After his return from France, Lord Pitsligo took his seat in the Scottish Parliament, and his parliamentary career has thus been characterised by a former writer.[3] “Here it is no discredit either to his head or heart to say, that, obliged to become a member of one of the contending factions of the time, he adopted that which had for its object the independence of Scotland, and restoration of the ancient race of monarchs.  The advantages which were in future to arise from the great measure of a national union were so hidden by the mist of prejudice, that it cannot be wondered at if Lord Pitsligo, like many a high-spirited man, saw nothing but disgrace in a measure forced on by such corrupt means, and calling in its commencement for such mortifying national sacrifices.  The English nation, indeed, with a narrow, yet not unnatural, view of their own interest, took such pains to encumber and restrict the Scottish commercial privileges that it was not till the best part of a century after the event that the inestimable fruits of the treaty began to be felt and known.  This distant period Lord Pitsligo could not foresee.  He beheld his countrymen, like the Israelites of yore, led into the desert; but his merely human eye could not foresee that, after the extinction of a whole race—­after a longer pilgrimage than that of the followers of Moses—­the Scottish people should at length arrive at that promised land, of which the favourers of the Union held forth so gay a prospect.

“Looking upon the Act of Settlement of the Crown, and the Act of Abjuration, as unlawful, Lord Pitsligo retired to his house in the country, and threw up attendance on Parliament.  Upon the death of Queen Anne he joined himself in arms with a general insurrection of the Highlanders and Jacobites, headed by his friend and relative the Earl of Mar.

“Mar, a versatile statesman and an able intriguer, had consulted his ambition rather than his talents when he assumed the command of such an enterprise.  He sunk beneath the far superior genius of the Duke of Argyle; and after the undecisive battle of Sheriffmuir, the confederacy which he had formed, but was unable to direct, dissolved like a snow-ball, and the nobles concerned in it were fain to fly abroad.  This exile was Lord Pitsligo’s fate for five or six years.  Part of the time he spent at the Court, if it can be called so, of the old Chevalier de Saint George, where existed all the petty feuds, chicanery, and crooked intrigues which subsist in a real scene of the same character, although the objects of the ambition which prompts such arts had no existence.  Men seemed to play at being courtiers in that illusory court, as children play at being soldiers.”