Esmé Stewart, 3rd Duke of Lennox
Esmé Stewart, 3rd Duke of Lennox (157930 July 1624), KG, lord of the Manor of Cobham, Kent, was a Scottish nobleman and through their paternal lines was a second cousin of King James VI of Scotland and I of England. He was a patron of the playwright Ben Jonson who lived in his household for five years. Origins. He was the younger son of Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox (1542–1583), a Frenchman of Scottish ancestry and a favourite of King James VI of Scotland (of whose father, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, he was  a first cousin), by his wife Catherine de Balsac (d.post-1630), a daughter of Guillaume de Balsac, Sieur d'Entragues, by his wife Louise d'Humières. Career. At the death of his childless elder brother Ludovic Stewart, 2nd Duke of Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond (1574–1624), he inherited their paternal title of Duke of Lennox, the Dukedom of Richmond having become extinct. He was by then already Earl of March (in the peerage of England) (1619) and Baron Clifton of Leighton Bromswold (in the right of his wife) as well as 8th Seigneur d'Aubigny in France. On 9 February 1608 he performed in  the masque "The Hue and Cry After Cupid" at Whitehall Palace as a sign of the zodiac, to celebrate the wedding of John Ramsay, Viscount Haddington to Elizabeth Radclyffe . Marriage and children. In 1609 he married Katherine Clifton, 2nd Baroness Clifton, by whom he had eleven children, third cousins of King Charles I, for whom many of them fought and died in the English Civil War: Death and burial. He died on 30 July 1624 at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, of the "spotted ague". He was buried, on 6 August 1624, in Westminster Abbey, in the "Richmond Vault" in the south  east apsidal chapel of the Chapel of King Henry VII (himself formerly Earl of Richmond).