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       2 Gnarled Roots

      ‘A HAY, A HAY, A HAY!’

      Clan slogan: armorial bearing of the Earldom of Erroll

      Josslyn Victor Hay was born in London on 11 May 1901, eleven days before the first wedding anniversary of his parents, Lord and Lady Kilmarnock. Their son and heir was fair; his skin would easily turn golden under tropical sun and his blue eyes were mesmerisingly pale. Shortly after his Protestant christening, his proud parents took him to Scotland where, before he could even focus, he was introduced to Slains, the Erroll family seat, near Cruden Bay, about twenty miles north up the coast from Aberdeen. This was where his father Lord Kilmarnock, a diplomat working in Europe since 1900, had been born in 1876. Joss’s mother Lucy would regard the visit to Slains as an important initiation rite for her children, following the same procedure later with Joss’s younger brother and sister.¹

      Joss’s brother, Gilbert Allan Rowland Hay, was born in January 1903 at the British Legation in Brussels. Lady Kilmarnock produced her next child, a daughter, soon afterwards: Rosemary Constance Ferelith was born in Vienna on 15 May, in 1904.

The coronation of Edward VII took place when Joss was just over a year old, in August 1902. His parents were over in England for the occasion, prior to their annual holiday north of the border – they were always in Scotland in time for the start of the shooting season on the Glorious Twelfth. It could easily have struck Lady Kilmarnock that one day her son would take his ceremonial place in Westminster Abbey for a coronation, as indeed her father-in-law Charles Gore Hay, the 20th Earl, was doing in 1902: first as Master of Erroll, Page to the Lord Lyon, King of Arms, and next – directly behind the monarch – as Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland.^*

      From the twelfth century, when reliable records of its activities began, the Erroll family history had been tumultuous, a curious mixture of glorious heroism and despicable double-crossing. Like Joss, a number of Erroll ancestors had their lives prematurely curtailed, though many fell courageously in battle, defending their faith and their King. Joss was descended from a steadfast line of military men and diplomats whose traceable origins go back to the Norman conquest, though family lore has it that the Hays were already performing acts of heroism in Scotland in AD 980. William de Haya of Erroll, the first Chief of the Hay Clan, who came to Scotland in about 1166 as butler to the Scots king William the Lion, was sent to the newly crowned King John of England in 1199 to negotiate a truce between the battling factions, and the return of Northumberland to Scotland.

William de Haya provides the earliest example of the Hay men’s tendency to marry with a view to increasing the family fortune. He married Eva of the Tay Estuary, who brought him Pitmilly in Fife and probably the Angus lands as well as the falcon-lands of Erroll.^† However, as the Hay estates seldom generated enough income to cover the costs of upkeep and family lifestyle, debts built up that were passed down the generations. Thus the Erroll family fortune gradually dwindled over the centuries and, when Joss’s turn came, ‘there would be little for the 22nd Earl to inherit’.²

Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, 5th Chief, was created Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, an office combining the functions of Secretary of State with that of Commander-in-Chief,^* by King Robert the Bruce in 1314 for helping to defeat the English at Bannockburn, leading a thousand horses to the battlefield to do so. Sir Gilbert’s service to Robert the Bruce established a tradition of loyalty to the Scots Crown which earned the family many privileges and granted them much local power. They could levy taxes on their tenants, raise an army and dispense justice on wrongdoers. Gilbert was also given Slains Castle, which stood on the coast of Aberdeenshire about fifteen miles south of Peterhead, in recognition of the part he had played in the war against Edward II. The name ‘Slains’ evokes but mildly the slaughter which befell this family. For the Hays were nothing if not courageous. Eighty-seven of them fell with James IV at the battle of Flodden in Northumberland in 1513.

      However, the corrupting influence of power was fully in evidence too. Plenty of scandals – beheadings, imprisonment, treason, suicide – occurred in the Erroll dynasty, but there has been only one murder.

      Three strong family characteristics would surface in the Errolls over the centuries: an inclination for politics, a natural penchant for subversion and a tendency to hedge their bets, the latter a useful survival mechanism. These qualities abounded in Francis, the 9th Earl. He collaborated in the Catholic rebellion of 1594 with George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. The 9th Earl had always been a Catholic, and his father and grandfather had both been staunch supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic party. James VI was lenient towards Francis for his part in the rebellion, the quid pro quo being that Francis’s son, the 10th Earl, be educated at court as a Protestant. But that was not the end of the story. In 1594 James marched north to supervise in person the burning of Slains Castle, reducing it to a ruin and giving rise to the differentiation between ‘Old Slains’ and ‘New Slains’ used by the Erroll family ever since. After the destruction of Old Slains, the Errolls moved seven miles away, north-east of Cruden Bay, where Francis initiated the mammoth construction project that was to be their next castle.

      The 10th Earl was dismissed – possibly unfairly – as extravagant. It had cost him so much to attend the coronation of Charles I that he was compelled to dispose of his ancestral estates. Attending a coronation was a costly business for families as grand as the Errolls. They would be expected to provide an impressive train of retainers, which on one occasion included ‘eight mounted esquires, four pages, ten grooms, twenty-five marshalmen … and a large body of highlanders’.³ In addition the 10th Earl was continuing the construction of ‘New Slains’, which would take a hundred years.⁴ It is clear that by now the precariousness of the family fortune was a feature – and a thorny issue for its scions – of the Errolls’ history.

      New Slains was the Scottish seat where Joss would get to know his great-grandmother Eliza Gore and his grandparents. It had left so deep an impression on him as a boy that he would name his first home in Africa after it. Joss and his siblings would occupy Slains Castle for only a few weeks at a time, but the place was ever-present in family conversation and had obviously captured the imagination of this intelligent child. What lad could resist stories of the wagers made in times gone by within the Erroll household on the chances of walking all the way round the castle’s outer wall without falling off. It was built so close to the cliff edge that one of its walls virtually overhung the ocean. The most famous victim of this dare-devil exercise was one of the Hay butlers, who fell to his death two hundred feet below the castle.

      The assumption was that Joss would inherit Slains. Therefore, like the heirs before him, he learned

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