Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond
Field Marshal Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond,, styled Earl of March until 1750, was British politician and military officer. Associated with the Rockingham Whigs, Richmond briefly served as Secretary of State for the Southern Department for a three-month period in 1766. His support for the Patriots during the American War of Independence along with concession in Ireland and parliamentary reform in Britain led Richmond to be nicknamed "the Radical Duke". He is believed by many to be the source of the second parchment copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, known as the Sussex Declaration. Richmond went on to be a reforming Master-General of the Ordnance first in the first Rockingham ministry and then in the first Pitt ministry.
Early life
He was the eldest surviving son and heir of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, of Goodwood and of Richmond House, by his wife Lady Sarah Cadogan, elder daughter and co-heiress of William Cadogan, 1st Earl Cadogan. Educated at Westminster School and Leiden University, he succeeded to the dukedom and other family titles in August 1750.Career
Commissioned as an ensign in the 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards in March 1752, he was promoted captain in the 20th Regiment of Foot on 18 June 1753 studying the fortified towns of the Low Countries under his military tutor, Captain Guy Carleton, appointed on the recommendation of Colonel James Wolfe. On 11 December 1755, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.Promoted to lieutenant colonel in the 33rd Regiment of Foot on 7 June 1756, a 2nd Battalion was raised in 1757 redesignated the following year as a regiment, the 72nd Foot, with Richmond as its commanding officer, while his younger brother Lord George Lennox took command of the 33rd Regiment. In May 1758 he was appointed Colonel of the 72nd Foot Regiment.
Richmond took part in the raid on Cherbourg in August 1758 and served as Aide-de-Camp to Prince Frederick of Brunswick at the Battle of Minden in August 1759. Promoted Major-General on 9 March 1761, at the end of the Seven Years' War he oversaw the 72nd Foot's disbandment in 1763.
Appointed Lord Lieutenant of Sussex by George III on 18 October 1763, Richmond was sworn of the Privy Council in 1765 being posted to the court of Louis XV in Paris as British ambassador extraordinary, and in the following year he served briefly in the Rockingham Whig administration as Southern Secretary of State, resigning office on the accession of Pitt the Elder in July 1766. He was promoted Lieutenant-General on 30 April 1770 and served briefly as parliamentary Leader of the Whigs in Opposition in 1771 when Rockingham's wife was ill. Richmond's strongly pro-Patriot sympathies earned him the epithet "the Radical Duke."
In policy debates leading up to the American War of Independence, Richmond was a firm supporter of the Patriots, initiating the parliamentary debate in 1778 which called for the removal of British forces from the rebelling colonies, during which Pitt died from a heart condition. Nevertheless, as Lord-Lieutenant, he raised the Sussex Militia for home defence, taking personal command as Colonel.
Richmond also advocated a policy of concession in Ireland, coining the phrase "a Union of Hearts" which remained in use long after his political lifetime. In 1779 Richmond brought forward a motion for retrenchment of the Civil List, and in 1780 he embodied in a Bill proposals for parliamentary reform, which included male suffrage, annual parliaments and equal electoral areas. In 1787, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Richmond joined the Second Rockingham ministry as Master-General of the Ordnance in March 1782; he was appointed a Knight of the Garter on 17 April 1782 and promoted to the rank of full General on 20 November 1782. He resigned as Master-General when the Fox–North coalition came to power in April 1783.
In January 1784 he joined the First Pitt the Younger ministry as Master-General of the Ordnance; in this role he reformed the Department of State, introducing salaries for office holders, establishing a survey of the South Coast and introducing new artillery. As Master-General, Richmond's operational headquarters was at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, where he oversaw the Royal Military Repository under its first Commandant, Sir William Congreve. Richmond supervised Congreve's development of the Repository's artillery collection and his gunpowder experiments at the Royal Laboratory, including improvements in powder manufacture and the establishment of facilities at Portsmouth and Plymouth for powder recovery. In 1794, Richmond formally established the Corps of Royal Artillery Drivers by Royal Warrant to provide professional teams for field artillery, complementing his earlier formation of the Royal Horse Artillery and ending the reliance on civilian contractors for moving guns. He further commissioned London gunsmith Henry Nock to design and manufacture a new "Duke of Richmond's musket" to replace the traditional British army muskets. The first practical example of using interchangeable parts, just as Nock succeeded in producing the weapon at scale Richmond lost his post as Master-General, ending the prospect of the weapon being adopted officially. However, similar designs continued to be associated with the Duke.
By now developing strongly Tory persuasions, his alleged desertion of the Reform cause led to accusations of apostasy and an attack on him by Lord Lauderdale in 1792, which almost led to a duel. In November 1795, when Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke were charged with treason and cited his publications on reform in their defence, Richmond became perceived as a liability to HM Government and was dismissed in February 1795.
