Sir Henry Stirling, 3rd baronet of Ardoch, has earned a footnote in history as a Jacobite agent and spy who lived in Russia for over 20 years. One source erroneously recorded his stay as 40 years and stated that he served the tsar. The reality is both less dramatic and more intriguing. His son claimed that his father had gone to Russia ‘in some disgust’. What really prompted his departure for Russia, and was it indeed a sense of disgust that kept him so far from home for so long?
Stirling was born in 1688 into the land-owning gentry of Perthshire. His father, Sir William Stirling, married Mary Erskine, one of the members of the large family of Erskine of Alva. William remarried after Mary’s death in 1697, but by 1702 Henry and his sisters had lost their father too. The contents of Ardoch House were sold by public auction to pay Henry’s step-mother her entitlement to one-third of the value.
His Erskine relatives were to be most influential in Henry’s future. Letters and requests for money sent from Alva to the factor at Ardoch suggest that Henry’s three sisters went into the care of their Erskine grandmother. Henry furthered his education on the continent. His name is listed twice among students at the University of Leiden – first in 1705, and again in 1709. His guardians expressed frustration at his continued time overseas. The long-suffering factor on his Ardoch estate received regular peremptory requests to supply him with money or to honour his bills.
At Leiden, Stirling studied law, as so many other Scots gentlemen did, among them his uncle, Charles Erskine. In 1710 Henry was admitted to the faculty of advocates and returned to his Ardoch estate. Now it would seem that he had settled into a future similar to that of many gentlemen of his class: landowner, lawyer, potential member of parliament.
Events of 1715
But in 1715 his political ambitions were frustrated. The death of Queen Anne and the arrival on the throne of George I led to an election in the early months of that year. Henry stood as a candidate for Perthshire. The result of each
