The death of George Hamilton on the Saverne on 1 June 1676 was mourned by many, including the French king. On 9 June the official historian to Louis XIV, Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, wrote from the French camp at Néer Hassel that

The Irishman had acquitted himself bravely in his service to the French crown and showed much promise as an officer. No one suffered more in the aftermath of his death than Frances: as Pellisson-Fontanier noted, ‘his wife was spoken of … as reduced by his death to a deplorable condition, and without anything’. Shortly afterwards, the English ambassador to France, Lord Berkeley, reported that Frances was in the house of John Brisbane, secretary to the English embassy in Paris, and was ‘distracted for the loss of her husband’. Berkeley’s remarks suggest that the young woman bore her grief publicly, and this is echoed in the correspondence of Marie Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné. On 1 July 1676 she reported to her daughter, Françoise, comtesse de Grignan, that ‘Madame Hamilton is inconsolable, and ruined beyond redemption; she really is to be pitied’. Less than a week later, de Sévigné commented again on ‘poor madame Hamilton’, who was ‘universally pitied on account of her melancholy situation’.

Accounts of the 27-year-old Frances Hamilton’s grief reveal a woman distraught over what she had lost, and over that which she might never have again: security. Frances had grown up in a family of reduced fortune, but familiarity did not make the prospect of penury any less affecting; if anything, it seems to have made it worse. Her sister Sarah’s ‘insecurity about money’ and ‘terror of debt and bankruptcy’ has been explained as ‘a fear of being beholden to others’, fuelled ‘by her wider sense that her life had been the property of others, that money alone freed her and her family from the vagaries of favour’.