The immediate successor of the first baronet led a quiet life, and died in his bed. His grandson was more ambitious. He made some figure in Parliament, and was in 1682 created Viscount Preston in the peerage of Scotland. This did not oblige him to retire from the English House of Commons, in which he sat as Knight of the Shire for Cumberland; and he ultimately, after serving as ambassador in Paris, took office as Secretary of State under James II. Lord Preston would never stoop to pay court to William III. He even accepted from James, after his expulsion from the throne, a patent of English nobility, which he pleaded in bar of trial before a common jury, when charged with conspiring to bring back the exiled family. The House of Lords, however, would not acknowledge the patent, and the evidence against Lord Preston proved too strong to be rebutted. He was found guilty, and sentence of death was passed upon him, with attainder of his peerage and forfeiture of his property. It is creditable to the memory of Dutch William that he refused to carry the sentence into execution. Enough of blood had been shed on the scaffold; and the King, though strongly pressed by some of the leading Whigs to let the law take its course, adhered to his own determination. Lord Preston’s daughter, it appears, was one of Queen Mary’s attendants. The Queen found her one day gazing at the picture of James II., and weeping bitterly; and desiring to be told why the maiden wept, she received this answer: “I am thinking how hard it is that my father should suffer death because he loved your father.” Preston’s pardon alarmed the Jacobites as much as it disgusted and offended the Whigs. The former not unnaturally came to the conclusion that he must have betrayed them. The latter, especially Bishop Burnet, himself the meanest and basest of intriguers, clamoured against the act of clemency, as if some wrong had been done personally to themselves. Both parties were, however, in error. Preston had not been many months at liberty before he was again arrested and sent to the Tower as a traitor; and though fortunate enough in the present instance to show that the charge against him was groundless, his health sank under disquiet of mind, and he died soon after his release.