1:16 HAYS OF ERROLL (KINNOULL BRANCH).
WE must now turn to that branch of the Hays of Erroll of which the Earls of Kinnoull are the present representatives. WrusAsz, second son of Sir David de HATA, by Helen, daughter of David, Earl of Strathern, obtained from Alexander III., on April 29, 1251, a charter confirming a grant of two carucates of land, &c., in Erroll, which had been given him by his brother, Sir Gilbert de Haya, the ancestor of the Earls of Erroll. From this William lineally descended Sir Edmund Hay of Melginche, in the time of James IV. He is styled "bailiff of the Earl of Erroll in the year 1504, and is frequently mentioned in the deeds of that family, having the management of their property in Perthshire- He was succeeded in the Melginche estate by his son, Sir Peter Hay, who bore the same title of bailiff to the Earl of Erroll. He had had a charter from James V. of the lauds of Inchconnane, in Perthshire, April 3, 1555. He had three sons, the second of whom was Sir James Hay of Kingask, who on June 25, 1606, had a charter of the rents and fens of Grange and Grangemuir, in the counties of Edinburgh and Haddington ; on the 10th of May, 1607, obtained a letter of possession under the Great Seal of the priory of Beaulieu, in Rossslafre ; and in 1607 was created Lori Beaulieu in Scotland. In 1608 he was created Comptroller of Scotland, and died in 1610, having owed his great advancement in the latter part of his life chiefly to the favour in which his son, Sir James Hay, stood with James VI. Sir James accompanied the King to England in 1603, and had a grant of the title of Lord Hay, with precedency next to the Barons of the Realm, but without a seat in Parliament, June 21, 1606. On June 29, 1615, he was made a baron of England as Lord Hay of Sawley, in Cumberland. He was sent Ambassador to France in July, 1616, sworn a Privy Councillor in March, 1617, and created Viscount Doncaster July 5, 1618. From May, 1619, to January, 1620, he was employed on a mission extraordinary to the Emperor Ferdinand II. He was again Ambassador to France in April, 1627, and on the 14th of September in that year was created Earl of ' Carlisle. He was keeper of the Great Wardrobe from 1616 to his death, Groom of the Stole to James VI., and a Knight of the Garter. On the death of James the new Sovereign continued hinr in his offices, and gave him a grant of the island of Barbadoas. He had received a certain tone from his residence in France, an r had assiduously cultivated the sort of learning in which the pedantic King James delighted ; at the same time, according ta Clarendon, he conciliated the English people by his affability, and by choosing the society and friendship of Englishmen in pre- ference to those of his own countrymen. He obtained by these means, in 1607, the heiress of the Lord Danny in marriage, with whom he had a "fair fortune," which descended to his son by her, the second Earl. After her death (which occurred from fright at a. thief pulling off her diamond earring in her coach at night in tha streets of London), he married the Lady Lucy Percy, daughter of Henry, Earl of Northumberland, the beautiful and clever Countess of Carlisle, who makes such a conspicuous figure in the reign of Charles L, and to whom Waller paid the compliment of addressing the Goddess of Love as the " bright Carlisle of the Court of Heaven.' He lived, says Clarendon, "rather in a fair intelligence than in any friendship with the favourites, having credit enough with his master to provide for his own interest, and he troubled not himself for that of other men ; and had no other consideration of money than for the support of his lustre "—but had "no bowels in point of running in debt, or borrowing all he could. He was surely," continues the historian, "a man of the greatest expense in his own person of any in the age he lived, and introduced more of that expense in the excess of clothes and diet than any other man, and was indeed the original of all those inventions- from which others did but transcribe copies. He had a great, universal understanding, and could have taken as much delight in any other way, if he had thought any other as pleasant, and worth his care. But he found business was attended with more evils and vexations, and he thought with much leas pleasure, and not more innocence. He left behind him the reputation of a very fine gentleman and a most accomplished courtier, and after having spent in a very jovial life above 400,0001., which upon a strict compilation he received from the Crown, he left not a house nor
an acre of land to be remembered by." Ile is said, among other excesses of luxury in which he rivalled Vitellius, to have invented what were called ante-suppers, the manner of which was to have the board covered, at the first entrance of the guests, with dishes ac high as a t min could wall reach, filled with the choicest and dearest viands sea or land.pould afford. And all this once seen, and having feasted the eyes 'of the invited, was in a manner thrown away, and fresh set on to the same height, having only this advan- tage of the other—that it was hot." Such was a "perfect courtier" of those days ! The Earl died at Whitehall, April 25, 1636, and was succeeded by his son by his first wife, James Hay, second Earl of Carlisle, who was a colonel in Count M tnsfeldt's army, but resided much of his time in the island of Barbadoes, of which he was proprietor. In the Civil War he rather vacillated between the two parties, adhering, however, on the whole to the Parliament, and being generally found in his place in
