Series 5 > Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, Volume 12

TWEEDDALE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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fine with the officials of the Protectorate.1 Lady Wemyss wanted no part of
this plan—she detested Tweeddale—and engaged in a series of ingenious and
successful ploys to keep her girls out of his hands. The final one was the
marriage of her last surviving daughter, Countess Anna, to the duke of
Monmouth in 1663. Their marriage contract violated the entail, leaving the
Buccleuch estate to Monmouth and his heirs should Anna die childless. The
king took the precaution of having parliament not only ratify the contract but
also declare that the act Salvo juris cuiuslibet, which protected the legal rights of
anyone prejudiced by a private act of parliament, could never be invoked to
challenge the contract’s legality.2
The language ofEarl Francis’s entail, which severely restricted what a female
heir could do, and the dubious legality of the Scottish parliament’s action—by
contrast with England, it was not at all clear that the Scottish parliament could
alter or break an entail—gave Tweeddale grounds for hope that the estate
might yet fall into his wife’s hands. The marriage he arranged for his son, the
disappointed would-be husband of the Buccleuch heiresses, with Lauderdale’s
daughter Mary, Lauderdale’s only child, certainly had as one of its motives
keeping that hope alive. As long as Anna had no children, Lauderdale’s
grandson might hope, one day, for the inheritance, and for many years Anna
was childless. Her first-born arrived in 1672. In that same year, by unhappy
coincidence, Tweeddale’s bitter quarrel with Lauderdale erupted, and all hope
of enlisting the great duke in his cause was gone. Lauderdale disinherited his
daughter and left his tides and estates to his brother. Anna’s children survived.
And, in the end, Tweeddale had to pay. By the time the last payment was made,
in 1690, the _£40,000 borrowed forty years before had tripled owing to the
accumulated interest. A long, disastrous story had finally come to an end.3
It is impossible to date the composition of the manuscript precisely. It was
certainly written before 1694, when Tweeddale obtained his marquisate. The
textual clues point in opposite directions. The lack of any hostile mention of
Lauderdale suggests that it might have been written in 1671, before the quarrel,
and before the failure of the union negotiations became apparent. On the other
hand, the chronological confusion about the events of the 1660s indicates
1 SRO, GDI 57/3088, 6July 1654, Tweeddale to Lady Wemyss.
2 For this episode see M. Lee, Jr., ‘The Buccleuch marriage contract: an unknown episode in Scottish
politics’, Albion, xxv (1993), 395-418.
3 The terms of the settlement, dated 6 Mar. 1679, can be found in SRO, GD224/924/43. Thanks to two
counterclaims by Tweeddale on the Buccleuch estate, his payments ultimately totalled a bit more than
,£71,000. For a full account of Tweeddale’s relations with the house of Buccleuch see Lee, Heiresses of
Bncclench.