Clan Campbell

Campbell begins as an insult. The name comes from the Gaelic cam beul, "crooked mouth" or "wry-mouthed", an epithet fastened to one man and inherited by everyone descended from him. Epithet-surnames are a small class in Gaelic, and their bluntness is startling beside the tidy patronymics around them: Caimbeul sits alongside Camshron, "crooked nose", the Camerons. The clan in its own language is Na Caimbeulaich, and no amount of later grandeur (earl, marquess, duke) scrubbed the nickname out of it.

The family carried an older name first. In Classical Gaelic they were Ua Dhuibhne, "descendant of Duibhne", and the early clan name was Clan O'Duine; Duibhne was a Celtic deity, so that descent was claimed rather than documented. The style was later changed to Clann Diarmaid on a fancied connection to Diarmuid the Boar of the Fenian cycle, normal practice among great clans, whose MacDonald rivals claimed Conn of Ulster or Cuchulainn. Traditional pedigrees also root the family among the ancient Britons of Strathclyde. What survives in writing is thinner and more interesting: the earliest Campbell on record is Gillespie, named in 1263, and the early grants to him and his kin were almost all in east-central Scotland, not the west the name is now inseparable from.

Argyll came to the Campbells through a woman. Some generations before Gillespie, a Campbell married the heiress of the O'Duines, who brought with her the Lordship of Loch Awe. Their first seat was either Innes Chonnel, the island castle on Loch Awe, or Caisteal na Nigheann Ruaidh on Loch Avich; the sources disagree and the clan keeps both. Within their country stands Ben Cruachan, the mountain that became the clan's war cry.

They did not start on top. For a long stretch the Campbells of Loch Awe were dominated by the Lords of Lorne, chiefs of Clan MacDougall, and in 1296 the MacDougalls killed the Campbell chief Cailean Mòr (Colin the Great) at the Battle of Red Ford. Every chief since has taken Mac Cailein Mòr, "son of Colin the Great", as his Gaelic patronymic. The most powerful family in the west is named, in its own language, for a man it lost.

The Campbell rise begins with a bet placed early and paid off enormously. In the first years of the 14th century the family of Colin Campbell became firm supporters of Robert the Bruce. Sir Neil Campbell (Niall mac Caile, died 1316) was among Bruce's staunchest allies and was rewarded with marriage to the king's sister, Mary Bruce. In 1314 the Campbells fought at Bannockburn.

The reward was land, and the land was taken from the men who had killed Cailean Mòr: Sir Neil received extensive estates stripped from Clan MacDougall, the Lords of Lorne, and other enemies of the Bruces in Argyll. The grievance and the grant were the same transaction. Between 1200 and 1500 the Campbells emerged as one of the most powerful families in Scotland, dominant in Argyll and able to exert authority from Edinburgh to the Hebrides. Marriage did as much of that work as war: Loudoun in Ayrshire, held by Clan Crawford, passed to them by marriage in the 14th century and founded the branch descending from Donald Campbell, second son of Colin Campbell of Lochawe. An heiress, a charter, a younger son in a new district: the pattern runs for four hundred years.

Behind it sits a distinction at the heart of Highland society. A clan held its country by dùthchas: the collective, prescriptive right of clansmen to settle land whose chiefs protected them as trustees. Against that stood oighreachd, the estate as defined by written charter from the Crown and owned by the chief in his own right. Over the early modern centuries oighreachd won, and no family understood that shift earlier or exploited it harder. Historians of clanship note that Campbells and Mackenzies alike were prepared to play off territorial disputes among other clans to expand their own land. That is not a slander invented by their enemies; it is the method, and it worked.

The title of 1st Lord Campbell was created in 1445 for Sir Duncan Campbell, Donnchadh. His wife, Lady Marjorie Stewart, born about 1390, was a daughter of Robert Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany, son of King Robert II, so every descendant of that couple descends from Robert I Bruce and from most of the early kings of Scots. It also made them dangerous relations. When James I turned on the Albany Stewarts, Duncan's kinsmen were executed or exiled; Duncan came through with his head and his lands. Survival, not glory, is the recurring Campbell talent.