Westminster. He married Lady Margaret Russell, daughter of Francis, Earl of Belford, bat had no children by her, and died in Oetober, 1660, when his titles became extinct, and the island of Barbadoes devolved on the E trl of Kinnoull, who sold it to the Crown in 1661. Sir Patrick Hay, elder brother of the first Earl of Car- lisle's father, succeeded to the paternal estate of Melginche, and
had three sons, the male line of the eldest of whom (of Melginche) is extinct. The second son, George Hay, after studying in the Scottish College at Douay, was introduced by his cousin, Sir James Hay of Kingask,. to James VI., who appointed him one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and conferred on him the Carthu- sian priory of Perth, with a seat in (the Scotch) Parliament, Feb- ruary 18, 1598, and also the ecclesiastical lands of Erroll on the 1st of that month ; but he found his means insufficient to support the dignity of a lord of Parliament, and returned that honour to the King. He accompanied the King to Perth, August 5, 1600, where the Gowns tragedy took place, that most mysterious of all the tragedies of Scottish history, when the mob outside Gowrie House shouted to the King, "Come down, come down, thou son of Seignor Davie ! thou has slain a better man than thyself !" Hay seems to have found the law a better field of advancement than the Court, for he accumulated in that profession a considerable property, his principal estate being Netherleiff, and he had a charter of Dunninald in Forfarshire, May 17, 1606, and of Lewes, Gleuelg, Barra, &c., May 24, 1610, was appointed Clerk Register in 1616, and knighted. He had also charters of an annual rent of Reicastle, July 18, 1620; of the barony of Kin- fauns, July 20; of Tulliehow, March 20, 1822; and of Innernytie, Kincleven, &c., May 15. On the 16th of July in the same year he was appoihted High Chancellor of Scotland ; on the 28th of August hal a charter of Craigton ; on the 22nd of August, 1621, of the lands and earldom of Orkney and Zetlandl and on the 29th of July, 1626, of the barony of Aberdalgy, Dupplin, &c.
On the 4th of May, 1627, he was created a peer as Viscount Dupplin and Lord Hay of Kinfauns, to him and the heirs male of his body, and advanced to the title of Earl of Kinnoull, Viscount Dupplin, and Lord Hay of Kinfauns, May 25, 1633, to him and his heirs male. He died December 16, 1634. A short time before his death he was involved in an unpleasant affair. "He had procured the marriage of a young lady named Inglis with a good portion to a nephew of his named Butler, and thus disappointed the Earl of Traquhair, who desired the morsel for a cousin of his own, with whom he was to have 'divided the prey. Traquhair proceeded to raise all the furies of the Court against the Chan- cellor, and procured a warrant for the examination of some of his accounts, which, however, terminated in clearing his Lordship of all suspicion." His funeral was "a grand heraldic procession."
Six earls and three lords followed the body to the grave, the funeral procession passing through the streets of Perth, crossing the water in boats, and marching to Kinnoull Church, where a full- length figure of the Earl still surmounts his tomb. Scot of Scots- tarbet says of him that "he was a man of little or no learning, yet had compast a good estate, namely, the baronies of Kinnoull, &c., all of which estates, in a few years after his decease, his son made havock of."
Mr. Napier, in his life of Montrose, quotes the Lord Napier of that period as declaring that at the Scottish Council Board, where they sat together, the Chancellor's "manner was to interrupt all men when he was disposed to speak, and the King too." Sir James Balfour, the Lord Lyon King-at-Arms, tells us that when Charles went to Scotland to be crowned in 1633, one of his first acts was to send for the Chancellor, and ask him as a favour to allow the Primate, Archbishop Spottiswode, to take precedence of him, "which the Lord Chancellor Hay, a gallant, stout man, would never condescend to do, nor even suffer him to have place
of him do what he could, all the days of his lifetime." On the day of the coronation Charles again sent Balfour to the Chancellor, "to show him that it was his will and pleasure, but only for that day, that he would cede and give place to the Archbishop, but he re- turned to me to His Majesty," says Balfour, "a very break answer, which was, that since His Majesty had been pleased to continue him in that office of Chancellor, which by his means his father of happy memory had bestowed upon him, he was ready in all hu- mility to lay it down at His Majesty's feet ; but since it was his Royal will that he should enjoy it, with the honours and privileges of the same, never a stoled priest in Scotland should set foot before him so long as his blood was hot. When I had related his answer to the King, he said, 'Weel, Lyon, let's go to business ; I will not meddle further with that old cankeral, genty man, at whose hands there is nothing to be gained but sour words.' " The son and successor of this sturdy old Chancellor, George, second