Trouble now began to fall thickly on Lady Jean. Her delicate child, Sholto, died after a brief illness. She was distracted with grief, and cried out in her deep distress: "O Sholto! Sholto! my son Sholto! if I could but have died for you!" This last blow of fate seems to have completely crushed her. A few months later, she gave up her gallant and hopeless struggle, but only with her life. Calling her remaining son to her bedside she said, with streaming eyes: "May God bless you, my dear son; and, above all, make you a worthy and honest man; for riches, I despise them. Take a sword, and you may one day become as great a hero as some of your ancestors." Then, but a few moments before drawing her last breath, she said to those around her: "As one who is soon to appear in the presence of Almighty God, to whom I must answer, I declare that the two children were born of my body." Thus passed "beyond these voices" a woman, who, whatever her faults, carried a brave heart through sorrows and trials which might well have crushed the proudest spirit.
Lady Jean's death probably did more to advance her son's cause than all her scheming and courage during life. Influential friends flocked to the motherless boy, whose misfortunes made such an appeal to sympathy and protection. His father succeeded to the family baronetcy and became a man of some substance. His uncle, the Duke, took to wife, at sixty-two, his cousin, "Peggy Douglas, of Mains," a lady of strong character who had long vowed that "she would be Duchess of Douglas or never marry"; and in Duchess "Peggy" Archibald found his most stalwart champion, who gave her husband no peace until the Duke, after long vacillation, and many maudlin moods, in which he would consign the "brat" to perdition one day and shed tears over his pathetic plight the next, was won over to her side. To such good purpose did the Duchess use her influence that when her husband the Duke died, in 1761, Colonel (now Sir John) Stewart was able to write to his elder son by his first marriage:
"DEAR JACK,--I have not had time till now to acquaint you of the Duke of Douglas's death, and that he has left your brother Archie his whole estate."
Thus did Lady Jean triumph eight years after her scheming brain was stilled in death.