These characteristics must be viewed as proceeding from the pen of a partisan; nor can we wonder at the contrariety of opinion which prevails respecting any public man who proposes a great and startling measure. Honours, places, and a pension were showered down upon this most fortunate of ministers; and his career is remarkable as having been cheered by the favour of four sovereigns of very different tempers. In his early youth, after his return from his travels, the Duke of Queensbury was appointed a Privy Councillor of Scotland by Charles the Second. He held the same post under James the Second, but resigned it in 1688. The reserved and doubting William of Orange placed him near his person, making him a Lord of the Bedchamber, and captain of his Dutch guard; eventually he became Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, and--to abridge a list of numerous employments and honours--Lord High Commissioner of Scotland. So far had Queensbury's fortunes begun with the Stuarts and continued under the House of Orange. It appeared unlikely that the successor of William--she who in her first speech announced that her heart was "wholly English," to mark the distinction between herself and the foreigner who had sat on the throne before her,--would adopt as her own representative in Scotland the favourite of William; yet she continued Queensbury in that high station which it was believed none could fill so adequately in the disturbed and refractory kingdom of Scotland.[18] During the early years of Queen Anne's reign, and in the season of his own comparative prosperity, the young Earl of Mar entered into his first marriage, at Twickenham, with Lady Margaret Hay, daughter of John Earl of Kinnoul. The wife whom he thus selected was the daughter of a house originally adverse to the principles of the Revolution. William Earl of Kinnoul, in the time of James the Second, had remained at St. Germains with that monarch. But the same change which had manifested the political course of Lord Mar, had been apparent in the father of Lady Margaret Hay. The Earl of Kinnoul was afterwards one of the Commissioners for the Union, and supported that treaty in Parliament; yet, when the Rebellion of 1715 commenced, this nobleman was one of the suspected persons who were summoned to surrender themselves, and was committed a prisoner to Edinburgh Castle. His daughter, the Countess of Mar, was happily spared from witnessing the turmoils of that period. Married in her seventeenth year, she lived only four years with a husband whose character was but partially developed, when, in 1707, she died at the age of twenty-one, having given birth to two sons. She was buried at the family seat at Alloa Castle, an ancient fortress, built in the year 1300, one turret of which still remaining rises ninety feet from the ground. Seven years intervened before Lord Mar supplied the place of his lost wife by another union.