James Robert Hope-Scott


1812 - 1873

Tractarian and barrister. Born James Hope at Great Marlow (England), the grandson of John Hope, 2nd Earl of Hopetoun (1704-81). He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became friends with William Gladstone and John Henry Newman (later Cardinal Newman). He was called to the English Bar in 1838 and made his living as a barrister.

In the early 1840s, with Newman, Hope-Scott became one of the leaders of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement, which sought to return the Anglican Church to a richer Mediaeval form of worship. This movement was deeply conservative and fought against liberal theology and a perceived secularisation of the church. It developed into Anglo-Catholicism and many of its members became Roman Catholics. Hope-Scott was received into the Roman Catholic church in 1851.

He was a founder of Glenalmond College, but spent £40,000 in the later years of his life building Catholic churches and schools in Scotland.

In 1847, he married Charlotte Lockhart, daughter of John Gibson Lockhart (1794- 1854) and grand-daughter of Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832). After their marriage they rented Scott's Abbotsford House in the Scottish Borders. His wife inherited the house in 1853, the couple changed their surname to Hope-Scott. In 1855 he bought the Loch Shiel Estate and built a house at Dorlin. Charlotte died in childbirth in 1858 and, in 1861, he married Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 14th Duke of Norfolk and god-daughter of Queen Victoria. She too died in childbirth in 1870. Hope-Scott never recovered from this second tragedy and died in London three years later.


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