TIMES PAST Agnes McLehose
HISTORY PEOPLE FIVE FACTS ABOUT
1
THERE will be many toasts made in honour of Robert Burns tonight as the world celebrates his life and work. Let’s also raise a glass to Agnes, or Nancy, McLehose, the Glasgow woman who was the love of his life, and to whom one of his most
2
famous love songs is dedicated. WHEN a 1791 handwritten manuscript of Ae Fond Kiss (normally held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh) went on display in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall for just two hours, hundreds of people turned up to see it. Burns wrote it as his
4
great love, Agnes, prepared to depart these shores for Jamaica AGNES moved to Edinburgh to try to patch things up with her after the break-up of her estranged husband. “Ae fond kiss, marriage and became and then we sever; Ae fareweel, a poet. She met Robert
3
and then forever…” Burns in December 1787 and BORN Agnes Craig on the they embarked upon a passionate Saltmarket in the late 1750s, relationship, writing to each other her father was a Glasgow as Clarinda and Sylvander. Burns surgeon and her mother is said to have written many of a minister’s daughter. She met the love letters he sent to Agnes in
5
James McLehose, or Maclehose, Glasgow’s Black Bull Inn. on a journey to Edinburgh, ON arriving in Jamaica, and legend has it her beauty so James did not meet Agnes entranced the young lawyer that and she discovered he had he booked all the other seats on replaced her with a mistress. the coach to be alone with her She came back to Scotland, for the full 10 hours. Despite moving to Edinburgh in 1810. She the romantic beginning, their was careful to retain ownership marriage – during which they of the Burns letters, and they had four children together – was were only published after her unhappy and they separated death, by her grandson. She died in 1780. in October 1841.