Loudoun was born in England and educated at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, but emigrated to Jerilderie, New South Wales, as a teen, where he was a rice farmer and family man.

He later lived at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and his name was legally changed via deed poll to Michael Edward Abney-Hastings in 1946.

[5] In 2004, Britain's Real Monarch, a documentary broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, repeated the claim that Abney-Hastings, as the senior descendant of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, is the rightful King of England.

This argument involves two disputed claims: first, that Edward IV of England was illegitimate,[6] based on the accusation that his supposed father, Richard, Duke of York, was absent at the time when Edward is thought to have been conceived; and second, that the Plantagenet crown should have descended by male-preference cognatic primogeniture instead of agnatic primogeniture and conquest.

[9] His eldest son, Simon, held the courtesy title Lord Mauchline until his father's death on 30 June 2012.