William Drummond, 1st Viscount Strathallan
His father was among the first of the nobility who joined the Marquis of Montrose at Bothwell after the battle of Kilsyth in 1645, for which he suffered imprisonment.
He happened to hear Cromwell's discussion with the commissioners sent from Scotland to protest against putting the king to death, and he afterwards told Burnet that 'Cromwell had plainly the better of them at their own weapon, and upon their own principles' (Own Time, Oxford edition, i.
At the battle of Worcester in 1651, where he commanded a brigade, he was taken prisoner and carried to Windsor, but managed to escape and reach the king at Paris.
He soon afterwards landed at Yarmouth, and contrived to reach Scotland disguised as a carrier, bearing with him the royal commission.
[1] As he himself says, he 'served long in the wars at home and abroad against the Polonians and Tartars' (Genealogie of the most Ancient House of Drummond).
With Dalyell he was popularly supposed to have introduced torture by the thumbscrew, 'having seen it in Moscovia' (Lauder, Historical Notices of Scotch Affairs, Bannatyne Club, ii.
In 1667 he went to London to urge upon the king the necessity of a standing army and the harshest measures against the refusers of the declaration (Wodrow, Church of Scotland, ed.
Little accustomed to brook contradiction, he found himself in constant conflict with Lauderdale, who on 29 Sept. 1674 caused him to be imprisoned in Dumbarton Castle on a mere surmise of his having corresponded with some of the exiled covenanters in Holland (Wodrow, ii.
Towards the end of March 1678 he, along with the Duke of Hamilton and others, made a journey to court in order to represent the grievances of the country to the king (Wodrow, ii.
On the accession of James VII the following year he was nominated lieutenant-general of the forces in Scotland, and a lord of the treasury.
In April 1684, on the resignation of his brother David, third baron Maderty, 'to save expenses,’ he succeeded to that title (Lauder, Historical Notices, Bannatyne Club, ii.
In March 1686 he accompanied the Duke of Hamilton and Sir George Lockhart to Westminster to confer with the king, who had proposed that, while full liberty should be granted to the Roman Catholics in Scotland, the persecution of the covenanters should go on without mitigation.
Drummond, although a loose and profane man, 'ambitious and covetous,’ had yet sufficient sense of honour to restrain him from public apostasy.
The king awarded him an heraldic augmentation of honour (to be quartered by his paternal arms) of Or, a lion's head erased within a double tressure flory counter-flory gules.
After his return to Scotland he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Archibald Johnston, lord Warriston, and widow of Thomas Hepburn of Humbie, Haddingtonshire.
By this lady, who was buried at St. George's, Southwark, in 1679, he had one daughter, Elizabeth, married to Thomas Hay, 7th Earl of Kinnoull, and a son William, second viscount of Strathallan.
416), drew up in 1681 a valuable history of his family, a hundred copies of which were privately printed by David Laing, 4to, Edinburgh, 1831 (Lowndes, Bibl.
