MELGUM, viscount of, a title, now extinct, in the peerage of Scotland, conferred on Lord John Gordon, second son of the first marquis of Huntly, by Charles I. in 1627, with the secondary title of Lord Aboyne. He was burnt to death in the castle of Frendraught, 18th October, 1630. He had married Lady Sophia Hay, fifth daughter of Francis, ninth earl of Errol, and had an only daughter. The ballad called ‘The Burning of Frendraught,’ thus describes her anguish on receiving, by his servant, the intelligence of her lord’s fate:

“O wae be to you, George Gordon;
An ill death may you dee,
Sae safe and sound as ye stand there,
And my lord bereaved from me.

‘I bade him loup, I bade him come,
I bade him loup to me;
I’d catch him in my armis two,
A foot I should not flee.

He threw me rings from his white fingers,
Which were so long and small,
To give to you his lady fair,
Where you sat in your hall.’

Sophia Hay, Sophia Hay,
O bonnie Sophie was her name;
Her waiting maid put on her clothes,
But I wat she tore them off again.”

The courtesy title of Viscount Melgum is held by the eldest son of the earl of Minto, a peerage of the united kingdom, of the creation of 1813.