Maitland’s father, who prided himself on his radical views, had married an heiress who was ‘a cypher as to intellect’, and ‘was not vain’ of his family, whom he kept ‘living in great retirement at Dunbar’. Elizabeth Grant, recalling this, added, ‘Sons and daughters were alike plain in face and short in person’.
Maitland made no mark in his first Parliament, in which he was expected to support his father’s friends in power. He was listed among the ‘staunch friends’ of the abolition of the slave trade. On 4 Mar. 1807, after serving on the Penryn committee, he took three weeks’ leave, but he returned to vote for Brand’s motion after the dismissal of the ministry, 9 Apr. 1807. He was then out of Parliament until 1818, when he came in on the interest of a distant relative, Lord Dundas. He signed the requisition to Tierney to lead the Whig opposition in the House, but he was not to be counted on for attendance: his only known vote in that Parliament was against the foreign enlistment bill, 21 June 1819, and no speech is known. Indeed he did not share his father’s advanced views and emerged as a Tory. He died 22 Aug. 1860.