LADY JANE MAXWELL

It was while they were on honeymoon at the Fordyce’s country seat, Ayton in Berwickshire, that she received a note from her former love, very much alive, asking her to marry him. She is said to have read the note and fainted.

For the next 20 years, the Duke and Duchess lived at Gordon Castle in Morayshire which Jane’s husband enlarged to be one of the largest homes in Scotland – with a facade 600 feet long and an 84 foot high central tower. Part of the town of Fochabers had to be demolished and rebuilt elsewhere to make room for the extensions.

At Gordon Castle, she organized parties, planted trees, and took a keen interest in farming. She was a great enthusiast for local dancing and fiddle and pipe music. She is credited with establishing the Strathspey as a dance form.

The couple had five children at two year intervals. Her first, George, Marquis of Huntly, was born in 1770. The Duke also had an illegitimate son at about the same time, also called George, by a Mrs. Christie. Jane used to refer to “my George and the Duke’s George.”

She entertained on an increasingly lavish scale, with as many as 100 sitting down to dinner and guests staying for three months in the Castle. And in the 1780s, the Duchess started entertaining in Edinburgh, quickly becoming the leading hostess. She regularly gave soiree evenings where up and coming artists were asked to entertain.

It was in her drawing room that Robert Burns first read his poetry to Edinburgh society, and she became his chief sponsor, purchasing all his early published works. The best known portrait of Burns was painted 100 years after his death and is set in the Duchess of Gordon’s Edinburgh drawing room.

Despite her father’s pre-marriage warning that “London is not the high road to heaven,” the Gordons moved to London in 1787. They first rented a house on Downing Street from Lord Sheffield, then one in Pall Mall from the Duke of Buckingham, and finally one in St. James Square. And Jane continued her party-giving habit, but with a distinctly Scottish flavor. She made everyone dance Scottish dances. King George III adored her, and she supported the King, so she was allowed to promote her Scottish heritage more than others would have dared. She gave a ball at which she and the Duchess of York dressed in tartan when it was officially banned, and she arranged for the King to inspect troops dressed in tartan in Hyde Park.

It was in the Pall Mall house that she held her greatest parties. Close to Parliament in Westminster, she kept open house for the Tories. Pitt, the Prime Minister, and Dundas, the Lord Advocate were frequent visitors. And it was during this time that she arranged a truce between the King and his eldest son, the Prince Regent, whose debts had run up enormous debts. She arranged for his debts to be met, and this enabled the construction of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, one of the most delightful of the royal palaces, to be continued.

In 1793, the army was short of recruits, and she had a bet with the Prince Regent that she could raise more men than he. Although 49 by then, she was still extremely attractive. Her recruiting technique was, to say the least, unusual. She wore a military uniform and a large black feathered hat, touring Scotland to organize reels. Anyone who joined the reel joined the army and received the King’s shilling, the recruiting payment, from between the Duchess’ lips by kissing her. This was how the Gordon Highlanders were founded. Her total was 940 men.

In 1799, she became depressed and ill. Her eldest son, George, had gone off to the wars, and she wrote in a letter to a friend: “Oh where and oh where has my highland laddie gone?” Her second son, Alexander, died at 23, and her husband had moved his friend, Jane Christie into Gordon Castle and built a small house on the Spey, called Kinrara, for his estranged wife. Jane lived there for the next six years, continuing her entertaining and partying.

Having enjoyed life as a Duchess, Jane was determined to get her daughters well married, and she set out securing suitable husbands for them. In 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, she took her younger daughter, Georgiana, to Paris with a view to marrying her to the son of the empress Josephine. This would not have been popular so soon after hostilities, but nothing came of it. A short time later, Georgiana was reputed to be friendly, if not engaged, to the 5th Duke of Bedord, but he died before they could marry. Jane then arranged a meeting with the Duke’s younger brother who had inherited the title and recently been widowed with several children. All went as planned, and he soon married his late brother’s fiancee. Georgiana had ten children by the Duke, and she followed in her mother’s partying footsteps, entertaining frequently in her Bedford home, Woburn.

Jane then turned to finding a husband for Charlotte, the eldest daughter. She plotted to have her marry William Pitt, the Prime Minister, but her plan failed when Pitt’s close friend, Lord Dundas, took an interest in Charlotte. Neither potential husband worked out, and Charlotte later married Colonel Lennox, the future 4th Duke of Richmond.

General Cornwallis had returned to England from his disastrous command of the British troops during the American Revolution to be, rather surprisingly, treated as a hero and created a Marquis. Having fought with Jane’s brother at Plessey in India as well as in the American war, he would have been a friend of Jane’s. So his eldest son, Lord Brome, was therefore considered suitable for Louisa, the fourth daughter. Cornwallis refused to approve the marriage, however, citing madness in the Gordon family. The Duchess allayed his fears by swearing that there was “not one drop of Gordon blood” in this particular daughter. The marriage then proceeded. History does not relate who Louisa’s natural father was, but it is thought to have been Captain Fraser.

Susan, the third daughter, married the 5th Duke of Manchester, and Madeleine, the second daughter, married Sir Robert Sinclair, about whom little is known. Jane’s own marriage had been more of less an arrangement from the beginning. The return from the dead of her lover during the honeymoon was an inauspicious start. The Duke having an illegitimate son by Jane Christie at the same time as his heir was born was an unfortunate sequence, to be followed by the birth of her illegitimate daughter a few years later. The Duke openly kept his mistress at Gordon Castle while the Duchess seems to have preferred assignations with her lover on the windswept moors.

By 1805, the marriage was officially over, and the couple reached a financial agreement whereby the Duchess would be given a new house, capital payments, and generous annual supplements. The Duke was by then in financial difficulties, however; he acknowledged his liability to the Duchess, but he did not pay all the monies legally due her.

Jane was reduced to living in hotels, and she became increasingly eccentric. She was involved in an acrimonious dispute with her estranged husband over money, and she died in 1812 at Poultney’s Hotel, Piccadilly, London, surrounded by her four daughters and surviving son. Her body was taken north to be buried at the old Celtic Chapel by the banks of the Spey at Kinrara. There her husband carried out her final wish and erected a monument to her on which were recorded the marriages of her children.

Jane, Duchess of Gordon, was painted by most of the leading English portrait painters, but she was known for her intelligence, infectious laugh, and sense of humor as well as her looks. She appears to have had an enormous amount of energy which she directed towards helping what she considered good causes. She left her mark on history by what she did to get Scotland and Scottish culture accepted by the new, strange German Kings of England.

And she is remembered in the lines of Robert Burns, of whose poetry she was an important early sponsor: