Mark Kerr (General)

Caricature of John Cope fleeing to Berwick, where Mark Kerr receives him

Lord Mark Kerr (baptized April 1, 1676 - February 2, 1752 in London ) was a British general.

Mark Kerr was a younger son of the Scottish nobleman Robert Kerr, 1st Marquess of Lothian and his wife Jane Campbell . His father was a loyal supporter of the Scottish-English King William III. and Mark Kerr, like his older brother William Kerr , who inherited their father in 1703, became a soldier. On June 8, 1693 he was appointed captain. He served in Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession and was wounded in the Battle of Almansa in 1707 , a decisive Allied defeat in Spain. As brigadier general, Kerr was one of the forces that occupied Vigo , Spain , during the Quadruple Alliance War in 1719 . In 1740 he was appointed governor of Guernsey before being promoted to general in 1743. During the Jacobite Rising from 1745 to 1746, Kerr was governor of Berwick upon Tweed in 1745 . When General Sir John Cope fled to Berwick at the head of his defeated troops after the Battle of Prestonpans , Kerr mocked him for being the first general to bring the news of his own defeat himself, as also in the contemporary Scottish ballad Hey, Johnnie Cope, Are Ye Waking Yet? mentioned. That same year, Kerr became governor of Edinburgh Castle , which withstood the Jacobite siege.

Kerr remained unmarried and was buried in Kensington four days after his death .

Web links

• Tristram Clarke: Lord Mark Kerr (1676-1752). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
• General Lord Mark Kerr, on thepeerage.com , accessed March 14, 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ^ National Galleries Scotland: A Race from Prestonpans to Berwick. Retrieved March 25, 2017 . 
2. ↑ Cracroft's Peerage: Lothian, Marquess of (S, 1701). Retrieved March 13, 2017 .