of the grantee is revested in the dignity. The law of forfeiture as applicable to peerage succession was not fully decided until the hearing of the claim to the earldom of Airlie in 1812-19, when the judges of England, being summoned by the House of Lords, held unanimously that if an attainted person lived to succeed to a dignity, he took it for the Crown, and no remoter heir had right even though he proved that he had in his own line of descent no corruption of blood. This law (described by the Earl of Aberdeen, in a letter I possess, as most cruel and one which ought to be repealed) is founded in the law of England, and only became applicable to Scottish dignities by the statute enacting that the law of forfeiture in Scotland should follow the law of England.
In the course of the eighteenth century there were several peerage claims, but it was not until the close of the century that the evidence was printed. Consequently the nature of the claims and decisions can only be inferred from rare printed cases and the Lords' journals. The extraordinary proposition that whenever the instrument creating a dignity is lost it must be presumed to have contained a limitation to heirs male of the body (unless such presumption is contradicted by the facts of descent) was, it is supposed, first enunciated in the Cassilis case, 1762. I call the proposition extraordinary, because of all the dignities created before (approximately) the reign of Richard II. in England and of Robert Bruce in Scotland I know of none created otherwise than in fee. The presumption so established nearly resulted in gross injustice when the Sutherland case arose, 1769-71. A young lady was heir to her father, the last Earl of Sutherland of the Gordon line, whose vast estates were settled on the heir to the dignity. A remote heir male, relying on the presumption, contested the succession, and thus elicited the celebrated Additional Case for the Countess of Sutherland, attributed to Dalrymple, afterwards Lord Hailes. This masterpiece, which traced the law and succession of all the original earldoms of Scotland, convinced the House of Lords of their danger, and judgment was given for the countess, notwithstanding that no evidence could possibly be tendered to rebut the presumption. There exist unfortunately no minutes of the evidence proved in this case. The printing of evidence began with a series of claims to Scottish peerages—made in response to orders of the House of Lords rather than voluntarily—in consequence of a
