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THE Hamilton
family, though they have for upwards of four hundred years ranked
among the most prominent and powerful of the Scottish nobility,
have never been prolific in great men, and they owed their
influential position to their connection with the royal family of
the Stewarts and their extensive territorial possessions rather
than to either intellectual or moral superiority.
The surname of the
family is supposed to have been originally derived from the Manor
of Hambleden, in Leicestershire, and WALTER DE HAMILTON, the first
of the name who is certainly known to have held estates in
Scotland, is alleged to have been the grandson of Robert de
Bellemont, third Earl of Leicester, who died in 1190; but of this
there is no evidence whatsoever. The story told by Hector Boece
respecting the first Scottish Hamilton, and faithfully copied not
only by the elder historians of Scotland, like Lesley and
Buchanan, but also by modern peerage writers, that he killed John
de Spencer, the King’s favourite, and was, in consequence, obliged
to flee from the Court of Edward II., in 1323, is evidently
fabulous. It is said that, being closely pursued in his flight,
Hamilton and his servant changed clothes with two woodcutters who
were working in a sawpit, and, taking their places, were in the
act of cutting an oak-tree when their pursuers came up. The
servant, owing to his nervous anxiety, stopped in his work; but
Hamilton cried out to him ‘Through!’ and made him resume his task.
From this incident he took for his crest an oak-tree and a saw
cutting it, with the word ‘Through’ for the motto. This story,
which bears the unmistakable stamp of Hector Boece’s own mint, has
evidently been invented for the purpose of accounting for the
Hamilton crest and motto; and it is certain that Walter de
Hamilton was settled in Scotland long before the period mentioned
in this legend. He was one of the barons who at first adhered to
the English interest in the War of Independence; and he swore
fealty to Edward I., in 1292, and again in 1296, for his estates
in Lanarkshire and other counties. But after the battle of
Bannockburn he made his peace with Robert Bruce, and received from
that monarch the Barony of Cadzow (the ancient name of Hamilton),
and several other grants of land. Here the family raised their
roof-tree and extended their branches throughout Clydesdale and
the neighbouring districts, where they founded several minor but
still influential houses, some of which remain to the present day.
The heads of the
Hamilton family continued faithful in their adherence to the heir
of Robert Bruce and the Stewarts. The immediate successors of
Walter fought at the disastrous battles of Halidon Hill and
Durham, and took some part, though by no means a very prominent
one, in the affairs of the kingdom and court. The member of the
family to whom their greatness is mainly owing was SIR JAMES
HAMILTON, the fifth knight and first baron, who was raised to the
peerage in 1445 under the title of Lord Hamilton of Cadzow
(pronounced Cadyow). He was noted both for his energy and his
sagacity, which gave great weight to his opinion in the national
council and among his brother barons. The vicinity of his estates
to the principal seat of the Douglases, as well as kinsmanship
with that family, probably led him at first to enrol himself in
the ranks of their followers. He accompanied the Earl of Douglas
in his celebrated visit to Rome in 1450; and, in the following
year, went with him on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas a Becket
at Canterbury. As might have been expected, Hamilton joined the
confederacy which Douglas formed with the Earls of Crawford and
Ross against the Crown, and narrowly escaped the fate of the
formidable chief of the league when he was assassinated by the
King (James II.) in Stirling Castle. When Sir James Douglas, the
successor of the murdered baron and the last of the old stock,
took the field against his sovereign at the head of forty thousand
men, Lord Hamilton was one of his most powerful and trusted
supporters. The insurgents encamped on the south bank of the
Carron, about three miles from the Torwood, so famous in the
history of Sir William Wallace. James, who was well aware of his
danger, advanced from Stirling to meet this formidable array with
an army considerably inferior in numbers, but with ‘the King’s
name as a tower of
strength, which they upon the adverse faction lacked. A battle
seemed imminent, which should decide whether the house of Stewart
or of Douglas was henceforth to reign in Scotland. But at this
critical juncture, art did more than arms for the royal cause.
Acting under the advice of the patriotic and sagacious Bishop
Kennedy, James made overtures to Lord Hamilton and other allies of
the Earl of Douglas, representing the danger which threatened not
only the independence of the Crown, but the welfare of the country
and their own interests, from the ambition and overgrown power of
the Douglas family, and making liberal promises if, in this hour
of extremity, they would abandon the cause of the insurgent baron.
