George Lockhart

Sir George Lockhart of Lee (1673 – 17 December 1731), of Carnwath, South Lanarkshire, also known as Lockhart of Carnwath, was a Scottish writer and Jacobite politician who sat in the Parliament of Scotland from 1702 to 1707 and as a Tory in the House of Commons from 1708 to 1715. He was a member of the Commission on the Union before 1707 but acted as an informant to his Jacobite colleagues and later wrote an anonymous memoir of its dealings. He supported the Stuart cause in the Jacobite rising of 1715. Early life Lockhart was the son of Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath and his second wife Philadelphia Wharton, daughter of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton and sister of Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton one of the leaders of the Whig Junta. After his father’s death, Lockhart succeeded to a sizable estate at the age of eight years. His Whiggish guardians removed his tutor, John Gillane, the family’s episcopalian chaplain. His education was placed in the hands of Presbyterian tutors who also tutored John Campbell. Lockhart and Argyll became friends as children, and remained friends into adulthood despite political differences. Campbell became one of Scotland's leading Whigs, while Lockhart came to have a profound dislike of Presbyterianism . By 1695 he had obtained the appointment of episcopalian guardians and had begun to manage his own financial affairs. He developed the estate and exploited the coal reserves to become one of the wealthiest of Scottish commoners, and gathered a major electoral interest in Lanarkshire and Midlothian. He married Lady Euphemia Montgomerie (d. 1738), daughter of a leading Episcopalian peer Alexander Montgomerie, 9th Earl of Eglintoun on 30 April 1697. The Parliament of Scotland and the Treaty of Union In 1702, Lockhart became shire commissioner for the shire of Edinburgh in the Parliament of Scotland. He joined the cavalier wing of the Country party. He was made a privy councillor in 1703 as part of the Court’s attempt to woo the cavaliers. He was attracted to a political alliance in the hope of achieving legal toleration for Episcopalians but as this was not forthcoming, he went into opposition, and remained disaffected with the Court for the rest of his time in the Scottish parliament. He denounced the defection from the Country party of the so-called ‘New Party’ (later Squadrone) in 1704.