George Stewart, 9th Seigneur d'Aubigny
George Stewart (or Stuart), 9th Seigneur d'Aubigny (17 July 1618 – 23 October 1642) was a Scottish nobleman and Royalist commander in the English Civil War. He was the son of Esmé Stewart, 3rd Duke of Lennox, and his wife Katherine Clifton, 2nd Baroness Clifton, and the brother of James Stewart, 1st Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Lennox, and of the Royalist commander Lord Bernard Stewart.[1][2]
Stewart, his older brother Henry, and younger brother Ludovic were brought up at Aubigny in France as Roman Catholics under the charge of their paternal grandmother, the old Duchess-Dowager, Katherine de Balsac.[3]
Stewart's father, the Duke of Lennox, died in 1624, and Stewart became a ward of his cousin,[4] King Charles I of England. He inherited the Lordship of Aubigny at the age of 14 on the death of his elder brother Henry in 1632. By 1633, he was a student at the Collège de Navarre, part of the University of Paris, and he did homage to Louis XIII of France for the lordship of Aubigny on 5 August 1636, shortly after his eighteenth birthday.[3] Later that year he moved to England.
In 1638 he secretly married Katherine Howard, the daughter of Theophilus Howard, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, and Elizabeth Home, without her father's consent, offending his guardian the king.[3]
The portrait of Stewart by Anthony van Dyck, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, may have been painted to mark his marriage; the Latin inscription can be translated "Love is stronger than I am" which may allude to his conflicting loyalties.[5] His younger brothers Lords John and Bernard are shown in a still more famous double Van Dyck portrait in the National Gallery, London - the iconic image of Cavaliers. They were also both killed in the Civil War.[6]
George Stewart and Katherine Howard had two children:[7]
- Charles Stewart, later 3rd Duke of Richmond and 6th Duke of Lennox (1638–1672)
- Katherine Stewart, later Baroness Clifton of Leighton Bromswold (1640–1702); she married firstly Henry O'Brien, Lord Ibrackan, and secondly Sir Joseph Williamson.
He fought with the French against the Spanish in the Battle of Montjuïc (1641).
As civil war loomed in England, Stewart joined the forces of King Charles at York where he was knighted on 18 April 1642 along with his brother Bernard. He was mortally wounded in the first pitched battle of the war at Edgehill on Sunday 23 October 1642, aged 24.[1] He was buried in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. The lordship of Aubigny passed to his next brother, Ludovic, on his death.[3]
His widow remarried James Levingston, 1st Earl of Newburgh and had one further child Elizabeth. They were suspected in 1648 of plotting to rescue Charles I and on the discovery of the supposed plot fled to the Netherlands where Katherine died in 1650.
Notes
- 1 2 Manganiello 2004, p. 518.
- ↑ "Aubigny et ses seigneurs: les Stuart de Lennox". Retrieved 2009-03-02.
- 1 2 3 4 Cust 1891, pp. 100-105.
- ↑ John Stuart or Stewart, 5th Seigneur d'Aubigny was the brother of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, Charles I's great-grandfather (father of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley), making he and Stewart 3rd cousins.
- ↑ "Lord George Stuart, Seigneur D'Aubigny, 1618-42". Retrieved 2009-03-03.
- ↑ National Gallery
- ↑ "The Peerage.com". Retrieved 2009-03-02.
References
- Cust, Elizabeth (1891). Some Account of the Stuarts of Aubigny, in France: 1422-1672. Privately printed at the Chiswick Press. Retrieved 2009-03-03.
- Manganiello, Stephen C. The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639-1660. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-5100-8. Retrieved 2009-03-02.
| French nobility | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Henry Stewart |
Seigneur d'Aubigny 1632-1642 |
Succeeded by Ludovic Stewart |