Excerpt from Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain Engraved From Authentic Pictures in the Galleries of the Nobility, and the Public Collections of the Country, Vol. 11: With Biographical and Historical Memoirs, of Their Lives and Actions

The severities of punishment and forfeiture which an intemperate attachment to the dangerous extravagances of Presbyterianism had drawn down on the heads of some of this great nobleman's ancestors, formed an ample recommendation of their posterity to the highest favour upon the great change in the form of English government which occurred in 1688. His father, Archibald, tenth Earl of Argyll, had been accordingly restored in blood immediately after that revolution, and at length received from William the title of Duke. He married Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Sir Lionel Talmash, of Helmingham, in Suffolk, by Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart in her own right; and the eminent person of whom we are to treat was the first issue of their union, and was born on the tenth of October, 1678.

He is said to have profited not much by the usual course of a fine education, his attention to which was interrupted by an ardent 1ncl'1nat10n to the study of the military art, and to the life of a soldier and so little did this partake of the caprice of a lively boy, that his father at length determined to indulge it, and, soon after his introduction at Court, in his seventeenth year, procured for him the command of a regiment of infantry. He does not appear, however, to have been engaged in active service till the following reign, when he highly distinguished himself at the siege of Keyserswaert, one of the first operations of Queen Anne's long and glorious war. In September, 1703, he succeeded to his father's dignities and estates, and was presently after sworn of the Privy Council in Scotland, and appointed Captain of the Horse Guards there; and, on the revival of the order of the Thistle in the next year, was chosen a Knight Companion. In 1705, the important oflice of High Commissioner to the Scottish Parliament was intrusted to him, and with it the management of the overtures to the treaty of Union, an affair of much delicacy and difficulty, by the preparations for which the transactions of that year were distin guished. Argyll promoted the measure with all the powers of his own mind, which were very considerable, and with all the weight of his great family influence in Scotland, and sacrificed to it much of the popularity which he had acquired there, or rather, according to the custom of that country, was born to possess. In this, as in all his early public conduct, he was actuated wholly by a clear and resolute judgment, and the most conscientious motives. He was extremely forward, says an enemy who has left a character of him, in effecting what he aimed at and designed, which he owned and promoted above-board, being altogether free of the least share of dissimulation, and his word so sacred, that one might assuredly depend upon it. His head ran more upon the camp than the Court; and it appears that nature had dressed him up accordingly, being altogether incapable of the servile dependency and flattering insinuations requisite in the last, and endued with that cheerful lively temper and personal valour esteemed and necessary in the other.

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