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Despite this, the Hamiltons continued to call into question Douglas’s inheritance and took him to court in what would become known as the ‘Douglas Cause’. After a long and expensive litigation, with great public interest, the Hamiltons won their case. However, Douglas appealed to the House of Lords, and with the help of Lords Mansfield and Camden, the decision was reversed and Douglas was reinstated as heir.
He married Lady Lucie Graham, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Montrose, in 1771. She died in 1780 and he later married Lady Frances Scott, sister of the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch in 1783. He was also an investor in the Ayr Bank of Douglas, Heron & Co but suffered financial consequences following its crash in 1772. Politically, he was a loyal follower of Henry Dundas and William Pitt and had achieved some prominence in his work to resurrect the Douglas interest in areas such as Lanarkshire, Berwickshire and Forfarshire. He was elected a Member of Parliament for Forfarshire in 1782, created a British peer in 1790, made Lord Lieutenant of Forfarshire in 1794, and raised a regiment of fencibles in 1795. He committed himself to improving his estates died on the Bothwell estate in 1827.
It has been suggested by Bolton that the following drawings from the Adam office were made for either William Home, 8th Earl of Home (1681-1761) or William Home (1757-81) son of the 9th Earl of Home. However, the Earls of Home did not inherit the estate of Bothwell Castle until the nineteenth century, as descendants of Archibald Douglas.
Bothwell Castle was first built in the thirteenth century. When Douglas’s uncle inherited the estate in the seventeenth-century, he sought to establish a new country house which was later rebuilt by Douglas and is attributed to James Playfair. In 1775, the Adam office made two designs for a lodge and gateway on the Bothwell estate. The building comprised a pyramidal lodge with a central arched passage flanked by walls with openings in them. These designs do not appear to have been executed.
Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, pp. 4, 68; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, pp. 183-4, 215; W. Lowe, ‘Douglas [formerly Stewart], Archibald James Edward, first Baron Douglas (1748–1827)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online [accessed 29 November 2023]
Louisa Catt, 2023
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).
Contents of Bothwell Castle, Lanarkshire: designs for a lodge and gateway for Archibald Douglas, 1st Baron Douglas, 1775, unexecuted (2)
- [1] Design for a lodge and gateway, c.1775, unexecuted
- [2] Alternative design for the elevation of a lodge and gateway, 1775, unexecuted