| On 21 July 1637 he had a ratification under the Great Seal of his title of Earl of Glencairn, and on 27 July 1642 a ratification of a charter granted to him by his father on 1 February 1628, to himself and the other heirs mentioned in the entail of 1614. On 7 April 1643 he had a charter of Lambroughton, co. Ayr. He was admitted a member of the Privy Council 3 November 1641, and one of the Commissioners of the Treasury on the 17th of the same month. He joined the Duke of Hamilton and the Earls of Lanark and Roxburgh in opposing an army being sent into England to the assistance of the Parliamentary forces in 1643. He was appointed Lord Justice-General 13 November 1646, and had a ratification of the office from Parliament on 4 January following. He entered into the 'Engagement' for the rescue of the King in 1648, and was in consequence removed from his offices in 1649, his patent of the earldom of 1488 being annulled by Parliament on the ground that it fell under the Recissory Act of James IV. He was, however, included in a list of the nobility of Scotland in 1650, and in the Committee of Estates the following year. In 1653 he took up arms in support of the King, and raised a large following. Next year he joined Middleton's forces, but in consequence of a quarrel with Sir George Munro he left the army, went home, and made his peace with Monck. He was, however, excepted from the Act of Grace and Pardon in 1654, and his confiscated estates were vested in trustees.17 |
| Glencairn was one of the Peers whom Monck summoned when he was about to march into England in 1659, and on the Restoration he had the office of Chancellor conferred on him, and was also appointed Sheriff-Principal of Ayrshire: a moderate Episcopalian, he quarrelled with Archbishop Sharp about the expediency of the latter's proceedings as to church matters. Sharp's revenge was to get a royal letter giving the Primate precedence over the Chancellor. As Glencairn had spent a considerable portion of his life in protesting from time to time for precedence over some of his fellow Peers, and especially his feudatory enemy the Earl of Eglinton, this act of Sharp's incensed him extremely; indeed it is said that it brought on the illness which occasioned his death, at Belton in Haddingtonshire, 30 May 1664, in the fifty-fourth year of his age. He was buried in St. Giles', Edinburgh, on 28 July following; the funeral was conducted with much ceremony, all the nobility then in Edinburgh being present; the Archbishop of Glasgow preached the sermon, and 'audit trumpetoires sounding at the grave's mouth ended the solempnitie.'18 |