Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/264

H vi. 298). Nevertheless he and others formerly known as popish earls were still held in strong suspicion by the kirk. In May of this year deputies were appointed by the assembly to wait upon them for half a year to confirm them in the truth. The deputies who waited on Errol reported satisfactorily (, vi. 162), but it was deemed best to continue them in attendance on him (ib. p. 166). At the parliament which met at Perth on 3 July 1602 he was appointed a commissioner to treat of the union with England. A few years afterwards he began to manifest luke warmness in his relations with the kirk, and the absence of the king in England allowed the kirk party to exercise a great influence on the council. In February 1608 a summons was issued against him for having absented himself from the communion, thereby incurring a penalty of 1,000l. (''Reg. P. C. Scotl''. viii. 63). On 21 May he was ordered to be confined within the city of Perth ‘for the better resolution’ of his doubts (ib. p. 94). At the assembly of the kirk held at Linlithgow in July he was ranked among the ‘professed’ catholics, and as one of the ‘head of the party’ (, vi. 752). Shortly afterwards the ‘brethren of the Presbytery of Perth’ appointed to confer with him reported him to be a ‘more obstinate and obdured’ papist than he was before his so-called conversion. It was therefore ordained that he should be excommunicated before 18 Sept. unless he recanted. On 20 Aug. he was, on his own petition, transferred from Perth, on account of a visitation of the plague, to Errol (''Reg. P. C. Scotl''. viii. 159). On sentence of excommunication being passed against him he was removed to permanent imprisonment in the castle of Dumbarton (ib. p. 176). On 11 March 1609 a decree was issued ordaining him to lose his life-rent and to be put to the horn (ib. p. 262). In 1610 Huntly and Errol made overtures to have their cases reconsidered. A meeting to consider Errol's case was held within the castle of Edinburgh, at which he again professed conformity to protestantism, but, according to Spotiswood, he the same night ‘fell in such a trouble of mind as he went near to have killed himself.’ On withdrawing his recantation he was detained in the castle of Edinburgh till the end of May of the following year, when, although still under the ban of excommunication, he was set at liberty (, vii. 159). In 1617 he was absolved from excommunication ‘upon some offers given in of him to some bishops convened at Perth’ (ib. p. 244).

Errol died on 16 July 1631 at his house of Bownes, which he had erected on the destruction of the ancient castle of Slains. He was buried without ceremony within the church of Slains by torchlight, and left instructions that the money which might have otherwise been expended on his funeral should be given to the poor. Spalding describes him as ‘ane trewlie noble man of ane gryt and couragious spirit, who had gryt trubles in his tyme, whiche he stoutly and honorably still careit, and now deit in peace and favour with God and man’ (Memorialls of the Trubles, i. 25). In his lifetime a dispute arose between him and the Earl Marischal regarding the privileges of the high constable, an hereditary office in the Errol and Marischal families. Though the dispute began as early as 1606, the commissioners appointed to consider the matter did not report till 27 July 1631, ten days after the death of the ninth earl. Discussion as to the privileges of the high constable continued for another century (see documents on the constabulary in ‘Errol Papers,’ Miscellany of Spalding Club, ii. 211–250). Errol was three times married. By his first two wives, daughters respectively of the Earl of Atholl and the regent Murray, he had no issue; but by his third wife, Lady Elizabeth Douglas, daughter of the Earl of Morton, he had three sons and eight daughters. He was succeeded in the earldom by his eldest son William. 

HAY, GEORGE (d. 1588), Scottish controversialist, second son of Dugald Hay of Linplum, was parson both of Eddlestone and of Rathven (sometimes confounded with Ruthven), Aberdeenshire, holding the two benefices by dispensation from the pope. He conformed at the Reformation, but continued to hold both charges. As commissioner for the diocese of Aberdeen and Banff, he along with other ministers, at the meeting held in the house of James M'Gill in 1561, supported the proposal to deprive the queen of the mass (, ii. 291). In 1562 he was appointed by the assembly to preach in the unplanted kirks of Carrick and Cunningham, Knox preaching in the adjoining district of Kyle and parts of Galloway, the result of their joint labours being the subscription on 4 Sept. by many of the principal gentry and burgesses of the districts to a band at Ayr to uphold the Reformation (ib. p. 348). Knox states