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Heiress of the Fleming estates - Lady Clementina Fleming, Lady Elphinstone
(1719 - 1799)
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Lady Clementina Fleming was the only surviving child of John, 6th Earl of Wigtown. When her uncle, the last earl, died in 1747 she inherited the Fleming estates of Biggar and Cumbernauld, and through her marriage they passed to the Elphinstone family.

The earl’s daughter

Clementina was born in 1719, the daughter of John Fleming, 6th Earl of Wigtown, and his second wife, Mary Keith, eldest daughter of William, 8th Earl Marischal. Her mother died when she was about two. Through her mother she was a niece of the Jacobite Keith brothers, George, the last Earl Marischal, and Field Marshal James Keith, and her letters survive among Keith family correspondence from 1738 to 1759.

In 1738 her father granted her a bond of provision of thirty thousand merks. As a woman she could not inherit the earldom, which went to her uncle Charles, but when he died unmarried in 1747 she became heiress to the family lands.

Lady Elphinstone

Clementina married Charles Elphinstone, who in 1757 became 10th Lord Elphinstone. Their sons included John, later 11th Lord Elphinstone, and George Keith Elphinstone, the admiral who became Viscount Keith. In 1748 she went to law with her father’s widow over his goods, and the Court of Session ruled that a lady’s dressing plate did not count as her personal paraphernalia.

The estates

Clementina held the Fleming estates for half a century. In 1773 she sold the barony of Biggar and Boghall to Sir Michael Bruce of Stenhouse, but she kept Cumbernauld. In 1788 she conveyed her estate to her grandson Charles Elphinstone, a younger son of her eldest son, passing over his elder brother John. Ten years later she seems to have tried to reverse this in John’s favour, which led to a long legal battle after her death.

Death and legacy

Clementina died at Marylebone in London on 1 January 1799, at the age of about seventy-nine, and was buried at Biggar. Her nickname, “the Heiress”, sums up her role. She was the link between the Fleming earls of Wigtown and the Elphinstone-Flemings who held Cumbernauld in the nineteenth century.