Elizabeth (Sutherland) Leveson-Gower Duchess-Countess of Sutherland (1765 - 1839)

Born 24 May 1765 in Leven Lodge, Edinburgh, Scotland

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 29 Jan 1839 at age 73 in Hyde Park, London, England

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Michael Thomas [send private message] and Marion Tango [send private message]

Biography

Elizabeth Sutherland was a member of the aristocracy in British Isles.

Elizabeth (Sutherland) Leveson-Gower Duchess-Countess of Sutherland is a member of Clan Sutherland.

Elizabeth Sutherland was born 24 May 1765 at Leven Lodge, near Edinburgh, Scotland, the second and youngest, daughter but only surviving child of William Sutherland, 18th Earl of Sutherland, and his wife, Mary Maxwell (c.1740–1766), daughter and co-heir of William Maxwell.

Her mother died of "putrid fever" in Bath on 1st June 1766, exactly one week after her first birthday. She succeeded as Countess of Sutherland, aged just over a year, when her father died there from the same affliction on 16th June 1766. The supreme irony was that the Earl and Countess had gone to Bath to "take the waters" in order to improve their health!

The Sutherland Peerage Case

As his only surviving child, Elizabeth was the obvious and only natural heir to the estates and titles associated with the Earldom of Sutherland held by her late father. Her title of Countess of Sutherland was contested by Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun, Bt. a descendant of Alexander, 12th Earl of Sutherland, on the basis that he was the heir male of the Gordon Earls of Sutherland and George Sutherland, Esq. of Forse, a descendant of Kenneth, 2nd son of William, 5th Earl of Sutherland on the basis that he was the heir male of the early De Moravia and subsequent Sutherland Earls of Sutherland. In a landmark decision, the House of Lords ruled in 1771 that Elizabeth was the rightful heir to the Honours and Dignities of Sutherland and recognised her as 19th holder of the Earldom of Sutherland. At the same time and in the same judgement they ruled that George Sutherland of Forse being the heir male of the Sutherland Earls was Chief of the Name of Sutherland and thereby Chief of Clan Sutherland. ^[1]

Childhood and marriage

Elizabeth Sutherland spent most of her childhood living in Edinburgh where she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Erskine (nee Hairstanes). In her teens she went to live in London, where she was educated between 1779 and 1782.

As a young woman, Elizabeth was considered clever, beautiful and with many talents, including drawing, by her contemporaries. As Countess of Sutherland and owner of vast estates in the Scottish Highlands, she was arguably the greatest heiress of her generation.

She married on 4 September 1785, by special licence, in London, George Granville Leveson-Gower, at that time known as Viscount Trentham. He was born on 9 January 1758, the eldest surviving son of Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower, later 1st Marquess of Stafford, and the only son of his second wife, Lady Louisa Egerton. As a married couple they were known as the "Earl and Countess Gower".

France and the Revolution

In 1790 her husband was appointed British Ambassador to the French court in Paris. Elizabeth became a close friend and confidante of Queen Marie Antoinette during this time. During the early days of what became known in 1792 as the "Reign of Terror" the Earl and Countess Gower were believed to have been actively engaged in the rescue and escape of members of the French aristocracy as the country spiralled down into both judicial and extra-judicial murders, often little more than the settling of scores.

During 1791 after the Royal Family was placed under arrest and their fate became less clear, several escape plans were hatched but most were at best amateurish and did not progress, largely due to the indecision of Louis XVI and his wife's refusal to leave without him. However on 21st June 1791 an escape attempt was made but the Royal Family was arrested before they could reach Varennes and safety.

Over the following year it became increasingly obvious that the outcome for Louis XVI would not be good and her friends, including Elizabeth tried to find ways of assisting the queen and her children. In 1792 as the situation rapidly deteriorated, the British Embassy was closed. Elizabeth managed to escape back to England before she could be arrested for her part in the rescue attempts.

At Dunrobin Castle there are many objects dating from the period Earl and Countess Gower spent in France and there is a particularly fine portrait of Elizabeth in which she is dressed and wearing her hair "in the French style" she would have adopted during her time in France. It has been speculated that part of the character of "the Scarlet Pimpernel" from Baroness Orczy's famous novels was based on the exploits of the Gowers.

Wealth and Succession

At the time of their marriage, Elizabeth was the largest female landowner in the British Isles and her husband, heir to one of the largest fortunes. His wealth came from the "Bridgewater" fortune. His maternal grandfather Scrope Egerton, 1st Duke of Bridgwater had been phenomenally wealthy. Neither of his uncles the 2nd and 3rd Dukes left legitimate issue so through his mother, George inherited all that wealth.