Earl of Kinnoull, who ran through most- of the property, was a Privy Councillor, and was Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard front 1632 to 1635. He did not take the Covenant till after the King came to Scotland, on August 24, 1641, and showed his leanings by supporting the King's demand that Hamilton and Argyll should be brought to trial after the "Incident." He is also said to have refused to sign the League and Covenant between the Parliaments of Scotland and England in 1643, but he does not seem to have joined the King, and died at Whitehall on the 5th of October, 1644. He had married the Lady Anne Douglas, daughter of William, second Earl of Morton. The peerages give him only one son by this lady, William, whom they proceed to describe as third Earl of Kinnoull. But, as Mr. Napier has abundantly shown, the successor of the second Earl was another George, who took arms with Montrose in 1644, but left him after a time, wearied out by his marches. We find him, however, again at the Queen of Bohemia's palace of Rhenen on the Rhine in August, 1649, practising archery with her, and Balfour has the following entry :— " In September this year, 1649, George, Earl of Kinnoull, with eighty commanders, and about 100 Danes and strangers, arrived in Orkney ; they gave themselves out for the forerunners of James Graham's army of strangers ; they took the castle of Birsay, in Orkney, and garrisoned it ; they brought arms and ammunition with them for a thousand men ; and immediately entered to levy and press soldiers." There is a letter from Kinnoull himself to Montrose among the Wadrow MSS. written from Kirk- wall announcing these first successes, and the surrender of a ship laden with ammunition which had touched at that place after his occupation of it. In this letter he says, "My uncle, my Lord of Morton, was pleased to think he was neglected, in that the cone- missions for stating the country were not immediately conferred on him by your Lordship. Wherefore, having all assurauce of his reality, I waived my own interest so much that I resigned all power of my commissions to him, which he was pleased to accept of before the gentlemen of this country, who were e,onvocated for the receiving of his commands and your Excellencie's." "Your Lordship," Kinnoull adds in another part of this letter, "is gaped after with that expectation that the Jews look after their Messiah." Charles I. had made a grant of the islands of Orkney and Zetland, with all their jurisdictions, to be held by wadset from the Crown, to William, Earl of Morton, in. 1643. We are hardly prepared for the catastrophe which followed. "The 12th day of November this year," records Balfour, "Robert Douglas, Earl of Morton, departed this life of a displeasure conceived at his nephew, George, Earl of Kinnoull, at the castle of Kirkwall, in Orkney, 1649." The allusion to the disagreement between uncle and nephew is probably an incorrect version of the difference referred to in the preceding letter of Kinnoull's. "Presently thereafter," says Gordon of Sallogh, the historian of the Sutherland family, "the Earl of Morton died, and within a few days Kinnoull died also, at Kirkwall, in Orkney, unto whom his brother succeeded." Captain John Gwynne, a Welsh officer who attended Kinnoull on his expedition, afterspeaking of the landing in Orkney in September, adds, "About two months after the Earl of Kinnoull fell sick at Birsay, the Earl of Morton's house, and there died of a pleurisy ; whose loss was very much lamented, as he was truly honourable and per- fectly loyal." What was the name of his brother who succeeded must remain at present uncertain, for though he is previously mentioned as such in "letters of the Scottish Royalists, he appears as "Mr. Hay" simply, but he was on the Continent in 1649, in the train of Montrose, and is commended. He is mentioned in a let- ter from Orkney in March, 1650 (as Earl of Kinnoull) as having lately arrived with fresh recruits to take the command there, and compose the disorder into which affairs had fallen ; and we find that after having been joined by Montrose he accompanied the
latter in his fatal expedition to Scotland, shared in his defeat, and accompanied him (with two other gentlemen) in his flight. The historian of the Sailerlands records that they "wandered up that river (Oikel) the whole ensuing night, and the next day, and the third day also, without any food or sustenance, and at last came within the country of Assiat. The Earl of Kinnoull, being faint for lack of meat, and not able to travel any further, was left there among the mountains, where it was supposed he perished." In 1Vhitelocke's memorials we find the following passage, "25th May, 1650.