James Leslie

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James Leslie (1603–?), a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth in Edinburgh, parentage, marriage to Marion Hendersoune, and his daughter Bessie. Notable: early 17th-century Scottish origins in the Canongate of Edinburgh, situating the family among the deep Lowland Scots roots of the Hyten paternal line.

James Leslie (1603–?) entered the world on the 27th of September, 1603, in the Canongate of Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland — a burgh nestled in the shadow of Holyrood, then standing apart from the walled city above. He was the son of James Leslie, who would not survive past the year 1631, and of Elizabeth Airmour. The Leslies were a kindred of long Scottish standing, and the parish registers of early seventeenth-century Edinburgh preserved his entry into one of the more storied quarters of the Scottish capital.

The Scotland of his youth was a kingdom only recently joined in personal union with England under James VI and I, whose 1603 accession to the southern throne occurred in the very year of this James Leslie's birth. The Canongate of those decades was a place of artisans, courtiers attached to the abbey precincts, and burgesses living within sight of royal lodgings, though the king himself had departed for London. Religious controversy, soon to swell into the upheavals of the Covenanting era, shaped the world in which young Leslie reached manhood.

In due course he married Marion Hendersoune, a name common in the Lothian lowlands and likely indicative of similarly Scottish kindred. Of this union there is recorded a daughter, Elizabeth — known by the diminutive Bessie — born in 1631, the same year that grief came upon the family in the death of the elder James Leslie. Whether further children followed, and the date and place of James the younger's own passing, have not been preserved in the records available to this archive.

Through his daughter Bessie, the Leslie line carried forward into later generations, eventually contributing to the deep Scottish substratum of the Hyten paternal-grandfather lineage. James Leslie stands as a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-paternal (PP) line.