The Dukes (62 page)

On the accession of George I Maccartney returned to England and was arrested for murder. He was tried in June 1716, when Hamilton's evidence was discredited by his admission of possible error. (Hamilton had himself been tried and acquitted.) Maccartney was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, and was burnt in the hand with a cold iron, according to the custom of the day.

Just before the duel, Hamilton had been appointed Ambassador to Paris, and had delayed his departure in order to settle the dispute with Mohun. Had he left in time, he would probably have disap­peared into the fog of minor history, never to be remembered. He had recently been created Duke of Brandon in the peerage of Great Britain (by Queen Anne in 1711), being one of the first creations since the union with Scotland. But the House of Lords had voted that he should not be entitled to a seat under this name; he would be allowed to continue to sit as a representative peer fo: Scotland. The Lords did not object to the principle, but to its being applied in favour of the 4th Duke of Hamilton.

Of his son, the 5th Duke, little is known, save that he reflected family traits in finding it difficult to make up his mind whether he was a Jacobite or not. He married three times. His brother earns a mention for the simple distinction of being called Lord Anne Hamil­ton. He was named after his godmother, Queen Anne, an honour which he may have lived to regret. We have no record that he found his name embarrassing, but it is known that Lord Anne was kept by a wealthy older woman, Mary Edwards, with an income of £60,000 a year, until she grew tired of him. There is a possibility that they married secretly in 1731; he was already twice a widower by 1729, when he was twenty-six years old.

His first wife had died at the age of eighteen in giving birth to the son and heir, the 6th Duke of Hamilton and 3rd Duke of Brandon (i724-most beautiful women of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Gunning.

Elizabeth and Maria Gunning were the daughters of an impover­ished Irishman, John Gunning, of County Roscommon. They were so poor that they had to escape the bailiffs by handing their furniture out of a window after midnight.
⁶
They came to London while they were still under twenty, and somehow or other gained access to the Duchess of Bedford, after which they were presented at Court. From that moment there was no looking back for the Gunnings. Their qualities were beauty of face and body, and pleasant good nature. With such boons, their want of a dowry or a station in life was, for once, of small matter. Within months of their arrival they were the most famous ladies in London. At the presentation, says Walpole, "the crowd was so great, that even the noble mob in the Drawing- room clambered upon tables and chairs to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs; and people go early to get places at the theatres when it is known they will be there."
⁷

One of those who were captivated by the beauty of Elizabeth Gunning was the "hot, debauched, extravagant" Duke of Hamilton, a well-known rake, hardly ever sober, and alarmingly over-sexed. So much did he want her, and so passionate were his imprecations, that when she said she would not submit to his desires before they were married, he married her within the hour. At Hyde Park Corner there was a church, St George's Chapel, where clandestine or hurried marriages often took place. The parson was summoned from his bed at 12.30 a.m., but even he would not perform the ceremony with­out, at least, a ring. So Elizabeth Gunning became Duchess of Hamilton with the ring from a bed-curtain. She was eighteen years old. Henry Fox described the marriage with euphemism: "I fancy he tried what he could without matrimony. But at one o'clock (not prevailing I suppose) sent for his friend Lord Hume out of bed . . . in consequence of which he was in bed with the lady soon after two, and carried her out of town the next morning."
⁸

They journeyed northwards to the Duke's palace in Scotland and when it was known they would stop at an inn in Newcastle 700 people sat up all night, to catch a glimpse of her.
⁹
Maria Gunning became Countess of Coventry, and died of consumption in 1760. The Duke of Hamilton died in 1758, aged thirty-four, apparently of a cold, and the following year Elizabeth married Lord Lorne, eventu­ally Duke of Argyll. In this way the ancient dispute between the Hamiltons and the Campbells, deadly enemies in the seventeenth century, was resolved by a poor but pretty Irish girl.

Her rise in rank was unique in peerage. From being Miss Gunning she accumulated five dukedoms, six marquessates, nine baronies, two viscountcies, six counties (earldoms) - twenty-eight titles in all. No one in the world beneath a crowned head possessed so many peerage dignities.

All four of her sons became dukes. Her eldest by Hamilton was 7th Duke of Hamilton, who died at the age of fourteen, and was succeeded by his brother as 8th Duke (1756-1799). From his mother he inherited commanding beauty of face, from his father an over­developed sexual appetite. He was convicted of adultery with the Countess of Eglinton in 1788, as a result of which the Earl was granted a divorce. He had an affair with one Mrs Esten, producing an illegitimate daughter, to whom he left as much as he could, oblig­ing his successor in the dukedom to buy it all back. His legitimate wife was a commoner, one of the Burrell girls, daughters of a Customs officer; she divorced him sixteen years later. The Duke was never able to control his dissipated ways, his love for low company, his alcoholism, or the Hamilton quick temper. He died aged forty-four, from too much good living.

The 9th Duke was father to Lady Anne Hamilton, poor Queen Caroline's only friend, and supposed author of that scandalously revealing
Secret History of the Court of England.
Creevey saw her waiting upon the Queen, leaning on her brother Archy's arm, "though she is full six feet high, and bears a striking resemblance to one of Lord Derby's great red deer".
¹⁰
Another daughter was Charlotte, who married the 11th Duke of Somerset, taking with her many Hamilton heirlooms which were to cause irreconcilable rifts in the Somerset family a generation later.

For the next hundred years, the dukes of Hamilton were chiefly notable for the exaggerated importance they attached to their own rank and ancient birth. The 10th Duke of Hamilton (1767-1852) carried pride in family to risible extremes. He firmly believed, without a hint of tongue in cheek, that he was heir to the throne of Scotland, being descended from the regent Earl of Arran. Heaven knows what he would have done to anyone who pointed out that the Earl of Abercorn was the direct descendant in the male line. Strangely enough, both this Duke and his approximate contemporary, Mar­quess of Abercorn, were known as
magnifico,
for they rivalled each other in pomposity. For his part, the Duke decided that no nobleman of his extraordinary class should be without a hermit in the grounds of his palace; it was a fashionable ornament. So he advertised for one, stipulating that the hermit should shave his beard only once a year, and only lightly.
¹¹
It was, however, in his death that he sur­passed himself. He had an Egyptian sarcophagus brought to Scot­land from Thebes, which had been made for an ancient Egyptian queen, and bore her sculpted and painted image on the outside. He had bought it in open auction for £11,000, outbidding the British Museum. To house the sarcophagus he built a colossal and ridiculous mausoleum, with dome and marble and statues, in which would lie himself and his nine predecessors, as well as all future heirs to the throne of Scotland. "What a grand sight it will be," he used to say, "when Twelve Dukes of Hamilton rise together here at the Resurrection!" He frequently would go to his splendid tomb and lie in it to see how it fitted. His last ride out was to buy spices for his own embalming (and he
was
embalmed), and as he lay dying he was haunted by the thought that he might not fit the sarcophagus, which could not be altered being made of Egyptian syenite, the hardest of all rocks. His last words were, "Double me up! Double me up!", but no amount of doubling could squeeze his body into the mummy-case, so his feet had to be chopped off, and placed in separately.
^12
[12]

The 11th Duke (1811-1863), son of the modern Pharaoh, had his share of honest Hamilton excess. He married a German princess and was friend and neighbour to the Duchess of Teck, who often visited Baden. The Tecks' little daughter, Princess May of Teck, remembered the Hamiltons in later life when she sat on the consort throne of England as Queen Mary.
¹³
The nth Duke never travelled in France with a lesser retinue than 200 horses, carriages, and servants. He used to drive down the Champs-Elysees in a carriage drawn by twelve horses and six postilions, in contravention of the law which forbade anyone but the Emperor Napoleon to drive with more than eight horses and postilions (it was called the Sumptuary Law). Hamilton, of course, considered himself at least the equal of Napoleon, and far aloof from such petty legalities.
¹⁴

The 12th Duke (1845—1895) married a daughter of Louise von Alten, who was in turn Duchess of Manchester and Duchess of Devonshire. On him we must linger a while, for he resurrected the old quarrel over
who
should be the Duke of Chatelherault. Briefly, we must go back and see what happened to this title, conferred on James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, in 1549.The patent of Henri II creating the dignity specifically nominates Arran's heirs in perpetuity ("
pour lui, ses hoirs et ayants cause, a perpetuite
"). But who were Arran's heirs? Certainly not the dukes of Hamilton. The heir male of Arran was Abercorn, and the
heir of line
was the Earl of Derby. According to an edict of Louis XIV, dated May 1711, all French dukedoms could
only
descend through the direct male line, which would make Abercorn entitled to the dukedom of Chatelherault. The Hamiltons were not having any of this.

