Your name’s past is written. Its next chapter is yours.

Clan Bruce

In 1306 Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scots and lost two battles within four months. Excommunicated by Rome, his wife and daughter taken, three of his four brothers executed by the English king, his sister hanging in an iron cage on the wall of Roxburgh Castle, he disappeared into hiding through the winter. The Scots cause was a fugitive in a coastal cave. By tradition he watched a spider try to swing a thread of web across a gap, fail six times, succeed on the seventh, and took it for his answer. The truth attested in chronicle is leaner: a king at the end of his options went back into the field, and won.

Clan MacDonald

In late 1691, the British crown demanded every Highland chief swear loyalty by the first of January, on pain of fire and sword. The MacDonalds of Glencoe missed the deadline by six days through no fault of their own. In response, the government quietly authorised the destruction of the family. For two weeks 120 government soldiers under a Campbell captain were billeted as guests in MacDonald longhouses, eating MacDonald food and playing cards with their hosts under the unbreakable Highland code of guest-right. Before dawn on the thirteenth of February 1692, the captain received written orders to fall on the village. What followed is remembered as the worst breach of guest-right in British history, and the reason the MacDonalds will not sit at table with a Campbell to this day.

Clan Douglas

In June 1329 Robert the Bruce lay dying at Cardross. He had vowed years earlier to take the cross to the Holy Land, but the Scottish wars had kept him from it; on his deathbed he asked that his heart be cut from his body, embalmed, and carried on crusade in his place. The man who took the charge was Sir James Douglas, his closest companion in arms, called Good Sir James. Douglas wore the heart in a silver casket on a chain at his neck the next year, through France and Spain and into a foreign battle on the Andalusian frontier, where what he did at the head of a Castilian charge became the founding act of the Douglas line.

Clan MacDonald

In June 1746, two months after the disaster of Culloden, Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the Hebrides with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds, the largest reward of the eighteenth century. Government patrols closed in around him on the islands of South Uist and Benbecula. The plan that came to him through an Irish Jacobite officer was to disguise him as an Irish spinning-maid and put him on a boat to Skye in the household of a young woman with a militia pass. Her name was Flora MacDonald. She was twenty-four years old. She had no political stake in the rising. The crossing made her name a synonym for the lost cause for the next two centuries.

Clan MacQuarrie

On the first of January 1810, on the quayside of Sydney Cove on the east coast of New South Wales, Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, forty-seven years old, the Ulva-born former Black Watch officer of the American, Indian and Egyptian campaigns of the British Army, took up the governorship of the British convict colony of New South Wales (established as a penal settlement at Sydney Cove on the twenty-sixth of January 1788, on the First Fleet landing). Macquarie inherited a colony of about eleven thousand convicts and free settlers in a state of near-mutiny (his predecessor Governor William Bligh, the Bligh of the Bounty mutiny of 1789, had been deposed in the Rum Rebellion of January 1808 by the New South Wales Corps under Major George Johnston). Over the twelve years of his governorship (1810–1821), Macquarie rebuilt Sydney from the disorganised convict-camp of 1810 into the coherent colonial city of 1821: he laid out the Sydney street-grid that still defines the modern central business district, commissioned over two hundred public buildings (the Hyde Park Barracks 1819, the St James's Church 1822, the Macquarie Lighthouse 1818), founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, built the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains in 1814–15 (opening the Western Plains to grazing-agriculture for the first time), established the policy of encouraging emancipated convicts (emancipists) to take government office on the merit-of-service principle. He is, by every careful judgment of Australian historians (Manning Clark, John Ritchie, Anne-Maree Whitaker), the foundational governor of the modern Australia and the most influential governor of any nineteenth-century British colony. His treatment of Aboriginal Australians, particularly the 1816 Appin Massacre on the Dharawal country south of Sydney, is the contested aspect of his legacy.

Clan Hamilton

By the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.

Clan Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.

