103); and the story that he returned to England to save their lives at the cost of his own (Buchanan, Rerum Scot. Hist.; Herbert, Henry VIII) is disproved by the fact that the pledges were conveyed into Scotland on 9 Feb. 1545, and that the earl did not repair to the English court till the 28th. His subsequent negotiations at Edinburgh on Henry's behalf were frustrated by Beaton; so in May he sent an offer to Sadler ‘for the killing of the cardinal, if his majesty would have it done, and would promise, when it were done, a reward.’ Henry, while highly approving of such ‘acceptable service to God,’ would ‘not seem to have to do in it,’ and Cassillis would not proceed without direct warrant. Meanwhile he had been an early supporter of George Wishart, who preached at Ayr against popery, and it was at Cassillis's invitation that Wishart in 1546 came from Dundee to Midlothian, as it was owing to Cassillis's failure to meet him that the reformer fell into the hands of the cardinal.
On 10 June 1546 he was present at a convention of nobles at Stirling, where, with Henry's other partisans, he discharged all bands made with the king of England, and he was one of the twenty peers selected to attend by fours in succession the governor, Arran, at his secret council. Yet even now he did not renounce the shameful English intrigues which had led him a year before to send Hertford advice as to an invasion in time of harvest, for after the defeat of Pinkie (1547) he made secret terms with the Protector. In the autumn of 1550 he attended Mary of Lorraine to France, in October 1552 he agreed with Angus, Glencairn, and the sheriff of Ayr ‘to stand with the Dowager against the Governor’ (Arran), in 1554 he was appointed lord high treasurer, and in 1557 he, Arran, Huntly, and Argyll refused to aid the queen regent in an invasion of England. In February 1558 he was sent with seven other commissioners to represent Scotland at the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the dauphin. Their refusal to send for the ‘honours’ or regalia of Scotland may well have incensed the Guises, but it is not true that three or four of the commissioners (among them the Earl of Cassillis) ‘died at Dieppe in one night on their homeward way, under strong suspicion of poison’ (cf. the epitaph by Buchanan ‘Occidit insidiis fallaci exceptus ab hoste’). For Reid, bishop of Orkney, died there on 6 Sept., Cassillis on 18 Nov. (having made his will four days before), and Rothes on 28 Nov.; while Fleming died in Paris ‘of the same distemper’ on 18 Dec. He was buried in the Collegiate Church of Maybole.
Cassillis married Margaret, daughter of Alexander Kennedy of Bargany, and by her had three sons, of whom the eldest, Gilbert, fourth earl of Cassillis [q. v.], is separately noticed, and two daughters.
[Historical Account of the Noble Family of Kennedy; Douglas's Peerage of Scotland. ed. Wood, i. 330; Historie of the Kennedyis, edited from a seventeenth-century manuscript by Robert Pitcairn, Edinb. 1830; Tytler's History, very full as to this earl's dealings with England; James Paterson's History of the County of Ayr, 1852, ii. 282; P. Hume Brown's George Buchanan, Edinb. 1890.]
KENNEDY, GILBERT, fourth Earl of Cassillis (1541?–1576), eldest son of Gilbert, third earl [q. v.], was still a minor when, in November 1558, he succeeded his father. He seems to have been with him in France, for on 10 Feb. 1559 he was appointed a gentleman of the bedchamber, in place of his father, to Henry II. On 27 Dec. 1560 he was condemned by the general assembly as ‘an idolator and maintainer’ of idolatry. In 1562 he was served heir to his father and sworn a privy councillor. Towards the close of 1565 he went openly to hear mass in the queen's chapel; but in 1566 he married Margaret Lyon, only daughter of John, seventh lord Glamis, and ‘by her persuasion he became a protestant, and caused to reform his churches in Carrick, and promised to maintain the doctrine of the Evangel’ (Knox, Works, ed. Laing, ii. 533). In 1567 he was with Queen Mary at her last parting from Darnley; he sat on the mock assize that acquitted Bothwell; he signed the bond in his favour at Ainslie's supper; but early in May he was one of the nobles who convened against him at Stirling. He fought well for Queen Mary at Langside (13 May 1568), and there are extant ten letters written to him by Mary from England between 20 May 1568 and 6 May 1571. But in 1569, soon after an ineffectual meeting at Glasgow on 13 March between Moray and Cassillis with others of the Hamilton faction, the latter went to Stirling to visit the young king, and was magnificently entertained by the regent.
The king of Carrick, as the earl was widely called, was ‘ane particular man, and ane werry greedy man, and cared not how he got land, so that he could come by the same.’ He had been scheming for a few of the abbey lands of Glenluce when the abbot died. ‘And then he dealt with ane monk of the same abbacy, who could counterfeit the abbot's handwriting, and all the whole convent's; and made him counterfeit their subscriptions. And when he had got the same done, fearing that the monk would reveal it, he caused a carl, whom they
