[46]. She had four children according to the Historical Account of the Noble Family of Kennedy, Edinburgh, 1849, p. 44.
[47]. ‘We were a’ put down but ane’ first appears in Herd, 1769.
[48]. These eight heads would correspond very neatly to the number of gypsies executed in 1624. But in the circumstantial account given by Chambers we are told that the house belonging to the family at Maybole was fitted for the countess’s reception “by the addition of a fine projecting stair-case, upon which were carved heads representing those of her lover and his band.... The effigies of the gypsies are very minute, being subservient to the decoration of a fine triple window at the top of the stair-case, and stuck upon the tops and bottoms of a series of little pilasters which adorn that part of the building. The head of Johnie Faa himself is distinct from the rest, larger, and more lachrymose in the expression of the features. Some windows in the upper flat of Cassilis Castle are similarly adorned; but regarding them tradition is silent.”
[49]. Sharp, in Johnson’s Museum, 1853, IV, 218*; Paterson, in Ballads and Songs of Ayrshire, I, 13. It is also clear from these letters that the countess was a sober and religious woman. Some minor difficulties which attend the supposition of this lady’s absconding with Johnny Faa, or any gypsy, are barely worth mentioning. At the time when Johnny Faa was put down, in 1624, the countess was seventeen years old, and yet she is made the mother of two children. If we shift the elopement to the other end of her life, there was then (so severe had been the measures taken with these limmers) perhaps not a gypsy left in Scotland. See Aytoun, 1859, I, 186.
[50]. John, seventh earl of Cassilis, son of the sixth earl by a second wife, married for his second wife, some time before 1700, Mary Foix (a name also spelt Faux): Crawford’s Peerage, 1716, p. 76, corrected by the Decreets of the Lords of Council and Session, vol. 145, div. 2. May this explain the Faws coming to be associated in the popular mind with a countess of Cassilis? (A suggestion of Mr Macmath’s.) The lady is even called Jeanie Faw in C 7, 11, first by the gypsy, then by her husband. The seventh earl had two children by Mary Foix.
[51]. I have seen this piece only in Elizabeth Cochrane’s Song-Book, MS., p. 38, and in Buchan’s MSS, I, 220. Its contents agree with what is alleged in W. Fuller’s “Brief Discovery of the True Mother of the pretended Prince of Wales, known by the name of Mary Grey,” London, 1696, pp. 5 f, 11, 17 f, and it was probably composed not long after.
[52]. Afterwards inserted in the first volume of The Tea-Table Miscellany (p. 66 of A New Miscellany of Scots Sangs, London, 1727, p. 68 of T. T. M., Dublin, 1729), from which source it may have been adopted by Sharpe.
[53]. Here from the original, Communications to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. i, from a copy furnished by Mr Macmath.
[54]. The most of this account, and in nearly the same words, was given in an earlier letter from Major Barry to James Cant, who printed (Perth, 1774) an edition of ‘The Muses Threnodie, by Mr H. Adamson, 1638’ (p. 19). The principal items of the story are repeated from Cant by Pennant, Tour in Scotland, 1772, Part II, London, 1776, p. 112. Pennant cites Cant’s book as the Gabions of Perth. “It seems,” says Mr Macmath, who has extracted for me the passage in Cant, “that Adamson’s work was sometimes known as Gall’s Gabions, the latter being a coined word.”
[55]. An “old manuscript volume” cited in The New Statistical Account of Scotland, X, 37; Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland, 1858, II, 167.