It is unlikely that this Member was in strict legal right of the baronetcy which he assumed in 1777 on the death of his mother’s maternal uncle. The modern legal view is that the title ought to have passed to the Lockharts, male heirs of the daughter of the first baronet, Sir George Wishart of Cliftonhall, by his second marriage. A few months before his death Stuart wrote that he had assumed the title ‘on what I believed good legal advice, as the heir of the last patentee in possession’ and that the question of the legitimacy of his claim had been ‘the cause of much doubt, anxiety and distress to me’. It was not disputed in his lifetime and he matriculated arms as ‘Sir John Belsches Wisheart Baronet’ on 9 May 1778. In the light of modern legal opinion, which admits the right of females to hold a baronetcy, he must be regarded as the fourth baronet and his mother, who died in 1807, as the third, though he was clearly styling himself ‘Sir John’ from 1777.
Stuart, who bought the Fettercairn estate about 1783,
He supported Pitt and, initially, Addington. He is not known to have spoken in the House, but claimed to have been a conscientious attender, as he told Lord Melville in 1806:
I have spent the best nine years of my life in giving that attendance which I conceived to be my duty ... tho’ I have not hitherto been more than a very quiet Member of the House ... my being there gave and now gives you and your friends the voice of a Scotch county Member which otherwise would probably have gone another way.
SRO GD51/6/1476.
In 1802, Charles Innes described him as ‘independent of Mr Dundas and will support administration’; but in a contemporaneous list in the Melville papers he was numbered among the ‘partisans’ of Pitt and Dundas. By 1803 Stuart, who had once admitted that ‘the shyness of my nature, and the great difference in the object which most people pursue, from what appears to me at all interesting, makes me unsociable to a degree that I believe is wrong’, was restless and discontented. He was worried by the mounting load of debt on his estate, desirous of secure employment and inclined in private to blame Melville and Pitt for neglecting him.
In September 1805 Stuart, confessing that ‘the situation of my family, and other circumstances, make the long attendances on parliamentary duty less convenient for me’, pressed Melville to expedite his acquisition of a gown by arranging a secret deal with one of the present possessors. Melville declined to commit himself and showed distinct signs of impatience when Stuart continued to badger him into the new year. He persevered and, shortly after Pitt’s death, obtained from Melville satisfactory assurance that he would ‘support my pretensions to a baron’s gown as having been a thing determined on by Mr Pitt’.
On the formation of the ‘Talents’ William Adam listed him among the ‘Dundas etc. interest’, but shortly afterwards he informed Lord Grenville that he intended to give the new ministry his ‘general support’. Late in March he complained to the premier that a recent local appointment had been made without consulting him. Grenville assured him that no slight had been intended, but Stuart, who had in fact already decided to retire from the House at the next general election, did not vote for the repeal of the Additional Force Act, 30 Apr. 1806.