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He owns more than 200,000 acres and four ancestral seats, three in Scotland and the fourth, Boughton House – “the English Versailles” – in Northamptonshire.
But does Richard Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch, also have family skeletons rattling around in the proverbial closet?
I ask because of the claims of Robert Calder, a 64-year-old asphalt paver from Kettering.
Although originally from Scotland, Calder appears to have little in common with Buccleuch, 70.
But that, Calder says, does not take into account a love story that took place in the 1930s, between her grandmother, a domestic servant, and Johnny, the Earl of Dalkeith.
Does Richard Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch have family skeletons echoing in the proverbial closet?
Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch, pictured with Queen Camilla, is the son of Johnny, the Earl of Dalkeith, who is said to have had a daughter in 1939 when he was 15 years old.
The latter became the ninth Duke of Buccleuch, married in 1953 and had four children, the eldest being the current Duke.
She had had another child years earlier, Calder says. “My grandmother had a daughter in 1939,” Calder tells me. ‘My mother.’
The name of the baby’s father could not appear on the birth certificate, and not only because the parents were not married. ‘[Johnny Dalkeith] I wasn’t even 16 when my mother was born,” explains Calder.
His mother, he adds, died aged just 43 in 1983. Calder hitchhiked from London to Edinburgh for the funeral, arriving when the service ended.
“There was a man in a wheelchair, with a gray blanket or shawl over his knees,” he recalls. “He smiled at me but we didn’t talk.”
Later that year, an acquaintance who had worked on the duke’s Boughton estate said the aristocrat would like to see it. Calder wasn’t interested.
“I had never heard of the Duke of Buccleuch and didn’t know he was in a wheelchair,” he recalls.
Years later he learned that the duke had been wheelchair-bound since a hunting accident in 1971. He heard many cryptic comments.
“They told me, ‘The problem is not who your father is, but who your mother’s father was.'”
Over the past two years, he has renewed his efforts to discover more, asking the current Duke what he knows, if anything, but with no answer.
The 10th Duke of Buccleuch owns more than 200,000 acres and four ancestral seats, including Boughton House, “the English Versailles”, in Northamptonshire.
Perhaps that is due to Calder’s other extraordinary claim. The 9th Duke and Calder’s grandmother were, he says, more than lovers, thanks to what happened in the previous generation.
“They didn’t know it, they couldn’t have known it, but they were half brother and sister.”
DNA testing would surely separate truth from myth. However, it can be difficult to organize.
A spokesperson tells me the duke “could not be reached for comment.”