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Queensberry became a courtier of King George I and held the posts of Lord of the Bedchamber (1721), Vice-Admiral of Scotland (1722) and Privy Councillor (1726) before his wife’s outrage at the Lord Chamberlain’s refusal to license the performance of John Gay’s Polly (which satirised Sir Robert Walpole) resulted in her being barred from court by George II and Queensberry to resign from his offices. Queensberry joined the opposition and served as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Frederick, Prince of Wales, from 1733. Queensberry regained his place on the Privy Council after the accession of George III, and became keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland in 1761-63 and Lord Justice-General in 1763-78.
They lived mostly in England, although Queensberry would periodically return to Scotland to take part in local politics in Dumfriesshire and Dumfries burghs. Queensberry sought to promote Scottish economic development as a major landlord and was also the Chairman of the Forth and Clyde Canal Company and a major backer of the Ayr Bank. He died in 1778 and was buried at Durisdeer, Dumfriesshire.
Robert Adam was commissioned by the Commissioners of Supply of the County of Dumfries in 1779 to make designs for a commemorative column to the Duke of Queensberry . The contractor was Thomas Boyd. The design comprises a square pedestal with ram’s heads in each corner and a panel relief depicting a woman (the personification Scotland) mourning over an urn, and above, a tall column which supports a casket with gilded flames. An additional plan and elevation of the column base is included in an Adam office design (dated 7th April 1780) in the RIBA Drawings Collection.
The column was placed in Queensberry Square, in the centre of Dumfries in 1780. The column was re-erected in 1934, under the supervision of Alexander Crombie, in the forecourt of the County Buildings on English Street. The monument was moved back to Queensberry Square in 1990.
Literary references:
A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, pp. 10, 84; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 1, 2001, pp. 363, 371; J. Gifford, The Buildings of Scotland: Dumfries and Galloway, 1996, p. 253; W. C. Lowe, ‘Douglas, Charles, third duke of Queensberry and second duke of Dover (1698–1778)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, 2009, online [accessed 09 May 2022]; Historic Environment Scotland, ‘English Street, Queensberry Column (in Front of Regional Council Offices)’, 1961, online [accessed 09 May 2022]
Louisa Catt, 2023
Level
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).