The family split into two main branches in the first half of the 15th century – from the senior branch descend from today’s Earl Home of the Hirsel, while by 1550 the junior branch had made its base at Wedderburn Castle just north of Paxton. Family tradition allowed girls to keep their family name, usually annexing it to their husband’s, leading to a confusing genealogy of Home-MacDonalds, Home-Robertsons and Milne-Homes.
Henry VIII’s son Edward VI was the aggressor in 1547 when David’s grandson, George, 5th Baron was killed at the battle of Pinkie. A century later, in the Third English Civil War, when a Scottish army took on Oliver Cromwell’s forces at Dunbar in 1650, both George’s grandson, David, 8th Baron, and his heir were killed. The lands at Paxton were then nearly lost when George, 10th Baron backed the losing side in the Jacobite Rising of 1715.
Margaret, Lady Billie by David Martin – Patrick Home’s mother (a posthumous portrait on loan from a private collection); Patrick Home by Cosmo Alexander, 1757 (on loan from a private collection); Prussian heiress Sophie De Brandt who was destined never to live at Paxton.
The Reverend had managed to save the estates for the family after the 1715 Jacobite Rising in which his cousin, Sir George Home, was implicated. Faced with the forfeiture of the Lands of Billie, The Reverend persuaded the Crown that the estates had been made over to him before 1715. He proposed that his eldest son marry George Home’s daughter Margaret to secure the inheritance but, when his son refused (as he loved her younger sister, Isobel), the Reverend married Margaret himself, despite being 30 years her senior.
The canny Reverend amassed a considerable fortune as a debt broker and when he died in 1744, Patrick’s mother, Margaret, continued to manage the estates until 1751, when she was murdered by the butler while her son Patrick was away on his continental travels.
The butler, Norman Ross, ‘confidential servant’ to Margaret, Lady Billie, broke into her bedroom on the night of 12 August 1751 intending to steal money from her cabinet, his mistress woke and Ross cut her throat before escaping through a window. Margaret survived for a few days; Norman was captured, tried and sentenced to hang in chains, the last man to suffer this shameful punishment.
When his mother was murdered, Patrick put aside any plans to return to Berlin and finished his Grand Tour with an extended stay in Paris, coming back to Scotland in 1753.
Patrick embarked upon the grand building project of Paxton House, commissioning designs in 1756, hoping that Sophie would one day become its mistress. Just after the completion of the new house at Paxton, Patrick inherited the Wedderburn title in 1766 from his mother’s brother.
The prospect of the more prestigious estate at Wedderburn, combined with heartbreak at the death of his Prussian sweetheart, caused Patrick to sell Paxton and start a new building project at Wedderburn with Robert Adam as architect. In 1771, in his early 40s, Patrick married Jane Graham, the daughter of a Grenadian plantation manager, but their relationship was short-lived as she ended up in a Belgian convent. Patrick served MP for Berwickshire in 1784-95 and died at Wedderburn in 1808.
The only portrait of Ninian Home, Governor of Grenada, is a series of tiny images in a set of 1789 landscapes of Grenada by Adam Callander.
Adam Callander’s View from Paraclete Plantation, Grenada, 1789, (left); Ninian is likely to be the man seated under the tree with the enslaved people tending to the gardens; (right) George Home of Wedderburn (1734-1820) by Sir Henry Raeburn.
Ninian was a plantation owner and enslaver in the Caribbean. He owned Waltham plantation on the north-west coast of Grenada and had shared ownership of Paraclete estate (near the centre of the east coast) where he grew sugar, cocoa, and coffee using enslaved Africans. He also used enslaved African people to grow cotton on the island of Mustique for a number of years. By late 1792, Ninian Home had risen to become Governor of Grenada on behalf of the British Crown, but in 1795 he and his friend Alexander Campbell were captured with other British planters and sailors by freedom fighters inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and 49 of the captives were killed including Ninian and Alexander. Fédon’s Uprising against British rule led to the deaths of 7000 enslaved people.
George and his ward, Nancy Stephens, felt they needed more space to show off this collection and commissioned a new wing including the Picture Gallery and Library. Many of the paintings were sold in 1923 to pay death duties, but the core of the collection is now beautifully enhanced by works loaned from the National Galleries of Scotland which hang in the Picture Gallery.
Today, the rooms at Paxton are arranged according to the inventory of 1820, taken after George’s death.
In 1988, the house, most of the contents and grounds were given to a charitable trust by John Home Robertson, MP for Berwickshire until 2001 and MSP for East Lothian until 2007. The establishment of the charity was helped by funds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The Paxton Trust cares for the house, collections and grounds in perpetuity for everyone to enjoy.
