The Dukes (61 page)

20.
   
Atholl Papers, 59 (5), 51.

21.
    
Atholl Papers, 59 (5), 139.

22.
   
Public Record Office, 1841 Census, H.O. 107/678, Section 10.

23.
   
8th Duke of Atholl to Hamish Murray, 1st August 1933.

24.
   
Truth,
4th October 1933.

25.
    
Gentleman's Magazine,
June 1809.

Lockhart, Patten, Macky, all quoted in
Complete Peerage.

Duke of Hamilton; Duke of Abercorn

The rules governing descent in the peerage can produce some fascinating anomalies. Consider the family of Hamilton, which has spawned two separate dukedoms :

-
    
the Duke of Abercorn represents the junior branch, lives in Ireland and has an Irish dukedom. Yet he is the
heir male
of the original Hamilton, and is therefore head of the House of Hamilton.

-
    
the Duke of Hamilton carries the much older Scottish dukedom, and represents the
senior
branch of the family. Yet this branch forfeited the right to be head of the family because it descended through the female line. To make matters worse, he
is,
however,
heir male
of the House of Douglas and head of
that
family.

-
    
they are
both
Duke of Chatelherault in France!

They have also produced along the way an almost unrivalled collection of odd preposterous characters. But first the genealogy needs to be unravelled, for which a brief excursion into Scottish history is necessary.

The common ancestor of both Hamilton and Abercorn was the 2nd Earl of Arran, who died in 1575. He was Governor of Scotland, and second only to the Crown in power. His grandfather had married Lady Mary Stewart, daughter of James II of Scotland, which made Arran
heir presumptive
to the throne of Scotland, a position held by the Hamiltons for the next hundred years. He was guardian to Mary Queen of Scots in her minority, and consequently much courted by the French who wished to secure his alliance against Elizabeth of England. It was for this reason that Henri II conferred upon him the dukedom of Chatelherault in Poitou in 1549; it was a bribe to buy his loyalty; later on we shall look at what happened, or should have happened, to this title.The 2nd Earl of Arran* had five sons, of whom:

(1)
   
died young

(2)
  
succeeded as 3rd Earl of Arran, but was insane and locked up

(3)
  
succeeded as 4th Earl, due to the incapacity of his brother,
was made Marquess of Hamilton in 1599, and is the progenitor of the Dukes of Hamilton

(4)
  
was made Lord Paisley in 1587, is the father of the 1st Earl of
Abercorn, progenitor of the Dukes of Abercorn.

(5)
  
 

Henry VIII actually considered a marriage between his daughter, then Princess Elizabeth, with Arran's eldest surviving son and heir, because he was first in line to the Scottish throne after Mary. Nothing came of it, fortunately for England, as the boy was already well on the way towards lunacy.

Arran's second son did not wait for the death of his brother to assume control of the family. The mad Earl, who was, it seems, "crackbrained and fantastic" rather than a total lunatic, was kept out of harm's way, while his brother was created Marquess of Hamilton in 1599, and Earl of Arran. He was rigidly Protestant, separating from his more easy-going and tolerant brother Claud, Lord Paisley. His son was 2nd Marquess of Hamilton (1589-1625), also loyal to the Crown, but he died prematurely at the age of thirty-five, and it was suspected that he had been poisoned. If so, his wife might have had something to do with it; she was opposed to him politically, even raising an army to fight for the Govenanters against the King, and riding herself at the head of the troops. They had married when Hamilton was fourteen years old, and by the time he was sixteen, his son and heir had been born. This is the child who was to become 1st Duke of Hamilton (1606-1649). Like his father, he also married at fourteen, and his bride was a mere seven years old. It is worth pausing a moment to consider this child, for her mother was Susan Villiers, sister of the Duke of Buckingham and daughter of Sir George Villiers, whose offspring are to be found in so many of our noble families. Evidence of the dominant Villiers personality emerges in several of the dukes of Hamilton, particularly the 4th and the 6th. The 4th Duke reinforced the Villiers connection by fathering a natural son by Barbara Fitzroy, who was the daughter of Charles II and Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland.

