Dudley Coutts Stuart

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Dudley Coutts Stuart, around 1839

Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart (born January 11, 1803 in London , † November 17, 1854 in Stockholm ) was a British politician.

origin

He was a son of John Stuart, 1st Marquess of Bute and his second Frances Coutts , a daughter of the banker Thomas Coutts and his first wife Susan Starkie. Since he had seven older half-brothers, he had no chance of inheriting his father's title, but only carried the courtesy title of Lord Coutts Stuart .

Life

Youth and education

After his father's death in 1814, his mother moved with him to Naples . Above all, his mother taught him compassion and a keen sense of justice. He studied from 1820 at Christ's College in Cambridge, where he graduated in 1823 as a Master of Arts . As a young man he was considered attractive and admirable, Charles Dickens is said to have taken him as a model for his 1860 story The Italian Prisoner , in which an unjustly convicted prisoner is freed.

Marriage to Napoleon's niece

After his studies he traveled again to Italy, where he met Christina Alexandrine Egypta , a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte and thus a niece of Napoleon . She was five years older than him and had been abandoned by her husband, the Swedish Count Aasvid de Possé . Annulment had been requested but not yet approved. Nevertheless, the two married secretly according to the Catholic rite in 1824 near Rome. Their son was born the following year. After hearing that Possé had died, to the horror of much of his family, Stuart officially married her in 1826 according to the Anglican rite in Florence. The attempt to legitimize her son as legitimate, however, failed after it was established in early 1827 that Possé was still alive. Thereupon the annulment of the marriage of Possé and Christine had to be requested again. For a payment of 5,000 pounds , Possé had himself declared incapable of childbearing, after which the marriage was dissolved in 1828.

Member of the House of Commons and supporter of constituency reform

Through his mother's mediation, Stuart was the Tories candidate for the constituency of Arundel , for which he was elected as a member of the House of Commons in 1830 . He was initially strongly politically influenced by his uncle Francis Burdett and, like him, supported constituency reform, even if this jeopardized his own re-election. In his first speech in the House of Commons on March 7, 1831, Stuart clearly spoke out in favor of a reform that should be even more comprehensive than the previous drafts. However, he was also re-elected in the 1832 and 1835 elections held under the Reform Act 1832 .

Champion of Polish independence in Great Britain

In 1832 he met Adam Czartoryski , Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz and Władysław Zamoyski , three members of the failed Polish November uprising against Russian rule living in English exile . Czartoryski in particular, who had previously been the Tsar's minister, made a deep impression on him. Stuart became the leading organizer of an action to help hundreds of often destitute Polish emigrants in England. He was supported by the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland (LAFP) founded by Thomas Campbell in 1832, and became its vice president in 1833. Stuart became Thomas Wentworth Beaumont even before the nominal president. After Beaumont's death in 1848, Stuart became president of the association, which, under his leadership, was able to support the Polish exiles effectively and publicly. On the basis of Stuart's initiatives, the House of Commons granted 10,000 pounds in 1834 and further significant amounts until 1838 to support the Polish refugees, which were distributed by the LAFP.

In addition to directly helping the refugees in England, Stuart publicly campaigned for the Polish fight for national independence. He was convinced that an independent Polish state was not only a question of justice, but also in the interests of Great Britain, that at that time the Russian Empire was increasingly coming into conflict over supremacy in Central Asia .

As a result of his commitment, he turned down all political offices, his only wish was to become British ambassador in Warsaw. In the House of Commons, Stuart was helped in his struggle for Polish interests by Stratford Canning , Joseph Hume , Robert Cutlar Fergusson , David Urquhart and other politicians. The debates they led raised anti-Russian sentiment in Britain, but their warnings of the growing Russian danger and calls for greater support for the Ottoman Empire were often ridiculed and ridiculed by opponents such as Richard Cobden and others.

In the 1837 elections, Stuart lost his Arundel mandate to Henry Granville Fitzalan-Howard . This meant that he was only able to represent the Polish cause indirectly in the House of Commons, so that he had to raise his concerns through meetings, publications and the press instead. His marriage failed in 1840 when his wife left him and moved to Rome, where she died in 1847. That year Stuart was re-elected to the House of Commons as MP for Marylebone, and was re-elected in 1852. After his hopes that Poland would regain its independence through the revolutions of 1848 were dashed, he became a supporter of the Hungarian struggle for freedom . After Austria had regained Hungary with the help of Russia, Stuart stood up for the several thousand Hungarian refugees who had fled to areas of the Ottoman Empire and whose extradition was demanded by Austria and Russia.

Fight for international support and death

After 1850, Stuart's public activities decreased. Nevertheless, he did not give up his support for the Polish struggle for freedom. From 1853 to 1854 he traveled to the Ottoman Empire to promote the fight of Polish exiles in the Crimean War against Russia. In the autumn of 1854 he traveled to Sweden to appeal to King Oskar I for support for Polish independence and for Sweden's participation in the Crimean War. There he died of pneumonia .

His unexpected death was deeply regretted in Great Britain. His body was returned to England and buried in the All Saints parish church in Hertford , where he had last lived with his niece Elizabeth Townsend, a daughter of his half-brother George Stuart . His son Paul Amadee Francis Coutts Stuart inherited his extensive property, but he was disabled after a riding accident. After the death of his son in 1889, his niece Elizabeth Townsend's children inherited his estate.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Amadeus Francis Coutts Stuart on thepeerage.com , accessed September 11, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Coutts Stuart, Dudley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stuart, Dudley; Coutts Stuart, Lord Dudley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician, member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH November 17, 1854
Place of death Stockholm