George John Robert Gordon

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George John Robert Gordon (born March 4, 1812 in Maryculter, Aberdeenshire , † October 2, 1902 in Würzburg ) was a British diplomat . It plays an important role in the cultural history of English-language Christmas carols (carols).

Life

Ellon Castle (2015)

George John Robert Gordon came from the on Ellon Castle north of Aberdeen -based branch Gordon of Ellon of clans Gordon . He was the eldest son of the British cavalry officer Alexander Gordon (1781–1873) and his wife Albinia Elizabeth, b. Cumberland. His father was an illegitimate son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen . The author Eleanor Vere Boyle was a younger sister; Charles George Gordon and George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen were his cousins.

From 1829 to 1832 George Gordon studied at the University of Edinburgh . In 1832 he came to Stuttgart as private secretary of the British envoy at the Württemberg court, Sir Edward Disbrowe ; In 1833 he entered the British diplomatic service. He was attaché in Frankfurt (1833), Stockholm (1834), and Rio de Janeiro (1837). In 1842 he went to Paraguay as a special envoy and first British diplomat after the death of the dictator Francia , where he sought contact with the new strong man Carlos Antonio López .

In 1843 he was sent back to Stockholm as legation secretary and was there in 1850 Chargé d'affaires . From 1854 to 1858 he was " Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary " to the Swiss Confederation in Bern . In 1858/59 he was accredited in the same capacity with the Kingdom of Hanover , and from 1859 to 1871 for the Kingdom of Württemberg with simultaneous accreditation for the Grand Duchy of Baden in Stuttgart.

On February 2, 1843, he married Rosa Justina Young (1817–1891), the daughter of a British merchant, in the legation chapel in Rio de Janeiro. The couple had three children: Cosmo Frederick Maitland Gordon (born October 30, 1843, † May 24, 1884 in Malta ), who became an officer in the Royal Navy , Arthur John Lewis Gordon CMG (born March 19, 1847 in Stockholm, † 13 August 1919 in London), who temporarily worked as a colonial official for Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Baron Stanmore in Mauritius and Fiji , married his cousin Carolina Augusta Hamilton-Gordon (1856–1937) and inherited Ellon, and Albina Alicia Georgina ( * October 2, 1845 in Stockholm; † 1935), who married the Austrian officer August Graf von Dillen-Spiering (1837–1907) in Stuttgart in 1867, a grandson of Carl Ludwig Emanuel von Dillen auf Dätzingen .

Around 1859/60, however, George Gordon met Emilie von Beulwitz (1841–1909) in Stuttgart , a daughter of the Rottenburg councilor and revolutionary Hartmund von Beulwitz (1814–1871). Firmly in love with her from 1865, the couple had a daughter on June 4, 1866. She was entered in the baptismal register as the daughter of a British captain John Smith Branka and Gordon as godfather. The second child, Robert, was born on May 27, 1869, and the third, Richard Wolf, on June 10, 1870. In 1871 the family moved to Scotland. George Gordon converted to the Catholic Church and married Emy von Beulwitz ecclesiastically in Manchester in 1871 after Catholic canon lawyers had told him that his first marriage was null and void under canon law . At the same time he left the diplomatic service. The following year, Louise Ignace Therese Julie Gordon had their fourth child. When George Gordon took over the heir as Laird of Ellon with 11,648 acres (over 4,700 hectares ) after the death of his father in 1873 and moved to Ellon with Emy as his wife, his first wife, who was separated from him but never divorced, sued for establishment the continuation of the marriage and its resulting claims in a Scottish court. The court agreed. The case caused quite a stir. The financial and administrative problems of Ellon, which wrote a 1958 story of Ellons discreetly as family diffulties , led in 1881 to a petition by the trustees still appointed by his father in the British Parliament and to the Ellon Trust Estates Act , which enabled land sales to repay debt.

George and Emy Gordon then left Great Britain. The couple first moved to Bruges; from 1884 they lived in Würzburg. Only after the death of Rosa Justina did they enter into a civil marriage in Maastricht in 1892 . Emy Gordon was involved in numerous charitable associations and wrote various publications, mostly on social topics. In 1904 she was the founder of the Catholic German Women's Association in the Diocese of Würzburg .

