Career
Her memoir describes him as "unkind, cruell and malicious": he failed to give her money for food, believed "misreports" against her, and turned her out of the house naked in the middle of the night, so that she and her maidservant were forced to take shelter in the minister"s house. She states that she was sick and pregnant at the time. As a modern commentator has pointed out, her detailed account is of importance also as "evidence of the acute vulnerability of wives and the inability of law, custom, and even powerful kinsmen to guarantee protection from brutal husbands." This follows almost verbatim a passage in Anne Locke"s 1590 dedication to the Countess of Warwick.
However, Lady Margaret, after bearing Hamilton five children, refused to sleep with him any more because of his adultery and his "excommunication for slaughter".
She had left him by the time she wrote out her memoirs in 1608. After Hamilton"s death in or after 1608, Lady Margaret was remarried as the third wife of Sir James Maxwell of Calderwood.
Her letters show this to have been a happy marriage.