Lady Julia Hay
(1831-1915)
[1860]

Possibly Volume 1, page 102, sitting number 617.

[There is no entry for this sitting in the Silvy daybooks but the preceding entry is Lady Julia’s sister, Jane, in a very similar set up of backdrop and props.]

Born at Haddington in East Lothian on 18 August 1831, Lady Julia Hay was the seventh daughter of the 8th Marquess of Tweeddale and his wife Lady Susan née Montagu, daughter of the 5th Duke of Manchester.

At the time of the 1851 census she was living with her mother and three of her siblings at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair. The household included thirteen servants. 

On the night the census was taken in 1861 she was staying with her mother at Tailor’s Hotel in Mayfair’s Cork Street. 

Lady Julia Hay never married. When the census was taken in 1891 she was a ‘boarder’ at a house in Highgate belonging to George Fletcher, a ‘Doctor in Medicine.’ The final column of the census form lists her as a ‘Lunatic.’ 

She was still at the same address ten years later, still classed as a ‘Lunatic.’

When the census was taken 1911 she was still under Dr Fletcher’s care at the same address, 60 Southwood Lane, Highgate. She was listed as a ‘Resident Patient.’

Lady Julia Hay died, aged 83, in Highgate on 27 January 1915, leaving an estate valued at £17,340 (Birmingham Daily Post, 16 April 1915).  

‘By the death of Lady Julia Hay, seventh daughter of the late George, eighth Marquis of Tweeddale, which occurred in London on Wednesday, several notable families will be cast into mourning. Lady Julia Hay, who was eighty-three years of age, and unmarried, was an aunt of the present Peer and of Lady Clementine Waring. Her father was a famous Field-Marshal, who served as Aide-de-Camp to the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War, and was wounded while acting in that capacity at the Battle of Busaco in 1810. He was from 1842 to 1848 Governor and Commander-in-Chief at Madras. […] Lady Julia Hay was one of a family of fourteen — six sons and eight daughters. Two of her brothers became Peers, bing the ninth and tenth holders of the title Marquis of Tweeddale. […] The only brother who survives is Lord John Hay, G.C.B., who is a distinguished naval officer, and Admiral of the Fleet (retired). […] Two sisters still living are both widows. One is the widow of the Right. Hon. Sir Robert Peel, who died in 1895, and the other is the widow of General Sir Richard C.H. Taylor, G.C.B., who died in 1904’ (The Scotsman, 29 January 1915).

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