Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon

Who was Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon?

Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon PC was a British peer and politician.

He was the eldest of seven children of the 9th Earl of Huntingdon and his wife, Lady Selina, a leader of the Methodist evangelical revival. Hastings was eighteen when succeeded as Earl of Huntingdon and Baron Botreaux on his father's demise in 1746. The earl never married but did father an illegitimate son, Charles, by a Parisian girl named Mademoiselle Lany, a dancer at the Opera whilst on his Grand Tour with his friend David Murray, 7th Viscount Stormont in 1747. In August 1752 Huntingdon left Paris for Spain, where his self-importance irritated the British minister, Sir Benjamin Keene. He visited Gibraltar and Lisbon before returning to England in early July 1753. The following July he left England for a second, two-year tour of the continent. In Italy he studied antiquities with the antiquarian Antonio Cocchi, as well as Joseph Wilton and the Abbé Venuti. On his return from the continent, he did well at the Royal Court, as a descendent of George, Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV, seemed to assure him and he was appointed Master of the Horse in 1760. He was a Bearer of the Sword of State at George III's coronation in 1761 and became Groom of the Stole that year. In particular, the Earl of Chesterfield, oversaw each step in the social and intellectual education of young Huntingdon, whom he praised as "the bright exemplar of the union of a scholar with the man of the world." In 1762, he incorrectly announced to the King that his first-born child, by the Queen, was a girl. The error was doubly unfortunate at the time, as the King had hoped for a male heir and he also promised £1,000 to the bearer of the news that he had a son and £500 that he had a girl. In 1766 he launched a claim to the royal Dukedom of Clarence that preoccupied him for the rest of his life. He died suddenly on October 2, 1789, at the London house of his nephew, Francis Rawdon. On his death in 1789, his earldom passed to a distant relative, Theophilus and his barony passed to his sister, Elizabeth. Huntingdon was a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1758 and of the Society of Antiquaries in 1768.