Lady Jane Hay
(1830-1920)
[1860]

Volume 1, page 103, sitting number 616.

Born in Geneva in 1830, Lady Jane Hay was the daughter of George Hay, 8th Marquess of Tweeddale and his wife Lady Susan née Montagu, daughter of the 5th Duke of Manchester.

She appears on the 1851 census living at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair with her mother and three of her siblings. The household also comprised a governess and thirteen servants, including a butler, two footmen and a page. 

On 9 June 1863 she married Richard Chambre Hayes Taylor, son of the Reverend and Honourable Henry Edward Taylour [sic]. Their marriage produced one son and four daughters.

General Sir Richard Chambre Hayes Taylor of Dowestown, County Meath and 16 Eaton Place, London, died on 6 December 1904.

Lady Jane Taylor died on 13 December 1920 at 16 Eaton Place, London. She left an estate valued at £17.072.

‘Lady Jane Taylor, widow of General Sir R.C.H. Taylor, G.C.B., and daughter of the eight Marquess of Tweeddale, and sister of Lady Emily Peel, mother of the present Sir Robert Peel, died on Monday at 16, Eaton Place, S.W.1, in her 91st year’ (Tamworth Herald, 18 December 1920).  

‘A remarkable old lady has passed away in Lady Jane Taylor, daughter of the eighth Marquis of Tweeddale. She remained vigorous in mind and body almost to the end, although she was born before Queen Victoria entered her teens, and not long since she defended a law suit with every appearance of interest. Her father, born in 1787, married a daughter of the fifth Duke of Manchester, and had thirteen children, of whom only the youngest, Lady Emily Peel, is left now. The eldest daughter married the famous first and last Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor-General of India. The fourth was the Duchess of Wellington, and daughter-in-law of “The Iron Duke.” George, Earl of Gifford, the eldest son, contracted a romantic marriage on his death-bed with Helen Lady Dufferin, the beautiful Sheridan, who was a poetess and sister of Mrs Norton, to make him happy in his last days. Lady Emily Peel is a widow of the great Sir Robert’s son and namesake, and lives out her days at Geneva, where she has a villa called after the beloved Lammermoor Hills of her native Lothians’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 16 December 1920).

[From an album compiled by Bertha Amelia Yorke, daughter of the Very Rev. and Hon. Grantham Munton Yorke.]