—Letters from Edinburgh that the Lord Frendraught, of Mon- troae's party, after his defeat, from vexation starved himself, and that the Lord Kinnoull was also starved." These passages, col- lected by Mr. Napier, seem to indicate that it is not the same, but another. Earl of Kinnoull (whether a brother of the last we cannot say) who figures as William, third Earl of Kinnoull in the peerage books, and of whom they record the following facts :—He was by the English committed prisoner to the castle of Edin- burgh, from whence he made his escape, 28th of May, 1654, over the wall, by tying sheets and blankets together. Joining Middleton in the north, he was taken by the English in the braes of Angus in November, 1654, after three days' pursuit through thick snow. They then record simply that he was buried at Waltham Abbey, 28th March, 1677. He was succeeded by his son George, sixth Earl of Kinnoull, who died without issue in Hungary in 1687, and was succeeded by his brother William, seventh Earl, who accompanied James IL abroad at his abdication, and was at the Court of St. Grermain's, but made his peace with Queen Anne's Government, and resigning his titles into her hands, obtained a charter, February 29, 1704, limiting the honour to himself during his life, and failing him by decease to Thomas, Viscount Dupplin, and the heirs male of his body, which failing to his heirs of talkie and provision succeeding to him in the lands and barony of Dupplin, but that this charter should by no means prejudice that granted by King William to Thomas, Viscount Dupplin, of the latter title and honour. The Earl died unmarried, May 10, 1709, and was, accord- ing to the preceding charter, succeeded by Thomas, Viscount Dupplin, a descendant of Peter Hay of Kirkland, brother of George, first Earl of Kinnotill. This Thomas Hay had been member for Perth in 1693, and was created a peer as Viscount Dupplin (to him and the heirs male of his body, which failing to his heirs of entail) by a patent, December 31, 1697. He of course, it will be seen, adhered to the cause of the Revolution. He was also a Commissioner for the Union of England and Scotland, and after his succession to his cousin as eighth Earl of Kinnoull sat as a representative peer for Scotland in 1710 and 1713, when he supported the Tory Administration. On the breaking out of the Rebellion of 1715 he was summoned to surrender as a suspected person, and committed prisoner to Edinburgh castle. He died in January, 1719. He was succeeded by his son George, ninth Earl of Kinnoull, who had sat in the House of Com- mons as a teller of the Exchequer in 1711, and was created a peer of Great Britain as Baron Hay of Podwardine, December 31, 1711, being one of the twelve created that day to secure a majority to the Tory Ministry. On the breaking out of the Rebellion of 1715 he also was taken into custody in Lon- don on suspicion on the 21st of September, and admitted to bail June 24, 1716. He was accused of complicity in Layer's conspiracy in 1722, but a motion in the Lords to inquire into it was lost by 64 to 29, the Earl voting himself for the inquiry. He was appointed Ambassador to Constantinople in 1729, and re- mained there till 1737, dying on the 28th of July, 1758. He re- ceived as compensation upon the abolition ef heritable jurisdictions in 1747, for the regality of• Balhousie, 800/. By his wife, a This nobleman, who was a classical scholar of learning, living on terms-of intimacy with the chief literary men of the day, had sat in the House of Commons for Scarborough and Cambridge, and was Recorder of the latter town. He was one of the Commissioners for the Revenue in Ireland in April, 1741, and of Trade, November, 1746; a Lord of the Treasury in April, 1754, Joint Paymaster of the Forces, 1755; and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster January 24, 1758. In 1759 he went on a special diplomatic mission to Portugal, and returned in 1760. On the resignation of the Duke of Newcastle in 1762 Lord Kinnoull also resigned all his em- ployments under the Crown, and spent the rest of his life in re- tirement at his country seat. In 1765 he was chosen Chancellor of the University Of St. Andrew's. The erection of the bridge over the Tay at Perth was owing to him. He is said to have granted longer leases at moderate rents to his tenants, to have rebuilt their houses, and to have greatly improved the condition of his estates by superior farming. He died after a short illness at Dupplin, December 27, 1787. He married Constantia, only daughter and heiress of John Kyrie Ernie, of Whetham, in Wiltshire, but their only son died an infant, and the Earl was succeeded by his nephew, Robert Auriol Hay Drummond, son of his brother, Robert Hay, Archbishop of York, who had assumed the name and arms of the Drummonds, as heir of entail of his great grandfather, William, Viscount Stratlutllau, by whom the estates of Cronalix and lnnerpeffry, in Perthshire, were settled as a perpetual provision for the second branch of the Kinnoull family. The Archbishop preached the coronation ser- mon for George III., and died in December, 1776. His Grace married the daughter and heiress of Peter Auriql, of Coleman Street, a London merchant, and his eldest son by her, as we have seen, succeeded as eleventh Earl of Kinnoull, having inherited, among other estates, from his father the fine one of Brodesworth, in Yorkshire. He signed the protest on the Regency Bill, December 29, 1788, but was sworn a Privy Councillor, April 29, 1796, and in the spring of the following year he and his eldest son, Thomas Robert, were appointed in succession Lord Lyon King-at- Arms for Scotland.. The Earl died April 12, 1804, and was suc- ceeded by his son, Thomas Robert Drummond Hay, twelfth Earl of Kinnoull, the present peer. This branch of the Erroll family now adheres to the Conservative party, their chief seat being DUPPLIN Castle, in Perthshire.
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