Fanny Callander, youngest daughter of Sir James Campbell of Craigforth and Ardkinglas Castle, married Sir James Robert George Graham, 2nd Baronet,(1 June 1792 – 25 October 1861) in 1819.
Born 29 May 1809, only son of George Ramsay of Barnton and Hon. Jean Hamilton, daughter of Robert, 8th Baronet of Belhaven. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1828 and married 04 Aug 1828, Hon. Mary Sandilands, daughter of James, 10th Baronet of Torpichen. Died 15 Mar 1850.
Born 1774, 2nd son of John, 11th Baron Elphinstone, by Anne, daughter of James Ruthven, styled 3rd Baron Ruthven. Married June 1816, Catalina Paulina Alessandro, ‘a Spanish lady’, 1s. 4da. suc. gdm. to the Wigtown estates 1799 and took additional name of Fleeming.
Elphinstone Fleeming had seen naval service in the Mediterranean and the West Indies when, in succession to his uncle Lord Keith, he was unanimously returned for Stirlingshire. This was at the instigation of his family and the Duke of Montrose and with the concurrence of the minister, Addington, whom he was expected to support. He was challenged at the ensuing general election by Sir Robert Abercromby, Henry Dundas’s nominee, who on being defeated petitioned unsuccessfully against Fleeming. The grounds were that his qualification, based on the estate of his great-grandfather John, 6th Earl of Wigtown, which he had inherited in 1799 under an entail of 1741, was invalid. His return was unopposed in 1806 and 1807.
On the resumption of hostilities Fleeming commanded the Egyptienne, capturing several ships off the French coast 1803-5, which made him an absentee Member. He was listed one of the Prince of Wales’s friends in the spring of 1804, but as a supporter of Pitt’s second ministry in September 1804 and July 1805. He was reckoned a supporter of the Grenville ministry and voted for Brand’s motion following their dismissal, 9 Apr., against the address, 26 June, and for Whitbread’s motion on the state of the nation, 6 July 1807. Thereafter he was absent for five years on active service, though he continued to be listed a friend of the opposition. In February 1811 his uncle stated on his behalf that Fleeming’s politics were ‘to oppose a weak minister, and support a strong’.
In 1812, faced with a contest with a ministerialist for the county, after he had only just arrived home, he withdrew. He was then advised against standing for Stirling Burghs in place of Sir John Henderson*.4 He had remained preoccupied with his profession, but was never afloat again and did not return to Parliament until 1832. He died 30 Oct. 1840, aged 66, reported to have been ‘a terror to every ship’s company he commanded’.
Thomas Graham, fourth son of William Graham of Airth and his wife Anne Stirling. Succeeded to the estates of his father in Airth after the death of his eldest brother James in 1805. Succeeded to Strowan in Perthshire and Ardoch estate in St Ann, Jamaica, in trust on the death of his uncle General Sir Thomas Stirling in 1808. Married Caroline Mary, only daughter of Major James Home of the Blackadder family, 09/02/1807. When his uncle wrote his trust settlement in 1804, he described Thomas as Captain of the Windham, East Indiaman. Thomas Graham appears to have sold the estate c. 1825-1826, possibly subject to annuities or legacies to other heirs of Charles Stirling.
Francis Jeffrey was born in Edinburgh on 23 October 1773. In 1781 he began studies at the Royal High School in the city and the then studied Greek and Philosophy at Glasgow University and Law and History at Edinburgh University. He prepared himself for the Scottish Bar and made the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott among others. Jeffrey was admitted to the Bar on 16 December 1794 - a Whig in the midst of a profession almost wholly in the hands of Tories. Despairing of success in his chosen profession he turned to writing and to the study of science. Together with Sidney Smith, Francis Horner, and Henry Brougham, he started the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and was its editor 1803-1829. By 1806 his law career had begun to pick up, and with the introduction of juries to civil cases in 1816 it advanced still more. The improved political fortunes of the Whigs also helped in this. Jeffrey participated in politics, advocating reconciliation with the USA after a visit there 1813-1814, and voicing his support for the abolition of income tax. In 1829 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and in 1830 he was appointed Lord Advocate. In 1830 he embarked on a parliamentary career, and from 1832 represented Edinburgh in Parliament. His time in the House was unremarkable but for the drafting of the Scottish Reform Bill with Henry Thomas, Lord Cockburn (1779-1854), in 1831 and 1832, and for the Burgh Bill 1833. In June 1834 he was appointed as Judge of the Court of Session and he took the title Lord Jeffrey. From now on his judicial work would take up his time, and he spent spring in London, winter in Edinburgh, and the summer at Craigcrook Castle, his home on Corstorphine Hill in Edinburgh. Indeed, as a member of the literary and social Friday Club and through the holding of open house at Craigcrook, Jeffrey was able to encourage and pronounce on literary and political matters. Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, died on 26 January 1850. He was buried in Dean Cemetery.