In 1803 he succeeded to his father's recently created title of Marquess of Stafford. From then until 1833, George and Elizabeth were known as the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford. In January 1833, just six months before he died, George was created 1st Duke of Sutherland and Elizabeth became universally known as the "Duchess-Countess of Sutherland" because she was Duchess of Sutherland by marriage and Countess of Sutherland in her own right. At Dunrobin Castle almost all the portraits of Elizabeth have labels which describe her as the "Duchess-Countess".

Scottish Estates and the Highland Clearances

As was the normal practice under Scots law for a marriage between people of their social status where the woman was an heiress, within the terms of the marriage contract prepared by the legal representatives of Elizabeth's Trustees and those of George, control of her property, but not ownership, of the Sutherland estates passed from Elizabeth to her husband for life. English law was different and normally a woman's property would automatically become that of her husband on marriage. Over the course of their marriage, the couple purchased additional landed estates in Sutherland, so that by the 1820s they owned well over two-thirds of the county.

In common with many major landowners of her generation, Elizabeth was interested in improving the yield she could obtain from her estates through using modern estate management techniques. Much of her estates inland from the sea were occupied by subsistence farmers, known as "crofters" or "cottars" who worked small parcels of often fairly unproductive land of between 1 and 20 acres in extent. These were divided into townships, basically what today we would consider to be a community of small-holdings centred round a larger farmhouse.

A typical township would be centred along both banks of a river or stream, rising in the nearby hills or mountains and running down the centre of a narrow valley between steep sided hills or mountains on either side. Although only a few hundred yards across, it might run for between 5 and 10 miles. Frequently these small rivers would run into naturally occurring small lochs (Scottish word for a lake) which would be stocked with salmon or trout which "ran up" each year from the open sea via the low firth (estuary) running from the river into the Moray Firth. Probably the most famous of these is the river Helmsdale (known as the river Ullie) rising above Loch Badenloch, running south-east through the Strath of Kildonan (also know locally as Strathullie) towards the village of Helmsdale and out into the Moray Firth.

These communities were known as Tacks and the Tacksmen who held them were usually granted a lease by Sutherland Estates for 14-16 years or more. Most Tacksmen were members of the extended Sutherland family, descended from younger and natural sons of earlier Earls of Sutherland. Each Tacksman leased the individual smallholdings to the crofters in exchange for payment of rent in crops, livestock and beer/spirit.

As early as 1772 when Elizabeth was still a child living with her grandmother in Edinburgh, her trustees and those acting on her behalf including Lt.Col. James Sutherland of Uppat who was living with his family at Dunrobin, became interested in beginning a programme of land management but had to put their plans on hold due to a lack of money.

Following her husband's succession to his father and his father's vast fortune in 1803, Elizabeth was able to put the plans shelved in 1772 into action. Her husband was willing to spend a substantial fortune on funding the redevelopment of Sutherland Estates.

Between 1811 and 1820 Elizabeth put them into operation. The first estate to be "cleared" was Assynt on the western side of Sutherland. Most of the Tacksmen there were Mackenzie men, members of the Ardloch and Gairloch families. In several cases they saw the opportunity of clearing crofters and cottars as a means of settling old scores. Although they secured leases from Elizabeth for what today we would consider to be large farms, some of them were so incompetent that in the subsequent years they went bankrupt and Elizabeth took back the Tacks and placed them under the control of her Factors and Land Agents.

In 1813 the second estate to be cleared was the Strath of Kildonan. Such was the opposition that Elizabeth's agents had to summon military assistance but after some concessions were made, a settlement was reached and the clearing proceeded.

The following year in 1814, there occurred the removal which led to Elizabeth and her husband's names becoming synonymous with the infamy of the Highland Clearances. In addition to her legal advisor James Loch, Elizabeth had employed an Elgin lawyer and farmer named Patrick Sellar. When Sellar began the enforced clearing of Strathnaver Estates, he applied the most brutal of tactics. In one case he ordered the thatched roof of a croft house to be set alight while the elderly female occupant was still inside. Although the bed-ridden, elderly lady was rescued, she died 6 days later, almost certainly from the effects of inhaling thick black smoke. The local law officer Robert Mackid hated Sellar and made sure everyone knew what had been done in Elizabeth's name. Sellar was eventually indicted for culpable homicide ( manslaughter) but in 1816 was acquitted after trial at Inverness.

Elizabeth was "wounded" by the incredibly bad publicity which Patrick Sellar's behaviour had generated and he was replaced. The final clearances took place between 1818 and 1820. Much has been said of the Highland Clearances and rarely is mention made of anything other than the Duke and Duchess-Countess of Sutherland and the Clearances carried out in their name. To put things in perspective, the total number of people cleared from Sutherland Estates was between 15,000 and 20,000 people. The total number of people cleared during the Highland Clearances was somewhere over 500,000, more than 25 times the number cleared from Sutherland Estates!

