“The memory of great men is no less useful than their presence.” George, 4th Earl of Winton.

At Seton Collegiate Church, Memorial to George, 7th Lord Seton:

"Near the south side of this chapel are deposited the bodies, once the habitation of the souls, of George Seton and Isabel Hamilton; souls truly noble, and worthy of everlasting remembrance.  George, of this name the 5^th, honourably possessed and enlarged the ample estates and fortune transmitted to him by his ancestors in times of great disturbance 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 marriage between Queen Mary and Francis, Dauphin of France, and the ancient treaties between the French and the 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 engaged in war, and the Scots also fighting among themselves, his house having been more than once burnt to the ground, and entirely demolished, and all of his estates ravished 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 independent and undaunted, when his King was murdered by the most abandoned of men, and the Queen being driven into exile by the faction of the nobles, he, like his brave ancestors, always stood unmoved.  For this steady loyalty being often imprisoned and kept in close confinement, often banished his country, and stripped of all his fortune, he not only sustained with fortitude, but with fortitude , but even despised and surmounted innumerable distresses of that kind, which bore witness of his faithful attachment to his country, and his loyalty to its rightful Sovereigns. 

At length, upon the accession of James the Sixth, by whose auspicious government, prudence, and counsels, Scotland was delivered from all its tempests and distresses, and restored to its antient splendour, he too was honourably received, and treated according to his merit, recovered his rank and dignity of his ancestors, and was sent by the King as his chief ambassador to Henry the Third King of France, with the most ample powers to confirm alliance between them.  In this high office, when he was performing services to the satisfaction, and with the favour of both Princes, the labours of his past life bring upon him a fatal disease.  He returned to his own country, and within a month after he went hence to a better state, on the 8^th day of January, in the year of our Lord 1585, about the 55^th year of his age."
 

Who married Lady Isabel Seton, daughter of Robert, first Earl of Winton, and who died at Seton in 1611, in the twentieth year of his age, formerly occupied the N.E. corner of the chancel, and is now affixed to the east wall of the south transept. In the upper portion, between two small pillars, is an escutcheon bearing the impaled coats of Perth and Winton, with the supporters, crest, and motto of the former earldom.

The same two coats appear in separate shields, each surmounted by a coronet, between two larger pillars in the central part of the monument, from which an oblong marble slab (2 feet 9 inches by 2 feet) has been
removed, and which bore the following inscription:—" Conditum hie est quicquid mortale fuit Jacobi Drummond, families principis, quique primus familiam titulo Perthiam comitatus illustravit. Monumentum hoc posuit amantissima et moestissima conjunx D. Isabell Setoun Roberti Wentoniae unica. An. . Sal . . . "

On one of two semicircular marble slabs, at the base of the monument, and separated by a monogram embracing the letters " I. D. (James Drummond) and " I. S." (Isabel Seton), is the following epitaph, composed by William Drummond of Hawthornden:

Instead of epitaphes and airye praise,
This monument a lady chaste did raise
To her lord's living fame, and, after death,
Her bodye doth unto this place bequeath,
To rest with his till God's shrill trumpet sound ;
Thogh tyme her lyf, no tyme her love can bound.

Soli Deo trino et uni

Omnis honor laus et gloria

Monumentum hoc Jacobo Ogvelvi de

Bernes filio tertio genito domini Georgii

Ogvelvie a Bamff de Dunlougus militis

et Beatricis Seton hujus familife

filise Georgius Ogvelvie de Carnousis

frater et hseres mserens posuit.

Febre violenta correptus hie apud

sanguine et amicitia conjunct! ssimos

obiit vicesimo nono Januarii

Anno Domini cioiocxvu.

Ex defunct! mandate et in fratris gratiam
curavit §W§ fieri.

Heaven's praise, man's honour, share one shameful lot,

God and his image both alike forgot. *

To this sweet maid a kindred place is due,

Her earth shall consecrate these walls anew,

The muse that listens to desert alone,

Snatches from fate, and seals thee for her own.

NOTES ON EPITAPH'S IN THE SETON COLLEGIATE CHURCH

The Campbell gyrons appear with the Seton and Sinclair arms upon an
interesting octagonal font still preserved in the church. In 1849, a circular font
(also still preserved) was dug up outside the church, and was found to contain
several coins, hawks-bells, &c., which were long at Gosford. Both of these fonts are very
accurately engraved in the E. A. A. Sketch Book.

Matrix of a monumental brass, 7 feet by 3| feet, broken across
the centre (fig. 2), dug up outside the church in 1849; in all probability
the tombstone of either Catherine Sinclair of Hermandston, wife
of William, first Lord Seton, or of Lady Janet Hepburn, widow of
George, fifth Lord, who fell at Flodden, both great benefactresses of
the sacred edifice, as the matrix very clearly indicated the outline
of a female figure under an ornamental canopy, with a surrounding inscription.
The interest of this slab was greatly enhanced by the
circumstance of there being very few Scottish examples of either
monumental brasses or their matrices.

An ornamental shield, charged with three crescents,
between the letters " I. S." and a surrounding inscription, commencing
" HEIR . LYIS . IOHNE . SETON." The lower portion of the slab was
broken off, and the remainder of the inscription " illegible, with the
exception of the two words " Margaret " and "August."
8. Impaled shield. Dexter, three crescents. Sinister, a
bend charged with three, roses or cinquefoils—on a chief, two (three 1) mullets.
 

Inscription.—" HEIR . LYIS . DAVID . SETON . MERCHANT . BVKGES . OF
EDINBVRGH . SPOVS . TO . IEIN . BRAND . QVHA . DECEISED . IN . VINTON
THE . 22 . DAY . OF . IVLIE . 1632."