ROMANCES OF THE PEERAGE.

Western Star, Issue 2218, 1 July 1898, Page 6

ROMANCES OF THE PEERAGE.

; For the sake of the ancient Dukedom of I Hamilton, which carries with it the hereditary I dignity of Knight, Mareschal of the Scottish 1 realm, the English Dukedom of Brandon, and ' the French Dukedom of Chatelherault, it must ! be regarded as in every way fortunate that the | late peer and his brother, Lord Carlo, should each have died without leaving male issue, j For by this means the honours amt dignities ' of this most illustrious of all houses of the British nobility have passed to another and remote branch of the family,the blood of which is free from (hat terrible strain of insanity which was infused therein by the marriage of the tenth duke, the grandfather of the late peer, to the daughter of William Bockford of Vithek fame. All the descendants of this tenth duke and his Beckford duchess have been queer. His daughter, who married the fifth Duke of Newcastle, eloped with a married man, the late Earl of Oxford, who afterwards deserted her, and she wound up by marrying a Belgian picture dealer by the name, of Opdi-beck. Her brother, the eleventh duke, married Princess Marie of Baden, and died at Paris from the effects of a fall down the steps of the Maison Done Restaurant. He lay for a time in the gutter before being recognised and cared for-; but it was then too late, and in spite of the nursing of his relative. Empress Eugenie, he expired without gaining consciousness. Of his thiee children, the daughter, Lady Mary Douglass Hamilton, married first the disreputable Prince of Monaco, from whom she ran away, obtaining, ten years afterwards, a dissolution of the marriage to enable her to become the wife of Count Tassilo F cate tics. The younger of the two boys, Lord Carlo, was renowned trom one end of Europe to the other for his insane freaks and extravagant conduct, distinguishing himself by eloping fromSt Petersburg with the lovely but plebian wife of the imperial chamberlain, Count Paskievitch. The late Duke ran him a very close race. But there was method in his madness, as the celebrated money-lender Padwick found to his cost. For, just at the moment when he imagined that he had the Duke completely, the latter rounded upon him and forced him to disgorge. The late Duke and Duchess were not a very closely united couple, especially after the birth, of their only daughter twelve years ago, and while the: Duchess spent the most of her time at Mellon hunting, being one of the finest horsewomen in the United Kingdom, the Duke lived mostly on board his yacht, the Thistle, in company with congenial friends, and it is upon this craft that he died at Algiers. The new Duke is a very nice young fellow of 30. In marrying him a lady would become a French duchess, an English duchess, and a Scotch duchess, the mistress of estates extending over some 200,000 acres, bringing in fi. yearly rental of nearly £200,000, and of coalfields covering some 9,800 acres, with royalties* bringing about £140,000 a year. He would indeed prove a worthy prize, and his lot cant only be compared to that of the Duko of Port*land, who, from an impecunious and untitled! subaltern of the Guards, found himself traus. formed in one day into a duko with a rent-roll of nearly £400,000 a year. The British titled! world is full of surprises and almost fairy-lika transformations such as this. There is tho Earl of Stamford, who was a school teacher, who by the death of a distant relative landed him in tho House of Peers, while the preseutl Earl of Haddington worked, not even at» an apprentice but a mere boy, with a mechanic when his father was suddenly called upon to assume the title and enter into possession of the entailed estates of a cousin whom they had never known. There are peers* who have started in life as carpenters, whil.t there are several instances of the heirs to earldoms and even marquisatns having been foun i{ before the mast on sailing ships, and on ranches, where they were serving as cowboys* as was the case with Lord Shannon, who was sought in vain for over two years in theWoslern* States and in the wilds of Canada. The colonies present yet even still strange* - metamorphoses, where we find tho Prime ter of an Australian colony promot' governship of a great penitentiary a ‘“ iau wh(^ had been his particular fae ha(|J served a twelve mouth,’ term , n jaj?> The late Lord Cal’- ~ . , , ... .os, too, was the son of as oema er, w j' a thor of Lord Brassojf was a tie - . , .y labourer.