Though tenth Earl (the first of the hereditary Marischals to be ‘belted earl’ was William, in 1458), George Keith was apt to mock at hereditary noblesse. Stemmata quid faciunt? He had a story of a laird who grumbled, during a pestilence, ‘In such times a gentleman is not sure of his life.’ The date of his birth was never known. In old age he cast an agreeable mystery about this point. He was once heard to say that he was twenty-seven in 1712; if so, he died at ninety-three (1778). Others date his birth in 1693, others in 1689; d’Alembert says (on the authority of one who had the fact from Ormonde) that he was premier brigadier of that general’s army in 1712. An engraving from a portrait of the Earl as a young man represents him as then twenty-three years of age. If the engraving was done in Paris, as seems probable, in 1716, he would be born in 1693. Oddly enough the pseudo-Memoirs of Madame de Créquy (who is made to speak of him as her true love) throw a similar cloud over the year of her birth. Concerning the Earl’s father, Lockhart of Carnwath writes that he had great vivacity of wit, an undaunted courage, and a soul capable of great things, ‘but no seriousness.’ His mother, of the house of Perth, was necessarily by birth a Jacobite. The song makes her say:
I’ll be Lady Keith again
The day the King comes o’er the water.
The Earl’s tutor was probably Meston, the Jacobite wit and poet.
The Earl succeeded his father in 1712. His own first youth had been passed in Marlborough’s wars; from 1712 to the death of Queen Anne, and the overthrow of hopes of a Restoration by the Tories, he lived about town, a brilliant colonel of Horse Guards, short in stature and slight in build, but with a beautiful face, and dark, large eyes. So we see him in the portrait of about 1716.
The following letter, the earliest known letter of the Earl, displays him as a disciplinarian. Conceivably the mutinous Wingfeild was a Jacobite, but, by September 12, 1714, the chance for a rising of the Guards for King James had passed, Queen Anne was dead, and the Earl was still colonel in the army of George I.
To Lord Chief Justice Parker
Stowe MSS. 750, f. 58.
‘September 12, 1714.
‘My Lord,—As soon as I heard that your Lordship had granted a Habeas Corpus for Thomᵃˢ Wingfeild one of the private men of His Majesties Second Troop of Horse Grenadier Guards under my Command, I sent a Gentleman to wait upon your Lordship and to acquaint you with the reasons for my ordering Wingfeild to be confin’d to the Marshall of the Horse Guards according to the practice of the Army, but your Lordship was not then at your Chambers; I now take the liberty to inform you that the Prisoner has not only been guilty of uttering menacing words & insolently refusing to comply with the establisht Regulations of the Troop, (to which Regulations he has subscribd) but has also been endeavouring to raise a mutiny therein, which crimes among Soldiers being of dangerous Consequences I did intend to have him try’d by a General Court Martial, that he might have been exemplarily punisht as far as the Law allows to deter others from the like practices: but as there is no warrant for holding a Court Martial for the Horse Guards extant, & I being unwilling to trouble their Excellᶜⁱᵉˢ the Lords Justices on this occasion, I had ordered my officers to hold a Regimental Court Martial upon him yesterday in order to break him at the head of the Troop, which is the only punishment they can inflict, but they did not proceed then on accoᵗ of the Habeas Corpus; this I thought fit to acquaint your Lordship with and to assure you that I am &c.