Catalogue description THE GORDON LETTERS

The one thousand letters dating from 1677 to 1860 which comprise the Gordon Papers, are the correspondence of the five Dukes of Gordon. The letters, which were originally preserved at Gordon Castle, were first noticed in the 1st Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1874, although a very small number of them were printed in the proceedings of the Spalding Club at a slightly earlier date. In 1836 they became the property of the 5th Duke of Richmond on the extinction of the Dukedom of Gordon, and, in 1911, the 7th Duke had the letters bound in nine volumes. At the same time two further volumes were bound. These were manuscript transcripts of almost seven hundred letters relating to the Gordon family from the Laing Papers in the University Library at Edinburgh.

Charles Gordon was born in 1649 and succeeded his father Lewis in 1653 as the 4th Marquis of Huntly. In 1661 the attainder of his grandfather, who was executed in 1649, was reversed by Act of Parliament. Charles was educated in France at a Catholic seminary, and joined the French army in 1673. He served under Turenne and the Prince of Orange and with the east of manner characteristic of his family made a number of friends in Europe. In 1675 he returned to England, and in the following year, married Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the 6th Duke of Norfolk, returning with her to Scotland. As a Catholic he was barred from public employment, but he was appointed Commander of the Northern Forces against Argyll's rebellion in 1685. The collection includes a number of letters relating to this event.

Charles II created him Duke of Gordon in November 1684, largely at the instigation of Claverhouse, but it was when James II succeeded his brother that the Duke began to receive considerable advantages. He was made one of the twenty-six Commissioners of Supply; Constable of Edinburgh Castle; a Privy Councillor; and one of the original eight Knights of the Thistle. The letters from James to the Duke and from his wife, Mary of Modena, to the Duchess attest their friendship. However, although he was an ardent supporter of the House of Stuart to the end of his days, the 1st Duke was not an ardent supporter of the re-establishment of Catholicism in Scotland, and so he lost favour at Court.

After the landing of William of Orange, the Duke held Edinburgh Castle for James II, but surrendered it to the Convention on 14 June 1689. William had written to him on 6 February 'In persuance ... of my design to restore the Laws of both Kingdoms by which no man that is a Roman Catholick is capable of any Publick trust Civil or Military I desire you to leave the Castle of Edenburgh and the Garison with the Regalia Magazines and arms ... In the hands and custodie of Mr. Achmoutie ... as being the next Protestant Officer under you', which contrasts nicely with James II's remark in a letter to Queensberry shortly after he had made the Duke of Gordon Custodian, that he wished the town to be 'civiler to Catholics by seeing it in the hands of one of that persuasion'. After his ambiguous conduct of the seige, the 1st Duke was coldly received at the Courts of St. James and St. Germain, and returned to Scotland, where he was treated with considerable suspicion and occasionally imprisoned. His correspondence at this time is no longer dominated by official letters from the Council, but by letters from peers with Jacobite sympathies. In 1697 the Duchess retired to a convent in Flanders. The Duke who was visited by and received letters from Nathanial Hooke, was classed by Hooke as 'a Catholic and entirely devoted to the King', and in March 1708 he was arrested, together with other Scottish Lords as a Jacobite suspect, and confined in Edinburgh Castle. Letters to the Duke from James Stuart, the Old Pretender, are among the Royal letters.

There are more than a hundred letters from the Duke to Mr. Dunbar, his agent at Gordon Castle, written while the Duke was at Edinburgh, showing his interest in the family estates. The Duke was confined to the City of Edinburgh on the accession of George I, and died at Leith in 1716. Macky, in his Characters, describing the 1st Duke when he was past fifty, says that 'he hath a great many links in him, but they do not all make a complete chain; is certainly a very fine gentleman and understands conversation and the belles letters; is well bred; made for the company of ladies, but is very covetous, which extremely eclipses him. The priests and new converts represented him to be a libertine and a fop; he is a Roman Catholic, because he was bred so, but otherwise thinks very little of revealed religion. He had a good estate which, notwithstanding his turns, he improves. He is handsome and taller than the ordinary size; thin; dresses well; but is somewhat finical, resembling the French'.

Alexander Gordon, the only son of the 1st Duke of Gordon, was born in 1678 and educated in the Catholic faith. As 5th Marquis of Huntly he travelled abroad extensively and visited several European Courts. He formed close friendships with King Frederick of Prussia and Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and there are a number of letters from both in the collection, particularly from the Grand Duke and his wife. In 1707 he married Henrietta, daughter of Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peter-borough, and their son and heir was christened Cosmo in the Grand Duke's honour. An ardent Jacobite like his father, Alexander was compelled to give a bond to surrender if called upon, at the time of his father's arrest in 1708. The list of his correspondents reads like a Jacobite roll-call and he received a number of letters from his father. The most interesting being an apology for the Stuarts covering twenty sides [Goodwood MS. 1428].

