David Lindsay, 8th Earl of Crawford

David Lindsay, 8th Earl of Crawford (died 27 November 1542) was the son of Alexander Lindsay, 7th Earl of Crawford. He was a member of Clan Lindsay, a Scottish Lowland clan.

Succession and penalty

His son, Alexander Lindsay, Master of Crawford, the "Wicked Master", tried to kill his father in 1537, and so was disinherited and died in 1542. The 8th Earl chose who would succeed him to the earldom of Crawford - David Lindsay of Edzell, a distant cousin who was descended from the 3rd Earl. James V set a penalty of 100,000 merks for this transaction, so that earldom would come back to the crown. The 9th Earl, Lindsay of Edzell, then chose to leave the earldom not to his own sons, but to the son of the Wicked Master of Crawford, another David Lindsay. So the 8th earl's grandson became Master of Crawford in 1546. A modern historian Jamie Cameron argued that this outcome was envisaged by James V when he set the penalty, so that the heirs of the Wicked Master were not excluded from the earldom. The sequence of events and size of the penalty has been used by other writers as evidence of the greed of James V and Regent Arran.