MURRAY, George, Lord Fincastle (1762-1836), of Dunmore Park, nr. Falkirk, Stirling.

His aunt Lady Stafford wrote of Lord Fincastle in 1786 ‘he is very plain, but his mind is well informed, and he is a good scholar’.1Leveson Gower, i. 7. Lord Fincastle’s sister Lady Augusta Murray m. secretly in 1793 Prince Augustus, which caused the Dunmores considerable embarrassment, especially as the marriage broke down, whereupon Fincastle was involved in the negotiations for a settlement in 1800; Geo. III Corresp. iii. 2145. The grandson of a Jacobite earl and son of a representative peer of Scotland who had a chequered career as a colonial governor, Fincastle sat briefly in Parliament for Liskeard on the interest of Lord Eliot, to whose family he was connected by marriage. He supported Pitt silently. Although Canning had offered to recommend him to Pitt for a seat in the next Parliament, he set off for France with Lord Boringdon in April 1802 and did not come in again. Lord Archibald Hamilton had this to say of him, when he entered the House: ‘No man has a better heart than Fincastle—and very few a better understanding, but his worldly creed is intolerable. It consists of simply this. Whatever is, is right.’2PRO 30/29/8/2, f. 171; Add. 51570, Hamilton to Holland, 20 Dec. [1800]. In 1804 Lord Hardwicke, having heard that Fincastle ‘was thought by some of his friends equal to an office of business’, wondered whether Pitt would consider him as a likely Irish secretary.3PRO 30/8/328, f. 103. Later he supported the Whigs, who eventually rewarded him with a United Kingdom peerage. He died 11 Nov. 1836.