Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 24.djvu/155

 Hamilton gallant conduct during the siege of Quebec in the previous year, and died 24 Jan. 1784; by his wife Cassandra Agnes, daughter of Edward Chamberlayne of Maugersbury, Gloucestershire, he had two sons, Charles and Edward [q. v.] In 1776 Charles Hamilton was entered on the books of the Hector, then commanded by his father, and in the following year was nominated to the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth, from which in 1779 he was again appointed to the Hector. In her he went out to the Jamaica station; and on 20 Oct. 1781 was made lieutenant into the Tobago sloop. On the death of his father, 24 Jan. 1784, he succeeded to the baronetcy. In 1789 he was promoted to be commander of the Scorpion, and was advanced to post rank 22 Nov. 1790. Early in 1793 he was appointed to the Dido frigate, which, after a summer in the North Sea and on the coast of Norway, was sent out to the Mediterranean, where, in the following spring, Hamilton served at the sieges of Bastia, Calvi, San Fiorenzo, and in the reduction of a martello tower at Girolata. In July he was moved into the San Fiorenzo, one of the captured frigates, and shortly after into the Romney, in which he returned to England. He then commissioned the Melpomene, which he commanded for upwards of seven years, in the operations on the coast of Holland in 1799 [see ], as senior officer on the coast of Africa, and at the reduction of Goree in 1800: and in the West Indies, where he also carried out the duties of commissioner at Antigua till July 1802. In 1801 he was returned to parliament as member for Dungannon, and in 1807 for Honiton, which he continued to represent till 1812, although at the time serving actively afloat. In November 1803 he was appointed to the Illustrious of 74 guns, in the Channel fleet, and afterwards to the Téméraire and Tonnant. On 1 Aug. 1810 he was promoted to be rear-admiral, and hoisted his flag on board the Thisbe frigate, as commander-in-chief in the Thames, a post which he held till his promotion to be vice-admiral 4 June 1814. From 1818 to 1824 he was governor and commander-in-chief at Newfoundland; attained the rank of admiral 22 July 1830, was nominated a K.C.B. 29 Jan. 1833, and died at his residence, Iping, near Midhurst in Sussex, on 14 Sept. 1849. He married in 1803 Henrietta Martha, daughter of Mr. George Drummond, and left issue a son, who succeeded to the baronetcy.

 HAMILTON, CLAUD, (1543?–1622), generally known as, was the fourth son of James Hamilton, second earl of Arran and duke of Châtelherault [q. v.], by his wife Lady Margaret, eldest daughter of James Douglas, third earl of Morton [q. v.] The date of Hamilton's birth is uncertain, but it was possibly in September 1543, for Sir Ralph Sadler wrote to Henry VIII that Châtelherault had gone ‘to Blackness to his wife, who laboured with child’ (, Letters); but he is said to have been in his seventy-eighth year at the time of his death; while on 20 March 1560 the list of Scottish pledges gives his age as fourteen (Cal. State Papers, For. Ser. 1559–60, entry 903), and a papal bull of 5 Dec. 1553, conferring on him the abbey of Paisley in commendam, says that he was in his fourteenth year (bull printed in Abbey of Paisley, pp. clxxxiii–5). The bull was issued at the instance of Claud's uncle, John Hamilton (1511?–1571) [q. v.], archbishop of St. Andrews, who until then held the abbacy, and was still to administer its temporal and spiritual concerns till his nephew Claud should reach his twenty-third year; and as a matter of fact Claud was infeft in the temporalities on 29 July 1567. Being one of the hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty of Berwick, Hamilton was detained in England at Newcastle till February 1561–2 (ib. 1561–2, entry 860). He took a leading part in the plot for the deliverance of Queen Mary from Lochleven and her re-establishment on the throne. Shortly after Mary crossed the Firth of Forth on her escape on 2 May 1568, he met her with fifty horse and convoyed her first to Niddry Castle, Linlithgowshire, and then to Hamilton. In all probability it was not Lord John Hamilton [q. v.], as stated by Sir James Melville (Memoirs, p. 201), but Lord Claud as stated by Herries (Memoirs, p. 102), and by the author of the ‘Hist. of James the Sext’ (p. 26), who led the vanguard of the queen at the battle of Langside; for Lord John had some time previously gone to France, and apparently had not returned in time to sign the band of 8 May. The vanguard consisted of about two thousand men, who endeavoured to storm the village, and were all but successful in turning the regent's right when, through the watchfulness of Kirkcaldy of Grange, reinforcements were brought up from the main battle, who with their low weapons ‘struck their enemy in their flanks and faces’ (, Memoirs, p. 202), and threw them into confusion. At the parliament held by the regent in the same year Hamilton and the other principal supporters