SEAFIELD TITLE

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 5, 1 October 1926, Page 9

SEAFIELD TITLE

ALEXANDER GRANT ABANDONS

CLAIMS

COURT’S DECREE FINAL

BY TBLBCRIPH.—PBYSS ASSOCIATION Copyright.

London, September 29.

Lord Moncrief, sitting in the Edinburgh Court of Sessions, permitted Alexander Grant to abandon his action against the Countess of Seafield. The defendant’s counsel opposed the abandonment, urging that the trial should proceed to enable the defence to show the untruth and impossibility of Grant being the son of the Countess of Seafield and \ iscouut Reidhaven, who, he declared, had not met till years after Grant was born. The plaintiff’s counsel asked for a decree of dismissal, which would permit another action to be brought at a later date, but Lord Moucrieff acted on the suggestion of the defence that it should be a final decree of absolvitor and ordered Grant to pay the defendant’s costs.

[Tlie title of the twenty-year-old Countess of Seafield, a peeress in her own right, was challenged by Alexander Grant, a retired tutor, aged 79, who declared that he was the son of the seventh Earl of Seafield, whereas the Countess was only the child of the eleventh Earl Grant alleged that the seventh earl, when Viscount Reidliaven, in 1846 married, by verbal contract, aboard a sailing vessel, Caroline Stuart, the youngest daughter of the eleventh Lord Blantyres, because she was about to become a mother Ihe marriage was later celebrated in London,. but every effort was made to hide the original birth. The baby, so it was alleged, was given to a gardener at Nordon Castle and received a university education with the aid of money furnished to the foster parents.]