From 1651 (the death of the 2nd Duke of Hamilton) until 1799, the family made no attempt to claim the French title, although they had occasionally pocketed the income from the duchy while it lasted. Then, in 1818, the Marquess of Abercorn was recognised in France as Due de Chatelherault. The 10th Duke of Hamilton (the one who died like an Egyptian Empress) was disdainful. He simply assumed the title the following year, 1819, as if the Abercorn line did not exist. He was acting illegally in so doing.

The squabble went on for the rest of the century, and fills two huge boxes of documents in the Hamilton archives. The Hamiltons had the upper hand, for they were in a position to pull strings — the 12th Duke's mother was a cousin of Napoleon! Accordingly, in 1864, he succeeded in being "confirmed" in the French title by the French Emperor, "
le Duc d'Hamilton a ete maintenu et confirme, par decret du avril 20, 1864 dans le titre hereditaire du Due de Chatelherault
etc."
¹⁵
Hamilton's case rested on his ancestor, the 2nd Duke and last in the male line of Hamiltons in
that
branch of the family, having entailed his French honours on 19th March 1650 upon Duchess Anne and
her
heirs.
¹⁶
Two things make this view of events untenable, (1) that the 2nd Duke
could not
have altered the entail of a French duchy, it was simply not in his power to do so, (2) that Napoleon
could not
"confirm" a title which the "holder" did not legally possess.

As one peerage lawyer wrote, "His Grace of Hamilton has as much right to it as he has to the throne of China."

The upshot of it all is that the present Duke of Abercorn is, whether he or anyone else likes it or not, the legal Duke of Chatelherault (1549), whereas the present Duke of Hamilton is
also
Duke of Chatelherault by a new Napoleonic creation of 1864. Neither of them is at all exercised by the problem.*

Now back to the 12th Duke of Hamilton, busy accumulating as many titles as he could. Another title he claimed, with justification

*
Anyone wishing to enquire further should consult the Hamilton Papers at the Scottish National Register of Archives.

this time, and with success, was the even more complex earldom of
Selkirk. It is worth looking at, because it must be unique in the entire
peerage.

The 1st Earl of Selkirk was William Douglas, the man who mar­ried Anne, Duchess of Hamilton in her own right and was later created Duke of Hamilton himself, for his lifetime only. (Incidentally, this marriage united the Douglas and Hamilton lines that we find reflected in the family surname.) He had been Earl of Selkirk in 1646, and Duke of Hamilton in 1660. On receiving the dukedom, he
resigned
his earldom, surrendering it to the King's hands to do with as His Majesty pleased. In fact, by surrendering a dignity to the King, you give back what was only yours during the monarch's pleasure, the monarch being the source and fountain of all peerage dignities. So the King assumed the earldom of Selkirk himself for a period. However, there was always the tacit understanding that it should be reconferred, with a fresh patent, on the Duke's family, but with a unique remainder. It was stipulated that this title should belong to the
third
son of the Duke of Hamilton and
his
heirs male and that, if the line failed, and if the lines of any younger sons should fail, the title should revert to the Duke of Hamilton of the day
until such time
as he had a younger son to start a new line of earls of Selkirk. As long as the Duke of Hamilton had one son, the earldom would be absorbed into his subsidiary titles; but it would re-emerge as a title in its own right (
not
a courtesy title) when there was a cadet branch of the family to assume it. Accordingly the title was conferred upon the third son of the 1st Duke in 1688, and remained with his descendants until 1886, when their line came to an end and it was claimed by the 12th Duke of Hamilton. It remained with the dukedom until the death of the 13th Duke in 1940, whereupon his dukedom and subsidiary titles passed to his eldest son, while the independent earldom of Selkirk went to his second son, Group Captain Lord Nigel Douglas-Hamilton (who was on active service at the time and did not claim his title until after the war). He, then, is the 7th and present Earl of Selkirk, and his son, born in 1939, is the Master of Selkirk; a new line of earls has begun, to exist in divergence from the senior line of Hamiltons.