General George Duncan Gordon, 5th Duke of Gordon, GCB, PC (2 February 1770 – 28 May 1836), styled Marquess of Huntly until 1827, was a Scottish nobleman, soldier and politician and the last of his line.[1]
From May 1796 as Colonel-in-Chief, he commanded the newly created regiment: the 92nd Highlanders (usually called the "Gordon Highlanders" in honour of his family). In 1798 he served with the regiment in Ireland as Brigadier General and went with them to Holland in 1799 On 2 October 1799 he was wounded at the battle at Egmont-op-Zee in Holland. In 1806 he left the 92nd and transferred to be Colonel-in-Chief of the 42nd Regiment of Foot ("Black Watch"). From 1820 he was commander of the 1st (Royal Foot).[2]
He left the 1st in 1834 and transferred to the Scots Fusilier Guards. He died on 28 May 1836.[3]
Marriage
Elizabeth Brodie, Wife of the 5th Duke of GordonThe Marquis of Huntly, Colonel of the 42nd Regiment, 1806George, 5th Duke of Gordon.
He married at Bath, on 11 December 1813, Elizabeth Brodie, who was twenty-four years his junior. Brodie was the daughter of Alexander Brodie of Arnhall in Kincardineshire. Elizabeth Grant described her thus:
His bride was young and good, and rich, but neither clever nor handsome. She made him very happy and paid his most pressing debts, that is what her father did, old Mr. Brodie of the Burn, brother to Brodie of Brodie... He made a really large fortune; he gave with his daughter, his only child, £100,000 down, and left her more than another at his death. Really to her husband her large fortune was the least part of her value; she possessed upright principles, good sense, and she turned out a first-rate woman of business. In her later years, she got into the cant of the Methodists.[4]
However, at the time of his marriage and, in fact, until he inherited the Dukedom, George found himself in almost constant financial difficulties. He was referred to as "Lord Huntly now in the decline of his rackety life, overwhelmed with debts, sated with pleasure, tired of fashion, the last heir male of the Gordon line".[4] While his marriage remedied some of these problems, it did not supply the much sought-after heir.
By the time of his succession to the dukedom, he had established a reputation as an extreme reactionary. He steadfastly opposed the Great Reform Bill and when the majority of Tory Peers opted to abstain, he remained one of the twenty-two "Stalwarts" who voted against the Third Reading of the Bill in the House of Lords on 4 June 1832.
Throughout much of this period, his wife served Queen Adelaide at court. Indeed, she was given the Queen's coronation robe, which is now to be found with many other Gordon memorabilia at Brodie Castle.
Nathaniel Parker Willis, the American journalist, has left us with an interesting account of life at Gordon Castle in the twilight years of the 5th Duke's life. He described the "canonically fat porter" at the lodges who admitted him to a "rich private world peopled by ladies cantering sidesaddle on palfreys, ladies driving nowhere in particular in phaetons, gentlemen with guns, keepers with hounds and terrier at the heel, and everywhere a profusion of fallow deer, hares, and pheasants. At the castle a dozen lounging and powdered menials." Willis continued: "I never realised so forcibly the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture." Just before dinner, the Duke called at his room, "an affable white-haired gentleman of noble physiognomy, but singularly cordial address, wearing a broad red ribbon across his breast, and led him through files of servants to a dining room ablaze with gold plate."[5]
The Duke died at Belgrave Square, London, on 28 May 1836, aged 66. The Dukedom of Gordon became extinct, but the Marquessate of Huntly (created in 1599) passed to his distant cousin the Earl of Aboyne while the Gordon estates passed to his nephew, Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond. The Gordon moveable property was left by the Duchess to the Brodies of Brodie.
Elizabeth Brodie, the last Duchess of Gordon, retired to Huntly Castle Lodge, where she became more fervently religious than she had previously been until her death on 31 January 1864, when the last trace of the original Dukedom of Gordon was also extinguished.
