Ayrshire > Volume 2

THE MARQUISATE OF BUTE 213
peace, and he stopped the subsidies to Frederick, but the
great Prussian was able nevertheless by a fortuitous
concourse of circumstances, to emerge from the struggle
lord of Silesia. It was largely as the result of the Seven
Years' War that Great Britain attained to the position
of the first commercial nation of the world. Bute carried
on war with Spain, 1762, and having the following year
concluded a Treaty of Peace with France and Spain, he,
in accordance with a stipulation previously made with
the King, resigned his post as Prime Minister. His period
of office had not been unattended by difficulties. He had
the disadvantage, for the time, of being a Scotsman, and
the Whigs assailed him vehemently, and, it is said,
irrationally; London also was hostile to him, and he
experienced a considerable sense of relief when he was
able to demit office and to retire into private life. In
1780 he became the first President of the Scottish
Antiquaries, and in 1781 Chancellor of Marischal College,
Aberdeen, and an honorary Fellow of the Royal College
of Physicians, Edinburgh. He died in London, March
10, 1792, and was buried in Rothesay. He was married,
August 24, 1736, to Mary, only daughter of Edward
Wortley Montague, Yorkshire, Ambassador at Con-
stantinople, who eventually succeeded, under her
father's will, to his estates in Yorkshire and Cornwall,
and was created, 1761, Baroness Mount-Stuart of
Wortley, in the county of York, with remainder to
heirs male of her then subsisting marriage with the
Earl. By the Countess he had five sons and six
daughters One of the sons, Frederick, was M.P. for
the Ayr Burghs, 1776-80, and for Buteshire, 1796-1802.
John, the fourth Earl, was born 1744. In 1766 he
became M.P. for Bossiney, and the same year he married
Charlotte Jane, eldest daughter, and eventually sole
heiress, of Herbert Hickman Windsor, Viscount Windsor,
and Baron Mountjoy, through whom the estates of the
Earls of Pembroke afterwards descended to the house of
Bute. In 1772 he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of
Glamorgan, and in 1776 he was created Baron Cardiff