These representations produced a deep impression on the mind of
Lord Hamilton, and taking advantage of the contemptuous reply made
by the Earl to his remonstrances against the proposal to postpone
till next day an attack on the royal army— ‘If you are afraid or
tired, you may depart when you please‘—the politic noble took
Douglas at his word, and that very night passed over to the King
with all his retainers. The other insurgent leaders, who had a
high opinion of Lord Hamilton’s prudence and sagacity, so
generally followed his example that, before morning, the rebel
camp was almost deserted. The complete overthrow of the formidable
house of Douglas speedily followed: their vast estates were
distributed among the supporters of the royal cause; and Lord
Hamilton, whose timely desertion of the ‘Black Douglases’ had
mainly contributed to their destruction, was rewarded with a large
share of their forfeited possessions. He became thenceforth one of
the most trusted councillors of his grateful sovereign, was
frequently employed by him on important embassies to England, and,
in 1474, he obtained the hand of the Princess Mary, the King’s
sister, through whom his descendants became next heirs to the
crown after the Stewarts. Besides his legitimate offspring, Lord
Hamilton left several natural sons, one of whom, SIR JAMES
HAMILTON, of Kincavel, became the father of
Patrick Hamilton, the protomartyr of the Scottish Protestant
Church, and was himself killed in the celebrated fight between the
Douglases and the Hamiltons in the High Street of Edinburgh, in
1520.
SIR JAMES
HAMILTON, the son of Lord Hamilton and
the Princess Mary, was created EARL OF ARRAN, in 1503, by his
cousin, James IV., and obtained at the same time a grant of the
island which still forms a part of the extensive estates of the
family. He was also created a privy councillor, and was one of the
nobles employed to negotiate a marriage between the King and the
Princess Margaret of England. In the following year he was
appointed to the command of the auxiliary force of ten thousand
men, which James sent to assist the King of Denmark in his
hostilities with the Norwegians and Swedes. He was subsequently
sent as ambassador to France, and was also placed at the head of
the force despatched to the assistance of Louis XII. of France,
who, in return for the valuable aid thus rendered him, settled a
pension on the Earl for life. After the death of the Scottish King
on the fatal field of Flodden, Arran was an unsuccessful candidate
for the office of regent, which was conferred upon the Duke of
Albany, and he revenged himself for his disappointment by
thwarting the Government at every turn, and fomenting dissensions
among the nobles. On the departure of the Regent for France, in
1517, and again in 1524, after Albany’s final retirement to the
Continent, Arran was appointed Lieutenant-General of the kingdom,
and had the chief direction of public affairs. But he was utterly
destitute of the energy and wisdom of his father, and proved
himself a weak, facile, and factious ruler. He was constantly at
feud with the Douglases, now represented by the Earl of Angus, the
second husband of Queen Margaret; and in the famous skirmish of
‘Clear the Causeway,’ which took place in the High Street of
Edinburgh, in 1520, the Hamiltons, who provoked the contest, were
completely defeated. Several of their chiefs and seventy of their
men were killed, and Arran himself, along with his natural son,
Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, the principal instigator of the
quarrel, with difficulty made their escape through the North Loch
on a coal-horse, from which they threw its load.
Arran’s facile
character was productive of great injury both to his family and
his country, and his legitimate offspring all bore their father’s
image. But his natural son, James Hamilton of Finnart, was a
person of remarkable energy, and was the principal architect in
Scotland of his time. He was a great favourite with James V., who
appointed him Cup-bearer and Steward of the Royal Household, and
Master of Works to the King. He superintended the erection of the
palaces of Falkland and Linlithgow; and, under his direction, the
castles of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Blackness, and the palace of
Holyrood were enlarged and adorned. The King, whose fine taste is
architecture, sculpture, and painting enabled him to appreciate
Hamilton’s merits, bestowed on him several valuable estates, among
others the lands of Draphen in Lanarkshire, on which Sir James
erected the strong and stately castle of Craignethan—the
Tillietudlem of ’Old Mortality.’ His character, however, was
stained by numerous acts of cruelty and oppression, into which his
fierce and passionate temper hurried him. He took a prominent part
in the sanguinary persecution of the Protestants at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, and no hand was more deeply stained than
his with the blood of his own relative, the saintly Patrick
Hamilton, who suffered martyrdom in 1528. He ultimately fell into
disgrace at Court, was accused of treason and embezzlement, and
having been found guilty, was beheaded in 1540. He was undoubtedly
the ablest and most accomplished man the house of Hamilton has
ever produced; and if he had occupied the position of his feeble
father, and still feebler brother, he would have been the supreme
ruler of Scotland during the troubled minority of James V. and his
daughter, the ill-starred Queen Mary.