Sir Charles Augustus Murray (22 November 1806 – 3 June 1895) was a British author and diplomat
Born William Lamb, in 1805 he succeeded his elder brother as heir to his father’s title. Now known as Lord Melbourne, he married Lady Caroline Ponsonby. It was a marriage which was to cause him no small amount of grief.
He first came to general notice for reasons he would rather have avoided, when his wife had a public affair with poet Lord Byron. The resulting scandal was the talk of Britain in 1812.
In 1806 he was elected to the Commons as the Whig MP for Leominster, where he served from 1806 to 1812, and from 1816 to 1829, before joining the House of Lords on his father’s death.
He was Secretary for Ireland from 1827 to 1828, and Home Secretary from 1830 to 1834, during which time he cracked down severely on agricultural unrest.
Lady Caroline Ponsonby-Lamb was not a typical politician’s wife. The daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough, and the granddaughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, she was born in 1785.
Lady Caroline married Lord Melbourne, in 1805. After 2 miscarriages, she gave birth to their only child, George Augustus Frederick, in 1807, and was devoted to him. He was epileptic and mentally handicapped and had to be cared for almost constantly.
In 1812, Caroline read Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and declared: “If he was as ugly as Aesop, I must know him.” On meeting Byron that summer, she famously noted in her diary that he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. They began an affair which lasted until 1813, but even after it finished Lady Caroline’s obsession with the poet continued. She published a novel, Glenarvon, in 1816 containing obvious portraits of herself, her husband, Byron and many others.
Embarrassed and disgraced, Melbourne decided to part from his wife, though the formal separation did not occur until 1825.
Lady Caroline died in 1828, aged 42, her death hastened by drink and drugs. Lord Melbourne, not yet Prime Minister, was by her bedside.
On Grey’s resignation in 1834, King William IV appointed Lord Melbourne as the Prime Minister who would be the “least bad choice”, and he remained in office for 7 years, except for 5 months following November 1834 when Sir Peel was in charge.
Without any strong political convictions, he held together a difficult and divided Cabinet and sustained support in the House of Commons through an alliance of Whigs, Radicals and Irish MPs.
He was not a reformer (although the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 did make sure that the growing middle class secured control of local government), but he was efficient in keeping order, raising taxes and conducting foreign policy.
Lord Melbourne also had a close relationship to the monarch. He was Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister, and she trusted him greatly. Their close relationship was founded in his responsibility for tutoring her in the world of politics and instructing her in her role, but ran much deeper than this suggests. Queen Victoria came to regard Lord Melbourne as a mentor and personal friend, and he was given a private apartment at Windsor Castle.
Later in his premiership, his support in Parliament declined and in 1840 it grew difficult to hold the Cabinet together. His unpopular and scandal-hit term ended in August 1841, when he resigned after a series of parliamentary defeats.
Edmonstone, the eldest son of Sir Charles Edmonstone, 2nd Baronet, by his first wife Emma, fifth daughter of Richard Wilbraham Bootle of Rode Hall, Cheshire, and sister of Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, 1st Baron Skelmersdale, was born at 32 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London, on 12 March 1795, and entered Eton in 1808. He removed in 1812 to Christ Church, Oxford, where he proceeded B.A. on 29 November 1816.
In 1819 he went to Egypt, where he visited and explored two of the oases in the great desert, of which he published an account, with views and plans of the ruined temples and tombs. On the death of his father, 1 April 1821, he succeeded to the baronetcy, and fruitlessly contested his father's parliamentary constituency, Stirlingshire, 24 May 1821.
He died at 34 Wilton Place, Belgrave Square, London, on 13 March 1871, leaving a personal fortune of £12,000.
He married, on 10 October 1832, his cousin-german Emma, third daughter of Randle Wilbraham of Rode Hall, Cheshire, and had issue three daughters, who all died in their infancy.[
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as Prime Minister. He won a notable victory against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Archibald John Primrose was born at Dalmeny Castle, West Lothian, on 14 October 1783. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1804. In the Commons he represented the burgh of Helston in 1805-1806, and Cashel in 1806-1807, and in 1814 he inherited the earldom of Rosebery from his father. In 1828 he became a Peer, taking the title Baron Rosebery of Rosebery, Midlothian. As a Liberal he took a keen interest in the Reform Bill 1832, and earlier, in 1831, he became a Privy Councillor. In 1840, Rosebery was made a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, and from 1843 to 1863 he was Lord-Lieutenant of West Lothian. Archibald John Primrose, 4th Earl of Rosebery, died on 4 March 1868. His grandson, Archibald Philip Primrose, Lord Dalmeny, 5th Earl of Rosebery, became a British Prime Minister.
