Elizabeth Gould

Biography

Youngest daughter of Col. James Cochrane of Ochiltree and Culross (1690-1758) and Margaret Hawkison. Boswell's mother's cousin. Married (1759) to Nathaniel Gould. Earlier marriage (1750) to Henry Carey Hamilton (b. ca. 1708) of Holycross. One of her sisters was Mary Ann Cochrane (d. 1780) who married Dublin attorney Robert Sibthorpe.

Mrs. Gould's father, James Cochrane, was the brother of Boswell's maternal grandmother, Euphemia Cochrane

Also known as

• Elizabeth Cochrane
• Betty Cochrane

Life with James Boswell

Boswell first went to visit the Goulds, whom he had not previously met despite the family relation between Mrs. Gould and himself, on December 2, 1762. During the next months he often dines with them and enjoys their company. Even so, on January 6, 1763 Mrs. Gould (jokingly) blamed Boswell for not visiting them more often. Paradoxically, Lady Betty Macfarlane had, the day before, jokingly said of Boswell that "his weakness is that he would prefer Mrs. Gould's to this [the Kellies]".

Notes

Research info: According to FamilySearch, (Link) a Betty Cochrane, married to a Nathaniel Gould, died on February 11th, 1799. This person was supposedly born in Weston, Somerset (see Nathaniel Gould for more on this) in 1735. This doesn't fit in with other dates, such as her marriage in 1750 to Henry Hamilton, but information in the database sometimes is way off, and it does seem to fit the information I have about Mr. Gould, so I think it is very probable that Betty Cochrane, Mrs. Gould, the cousin of Euphemia Boswell, died in 1799, which was also the opinion of the editiors of the general correspondence 1766-1769 (vol. 2), which was published in 1997 (p. 213, note 8). This volume also gives her year of birth as 1735, but the sources are a bit unclear, and it would make her only 15 years old at the time of her first marriage.

Mentioned in

Elizabeth Gould is mentioned in:

• London Journal 1762-1763