 Sylvester Douglas,
Baron Glenbervie (1743–1823), politician and diarist,
was born in Fechil, Aberdeenshire, on 24 May 1743, the elder and only
surviving son of John Douglas (1713/14–1762), landowner, of
Whiteriggs,
Kincardineshire, and his first wife, Margaret Gordon (d. 1747),
daughter and coheir of James Gordon of Fechil. His father was descended from
a brother of Sir William Douglas of Glenbervie, later earl of Angus, and
resided at Fechil after having bought out his wife's two sisters, who were
second cousins of George Keith, the Jacobite Earl Marischal. Douglas's pride
in his genealogy is displayed in the account of his family which he
published in the third edition of Lyric Poems
(1806) by his brother-in-law, the poet James Mercer (1734–1804), who had
married his only sister, Katherine Douglas.
Douglas was educated at
Foveran School, Aberdeen, where bullying by a young kinsman, so he later
alleged, damaged his development. From 1754 his father engaged tutors (Alan
Gordon, John Calder, and Alexander Gall) to teach him at home, until in 1757
he entered King's College, Aberdeen, of which he later became rector from
1805 to 1814. He lived at home, his father having moved to Aberdeen, and
left college without a degree in 1760. After his father's death he spent
some time in Edinburgh, proceeded to London in 1765, and took a medical
degree at Leiden in 1766, with a dissertation ‘De stimulis’. He travelled to
Paris, then toured Italy and progressed to Vienna, from where he visited
Hungary; his first publication was to be an account of Tokay wines in the
Philosophical Transactions (1773). He returned
to London in 1769, switched from medicine to the law, and entered Lincoln's
Inn in 1771. When called to the bar in 1776 he had already embarked on
reporting the disputed parliamentary elections to the 1774 House of Commons,
which were published in four volumes in 1775 and 1777. From 1778 he reported
Lord Mansfield's judicial decisions in king's bench, published in 1783. He
was elected FSA in 1781 and FRS 1795.
By 1784 Douglas's election
reports were said to earn him £3000 a year. He had also, since his call,
practised on the Oxford circuit, and for a decade to 1794 he was king's
attorney. Tall and high-nosed with beetling black brows, he was more
remarkable for his assimilative capacity and ambition than for any
originality. One of the prosecuting counsel for Warren Hastings's
impeachment, he moved in whig circles, joining Brooks's Club and the Whig
Club in 1789, when he made a momentous marriage on 25 September that year.
His bride, Catherine Anne North (1760–1817), to whom he had been introduced
by Lord Sheffield, was the eldest daughter of
Frederick North, second earl of Guilford (1732–1792), the former premier,
and his wife, Anne Speke, and was her father's match for wit and ugliness.
They had a son, Frederick Sylvester
North Douglas, who pre-deceased him, but both of their daughters were
stillborn. Douglas's whig friends had encouraged him to look to high legal
office during the Regency crisis, but even the solicitor-generalship would
have left him much poorer than his professional income, and he was in no
hurry to enter parliament, which served him better with its crop of election
and canal disputes.
The death of his father-in-law in 1792 freed
Douglas from whig shackles. He joined the phalanx of Portland whigs who went
over to Pitt the younger's administration. He took silk on 7 February 1793,
and became a bencher of his inn (of which he was to be treasurer in 1799).
After complaining loudly of not having been made solicitor-general to the
prince of Wales, he was offered a commissionership at Toulon, captured from
the French, in September 1793. As this appointment was worth £1500 a year
and not pensionable, Douglas declined, preferring an under-secretaryship at
the Foreign Office. In January 1794, however, he agreed to become chief
secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and was sworn of the Irish
privy council on 20 January and of the British privy council on 4 May.
Report had it that having failed to ‘bustle himself into the Chancellorship
of Ireland’, he ‘bullied himself into the Secretaryship’ (Walpole, 12.124).
