His son Charles, who raised the first regiment of Scottish Fusileers, and was constituted their Colonel, began life as a determined Royalist; but disapproving of the measures of James the Second, he had prepared to go abroad when the Prince of Orange landed in England. He appears afterwards to have pursued somewhat of the same wavering course as that of which his son has been accused, and, joining the disaffected party against William, he was arrested, but afterwards released. The heavy incumbrances upon his estates, contracted during the civil wars, were such as to oblige him to sell a great portion of his lands, and to part with the ancient Barony of Erskine, the first possession of the family. This necessity may almost be considered as an ill omen for the future welfare of a family; which never seems to be so utterly brought low by fortune, as when compelled to consign to strangers that from which the first sense of importance and stability has been derived. Under these circumstances, certainly not favourable to independence of character, John, eleventh Earl of Mar of the name of Erskine, and afterwards Lieutenant-general to the Chevalier St. George, was born at Alloa, in Clackmannan, where his father resided. He was a younger son of a numerous family, five brothers, older than himself, having died in infancy. His mother, the Lady Mary Maule, eldest daughter of George Earl of Panmure, gave birth to eight sons, and a daughter. Of the sons, the Earl of Mar and his brothers, James Erskine of the Grange, afterwards the husband of the famous and unfortunate Lady Grange; and Henry, killed at the battle of Almanza in 1707, alone attained the age of manhood. The only sister of Lord Mar, Lady Jean, was married to Sir Hugh Paterson of Bannockburn, in Stirlingshire. The Earl of Mar succeeded to the possession and management of estates, heavily encumbered, in 1696.[10] His qualities of mind and person, at this early period of his life, were not eminently pleasing. His countenance, though strongly marked, had none of the attributes of intellectual strength. In person he is said to have been deformed, although his portrait by Kneller was skilfully contrived to hide that defect; his complexion was fair: he was short in stature. In his early youth the Earl is declared by historians who were adverse to the Stuarts, to have been initiated into every species of licentious dissipation, by Neville Payne: and the young nobleman is characterized as "the scandal of his name."[11] Although his ancestors had been devotedly attached to the interests of the exiled family, yet, it was to be shewn how far Mar preferred those interests to his own, or upon what principles he eventually adopted the cause of hereditary monarchy, which had already brought so much inconvenience, and so many losses to his father and grandfather.