In the last post we left Alexander Bayne as a proud father extolling the virtues of his children, and especially the intellectual prowess of his eldest daughter. He died only a few years after writing that letter. What became of the children?
The oldest of the five children was Anne. She married the famous artist Allan Ramsay.
Sadly, she died in childbirth in 1743, and none of their three children lived to adulthood.
The second daughter, Cecilia, married William Edmonstone, a doctor in Leith and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. They had at least two daughters who grew up and married.
The eldest son, also called Alexander, was another doctor, at Perth. He married Jean Moir and they had two children.
The middle boy, William, joined the Navy and never married. He worked his way up through the ranks until he was Captain of a 74-gun ship of the line, Alfred. He was killed in battle with a French fleet in the Caribbean in 1782. The French fleet was devastated in the engagement and the three British captains who died were commemorated by a 25-foot tall monument in Westminster Abbey sculpted by Joseph Nollekens.
The youngest son, John Bayne, was apprenticed to a merchant in Edinburgh, and may have been in London in the 1760s. During the Seven Years’ War, William Bayne’s sloop, Spy, captured a French ship, and the agent appointed to distribute the bounty to the sailors who had been aboard at the time was a John Bayne. John later went out to India, where he amassed a substantial fortune. He returned to England in 1790, bought up a variety of properties in Kensington, and married off his (illegitimate) daughter Jane to William Kirby Trimmer, a grandson of Joshua Kirby.
Kirby and his world 