JAMES HAMILTON,
the second Earl of Arran and
Duke of Chatelherault, was unanimously chosen regent of the
kingdom on the death of James V., in right of his proximity of
blood to the infant Queen, and was declared heir-presumptive to
the Crown. He was in every way a poor creature, the very essence
of weakness and pusillanimity, facile in character and conduct,
blown about by every wind of public opinion and feeling,
‘everything by turns, and nothing long;’ changing from Romanism to
Protestantism and from Protestantism to Romanism; alternately the
tool of Lord Burleigh and of Cardinal Beaton; and, by his combined
feebleness and fickleness, he brought great misery on the country.
At the outset of his career he professed himself friendly to the
Reformed faith, and authorised the translation of the Bible into
the language of the common people. He entered into an alliance
with Henry VIII. of England, promised to support the schemes of
that monarch, and concluded a treaty with him for a marriage
between Prince Edward, Henry’s son, and the infant Queen of the
Scots. In a short time, however, he was gained over by Cardinal
Beaton to the Roman Catholic party and faith, and was induced by
that astute prelate to renounce the friendship of England and to
enter into a league with France. The consequence of this
vacillating policy was the invasion of Scotland by an English army
under the Earl of Hertford, the sanguinary defeat of the Scottish
army at Pinkie, which was entirely owing to the mismanagement and
unskilful generalship of the governor, and the devastation of the
whole of Scotland south of the Forth. Arran was rewarded for his
services to the French king by the title of Duke of Chatelherault
and a liberal pension; but he was compelled, in 1554, to resign
the regency of the kingdom, which was conferred by the Parliament
on Mary of Guise, the Queen’s mother. A few years afterwards the
fickle nobleman joined the Lords of the Congregation, and employed
all his influence in support of the Reformed faith. He opposed the
marriage of Queen Mary with Darnley, and was, in consequence,
obliged to leave the kingdom. After the murder of that ill-fated
Prince, and the abdication of Mary, the Duke made a fresh attempt
to regain the supreme rule of affairs, but was compelled to submit
to the authority of the Regent Moray, who committed him and Lord
Herries—a zealous partisan of the Queen—prisoners to the Castle of
Edinburgh, and they did not obtain their release till after the
murder of the ‘Good Regent.’
‘The conduct of the
Hamiltons,’ says Mr. Froude, ‘for the ten past years, had been
uniformly base. They had favoured the Reformation while there was
a hope of marrying the heir of their house to Elizabeth. When this
hope failed, they tried to secure Mary Stewart for him; and when
she declined the honour, they thought of carrying her off by
force. Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews (illegitimate brother of
the Duke of Chatelherault), had been a party to the murder of
Darnley. He had divorced Bothwell and helped the Queen to marry
him, in the hope that she would ruin herself. When she was at
Lochleven, the House of Hamilton would have voted for her death if
their title to the crown had been recognised. Had they won at
Langside, she was to have repaid their services by marrying the
Abbot of Arbroath. A steady indifference to every interest but
their own, a disregard of every obligation of justice or honour,
if they could secure the crown of Scotland to their lineage, had
given a consistency to the conduct of the Hamiltons beyond what
was to be found in any other Scottish family. No scruples of
religion had disturbed them, no loyalty to their sovereign, no
care or thought for the public interests of their country. Through
good and evil, through truth and lies, through intrigues and
bloodshed, they worked their way to the one object of a base
ambition.’
The Regent Moray
was the great obstacle to the accomplishment of their dark
designs, and must be put out of the way. His assassination was
planned by them, and was executed by a member of the family, who
fired the fatal shot from a house belonging to the Archbishop of
St Andrews, an illegitimate son of the first Earl of Arran, who
was afterwards most deservedly hanged on the Bridge of Stirling
for his complicity in this execrable murder. This foul deed was as
useless to its projectors as it was mischievous in its immediate
consequences to the country. It did not open a road to the throne
to the Hamiltons, but it gave over Scotland to three years of
anarchy and bloodshed, for which they were mainly responsible.
As James, the third
Earl of Arran, who succeeded his father in 1575,
had become insane, the real head
of the family at this critical period was LORD JOHN HAMILTON,
commendator of the rich abbey of Arbroath,
who was a candidate for the hand of Queen Mary, and was deep in
the councils of the Queen’s party during the civil war between
them and the ‘King’s men,’ and an accomplice in all their worst
deeds. Condign punishment at length overtook him and the other
members of the family. They were attainted and driven into exile
in 1579 by the Earl of Morton, and their estates were confiscated
and conferred, along with the title of Earl of Arran, on the
infamous Captain James Stewart (‘A notorious scoundrel,’ says
Froude), who was a descendant in the female line of the first
Earl. The honours and estates of the family were, however,
restored in 1585, and
Lord John became a great favourite of King James, by whom he was
created MARQUIS OF HAMILTON in 1599. Like his predecessors, he
left a numerous progeny, illegitimate as well as legitimate. His
son JAMES HAMILTON, the second Marquis of Hamilton and Earl of
Cambridge in the English peerage, died at Whitehall in his
thirty-sixth year, a few days before King James, and was popularly
believed to have been poisoned by the Duke of Buckingham.
