History of the Johnstones, 1191-1909, with ... - Electric Scotland

1 62 ANNANDALE'S BROTHER JOHN
for a lawyer, but was employed in the Secret Service of the Prince of Orange.
The last heard of him is the extract from Brodie's diary, quoted in Morison's
Johnston of Warrieston, Nov. 17, 1671— " I heard that Alexander, Warrieston's son,
had brok, and through cheating, lying, wrong ways. My brother and others had
suffered much by him." He had a son, Jasper of Warrieston, who left only a
daughter. The younger son, James, born Sept. 9, 1655, was educated in
Holland, and, having passed particularly well in civil law at Utrecht, his cousin,
Bishop Burnet, gave him a helping hand. Like Burnet, Secretary Johnston
was a good friend to his relations, and many of them came to London in the
hope of obtaining a Government office through his influence. He is described
as a tall, strong, fair-haired typical Scotsman, with much endurance at a time
when the dress and mode of life in England was conducive to effeminacy. He
could undertake the rough travelling a Continental journey then necessitated,
and be back again in England, fit for business, after a secret conference with the
Prince of Orange, before he was even missed. William III. was the great hope
of the Covenanters. As the son of a Stewart Princess, with double Stewart
descent through his grandmother, it was not a long step to accept him J and his
Queen, James's daughter, in the place of James, who was never popular in
Scotland. But the Secretary was considered as a friend to Scottish democracy,
and insisted on an inquiry into the massacre of Glencoe. His freedom of
speech is supposed to have irritated William III., who perhaps could not afford
to displease Englishmen by employing Scots. Anyway, he was dismissed from
office in 1696, though he continued to advise the Government. He was opposed
to a separate Parliament in Scotland, and brought Annandale over to his view,
for he was again in office, for a year as Lord Clerk Register of Scotland
(1704-05), under Queen Anne, but obliged to resign, and this time permanently,
on account of the protection he had given to Jacobites, among them Nathaniel
and Henry Johnston of Pomfret, and Annandale's brother, John, whose career
only became important when it was necessary to prove that he died s.p. before
the House of Lords.
This John (Annandale's brother) was born at Newbie in 1668, and went to
school at Glasgow till he was about twelve. Then his maternal uncle, the
Earl of Dumbarton, sent him to Haddington school, and gave him a commission
in his own regiment as soon as he was sixteen. The pay he received was
supposed to be enough for his expenses at a college in Paris, where he went to
complete his education, though he shows in a letter to his brother, dated
1687, that it was not. Annandale had just got a commission in the Guards
from James VII., but was never backward in helping his brother when he could
afford it. John returned as a captain to England, where he was received
by the Royal Chaplain, his cousin, Henry Johnston of Pomfret, into the Roman
Church. The next year the Revolution began, and he joined heart and soul on
the side of the King, while his brother, after some vacillation, took the oaths to
William. Lord Dumbarton fled with the exiled King to St. Germains, and
1 The Lockhart Memoirs state that Secretary Johnston told Lockhart he could make
people's hair stand on end with revelations about the Court and Government of William III.