Douglas Cause
Following their marriage, Colonel and Lady Jane Stewart travelled to the Continent to escape their creditors under the assumed name of "Gray".
It was subsequently reported that on 10 July at the house of Madame Le Brun in Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris, she had given birth to twin sons – Archibald and Sholto.
Lady Jane and her son Sholto both died in 1753, and the young Archibald ended up in the care of his kinsman, Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of Queensberry, who saw to his education.
In the end he was satisfied, expressed passionate remorse[2] and revoked the existing entail of his estates, settling them upon Archibald Stewart in July 1761.
Stewart legally changed his surname to Douglas and duly entered into his inheritance, worth the remarkable sum of £12,000 per annum[1] (the equivalent value of over £2.6 million in 2021).
He came back with the information that Archibald Douglas had been born ‘Jacques Louis Mignon’, the son of a glass worker, and had been kidnapped in July 1748 by ‘a lady, a gentleman and their maid’.
[4] By 1767, each side had published memorials – 1,000 page statements of case, which incorporated letters, documents, witness reports, affidavits and citations of Scots and French law.
Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, disagreed and became a propagandist for Douglas, producing more than twenty articles and three books on the subject.
[1] The Edinburgh populace were also firmly on the side of Douglas, no doubt resentful at the prospect of Hamilton acquiring a second ducal fortune.
As one contemporary observer, lawyer Robert Stewart wrote, ‘poor Douglas lost his cause yesterday by the president’s casting vote, leaving him without father or mother, sister or brother or any relation on Earth for the evidence on which he is condemned does not give him in law other parents’.
[1] During its progress, the Hamiltons’ investigator, Andrew Stuart, challenged one of Douglas’s lawyers Edward Thurlow to a duel for calling him a liar.
[4] The scandal was the subject of a book by Percy FitzGerald entitled Lady Jean, The Romance of the Great Douglas Cause, published by Fisher Unwin in 1904.
