Jean Hamilton

JEAN HAMILTON (aka Jeane HAMILTOUN)

Jean Hamilton, here treated, is the third daughter by the second marriage of Sir Thomas Hamilton, afterwards Earl of Haddington. She was born on 5 February 1607 The Scots Peerage IV: 315 and her baptism was registered on 8 February 1607, at Edinburgh in Midlothian, Scotland. [National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh Baptisms, reference OPR.685/1/1]

Marriage

Jean Hamilton, here treated married (contract 21 December 1621 and 7 January 1622) John Kennedy, sixth Earl of Cassillis, whom she predeceased, dying about 15 December 1642. The Scots Peerage IV: 315

Biography

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy,_6th_Earl_of_Cassilis

Kennedy's wife, Jean Hamilton, was the daughter of Thomas Hamilton, 1st Earl of Haddington and Margaret Foulis. They married on 7 January 1621/22.[26] They had three children:

1. Lady Catherine Kennedy (d. c Feb. 1700), who married Lord William Cochrane.
2. James Kennedy, Lord Kennedy (d. 1642/43)
3. Lady Margaret Kennedy (d. 1685), first wife of Bishop Gilbert Burne

"The Gypsy Laddy" and the Countess of Cassilis

"The Gypsy Laddy," an old Scottish ballad about Johnny Faa, king of the “Egyptians,” or “Gypsies,”]] became associated with Jean Hamilton, Kennedy's first wife, in the eighteenth century. The ballad narrates the tale of a gypsy band who carried away the lady loved by Johnny Faa. In the eighteenth century, the people of Ayrshire began to associate the tale with Jean Hamilton, adding elements which placed the kidnapping at a time when the Earl was away at Westminster and included the Earl's revenge against the band of “bonny” gypsies. In 1827, Robert Chambers in his Picture of Scotland added the fiction that the Earl imprisoned his wife for the remainder of her life, and that while she still lived, he married another woman. These elements have all been disproved, however. Folklorist Francis James Child explained in the nineteenth century that, first of all, Jean Hamilton had died a year before the Earl went to Westminster; secondly, the Earl's second marriage did not take place until February 1644, more than a year after Lady Hamilton's death; and thirdly, that upon the death of his wife, the Earl wrote a letter of lament to fellow Covenanter the Earl of Eglinton, saying “It hath pleased the Almighty to call my dear bedfellow from this valley of tears to her home (as she herself in her last hour so called it),” and urging Eglinton's attendance at the funeral.[24][25]

References

• An Historical Account of the Senators of the College of Justice: From Its Institution in MDXXXII; by George Brunton, David Haig; 1832; Page 342
• The Scots peerage : founded on Wood's ed. of Sir Robert Douglas's Peerage of Scotland; containing an historical and genealogical account of the nobility of that kingdom Author Paul, James Balfour, Sir, 1846-1931. “Kennedy, Earl of Cassillis.” Page 475 Archive.Org
• http://www.clanmacfarlanegenealogy.info/genealogy/TNGWebsite/getper...
• Child, Francis James (1892). Popular Ballads. Boston. p. 4:65. Retrieved 29 July 2019 Archive.Org