INTRODUCTION 



Ormistoun and th:^ Cockburns 



Of the many branches of the old Border family of Cockburn ^ 

 that of Ormistoun finds in the author of these letters its last 

 noted representative. The barony, which had come into the 

 family in the fourteenth century through a marriage connec- 

 tion with a Lindsay of the Byres, another and more famous 

 barony in the neighbourhood, was sold by John Cockburn in 

 1747 to the then Earl of Hopetoun, and now belongs to the 

 Marquis of Linlithgow. This sale must have been a pathetic 

 blow to many hopes — for Ormistoun was as much to John 

 Cockburn as any Abbotsford to the hand and heart that had 

 striven and lived for it. Retiring in 1744 from a post he had 

 long held as a Lord of the Admiralty, and busied with the 

 building of what is now Ormistoun Hall, girt with the garden 

 and the trees he had so lovingly tended, he had to give up 

 the battle within sight of victory. His closing years were 

 spent under the roof of his only son, George, of the Navy 

 Office, and there he died in 1758,^ the year of the birth of 

 Nelson, at the age of seventy-nine. He inherited his ' ruling 

 passion ' from his father, Adam Cockburn, Lord Justice-Clerk 

 under Queen Anne, and on the commission that reported severely 

 on the Glencoe Massacre. In the 'Fifteen he earned much 

 ill-will for severity in dealing as a judge with the rebels who 



1 The name is, throughout the Letters, Cokburne. Defoe {Totir^ first 

 edition, 1725) says, 'as commonly express'd, Coburn.' Heraldry, in its usual 

 fashion, places three cocks in the family shield as an obvious emblem. But old 

 names of good families are, as a rule, place-names. Cockburn was more pro- 

 bably the Gowk-burne, or well of the Cuckoo. Cf. Pen-i-cuick and Cock-pen. 



2 The obituary notice in the Scots Magazine^ Nov. 1758, says : * At his son's 

 house at the Navy Office, London, John Cockburn, Esq., eldest son of Adam 

 Cockburn of Ormiston, Esq., late Lord Justice-Clerk.' 



B 



