two daughters, Elizabeth (1715), and Susanne Marie (1717), were born to him. [The son was born within the parish of St. Mary, Aldermary; and on the presentation of a certificate of Henri Chatelain, pasteur of St. Martin-Organ, his baptism was inserted in the parish register.] The gallant Baron became a Brigadier 22d April 1727, Major-General 13th November 1735, and Lieutenant-General 2d July 1739. In 1744 he wrote a letter on behalf of the King to the City of London French Church, desiring to ascertain “the number of French Protestants willing to take up arms in case His Majesty required their services at this conjuncture.” I have found the minute of the General Assembly of the French Churches of London.[1] The Assembly met on the 7th March 1844, Rev. J. J. Majendie being in the moderator’s chair. The Baron de Saint Hippolite’s letter was read and engrossed in the minutes. A committee was appointed to ascertain the number of volunteers that the French refugees could muster for military service, and to collect their names. The committee-men were Monsieur Dalbiac, Captain de Merargues, and Mr. Pravan (formerly a captain of militia), for the City and Spitalfields; and Messrs. de St. Maurice, De Foissac, and Soulegre, for Westminster. On the 13th of April, they reported that more than 800 names had been received in Spitalfields, and about the same number for Westminster; the latter list including a number of officers and housekeepers. An autograph note, preserved in the British Museum, shows that the Baron had submitted to a literary friend for revision his Memorial to the French Churches:—
“A Monsieur, Monsieur Des Maizeaux à Marie-la-Bonne.”
“Monsieur, Je vous remercie de la bonte que vous avez eu de corriger le mémoire que je vous avois donné. Agréez, Monsieur, que je vous prie de boire à ma santé avec la demy Guinée çi-incluse, étant avec une parfaite estime, Monsieur, Votre très humble et très obeissant serviteur,
“Albemarle Street, le 23 Janvier 1743-4.”
The Baron was promoted to the rank of General of Foot on the 9th of March, in the last year of his life. He died 9th June 1761 , “at his house in Surrey,” aged ninety-three, and was buried in the Wandsworth Cemetery, which is still called “the French burial ground.” In his will, he left “the house in Albemarle Street” to his widow; £100 to the French Hospital, of which he had been a director from its establishment in 1718; he directed that the allowance which he had regularly given to his youngest brother, Aimard Montolicu, residing at Berlin, should be continued [this brother’s name is mentioned by Moreri, who styles him “Aymard de Montolieu, Conseiller de Cour et d’Ambassade de S. M. Prussienne.”] The Baron also left £1500 to his only surviving daughter, Elizabeth, wife of “the Reverend and Honourable” Gideon Murray, D.D., Prebendary of Durham (third son of Alexander, fourth Lord Elibank), to whom she had been married in 1746. In 1778 Prebendary Murray died, leaving two sons, Alexander and David; the former had married, 20th April 1776, his first cousin, Mary Clara Montolieu, daughter of Colonel Louis Charles Montolieu.
The Baron’s son, Louis Charles, entered the army. By his marriage, he allied himself with the family of Leheup, of which four members appear in the journals as public servants, named Isaac, Michael, Matthew, and Peter; of these, Isaac twice represented boroughs in Cornwall in Parliament, and was Minister-Plenipotentiary to the Diet of Ratisbon in 1726. On the 26th July 1750, Captain Montolieu, only son of Lieutenant-General Baron St. Hippolite, married Elizabeth, daughter of Peter Leheup, Esq. of St. James’ Place, London; the marriage was performed in the French Church in the Savoy. He rose to be Colonel in the Horse Guards. He established a bank in London, afterwards known as Hammersley’s Bank. He died on 13th February 1776, and was buried in the Huguenot Cemetery at Wandsworth, where his sister, Susanne Marie, who died at the age of twenty-five, had been laid in 1743, as well as the Baron, his father, in 1761. He himself, as declared in the Wandsworth register, claimed to have succeeded his father as second Baron.
Colonel Montolieu left several daughters. I have already named Mary Clara, wife of Alexander Murray, who in 1785 succeeded to the Peerage as the seventh Lord Elibank; she died on the 19th January 1802, leaving three sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Alexander, eighth Lord Elibank (born 1780, died 1830), had six sons and seven daughters; the third son being the Hon. Thomas Montolieu Murray (born 1811, died 1852), and the eldest son, Alexander Oliphant Murray, the ninth Lord Elibank, father of Oliphant Montolieu Fox Murray, tenth Lord Elibank. The two latter represent both the son and daughter of the old Baron de Saint Hippolite; the
- ↑ Burn’s MSS.
