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 and clever, whom Keith carefully educated and made his mistress; he had several children by her.

In August 1744 he returned from a nine months' embassy at Stockholm, and was loaded by the new empress, Elizabeth, with gifts and honours. But the jealousy of the Russians towards foreigners and the personal animosity of Bestucheff, the vice-chancellor, made his position a hazardous one; and little by little he was stripped of all his commands, till in 1747 he found himself left with only a couple of militia regiments. At the instigation, moreover, of Lord Hyndford, the British ambassador, his brother had as a Jacobite been refused permission to visit him at Riga; and, fearing Siberia for himself, Keith at last stole away from the empire.

He had not long to wait or far to go before he found a new master who could recognise his worth. On 18 Sept. 1747—not a month from his leaving St. Petersburg—Frederick the Great created him a Prussian field-marshal, and two years later governor of Berlin, with 1,600l. a year. From the first Marshal ‘Keit’—as Germans pronounce his name—became Frederick's right hand, and in the seven years' war, which broke out in August 1756, he was so closely associated with the king that a full record of his movements would involve a detailed account of the campaign. The victory of Lobositz, the seven weeks' unsuccessful operations before Prague, Keith's two days' defence of Leipzig with four thousand men against twice that number of Austrians, the victory of Rossbach, and Keith's fruitless siege of Olmütz, led up to the disaster of Hochkirch on 14 Oct. 1758. There, at five in the misty morning, the weak Prussian right wing under Keith was surprised—as Keith had warned Frederick it would be surprised—by overwhelming masses of Austrians. Thrice he tried to retrieve the position and twice he was wounded, the second time mortally. His naked corpse, wrapped only in a Croat's mantle, was recognised by the son of his old comrade, Lascy, and was honourably buried by the Austrian commander, Daun, in the village church of Hochkirch, whence Frederick translated it three months later to the Garrison Church at Berlin. A marble statue of him, erected by Frederick in 1786 in the Wilhelmsplatz, was removed in 1857 to the Cadets' Academy, its place being taken by a bronze reproduction, a replica of which was given by King William in 1868 to Peterhead. The monument raised to him in 1776 in Hochkirch Church by his kinsman, Sir Robert Murray Keith [q. v.], bears a Latin epitaph by Ernesti (not Metastasie). In 1889 the 1st Upper Silesian regiment was renamed in his honour the Keith regiment. Two portraits exist of him.

Keith died poor. ‘My brother,’ the Earl Marischal wrote to Madame Geoffrin, ‘has left me a fine heritage. He had just levied contributions on all Bohemia at the head of a great army, and I have found only twenty ducats in his purse.’ As a matter of fact, Keith bequeathed all he had to his mistress, who afterwards married and survived him fifty-three years. It is impossible to determine whether his German biographers are right in ascribing his poverty to a splendid unselfishness, or whether there is anything in the statement of the old ‘Statistical Account’ that he ‘was a very bad economist, and sometimes absented himself from court when he could not pay his debts.’ But as a soldier he was beyond question by far the greatest of all ‘Scots abroad;’ and he may be fitly remembered as the inventor of Kriegspiel, or rather of its precursor, Kriegsschachspiel.

[A fragment of a memoir of Field-marshal James Keith, written by himself, 1714–34, Berlin, 1789; reprint from original manuscript, Spalding Club, Edinburgh, 1843; A Succinct Account of the Person, the Way of Living and of the Court of the King of Prussia, translated from a curious manuscript in French found in the cabinet of the late Field-marshal Keith, London, 4to, 1759—a very interesting but little-known pamphlet of twenty-one pages; Life in German, by K. A. Varnhagen von Ense (Biographische Denkmale, 1844; 3rd ed. Leipzig, 1888); another shorter Life in German by Lieutenant von Paczynski-Tenczyn (Berlin, 1889, portrait); Sir J. Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland, 1795, xv. 152; Peter Buchan's Historical Account of the Family of Keith (Peterhead, 1820), with a translation of the French éloge pronounced on Keith at Berlin by M. Formey; Carlyle's Frederick II; Memoir of Marshal Keith, with a Sketch of the Keith Family, by a Peterheadian (Peterhead, 1869); William Boyd's Old Inverugie (Peterhead, 1885); The Jacobite Rising of 1719, edited by John Russell for the Scottish History Society, 1892.] 

KEITH, JOHN, first  (d. 1714), was the fourth son of William, sixth earl Marischal [q. v.] In 1650 Dunnottar Castle, then possessed by his brother William, seventh earl Marischal [q. v.], was selected by the Scottish estates, as a specially secure place, for the preservation of the regalia of Scotland from Cromwell's troops. The castle was soon afterwards besieged, but the wife of James Grainger, minister of Kinneff, obtained leave on some pretence to visit Mrs. Ogilvie, wife of the governor, and carried the regalia to Kinneff, where her husband con-