David Leslie, 3rd Earl of Leven

Who was David Leslie, 3rd Earl of Leven?

David Melville, later Leslie, 3rd Earl of Leven and de jure 2nd Earl of Melville was a Scots aristocrat, politician, and soldier.

The third son of George Melville, 1st Earl of Melville and his second wife Catherine Leslie-Melville, he shared the Whig political and the Presbyterian religious sympathies of his father.

In 1681, with the death of the rival claimant, John Leslie, 1st Duke of Rothes, he was permitted to enter into the Earldom of Leven.

In 1683 Leven and his father were suspected of complicity in the Rye House Plot, a Whig conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York. To escape arrest they fled to the Netherlands where they joined the band of British Protestant exiles at the court of Prince William of Orange.

Here Leven was used by William to obtain the support of German princes for his invasion of England in 1688, Leven himself having raised a regiment for that invasion, in the course of which he received the surrender of the town of Plymouth in south Devonshire.

In 1706 he was appointed as one of the Commissioners for the Union of England and Scotland.