Isabella was imprisoned in Tantallon Castle, but she escaped execution, and succeeded her father as Countess of Lennox.

In 1473 the earldom was reclaimed by Sir John Stewart of Darnley, who was the grandson of Elizabeth Lennox, daughter to Earl Duncan and sister to Countess Isabella.

He would be murdered at Kirk o' Field in 1567, and therefore on the death of his father Earl Matthew, the earldom of Lennox passed to James, the son of Henry and Mary.

In 1581, Esmé's earldom was raised to a dukedom, and his line continued as Dukes of Lennox until the time of his great-grandson Charles, who died childless in 1672 after drowning at Elsinore while on a diplomatic mission to the Danish government.

[2] The founder of the French branch of the Stewart family of Darnley in Renfrewshire, Scotland, was Sir John Stewart of Darnley (c. 1380 – 1429), 1st Seigneur de Concressault, 1st Seigneur d'Aubigny, 1st Comte d'Évreux, a warrior who commanded the Scottish army in France assisting the French King Charles VII to expel the invading English forces under King Henry V during the Hundred Years War.

Charles faithfully fulfilled this obligation, and as a result the Lennox family had considerable influence at the Scottish and English Courts over the next two generations.

[3] He married three times but died on 16 February 1623/4, aged 50, without legitimate issue,[4] when all his titles, excepting those inherited from his father, became extinct.

He was a key member of Royalist party in the English Civil War and in 1641–42 he served as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, which office was administered from nearby Dover Castle in Kent.

On his father's death when he was aged 6, and following the defeat of the royalist faction in the Civil War, he and his mother went into exile in France, where he died of the smallpox aged 10 in 1660 (the year of the Restoration of the Monarchy), when his titles passed to his first cousin Charles Stewart, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 6th Duke of Lennox.

With the Civil War over and the Stuart monarchy restored, he re-built the central block at Cobham Hall, between 1662 and 1672, to the design of the architect Peter Mills.

[6] His "Gilt Hall" of 1672 (with marble wall decorations added in the 18th c. by James Wyatt) was considered by King George IV to be the finest room in England.