Lesmahagow

Young Cambusnethan having laid aside his arms, employed his time in hunting and hawing, but mostly in courting of his mistress, until the beginning of September, when that business was brought to a tryst at the Corsefoord boat, a passage upon Clyde, near midway between the Corhouse and Cambusnethan. There was not much trysting in the matter, there being ane equality in the persons, the portion offered, the present sustenance, jointure, and estate that was to be secured to the heirs of the marriage.

Near two month after the contract, they were married by Mr. John Home, in Lesmahagow kirk, upon the 13th day of November 1651, the bride being in the eighteenth year of her age, and the bridegroom in the nineteenth. A matchlier pair was not seen within the walls of that kirk this last century, nor a greater wedding considering the great consternation the country had been in for some months preceding, for there were one Marquis, three Earls, two Lords, sixteen Baronets, and eight ministers, present at this solemnity, but not one musician. They liked yet better the bleating of the calves of Dan and Bethal, the ministers' long winded and sometimes nonsensical graces, little to the purpose, than all the musical instruments of the sanctuary at so solemn an occasion, which, if it be lawful at all to have them, certainly it ought and should be upon a wedding-day, for divertisement to the guests, that innocent recreation of music and dancing being much more warrant-able, and a far better exercise than drinking and smoking tobacco, wherein these holy brethren of the Presbyterian persuasion for the most part employed themselves, without any formal health or remembrance of their friends; a nod with their head, or a sigh, with the turning up of the white of the eye, served for that ceremony. The solemnity continued from the Thursday until the Tuesday following when the nobility and gentry went home to their own houses, as Cambusnethan did to his, leaving his son at this father-in-law's, where he remained a year, and had his first child born there. Being a son, he was named after his father and grandfather, "James".
After this period, we find Bannatyne of Corhouse making himself useful as a county gentlemen, by enforcing an Act of the Scottish Parliament along with the Magistrates of Lanark, fixing reasonable prices on boots and shoes. The Act was passed in 1668, and was a repetition of the one of 1605. (Act. Parl., iv 404.) It appears from a MS account of the parish of Lesmahagow, written by the late Sheriff Aiton of Hamilton, that the Regent Earl of Arran, the Earl of Argyle, and the Earl of Glencairn, married sisters of John Bannatyne of Corehouse. The correct version as given by Anderson in the "House of Hamilton" is, that John Bannatyne of Corhouse, the Earl of Argyle, and the Earl of Glencairn married sisters of the second Earl of Arran. Sir John Bannatyne having married the heiress of Crookdyke, in Cumberland, settled there, and sold the estate of Corehouse about the year 1694, to William Sommerville of Cambusnethan, who, in 1695, appears on the list of commissioners of Supply, which honour he enjoyed also in 1704. (Acts Parl., ix. 374, xi. 141.) He was succeeded by George Sommerville, on whose decease, without issue, the property devolved on his two sisters, one of whom married Lockhart of Birkhill. These ladies sold it, and in 1773 it belonged to a gentleman named Dickson. The estate was afterwards purchased with the reversion of the price of the barony of Ednam by James Edmonstone, Esq., a member of a border family, who for nearly 800 years had possessed the fertile barony of that name. Corehouse gave a senatorial title to a gentleman of pre-eminent talent at the Scottish bar, the late George Cranstoun., Esq., who was related to the family of Edmondstoun by the female line. After his succession to the estate, Lord Corehouse built the present elegant mansion in the Elizabethan style, and completed it in the year 1827, from designs by the well-known architect and antiquary, Blore of London; and it is justly regarded as a monument of refined taste. The estate is now in the possession of Lord Corehouse's niece, Miss Edmondstoun Cranstoun.