Colin Campbell was ennobled as Earl of Argyll in 1457, later became Baron of Lorn and took further grants in Knapdale. In 1465 the Lowland castle of Gloom came to him by marriage from the Stewarts; he renamed it Castle Campbell and kept it as the Earls' Lowland seat, a deliberate foothold within reach of the court. James III made him keeper of the royal castle of Dunoon in 1472, and Campbell captains held Dunstaffnage from 1470. Castle Sween in Knapdale came by royal grant late in the century (this atlas records James IV's grant of 1490, the clan's own account 1481) and the MacDonalds took it back in 1647.

The decisive moment came in 1493, when the MacDonald Lords of the Isles were forfeited. The Crown's most powerful rivals in the west had been broken, and the Campbells were left as the main power in the area and its standing authority, successors to Clan Donald in the leadership of the Gaels of the Hebrides and western Highlands. That transition, rather than any single atrocity, may be the real root of the long enmity between Campbell and MacDonald. And the caricature leaves something out: the Campbell lordship remained one of the great bastions of Gaelic learning and culture in late medieval Scotland. The family Jacobite song casts as the Gaelic world's betrayer was also one of its chief patrons.

Expansion continued by every available means. In 1490 Campbells and Drummonds combined against Clan Murray at Knockmary, remembered on the other side as the Massacre of Monzievaird; in 1499 Campbell of Inverliver defeated Clan Calder at Daltullich, and Sir John Campbell, a younger son of the Earl, took the Calder estate and Cawdor Castle by marrying the heiress Muriel Calder. Cawdor is Campbell to this day.

More than thirty castles in this atlas were held at some point by Campbells, and that is the clearest measure of what the family became: not one stronghold but a network, each held by a cadet branch answering to Inveraray. The clan recognises some twenty-eight branches: Ardkinglas, Auchinbreck, Barcaldine, Cawdor, Craignish, Dunstaffnage, Duntroon, Glenlyon, Glenorchy, Inverawe, Loudoun, Strachur, Succoth and the rest. A younger son with a charter and a tower was the instrument of Campbell expansion.

The most prolific builder was Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy, remembered as Black Duncan of the Seven Castles, who raised or rebuilt strongholds at Kilchurn, Achallader, Loch Dochart, Finlarig, Balloch (later Taymouth) and Edinample. He acquired Achallader in 1590; Edinample had been granted to Colin Campbell, 6th Laird of Glenorchy, in 1547 and its castle probably went up in 1584; Balloch was built around 1580, and the Taymouth of today, raised between 1801 and 1842, still stands on its cellars. Barcaldine followed in 1601–09, Finlarig in 1629. Kilchurn on Loch Awe, held by the Glenorchy Campbells from the 1450s to the 1740s, stood on land that had been MacGregor before it was theirs: one reason Clan Gregor damaged the castle at the end of the 16th century, and one reason Campbell and MacGregor are still named as rivals. Skipness went in 1511 to a younger son of the 2nd Earl; Kilbryde has been Campbell since 1659 and is still the family's home; Castle Stalker, by a story the family has never troubled to deny, was won from the Stewarts in a drunken wager around 1620.

If your surname is not Campbell you may still belong to this story. A Highland clan was never only the chief's blood kin: it took in a large group of loosely related septs, dependent families who looked to the chief as head and protector and accepted his authority in exchange. There is no official register of septs; which families a clan claims is decided by the clan itself, and the same sept name is often claimed by more than one. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the record; it is what clanship was, a community built on territory and protection as much as on descent.

Being the Crown's arm in the west meant standing in the front rank of its disasters. In 1513 the 2nd Earl of Argyll was killed at Flodden with many of his clan. In 1568 Archibald Campbell, 5th Earl, commanded the army that fought for Mary, Queen of Scots at Langside. In 1594 the 7th Earl took a royal commission against George Gordon, 6th Earl of Huntly, and was beaten by him at Glenlivet. For two centuries from the mid-15th, Gordon in the north-east and Campbell in the west were the magnate houses of the Highland–Lowland divide.

