Richard Maitland 1653-1695
Richard MAITLAND, 4th Earl of Lauderdale 1653-1695
Biographical Note
Maitland was born on 20 June 1653, the eldest son of Charles Maitland, later 3rd Earl of Lauderdale, and Elizabeth Lauder. John, Duke of Lauderdale, also a great book collector, was his uncle. He married Lady Anne Campbell, daughter of the 9th Earl of Argyll in 1678 and succeeded to the earldom in 1691. After the death of his uncle and before the death of his father he was termed Viscount Maitland. In the year of his marriage he was made a Privy Councillor, and in 1680 became Lord Justice General, but was dismissed in 1684 due to supposed links with his exiled father-in-law. However, he soon came back into political favour under James VII and became Treasurer Depute. He also became a Catholic. After the Glorious Revolution he adhered to King James, fled to France in the summer of 1689, and was declared a rebel at the same time. He fought at the Battle of The Boyne in 1690, and was resident in France until his death. A translation of Virgil by Maitland was published in 1707.
Books
The then Viscount Maitland’s very extensive and impressive library was auctioned in London in April 1689 (postponed from October 1688), prior to his fleeing the country following the Glorious Revolution. There were 6,370 lots covering books on many subjects, and in several different languages, as shown in the printed auction catalogue. There were also twenty-seven lots of manuscripts, including an early manuscript of Chaucer’s works and three Persian manuscripts, drawings (seven lots) and seventy-three lots of prints, comprising ‘several thousands of Italian and other prints’. After the sale, John Evelyn in a letter to Samuel Pepys, 12 August 1689, declared Maitland’s library to be much greater than his uncle’s collection and ‘certainly the noblest, most substantial and accomplished library that ever pass’d under the speare, and it heartily griev’d me to behold its limbs, like those of the chaste Hippolytus, separated and torne from that so well chosen and compacted body’.
Sources
- Alston, R. C., Inventory of sale catalogues ... 1676-1800, St Philip, 2010.
- Catalogus librorum instructissimae bibliothecae nobilis cuiusdam Scoto-Britanni … quorum auction habenda est Londini … octavo die Aprilis. 1689 [and as many subsequent days as necessary to sell the whole collection]. [London: Benjamin Walford, 1688]. ESTC R29464
- Patrick, Derek John ‘Maitland, Richard, fourth earl of Lauderdale (1653-1695), Jacobite nobleman’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- Information from Murray Simpson.