Clan Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.

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On the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.

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By the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.

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Just before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.

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