He sat for St Canice in the Irish parliament. Recalled from Dublin with
Viceroy Westmorland in January 1795, he was unable to obtain the sinecure
Irish secretaryship of state, being told this was reserved for Irishmen, but
he was offered compensations: the first vacant lordship of the Treasury at
home, a seat at the Board of Control for India, a pension of £800, half of
which was to descend to his son, and a seat in parliament. The latter was
for Fowey, where he was by-elected on 14 February 1795 with ministerial
backing, having failed in his negotiations elsewhere. His pension, awarded
on 21 March 1795, was actually set at £600 for life and the same in
survivorship for himself or his son unless he accepted office of £1000 a
year (a condition which reflected his stated aspiration to succeed John
Robinson as surveyor of woods and forests). He gave his maiden speech on
disputed elections on 14 April 1795, but was shouted down when he defended
Westmorland's Irish administration on 19 May. In June he took his seat at
the Board of Control, but chafed for further employment. Lord Camden would
not have him as his chief secretary at Dublin, although the king had
suggested it, and he tried to make himself useful to ministers in debate,
coming to the defence of Henry Dundas and of Pitt, whose
Poor Relief Bill he helped to prepare. In March 1796 he obtained a
seat at the Board of Trade.
Douglas sat for Midhurst on Lord
Carrington's interest in the 1796 parliament. In September he was invited to
accompany Lord Macartney to the Cape with the promise of succeeding him as
governor in eighteen months' time, and of receiving a £2000 pension two
years later. He agreed, on condition that he would be raised to the Irish
peerage, but his wife disapproved, and her influence on his decisions was
paramount. He jobbed with Dundas to place him at the Treasury board instead.
In the Commons he served as committee chairman and teller, and was a notable
promoter of the Irish union: his speech of 22 April 1799 answering
objections to it was published in 1800. When in January 1800 he was again
offered the governorship of the Cape, his wife took the blame for his
refusal. After talk of a continental mission, he settled for the Cape in
October 1800, and was duly created Baron Glenbervie on 30 November. Pitt's
resignation spared him the Cape, and from Addington he requested the Home
Office. Instead he was appointed joint paymaster-general, in March 1801, to
which he would have preferred a return to Dublin or promotion on the Board
of Control, and finding himself second fiddle at the pay office, he angled
to replace Dundas in charge of Scottish affairs. As his Irish peerage
enabled him to sit at Westminster, he was by-elected for Plympton Erle as a
government nominee on 6 July 1801; he made himself useful in debate, and was
offered the presidency of the Board of Control. This still did not satisfy
his ambitions as he would have preferred the vice-presidency of the Board of
Trade, presiding in Lord Liverpool's absence, or better still, the
speakership. He scorned, as Lord North's son-in-law, Addington's proposal of
a diplomatic mission to the United States in December 1801, even though he
introduced a bill easing commercial relations with America, and on 24 May
1802 reminded Addington that he had no objection to negotiating a commercial
treaty with France.
In January 1803 Glenbervie, who sat for Hastings
as a Treasury nominee in that parliament, succeeded Robinson as surveyor of
woods and forests, thereby enabling Addington's brother to replace him at
the pay office, although he would have preferred to have held both. He
obtained £3000 a year, but not for life, and promotion in the peerage might
have compensated him. Ostensibly for health reasons he took little part in
debate, and in February 1804 gave up the Board of Trade. On Pitt's return to
power that year he was a doubtful supporter, and offered to relinquish
office only if compensated. By September he was listed as a reliable
government supporter, and in 1805 defended Lord Melville against charges of
naval maladministration. He was mortified to lose his surveyorship when the
Grenville administration took over in February 1806. He complained that the
pension he negotiated was only a fifth of what he had been earning in 1793,
and tried to obtain compensatory employment hearing appeals to the privy
council. He did not seek re-election to parliament that year. The Portland
ministry restored him to the surveyorship of the woods and forests in April
1807, reducing his salary but not sufficiently to allow him to retain his
pension: this saved the public £1600 a year. In July 1810, when his office
was reformed, he became first of three commissioners. Then, and in 1812, he
was criticized as a jobber in the Commons, and Lord Liverpool was reluctant
to let him serve in 1814 in view of his pension claims. He travelled on the
continent, and his later years were devoted to a vain attempt to guide his
son's career. His wife died on 6 February 1817 and his son in 1819. Cared
for by his daughter-in-law, he turned to literary pursuits. Nothing came of
a projected biography of Lord North, but he managed a translation of part of
the Italian poet Fortiguerri's Ricciardetto,
published in 1822. From 1812 he was a trustee of the British Museum. He died
at Cheltenham on 2 May 1823, whereupon his title became extinct. His
journals and diaries, published piecemeal in 1910 and 1928, are a record of
his aspirations and disappointments, interlaced with scandalous anecdotes,
political gossip, and travel notes, which account for their attraction as a
period piece.On his death on
2 May
1823, the
barony became extinct.
See also: Douglas of Glenbervie
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