Life

He was probably the third son of Alexander Hannay of Kirkdale in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright

Kirkcudbright

Kirkcudbright, is a town in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.The town lies south of Castle Douglas and Dalbeattie, in the part of Dumfries and Galloway known as the Stewartry, at the mouth of the River Dee, some six miles from the sea...

. Early in the reign of James I of England

James I of England

James VI and I was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603...

 Patrick Hannay, with a cousin Robert (created a baronet of Nova Scotia in 1629), came to the English court and was favourably noticed by Queen Anne

Anne of Denmark

Anne of Denmark was queen consort of Scotland, England, and Ireland as the wife of King James VI and I.The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, Anne married James in 1589 at the age of fourteen and bore him three children who survived infancy, including the future Charles I...

. About 1620 both Patrick and Robert received grants of land in County Longford

County Longford

County Longford is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Midlands Region and is also located in the province of Leinster. It is named after the town of Longford.Longford County Council is the local authority for the county...

, Ireland, and in 1621 Patrick visited Sweden. After his return he received a clerkship in the office of the Irish privy council in Dublin. Attempts, which were for a time successful, were made to oust him from this post, but Charles I

Charles I of England

Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...

 reinstated him in 1625 on the grounds of his foreign service and relationship with Queen Anne. In 1627 Hannay became master of chancery in Ireland. He is said to have died at sea in 1629, but records continue until 1630.

Works

Hannay is mentioned in John Dunbar's Epigrammaton Centuriæ Sex, 1616. In 1618–19 appeared A Happy Husband; as with Richard Brathwaite's Good Wife accompanying it, the work was written in imitation of Thomas Overbury

Thomas Overbury

Sir Thomas Overbury was an English poet and essayist, and the victim of one of the most sensational crimes in English history...

's Wife. In 1619 Hannay published Two Elegies on the late death of our Soveraigne Queene Anne. With Epitaphes, with the title printed in white on a black ground.

Three years afterwards he republished the Happy Husband and the elegies, adding some new poems. The collective edition of 1622, The Nightingale. Sheretine and Mariana. A happy Husband. Elegies on the Death of Queen Anne. Songs and Sonnets, has the title within a border of thirteen compartments (engraved by Crispin de Pass), with two bars of music in the upper portion and the author's portrait below. Each of the five parts has a separate title-page. ‘The Nightingale,’ a poem in stanzas of sixteen lines, has a dedication to the Duchess of Lennox and commendatory verse by Robert Hannay, John Marshall

John Marshall

John Marshall was the Chief Justice of the United States whose court opinions helped lay the basis for American constitutional law and made the Supreme Court of the United States a coequal branch of government along with the legislative and executive branches...

, William Lithgow

William Lithgow (traveller and author)

William Lithgow , traveller, writer and alleged spy, born at Lanark, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, claimed at the end of his various peregrinations to have tramped 36,000 miles on foot....

 and others. ‘Sheretine and Mariana,’ a graceful narrative poem in six-line stanzas, is dedicated to the Countess of Bedford

Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford

Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford was a major aristocratic patron of the arts and literature in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras...

. Before the Songs and Sonnets there is a dedicatory epistle to a soldier under whom Hannay had served abroad, Sir Andrew Gray. In 1632 a copy of commendatory verses by him was prefixed to the first collected edition of William Lithgow's Travels. A facsimile reprint of the 1622 collection of Hannay's poems was issued in 1875 by the Hunterian Club, with a memoir of the author by David Laing

David Laing (Scottish antiquary)

David Laing was a Scottish antiquary.The son of William Laing, a bookseller in Edinburgh, where he was born, he was educated at the Canongate Grammar School. At fourteen he was apprenticed to his father. Shortly after the death of the latter in 1837, Laing was elected to the librarianship of the...

.