James Jay

Sir James Jay (1732–1815) was an American physician and politician. He was brother of John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. While initially a supporter of American independence, he later changed his views becoming a Loyalist and went into exile in London after the Treaty of Paris recognised independence.

The Jays were a prominent merchant family in New York City, descended from Huguenots who had come to New York to escape religious persecution in France. In 1685 the Edict of Nantes had been revoked, thereby abolishing the rights of Protestants and confiscating their property. Among those affected was Jay's paternal grandfather, Augustus Jay. He moved from France to New York, where he built a successful merchant empire. Jay's father, Peter Jay, born in New York City in 1704, became a wealthy trader in furs, wheat, timber, and other commodities.

James Jay was born in New York City; later the family moved to Rye, New York, when Peter Jay retired from business following a smallpox epidemic that had blinded two of his children.

James' mother was Mary Van Cortlandt, who had married Peter Jay in 1728, in the Dutch Church. They had ten children together, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Mary's father, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, had been born in New Amsterdam in 1658. Cortlandt served on the New York Assembly, was twice mayor of New York City, and also held a variety of judicial and military offices. Two of his children (the other one being his son Frederick) married into the Jay family.

James Jay studied medicine, and became a practicing physician.

He was instrumental in obtaining the endowments for Benjamin Franklin's projected college (now the University of Pennsylvania) in Philadelphia (with William Smith, 1755) and King's (now Columbia) College, New York. For the purpose of soliciting contributions for the latter college, he visited England in 1762, where he was knighted by the king, George III, in 1763.

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