Lanarkshire

Up to 1750 Lanarkshire was usually represented by relations of the Tory dukes of Hamilton, its hereditary sheriffs. The only exception was James Lockart, a Whig, who was returned in 1715, when the 5th Duke was a minor. On Lockhart’s death in 1718, the Duke being still under age, his uncle, Lord Archibald Hamilton, took the seat, twice defeating Lockhart’s kinsman, Sir James Stewart. In 1734 Lord Archibald was replaced by the Duke’s brother, Lord William, on whose death two months later another brother, Lord Anne, was defeated by a distant kinsman, Sir James Hamilton, who held the seat till his death in 1750. By this time the Hamiltons had lost the sheriffdom of the county as a result of the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions in 1747. At the ensuing by-election Patrick Stuart, a Whig, was selected as ‘the only person who, by his connexions, and for other considerations, could unite the several jarring interests of the shire’, defeating Hamilton of Aikenhead who, in the absence abroad of the 6th Duke of Hamilton, was set up by a group of dissident Hamilton freeholders.1Caldwell Pprs. ii. 88-91; G. W. T. Omond, Arniston Mems. 154-8.