pointed a commissioner of the exchequer. In 1662 he went to London to justify the proceedings of the Earl of Middleton and to press for the immediate establishment of episcopacy (Burnet, p. 81); and when the synod of Fife was engaged the same year in preparing an address for an act establishing their government, he, in the king's name, dissolved the synod and commanded the ministers, under pain of treason, to retire (ib.) On the fall of Middleton in 1663 he was appointed to succeed him as lord high commissioner to the parliament which met at Edinburgh on 16 June, but Lauderdale, accompanied him, was supposed to be the person in whom the real authority was vested. In the same year he succeeded his father-in-law as lord high treasurer, was sworn a privy councillor of England, and was appointed Captain of the troop of lifeguards and general of the forces in Scotland. On the death of the Earl of Glencairn in the following year he was, on the recommendation of Archbishop Sharp, also appointed the keeper of the privy seal 'till the King should pitch on a proper person' (ib. p. 142). On 14 Oct. of this year he was nominated commissioner to a proposed national synod, which, however, never met (Wodrow, Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, i. 419). In November of the following year be made a tour in the west country with great pomp, the king's guard attending him, in order to enforce the persecuting measures against the covenanters (ib. p. 428). Gradually, according to Burnet, he allowed matters to be directed by Sharp, and 'abandoned himself to pleasure' (Our Time, p. 143). He caused considerable scandal by taking his mistress. Lady Anne, sister of the Duke of Gordon, along with him in his progresses through the country. Ultimately he was through the intervention of Lauderdale, deprived on 16 April 1667 of all his offices, but in October was consoled by being made lord chancellor for life. Through the intervention of the Duke of York he was on 29 May 1680 created Duke of Rothes, Marquis of Balleobreich, Earl of Leslie, Viscount of Lugton, Lord Auchmutie and Caskiebery, limitation to the heirs male of his body. Intemperate habits—which had been confirmed by his extraordinary power of withstanding the immediate effects of liquor — had, however, completely undermined his constitution, end he died of jaundice at Holyrood House 27 July 1681. He was buried at night with great splendour in the cathedral church of St. Giles, Edinburgh, but subsequently the body was removed to Leslie, Fifeshire. The funeral pageant is the subject of an engraving. Rothes had two daughters: Margaret, married to Charles, fifth earl of Haddington, and Christian. The former became at his death countess of Rothes.
[Burnet's Own Time; Sir George Mackenzie's Memoirs; Sir James Balfour's Annals; Lauder of Fountainhall's Historical Notices; Wodrow's Sufferings of the Church of Scotland; Cal. State Papers. Dom. Ser., during the Commonwealth and reign of Charles II; Col. Leslie's Historical Records of the Leslie Family, ii. 106–10; Douglas's Scottish Peerage (Wood), ii. 4312; Crawford's Officers of State, pp. 223–6.]
LESLIE, JOHN, eighth Earl of Rothes (1679–1722), the eldest son of Charles (Hamilton), fifth earl of Haddington, was born in August 1679, and baptised at Tynninghame on the 31st of that month. His mother, Lady Margaret Leslie, being the elder daughter of John Leslie, duke of Rothes [q. v.], succeeded her father as Countess of Rothes, and John, her eldest son, in terms of the marriage contract of his parents made in 1674, inherited her earldom of Rothes with the surname of Leslie, the title of Haddington passing to his next brother. He was brought up at Leslie, where his parents resided after the death of the Duke of Rothes, and, assuming the surname and arms of Leslie, he succeeded on the death of his mother (20 Aug. 1700) as eighth Earl of Rothes. Thereafter, the better to effect the separation of the two earldoms of Rothes and Haddington, he made formal resignation of the latter in favour of his younger brother (Fraser, Earl of Haddington, i. 221–41, ii. 315).
Having taken the oaths and his seat in parliament, Rothes proved a steady friend the revolution interest. He was, says Macky, the court spy, 'a warm asserter of the liberties of the people and in great esteem, also of vigilant application for the service of his country' ('Memoirs, p. 229). The Jacobites thought him false to them, for they claimed that he promised them fair, but fell away at the first temptation (Lockhart Papers, i. 94). He was one of three commissioners chosen at a meeting of the Duke of Hamilton's party to proceed to the court of Queen Anne in February 1704, and to request that certain charges made against her Scottish subjects of being plotters against her government should be fully tried, and that Scottish troops should not be paid with English money (Fraser, Earls of Cromartie, i. 218). That year, on l7 Oct., he was appointed lord privy seal, with the annual pension of 1,000l. sterling, but he held the office only for a year.
Rothes zealously aided the union of 1707 (Marchmont Papers, iii. 320), and was chosen one of the sixteen representative
