John Lockhart-Ross - Later Naval and Parliamentary Career

Later Naval and Parliamentary Career

With the death of his brother James in September 1760 Lockhart succeeded to the Ross estate of Balnagowan, the entail of which obliged him to take the name of Ross; this he formally did in the following spring, announcing the change to the admiralty on 31 March 1761. He was then at Lockhart Hall, where he seems to have passed the winter on leave, but afterwards rejoined the Bedford during the summer. In September he applied to be relieved from the command, and on 27 September was placed on half pay. In the previous June he had been elected member of parliament for Lanark Burghs, but it does not appear that he took any active interest in parliamentary business. He devoted himself principally to the improvement of his estates and the condition of the peasantry, and became known as ‘the best farmer and the greatest planter in the country; his wheat and turnips showed the one, his plantation of a million of pines the other’. He was MP for Lanark Burghs from 1761 to 1768 and in 1762, he initiated land tenure reform which would later evolve into the Highland Clearances. He was MP for Lanarkshire from 1768 to 1774.

In 1777, when war with France appeared imminent, Ross returned to active service, and was appointed to the 74-gun HMS Shrewsbury, joining the fleet under Admiral Augustus Keppel in the Battle of Ushant on 27 July 1778. On 13 August, by the successive deaths of his elder brothers without male issue, he succeeded to the baronetcy. On 19 March 1779 he was promoted to the rank of rear-admiral, and during the summer, with his flag in the Royal George, he was fourth in command in the Channel. In September he was sent with a small squadron into the North Sea to look out for John Paul Jones, but Jones, after capturing the Serapis in 1779, made good his escape. Continuing in the Channel Fleet, Ross was with Rodney at the capture of the Caracas convoy, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent and the relief of Gibraltar in January 1780; with George Darby at the relief of Gibraltar in April 1781; and with Lord Howe during the early summer of 1782. On the return of the fleet to Spithead in August he resigned his command, and had no further employment afloat. He became a vice-admiral on 24 September 1787, and died at Balnagown Castle in Ross-shire on 9 June 1790. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Dundas of Arniston, the younger, in 1762 and had a number of children. Among them was his eldest son, Charles Lockhart-Ross, an army officer who inherited the baronetcy on his father's death, and George Ross, father of distinguished legal writer George Ross.