Having traced the connection between the families of Rawdon and Hastings, it now remains to discover how the baronies of the latter became attached to the former family. The ninth Earl of Huntingdon, father of the first Countess of Moira, died in 1746, and was succeeded by his son, brother of the Lady Moira. The tenth earl, however, died without issue in 1789; whereupon the earldom became suspended, and so continued for thirty years, a fact involving matters of very deep interest, but of no importance so far as present purposes are concerned. The tenth Earl of Huntingdon’s heir was his sister, Lady Moira, and upon her descended the ancient baronies of the Huntingdon earldom—namely, Hastings, Hungerford, Botreaux, and Molines. Her husband, the first Earl of Moira, died in 1793, and, as just stated, was succeeded as such by his son Francis, who, in 1804, married Flora, Baroness Campbell and Countess of Loudoun in her own right. Elizabeth, Countess-Dowager of Moira, died in 1808; Francis, her son, was promoted to the English peerage so far as the barony of Rawdon was concerned. Then came his assumption of his mother’s maiden name of Hastings, his successful claims to the Huntingdon baronies, and lastly, in 1816 we find him Viscount Loudoun, Earl of Rawdon, &c., and Marquis of Hastings—all in the peerage of the United Kingdom. It is thus shown how a Rawdon was the founder of the Hastings marquisate; how Elizabeth Hastings brought the old baronies previously mentioned into the Rawdon family; and how the Scotch earldom of Loudoun and the United Kingdom viscounty were held by the same family.
There are two more titles to account for—the ancient baronies in fee of Hastings, created in 1264, and Grey de Ruthyn, created in 1324. These titles were originally in the De Hastings family, one of whom married, some time in the seventeenth century, Sir Henry Yelverton, Bart., of Norfolk, since which time, Yelverton—not to be confounded with Lord Avonmore’s family name—has been the patronymic of the Lords and Ladies Grey de Ruthyn. On the death of the nineteenth lord in 1831, the title descended to his daughter, who married the second Marquis of Hastings. This is how these two titles of Hastings, as a barony, and Grey de Ruthyn came to be held by the late marquis, whose mother was the twentieth holder of the latter title.