However, Lord Nithsdale made a celebrated escape from the Tower of London by changing clothes with his wife's maid the day before he was due to be executed.
The early death of his father ensured that he was raised by his mother, the Dowager Countess, who educated him to be a faithful and conventionally devout Roman Catholic and a partisan of the Stuart cause.
On reaching the age of 21, in 1697, and becoming earl, he secretly visited the Jacobite court at Saint-Germain to give his allegiance to the exiled King James II and VII, where he met his future wife Lady Winifred Herbert, daughter of the Duke of Powis.
As a prominent Catholic in the predominantly Covenanting Lowlands, he was on a number of occasions the object of Presbyterian assaults on his estate, on suspicion of harbouring Jesuits.
[3][2] The story of the Earl of Nithsdale's escape from the Tower of London inspired James Hogg's Ballad of the Lord Maxwell first published in the Royal Lady's Magazine in October 1831.