to the other
side. His abilities, if we judge of the high appointments which he held,
must have been eminent; but he was devoid of all principle, and was
capable, if the melancholy and extraordinary history of his unhappy
wife be true, of the darkest schemes.

It would be difficult to reconcile, in any other man, the discrepancy of
Lord Grange's real opinions and of his subsequent efforts to restore the
House of Stuart; but, in a brother of the Earl of Mar, the difficulty
ceases, and all hopes of consistency, or rather of its origin,
sincerity, vanish. Lord Grange is declared to have been a "true blue
republican, and, if he had any religion, at bottom a Presbyterian;" yet
he was deeply involved in transactions with the Chevalier and his
friends.[60]

Lord Grange was united to a lady violent in temper, of a dauntless
spirit, and a determined Hanoverian. Their marriage had been enforced by
the laws of honour, and was ill-omened from the first; therefore, where
respect has ceased, affection soon languishes and expires. The daughter
of Cheisly of Dalry, a man of uncontrolled passions, who shot Sir George
Lockhart, one of the Lords of Session, for having decided a law-suit
against him, Mrs. Erskine of Grange, commonly called Lady Grange,
inherited the determined will of her father. It was said that she had
compelled Lord Grange to do her justice by marrying her, and "had
desired him to remember, by way of threat, that she was Cheisly's
daughter." For this menace she suffered in a way which could only be
effected in a country like Scotland at that period, and among a people
held in the thraldom of the clans. Her singular history belongs to a
later period in the annals of those events in which so much domestic
happiness was blasted, never to be recovered.[61]

With his brother, Lord Mar was in constant correspondence, during his
own residence in London; and although Lord Grange was skilful enough to
conceal his machinations, and to retain his seat on the bench as a
Scottish judge, there is very little reason to doubt his secret
co-operation in the subsequent movements of the Earl.

Acting as if "he thought that all things were governed by fate or
fortune,"[62] George the First remained a long time to settle his own
affairs in Hanover, before coming to England. This delay was employed by
the Earl of Mar, in an endeavour to extenuate the tenor of his political
conduct of late years in the eyes of the Sovereign, and in placi