younger sons by Lady Mary Stewart.’ In 1606 he returned to Scotland to assist at the trial of John Welsh and five other ministers on a charge of treason. He was appointed a member of the court of high commission, erected in 1610 for the trial of ecclesiastical offences (Calderwood, vii. 58). On the fall of the Earl of Somerset, Mar was in December 1616 appointed lord high treasurer of Scotland, an office which he held till 1630. He died in his own house at Stirling 14 Dec. 1634, and was buried at Alloa 7 April 1635. Mar devoted himself as far as possible to recover the heritage of his family, under the warrant to his father, 5 May 1565. A narrative of the various lawsuits connected therewith, especially the great process for the recovery of Kildrummie from the Elphinstones, 1624–6, is given in Crawford's ‘Earldom of Mar.’ He was twice married: first to Anna, second daughter of David, second lord Drummond, by whom he had a son John, who succeeded him in the earldom; and secondly to Lady Mary Stewart, second daughter of Esme, duke of Lennox, by whom he had five sons and four daughters. The eldest of these sons, Sir James Erskine, married Mary Douglas, countess of Buchan in her own right, and was created Earl of Buchan [see Erskine, James, sixth Earl of Buchan]. The second, Henry, received from his father the barony of Cardross, and was known as the first Lord Cardross. The third, Colonel the Hon. Sir Alexander Erskine, the hero of the old Scotch ballad ‘Baloo, my boy,’ was blown up at Dunglas House, East Lothian, in 1640. The fourth, Hon. Sir Charles Erskine, was the ancestor of the Erskines of Alva, now represented by the Earls of Rosslyn. The youngest, William Erskine (d. 1685) [q. v.], became cupbearer to Charles II and master of the Charterhouse, London. All the four daughters were married to earls, viz. Mary, to William, earl Marischal, and again to Patrick, earl of Panmure; Anne, to John, earl of Rothes; Martha, to John, earl of Kinghorn; and Catherine, to Thomas, earl of Haddington, who was blown up at Dunglas House along with her brother Alexander. This Earl of Mar built the castle of Braemar in 1628 (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. 618).
[Register of the Privy Council of Scotland; State Papers, Reign of Elizabeth and James I; Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland; Moysie's Memoirs (Bannatyne Club); Historie of James Sext (ib.); Gray Papers (ib.); Sir James Melville's Memoirs (ib.); Letters and State Papers during Reign of James VI (Abbotsford Club); Miscellaneous Papers relating to Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Maitland Club); Bowes's Correspondence (Surtees Society); Cecil Correspondence (Camd. Society); Nichols's Progresses of James I; Birch's Life of Prince Henry; Secret History of James I; Spotiswood's History of the Kirk of Scotland; Douglas's Scottish Peerage (Wood), ii. 213–14; Craufurd's Officers of State, pp. 402–4; the Earl of Crawford's Earldom of Mar in Sunshine and Shade (1882); the histories of Tytler, Hill Burton, and Froude.]
ERSKINE, JOHN, sixth or eleventh Earl of Mar of the Erskine line (1675–1732), leader of the rebellion of 1715 in behalf of the Pretender, eldest son of Charles, tenth earl of Mar, by his wife, Lady Mary Maule, daughter of the Earl of Panmure, was born at Alloa in February 1675. On account of the fines and sequestrations to which his grandfather had been subjected the eleventh Earl of Mar, on succeeding his father in 1689, found, in the words of the Master of Sinclair, that he had been left heir to ‘more debt than estate’ (Memoirs, 59), and according to the same authority his endowments from his mother were of an equally questionable sort, the most noteworthy being the ‘hump he has got on his back, and his dissolute, malicious, meddling spirit’ (ib.) It was almost in the character of a needy suppliant that he joined himself to the Duke of Queensberry and the court party, whose goodwill he deemed it advisable to secure, in view of his questionable proceedings towards his creditors. He took his oaths and seat on 8 Sept. 1696, and on 1 April following was sworn a privy councillor. Subsequently he held the command of the 9th regiment of foot (1702–6), and was invested with the order of the Thistle. He remained a devoted adherent of the court party till the fall of the Duke of Queensberry in 1704, after which he joined in opposing the tactics of the squadrone party, of which the Marquis of Tweeddale was the head, doing so, according to Lockhart, ‘with so much art and dissimulation that he gained the favour of all the tories, and was by many of them esteemed an honest man, and well inclined to the royal family’ (Papers, i. 114). With the return of the Duke of Queensberry to power in 1705 the tactics of Mar again underwent a change, and determining at least to postpone any purposes he might have cherished of advancing the cause of the Stuarts, he became, as before, one of the most exemplary supporters of the court party. Of his willingness to promote the policy of Queensberry he gave a sufficient pledge by undertaking to bring forward the motion for an act for the treaty of a union between Scotland and England in the parliament of this year, and he was constituted one of the commissioners for that purpose. In reward for such important services he was, after the prorogation of