Piae Cantiones

Title page of the first edition of the Piae Cantiones , Greifswald 1582 (copy from the Royal Library of Stockholm )

Before his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, Gordon was close to the Anglo -Catholic renewal movement of the Church of England . During his time in Stockholm from 1847 to 1853 he regularly wrote articles for The Ecclesiologist magazine , in which he described the liturgical life and churches of the Lutheran Church of Sweden and presented them as exemplary for a liturgical and spiritual renewal of the Anglican Church.

Presumably in Stockholm, Gordon acquired a copy of the first edition of the song collection Piae Cantiones from 1582. The composer Pehr Frigel (1750–1842) was one of the previous owners . In 1853, Gordon made it available to John Mason Neale . Together with the composer Thomas Helmore, he used texts and melodies from them for two publications of Christmas and Easter songs, including Of the Father's Love Begotten and Good King Wenceslas , thus establishing a very special history of the collection's impact in Great Britain. The Christmas carols in particular quickly became very popular and found their way into many English-language hymn books.

The British musicologist Eric Routley (1917-1982) told him for it in 1959 in his classic work The English Carol to one of our more prominent national benefactor.

literature

  • Markus Mösslang, Chris Manias, Torsten Riotte (eds.): British Envoys to Germany, 1816–1866. Volume 4: 1851-1866 . CUP, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-1-107-00944-8 , pp. 239–244, 362–377, 379–393 (Gordon's diplomatic reports from Hanover and Stuttgart)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Malcolm Bulloch: The House of Gordon. Aberdeen 1903 ( digitized version ), p. 203
  2. ^ Pablo Max Insfrán: El Paraguay En 1842, Visto Por Un Inglés .
  3. ^ Digitized (PDF) of Gordon’s letter in the Paraguay archive
  4. ↑ Tobias C. Bringmann: Handbuch der Diplomatie 1815-1963: Foreign Heads of Mission in Germany and German Heads of Mission Abroad from Metternich to Adenauer , Walter de Gruyter, 2001, p. 198
  5. ↑ Rosa Justina Young in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved December 11, 2017.
  6. ↑ thePeerage.com
  7. ↑ Cosmo Frederick Maitland Gordon in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved December 11, 2017.
  8. ↑ Arthur John Lewis Gordon in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved December 11, 2017.
  9. ↑ Meet the Gordons , University of Aberdeen Museum, accessed December 11, 2017
  10. ↑ For her see Emy Gordon of Ellon
  11. ^ Entry in the Landesbibliographie BW online
  12. ↑ Hildegund Braun: Emy Gordon. Your life and your work for the women's movement. Würzburg: Kath. Frauenbund n.d., p. 21
  13. ^ The Gordon Marriage Case . In: Dundee Courier (Dundee, Scotland), August 12, 1873, p. 6; Issue 6253
  14. ^ John Bateman: The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland. Harrison, London 1878, p. 170
  15. ^ The Law Journal 8 (1873), p. 375
  16. ↑ An Easy Way of Divorce . (PDF) In: The New York Times , May 3, 1875
  17. ↑ James Godsman: A History of the Burgh and Parish of Ellon, Aberdeenshire. W. & W. Lindsay 1958, p. 67
  18. ↑ Private acts. 22nd Parliament2nd Session, 44/45 Victoria 1881. London 1881, p. 63
  19. ↑ BS Huwelijk met George John Robert Gordon , accessed December 9, 2017
  20. ↑ Emy Gordon in the WürzburgWiki , accessed December 8, 2017
  21. ^ Nigel Yates: Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830-1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999 ISBN 978-0-19-826989-2 , pp. 118f
  22. ^ Margaret Vainio: Good King Wenceslas - an “English” Carol: the appearance of Piae Cantiones melodies in 19th century England. MA Thesis, Jyväskylä 1999, p. 19, urn : nbn: fi: jyu-1999858911
  23. ↑ Carols for Christmas-tide . 1854 ( Wikisource )
  24. ^ Piae Cantiones - A Medieval Song Treasury . hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com; Retrieved December 9, 2017
  25. ^ “One of our more conspicuous national benefactors”. Erik Routley: The English Carol. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1959, p. 192
personal data
SURNAME Gordon, George John Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gordon de Ellon, George John Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1812
PLACE OF BIRTH Maryculter, Aberdeenshire
DATE OF DEATH October 2, 1902
Place of death Wurzburg