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Updated: June 8, 2025
At the head of a troop of gentlemen, full of ardour in the cause, the plain dress and homely manners of Lord Kenmure seemed inappropriate to the conspicuous station which he held; for the exercise of his functions as commander was attended by some circumstances which required a great combination of worldly knowledge with singleness of purpose.
"The army lay doing nothing for weeks, and just before we were expecting a movement, the company I belonged to was sent with a force of Highlanders under Mackintosh to join the army under the Lords Derwentwater, Kenmure, and Nithsdale. Lord Derwentwater had risen with a number of other gentlemen, and with their attendants and friends had marched against Newcastle.
He was first minister at Weemyse, the first admitted under Presbytery 1638. He was minister at Weemyse about two years. He was very young when laureate, before he was seventeen. He was chaplain first to my lord Kenmure, then to the Lord of Cassilis. When he was with Cassilis, he wrote his ‘English Popish Ceremonies,’ which when printed, he was about twenty-two.
I pray God forgive those who thirst after blood. Had we been all putt to the sword immediatly upon our surrender, that might have born the construction of being don in the heatt and fury of passion; but now I am to die in cold blood, I pray God it be not imputed to them. May Almighty God restore injured right, and peace, and truth, and may He in mercy receave my soull. Kenmure."
This unfortunate nobleman succeeded his father in 1698; and possessed, up to the period of his taking the command of the army in the south, the estates belonging to his family in the Stuartry of Kirkcudbright. Kenmure Castle, still happily enjoyed by the family of Gordon, stands upon an eminence overlooking the meadows, at that point where the river Ken expands into a lake.
There are hundreds of passages as good as these scattered up and down the forty-seven letters we have had preserved to us out of the large and intimate correspondence that passed between Samuel Rutherford and Lady Kenmure. 'Think it not easy. Rutherford. What a lasting interest Samuel Rutherford's pastoral pen has given to the hoary old castle of Cardoness!
While she spoke, perhaps, the condemned nobleman was supplicating on his knees to God for that mercy which was withheld by man. Imagination paints the despondency of Lord Derwentwater; the calm and dignified sorrow of the justly pitied Kenmure.
In the shires of Annandale, Niddesdale, and Galloway, are the Earl of Niddesdale, with the Viscount of Kenmure, the Laird of Spinkell, with the numerous clan of the Maxwells; and there is some hope also of the Earl of Galloway; Thus the King's party is connected through the whole kingdom, and we are certain of being masters of all the shires, except Argyleshire, Clydesdale, Renfrew, Dumbarton, and Kyle."
The earliest motto borne on these arms by the Seatons, "Hazard, yet forward," might indeed be mournfully applied to all who engaged in the hopeless Rebellion of 1715. Lord Wintoun, like Lord Derwentwater, was in the bloom of his youth when he summoned his tenantry to follow him to the rendezvous appointed by Lord Kenmure.
The trial of the Seven Bishops caused great excitement, that of Lords Kenmure and Derwentwater hardly less. Lord Byron was tried in Westminster Hall, and every child has heard of the arraignment of Warren Hastings. Surely, if ever a building had memories of historic dramas, played upon its floor as on a stage, it is Rufus's great hall at Westminster.
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