Print commemorating the
victory of Archibald Douglas
in the House of Lords

In the 18th century the Douglas Cause was the biggest legal case in Scottish history.

The latest episode of Denise Mina’s Case Histories on BBC Radio Scotland explores the case.

The court papers amounted to thousands of pages. The judges’ arguments ran into hours, days and weeks, the public gallery hanging on their every word.

The great and the good from Adam Smith, David Hume and James Boswell took sides. There were riots in the streets of Edinburgh and a duel between barristers in Hyde Park.

£100,000 was bet on the outcome. An inheritance dispute between the two most wealthy aristocratic families in Scotland, the case rested on whether Lady Jane Douglas had indeed given birth to twin boys in Paris in 1748 at the age of 50, providing a direct heir to her brother the Duke, or had she instead bought babies from a Parisian glass blower and rope dancer in a despicable plot to retain the estate and outwit the rival Hamiltons.

We’ll never know for sure, and Denise discovers that even today with DNA testing, we still might be none the wiser.

Listen here