Appointed Colonel of the Royal Horse Guards on 18 July 1795, he was promoted as Field Marshal on 30 July 1796. On 15 June 1797 he raised a Yeomanry Artillery Troop, the Duke of Richmond's Light Horse Artillery, at his Goodwood estate. The Troop was equipped with his own design of a Curricle gun carriage.
In retirement, Richmond developed the family seat enhancing Goodwood's reputation as a sporting estate by adding, alongside his father's cricket pitch, the famous Goodwood Racecourse. He was also a patron of artists such as George Stubbs, Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raphael Mengs, Joshua Reynolds and George Romney.
Marriage
On 1 April 1757, he married Lady Mary Bruce, youngest daughter and co-heiress of Charles Bruce, 3rd Earl of Ailesbury, and his third wife, Lady Caroline Campbell. The wedding was held at the house of Major-General Henry Conway in Warwick Street, St James's, with the consent of the Major-General, one of Lady Mary's guardians, by special licence of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral, given the then vacancy of the See of Canterbury, and performed by the Hon. and Revd Frederick Keppel, then Canon of Windsor and the future Bishop of Exeter. The marriage failed to produce any legitimate issue.Mistresses and illegitimate issue
Mrs Mary Bennett
As acknowledged in his Will the Duke had three illegitimate daughters by Mrs Mary Bennett, described as "his housekeeper", also known at sometime as Mrs Mary Blesard, 30 years his junior. To his daughters he bequeathed the sum of £10,000 each, and to Mrs Bennett he bequeathed his estate at Earl's Court, Kensington.- Mary Bennett, who at the age of 19 married Colonel William Light, founder of the City of Adelaide in Australia.
- Caroline Bennett, who married her first cousin Captain Henry Edward Napier, son of Colonel the Hon. George Napier and Lady Sarah Lennox, sister of the 3rd Duke. Captain Napier was the author of Florentine History from the earliest Authentic Records to the Accession of Ferdinand the Third, Grandduke of Tuscany, and a brother of General Sir Charles James Napier, conqueror of the Sindh. She died at the Villa Capponi in Florence and her inscribed gravestone survives in the "English Cemetery" or Cimitero di Pinti at Florence, next to that of her mother.
Vicomtesse de Cambis
By his French mistress Gabrielle-Charlotte-Françoise d'Alsace de Hénin-Liétard, wife of General Jacques-François de Cambis, seigneur d'Orsan, niece of Cardinal d'Alsace and sister of the Prince de Chimay, the Duke had another illegitimate daughter:- Henrietta Anne le Clerc, variously called "a protégée of the Duchess" and "a long acknowledged daughter of His Grace". The 3rd Duke referred to her in his Will as "Miss Henrietta Anne le Clerc, who resides with me and though Christened by the name of Anne only, is called Henrietta and whom I have from her childhood", and bequeathed her an annual income of £2,000. In 1778, aged 5, Henrietta had been brought from France by the Duke's sister Lady Louisa Conolly, to live at Goodwood House. It was in Henrietta's bedroom at Richmond House where the fire started in 1791 which destroyed that building. By the Duke's will she received the life tenure of West Lavant Park and other lands and farms on the Goodwood Estate. On 28 March 1808, at St James's Church, Westminster, she married Lieutenant-General John Dorrien, late Royal Horse Guards, by whom she had a son, Charles Dorrien. After her husband's death she turned to the management of her estate, where she bred Merino sheep as well as hunting with Colonel Wyndham's foxhounds.
Death, burial and succession
The 3rd Duke died at Goodwood on 29 December 1806 being buried in Chichester Cathedral, Sussex. As he left no legitimate issue he was succeeded in his peerage titles by his nephew, Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond and Lennox.The Sussex Declaration
On April 21, 2017, the Harvard Declaration Resources Project announced the discovery at West Sussex Record Office in Chichester, England, of a second parchment manuscript copy of the United States Declaration of Independence. Named the "Sussex Declaration" by historians Danielle Allen and Emily Sneff, it differs from the National Archives version in that the signatures on it are not grouped by States. How this manuscript arrived in England is as yet unknown, but the finders believe that the randomness of the signatures points to an origin with signatory James Wilson, who had argued strongly that the Declaration was made not by the States but by the whole people. The Sussex Declaration is thought probably to have been brought back to England by the Duke of Richmond.However, in 2025 Professor Allen, after continued research, wrote of her conviction that the Sussex Declaration was brought from Philadelphia to Lewes, Sussex not by the Duke of Richmond, but by Thomas Paine, on a brief return visit home in 1787, as a gift to the duke, his longtime patron and friend.