Clan Hay

On the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1411, on the rising ground above the head of the Garioch, twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen, the Lowland-Norman levies of Aberdeenshire and Angus, under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, met a Highland-Hebridean army of about ten thousand under Donald, Lord of the Isles, in the most consequential battle fought in north-east Scotland in the post-Bruce century. Donald had been pressing east for the earldom of Ross. Mar's hastily levied army of three thousand had three of the great Lowland constables on the field. The High Constable of Scotland, Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, son of the second Lord of Erroll, in his fifty-first year, in his hereditary office and on his own ground, held the right wing of Mar's line. The action was, by every contemporary account, fought to a standstill on the strath of Harlaw at the cost of about a thousand dead a side. Donald withdrew north-west overnight; Mar held the field. The Lowland-speaking belt of Aberdeenshire and Angus would not be reabsorbed into a Gaelic west again. The Hay tradition has it that the day held because Erroll held the right.

Clan Douglas

On the twenty-fourth of November 1440, the sixteen-year-old William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the Black Douglas line and the most powerful subject in Scotland, was invited with his younger brother David to dine in the great hall of Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the ten-year-old King James II. The dinner was hosted by William Crichton (the Lord Chancellor) and Sir Alexander Livingston (the Custodian of the Castle and the King's tutor), the two regents who effectively ruled Scotland during the king's minority and who had been alarmed for two years at the rising power of the Douglas earl. By the tradition of the next century, told in the chronicles of John Major and Hector Boece, a black bull's head was brought in on a silver platter as the principal dish, the symbol in fifteenth-century Scotland of imminent execution. The two Douglas brothers were seized at the table, given a hasty trial in the courtyard, and beheaded on the spot. The political effect was immediate: the Black Douglas eclipse, the rise of a new (and deliberately diminished) Douglas line under the eighth Earl. The Black Dinner is the most consistently remembered episode of medieval Scottish political violence, has produced two surviving children's rhymes (one in the eastern Border tradition, one Aberdeenshire), and was deliberately referenced by George R. R. Martin as the structural model for the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords.

Clan MacDonald

On the night of the thirty-first of January 1645, after a winter march of thirty-six hours from the south end of Loch Ness through Glen Tarbet and the high pass of the Lairig Leacach, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, with the Highland-Irish brigade of Alasdair MacColla MacDonald and a force of about fifteen hundred men of the western clans, came down at first light on the second of February, the morning of Candlemas, on the Campbell army of Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, encamped under the walls of Inverlochy Castle at the head of Loch Linnhe. Argyll had three thousand men. The day broke in heavy frost. The Highland charge took the Campbell line in flank and rolled it down the loch shore. Argyll was put aboard his galley and rowed for Inveraray. Fifteen hundred Campbells died, by the careful estimate of the modern historians of the action, in two hours. The MacDonalds of Clanranald, of Glengarry, of Keppoch, of Glencoe, fought beside MacColla in the centre. The single most consequential reckoning between MacDonald and Campbell of the seventeenth century was won that morning by Montrose's tactical genius and the Highland charge in winter, fifty years and ten days before Glencoe, and reads, in Highland MacDonald memory, as the inverse of Glencoe.

Clan Henderson

On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1638, in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, the Scottish nobility and gentry gathered to subscribe a four-thousand-word document called the National Covenant, drafted by the Edinburgh advocate Archibald Johnston of Wariston and the Leuchars minister Alexander Henderson, in the third month of the country's open resistance to the Caroline-Laudian Prayer Book that Charles I had attempted to impose on the Kirk by royal warrant. The Covenant was signed by some four hundred men in the kirk that afternoon, and laid out on a flat tomb-slab in the kirkyard for the remainder of the burgh to subscribe over the next several days. Many signed in their own blood. The document was then carried in copy through every shire of Lowland Scotland, and was, by the spring, signed by the great majority of the country's adult male Protestant population. The Covenant became the constitutional pivot of the next half-century of Scottish history: of the Bishops' Wars of 1639–40, of the alliance with the English Parliament in 1643, of the Westminster Assembly, of the long defeat at Dunbar in 1650, and of the political identity of Presbyterian Scotland for two hundred years afterwards.