Ayrshire > Volume 2

240 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
so far as reparation was possible, the indignity," and
that, notwithstanding the " atrocious indignity," Sir
James Clark still remained Her Majesty's physician.
But nothing was done.
Lady Flora's brother, the Marquis of Hastings,
added his protests to those of his mother. " I should
be wanting," he wrote, " in every impulse which ought
to actuate and guide, a brother, if I did not take the last
means now left in my power of showing that it is not from
the enormous difficulties which have been thrown in
the way of finding out the slanderers of my poor sister
that her family have been prevented from bringing
them to justice and holding them up to the contempt
and indignation of the world, but from the manner in
which they have been screened by the Court." Lady
Flora died, as has been said, July 5, 1839 '> ^ ne
Marchioness, January 9, 1840.. In 1841 Messrs. Black-
wood published a volume of poems by Lady Flora
Hastings, edited by her sister, Lady Sophia, afterwards
the Marchioness of Bute. These prove that she was a
woman of high poetical gifts. There is a religious and
spiritual tone about them that speaks volumes for
the manner of her education and the high and serious
views of life that she entertained. The poems realised
upwards of £700, which was used in the founding of a
school in Loudoun parish, which still bears the name of
the gifted and unfortunate lady. Her remains were
laid in the family vault, amid a sorrow that was national
in its extent, and as natural as it was honourable in its
depth and sincerety.
When the first Marquis of Hastings died in 1826, he
was succeeded by his son, George Augustus Francis, the
second Marquis, who succeeded his mother as seventh
Earl of Loudoun. Born in 1808, he married, August 1,
1831, Barbara, in her own right Baroness Grey de
Ruthvyn, by whom he had a family of three sons and
four daughters. His eldest son, Paulyn Reginald Serlo,
born 1832, died 1851. The third Marquis of Hastings
and eighth Earl of Loudoun, was succeeded by his only