reckless lad to have a look at the fortifications of Brest. He was
caught in the act; Harcourt repudiated all knowledge of him; and he was
executed November 24, 1769, gay to the end, and attracting the eyes of
every pretty girl in the town. The guillotine which did its worst is
still preserved in the arsenal at Brest, and the whole story is set forth
with legal precision in the transactions of the Societe Academique de
Brest.

Poor Alexander was succeeded as laird by his younger brother Charles
Edward (1750-1832), who became an officer in the Northern Fencibles, and
was not without his share of adventure, which curiously enough arose out
of his brother's regiment, the 49th. He married as his second wife
Catherine Mercer, the daughter of James Mercer, the poet, who had been a
major in that regiment. In 1797, his commanding officer, Colonel John
Woodford, who had married his chief, the Duke of Gordon's, sister, bolted
at Hythe with the lady, from whom the laird of Wardhouse duly got a
divorce. That did not satisfy Gordon, who thrashed his colonel with a
stick in the streets of Ayr. Of course he was court-martialled, but
Woodford's uncle-in-law, Lord Adam Gordon, as Commander-in-Chief of North
Britain, smoothed over the sentence of dismissal from the Fencibles by
getting the angry husband appointed paymaster in the Royal Scots.

Gordon's eldest son John David, by his first marriage (with the
grand-daughter of the Earl of Kilmarnock, who was executed at the Tower
with Lord Lovat), had wisely kept out of temptation amid the peaceful
family vineyards at Jerez, from which he returned in 1832 to Wardhouse.
But John David's half-brother stayed at home and became Admiral Sir James
Alexander Gordon (1782-1869), who as the "last of Nelson's Captains"
roused the admiration of Tom Hughes in a fine appreciation in
_Macmillan's Magazine_. Although he had lost his leg in the capture of
the Pomone in 1812, he could stump on foot even as an old man all the way
from Westminster to Greenwich Hospital, of which he was the last
Governor, and where you can see his portrait to this day.

Although John David Gordon succeeded to Wardhouse, his family remained
essentially Spanish, and his own tastes, as his grandson, General Gordon,
points out, were coloured by the character of the Peninsula. The General
himself, as his autobiography shows in every page, has had his inherited
Gay Gordonism aided and abetted by his associations with Spain and wit