Paper on the Mar peerage

12
died, it is by no means certain that Margaret did
succeed him as a matte)- of course. I need not
enter into this matter, farther, than to state that
there is great reason for believing that Earl
Thomas (the last male of the line as far as we
know), either left by will or entailed in his lifetime,
the Earldom or Comitatus which bore along with it
'he title to his sister and her husband, the Earl of
Douglas, if so it would go to their heirs. Her hus-
band, is always called Earl of Douglas and
Mar (not Mar and Douglas, though Douglas was a
new title, yet the title of Mar seems even more
recent). Her husband died in 1383 or 1384, his
wife survived him, yet his son James became Earl
of Douglas and Mar, though his mother held as
survivor the Mar property or Comitatus — which
could not have happened if the title of Mar, which
Earl Douglas joined to Douglas, had been the old
territorial title. This Earl James died in 1388, his
mother being still alive, and having remarried Sir
John Swinton, who is called Lord of Mar — not
Earl of Mar as he would have been in those days
had his wife been Countess of the territorial
Earldom of Mar.
After Earl James' death in 1388 the title of
Douglas went according to some entail now lost to
a Sir Archibald Douglas. Isabel, his sister, suc-
ceeded on her mother's death to the Mar estates
in 1402. Being then n widow, she styles
herself Lady of Mar and of the Hegality of Garrioch;
in 1403 she styles herself Countess of Mar and
Lady of Garrioch. Now the consideration of these
facts shows us that the title did not descend as a
matter of course and in the same manner from the
time of Earl Gratney to the Countess Isabel, a
change in the manner of descent, in fact in the
the nature of the title took place at the death of
Earl Thomas the last of the mule line.
But the great and insurmountable obstacle now
presents itself. Isabel daughter and finally sole des-
cendant of Earl Donald, being at the time a child-
less widow married Sir Alexander Stewart. On the
12th August 1404 she, in pursuance of a contract of