at first was so negligently defended that his scheme for surprising it might have very likely succeeded. But his episcopalian creed barred all chance of promotion, and in 1728 he entered the service of Russia as a major-general.

Confining himself to his military duties and keeping clear of court intrigues, in 1730 he was appointed lieutenant-colonel of the bodyguard of the Empress Anna (‘an emploiement looked on as one of the greatest trust in the empire’), and in 1732 army inspector on the Volga and Don. In the war of the Polish succession (1733–5) he occupied Volhynia, and then, as second in command to Lascy, pushed forward to the Rhine against the French, till a truce arrested the advance of the Russians. Next, in the war with Turkey, he earned promotion to general of infantry, and got a bullet in the knee at the storming of Otchakoff (July 1737). ‘I had sooner,’ said the empress, ‘lose ten thousand of my best soldiers than Keith;’ but the wound took a bad turn and amputation was pronounced necessary. The Earl Marischal, however, who had hastened from Valencia to Keith's assistance, insisted on carrying him off to Paris, and on their way through Berlin the brothers visited Frederick William I and the Crown Prince Frederick. In Paris (1739) some fragments of cloth were successfully extracted from the wound, and from Paris the brothers paid a three months' visit (February–May 1740) to London, where, though he still was a Jacobite, Keith had more than one audience with George II. On his return to Russia he was made governor of the Ukraine, and a single year of his wise and humane administration made the natives complain that they should either never have appointed him, or, having once done so, never have recalled him. His recall was due to the outbreak of the war with Sweden (1741–1743), in which Keith bore a leading part in the capture of Willmannstrand, in forcing seventeen thousand Swedes to surrender at Helsingfors, and in the reduction of the Åland islands. Among the Swedish prisoners was an orphan, Eva Merthens, pretty