As Marquess of Hamilton, the 1st Duke is already known to us as the opponent of Argyll at the time of the Covenant, for he was the

*
He has nothing to do, by the way, with the journalist Earl of Arran of our own day, whose family name was Gore, and whose title was Irish.

luckless royal Commissioner whose task was to compel acceptance of the new Prayer Book in Edinburgh, and who failed dismally. In 1638 he suffered the humiliation of having declared, in the name of the King, the dissolution of the Scottish Assembly, and being wholly ignored by the Scots, who went on with their meeting as if he had not been there. The following year he led the King's army against the Covenanters, once more with disastrous results. Like his forbear Arran, he brought success to none of his undertakings, yet, also like Arran, he wielded an influence quite out of proportion to his talents. Clarendon says that he "had the greatest power over the affections of the King, of any man of that time", and that "no man had such an ascendant over him". The historian also states that Hamilton had more enemies than any man in the kingdom. In the
Dictionary of National Biography
he is reckoned "devoid of intellectual or moral strength, and he was therefore easily brought to fancy all future tasks easy and all present obstacles insuperable". With his limited under­standing, he sought compromise as the solution to all problems, with the result that problems were simply shelved, while Hamilton felt pleased with himself.

The last years of his life were pathetically useless. Only weeks after he was created Duke, he found himself in prison, where he languished from 1644 to 1646. In 1648 he led the Scottish army for the relief of the King, with typical ineptitude, surrendering to Cromwell at Uttoxeter after the briefest display of resolution.
Cromwell
was not a ditherer like his victim. In 1649 Hamilton was indicted, tried, found guilty of treason, and beheaded in Palace Yard, Westminster, only weeks after the King to whom he had been so faithful.

A contemporary said, "There is one good quality in this man,
viz.
that he was born and that God made him: and another,
viz.
that he is dead, and we must speak nothing but good of the dead."

History has not flattered Hamilton. His pomposity, arrogance and wordiness have been noted (all qualities which were to occur again and again in his descendants), as well as his ineffectual deceits. The best portrait of him is by John Buchan, who describes him as "a vain, secret being, a diligent tramper of backstairs, and a master of incompetent intrigue, he is throughout his career a sheep in wolf's clothing . . . His life was one long pose, but the poses were many and contradictory, and the world came to regard as a knave one who was principally a fool."
¹

Hamilton's reward for his fidelity had been his elevation to the rank of Duke in 1643 (which makes this the third oldest dukedom in the Union, surpassed only by Norfolk and Somerset, and paramount inScotland). Having only two daughters, he arranged for a
special remainder
naming his brother William as heir to all titles and estates, assuming, one suspects, that William would beget healthy male heirs. It was to turn out differently.

William, 2nd Duke of Hamilton (1616-1651) emerges the more admirable in comparison with his brother. He had courage, intelli­gence, and honesty, and might have proceeded, after the Civil War, to a distinguished career. His courage, however, cut short his life. Leading the King's troops at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, he could not be restrained from fighting in the thick of carnage, his leg was shattered by a ball from a Cromwellian musket, and he died twelve days later. He was thirty-four years old, and had been Duke for two years.

In his will, made the previous year, he wrote: "Considering the extraordinary kindness my late dearest brother James, Duke of Hamilton, did express to me both in his life and at his death by preferring me even to his own children, I conceive myself in duty and gratitude bound to prefer his to mine, and therefore I do leave and nominate my dearest niece Lady Anna Hamilton, his eldest lawful daughter, as my sole executor . . . and freely give unto her all my jewels, silver, plate, hangings, pictures, beds and whatsoever goods else are mine."
²
As for the titles, they would be hers anyway, by the terms of the patent of 1643. Thus Anne became Duchess of Hamilton in her own right.

It is at this point,
anno
1651, that the male heir of the Hamilton family ceases to be found in the senior branch. Henceforth, the head of the Hamiltons is the man who bears the title of Abercorn, descended from the Marquess of Hamilton's younger brother Claud. The implications of this situation were not lost on the Earl of Abercorn, who immediately set in motion a lawsuit claiming the right to all the Hamilton estates and titles. This was a fanciful claim, for he must have known that all previous entails had been cancelled by the 2nd Duke, as one can so easily redirect an inheritance in the Scottish peerage, and that his settlement of the estates on Anne had been legally recognised. However, Abercorn's anomalous position as male head of the family was tacitly recognised in 1661 when Duchess Anne named the Abercorn line as eventual heirs in the event of the failure of the Hamilton line. This has yet to occur, but the stipulation is still valid today.

Duchess Anne further complicated matters by marrying William Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, and petitioning the King to make him what we should now call a Life Peer, with the title of Duke of Hamilton.

Thus, she was Duchess of Hamilton twice over, once in her own right, and once by virtue of being married to the new Duke. Or, if you like, the 3rd Duke of Hamilton of the first creation (Anne) married the 1st (and last) Duke of Hamilton of the second creation. Their son, who became 4th Duke, inherited his mother's, not his father's, title.

