On Saturday 11 October 2008, the inhabitants of a small village lying 20 km west of Berlin, unveiled a monument to a soldier who fell on nearby soil some two-hundred-and-fifty years ago. The soldier, one of the finest warriors of the eighteenth century and a Field Marshal of Frederick the Great of Prussia, was fatally wounded on 14 October 1758 while fighting Austrian forces in the environs of the Saxony village of Hochkirch in a major engagement of the Seven Years’War (1756-63). But the soldier in question was not a native German as one might expect; he was in fact a Scotsman, a Jacobite and a dedicated Freemason, and his life story reads as if it were lifted straight from the pages of a boy’s-own annual.
     James Francis Edward Keith was born on 11 June 1696 at Inverugie castle near Peterhead, Aberdeenshire. He was the second son of William Keith, the 9th hereditary Earl Marischal of Scotland and Lady Mary Drummond, and he was educated privately and at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Both he and his elder brother George, the 10th and last Earl Marischal, participated in the disastrous Jacobite rising of 1715 and during that winter he helped to entertain ‘the old’ Stuart Pretender at the Keith family castle at Fettereso. However, the brothers paid a heavy price for their allegiance, as the family title was attainted and they were both forced to flee to France via the Scottish Western Isles.
     James Keith initially settled in Paris where he received a stipend from the Pretender and this enabled him, for a short time at least, to continue with his studies. Then in 1717, after failing to enter the service of Peter the Great of Russia, he decided to decamp to Spain where he later became embroiled in two Spanish-backed attempts to restore the Stuarts to the British throne. He also served as colonel in the Spanish army during a four-month siege of the British colony at Gibraltar together with his brother and Philip Duke of Wharton, both fellow Freemasons. But following the cessation of hostilities in the summer of 1727, he decided to chart a new career path in Russia.
     Keith arrived in St. Petersburg in early September 1728 and by the autumn of 1730 he had won the trust of the Tsarina Anna Ivanova, who appointed him lieutenant-colonel of her personal bodyguard, the newly formed Ismailovsky guard regiment. Then in 1732, Keith was appointed inspector-general of the military districts along the Don and Volga rivers. And it was around this time that Keith also reportedly served as the master of a masonic lodge in St. Petersburg, although it is not known when or where he was initiated.
     Keith commanded during the War of Polish Succession and in the defence of the Ukraine against Turkey and her allies, but in July 1737 he was forced to retire from military service for two years after being injured at the siege of Ochakov.
     During his convalescence the Tsarina wrote to George II on his behalf and asked him ‘to aid’ Keith in matters relating to his ‘inheritance in England’. Although the original reply of British government is no longer extant, it would appear that it was favourable to Keith as he subsequently travelled to London and on 25 January 1740 was presented to George II dressed in the uniform of the Ismailovsky guards by the Russian ambassador, Prince Scherbatov.
     The meeting was duly reported in the British press and it was the subject much contemporary speculation; one report even claimed that he had sworn allegiance to the Hanoverian monarch, although Keith later stated that he would not swear allegiance to any other ‘Prince in Europe’ while he was in the service of the Tsarina.

Provincial Grand Master of Russia

On Friday 28 March 1740 Keith also attended a quarterly meeting of the grand lodge held at the Devil Tavern, Temple Bar. The minutes of the meeting record that he was ‘a Lieutenant-General in the service of the Empress of Russia’, and that his cousin, John Keith, 3rd Earl of Kintore, was proposed as grand master for the ensuing year.
     Once installed, Kintore formally appointed his cousin provincial grand master ‘for all the Russias’. Indeed, Keith’s elevated masonic status at this time was even celebrated in a Russian masonic hymn, a verse of which ran:

After him [Peter the Great] Keith, full of light came to the Russians, and exalted by zeal lit here the sacred fire. He erected the temple of wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts, and strengthened us in brotherhood. He was an image of that dawn, the clear rise of which announces to the world, the arrival of the light-shedding queen.

     Upon his return to St. Petersburg Keith was presented with a sword and medal by the Tsarina, and he replaced General Rumiantsev as both the civil and military governor of the Ukraine. But following the death of the Tsarina on 28 October, yet another succession crisis erupted and he once again found himself embroiled in a war, this time with Sweden.
     Keith was promptly recalled to Russia and appointed second in command of a 50,000 man army which he used to defeat the Swedes at Helsingfors. He also led his forces into Finland and after a brief stint as governor of the country he returned triumphant to Russia.
     In 1743 Russia and Sweden went to war again over the vexed question of the Swedish succession. This time Keith acted as naval commander and managed to advance his Russian forces to the Aland Islands within striking distance of Stockholm. The Swedish government panicked and entered into peace negotiations, while Keith returned with Russian troops to Finland, where, in August, the conflict was brought to a close with the signing of the Treaty of Abö (Turku).
     The following month Keith was despatched to Stockholm at the head of a military and diplomatic mission which had been requested by the Swedish King Frederick who feared an attack from Denmark. While the 12,000 Russian troops under his command were stationed in two small coastal towns south of Stockholm, Keith spent most of his time pursuing diplomatic business in the Swedish capital.
     And it was there, during the winter of 1743, that Keith established a masonic lodge which met until June 1744 when he was recalled to Russia. He did not participate in the Jacobite rising of 1745 as he was preoccupied with his military duties.
     In 1747 he left Russia and travelled to the Prussian court of Frederick the Great. Frederick was an enlightened monarch and a fellow Freemason, and he welcomed Keith with open arms and elevated him to the rank of Field Marshal; he was also appointed governor of Berlin and made an honorary member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Keith went on to play a major role in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and participated in several Prussian victories, before he was temporarily forced to retire from the campaign on health grounds. After a short period of recuperation he returned to the front and on 14 October 1758 was shot in the abdomen at the battle of Hochkirk. Characteristically, he refused to leave the battlefield and sometime later was fatally struck in the chest by a cannonball; he was buried at the local church the following day.
     Keith was widely viewed as one of the greatest military commanders of the era, and his body was, at the behest of Frederick the Great, subsequently exhumed and formally re-interred in Berlin amid the pomp and pageantry of a full military funeral. In fact, Frederick was so devastated by his loss that he reportedly wept over Keith’s coffin and later described him in glowing terms:

he was sweet in his demeanour, a man of virtues and fine manners, clever in his metier, and showing, besides his education as a man of the world, the courage of a hero when in battle.

     The French writer and philosopher Voltaire (who later became a Freemason), was among those who sent condolences to the Prussian monarch, while James’s elder brother George provided a fitting epitaph for his memorial in Potsdam: Probus vixit, fortis obiit (‘He lived honestly, died bravely’). A copy of this monument was later gifted to the people of Peterhead by Kaiser Wilhelm I.