EARLS OF ABERDEEN.—Sorne genealogists have sought to engraft this branch upon the parent stem before it was transplanted to the n. towards the end of the 14th century. But no evidence has been produced in support of this claim; and modern research holds by the old tradition, that the house descends from one of the illegitimate brothers of sir Adam of Gordon, who was slain at Homildon in 1402. His first possession seems to have been Methlic on the banks of the Ythan. Patrick Gordon of Methlic fell under the banner of the earl of Huntly at the battle of Arbroath in 1445. His son and successor was of sufficient mark to obtain the bishopric of Aberdeen for one of his younger sons in 1516. The family reached the rank of lesser baron in 1531, and the dignity of knight-baronet in 1642. Its chief, at this last date—sir John Gordon of Haddo—one of the most gallant of the northern cavaliers, was the proto-martyr of his party, the first of the royalists who suffered death by a judicial sentence. He was beheaded at the cross of Edinburgh by the covenanters in 1644, bequeathing the name of " Haddo's Hole" to one of the aisles of St. Gile's church, which had been his prison. His son, sir George Gordon of Haddo, after distinguishing himself at the university and the bar, was made a lord of session in 1680, lord president of the court in 1681, and lord chancellor in the He was raised to the peerage in 1682, by the titles of earl of Aberdeen, viscount of Formartine, lord Haddo, Methlic, Turves, and Kelfie. He died in 1720, with the character of being "a solid statesman, a fine orator, speaking slow but strong." Some of these lineaments, it has been thought, reappeared, with his love of letters, in his great-great-grandson, George, fourth earl of Aberdeen, who died in 1860, after holding the office of prime minister of the united kingdom from Dec.,1852 to Feb., 1855.
The history of the Gordans waswritten in the middle of the 16th e., at the request of the fourth earl of Huntly, by an Italian Monk, 'who found his way to the Cistercian monastery of Kinloss, in Moray. His work, which has not yet been printed, is entitled,
Ilistorias Compendium de Origine et Incremento Gordonice Familiar, Johanne Ferrerio, Pedemontano, authore, spud Kinios A.D. 1545, fideliter collectum. A century later, the Gordons found another and abler historian in a country gentleman of their own race, the excellent and accomplished Robert Gordon of Straloch, who died in 1661, before he had completed his Origo et Progresses Familice Illustrissimce Gordoniorum in Scotia. It is still in manuscript. A history of the Ancient, Noble,. and illustrious Family of Gordon, by William Gordon, of Old Aberdeen, was published at Edinburgh in in 2 vols. 8vo. A Concise History ef the Ancient and ,Illustrious House of Gordon, by C. A. Gordon, appeared at Aberdeen, in 1"vol. 12.mo, in 1754. The chief value of both books is now in their rarity. A work of much greater merit is the Genealogical History of the Earldom of Sutherland, or. as its author called it, '• The Genealoeie and Pedigree f the most Ancient and Noble• Famine of the Etudes of Southerland, wherein also many Par ticulars are related touching the Surname of Gordoun and the Family of Huntly." This was published at Edinburgh in 1813, in one vol. fol. It was written in .1639 by sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun, the fourth son of the twelfth earl of Sutherland by his marriage with that lady Jane Gordon (daughter of the fourth earl Of nuttily), who was divorced from the infamous earl Bothwell, in order that he 'might marry Mary, queen of Scots. Along with sir Robert Gordon's Work, there is printed a continuation of it to the year 1651, by Gilbert Gordon of Sallacle We learn from this sequel that the house of Gordon (claiming descent from a younger son of the second earl of Huntly), which gave birth, at the end of the 18th c., to the poet George Gordon, lord Byron, gave birth, at the end of the 16th c., to one of the assassins of Wallenstein, 6)1. John Gordon, governor of Eger, in Bohemia.