The title had been granted in 1621 by James I to his friend and helper, Sir David Murray (d. 1631), a Scottish politician of some note. Stormont's elder son was William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield. Lord Stormont's family was Jacobite in its politics, and his second son James (c. 1690-1728), being apparently mixed up in some of the plots of the time, joined the court of the exiled Stuarts and in 1711 was created Earl of Dunbar by James Francis Edward Stuart, the "Old Pretender".