‘sought in the very eye of justice in Edinburgh;’ and that he was ‘then constrained, of mere necessity, to take the abbacy of Holyrood by advice of sundry godly men’ (ib. p. 531). On 18 July 1574 a letter passed the great seal in favour of Lord Robert, confirming the letter of pensions to his three legitimate and two natural sons out of the abbacy of Holyrood, reserving 860l. to the ministers and readers (Reg. Mag. Sig. Scot. 1546–80, No. 2283). Having, however, been accused in the following year of treason in offering the Isles of Orkney to the king of Denmark, he was in August imprisoned by the orders of the regent Morton in the castle of Orkney (Hist. of James the Sext, p. 157); and although he made large offers to obtain his freedom, he was retained in prison until Morton's resignation of the regency (ib. p. 182). On being set free he became one of the chief conspirers of Morton's ruin (Melville, Memoirs, p. 266); and he was one of those who, on 18 Jan. 1580–1, conveyed Morton to imprisonment in Dumbarton Castle (Moysie, Memoirs, p. 29; Calderwood, iii. 484). On 21 Oct. 1581 he was created by the king Earl of Orkney, when his lands of Orkney and Zetland were erected into an earldom (Reg. Mag. Sig. Scot. 1580–1593, No. 263); and on 18 Dec. he had a grant of the island of Caned in Orkney (ib. No. 307). He died in 1592. By his wife, Lady Janet Kennedy, eldest daughter of Gilbert, third earl of Cassilis, he had five sons and four daughters: Henry, who died before his father; Patrick, second earl of Orkney [q. v.]; John, earl of Carrick; Sir James, gentleman of the bedchamber to James VI; Sir Robert; Mary, married to Patrick, seventh lord Gray; Jean, married first to Patrick Leslie, commendator of Lindores, by whom she was mother of David Leslie, first lord Newark [q. v.], the general; and secondly to Robert, lord Melville of Raith; Elizabeth, married to Sir John Sinclair of Murchil, brother of George, fifth earl of Caithness; and Barbara.
[Reg. P. C. Scotl. vols. i–v.; Reg. Mag. Sig. Scot. 1546–80 and 1580–93; Knox's Works; Calderwood's Hist. of Scotland; Moysie's Memoirs, and Hist. of James the Sext (Bannatyne Club); Douglas's Scottish Peerage, ed. Wood, ii. 341.]
STEWART, Sir ROBERT (d. 1670?), governor of Londonderry, reputed to have been the younger brother of Sir William Stewart (d. 1662) [see under Stewart, Sir William, first Viscount Mountjoy], in which case he was the third son of Archibald Stewart of Bardye, and other places in the parish of Whithorn, Wigtonshire (cf. Lodge, Peerage, vi. 243; M'Kerlie, Lands and Owners in Galloway, i. 481–4); but the grounds of identification are insufficient, and there is reason to connect him with Patrick Stewart, second earl of Orkney [q. v.] He apparently accompanied James I, to whom, if this latter conjecture is correct, he was not very distantly related, to England in 1603, and was granted letters of denization on 3 July 1604 (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603–10, p. 127). In 1609 he was appointed to conduct eight hundred swordsmen, followers of the fugitive Hugh O'Neill, second earl of Tyrone [q. v.]—whose presence in Ulster was deemed by the government likely to interfere with the success of the plantation of that province—out of Ireland into Sweden. He sailed from Lough Swilly with three vessels in October; but whether he reached his destination is doubtful, for towards the end of November he was arrested in London for debt, at the instance of one Lesly, executor of Lord Lindores. Salisbury, in notifying the fact to Sir Thomas Lake, adds that three vessels, with Irishmen on board, had arrived at Newcastle (ib. p. 564). The debt amounted to the considerable sum of 2,500l., and notwithstanding the personal exertions of the king, who was himself involved in the matter, and a grant to Stewart of ‘tops and lops’ in the royal parks, the matter was still unsettled in July 1611, when James, acting on the advice of Sir Alexander Hay, allowed Stewart to enter the service of Gustavus Adolphus. He left England early in August, and, proceeding through Denmark, endeavoured, though unsuccessfully, to enlist James's intervention in the settlement of the differences existing between that kingdom and Sweden (ib. 1611–13, pp. 51, 66, 98).
Stewart remained abroad apparently till about 1617, in which year, on 24 July, he received, as a recompense for his faithful and acceptable services, a grant of lands in the counties of Leitrim, Cavan, and Fermanagh, to the value of 100l. a year. After a time, however, being of an adventurous spirit, he again repaired abroad, serving this time apparently under Sigismund III, king of Poland, in whose interest he undertook in 1623 to raise eight thousand volunteers in Scotland (Register of the Privy Council Scotland, xiii. 364). That his promise did not remain altogether a dead letter appears from some correspondence between Secretary Conway and Viscount Annandale in March 1624 (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1623–5, pp. 183, 192); but of his career abroad information is restricted to incidental reference (Monro his Expedition, pt. ii. p. 13) to the effect that
