George Melville, 1st Earl of Melville (1636 – 20 May 1707) was a Scottish peer and politician who was active during the reign of William III and Mary II. In 1643, he succeeded his father as Lord Melville.
The turning point in his career came in 1683 when Melville and his son David Leslie-Melville, the Earl of Leven, were accused of complicity in the Rye House Plot. a Whig conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York (the future James VII).[1]
To escape arrest Melville, together with his son, fled to the Netherlands where they joined the band of British Protestant exiles at the court of Prince William of Orange. Here Melville became one of the chief Scots supporters of William of Orange.
It is possible that details of Melville and his son's lives were used by Sir Walter Scott in this novel Old Mortality to lend authentic sounding biographical detail to the hero Henry Morton.
In the novel Morton – like Melville a moderate Whig who desires peace and religious tolerance whilst supporting the Stuart monarchy – is reluctantly involved in the Covenanter uprising of 1689 (albeit on the Rebel side) and attempts to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict between his brother Calvinists and the AnglicanRoyalists.
Later Morton is forced to flee to the Netherlands where (living under his mother's name of Melville) he becomes one of William of Orange's supporters, before returning to Britain in the wake of the Glorious Revolution.
