Genealogy of the house and surname of Setoun

THE EPITAPH
OF LORD SETON AND HIS LADY,
TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN, ON A MARBLE SLAB,
IN SETON CHAPEL.
{From a MS. in the possession of the Earl of JVemyss.)
Near the south side of this chapel are deposited the bodies, once the
habitations of the souls, of George Seton and Isabel Hamilton;
souls truly noble, and worthy of everlasting remembrance. George, of
this name the 5th, honourably possessed and enlarged the ample estates
and fortune transmitted to him by his ancestors in times of great dis-
turbance in the country. He was born in the reign of James the Fifth.
Being deprived of his most worthy father, when he was a young man,
living in France, he returned home, and in a short time afterwards, by a
decree of the Estates of the Kingdom, he is sent back to France, and
there, as one of the Ambassadors, he negotiated and ratified the mar-
riage between Queen Mary and Francis, Dauphin of France, and the
antient treaties between the French and Scots. Upon his return home,
he found his country involved in the flames, both of foreign and civil
wars, upon the change of religion and the forms of worship : when within
Scotland, the English and French, the Germans and Spaniards, were en-
gaged in war, and the Scots also fighting among themselves, his house
having been more than once burnt to the ground, and entirely demolish-
ed, and all his estates ravaged by the English, he restored the whole
anew upon a scale more extensive, and in a style more magnificent. In
every change of fortune always independant and undaunted, when his
King was murdered by the most abandoned of men, and the Queen
driven into exile by the faction of the nobles, he, like his brave ancestors,
H