[1][2] John Drummond Hay was born in 1816 in Valenciennes, France,[1] where his father Captain Edward Drummond Hay, a nephew of the ninth Earl of Kinnoul, was serving in the British army of occupation.

[1] At the age of 24, he was appointed a paid attaché to the Embassy of Constantinople, where he remained for four years.

Within a few months, he was promoted; though still having merely the rank of a paid attaché, he succeeded his temporary chief as Agent and Consul-General.

[5] Drummond Hay's diplomatic service in Morocco would continue for more than forty years, and would involve considerable personal initiative; he was able to exercise significant freedom of action and independence from bureaucratic and political control.

In 1856 he negotiated and signed the Anglo-Moroccan Accords, a general treaty and a commercial convention with the Moroccan government.