d and sealed in the
open fields, in the presence of the Bishop of Ross, and of her whole
tenantry, in order to show that these acts were produced by no unlawful
coercion on the part of her husband. The said honours and estates were
also to descend to any children born in that marriage. Some of her
kindred listened resentfully to the account of these proceedings of
Isabel of Mar.

The next heir to the Earldom, after the death of Isabel, was Janet,
grand-daughter of Gratney, eleventh Earl of Mar. This lady had married
Sir Thomas Erskine, the proprietor of the Barony of Erskine, on the
Clyde, the property of the family during many ages; and she expected, on
the death of the Countess of Mar, to succeed to the honours which had
descended to her by the female line. By a series of unjust and rapacious
acts on the part of the Crown, not only did Robert, Lord Erskine, her
son, fail in securing his rights, but her descendants had the vexation
of seeing their just honours and rights revert to the King, James the
Third, who bestowed them first upon his brother, the accomplished and
unfortunate John Earl of Mar, who was bled to death in one of the houses
of the Canongate, in Edinburgh; and afterwards, upon Cochrane, the
favourite of James the Third. The Earldom of Mar was then conferred on
Alexander Stewart, the third son of King James; and after his death,
upon James Stewart, Prior of St. Andrews, who had a charter from his
sister, Queen Mary, entitling him to enjoy the long contested honour.
But he soon relinquished the title, to assume that of Moray, which had
also been bestowed upon him by the Queen: and in 1565 Mary repaired the
injustice committed by her predecessors, and restored John Lord Erskine
to the Earldom of Mar.

The house of Erskine, on whom these honours now descended, has the same
traditional origin as that of most of the other Scottish families of
note. In the days of Malcolm the Second, a Scottish man having killed
with his own hand Enrique, a Danish general, presented the head of the
enemy to his Sovereign, and, holding in his hand the bloody dagger with
which the deed had been performed, exclaimed, in Gaelic, "Eris Skyne,"
alluding to the head and the dagger; upon which the surname of Erskine
was imposed on him. The armorial bearing of a hand holding a dagger, was
added as a further distinction, together with the motto, _Je pense
plus_, in allusion to the declaration of the chieftain that he intended
to perfo