Lady
Livingstone only when it was too late to withhold her approval.

The marriage was not, it was said by those who were disposed to
scandalize the Earl of Kilmarnock, productive of happiness. The young
Countess was possessed, indeed, of beauty, wit, and good sense: but her
husband, if we may accredit the memoirs of his life, gave her much cause
to complain of his conduct. They lived, however, as the same doubtful
authority states, "if not happily, at least civilly together." Such is
the statement of a contemporary writer; it must, however, be adopted
with just as much allowance as we give to similar reports raised by
party writers in the present day: and it will be shown[324] not to
accord with the dying declarations of Lord Kilmarnock. "I leave behind,"
he wrote to his agent, "in Lady Kilmarnock, what is dearest to me."[325]
Subsequently to his marriage, Lord Kilmarnock's necessities and the
additional burden of a family induced him to apply to the English
Government for a pension, founded, as it is probable, on his father's
services to Government in 1715. But this statement, and the conditions
upon which the bounty was given are left in obscurity. "Whether," says
the anonymous biographer of Lord Kilmarnock, "my Lord Kilmarnock's
pension was a ministerial bribe, or a royal bounty, is a question I
cannot determine with any certainty; but I have reason to suspect the
former, since few pensions, granted by a certain administration, that of
Sir Robert Walpole, deserved the latter." The same writer truly
observes, that little or no dependance is to be placed on that loyalty
which wants the support of bribes and pensions. "The practice," he adds,
"is too general, and a defection of this kind of men may be fatal to
the state."[326] The pension, as it appears from Horace Walpole's
letters, was taken from Lord Kilmarnock by Lord Wilmington. "Lord
Kilmarnock," he writes to Sir Horace Mann, "is a Presbyterian, with four
earldoms in view, but so poor since Lord Wilmington's stopping a pension
that my father had given him, that he often wanted a dinner."[327]

In the last days of his existence the Earl, indeed, acknowledged that
the state of his affairs was, in part, the reason of his defection from
Government. He attributed it, (though, it must be stated, under the
pressing arguments of a minister of religion who considered what he
termed "rebellion" as the most heinous sin,) to the great and pressing
difficulties into which h