In 1715, he proclaimed James Stuart, King, at Gordon Castle, and joined his standard at Perth with three hundred horsemen and two thousand foot, but he returned to Gordon Castle after the Battle of Sheriffmuir. In February 1716 a company of the Earl of Sutherland's men took possession of the Castle and Huntly was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. The correspondence includes the proceedings under the Disarming Act against Huntly's followers, and a number of moving letters from some of his imprisoned followers. However, Huntly was soon pardoned 'for quitting the rebels in time', and retired to Gordon Castle, succeeding his father as second Duke later in the year. For the rest of his life the Duke lived at Gordon Castle, entertaining on a lavish scale, exchanging letters and presents with the Duke of Tuscany and the King of Prussia, and corresponding with his friends among the Scottish Peerage. He was well regarded at Court, especially by Queen Caroline, who corresponded with him as a friend of her father. The Duchess, who brought up her eleven children as Protestants, for which she received a government pension of £1000 in 1735, was occasionally estranged from the Duke as her father's letters to the Duke make clear. She died in 1760, having outlived her husband by thirty-two years.

Cosmo Gordon succeeded his father as third Duke in 1728, at the age of seven. Little can be gathered from his correspondence about his character, as the letters which have survived are mostly formal courtesy letters. In 1741, he married Catherine Gordon, the daughter of William Gordon, 2nd Earl of Aberdeen, his brother-in-law. Apparently, he married Catherine without her father's knowledge or consent. The 3rd Duke died in France in 1752 and his widow, who married General Staats Long Morris, lived on until 1799.

Alexander Gordon was born at Gordon Castle in 1743 and succeeded his father as 4th Duke of Gordon. He was educated at Eton and afterwards entered the Army, becoming a Colonel in 1793. In 1767 he married Jane Maxwell, the daughter of Sir William Maxwell, and was described by Lord Kames at the time of his marriage as 'the greatest subject in Britain in regard not only of the extent of his rent roll but of the number of persons depending on his rule and protection'. In the same year as his marriage, the Duke was elected one of the Scottish Representative Peers, a position he held until 1784, during which time he generally supported Pitt. The Duke received a number of marks of Royal favour. He was created a Knight of the Thistle in 1775; Earl of Norwich and F.R.S. in 1784; Chancellor of King's College, Aberdeen, 1793-1827; Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, 1794-1806, 1807-1827; and Lord Lieutenant of Aberdeen, 1794-1808.

The Duke corresponded with all the foremost politicians of his time, and the collection includes letters from William Pitt, Sir Robert Peel, Lord North, Lord Palmerston, Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Portland, as well as various members of the English Royal Family. He was also a devotee of rural pursuits and field sports and a number of letters attest to these interests. There are some extremely interesting letters from Patrick Copland, who was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen. In 1805 the Duchess of Gordon determined to have a separate establishment and almost a whole volume of letters [Goodwood MS. 1173] is taken up with her bitter estrangement from the Duke, and the legal and financial arrangements which it necessitated.

The Duchess had been a noted beauty in her day, and was an influential hostess for the Tory party, receiving gatherings of the Pitt administration at her house in Pall Mall. She had an unrivalled capacity for match-making, marrying her daughters to the Dukes of Bedford, Manchester and Richmond, and the Marquis of Cornwallis, having failed with Pitt and Eugène Beauharnais. Cornwallis expressed to the Duchess some hesitation about marrying her daughter on account of supposed insanity in the Gordon family, and received from her the gratifying assurance that there was not one drop of Gordon blood in Louisa. Among her correspondents in the collections are a number of literary friends such as Lord Kames, the Earl of Temple, the Earl of Nugent, Alexander Geddes and Dr. James Beattie, all of whom wrote to her regularly.

The Duchess died in 1812, and in 1820 the Duke married Jane Christie by whom he had already had four children. She died in 1824 and the Duke in 1827.

Lord Adam Gordon, the youngest brother of the 3rd Duke of Gordon, is also well represented in the collection. Lord Adam was a notable soldier, and ended his career a full General and Commander of the Forces in Scotland. He was the Member of Parliament for Aberdeenshire from 1733 to 1768 and for Kincardineshire from 1774 to 1788. The General was a close friend of the exiled French Court during the Napoleonic Wars and entertained them at Holyrood House. The collection includes letters from Prince Charles Phillipe, Comte d'Artois, and Prince Louis Antoine, Duc d'Angoulême, and several of their retinue, especially M. de Rebourquil, who seems to have acted as their agent. One hundred and twenty-two letters from Lord Adam to George Gordon are included in the Laing Papers, and are mostly concerned with Scottish elections and family business.

George Gordon was born in 1770, and educated at Eton and St. John's College, Cambridge. He had a long career in the army, and was a Member of Parliament for Eye from 1806 to 1807. Like his father, whom he succeeded as 5th Duke in 1827, he was Lord Lieutenant of Aberdeen, 1808-1836, and Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, 1828-1830. In 1813, he married Elizabeth Brodie, but the marriage was childless, and when the Duke died in 1836, the dukedom became extinct. The Duchess, who rescued the 5th Duke from his financial embarrassments with her large dowry, survived him for thirty-seven years, devoting herself to works of charity, after she joined the Free Church in 1846. Very little family correspondence has survived from this period, but a certain number of relevant letters will be found in the section relating to the Dukedom of Gordon on pp. 52-55 of volume II of this catalogue.