Additionally, their grandmother was the daughter of the 9th Earl of Eglinton, head of the great Ayrshire landowning family and distinguished Member of Parliament.

The young Duke lived in the Gordon townhouse almost opposite the Maxwells, and he had inherited a considerable fortune and the title at the age of nine.

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, the young Fraser, very much alive, asking her to marry him.

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.

[2] Jane entertained on an increasingly lavish scale, with as many as 100 sitting down to dinner and guests staying for three months in the Castle.

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.

They first rented a house on Downing Street from Lord Sheffield, then one in Pall Mall from the Marquess of Buckingham, and finally one in St. James's Square.

Although 45 by then, she was still extremely attractive, upon which she based her recruiting technique: She wore a military uniform and a large black feathered hat (highland bonnet), touring Scotland to organise reels.

Her second son, Alexander (1785–1808), died at 23, and her husband had moved his mistress, Jane Christie, into Gordon Castle and built a small house on the Spey, called Kinrara, for his estranged wife.

[12] Having enjoyed life as a Duchess, Jane was determined to get her daughters well married, and she set out securing suitable husbands for them.

Neither potential husband worked out, and Charlotte later married Colonel Charles Lennox, the future 4th Duke of Richmond, on 9 September 1789 at Gordon Castle.

In 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, she took her youngest daughter, Georgiana (1781–1853), to Paris with a view to marrying her to the son of the Empress Joséphine, Eugène de Beauharnais.

A short time later, Georgiana was reputed to be friendly, if not engaged, to Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, but he died before they could marry.

Georgiana had ten children by the Duke, and she followed in her mother’s partying footsteps, entertaining frequently in her Bedford home, Woburn Abbey.

The Duchess of Bedford was a great patroness of the arts, and had a long-standing relationship with the painter Sir Edwin Henry Landseer.

[13] 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 Marquess.

The Duke openly kept his mistress at Gordon Castle while the Duchess seems to have preferred assignations with her lover on the windswept moors.

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.

She left her mark on history by what she did to get Scotland and Scottish culture accepted by the new Kings of Great Britain with German roots.

[2] She is remembered in the lines of Robert Burns, of whose poetry she was an important early patroness: She kiltit up her kirtle weel To show her bonie cutes sae sma', And walloped about the reel, The lightest louper o' them a'!

While some, like slav'ring, doited stots Stoit'ring out thro' the midden dub, Fankit their heels amang their coats And gart the floor their backsides rub;

Gordon, the great, the gay, the gallant, Skip't like a maukin owre a dyke: Deil tak me, since I was a callant, Gif e-er my een beheld the like!