James Campbell (of Burnbank and Boquhan)

The Honourable James Campbell (after c. 1660 – c. January 1713) of Burnbank and Boquhan was a Scottish nobleman of Clan Campbell, an officer of the Royal Scots Army and then the British Army, and a politician.

In 1690, his abduction of a teenage girl whom he forced into marriage was a notorious scandal. His accomplice was executed, but Campbell went unpunished. He went on to sit for three years in the Parliament of Scotland, and after the Union with England he sat for two years in the new House of Commons of Great Britain.

Family and early life
Campbell was the fourth son of Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll and his first wife Lady Mary, daughter of James Stuart, 4th Earl of Moray. He was educated at the University of Glasgow.

During the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 Campbell was held in preventive detention in Edinburgh Castle. His father played a leading role in the rising, for which he was later executed.

Campbell joined the army in 1689 as a captain in his brother's regiment, the Earl of Argyll's Regiment of Foot.

Forced marriage
In 1690, a scandal erupted when Captain Campbell, aided by Sir John Johnston of Caskieben and Archibald Montgomery, abducted and married a young heiress in London. The 13-year-old Mary Wharton was heir to her father Philip Wharton of Goldsborough Hall in North Yorkshire, who had died in 1685. On her 13th birthday she had come into an annual income of £1,500, equivalent to £ in 2024.

On 10 November 1690 Mary was lured outside from the home she shared with her mother in Great Queen Street, Westminster, where the three men forced her into a six-horse coach and took her off to the coachman's house. There she was forcibly married to Campbell, without her consent, and without the presence of her legal guardian Robert Byerley, the son of her mother's sister.

Mary was returned to her guardian within two days by order of the Lord Chief Justice. Sir John Johnston was arrested and indicted for the abduction on 11 December, convicted by jury, and hanged at Tyburn on 23 December 1690. Reputedly a "nasty piece of work", Johnston had previously been involved in a similar elopement with a Miss Magrath in County Clare, Ireland and had subsequently been imprisoned in Dublin as a debtor. He was also alleged to have committed rape in Utrecht.

However, the real culprit was Campbell, who had lured the impoverished Johnston with money, but escaped scot-free. Abduction and forced marriage was an ancient custom in the Scottish Highlands, but in London Campbell was regarded as lucky to have escaped the hangman's noose.

The marriage was annulled on 20 December 1690 by the Parliament of England, which passed a personal Act of Parliament: the Mary Wharton and James Campbell marriage annulment Act (2 W.& M. c. 9). Campbell's older brother, the 10th Earl of Argyll and later 1st Duke of Argyll, had unsuccessfully petitioned against the annulment.

In 1692, Mary was married to her guardian, Robert Byerley. She died in 1727, having had two sons and three daughters. Campbell remarried in 1694 to Margaret Leslie, daughter of General David Leslie, 1st Lord Newark. They had two sons and three daughters.

Politics
Campbell subscribed £500 to the Darien scheme in 1696, and in 1702 he became a director of the Bank of Scotland.

His relationship with his brother faltered during the 1690s, but had recovered sufficiently by 1699 that Campbell was elected in the Argyll interest to Parliament of Scotland, as a burgh commissioner for Renfrew.

The first Duke of Argyll died in 1703, and was succeeded by his son John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, a nephew of James. In 1708, at the first election to the new Parliament of Great Britain the Duke chose his uncle James as his candidate for the Ayr District of Burghs of Ayr, Irvine, Rothesay, Inveraray and Campbeltown. The 1st Earl of Bute, who controlled Rothesay, acquiesced in the choice and made James Campbell a burgess of Rothesay to allow him to be appointed as the burgh's commissioner for the election. Argyll controlled Inverary and Campbeltown, so with three of five burghs backing James Campbell, a challenge would have been futile. He was returned unopposed.

He was not prominent in Parliament, where his efforts to secure reinstatement to the army failed. By the time of his election in 1708 he had taken and then left another commission in the army, probably as colonel of a foot regiment, but neither appeals to the Duke of Marlborough nor the lobbying of his nephew Argyll were enough to win him a new commission.

Campbell gave up his Parliamentary seat at the 1710 general election, when his nephew gave the seat to the London-based Scottish physician Charles Oliphant.