and his heirs male. Sir James Balfour relates that when on the day of his coronation the king sent the Archbishop of St. Andrews as Lyon king-at-arms to Kinnoull to intimate his pleasure that for that day only he should give place to the archbishop, of whom he claimed precedency as chancellor, Kinnoull vehemently declined to obey. The king did not press his point. ‘I will not meddle further,’ he added, ‘with that ald cankered gootishe man, at whose hand there is nothing to be gained but sour words’ (Balfour, ii. 142). Kinnoull died in London of apoplexy on 16 Dec. of the following year. His body was embalmed and brought to Kinnoull, where, on 19 Aug. 1635, it was interred in the nave of St. Constantine's Church. Here a life-size statue has been erected to his memory, representing him in his robes as lord chancellor of Scotland. He is commemorated in a Latin epitaph by Arthur Johnston. By his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir James Halyburton of Pitcur, he had two sons, Sir Peter Hay, who predeceased him, and George, second earl of Kinnoull.
[Register Privy Council Scotland; Calderwood's Hist. Church of Scotland; Sir James Balfour's Annals; Douglas's Scottish Peerage, ed. Wood, ii. 46–7.]
HAY, GEORGE, seventh Earl of Kinnoull (d. 1758), was eldest son of Thomas Hay, sixth earl of Kinnoull. While Lord Dupplin he was elected M.P. for Fowey, Cornwall, in 1710, and was in the following year appointed one of the tellers of the exchequer. On 31 Dec. 1711 he was created a peer of Great Britain, with the title of Baron Hay of Pedwardine, Herefordshire, being one of twelve peers specially created by the tory administration of Harley and St. John to secure a majority in the House of Lords on the question of the Utrecht treaty. On 21 Sept. 1715, when the Jacobite rebellion broke out in Scotland, he was suspected of favouring the Pretender, and was placed under arrest in London, with the Earl of Jersey and Lord Lansdowne, but on 24 Jan. following was liberated on bail. He succeeded his father as seventh Earl of Kinnoull in 1719. In 1722 witnesses declared that Kinnoull was privy to the conspiracy of Richard Layer [q. v.], but a motion to examine the witnesses in the House of Lords was negatived. Kinnoull voted in favour of the motion. On 27 Feb. 1724 he was served heir to his father in the lands and barony of Keillor, including Eastern and Western Keillars, Strathevan, and Tulchan in Perthshire. On 24 Nov. 1729 he was served heir to his cousin James, viscount Strathallan, as heir of line special in the barony of Cardeny, chiefly in Perthshire, Balfron, Stirlingshire, and Kirklands of Kilmorith, Argyleshire.
In 1729 he was appointed British ambassador to Constantinople, where he remained till 1737. Two years after his return home he entered on a controversy with the Scottish ecclesiastical courts regarding the presentation of a minister to the parish of Madderty, Perthshire. The earl presented George Blaikie, who was so unacceptable to the parishioners that the presbytery refused to induct. The case was carried by appeal before the commission of the general assembly in Edinburgh, where the objecting parishioners were ably represented by Robert Hawley, weaver, and John Gray, mason. The commission asked Kinnoull to waive hac vice his right of presentation, but this he refused to do (August 1740), from fear of ‘weakening … the right of patronages, and of all those to whom they do by law belong.’ The court instructed the presbytery to induct Blaikie, but while the difficulty was still unsolved Blaikie accepted a call from a congregation in America.
Kinnoull died on 28 July 1758. He married Lady Abigail, daughter of Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford [q. v.] She died 15 July 1750. By her he had four sons and six daughters. His eldest son, Thomas, is separately noticed.
[Scots Magazine; Caledonian Mercury (1740); Records of the Church of Scotland; Register of Sasines in General Register House, Edinburgh; Douglas's Peerage of Scotland, ed. Wood, ii. 48–49.]
HAY, Sir GEORGE (1715–1778), lawyer and politician, son of John Hay, rector of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, London, was born on 25 Jan. 1714–15, and admitted into Merchant Taylors' School in 1724. He was elected to St. John's College, Oxford, in 1731, matriculating on 30 June, and took the degrees of B.C.L. on 29 April 1737 and D.C.L. on 23 Feb. 1742. On 23 Oct. 1742 he was admitted a member of the College of Advocates, and rapidly rose in his profession. His first piece of preferment was the chancellorship of Worcester diocese, which he held from 1751 to 16 July 1764. At the general election in 1754 he was returned for the borough of Stockbridge in Hampshire, and in 1755 he became vicar-general to the Archbishop of Canterbury and king's advocate. Horace Walpole's first impression of Hay's oratory was that his reputation was greater than his merits deserved, but in the course of a month this opinion changed. Hay, as one of Pitt's followers, was appointed a lord of the admiralty in November 1756. Henry Fox caused his re-election at