JAMES HAMILTON,
third Marquis and first Duke of
Hamilton, had the misfortune to have his lot cast in the
‘troublous times’ of the Great Civil War, and was led to take a
prominent but most unfortunate part in the contest between Charles
I. and the Covenanters. In his twenty-fourth year he was appointed
to the command of the auxiliary force of six thousand six hundred
men, whom Charles I. sent to fight under the famous Gustavus
Adolphus in the cause of the Elector Palatine, brother-in-law of
the English King, and distinguished himself by his bravery in
several important sieges and battles. It was probably owing to the
reputation which he gained in this service that Charles appointed
the Marquis of Hamilton to the command of the fleet which he sent
against the Scottish Covenanters in 1639. It was on this occasion
that the mother of the Marquis, a daughter of the Earl of
Glencairn, a lady of bold and masculine spirit, and a zealous
Covenanter, appeared among the patriotic volunteers with pistols
at her saddle-bow, and declared that she would be the first to
shoot her son if he should dare to land his forces and attack his
countrymen.
It was to the
Marquis of Hamilton that Charles entrusted, as his High
Commissioner, the arduous and, indeed, hopeless task of persuading
the Covenanters to abandon their League and Covenant, and to
support him in his contest with the English Parliament. Hamilton’s
policy was timorous and trimming; his attempts to overreach the
Presbyterians were easily seen through and foiled; and, in spite
alike of his promised concessions and his threats, they persevered
in their determination to overthrow the Episcopal system, and to
establish Presbyterianism in its room. And, finally, their
distrust of Charles and his ministers, and their sympathy with the
Parliamentary party, induced them to send an army to the
assistance of the patriots in their contest with the King.
Montrose had recommended, but in vain, that a prompt and vigorous
policy should be adopted, and had predicted that the result of
Hamilton’s timid counsels would be that ‘the traitors would be
allowed time to raise their armies, and all would be lost’
Montrose’s enthusiastic admirer and biographer, Sheriff Napier,
broadly accuses Hamilton of treachery to the cause of his royal
master. There is no reason, however, to believe that the luckless
noble, who had shortly before been created a duke, was guilty of
anything worse than weakness, vacillation, and trickery. He was
ambitious of an office which he was not competent to fill, and
undertook a task which it was greatly beyond his abilities to
perform. His wavering, trimming policy earned him the distrust of
both parties, and contributed not a little to the ruin of the
royal cause. King Charles was so much provoked by his failure,
that he sent the Duke a prisoner to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall,
and afterwards to St. Michael’s Mount, where he was confined till
the end of April, 1646. After the downfall of the monarchy, the
Duke exerted all his influence to promote the ‘Engagement’ entered
into by the Scottish Parliament to raise an army for the relief of
the King. He was appointed commander-in-chief of the
hastily-levied, imperfectly armed, and ill-disciplined body of
troops, fourteen thousand strong, which marched into England for
this purpose, but were defeated at Preston, and ultimately
compelled to surrender. The Duke was tried (February 6th, 1649),
as Earl of Cambridge and an English subject, on the charge of
having levied war against the people of England, and was found
guilty and executed on the 9th of March. Sir Walter Scott makes
John Gudyill, the butler at Tillietudlem, say of the Duke that he
‘lost his heart before he lost his head;’ and that his brother and
successor was ‘but wersh parritch, neither gude to fry, boil, nor
sup cauld.’
WILLIAM HAMILTON,
Earl of Lanark, second Duke and
fourth Marquis of Hamilton, supported the royal cause like his
brother, and was equally unfortunate. He accompanied Charles II.
to Scotland, in 1650 and when the march into England was decided
on in 1651, he joined the army on the way with a strong body of
horse, and shared in all the hardships and perils of that
ill-chosen and disastrous enterprise. He was mortally wounded at
the battle of Worcester (September 12th, 1651), where he fought
with conspicuous bravery, and died nine days after. As neither he
nor his brother left any male issue, the titles and estates of the
family devolved upon the daughter of the first Duke (Duchess
Anne), who became the wife of William, second son of the Marquis
of Douglas; and on the death of the Duke of Douglas in 1761,
without issue, James, fourth Duke of Hamilton, a descendant of
Duchess Anne and Lord William Douglas, became heir-male and head
of that ‘great old house.’ |