Unusually for her time, it was Elizabeth herself who became the driving force behind the clearances that were to take place in Sutherland in the name of modernisation and efficiency. From an early date after 1811 it became clear to Elizabeth and those advising her that there was potentially a great income to be gained from replacing crofters and cottars with large-scale sheep farming. Elizabeth travelled up from London to visit her estates regularly and was fully aware of what her policies meant for the tenants dispossessed of land on which their families had lived for generations. She and her supporters "considered the changes necessary, inevitable, and benevolent ... endeavoured to counteract the adverse publicity surrounding the clearances, but with little success".

Elizabeth and George spent large sums building alternative housing for many of the displaced crofters and cottars along the ribbon of agricultural land along the coast of the Moray Firth from Helmsdale down to Golspie. However there was inadequate housing and land for all those evicted and much of the land was less fertile and far more difficult to work than that in the straths from which they had been cleared. Men would rope themselves to a post or wall when working to recover rough pasture in order to avoid being swept over the cliff tops in gale force winds.

Some of the cleared families were also encouraged to engage in the rapidly expanding herring fishing industry and Helmsdale became a leading port. Other families were invited to move to Caithness by other branches of the Sutherland family (Sutherland of Forse and Sutherland of Duffus) and many of their Sinclair cousins who prided themselves that they had refrained from engaging in clearing tenants.

Notwithstanding all of the provision made either by Elizabeth and those acting on her behalf or by her disapproving distant cousins, many cleared families chose to chance their luck in North America or in the rapidly expanding industrial factories in Central Scotland and left the Highlands for good.

The Clearances brought widespread condemnation, and the Highland Land League eventually achieved land reform in the enactment of Crofting Acts. These measures could not bring economic viability, however, and came too late at a time when the land was already suffering from depopulation.

It is accepted by most experts on the topography of the Scottish Highlands that the communities in the upland estates had regularly suffered periods of starvation and death brought on by famine for centuries and long before the Clearances took place. Indeed in 1846 when the Highlands was struck by the potato blight which had ravaged Ireland the previous year, such was the level of starvation which ensued among the remaining crofters and tenants, that landowners incurred huge expense to procure and ship up food to feed their starving tenants. Elizabeth's son George, 2nd Duke reputedly paid more than £30,000, a vast amount in those days, to ship up large quantities of food from his English estates to feed the starving Sutherland tenants.

Unfortunately Elizabeth clearly did not think about how her actions and comments might reflect on her in posterity and it so it was, on seeing the starving tenants on her husband's estate, remarked in a letter to a friend in England, "Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals"

Elizabeth is usually portrayed as the wicked landowner preying on her powerless tenants and whilst to a large extent this is true, as I have said, a great many of those whom she and her agents cleared were her own flesh and blood. Two examples of this are Colonel Sutherland of Braegrudie and Christina Ross, widow of James Boog who built most of the fine houses and churches in Sutherland between 1760 and 1810 including work on Dunrobin Castle from 1767.

Family

Following their marriage on 4 September 1785, Elizabeth Sutherland and George Leveson-Gower had the following children: ^[2]

1. George Granville Leveson-Gower, born 8 August 1786 in Portland Place, London,^[3] later Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, styled Earl Gower, later styled Marquess of Stafford, later 2nd Duke of Sutherland and 20th Earl of Sutherland (died 1861);
2. Lady Charlotte Sophia Leveson-Gower, born 8 June 1788, (died 1870), married Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 13th Duke of Norfolk, and had issue;
3. Hon. William Leveson-Gower, born 4 June 1792, died young 14 September 1793;
4. Lady Elizabeth Mary Leveson-Gower, born 8 November 1797, (died 1891), married 16 September 1819, Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster, and had issue;
5. Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, later Egerton, born 1 January 1800 created 1st Earl of Ellesmere (died1857);
6. Hon. Henry Leveson-Gower, born 17 June 1801, died an infant;
7. Lord William John Leveson-Gower, born 5 May 1803, died young 17 June 1804.

Sources

1. ↑ The Sutherland Peerage, 1771
2. ↑ Lodge, p. 372
3. ↑ White, p. 565

• Biography adapted from the Wikipedia article:

[1]

• Wikipedia article [2]
• [3]
• Political career - [4]
• [5]
• Thorne, R.G. (1986), 'Leveson Gower, George Granville 1, Earl Gower (1758-1833), of Trentham, Staffs' in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1
• White, Geoffrey H. (ed.), (1953), The Complete Peerage: or a history of the House of Lords and all its members from the earliest times, vol 12, pt 1, rev. ed. (originally edited by G.E. Cokayne); London : St Catherine Press.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Janice Hardin and Marion Tango for starting this profile 10 December 2011 and 27 September 2014 respectively.
• First-hand information as remembered by Sir William Arbuthnot, Sunday, May 25, 2014.
• First-hand information as remembered by Marion Tango, Saturday, September 27, 2014.
• First-hand information as remembered by Mark Sutherland-Fisher, Genealogist of Clan Sutherland, Friday, May 3, 2019.