Service kept paying in land. In 1607 the 7th Earl was granted the former MacDonald lands of Kintyre, Saddell Castle among them, and in 1615 Campbell of Cawdor was permitted to purchase the Isle of Islay, which had belonged to the Macleans of Duart. Every one of these transfers was lawful, and every one left a dispossessed family that remembered the name.

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms turned that resentment into fire. In 1639 Archibald Campbell, Covenanter politician and head of the clan, was given a commission of fire and sword, and used it to seize MacDonald territories in Lochaber and Clan Ogilvy lands in Angus. Both clans consequently backed Montrose's Royalist campaign of 1644–45 in hope of regaining them. At Inverlochy in 1645 the Marquess of Argyll's Covenanter army was broken by Montrose at the head of a force made up largely of MacDonalds, Macleans and men from Ireland. Castle Campbell was burnt by Montrose and the Macleans, and again by General Monck for Cromwell, yet stayed in Campbell hands. The Lamonts raided Campbell country; the Campbells ravaged Maclean lands in turn, and Duart surrendered. In 1648 the Marquess was beaten again at Stirling by Sir George Munro of Newmore, William Campbell of Glenfalloch among his dead.

The clan's other great weapon was debt. In 1672 George Sinclair, 6th Earl of Caithness, forced by creditors, resigned his titles and estates to Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy, who took Castle Sinclair Girnigoe that year, Ackergill Tower in 1676, the estates on Sinclair's death that May, and the earldom of Caithness itself the following June. Sinclair's heir seized the land back in 1678, and at Altimarlech on 13 July 1680 the Campbells beat him so heavily that legend has the victors crossing the river on Sinclair dead without wetting their feet. Then he did what the Campbells usually did and went to law, taking his seat as Earl of Caithness in July 1681 and recovering his lands that September, while Campbell was compensated with the earldom of Breadalbane. Loyalty had its own bill. Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll, who had taken Duart from the Macleans in 1678, was beheaded on 30 June 1685 for his part in Argyll's Rising against the Catholic James VII and II, and Carrick Castle burnt in that rising.

In 1692, thirty-eight unarmed people of the MacDonalds of Glencoe were killed by soldiers who had been quartered on them and had taken their hospitality for over a week. The officer commanding was Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. A government initiative to suppress Jacobitism had become entangled with the long feud between Clan MacDonald and Clan Campbell, and the killing of hosts by guests was a grave affront to Scots law and Highland tradition alike. The full story of that night belongs to the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and on this site it is told under their name, where it should be.

What belongs here is what the name carried away. Two things are usually left out of the ballad. The first is that most of the soldiers were not Campbells: they were the Earl of Argyll's Regiment of Foot, and a roll call from a few months earlier lists only six Campbells in the ranks besides the captain. The second is that this changes very little. The order was executed under a Campbell officer against a family Campbells had spent two centuries dispossessing, and in the same year the 1st Duke of Argyll again took the Macleans' Duart Castle. A family is what it did, and this is part of what the Campbells did.

One detail is worth keeping, because it is the only human thing in the affair. When the Jacobites rose in 1715, a small number of Campbells came out on the rebel side, led by the son of that same Campbell of Glenlyon who had commanded the troops at Glencoe barely twenty years before. The two families settled their differences, swore to be brothers in arms, and fought side by side at Sheriffmuir.

Through the Jacobite risings the Campbells stood with the British-Hanoverian government, and they are the reason the Highlands cannot simply be assumed to have been Jacobite country. On 23 October 1715 the chief, John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, sent cavalry against a rebel detachment passing Castle Campbell towards Dunfermline and scattered it; a month later he commanded the government army, Campbell men among it, that beat the Jacobites at Sheriffmuir. The name was never monolithic, though. General Wade's 1724 report put the clan's government strength under Argyll at 4,000 men, and those under Campbell of Breadalbane, who had been out for the Jacobites in 1715, at a further 1,000.

