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Rear Admiral Henry Dundas Trotter (1802-1859)

    
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This bookplate caused my father some confusion in his old age. It was in each of a set of fourteen volumes of Wellington's Complete Works. My father had acquired these when he was 50 or so but by the time he was 90 he had no idea how they came into his hands. He asked, not unnaturally, what his grandfather Henry Trotter, rector of Whitchurch on Thames and canon of the diocese of Oxford, was doing with the works of a war-lord.

Fortunately he asked me and even more fortunately I had been doing some work on our Trotter family and I thought I knew the answer. It was quite simple. My father's grandfather was Henry Eden Trotter and this bookplate was for Rear-Admiral Henry Dundas Trotter, my father's second cousin four times removed. And a war-lord taking an interest in the works of a war- lord was not so surprising. The odd thing is that my father had managed to acquire copies previously owned by a relative.

Henry Dundas Trotter was a member of a cadet branch of the Trotters of Kettleshiel, Ayshire, Scotland, but a branch that had some fabulously wealthy members, notably Sir Coutts Trotter the banker. This branch had started wth the marriage of a second surviving son, Archibald, to the notable heiress, Jean Mowbray of the Bush and Castlelaw, Edinburgh. Perhaps her family had contacts to enable her descendants to make very good use of their talents?

Anyhow the arms on Henry Dundas' bookplate are his arms impaled with those of his wife. His arms were a quartering of Trotter with Mowbray:

  1. Argent a crescent gules and on a chief indented azure three mullets pierced of the field (Trotter),
  2. Gules a lion rampant or (Mowbray).
Henry Dundas' wife was Charlotte Pringle and her father's, Major General James Pringle's, arms were:
Azure three escallops or. (Pringle of Stitchell, from Balfour Paul's Ordinary of Scottish Arms)

The arms must date from Henry Dundas' adulthood from c. 1823 to 1859.

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