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overturned on the bad roads that led out of Carluke on his way home, and he suffered what Elizabeth termed ‘a truble in his bake’ for manyweeks. Upon returning to Arniston, Dundas too wrote to Ann. ‘I won’t omitt ane opportunity of writing to you however litle I may have to say,’ he assured her. He was positive that, ‘when I speak of affection[,] good oppinion and every good wish I am capable of, these will be no news to you’. Dundas designated Ann his ‘rival wife’, and he reflected ponderously that ‘this is quite new for a man and two wifes to be all one’. He signed off by exhorting her to ‘believe me Dear Anne’ that he was ‘with the greatest esteem and pleasure, as much yours as I can be … my Dear Girl’.
    In the wake of Elizabeth’s death only a few months later, Ann Gordon wrote back to Robert Dundas. She sympathised with ‘the Loss You have … Made’ but she firmly reminded him that ‘You once gave me Reason to Pretend some Tittle to Your Heart’. With a mixture of sincerity and flirtatiousness , Ann openly informed this man, who was almost thirty years her senior, that ‘I Intend to Pursue You with so Much Friendship & Contempt[,] Love and Indifference as Must Convince You’. He was easily convinced and the ‘rival wife’ soon became his lawful spouse. Ann and Robert’s wedding took place four months after Elizabeth’s death. There were few guests. In the circumstances of the recent devastation of Dundas’s first family, a discreet wedding seemed appropriate. Dundas did not even inform his surviving son Robert, or ‘Robin’ as he was affectionately known, who was studying law at university in Utrecht, of his remarriage until three months after the fact. ‘I did not incline to owne my mariage to any body,’ he wrote.
    Robert Dundas’s second marriage to Ann Gordon did not mean that he excluded David Watson, his first wife’s younger brother, from his affections. On the contrary, Robert and Ann too continued to take an active interest in Watson’s career. In 1742 the Dundases were behind an alteration in his profession that capitalised on Watson’s childhood love of maps. Dundas supplicated the Secretary of State for Scotland to help move his brother-in-law from the regular army to the Board of Ordnance. He successfully persuaded that minister to intercede with the Master-General of the Ordnance, and arranged for Watson to enter ‘upon the Establishment of an Engineer’. David was instructed to ‘immediately come here’, to London, to clinch the deal, and the Secretary of State reflected with satisfaction that this ‘would be a good beginning’ for him. By 1743, thanks to Dundas’s endeavours, Watson hadtaken up his new post as a military engineer under the employment of the Board of Ordnance. He became adept at reconnaissance, plotting march routes that transported armies between destinations. And one of his principal concerns was map-making.
     
    A DEPARTMENT KNOWN as the ‘Office of Ordnance’ had existed in Britain since the late fourteenth century. The Ordnance was an adjunct to the Royal Arsenal, which was housed at the Tower of London, a large complex of buildings on the north side of the river Thames. Responsible for the administration of the monarch’s armaments, arsenals and fortified castles, the body was renamed in 1518 as the Board of Ordnance, a name that stuck for almost 350 years. Ordnance is abbreviated from ordinance , a complex word that covers a host of meanings, all united by a general sense of ‘that which is ordered or ordained’, but the word’s foremost association was military . Ordinance, or the French ordonnance , denoted an army’s arrangement in ranks or lines and most importantly the ‘ordinantia ad bellum’, the military equipment, guns, cannons and explosives, for whose management the Board was responsible.
    The Board of Ordnance was an independent military body, separate from the Army. Where regular soldiers answered to