Alan Gardner, 2nd Baron Gardner

Alan Hyde Gardner, 2nd Baron Gardner KCB (5 February 1770 – 22 December 1815), was a British admiral.

The Lord Gardner
Born(1770-02-05)5 February 1770
Died22 December 1815(1815-12-22) (aged 45)
Allegiance United Kingdom
Service/branch Royal Navy
Years of service?–1815
RankAdmiral

Born the son of Admiral Alan Gardner, 1st Baron Gardner, he followed his father into the Royal Navy. In 1796 he was captain of the frigate HMS Heroine,[1] in 1802 he was captain of Resolution,[2] and in 1805 of the 74-gun HMS Hero[3] – in the latter he was present at the action off Ferrol in 1805,[3] and led the vanguard at the Battle of Cape Finisterre later that year.[4]

In 1815 it was announced that he was to be created a viscount, but he died before the patent had passed the Great Seal. He passed on the title of Baron Gardner to his son, Alan.

Marriage and issue
  1. His first marriage was on 9 March 1796 to Maria Elizabeth Adderley, the daughter of Thomas Adderley and his wife Margaretta Bourke, later Baroness Hobart (d. 1796), and stepdaughter since 1792 of Robert, Baron Hobart, the future Secretary of State for War and the Colonies 1801–04.[5] The couple divorced in 1805, after Lord Gardner discovered his wife's adultery and secret delivery of a child in June 1803, and brought about an ecclesiastical suit followed by an Act of Parliament, citing her adultery with a Henry Jadis (the father of her son born in 1803, Henry Fenton Gardner, who was declared illegitimate by the House of Lords in 1825).[2][6] According to the Treatise on Adulterine Bastardy, the divorced Mrs Gardner married her lover immediately afterwards, and they raised Henry Fenton as their own child and with the Jadis surname.[7]
  2. His second marriage (as 2nd Baron Gardner) was on 10 April 1809 to Charlotte Elizabeth Smith (d. 27 March 1811), third daughter of Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington, and his wife Anne Boldero-Barnard. The couple had one son Alan (29 January 1810 – 2 November 1883) and one daughter, Hon. Charlotte Susannah Gardner (29 December 1810 – 15 August 1859), m. 1835 Edward Vernon Harbord, 4th Lord Suffield (1813–1853) without issue.[8] These children were "Irish twins" (born in the same calendar year, and within twelve months of each other); Lady Gardner died three months later.

The 2nd Baron Gardner inherited his father's barony and baronetcy in 1809. He died 1815, leaving legitimate issue. Efforts were made in 1824 to seat his son as a peer, and to ensure that Fenton Gardner (son of Lord Gardner's first wife) would not inherit the peerage. The subsequent proceeding in the House of Lords established that Alan Legge Gardner was the 3rd Baron Gardner, and that his (alleged) half-brother was in fact illegitimate.[9] The proceedings heard evidence from domestic servants and also medical practitioners, testifying to the possible lengths of human gestation; the medical evidence also received an eccentric contemporary commentary by Robert Lyall.[10] This commentary includes an science-fictional experiment to calculate the exact length of human gestation, which Lyall calls the Experimental Conception Hospital.[11]

References
  1. Marshall, John (1828). "Willoughby, Nisbet Josiah" . Royal Naval Biography. Vol. sup, part 2. London: Longman and company. p. 115.
  2. Le Marchant, Denis (1828). Report of the proceedings of the House of lords on the claims to the barony of Gardner; with an appendix, containing a collection of cases illustrative of the law of legitimacy. London: Henry Butterworth.
  3. Allen, Joseph (1852). Battles of the British Navy. Vol. 2. p. 150.
  4. Brenton, Edward Pelham (1837). The naval history of Great Britain, from the year 1783 to 1786. H. Colburn. p. 21.
  5. Her mother, Margaretta Adderley née Bourke, married 2ndly (as his 1st wife) 1792 Robert Hobart (1760–1816), later Baron Hobart (writ of acceleration 1798), later 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire (1804), son of George Hobart, 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire, who succeeded his half-brother 1793. Robert Hobart's mother, the former Albinia Bertie, was granddaughter of Robert Bertie, 1st Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven, and was formerly known as Mrs Hobart of gaming house fame (see references in Georgette Heyer's Faro's Daughter). Robert and Margaretta Hobart had issue, one son (who died young) and one daughter Sarah who married Prime Minister Lord Goderich and was the mother of George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon. Through her mother's remarriage and her surviving half-sister, Mrs Gardner had powerful relatives: the 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire, his cousin Lady Castlereagh (born a Hobart), Lady Lothian who was herself a divorcée (also a Hobart), Lady Willoughby de Eresby and her sister Lady Cholmondeley (both Bertie sisters) and so forth. It is not certain how much they helped her. None of them seem to have helped her in the divorce case 1805 or in the subsequent attempt of her son Henry Fenton Jadis to claim the barony in 1824.
  6. Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, William Knollys, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords A treatise on the law of adulterine bastardy: with a report of the Banbury case, and of all other cases bearing upon the subject (Google eBook). W. Pickering, 1836, 588 pages.
  7. Nicolas, p. 214 "He was called by the name of the adulterer who reared him, educated him, and finally provided for him; having moreover married Mrs Gardner the instant the divorce was obtained."
  8. William Courthope ed. Gardner entry p. 323 Debrett's Complete Peerage of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Printed for J.G. & F. Rivington, 1838 - 781 pages. Retrieved from Google Books.
  9. Nicolas, p. 214. "[I]t was the adultery of his mother, and the concealment of the birth from the husband which justified the House in holding that he could not have been the result of intercourse which took place on board ship between Captain Gardner and his wife on the 30th of January preceding his birth." The point made here was that unusually long gestation alone is not proof of illegitimacy, but rather known adultery coupled with a secret birth or concealed births of children of a married woman are proofs.
  10. Lyall, Robert (1826). The medical evidence relative to the duration of human pregnancy : given in the Gardner peerage cause, before the Committee for Privileges of the House of Lords in 1825-26. London: Burgess and Hill.
  11. Davis, Isabel (May 2018). "The Experimental Conception Hospital: Dating Pregnancy and the Gothic Imagination". Social History of Medicine. 32 (4): 773–798. doi:10.1093/shm/hky005. PMC 6839528. PMID 31723312.
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