Out of that alignment came a regiment that still exists. In 1725 six Independent Highland Companies were raised for the government (three of them Campbell, one each from Fraser of Lovat, Munro and Grant) known as the Reicudan Dhu, the Black Watch, after a body first raised in 1695 to police the "black trade" of cattle smuggling. They became a regiment of the line in 1739 as the 42nd Regiment of Foot and first mustered at Aberfeldy in 1740. This is why the plainest Campbell tartan is a uniform: of the four setts the chief recognises, the dark Old Campbell is better known as the Black Watch or Government sett, still worn by units across the Commonwealth, and the others belong to Breadalbane, Cawdor and Loudoun.

Just before 1745 the clan's strength was reckoned at 5,000 men. In the last rising they fought at Falkirk in 1746, where the government was beaten, and held out through the Siege of Fort William, where the Jacobites were. At Culloden the government line included four companies of the Campbell of Argyll Militia, three of Loudoun's Highlanders under Lieutenant Colonel John Campbell, and a company of the 43rd Highlanders under Captain Dugald Campbell of Auchrossan. The Campbells had backed Bruce, the Stewart kings, the Covenant and the Hanoverians, and had come out of nearly all of it on the winning side.

Then they helped end the world they had won. The first major step in the Highland clearances was the decision of the Dukes of Argyll to auction the tacks (the leases of farms and townships) beginning with Campbell property in Kintyre in the 1710s and spreading after 1737 to all their holdings. Letting clan land to the highest bidder was a clear breach of dùthchas: the chief was now a commercial landlord rather than a trustee for his people, and the tacksmen who formed the middle tier of Gaelic society were squeezed out. The historian T. M. Devine calls the displacement of that class one of the clearest demonstrations of the death of the old Gaelic society, and many tacksmen and wealthier farmers, worn down by rising rents, emigrated rather than accept it. If you are a Campbell in Ontario or Otago, this paragraph is likelier than any battle to be the reason.

Large-scale emigration from Scotland from the 18th century onward, and Scottish settlement in Ulster in the 17th and 18th, scattered the name further than any earl ever reached. Campbell is now the third most common surname in Northern Ireland, the seventh in Scotland, the twelfth in Canada, the eighteenth in Australia, the forty-first in the United States and the sixty-fifth in England. A name that began as a joke about one man's mouth in a corner of Argyll is carried today by millions who have never seen Loch Awe.

The bearers who made the most noise came from the city, not the glen. Sir Colin Campbell, 1st Baron Clyde (1792–1863), was a Glasgow carpenter's son who entered the army at fifteen, commanded the 93rd Highlanders as the Thin Red Line at Balaclava in 1854, carried out the Second Relief of Lucknow on 17 November 1857, and finished as Commander-in-Chief in India and a baron. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, also Glasgow-born, won the great Liberal landslide as Prime Minister and gave self-government back to South Africa. Kim Campbell became the nineteenth Prime Minister of Canada, the first and so far only woman in the office.

The chiefship is still exactly where it was. Inveraray Castle in Argyll remains the seat, the present mansion of towers and turrets built from 1743 on the site of an earlier 15th-century castle, with a clan room kept for Campbells who come looking. Torquhil Ian Campbell is 13th Duke of Argyll, Marquess of Kintyre and Lorne, Hereditary Master of the Royal Household in Scotland, Hereditary Keeper of the Great Seal, and hereditary keeper of the royal castles of Dunoon, Carrick, Dunstaffnage and Tarbert. In Gaelic he is Mac Cailein Mòr, still named for the chief killed in 1296.

The motto is Ne obliviscaris: "Forget not". It is not a comfortable line for a family with this record, and it should not be softened into one. The Campbells took Argyll from the MacDougalls, the west from the MacDonalds, Cawdor from the Calders, Caithness from the Sinclairs and Kintyre from Clan Donald, with charters and marriages and commissions of fire and sword and, at Glencoe, with something no law excuses. They also kept Gaelic learning alive when it had few other patrons, raised the regiment that still wears their sett, and sent a Glasgow carpenter's son to command an empire's armies. Forget not is an instruction to hold all of it at once, which is what an honest inheritance asks.