FlemingClans.com

Heir of the Fleming estates - Cornwallis Maude-Fleming
(born 1852)
Basic information about this person: \click here\

Cornwallis Maude-Fleming was the grandson of Admiral Charles Elphinstone-Fleming and the last of the line to carry the Fleming inheritance of Cumbernauld into the later nineteenth century.

Family background

Cornwallis was born in 1852, the son of Cornwallis Maude, later 4th Viscount Hawarden, and his wife Clementina Elphinstone-Fleming, daughter of Admiral Charles Elphinstone-Fleming of Cumbernauld. His mother is remembered today as Clementina, Lady Hawarden, one of the pioneers of Victorian photography, whose portraits of her daughters are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Heir to Cumbernauld

When Cornwallis’s uncle John Elphinstone-Fleming, 14th Lord Elphinstone, died without a son in 1861, the Fleming inheritance appears to have passed to his mother, who died in 1865 when Cornwallis was about thirteen. As heir to the Fleming estates he took the additional surname of Fleming. On 30 April 1867 he visited Cumbernauld, the seat of the Fleming family since the fourteenth century.

Legacy

Little more is recorded of Cornwallis in the family papers. He represents the last link in a chain of inheritance that ran from Malcolm Fleming of Biggar, who received Cumbernauld in 1382, through the Lords Fleming and Earls of Wigtown and the Elphinstone-Flemings, for almost five hundred years.