Stuart, George, 9th seigneur d’Aubigny (1618 -1642)

George Stuart (or Stewart) was the son of Esmé Stewart, 3rd Duke of Lennox, and his wife Katherine Clifton, 2nd Baroness Clifton, and the brother of James Stewart, 1st Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Lennox, and of the Royalist commander Lord Bernard Stewart. With his elder brother Henry, and younger brother Ludovic, Stuart was brought up at Aubigny in France as Roman Catholics under the charge of their paternal grandmother, the Duchess-Dowager, Katherine de Balsac. Stuart's father, the Duke of Lennox, died in 1624, and Stuart became a ward of his cousin, the future King Charles I of England. In 1632 he inherited the Lordship of Aubigny at the age of 14 on the death of his brother Henry, the 8th seigneur. By 1633, he was a student at the Collège de Navarre, part of the University of Paris. In 1636 he paid homage to Louis XIII of France for the lordship of Aubigny, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and later that year he moved to England. In 1638 he secretly married Katherine Howard, the daughter of Theophilus Howard, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, and Elizabeth Home, without her father's consent, offending his guardian the King. They had two children. As Civil War loomed in England, Stuart joined the forces of King Charles at York where he was knighted on 18 April 1642, along with his brother Bernard. He was mortally wounded in the first pitched battle of the war at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, aged 24. He was buried in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. The lordship of Aubigny passed to his next brother, Ludovic (1619-1665). His widow remarried James Levingston, 1st Earl of Newburgh, and had one further child Elizabeth. They were suspected in 1648 of plotting to rescue Charles I, and on the discovery of the supposed plot fled to the Netherlands, where Katherine died in 1650.