This man, the 4th Duke of Hamilton (1658-1712) was a disaster. He has been accorded a lengthy footnote in history by the circum­stances of his death, in the most notorious of all Hyde Park duels, but the fuss generated by the duel has obscured all previous mention of him. From the first, he was a bone-headed wastrel, using the Hamilton estate, even in the lifetime of his mother, as simply a bottomless source of revenue with which to amuse himself. Selfish, pleasure-seeking, indolent and arrogant, his squalid end might easily have been predicted by those who knew him. He had spent some time in prison on suspicion of Jacobite sympathies (and sent there on the advice of his own father), during which time he contrived to father a child by Barbara Fitzroy (daughter of Charles II and Barbara Villiers), to which he paid no attention whatever; the child was brought up in the household of its grandmother Villiers. Even those who have kind words to say about him do so, it is clear, under the pressure of wishing to be fair towards a man whom many thought had been murdered. There is a letter written within days of the duel in which the writer says, "I assure you he has more friends at present than ever he had while alive."
³
The taint of pride and vanity, never far below the surface in the Hamiltons, together with the absurdly hot-tempered habits of the day, was responsible for a duel which created more excitement than any other. In fairness, Hamilton's opponent, Lord Mohun, came to' Hyde Park with an even more unsavoury reputation than the Duke. Lord Mohun was an infamous profligate. Perpetually drunk, always seeking quarrels, he was no stranger to Hyde Park. He had frequently been engaged in duels, or midnight brawls, and had been twice tried for murder.
⁴
His connection with Hamilton was by marriage. They had both married nieces of the Earl of Macclesfield, who on his death-bed had named Mohun as his sole heir, to the exclusion of Hamilton. For eleven years the Duke fought this decision in the courts, and was eventually provoked to cast doubt upon the credi­bility of one of Mohun's witnesses, to which Mohun retorted that the witness had as much truth as His Grace. The following day the Duke was visited by General Maccartney, on behalf of Lord Mohun, chal­lenging the Duke to meet his lordship in Hyde Park, the usual place for such assignations. The challenge was accepted, the appointment fixed for seven o'clock the next morning, Sunday, 15th November 1712.

Maccartney, who brought with him a similarly fierce and hot- tempered reputation, was Lord Mohun's second. The Duke was seconded by his illegitimate son, Colonel Hamilton. In short, there could hardly have been assembled four more dangerous, foolhardy men; the encounter was bound to be bloody. The Duke addressed Maccartney: "I am well assured, sir," he said, "that all this is by your contrivance, and therefore you shall have your share in the dance; my friend here, Colonel Hamilton, will entertain you." The fight then began with the fury of mad dogs, the seconds joining in, as was then sometimes the custom. No attempt was made at skill; such hatred and pride swelled their emotions that they fell upon each other with unbridled ferocity. It was less an affair of honour than of anger. Maccartney was the first to be disarmed, having wounded his opponent in the right leg. But Colonel Hamilton's attention was diverted by cries of pain from the Duke and, ignoring Maccart­ney, he rushed to his aid. The Duke had been wounded in both legs. Mohun had been struck through the groin, in the arm, and several times in the chest. Their swords were dripping with blood, their faces bathed in it, the grass around them stained. Still they fought on, in rage and fury, paying no thought whatever to self-defence. Some early morning strollers came upon the scene, stood and watched in awe. Then each man made a lunge at the other, simultaneously. The Duke's sword passed right through Lord Mohun's body, to the hilt. Being ambidextrous, he had been fighting with his left hand; Mohun with his dying gesture slashed the Duke's unprotected right arm, severing an artery.
⁵
The Duke fell against a tree, into the arms of Colonel Hamilton, who had dropped his sword. Maccartney then grabbed the sword, and plunged it into the dying Duke's breast, as he lay supported by his son. One of Mohun's footmen, according to contemporary rumour, also attacked the Duke. Mohun died on the spot, and Hamilton was dead before he could be conveyed to his house. The onlookers had made no move to help or intervene, but as soon as the Duke's body was carried off, they fell upon the tree and stripped away pieces of bark for souvenirs. Sightseers flocked there for days afterwards. Comment excited by the affair lasted a long time, and divided London society along political lines. The Tories said that the Duke's death had been engineered by the Whigs, who had an army of thugs lurking in Hyde Park wating to finish off the job should Lord Mohun bungle it. There was of course no truth in this. But the role of Maccartney was sufficiently suspicious for the Privy Council to order an enquiry, at which Colonel Hamilton testified on oath that Maccartney had struck the Duke while he was holding him against the tree. Maccartney had already fled to Holland, so he must have thought there was some truth in the allegation himself. On the strength of Hamilton's evidence, a warrant was issued for Maccartney's arrest, and proclamation was made offering a reward by the Crown of £500 for his apprehension. The Duchess of Hamilton added a further £200. Foreign governments were approached with a view to extradi­tion.