Paper on the Mar peerage

THE PROCEEDINGS IN THE CASE OF THE
EARLDOM OF MAR.
On the 17th July of this year* the Earl of Galloway in the
House of Lords moved a resolution regarding the Mar
peerage. He desired, in effect, to have it resolved that
the present Earl of Mar and Baron Garioch was the only
Earl of Mar, and that an order of the House of Lords of
February 26th, 1875, which declared the Earl of Kellie to
be also an Earl of Mar, should be cancelled : — " What they
were asked to do," according to one of the speakers, the
Earl of Rosebery, was " to declare that there were not two
Earls of Mar ; whereas three years ago they had solemnly
declared that there were ; " and, according to the report of
the debate in the " Times," the motion was lost by a
majority of 27 in a House of 51.
This is the last public resuscitation of a long-stand-
ing and involved dispute ; and it is proposed to give some
account of the most interesting inquiry of the kind which
has taken place in this century — interesting for its in-
trinsic historical merits and research, and for the perplexed '
proceedings following upon it — not for any details of
questions of disputed legitimacy which often accompany
such investigations.
Burke dryly records in his peerages the vicissitudes of
this title. In the peerage of 1866, John Francis Miller
Erskine was Earl of Mar and Kellie. In 1867, after his
death, the name of the son of his sister is inserted as
having succeeded to the single title of Earl of Mar, that
is the name of John Francis Erskine Goodeve, who after-
* Written in 1888, since which the Earl of Mar and Xellie has been suc-
ceeded by his son.
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