William Hay, 5th Earl of Erroll
Scottish peer and statesman
William Hay, 5th Earl of Erroll (c. 1495 – 28 July 1522) was a Scottish peer and statesman.
Biography
William Hay was the son of the William Hay, 4th Earl of Erroll and Christian Lyon. He had double royal lineage, descended from Kings Robert II of Scotland and James I of Scotland.
He inherited the earldom on 20 October 1513, aged approximately 18. In his role as Lord High Constable of Scotland, the young earl was sent as a commissioner to France in 1515 and to England in 1516.
Marriage and issue
William Hay married Elizabeth Ruthven, youngest daughter of William Ruthven, 1st Lord Ruthven by his second wife, Christian Forbes, and had one son by her:
William Hay, 6th Earl of Erroll (1521 – 11 April 1541)
He died on 28 July 1522, not yet 30 years old. As his son William died under 21 years of age, the lands of Errol, Perthshire were held by the Crown, until the end of 1541, when the title was inherited by George Hay, the grandson of William Hay, 3rd Earl of Erroll.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as scottish peer and statesman. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19873055. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1495, 1522, 1513 and 1515.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Hay, 5th Earl of Erroll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.