The elder son, Henry Nisbet, calls for fuller notice. This is none other than the collector and preserver of Scottish ballads, after whom the Bannatyne Club is named, who, on his wife's death in 1603, enters in his 'Family Record' his high appreciation of her worth as 'ane godly, honest, wyiss, vertewous, and trew matrone, who was first mareit to uqml willia nisbet, baillie.' He married Isobel Mauchane (probably descended from John Mauchan, a bailie in 1523 and name-father of Mauchan's Close), who afterwards took as her second husband, George Ballenden, or Ballantyne, or Bannatyne, - the names are interchangeable - merchant burgess in Edinburgh.
'William Nisbet, merchant,' is one of the councillors whose names are appended to the King's 'Decret Arbitral' fixing the constitution of the town in 1583, and he was second bailie in the following year. Besides three daughters, Christian, Marion, and Elizabeth, he had two sons, the second of whom, William, 'ane honest and discreit man,' was made a freeman and burgess of the city in 1567, and 'died of the pest' in September 1585. His half Italian blood and his connection with the Court through his mother would sufficiently account for his strong support of the Old Religion and of the Queen Regent. The arms of Adam Nisbet's spouse, Madame Beatrix Ambrosia - this euphonious baptismal name is still perpetuated in the Dick Lauder family - Fountainhall is unable to supply, for 'the coat armorial of Monsieur Ambroise, the Italian Secretary, we cannot well know without consulting the books published in France and Italy containing the bearings of these nations and what were the gentilian arms of the Ambrosian Sirname.'Īccording to the editors of Nisbet's Plates, an Adam Nisbet, whom we take to be the son of James V.'s 'merchant,' married Elizabeth Hay. and his queen lived in January 1591, when frightened out of Holyrood by the plots of Francis, earl Bothwell, and from whence, in the following month, Lord Huntly set forth to take part in the murder of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray.' The Chancellor at the same time lived 'at the same wynd-head,' in the house of Provost Alexander Clark, the door-lintel of which, bearing the words 'The Lord is my Protector: Alexandrus Clark,' found a place for a time in the walls of Walter Ross's mansion of St. For he says of his grandfather, the Dean of Guild, that he was 'grandchild of another Nicol Edward, Provost of Edinburgh in 1592, being of a most antient descent in that Burgh, who built those great lodgings in the middle of Niddrie's Wynd, where I have seen the said Nicol Edward's name and arms on the lintell of a Chimney with this Anagram on his name in french, "Va d'un vol à Christ" "goe with one flyght to Christ."' Provost Edward's house was that afterwards known as 'Lockhart's Lodging,' in which James VI.
The author of the Historical Observes, the son of this union, in his attempts to blazon his maternal coat-of-arms, in which he includes 'Nisbet of Dean', sets us on the trail of more than one of the lost sculptured stones of Old Edinburgh. Isobel's son, Alexander Eleis, married Elizabeth, daughter of Nicol Edward, Dean of Guild, whose daughter Isobel was wife of 'John Lauder, merchant in Edinburgh, afterwards designed Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall, lineally descended from the Lairds of Lauder of that Ilk.' 'The said Adam Nisbet, of whom the Lairds of Dean, Craigentinnie, Dirleton, etc., are all descended, had by Dame Ambrosia, besides other children, Margaret Nisbet,' who was married to John Seton, son of the Laird of Parbroath, whose daughter Isobel (Fountainhall's great-grandmother) became the wife of Patrick Eleis, a wealthy Edinburgh bailie, who acquired the lands of Stenhopemill, Plewlands, Southside and Mortonhall, and whose arms and initials, with the date 1623, are to be found carved above the lintel of the doorway of old Stenhopemill House. Giles) it is stated that the merchant to the 'Commons King' married 'Madame Beatrix Ambrosia, one of Queen Maria of Lorraine's Maids of Honor' and 'daughter to Monsieur Ambroise, an Italian,' who was secretary to the queen in her widowhood.