John Hope, 4th Earl of Hopetoun

General John Hope, 4th Earl of Hopetoun, (17 August 1765 – 27 August 1823), known as The Honourable John Hope from 1781 to 1814 and as Lord Niddry from 1814 to 1816, was a British Army officer and politician.

Military career Hopetoun was the only son of John Hope, 2nd Earl of Hopetoun, by his second wife Jane or Jean Oliphant. His mother died when he was only one year old.

He commanded a division during the advance into Spain and commanded the British left at the Battle of Corunna in 1809, succeeding to overall command when Sir John Moore was killed.

He served as Lord-Lieutenant of Linlithgowshire from 1816 to 1823. On 17 May 1814, two years before he succeeded in the earldom, he was raised to the peerage in his own right as Baron Niddry, of Niddry Castle in the County of Linlithgow. In 1816 he succeeded his elder half-brother as fourth Earl of Hopetoun. By his second wife Hopetoun had ten sons; he was succeeded in his title by his eldest son, John. His seventh son was Louis Hope.

Monuments

Following Lord Hopetoun's death, the Hopetoun Monument was erected on Byres Hill, East Lothian, in 1824. This was followed in 1826 by a similar monument on Mount Hill in Fife. In 1824 the city of Edinburgh commissioned a bronze statue of Lord Hopetoun, by Thomas Campbell, and originally designed as a centrepiece for Charlotte Square in 1829, but which was eventually placed in St Andrew Square in 1834, in front of Dundas House where he had acted as vice governor of the bank. The text on the latter is by Sir Walter Scott. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a plaque was installed by its owners in June 2020 on the statue which reflected Lord Hopetoun's role in suppressing Fédon's rebellion, an uprising against British rule on the island of Grenada.