STUART, Hon. John (1797-1867), of Cambus Wallace, Doune, Perth.

Stuart’s grandfather Francis, 9th earl of Moray, was a Scottish representative peer from 1784 to 1796, when he was created Baron Stuart of Castle Stuart in the British peerage. His two eldest sons died young and it was the third, this Member’s father, who succeeded him as 10th earl of Moray in 1810. He was lord lieutenant of Elginshire from then until his death in 1848. His first wife, the mother of his two eldest sons, died in 1798, aged 23. Two years later her sister Joan Scott married George Canning*, who as premier in 1827 successfully recommended Moray to George IV for a vacant green ribbon, even though he was ‘of such retired habits, that he would never seek such a distinction’. Gent. Mag. (1848), i. 305; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1361.

John Stuart, Moray’s second son, entered the army three weeks after Waterloo and, in what was a nominal career, rose no higher than half-pay captain. He was described in 1822 as ‘six feet in stature, dark complexioned, and handsome’. CP, ix. 191. Three years later Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, named him for a vacant seat at Newport, which the Worsley Holmes trustees had placed at the government’s disposal for the remainder of the Parliament. He was returned unopposed in absentia. Berks. RO, Mount mss D/EMt F14, pp. 1-7, 21. A lax attender, who is not known to have spoken in debate, his only recorded votes were for Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., 10 May 1825, and in government majorities on the duke of Cumberland’s annuity bill, 6 June 1825, and the Jamaican slave trials, 2 Mar. 1826. Session of Parl. 1825, p. 486. At the 1826 dissolution he retired. Later that year he was one of a committee of three deputed by the Celtic Society to present Sir Walter Scott with a ‘most splendid broadsword’. Scott Jnl. 70-71. In 1859 he succeeded his elder brother, who had been incurably insane since their schooldays, to the peerage and the family’s extensive estates in north-eastern Scotland. He died at Doune in November 1867, having ‘for many years taken no part whatever in public affairs’. He was succeeded in turn by his half-brothers Archibald George Stuart (1810-72) and George Philip Stuart (1816-95). Gent. Mag. (1867), ii. 815.