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Rh the end, married in 1863 the Honourable Robert Bourke, now Lord Connemara, brother of a later Viceroy of India, the Earl of Mayo.

The year after his marriage, Lord Ramsay was returned to Parliament in 1837 for Haddingtonshire, a county in which his mother's influence, as heiress of Colstoun, was great. In 1838, however, he succeeded, on his father's death, to the Earldom, and his career in the House of Commons came to a close. A young conservative peer had, at that political juncture, but little chance of distinction in the House of Lords. So the new Earl of Dalhousie threw himself with characteristic vigour into what local work offered itself to his hand. He represented the Presbytery of Dalkeith, within which lay his own parish of Cockpen, as an elder at the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland in 1839.

The great questions which split up the Church of Scotland four years later were already stirring men's minds. Lord Dalhousie, as an enlightened conservative of the disinterested type, sympathised in several important points with the reformers, and is said to have voted with them on what was then regarded as the crux of lay patronage. But while favouring enquiry and redress of grievances, he resolutely refused to be led into a line of wholesale innovation which he foresaw must end in separation, and which as a matter of fact did end, in 1843, in the Disruption of the' Scottish Church.